November 8

Lake Worth had a somewhat unusual class schedule at that time, at least for the Junior High, which was trimesters.  It was a bit odd because the second trimester wrapped around the Christmas holidays.  But they also had classes I would never have been able to access in Big Lake.  One of my first trimesters in seventh grade our math teacher taught a class on German.  Another trimester I took Japanese from Mr. Sechrist, the English teacher.  I especially enjoyed this class because Mr. Sechrist had actually been to Japan and as part of the class he would give out props.  We learned to use chopsticks, for instance, and for years I still had these little ceramic boats to rest my chopsticks on.  To this day I remember basic greetings and can count to at least twelve in both languages.

Mr. Sechrist was also, in retrospect, very likely gay but I never heard it brought up.  He was later the high school librarian and to this day volunteers as both museum and tour guide in the historic part of Fort Worth.  I’m sure he thought I was the perfect little fascist in training after I wrote a class paper defending Richard Nixon since, after all, he was the one who pulled our troops out of Vietnam!

The main church activity that I was involved in that I actually cared anything about was the youth group.  Randy’s older siblings Steve and Chris, his sister, were regulars, as well as Cynthia, daughter of one of the deacons, and her boyfriend Loval, and Eddie.  Most of them exist only in sparse memories.  I remember Eddie because he had a Mustang with a custom shifter knob.  Steve sticks out in my mind because he did janitorial work for the church and I enjoyed pestering him.  The typical scenario involved me crawling into the sanctuary while he was buffing the floor and unplugging his cord.  It usually ended with me on the floor screaming as he tried to get a clean shot at the top of my head with his senior ring.  He definitely hurt me a few times, but then I was bugging the crap out of him.  The main thing I remember about Chris was the rumor of her getting caught doing drugs in the church bathroom.  Cynthia and Loval I remember a lot more because we were involved with a music group for awhile, along with Eddie.  I have even seen them at two different events during the past year, so we’re still in touch now and then.  But the first year or two my main memory of Cynthia came from when we would go to her parents’ house to swim.  Not long after she would appear in her bikini I would disappear to the bathroom off of the garage to revel in adolescent fantasies fueled by her size D top.  Memories of Loval center around his car, a jacked up, souped up Barracuda with the stereotypical foot-shaped gas pedal.  I will never forget zooming down the newly completed Loop 820, looking over Cynthia’s shoulder and watching the speedometer approach 120 miles per hour.

The summer between seventh and eighth grades the band director Mr. Phelps asked me to take home a saxophone and practice.  Evidently we were short on woodwinds and heavy on percussion.  So I spent a good part of the summer driving people crazy while learning the school fight song on tenor sax.  I had a very good sense of pitch (although probably not ‘perfect’ pitch) and rhythm came naturally.  I also started taking piano lessons from Cynthia’s grandmother, Oma.  She gave me a very good foundation and always tried to strike a balance between the basics and classics on one hand and contemporary songs on the other.  I think she recognized that I was much more apt to practice an Elton John song than Franz Lizst.  More often than not I walked to her house, which was easily a mile and a half.  Unfortunately this left me vulnerable to one of the few bullies in Lake Worth.  Rodney was the younger brother of three who were all constantly in fights and in jail.  Why he felt compelled to target me I’ll never know, but as I was walking to piano practice he was walking the other way and as he passed me he stopped and sucker punched me in the jaw, and then stood there as if I was going to suddenly launch a vicious counter-attack.  Instead I ran to a nearby yard of someone who I think was a church member.  He finally walked off.  He is one of several on my list of “If I ever see them again…”

I eventually had the complete works of both Elton John and Chicago.  Unfortunately I was most fond of the music of artists whom I had the least chance of emulating.  The sheet music was incredibly complex, the result (no doubt) of advanced classical training.  So I took a shortcut and played using the guitar chords and then improvising the rhythm and key notes.  And of course I sang along.  Again, why I was so drawn to those with above-average vocal ranges?  I could never hit the high notes that Elton and Peter Cetera could.  But I switched to falsetto or sang an octave lower and did what I could.  Enough girls were impressed that I was encouraged to continue.

While I was still ‘going steady’ with Kelli something happened that, in hindsight, may have set some things in motion in my psyche, or at least confirmed them.  Up to this point I had genuinely been a law-abiding kid, but just like the incident in Paisano I was again falsely accused.  We were browsing a five-and-dime store, we being Kelli, Randy and me and I think their dad.  I found a bracelet that I wanted to buy for Kelli.  I had it in my hand and walked around the corner and saw Kelli.  Without even thinking I stuck it into my coat pocket so she wouldn’t see it.  The next thing I new I was being drug backward by an arm around my neck by the store manager.  Yes, he was accusing me of shoplifting.  I think Kelli’s dad finally talked him down off of what he obviously thought was the bust of the year.  I was again humiliated and embarrased, and this time in front of my girlfriend.  The police were never called, but I could tell the manager was sure I was guilty.  Within a year I deliberately revisited that store three or four times and purposefully stole miscellaneous trinkets and worthless crap, just to prove to that stupid idiot that if I was a thief he would never know.  I’ve proven it again many times since, at different places.  Soft drinks from a gas station, cigarettes and fruit pies from grocery stores, motorcycle and automobile gas from gas stations.  I once stole a demo fake cell phone from a display in an auto dealership.  And don’t get me started about hot checks and firearms.  But I have to wonder if this urge didn’t start with these false accusations.  Perhaps I should run this by a therapist some time…

I enjoyed being around the older band members.  I always associate Chicago’s “Wishing You Were Here” with that period because this girl was playing the Chicago VII LP in the band hall.  I believe I was in the eighth grade then.  This was about the time that Randy was diagnosed with cancer.

It was a mole on his lip.  He’d always had it, but evidently it started changing colors and they had him tested.  Malignant Mellanoma.  I saw him afterwards and he showed me the tic-tac-toe criss-cross pattern of cuts on his arm where evidently they let the chemicals soak in.  He seemed to be taking it all in stride.  Not too long after that he went back for more treatments and I saw less of him.  I remember visiting him in the hospital and getting to see him in his room.  But later when we went to his house his room was off-limits.  Either his parents or mine were trying to protect me, and I was too naive to realize that I should have insisted on it.  He was my friend.  The next thing I remember was crying at his funeral.

The one thing I have done so far in my life that might be considered a claim to fame is a very brief stint as the boyfriend of a TV sitcom star.  If you watched TV in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s you saw my ex-girlfriend, first on Disney’s New Mouseketeers and then on 209 episodes of The Facts of Life.  Yes, that’s her…..Blair Warner!  (A.k.a. Lisa Whelchel)   I always got a kick out of watching that show because the character she was playing was pretty much the exact opposite of the way she was in real life, back when we were in love.

Lisa’s family attended First Baptist Church in Lake Worth where my dad was pastor.  Her dad drove the church bus most Sunday mornings during this time and I was often coerced into riding along, an effort to boost the numbers a bit, I suspect.  When Lisa rode along she often helped lead the main body of passengers (neighborhood children) in singing, or she would entertain them with a bit of ventriloquism.  She honed her skills on the bus and I later saw her put on a very nice ventriloquism performance in a school talent show.  Other than that I rarely saw her at school as I was a couple of years ahead of her.  A CCM Magazine interview with her mentions the following which I originally assumed was a reference to myself:

“While the other kids were having food fights in the cafeteria, she and her only friend, the preacher’s son, were off in a corner studying.”

As it turns out she was referring to someone else, but for years I thought that it was me and that I had just forgotten it.  I gave her memory the benefit of the doubt, however, since I also don’t recall a brief ‘love affair’ with Ruthie Martin in the 7th Grade, but Ruthie remembered it enough to bring it up in front of the entire group of attendees at my high school’s 20th reunion!  Trust me, when a woman stands up in front of a group of people and asks you if you remember being in love twenty-five years ago there is only one correct answer, and it doesn’t involve shrugging your shoulders and looking like an amnesia victim!

What I *do* recall is the brief period of time when Lisa and I were ‘going steady.’  I believe it lasted all of two weeks, and the timeframe is a bit difficult to narrow down.  I sporadically kept a diary from February, 1973 to October, 1975.  Most of the entries appear to mark either the beginning or ending of a romantic relationship and I can hardly read them now without laughing out loud!  On December 7, 1974 I wrote the following:

“I have since left Karen and have gone on to other girls.  For instance, Regina and Sharon.  But now I’m having a problem making up my mind.  Lisa Whelchel or Kelli?  I think Kelli likes another boy, but I don’t know if Lisa has a boyfriend or not.  I hope not!”

On the 11th I noted, “Lisa doesn’t seem to notice me.”  And on March 3, 1975 I made the following mature observation:

“I seem to be doing pretty good with Lisa Whelchel.  Yesterday, in Training Union, she and another girl came in from another class.  I made the usual funny jokes.  But today in school she told me “Hi!”!  That’s a switch.  I hope to really get something going with her!”

I hope you are get as much laughter out of this as I do.

I somehow failed to record the ‘climax’ of this torrid affair which occurred on the night my family went to her house, for dinner I believe.  The grown-ups talked and drank coffee in the kitchen and Cody did what all little brothers are supposed to do and pestered us.  As crazy as it sounds I only remember two things about that evening.  One thing is how embarrassed she became when Cody found a pair of her panty hose lying around somewhere and thought it would be great fun to show them to me.  The other thing is the odd way we walked around the house together….instead of holding hands we somehow ended up with her holding on to my thumb.  It felt awkward but I was so excited that she was touching me at all I couldn’t figure out how to adjust!

The next diary entry that mentions her was on September 6, 1975:

“Things have been going okay lately.  In my love life, I guess I will have to say I’m still hung up on Lisa.  I have started clipping newspaper articles of her and keeping them.”

The rest of that entry goes on to describe all of the other girls that had been grabbing my attention.  (Hey, I was fourteen, what do you expect?)  The newspaper articles in question were related to some of her early beauty pageants and acting roles at the local theater Casa Manaña.  She was out of town a lot on weekends after that, and before you know it she was living in California with her mom and running around wearing mouse ears as a member of the “New Mouseketeers.”  That was the break that eventually led to “The Facts of Life.”

The last time I saw her was several years later when I was attending college at Dallas Baptist University.  This would have been somewhere between late 1979 and late 1980.  (I believe that the first season of Facts of Life had already aired.)  I was running around helping get things set up for a concert, I think it was one of the last for a Christian group named Dogwood.  It was either that or when 16-year old Amy Grant did a concert there.  Lisa and a friend from her church came in and I was pleasantly surprised that she remembered me.  We chatted ever-so-briefly but I had to get back to work and I didn’t see her afterwards.  In retrospect I should have hunted her down and had a great evening catching up on her life, but I didn’t, and so that’s where this story ends as my 15 minutes of fame was up.