My Blog
My Journey, My Journal...
I was born in Fayettville North Carolina on January 23, 1952. The rest as they say is history. I have always wonder just who, 'they' are. I don't however wonder anymore who I am and would like to recollect here both a bit of my history and how it has led up to these present times in my life.
More will be forth coming as I find the time to blog and log it in...
My earliest memories are from just about four years of age and are that of growing up in West Palm Beach Florida. I come from a family of five siblings of which I am the third or middle child. My father was a musician struggling to feed five hungry children and a wife. They were to quote Dickens both the best and worst of times. It was wonderful for a kid like me growing up in a lush tropical setting like south Florida. One who loved adventure and mystery, imagination and art. I from the very start loved the water and we lived right on Lake Worth and we were very close to the Atlantic Ocean.
I spent my time hanging out on the docks down by the sailing ships, cabin cruisers, speed boats and fishing trawlers. The smell of salt air breezing through the towering palms was my daily breath. I loved to play with my friends and pretend I was Sinbad or Captain Kidd, out on the sea commanding the Jolly Roger. The tall sea pine trees would serve well as my ships mast gazing out to sea and it instilled in me a strong sense of the romantic and poetic, early on.
I started elementary school in 1958 and began my life of academic learning and social frustration there at a place called ironically, Northmore. I could have only been more south if I lived in Key West. We arrived in Florida at a pivotal time in American history. The following year Castro over threw the Cuban government in the Revolucion. Our nieghborhoods quickly began to overflow with Cubanos and Spanish quickly became a second language lingering everywhere in the air. Shortly afterward John Kennedy became our new president. His father Joe Kennedy maintained a mansion/compound just over the inter-coastal waterway in Palm Beach were the rich and famous in entertainment, politics and business came to play during the winter season. So the Kennedys were down there a lot in those years. My father many times would be hired to play for their partys, social dances and functions. He would come home with tales of how he had rubbed elbows with the elite and we were held spellbound by his stories. It was all so very romantic and exciting during those Camolot days until the Cuban Missle crisis. The CEO East Coast train tracks ran right behind our house on Pinewood Ave. When the 'big scare' was on during those Cold War days of emminent WWIII cataclysm, I would stand day after day in my back yard watching armoured vehicles, tanks, guided missle launchers and other implements of war rushing by on flat bed train cars heading down to Key West.
I was ten years old and was wondering if I'd ever even see my eleventh birthday party. I was learning early on what global paranoia meant. While the threat of the nuclear arms race was playing out it's grim hand in my own backyard. Not the safest kind of feeling for a kid to grow up with, not right before his eyes!
And yet on the positive side Cape Canaveral was right up the coast from us and the space program was in full swing. We could actually watch the Mercury missions blasting off into space from a distance and for me as a big sci-fi fan this was terribly exciting stuff. The second wave of the UFO phenomanon was also happening then which utterly fascinated me and I lived for TV shows life The Invaders, Lost in Space, The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone.
Then when I was in the sixth grade in 1963 the unthinkable happened! The president was shot, assasinated in Dallas, Texas. It stunned the nation and broke my heart at that tender age. Camelot was over. The Vietnam War had begun and the civil rights movement was churning forward. The big ugly of race riots, social protests, more assasinations and violent disorder was about to descend on America and the, 'Age of Innocence' was ending. On the lighter side however the Beatles emerged out of nowhere like a breath of fresh air and joy to play on the Ed Sullivan Show. My world was forever changed from then on! Rock and Roll and the new British Invasion became my obsession. It was to frame my veiw of the world in time and define the person I would become for the rest of the decade.
We left Florida to move north in 1964. To Richmond, Virginia where my mothers releatives lived. We had moved all of our lives except for those days for me in elementary school. I am grateful to this day that I at least had those years to ground me and leave me with a feeling of some constantcy in life without the full blown gypsey effect of the coming days that followed. We moved next from Richmond to Salisbury, Marlyland for a season while my father worked in Ocean City. Then back to Florida in 1965 for a season and then back to Richmond for a while. Once again we moved back to Florida for the winter season. Ping-Pong! And as soon as it seemed we had settled into a nice house and a great neighborhood my father ran out of work options and we had to move again. About the time we'd settle in and I managed to make some friends we had to move yet again. The next time it was back to Richmond to stay. All of this jumping up and down the Eastern Seaboard was taking it toll on the family and I for one came to hate it. As we finally settled into what seemed a permanant home in Richmond my father would leave and go work out of state leaving us alone. During this time my brothers and I began to get involved in local rock and roll garage bands. My oldest brother who had graduated High School was not long after married and then drafted into the US ARMY. My other brother and I continued to ply our musical skills in bands, he as a guitarist and I as a lead singer.
Then once again the unthinkable happened. Because we were so poor and my fathers work was so unpredictable my parents decided to put my brother and I into a boys home/orphanage. This was to lighten the load on the rest of the family finacially. My father and mother, little sister and baby brother moved from Richmond up to Asbury Park, New Jersey while my brother and I were left in town to make our own way forward in life apart from our family in the orphanage. In many ways it was a devasating thing to be wrenched away from our parents and siblings but on the positive side at least we didn't have to move yet once again and were assured of a place to eat and live. The year was 1967, the year of Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Summer of Love in San Francisco. I was fourteen, a young rock and roller and an angry young man. From a broken home with a broken heart. I was primed to plung deeply, without my fathers and mothers direct discipline, right into the center of the Counter-Culture, Hippie mindset. The drug culture was starting to burgeon across America and I was to be right in the middle of it.
This is my on-going personal testimony and life history and will take some time to complete it, as it is a very long story with much to tell...I will be adding to it as I can find the time to.
More recent times...
This is where I will be blogging more recent develpments in my life and times.