WHILE WE’RE REMINISCING…

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

A lot was going on in the month of March in different decades, not all of it good times, though. I’ve decided this time around to highlight March of every year ending in number 5, going back to before I could remember what I was doing, beginning with 1955.

70 Years ago: I was in Nursery School in Lafayette, Louisiana. The head of the school was Mrs. Faulk, and that’s pretty much all I can remember.

60 Years ago: I was a freshman at Palo Verde High School in Tucson, Arizona. I had half-assed aspirations of being some sort of athlete, probably left over from my primary school days when I was hoping to be a pro baseball player and have my picture on a trading card. After that bubble was quickly burst, I tried out for and made the freshman track team, but only because they didn’t cut anyone. I would quit the team in April after two months, realising there were a lot of guys faster and stronger than me. I was also on the freshman class advisory board, basically made up of those who had run for class offices but didn’t win. I soon found I hated almost everyone on the board, and the feeling was mutual from the other board members. So being a jock and being in Student Government were cast aside from my aspirations, the latter only being considered because my brother had succeeded in it. I discovered I didn’t give that much of a rat’s ass about school spirit.

50 Years ago: I had been working with my partner for just under four years, but she decided at the beginning of 1975 to quit the act, leave San Francisco, and live in Palm Springs. This situation would last until late spring, as there was an upswing in gigs for us, culminating in a full time gig in Lake Tahoe beginning in August and lasting on and off for two years, until we started getting notice in our home town. How I survived those relatively lean times was through my record collection. I had accumulated about 10000 records by then, some worth quite a bit as it turned out. I put one ad in the classified section of the San Francisco Chronicle and had a flurry of interest from various collectors. It meant giving up some things that I might not have wanted to, but I still had plenty to amuse myself, and quite a few of the ones I sold I found again. I would spend my days checking out thrift stores all over Northern California, and on the third Sunday of each month, bring my most valuable stuff to a record swap meet in San Leandro, about 30 miles east of SF. I would not only make some decent money, but would also score records that I would enjoy for many years after.

40 Years ago: A transitional period. The days of the partnership were numbered, as my partner was now raising two children, and that’s where her priorities understandably were. Gigs weren’t consistent and the ones we had weren’t career builders to say the least. Plus I was living in LA, while she had moved back up north. However, I was working enough that I was able to quit the one day job I had in my adult life, working phones for AAA, answering calls from stranded motorists. Thankfully, that job only lasted from January until early March. Seeing as how my partner was only working with me because she had no other source of income, and otherwise was not that interested, I started looking into the possibilities of a solo career (That would become a reality by November of 1985). The distance of the partnership would be complicated even further when she and her family moved to Sacramento, so all signs were pointing to change.

30 Years ago: Even more of a transitional period, as things were heading south. It got to where the 2nd Mrs and I had to give up living the nice life in our two-story two-bedroom apartment in Park La Brea, Hollywood, and try to live for less rent in a one-bedroom in Santa Monica. Not much else happened that year, except I got to go to Korea and Japan, but the guy who was booking me for those gigs, who was very enthusiastic about booking me for future tours, was in poor health and died just before I left for the Asian tour. My career sort of followed him down the same path until the Millennium, when I discovered a new country was interested.

20 years ago: I was married to wife #3 and living in Dagenham, Essex, but equally important, I had spent much of the previous month in California retrieving my record collection that was now scattered in three different places. I managed to fit them all in one truck that the shipping company would then send from San Francisco to Dagenham. The records arrived there in late March 2005, to stay forever in UK, possibly even if I, by some near impossible circumstance, move back to USA (about a 2% chance!). They would have arrived sooner, but the ship developed a leak and had to dock in Antwerp, Netherlands for a day. Meanwhile, in March 2005 I did a total of 15 gigs, mostly for the Jongleurs comedy club franchise. Fortunately for me, they stopped booking me in 2012, about the time they started going delinquent on paying the performers!

10 Years ago: I’ve talked about most of this before, but by this time, comedy was relegated to hobby status, as I had begun my pub quizzing career a year earlier, and only a few months down the line, would begin my regular gig as a DJ at Kings Head in Crouch End, which I held on to until March 2020, when Covid intervened. Most importantly, I was singing in the Songworks choir, where right about this time, I would first meet Maggie O’Hagan without the slightest hint that I would still be with her ten years later! Shit happens, don’t it?

March 16th, 2025



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