The show this week is my birthday show. I was born on January 20, 1968. When I first started doing Self Help Radio, I thought it would be fun, on the week of my birthday, to do a show featuring my favorite music from the year of my birth. & then, since it would be weird to devote a show to 1968 every year, I decided to move up a year on subsequent shows, so the next year I'd do 1969, the year after that I'd explore 1970, etc.
Because I was born in January, I would be the age I turned on my birthday for nearly most of the year. This is handy for remembering a certain year of my life. It's not so handy when it comes to schooling. In January 1979, I was in the fourth grade, a miserable experience; fifth grade would be a little better.
I talked some about my life in 1978 previously on this blog. That link is good at pointing out two important things. One is that virtually none of the music I'm playing on my show this week is music I listened to at the time, though I had at the very least discovered the Beatles by this point. I did listen to the radio constantly, & so did my older brothers, who (as I also noted last year) listened to none of the great punk & post-punk that was happening at the time. This may be because it simply wasn't being played on the radio - but the fact that the Sex Pistols played in Dallas - Dallas! - ten days before my eleventh birthday & none of my family probably noticed says a lot, I think, about the limited amount of musics I had access to.
Strangely, I can't remember the name of my fifth grade teacher. She was a very nice person & she made us sit in desks that were grouped in fours. My group - at least for a while - included someone with whom I am still friends, Dale Smith, & also a fellow named Greg Brown, who never liked me. (Greg went on to become valedictorian of my high school class, & I was frankly surprised he didn't turn out to be gay.) The other person was a fellow named Phil Claunch, who was kind of my best friend. I say "kind of" because he teased me mercilessly about things that I had very little control over - mainly things that existed because my family was very poor - like my terrible teeth & my clothes. Still, I must've been amusing enough to be around, as my little brother & I would ride our bikes to school to Phil's house - which meant riding up a big hill on Parkmont - & get him before we went to the school. It wasn't a long ride - maybe a half mile - but it was quite a triumph that my mother, a person so full of fear that I think she's lived to a ripe old age mainly because she's terrified of dying, even let us. She confided in me later that she would call the school every morning to make sure we got there okay. I don't think she did it all year long, but certainly she probably did it longer than most parents would.
I remember that group of four because I somehow convinced all of them to help me make my first comic book. I was obsessed with comics & even though I had virtually no sense of humor, I drew strips all the time. I got Dale, Phil, & Greg to write strips, then to copy them three times (!) so we could have four issues. (I had no access to the mimeograph machine.) I remember my most successful strip was me illustrating a joke from a book of "jokes for kids" I got from the library. I remember Dale did a strip called "Big Red" that involved a cowboy who was so large all you saw was his boot. & I remember Greg making a "Battle Of The Planets" parody that I liked so much that I made my own - which annoyed him - but mine was more detailed because I loved the show more. He may have started hating me then, although it did boil over in Music class later in fifth grade because both of us had memorized the required terms, & we answered questions to a standstill.
Or it may have come earlier - I remember a similar competition with him in third grade, involving times tables. From a young age, I've hated competition. It made me uncomfortable, & I was by the age of eight or nine exhausted by constantly competing with my little brother. In school, which didn't seem to operate by the same rules of my house, where my mother openly encourage her children to vie with each other for her affection & approval, in school competition seemed weird to me. Anyone who did well could get an "A." There didn't need to be a winner.
In third grade against Greg Brown, I just decided I'd had enough, & was yelled at for it. In fifth grade - possibly also against Greg Brown - I purposely flubbed a word in a spelling bee competition when I realized that, after it was done in the class, if I won, I'd have to compete against the winner in the other fifth grade class, & then that, after, with the one who won at his or her elementary school - it just seemed endless, endless discomfort, endless pressure, endless attention to something that didn't mean anything to me.
So when I misspelled the crucial word, I said, out loud, "Oh well! Back to my comic!" & my teacher, furious with me, took the comics from me & told me I couldn't make them any more. (It didn't make me any more competitive, however.)
The teacher was otherwise very nice. I wish I could remember her name! I liked her definitely more than my fourth grade teacher, & I remember her treating me with respect. Her anger at me throwing the spelling bee was probably because she expected more from me. I was, & I say this not as a boast, a pretty smart kid.
I may be getting dates mixed up, but I believe the summer of 1979 was the first summer I ever spent away from home. In the summer of 1974, I spent a couple of weeks with my mother & little brother in Germany, but in June of 1974, my brother & I were whisked away from our home - & from the summer I loved, the time to sleep late, watch reruns, & go swimming - & taken to Albany, Georgia, for almost three months. I'll talk about that tomorrow.
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