If only Lynne and I weren’t a mere thirty-five years old, we might have spent the Summer of ’69 this way:
We might have stayed up all night secretly talking on the phone by stretching the cords as far as possible toward our bedrooms. I could usually get away with this because of where our second phone was situated, but the princess phone Lynne used had to cross the hall from her parents’ bedroom to hers. The base was stuck in the hall, and the curly cord to the handset snaked under Lynne’s bedroom door. When Elnora (her mother) woke up from her pre-bedtime nap on the couch and walked down the long, dark hallway to go to bed, she’d trip on the phone, cussing as she caught her balance by grabbing the walls, while the handset would be jerked from Lynne’s grip and slam against her closed bedroom door. This was my cue to hang up, sneak our phone back to its stand, and go to bed, while in her house, Lynne would immediately jump into bed and pretend she’d forgotten to hang up the phone before falling asleep hours before. I doubt Elnora was fooled.
I remember the closet in Lynne’s parents’ bedroom as being huge, and tucked into one corner were several brown grocery bags full of romance novels that Elnora and her friends passed among them. That summer, while Lynne mooned over pictures of Mark Lindsay and his pony tail, I was devouring one or two romance novels a day. If she got bored, Lynne would reread her Archie, Casper, Richie Rich, and Little Lulu comic books. Sometimes she could talk me into walking to town–it wasn’t much of a town, but we still found plenty of mischief to get into.
The one constant was the radio. Whether it was our transistors, my parents’ big console stereo, or the radios in the cars that took us to and from each other’s houses, we always listened to WVOK-AM out of Birmingham. (When it signed off at night, we became contortionists with our transistors to our ears trying to pick up WLS out of Chicago.) Taking a look at the old WVOK Tough Twenty Surveys, the mix of music amazes me. In one afternoon, we might hear the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Herman’s Hermits, Tom Jones, the Grass Roots, the Archies, Dionne Warwick, Ray Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel, the Bee Gees, Henry Mancini, Marvin Gaye–we were the market for the music of anybody we might find on the pages of Tiger Beat, 16 Magazine, and Teen Beat. WVOK’s morning show was hosted by Joe Rumore who played oldies and sometimes music with a country influence between Sweet Sue and Golden Eagle Table Syrup ads. By the time we were fully awake and on the phone or being chauffeured to the swimming pool, Don Keith was DJing, and later in the afternoon, we’d listen to the melodic voice of DJ Dan Brennan.
It was also Dan Brennan who introduced WVOK’s Shower of Stars shows. Every one of these that Lynne and I were taken to by her mother and/or sister in Birmingham, we managed to find someone who could get us backstage. I have so many autographs from those shows. And when Lynne was old enough to drive us herself, we collected a few not-for-the-blog stories along with our autographs. We had a blast. We saw Tony Orlando when Dawn was just hastily assembled backup vocalists so he could tour after his first hit record. We saw Neil Diamond before he was uncool and then cool again. We saw Bobby Sherman, who we cared nothing about, and Pat Paulsen, the first comedian to run a satirical campaign for president (imagine–if he’d beat Nixon–Smothers Brothers in the cabinet instead of those thugs we ended up with!), and the Carpenters–who wouldn’t want to remember getting to hear Karen Carpenter sing in person? Most especially, we saw our favorite bands, Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Grass Roots, which is what branded us teenyboppers by the boys we knew, who were into much cooler music. Whatever. It was all about the crushes, and our walls were plastered with our idols’ faces like the young teens who loved Sinatra and Frankie Avalon before us, Wham!, New Kids on the Block and Hanson after us, and Bieber today. Long may you pop your bubblegum and sing along, ‘tweens and teenyboppers.
