I didn’t wait for the obvious question. “We’ll take it,” I said. We needed a truck, having been without one since somebody in a minivan tried to create a middle lane during a traffic jam and totaled ours several years before. I hated having to rent a truck when I needed to haul something, and a truck was on my list of things to get.

Two days later we went back over, bringing lunch from a favorite drive-inn near my hometown. After we’d had a pleasant lunch with my parents, we went into the yard where my new old truck was waiting. Dad handed me the keys and an envelope full of paperwork, we took some photos to commemorate the moment, and then off we went. I’d barely made it out of the driveway before the tears I’d been holding back started to fall, and hard. I must have cried for the first three miles of the trip home.

For as long as I’d been around, squarebody Chevrolet trucks like this one had been a part of our family. To sit in one took me back to countless childhood memories of Saturday mornings, getting a biscuit and a big glass bottle of Dr. Pepper and riding around wherever the road took us, or going to work with Dad at the sawmill, the occasional Saturday I’d ride the mail route with him, or countless errands near and far. These trucks were as much a part of my childhood as the little church up the street or the Sears catalog. And now, the last of the family’s squarebodies was coming home with me.

Like all the family’s trucks, there was no mistaking it was a work truck. Dad’s trucks were always the lowest trim level (Custom Deluxe, which meant anything but), nothing power in the interior, no air conditioning, no fancy trim. This one was the same, the kind of truck that shaped my feelings about what pickup trucks should be. I know some folks like their big shiny trucks with the fancy trim and plush interiors and full-power everything, but I’d never want one like that. This one looks at you and says “Let’s go get a load of lumber or some concrete blocks and get to work on something, and I won’t care if I get a battle scar or two.” It’s a truck that cuts the crap, and that’s the kind of truck I love.

Although the 90-minute voyage to our homestead went without any drama, it was obvious the truck had some issues. Some I could smell (what’s with the smell of gasoline around the filler door?) and some I’d found out (no functioning horn). It also didn’t have a heater core, though Dad had one inbound through the local Carquest. There was surface rust on the top of the bed. The engine tended to flood out. A trailer neck had bashed into the tailgate a few months before, leaving a big dent. As they say, the bones were solid, but it was a fixer-upper.

Before I could do anything else, of course, I had to get square with the county and the state. The property taxes on a 33-year-old truck weren’t that much, which was good. Of course, I canceled out that luck by going to the DMV on the same day the statewide computer system decided to crash, and hard. After a long wait, I went home, new license plate in hand. But then Dad’s home county didn’t get a notification and kept sending him tax notices. It got resolved, but along the way it was every caricature of bureaucracy come to life.

Now with the official stuff done, it was time to start fixing what needed it. I’d done minor repairs before, but one major repair effort with my Cavalier that ended in disaster had left me gun-shy about trying anything new. On the other hand, it wasn’t easy to find people who could fix a vehicle whose technology was this old-school, and even that would cost more than I had. And, I mean, I had some tools – in fact, Mom had given me a huge tool kit she’d won in a local drawing she’d randomly entered, so I was set. Why not see what I could do? When the heater core came in, I looked up some instructions on how to do it, then screwed up my courage and dropped the heater box. Inside the box was a mouse nest (abandoned, thankfully). Everything got very thoroughly cleaned, the heater core got installed and connected, and with heart wedged between adenoids I started the truck to see if the repair took. Somehow, it had.

From there, the other little chores got done: fixing the horn, polishing the paint, then grinding the rust off the top of the bed and repainting it. Most of what I did in the first couple years was accessible stuff that didn’t require too much risk. I didn’t yet feel comfortable doing more intense projects, but I was also allergic to paying someone to do it. Not only am I not rich, but I just don’t like paying someone to do a job that I can do myself with a clear set of instructions.

The truck was going to force my hand, anyway. One summer day we went to get some building supplies and barely made it home. The engine was stumbling out, and a couple times the truck died on the highway. Somehow we made it home and got unloaded, and then the truck just sat for a while as I did some figuring. Bad sending unit? Bad gasoline? Dirty fuel tank? Carburetor problems? Fuel pump? Everything seemed questionable, and the more I looked, the more I figured a general overhaul was in order. So the whole fuel system got redone, from cleaning the fuel tank and changing the rubber lines to installing a new fuel pump and charcoal canister.

Then came the real fun: rebuilding the carburetor. I had visions of things going really wrong there, of a rookie mistake causing a stuck throttle. But, good student that I am, I did my homework and ordered the correct parts and supplies. After a couple evenings of work, the old Quadrajet was in better shape than it had been in years. Getting it dialed in once reinstalled was an adventure, but two years and several thousand miles later it’s proven reliable.

Since then I’ve done more projects. I replaced the water pump and flushed the cooling system. The transmission has a new gasket and filter. The rear differential, which was covered in gunk from a leak, got serviced (and few things are worse than the smelly glop that is aged, dirty gear oil). I rebuilt the power steering pump. The electrical circuit from the battery to the starter and alternator was rewired, and the alternator got overhauled, too. Last year I finally replaced the window rubber in the doors, and the cab is nicely weatherproof now.

Along the way I’ve found all kinds of surprises, such as the battery cable with a length of electrical tape covering a couple inches of missing insulation. When I replaced the shock absorbers, I compressed the old ones to see how shot they actually were. One of them was still compressed when I took it to the scrap metal bin a few weeks ago, so it’s no wonder why the poor truck rattled my fillings whenever we hit a bump. I’ve found things that made me wonder how the truck got this far, and yet we keep going.

I’ve kept a list of all the things I’ve done for the truck, and all the systems I’ve fixed, one at a time. Most all of it has been done with that set of tools Mom gave me the day I brought it home. It’s been an education, and mostly a fun one. Sometimes I’ve inflicted setbacks on myself (I learned the hard way the difference between inch-pounds and foot-pounds on a torque wrench) but I’ve always worked my way through it.

And that’s the thing: it’s only been me doing all these things. Call it a Generation X-er’s instinct that nobody’s going to help you, call it autodidactism, or call it whatever you may, but no one else’s hands have been doing the work. Thus far at least, it’s worked. Fortunately, a Squarebody with a small-block engine is not only easy to work on, but since they’re common as dirt just about anything you’d need is widely available.

Maybe if I were more enterprising and outgoing and visionary I’d have chronicled the adventure and turned it into something educational. I mean, I work around television in my day job, and I love Vivian Howard, so…maybe I could have my own series and everything, an automotive version of Kitchen Curious. (Imagine me, a purposeful smile on my face, one of the cats in my arm, as I stroll out of the house and head purposefully toward my workbench! Imagine the vigorous string music behind the gorgeous drone shots of the local Advance Auto Parts store! Imagine me strolling the aisles of the hometown Harbor Freight with a mechanic friend who’s telling me about the merits and demerits of floor jacks versus bottle jacks! Imagine me having interesting and informative and artistically-captured conversations with auto body repair instructors and junkyard owners! This concept sells itself! Somebody get the teevee people on the phone! Somebody round up some funding sources and let’s get this going! Y’all know where to find me.)

I haven’t kept a spreadsheet on how much I’ve spent fixing up the truck. Maybe it would be fun to know, but I really haven’t minded any of the money I’ve spent on it. Some of it is an investment in my own education, in the skills I’ve picked up as I’ve done all this work. But the real value is in keeping this truck on the road, not only for its usefulness, but as a link to where I came from.

Sometimes I’ll have fun with the fact that I own it, calling it the Rolling Energy Crisis (I mean, it has the aerodynamics of a brick and it gets 11 miles per gallon with a tailwind) or the Herkimer Battle Jitney. But underneath it all, I know how much I love that big ol’ truck, that sometimes I can’t believe I actually own it, and how it’s a reminder of so much that I left behind in yesteryear, and of so much that will never leave me.

How I got here was an adventure in itself. My first two cars were hand-me-downs. When Dad bought a used Oldsmobile as the new family car, I got the slightly younger Chevrolet we’d had since I was 6. It was faded and getting a little wheezy, but it was plenty enough for my daily commutes to and from college. When I went off to graduate school, the Chevy was retired and I got the Oldsmobile, since Dad had bought a used Buick Park Avenue for him and Mom. That Oldsmobile and I went on many an adventure together. It was big and underpowered, its paint was cracking, and it bore suspicious welds that made me think it had been in a really bad wreck at some point before we bought it. That car had been around. But it rode like a cloud.

The Oldsmobile was what took me, and as many of my belongings as I could cram into it, to Florida when I moved there in mid-2000. Somewhere around Palm Beach, the alternator light flickered on. I managed to limp into Fort Lauderdale. A few days and a new alternator later, things were fine again. I saw a puddle of brake fluid under the car a few weeks later, and Midas got a good bit of money to make things right. Not fun when you don’t have a job.

A couple months into my stay, I did get a callback and ended up with decent employment. But the Oldsmobile was having none of it, and more little things continued to go wrong – nothing major, but just enough to tell me I’d best do something soon. I’d been raised in a GM family, and I wanted to stay loyal. So one day in September 2000, I took delivery of a new two-door Chevy Cavalier, a cute little silver job with a little bump on the trunk lid that was supposed to suggest a spoiler. I was so proud of that little car. At the end of the month, I drove the Oldsmobile back home for its formal retirement, and then flew back to Florida.

The Cavalier made the move back to South Carolina with me, and then over the summer of 2001 made a couple trips back and forth as I closed things out in Florida and set things up in my new old home. It wasn’t any great shakes as a car. Its inline-four engine had all the power of a washing machine motor, and the interior was full of plastic that didn’t take long to turn brittle. It was a product of peak turn-of-the-century GM mediocrity. I’d remained loyal to the Bowtie, only to find out that the Chevrolet of my youth had gone the way of the passenger pigeon. But that little Cavalier held together and we went everywhere, it seemed. And few things felt as happy as the day in 2005 that I made the last payment on that car. I was still kind of young, and there was a pride I took in that achievement. Every last cent I paid for that car had been my own, earned with my own work. Nothing about it had been given to me.

It felt good to not have a car payment, and I planned to drive that car forever. In it I drove to conferences in Georgia and Alabama, with a quick jaunt over the Mississippi border just to say I’d been there; several trips to Florida, including a crazy and enjoyable extended adventure on another conference trip in 2014 and a 2008 adventure to see a Shuttle launch; and our biggest adventure, to Indianapolis and then Evansville and back in 2015. There’s a memory I have from that trip, and I cherish it: driving along at speed, somewhere between Evansville and Bloomington on a deserted Interstate 69, on a picture-perfect afternoon in early June, and it seemed like things couldn’t get any better.

Of course, they didn’t. About a month and a half later, the air conditioning system quit working. It was going to be an expensive fix for a car with nearly 180,000 miles on the Hobbs. Before the summer was out, I signed a three-year lease on a shiny black Toyota Corolla sedan. Like the Cavalier, it was a smaller car for basic transportation, but “basic transportation” in 2015 was far better appointed than in 2000. The lease payments weren’t much, and I kept the Cavalier as a utility car until its cooling system finally let go rather spectacularly in 2017. I cried the day it was hauled off. It was like losing a member of the family.

The Corolla went on a lot of adventures with me, including a completely bonkers trip in the summer of 2017. The first stop was Indianapolis and the museum at the Speedway, and then it was on to Madison, Wisconsin to do some research for the book I was starting to write about Dave Garroway. Outside Rockford, Illinois there was a torrential Midwest storm I drove through, on a crowded Interstate highway. As I started down a cloverleaf, hail started pelting the car and visibility went zero-zero. Only through divine intervention did I not plow into the back of the semi in front of me.

In early 2018 it was clear I was going to run well past the mileage allotment on the Corolla’s lease. A smarter version of me would have just started planning to buy the little one when the lease was up. Instead, I got ambition. I wanted something that felt more like my station in life, a car that made me feel I’d achieved it. Never mind that the Corolla was doing just fine for everything I needed, of course. I got ambition, or maybe ambition got me. And, after serious flirtation with the Mazda 6 after a couple of test drives (and, man, did I love that thing), I swapped the Corolla for a Camry XSE, just off the assembly line. It didn’t have the elegance of the Mazda, but it had things all its own that I liked when I test-drove one. Plus, it was a Toyota, a known quantity with plenty of service opportunities nearby. I was so proud the day I took delivery. Finally, I had a big and sporty car of my own, one that was actually something I wanted instead of settling for.

The Camry started out as a lease. Over time, though, I realized I didn’t want to go through the agonies of buying a car for a long time. On January 6, 2021, I took the car back to the dealership. While it was up on the rack in the service department, I was in the front going through the agonies of paperwork and financing and everything else. When we were done, the Camry was out front, all nice and clean after service and a run through the car wash. It seemed like a great day, until I got home and learned what had happened at the Capitol.

Of course, a buyout meant I’d gotten myself into another installment contract for a few years – on top of my student loans and credit cards. At least with the car, it was going toward reliable transportation that I knew would see me through just about any trip I’d need to take. The many road trips we’ve been on together have borne this out: Maryland, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia are all in the Camry’s logbook. I’ve had family members, students, even two or three sorta well-known people as passengers. I’ve parked that car next to the greatest ship ever built. I’ve seen the Empire State Building through that car’s windows. Yes, we’ve got stories.

In all these adventures, the car’s mechanical soundness has never been a worry, and I’ve been religious about keeping up with service intervals. Of late, I’ve been doing it myself; not only oil and filter changes, but recently I redid the brakes and replaced the struts and shocks. It continues to be reliable and ride well. In fact, the only issue I’ve really had with the car has been with the huge wheels and rubber-band tires on the XSE model. They do not like potholes or road hazards, and I’ve lost count of how many tires I’ve replaced over the years. I finally installed 17″ wheels with more substantial tires, and although this configuration isn’t as sleek as the factory setup, it means a lot less worry. (I also replaced the doughnut spare with a matching wheel and tire, which means even less worry.)

Through all these years, I’ve continued to make that monthly payment, steadily paying it down, getting ever closer. Until that magic day this week when the payoff was close enough that I could goose my regular payment with some money from my savings, and the magic words PAID IN FULL appeared.

It reminded me of how I felt almost four years ago when I paid off my student loans. I’d dreamed of that day for more than 20 years, remembered how it felt when I got that first invoice. It was like telling me to climb Denali. But how do you climb a mountain? One step at a time. And, so I did. Came that glorious day in August 2022, when the last payment went in…and I remember wishing there were fireworks or flashing lights, like the pinball machine in “The Time Of Your Life” (or the scoreboard at Old Comiskey that it inspired). Instead, my great achievement was marked with a whisper.

There weren’t fireworks, but there was instead a feeling of quiet accomplishment. I did it. I didn’t begrudge the people whose student loans were being forgiven around that time; heck, if I’d had a higher balance at the time I’d have applied too. (In fact, I had seriously looked into the public service loan forgiveness program, only to learn that refinancing my loans through an eligible program would have taken as much time as just paying them off as they were.) I don’t wish student loan debt on anybody, and I don’t begrudge anybody who got forgiveness or other help, not at all. But there’s something I feel when I look at my payoff letters: the knowledge that this big thing I overcame was mine. It’s how I felt then, and it’s a feeling I had again this week when those three glorious words appeared on my computer screen.

It’s not like I can suddenly go nuts with all this money that will no longer go toward a car payment. There’s still a couple or three consumer accounts that need to be retired and a mortgage that’s creeping toward payoff. All the while, I need to build up my savings and get some other things going so I can prepare for my next act, once I’ve had enough of teaching. (Not retirement, mind you, because I’ve long known that if I don’t have something to do, I’ll go stark raving mad.)

But even with what’s ahead, this is a moment to enjoy. I did, the other day, as I walked out front and saw that sleek blue machine in the driveway, and thought to myself: “This is my car now.”

It took a long time, but it was worth it.

My parents implored Santa to do something about it, and the following Christmas I got a portable cassette recorder.

Over the years to come, I would make many tapes on that machine and the several that would follow when they inevitably broke. But the very first tape I made with that first tape recorder it is an interesting artifact. On Side A, there’s a few moments from Christmas morning: me goofing around and Dad’s voice commanding me to bring something to him; me giving a couple of inventories of my haul from Santa. Then there’s an extended cut from the next day, when Dad thought it would be hilarious if we secretly recorded Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house, and so we conspired to hide the tape recorder on a nearby shelf. In the moment, it was funny, for we played it back about an hour later to our astonished family (at one point my grandmother, hearing herself say something kind of harsh, did a spit-take worthy of Danny Thomas). Now, with half the people at that table now dead, it’s a precious artifact. It’s the only recording I have of my great-grandfather’s voice.

Side B, though, has a time capsule of a different sort. After I got home from Sunday school, I turned on the hand-me-down cabinet-model stereo in my room (which didn’t have a cassette deck, alas), placed the tape recorder next to the speakers, and recorded the last 45 minutes or so of that week’s “American Country Countdown.” That’s interesting in a lot of ways. In the previous installment I talked about country music being what I grew up with, so the eleven songs that led the week’s chart are a good idea of what the typical week in my fourth-grade life would have sounded like.

For the uninitiated, “American Country Countdown” was the country music version of “American Top 40.” Like AT40, it most often aired on weekends. It was hosted by the super-cool Bob Kingsley, who had one of the best radio voices I’ve ever heard (seriously, listen to some of this for a little bit and I dare you to not keep listening), and who was so good at telling you the little stories that gave you a glimpse into the artists and their hit songs. As the best DJs could, back when radio was an art form, Bob had this way of making you feel like you were a couple friends spending a few hours together on a weekend morning. (I came to appreciate this even more about a decade later, for one of my responsibilities working Sunday mornings at the radio station was playing “American Country Countdown.” By then it arrived at the station as a package of four CDs. Each segment within an hour was a separate track, and I’d pause the CD player after each track to do our local breaks. At the start of 1993, our program director figured out how to integrate the “Countdown” discs into our automation, and that was the beginning of the end of my young radio career. But, I digress.)

I wish I could say my recording was perfect, but it’s far from it. (I keep hoping the complete show will surface someday, either through one of the video/audio sites or that I’ll happen across the LPs on an auction site; regardless, if anyone reading this has the whole program, please let me know, for I’m interested.) It’s straight off the speaker, and that means you get background noise. My folks were wanting me to get finished so we could go over to my grandparents’ house for lunch (where Dad and I pulled our prank). You can hear me opening and closing the door to my room, and my voice calling out to my folks, trying to buy time. (I was a completist, even then.) At one point you can hear me trying to sing along to the David Frizzell song. On the other hand, I had the foresight (or laziness?) to keep the commercials and IDs intact, and those speak not only of a bygone era in radio production but also of local businesses that are gone with the wind.

But, what are we waiting for, right? Let’s get into the songs that led Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart for the week of December 18, 1982. (The full rundown is visible here, if you like. There’s some stuff on there that’s pure gold, and some stuff that didn’t age well, but that’s the nature of time capsules, no?)

Up five notches (as Kingsley would say) to number 11 is Johnny Lee and Friends, with an enhanced version of “Cherokee Fiddle.” For some reason, I loved this song a lot as a kid, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the chance to capture it on tape was the reason I wanted to record this program. One of Johnny’s friends on this version is reportedly Charlie Daniels. Say what you will about Charlie (and I have about his later years), but the man was a musical genius, and without peer on the fiddle.

At number 10, up three notches this week, is Rosanne Cash with “I Wonder.” It’s…well, only vaguely country music (to borrow a line from William Poundstone, curved lines and considerable imagination must be used). It’s closer to “Linda Ronstadt with Nelson Riddle” than “Loretta Lynn with Conway Twitty.” On the other hand, it’s Rosanne freakin’ Cash, who is awesome and is welcome to do whatever she wants.

Number nine is one of the first George Strait songs I remember, that’s now a deep cut. “Marina Del Rey,” up two notches this week, has George pining over a beach weekend he’s just spent with a mysterious lady. It’s lovely, evocative, haunting. George Strait knows how to select good songs and interpret them just right; in this one, you feel both ecstasy and ache. I can’t think of a bad George Strait song, but without question this is one of his best.

Bob leads into this week’s number eight song (up one from last week) by mentioning that David Frizzell (brother of Lefty) plays a bit part in the new Clint Eastwood movie Honkytonk Man. (As did several other real-life country artists, including beloved Marty Robbins in a scene made even more poignant by the fact that Marty died one week before the movie’s release.) It wasn’t David Frizzell’s first go-around with Eastwood, for he had contributed to the soundtrack for Any Which Way You Can. Clint helped make Frizzell’s first solo album a reality, and it’s from that album that we get “Lost My Baby Blues.” Frizzell’s voice was perfect for songs about getting drunk after getting dumped. (The same album also gave us the immortal “I’m Gonna Hire A Wino To Decorate Our Home,” without question the greatest song title in history. Young me missed the point of the song, loved the over-the-top mental imagery, and bought the single.)

Continuing that theme is Merle Haggard, whose “Going Where The Lonely Go” advances five positions this week. It’s a typical solid song from Merle Haggard in the early ’80s. He was reliable, one of the human gods on the country music Olympus of my childhood. Like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and George Jones, Merle Haggard had just always been there, reliable as my dad’s Chevy truck.

Reba McEntire, some time before she became a Southern-fried queen of all media, is up four notches with “Can’t Even Get The Blues.” Even in this early track you get a glimpse of the exasperated Southern-fried sass that would become her trademark.

Hank Williams Jr. gets topical with this week’s fifth-place song, “The American Dream.” Bocephus takes on professional athletes signing million-dollar contracts (one wonders if Nolan Ryan’s ears were burning), well-dressed televangelists mooching for donations (“they want you to send your money to the Lord, but they give you their address”), and Democrats complaining about Reagan’s budget cuts, all while the rest of us are making hard choices about what we can afford. Hank was a few years away from fully embracing the outsized Bocephus character of “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight,” but for those who knew his albums’ deeper cuts, nothing to come stylistically or politically was really that much of a surprise. The post-chorus bridge incorporates the first line of “Hail to the Chief,” which is reprised at the end with Hank saying “Hail to the chief.” (The version we get here ends with that, but another version has Hank pausing for a moment before laughing and saying “Hail, yes. Heh-heh-heh!”)

My brother, then in his mid-teens, was becoming a full-blown Hank Jr. fan about this time; the macho Southern outdoorsman aesthetic of Hank’s music really resonated with him, and a few months later Mom took him to see Bocephus when he performed at the (now-demolished) Greenwood Civic Center. He also had all of Hank’s albums, and when he would do the driving he’d play Hank’s cassettes, and I thus got exposed to a lot of his late ’70s and early to mid-’80s work. Some of it is cartoonish, some of it has not aged well at all, some of it is outright gross (seriously, “Fat Friends” should never have existed), some of it goes places you wish it hadn’t, but if you know where to look there’s some really nice, sensitive and sometimes outright gorgeous stuff in there.

Kenny Rogers was white-hot in the early ’80s and it seemed like everything he touched turned into a best-seller. In his lead-in, Bob mentions that Rogers attributes much of his success to having an ear for good songs that he knows will become hits. That continues this week, as “A Love Song,” written by Lee Greenwood, is up four. Mom didn’t like Kenny Rogers and thought he acted like a conceited showboat, but even as a kid I could appreciate that he was a reliable hitmaker with mass appeal, and even if I wasn’t necessarily a fan I couldn’t deny that some of his stuff was just plain good. (“Love Will Turn You Around,” which he had taken to #1 earlier in the year and was used as the theme to Six Pack, may be slickly-produced, but…my word, that groove. It’s a particular favorite.)

Number three this week is John Anderson, up three on the charts with “Wild and Blue.” Lots of fiddle, lots of steel guitar, lots of John’s twangy, yodeling voice encompassing the ache and frustration at the song’s heart. It’s a great version of a great song, but within about three months it’s going to be lost in the super-colossal shadow of a breakout hit from the same album.

Aw, son. Jerry Reed’s up two this week as “The Bird,” one of his reliable comedic turns, moves into second place. Reed leaned so much into his goofy comic persona with his songs and on-screen appearances, but, my word, the man was an outright genius with a guitar.

Bob leads in to this week’s number one song by telling us that for his hit songs, Earl Thomas Conley – who, from Bob’s description, sounds like kind of an introvert – gets inspiration from things that he’s learned in his life. Each song is, in a way, Conley saying “Well, if you liked that, here’s another side of me.” It’s something that Conley expects will be happening the rest of his life. With that, up one notch to take this week’s title is “Somewhere Between Right and Wrong.” And wherever that may be, this song makes it sound like a rockin’ good time.

And after the fade-out and Bob’s closing remarks, my efforts to stall for time with my parents gave out and the recording abruptly ends.

Many more tapes were to come in the months and years ahead. I have many of them, and sometimes I’ll listen to them. The sound isn’t the greatest, but the memories are vivid. I’d never dare let anyone else listen to them, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything. It doesn’t seem like it really was that long ago, and it’s strange how these sounds can bridge the decades I’ve lived, and yet some of the things I captured – like these eleven songs – make me glad I got to experience the times I’ve lived.

I also grew up in a tiny, cloistered rural town, raised by a conservative family. The music our parents listened to was always country music. Which was fine, and there’s so much of it I love deeply, but it also meant I missed a lot that was happening in other genres because I never really got to explore. My first exposure to a lot of hit songs was through Weird Al Yankovic’s parodies. I missed a lot of what my peers were experiencing. I didn’t discover R.E.M., for instance, until I was in my first year in college and Out Of Time had been out for a while. We also didn’t have cable, so “music television” to me was whatever was on that week’s Hee Haw. I didn’t have MTV until my first apartment in graduate school, and by then MTV wasn’t MTV any more. To this day, if somebody is watching videos from yesteryear, there’s this aching sadness, the feeling that I missed out on an entire era.

It also meant I discovered some acts just a little too late. In 1993, the group 10,000 Maniacs had a huge hit with its version of “Because The Night,” recorded during the MTV Unplugged special. It was played to the point of becoming audio wallpaper. I didn’t really know anything about the group, aside from when David Letterman would ask Paul Shaffer if all 10,000 of the Maniacs would be there. Lack of familiarity meant I didn’t pay attention to musical guests, which meant I missed out on these four guys performing upbeat rock music while their frontwoman, who twirled a lot, sang bookish lyrics about Very Serious Topics in an accent and cadence that defied description. But when I got interested, I got interested, and then captivated.

The joke was on me, though, for the band and the singer had gone their separate ways. That didn’t stop me from making up for lost time. I bought all the CDs, which prompted lights to go on in my head (“Oh! That’s who did that song about the days you’ll remember!” And yet when you hear it a year and a half after it was a thing, there’s that ache again, the ache of the thing you missed out on). I even went to independent music stores (remember those?) to hunt down bootleg CDs of live performances and demos and expanded singles and anything else I could find. The day Natalie Merchant’s first solo album hit the stores, I went to the Musicland (remember those?) at our little local mall and gladly paid the list price for the CD. After all the anticipation, I found it…well, different. Beautiful, yes, but it’s sorta difficult to dance to songs about earthquakes and deceased wives and a seven-year relationship that ended in betrayal and that sort of thing. (Although “Jealousy” is a lot of fun, especially the single version.) But even if it wasn’t what I expected or exactly my cup of tea, I seethed at the snide review in Rolling Stone. How dare they!

Be that as it may, Natalie intrigued and influenced me. Along with early R.E.M., her music has been the soundtrack of my life, providing joy when things were good and solace when life was difficult. Her off-stage work, including volunteering her time and resources for educating young people, nudged me into volunteer work and very likely toward my own career in education. In many ways, her example made me want to heed my better angels. She has shown how to accept advancing age with wisdom, and her example is why I don’t dread the silver I’m starting to see in the mirror; if she can do this, so can I. And I remain captivated by her art. To this day, if one of her songs comes on while I’m in the car, I’ll sing along. (Dick Smothers once told an interviewer, “In my head, I sing like Sinatra. The problem is, nobody can hear it.” Replace Sinatra with Natalie Merchant and you have what I’m up against, and it’s why I don’t sing unless I’m alone.) And knowledgeable readers have no doubt noticed my habit of working her lyrics or phrasings into my writing. For so many reasons, I remain loyal to her.

What of the Maniacs, though? Well, when the record label opted to go with Natalie and not the band, they had to find their own way, and I lost track. But they kept going. Sometimes they’d release some new stuff; sometimes they’d play some gigs or go on tour. Over the years, as with any family, changes have happened: comings and goings, things that did and didn’t work, the whole thing. The band has had different lead vocalists, different guitarists…over four and a half decades, stuff will happen. Saddest of all was the death of lead guitarist Robert Buck in 2000; his distinctive guitar work added so much to their music’s character. But despite the challenges, the band’s still with us. They’re not selling out arenas or appearing on the big-name talk shows, but they are still playing, still touring when they can, and have a devoted fan base that will buy the tickets and fill the house and sing along and dance and have a wonderful time. And in return, the audience will get a couple hours of music performed by artists who are playing their hearts out and sure do look like they’re having fun doing it. Their fans love them, and they love us, and…well, ’tis sweet to be remembered.

I’ve never been much of a concert-goer. Some of it is that music is a very personal thing to me, and I still bear scars from when people have ridiculed my musical preferences. That’s exacerbated by the logistical hassles of getting to and from the show, the antics of other concertgoers, and all the other things that could go sideways and ruin the experience. And growing up cloistered meant I just never got in the habit of going to things. Even when I moved away to graduate school, and there were at least three venues in town that routinely brought world-class entertainment, I couldn’t break the habit. (And it cost me. Not going to see Tori Amos at the Township in 1997…oh, that remains a regret.) At some point, it became kind of a stupid point of pride. The closer I got to my 50th birthday, the more stupid it seemed.

In late 2022 I found out that Natalie Merchant would perform in Greenville. She’d not had much cooking the last few years (and there were reasons), but she had a new record coming along. With what she’d meant to me for so long, and with her being so close to home, it would be ridiculous not to go. In a way, it would be a way for the me of nearly three decades before to have a moment, to thank her for what she’d meant to me. On the day tickets went on sale I splurged and got the best seat I could, which was pretty close to the stage. I thought, “Okay, I’ll do this, close that chapter and move on with my life.”

Oh, boy, was I mistaken. If anything, that night in April 2023 reminded me of so much that the years had let me forget. It was a sweet, profound evening. (And although she has an image as a very serious person – and yes, she can be – she was not only very charming, but at several points was a hoot. Hearing her imitate The Count from Sesame Street was not on my bingo card, but it happened.) It was one of the best things I’d done for myself in a long time, and it made me glad I heeded the voice that said “this is ridiculous. Go.” And happily I re-upped in the Natalie Merchant Marines, this time for the duration.

A year or so later, while goofing around the social media feeds, I came across a group dedicated to the Maniacs. When I saw a couple of the band members commenting from time to time, I had to join. There was a radio documentary series that told the story of the band’s formative years, and I devoured each new installment. There was talk of new touring dates. I was hoping that maybe they’d come to Athens for a show at the 40 Watt, a trip I’d gladly make. But imagine my surprise when the August 2025 swing included the Newberry Opera House. Yep, a venue about a mile from where I work. The day tickets went on sale, I leapt. Front-row center? Sold American.

Throughout the summer the little envelope with my ticket sat on the counter, a bittersweet reminder since the show would be on the last day before I had to go back to work. Life went on, though, and soon that day was here. From my collection I got out a T-shirt from the “Our Time in Eden” days, one I’d found in a record store in the mid-’90s. I never imagined wearing it to a Maniacs performance, but…30 years on, here we go.

I was at the Opera House early enough. It was a reasonably pleasant evening, and I sat outside with some of my fellow patrons who were waiting. Out the corner of my eye I saw my colleague Warren driving past and figured he must be here for the show, too. Sure enough, he was, and I walked up to meet him. With him was his longtime friend Will, who was wearing a Maniacs T-shirt, and I knew I was among friends. (Since this post went live, Warren has written his own account of the evening, and I’m very happy to recommend it. You can also visit Will’s most enjoyable blog here.) The three of us talked for a couple minutes and then headed on in. While Warren and Will went to the will-call window, I walked over to the merch table for the obligatory souvenir. Instantly I fell in love with a T-shirt based on the Maddox Table trademark, and closed the deal on one in no time.

There was some kind of delay in starting the show, but in time the band members took the stage. Having known them mostly from pictures taken in the ’80s and early ’90s, it took a moment to place them. (The guitar player in the back took me a minute before I happily realized, “Holy crap! John Lombardo!”) But the moment the show started, age vanished. They played with a vigor and joy that was timeless. So many of the little things I remembered from countless playings of their first five CDs were there, as emotionally powerful as the original. If I’d closed my eyes, I’d be back in the early ’90s.

Of course, there had been two key personnel changes since 1993. Mary Ramsey has been the most enduring lead vocalist. She has made the lead role her own, and you fall in love not only with her vocals and her stage presence, but with her charming, down-to-earth, funny vibe. She is also an amazing violinist, which not only adds to the songs but gave us an extended solo at one point that was electrifying.

Ben Medina was playing lead guitar tonight, and although his guitar work sounds so much like Robert Buck’s, it’s still his own. He’s a true craftsman. What’s more, it’s fun watching him play, as this peaceful look comes across his face and he is one with the music. It added to the joy of the evening.

And what an evening, with songs spanning the band’s career. Most of the selections were from the band’s catalog up to 1993, along with a couple newer songs and some covers. “Because the Night” also made an appearance, of course, and Mary invited us to join in the chorus (and added a sweet “Because the night…belongs to you!” before the instrumental interlude).

Some of the songs were surprises, and I wasn’t expecting “You Happy Puppet” to be in the set, especially in this neck of our deep-red woods. It was a wonderful tour of the band’s catalog, and as Dave Letterman would say, they tore the roof off the place. There were people dancing in the aisles and at their seats. It was pure joy. Later in the show, bassist Steven Gustafson drifted from the stage to one of the wings, playing and swaying along with folks dancing nearby. The energy and love in the house was going both ways, and it turned into a big party. So many people were so happy. It was so beautiful to see.

As it happened, keyboardist Dennis Drew was celebrating his birthday that day. Steven had us all join in a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” and then said it was a tradition that if a band member had a birthday, they got to sing. So Dennis sang a song that’s been written for next year’s album, a really neat song about life in a small town. It fit so well with our own small town, and given that the band’s hometown is a good bit like our town and a few others nearby, smaller working-class cities that have had to adapt to changing times, it was especially apt.

For me, the evening was one song after another that I knew by heart, that I’d sung along with countless times over the decades, and it was so much like being in the car with my iTunes playlist going that it was oddly comforting. I happily sang along, although with the sound system in front of me I was mercifully inaudible. But I was caught up short during a break between songs when I heard several people in the audience start to sing lyrics that were strange to me, but somehow hauntingly, vaguely familiar. I felt once again like that kid who missed out on something. Mary picked up the lyric, then the band launched into an otherworldly cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” And once again, as I watched the band perform this song I didn’t know as if it was one of their own, and as I heard the others in the audience sing along, I was simultaneously mesmerized by the glory of the moment and saddened anew by what I’d missed back in the day, this great secret I’d missed, and it ached.

All too soon it was over. The band left the stage, and Steven said they’d see us in the lobby. I met up with Warren and Will, and on the way out we compared notes about what we’d seen. In the lobby we chatted for a little while longer, talking about the Maniacs and other topics, and then the guys set out to find something to eat. I was thankful I had bumped into them, for it made me so happy to share this evening with friends who got it, to whom I didn’t have to explain it.

By that time some of the band members were in the lobby. Now, I have a “don’t bother people unless there’s a need” policy, especially when it comes to well-known people. Some of it is upbringing, some of it is respect, and some of it is shyness. (You can understand why I didn’t last that long as a reporter.) In my mind, I’d wrestled with what to do if I bumped into any of the band members. I finally decided to just see what happens.

As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. The band members I saw were happy to sign autographs, pose for pictures, and mingle. Steven Gustafson was nearby when I was talking with Warren and his friend. He was signing a record for someone, and chuckling a bit about the aches and pains of being in a band while you’re getting older. I waited my turn, then gathered up my courage and thanked him for coming. He shook my hand and thanked me when I thanked him for all the joy he had brought me the last few decades. It was a very sweet moment. Dennis Drew was nearby. “You were sitting in the front row!” he said with a big smile. “How did we sound?” (“You were great!” I fan-girled in response.) We shook hands and I thanked him, too. John Lombardo was on a bench, and I went over to thank him. He shook my hand and was very touched when I shared what their music meant to me, and we had a brief but very warm visit. It made a beautiful evening more so.

I didn’t see the others, and although I’d have liked to have spoken with them, I figured it was a good enough evening. I needed to get home anyway. I kind of floated back to my car, still quite unable to believe I’d actually met three members of this band I’d loved so long…and glad to find out they were just a group of folks who love to make music and have fun doing it, were fortunate enough to make it this big of a thing, and the fun is what keeps them doing it. After this night, I hope they keep having fun for a long, long time.

For about three hours I’d laid all the problems and perils of my life, not to mention the world at large, aside. But now it was all waiting: the headlines, the chores, the meetings waiting for me next week. And against it, I would have to process this fantastic experience I’d just enjoyed, and since nature afflicted me with the power and pain of experiencing things very deeply, that kind of decompression can be an ordeal. But it was a bargain I’d gladly make again.

I hope the Maniacs will come back to town, and I hope I get to meet them all again, but I have no way of knowing if that’ll happen. I may never get to see Natalie Merchant again, and I doubt I’ll ever meet her (and I’m sure if I did, I would get out maybe three words of gibberish before hilariously fainting dead away). But, if nothing else, I can go the rest of my life knowing I’d had a moment to thank three of the folks whose artistry added joy to my happy moments and soothed me when times were hard, who have provided so much of my life’s soundtrack.

Others I’ve said have said it more eloquently, but I’ll say it again, and from my own experience: when the performers who mean something to you come around, give yourself the gift of going to see them. Buy the best tickets you can. Buy the T-shirt. Enjoy the show. And if you get the chance to thank them in person, do it. Let them know what their work has meant to you, while you have the chance. Don’t be one of the “well, I coulda” types. If you don’t…well, you’ll regret it.

Sunday was deceptively calm. Old movies (including one with a hilarious supporting role played by my spiritual godmother Eve Arden), watching the football playoffs and the goofiness thereof. But it was all with two thoughts looming in the background: it all changes tomorrow, and it all changes next week.

The more immediate change happened Monday at noon, and that’s been the gigantic thing that has dominated the entire landscape before and since. Others have written volumes about it, and we’re not even through the first week. For my part, since I try to keep this place reasonably family-friendly and there’s no way I can discuss it without using language that’s not at all family-friendly, it’s best if I preserve silence. I didn’t have long to think about it, anyway, because an hour after it all began, I was in our front yard helping to free a delivery van whose driver got it stuck in our wet grass. (It’s a long story involving some poor assumptions on his part.)

The other change I had to cope with this week was more personal: the end of a lengthy winter break. A few years ago, the college went to an academic calendar that built a very brief January term into the schedule, which then bumped the start of the Spring semester by about two and a half weeks. For those of us who don’t teach in the January term, it effectively means half of December and almost all of January are out of the office and self-directed.

Those who don’t understand what we do in our trade (and it’s a lot of folks, including most people in my family) get the idea that we coddled professors use all this free time to lounge around eating bon-bons while regular folks work for a living. What many don’t know is that my work doesn’t stop. It’s just not in the office. We have to rewrite our syllabus documents, write and revise lesson plans, develop assignments, take care of requests from students (which continue regardless of what the calendar says), develop and submit course schedules for upcoming semesters, monitor e-mail…a ton of things. In my case, I’ve also had to continue producing episodes of the television program – which, even though most of it is assembling features and connecting segments we recorded in advance, still involves about a half-day to stitch everything together, round up the latest game information for the scoreboard segment, QC it, render the final version and deliver it, etc. And in between all that is when I see after the things that are hard to fit in my schedule during the school term: taking the car in for service, taking the cat in for her annual exam, meetings with colleagues at other institutions to share/steal ideas, etc.

And, sometimes, we have to attend things on campus. There were a couple during the break, but few are as sobering as the one I attended Thursday, which had to do with preparation in the event of something that’s happened with increasing frequency over the last many years (and, indeed, happened again this week). It was a presentation of about two and a half hours, and it forced me to think about things I really don’t want to think about – including, again, how vulnerable a campus is, and how easily some nutcase could shatter the peace and goodwill that we take as a given.

Now, none of this is that new. In 1988 it happened at an elementary school near my hometown. I was in high school at the time, only a few miles from that school, and I remember hearing about it when school dismissed that afternoon. Three years later, the semester after I graduated, an isolated incident happened at my high school (more disturbing is that my mother, who worked at the school, was just over in the next hallway when it happened). And over the years, these kinds of incidents have happened in all kinds of places; not just schools but just about anywhere groups of people can gather.

You would have hoped at some point enough would have been enough, but it keeps happening. At one point the presentation showed, on a map, the number and magnitude of these incidents over the last 24 years. The word “disturbing” isn’t enough to describe it. The incidents themselves are disturbing enough, but the lack of meaningful action by those who could do something about it is even more so, and on the notes I took, I wrote some rather pungent commentary about this sorry state of affairs.

Part of the presentation included a network interview with a teacher who was at the school that got attacked not long before Christmas 2012, and she talked (through tears) about what she did to protect her students. We were told about another teacher who got on top of her students to protect them, and then paid for their futures with her life.

I remember that day very vividly – or, more accurately, the following days. We were going to a Christmas party the next afternoon, but it was so difficult to feel any kind of joy after knowing what had happened. Even though it was hundreds of miles away, the horror of it all was overwhelming. On the way home, as we listened to a radio news story about it, I had the first genuine crisis of faith I can recall in my life. It frightened me. What kind of world could this happen in, that this could happen to these little kids and the adults who took care of them? And it was my hope that something would get done about it. But we know what happened: a whole lot of nothing. My faith in God survived, but my faith in a few other things has yet to recover, and my scorn for a few people in particular only deepened.

And that’s what accompanied me as I sat through this seminar on Thursday. Not only do I have to know my subject area, not only do I have to know about classroom management and assessment methods and all this other stuff, but I have to constantly keep one ear open. I have to know where the nearest exits are (or can be made). I have to keep a special app on my phone, just in case. I have to know how to use the things in my classroom to defend or fight. And I also know that, in the worst case, I have to make sure my students are safe before I can see after my own safety. I’m the last one out of the danger zone. And I also know in my heart that if I have to, I’m going to be the one on top of the pile, protecting them.

It’s a hell of a thing, but it’s what we have become, or what we have allowed to happen. I’m in this business to give these young people knowledge and experience. And yet I know there’s a very real possibility I could pay for that with my own life. I know if it came to it, I would, and without a moment’s hesitation. But it shouldn’t be that way. (And any time somebody suggests that the solution is for teachers to carry…well, please don’t go there with me. And I write this as someone with a small arsenal of my own.)

Over the years I’ve become more reclusive. Some of it is because some things I used to enjoy are no longer out there to be had. But, to be honest, some of it is because I’m turned off by the amount of rudeness and lack of consideration so many people display any more. It’s everywhere from the drive over (try going anywhere without somebody zooming up and tailgating you) to people plowing you over in store aisles, people using their phones in movie theaters…there’s so much that’s counter to how I was taught to behave. But on top of that, when you go anywhere, you also have in the back of your mind…what if somebody comes in to cause mayhem?

And with all that, being out here in the woods has an appeal that’s almost narcotic. We’re away from so much of that, and to an extent we can control how much of the outside world reaches us. We interact more with animals than with people, and they’re often much better company. It’s easy to get into a groove with all that and wish I could just work from home. But I also know how much I enjoy my work, and how much working with the kids does for me, even on days when they drive me crazy. I spent a year teaching over Zoom during the pandemic and, although it was the prudent thing to do given the circumstances, it was missing something. I didn’t think the students were getting everything they needed from me. And, for my part, it hurt my style. The way I work in a classroom is just this side of improv, and unless I have a live audience I can play off, it just doesn’t work.

It comes down to a calculation. Do I let the possibility that something horrible could happen cheat me out of the joy of doing my job? Do I let it cheat the students out of what I could give them?

Do I let the horror win? Or do I accept the risk, learn what I can about how to protect them if the worst happens, have a plan in the back of my mind, keep one ear open, and move forward?

I know what’ll happen Monday. I’ll go in and do my job, and make the most of it. But part of me will regret that I have to think about those other aspects.

This time of year is my least favorite. It’s the start of a new year; the days are still too short, the shadows are at weird angles, the weather is cold and sometimes fierce. My mood tends to sag, not only because of the environmental factors but also because it’s a new year, full of uncertainties. And within the span of this week, that was driven home anew.

I can’t let that keep me behind a moat, though. I’m cheating myself if I don’t keep my courage, and move toward better days. They are coming, even if I can’t yet know when.

As I write this, I’m in a hotel room in Athens, Georgia, a stone’s throw from the University of Georgia’s main campus. Tomorrow morning, I’m meeting with an archivist who works with the huge media library over here, hoping to get guidance on some projects that some associates and I have in the works.

The fact I’m over here on business makes this visit an exception. Most of the time, I’m over here for my own purposes. Many times it’s been to visit my friend Bobby, who now lives just a short drive from downtown. Other times, though, I’m over here to chase some ghosts. And every time I come over here, there are that many more ghosts to chase.

Once upon a time I wanted to live here. For some reason, I decided during the first half of my junior year that I wanted to go on to graduate school. I’m not sure I knew why. I think a friend and I had talked about it, and I wanted in, especially since it would give me a chance to get out of the nest. I still remember the night I told my mother, as we browsed in the housewares section of a massive hardware store during a particularly enjoyable shopping trip a couple weekends before Christmas. I started planning from there.

There were several universities on my mind. The most obvious was the University of South Carolina. I mean, it was right there in the middle of my home state. However, my mentor and unofficial adviser at Lander told me that going to my home state’s university for graduate work could confine my prospects. He said I should expand my horizons, and suggested Vanderbilt and Wright State, among others. Intrigued, I sent away for information and added those to the roster.

But somehow my heart got set on the University of Georgia. Location had a lot to do with it. I knew of Athens, and my dad often listened to a country station from there (WNGC, which provided us with our weekly dose of “Leonard’s Losers” – get me outta here, Percy!), but had never been there. It was far enough away for me to have independence (important, given that I was spending my college years still living at home, with most every move benevolently but still carefully watched by my parents, if not the whole tiny town) and yet not too far away. And, to be honest, the town’s reputation as a haven for independent types, artists and oddballs appealed to me. Now, granted, the Athens of the mid-’90s was nothing like the Athens of those not-so-long-ago days that spawned R.E.M. and any number of others, but it still appealed to me.

So, plans got made. I started getting things lined up, taking the Graduate Record Exam and having my scores sent to the appropriate places, getting applications in before deadline. And in the summer of 1995, not long after I graduated, my mother and I drove over to Athens for the day, just to look around town. It was a long drive through rolling hills and beautiful countrysides before we got to this odd city that seemed to be on top of a hill. We parked and wandered around, going into quirky little shops, stopping in an art gallery where several photographers (including Michael Stipe) had their works on display, having lunch at a neat sandwich shop across from the university campus. We went over to campus and I spent an hour or so in the massive stacks of the library, making photocopies (remember those?) of sections of books that I never knew existed, on topics that fascinated me. I couldn’t put my finger on why Athens held me in thrall, at least not in a way I could express that others would understand, and at one point my emotions boiled over into a flash of impatience toward my mother that, though I will always regret it, is typical for someone who’s in their early 20s and feeling frustrated. I was caught, I suppose, between being in a place that represented possibility and being in the company of someone who represented the world I was trying to escape.

The year after I finished college turned out to be what we’d now call a “gap year.” It wasn’t planned that way, but that’s what happened. I didn’t have any job prospects or anything lined up. (It turned out to be a good thing, for I spent much of that time off fighting a case of depression that, now that I look back, I’m amazed I made it through with my mind intact.) But one day the phone rang. It was a professor in the history department at UGA. They were looking at applications. Was I interested in starting in January? Oh, was I ever. But I knew so much would have to happen in a big hurry. The finances would have to get squared. I’d have to find a place to live. I’d have to move a couple of mountains. I had to conclude that although I would love to, I wasn’t in a position where I was honestly prepared to do it, and I declined with regret. So, on I went, with Georgia as my primary focus and South Carolina as my safety school, with visions in my head of moving off to Athens the next August to start my new life.

Well, not so fast. In the mail one Saturday arrives a letter from Athens: thanks, but no thanks on admission for Fall. I was heartbroken. I’d just been offered a slot a few months before, and now I’m chopped liver. What gives? My mother took me to lunch, and in our booth at the Huddle House the next town over, I stewed and considered next steps. The next week, I wrote back (by postal mail – remember, this was the mid-1990s, and e-mail had yet to make it to our tiny town) and expressed my displeasure over this perceived inconsistency. Why was I okay for January but suddenly no good? In full early-20s righteous indignance, certain that I was getting the shaft (and blissfully unaware of how admission processes actually work in high-demand programs), I demanded an investigation. Which, obviously, did not turn out in my favor, as a very polite letter a few weeks later explained.

South Carolina did want me, though, and I made my peace with that. In August I moved to Columbia and started graduate work at the big university. And it’s funny how life works: you don’t get what you want, but you end up finding what you really needed. That first semester, I met people I’d never have met otherwise. I built some friendships that last to this day. I had faculty members whose example showed me how to do the job I have now (and at least one faculty member whose example showed me what to never let myself become). This was doubly so when, after a year in the graduate history program, I decided to pursue a master’s degree in journalism instead. As I quickly found out, it wasn’t as easy as changing majors as an undergraduate, and I’m still boggled by how naive I was to think it could be. Be that as it may, the folks in the J-school were kind enough to help, and the basement of the Carolina Coliseum, with its windowless offices and classrooms, became my new home. I’ve often felt those were some of the best days of my life, and some part of me will always yearn for those times. Those were days when I was with classmates with whom I seemed to click, when I had professors who really saw something in me that I had yet to see myself, and when things just felt happy. And to think: had I gotten in at UGA, I’d have never had that. (Heck, I might not have survived it.)

None of that stopped me from driving over to Athens every now and then, though. Maybe I couldn’t get in as a student, but it was a nifty day trip and I could visit favorite haunts: not only could I spend hours in the library, but I could browse at Wuxtry Records and Jackson Street Books, enjoy a sandwich at Yudy’s, visit any number of the interesting little shops along the streets, and generally indulge the latent bohemian inside me for a little while. It was all of the pleasure of living the daydream without the reality of actually living there, and it was fun. You get to know the landmarks, and you love it while you have it, and you hope it can stay that way forever – for the heart is sentimental, sometimes foolishly so.

At the turn of the century, life took me to another part of the country. I was back a year later, to take up the job I now have, but it took four more years for me to get back to the little town with the big university. AEJMC was having its regional conference in Athens, I needed to attend conferences to build up my tenure and promotion portfolio, and so it all came together. In early March of 2005 I drove into town for the first time in nearly six years. Athens had been fixed in my mind as it was the last time I saw it. But as I drove along Broad Street, things…well, they didn’t look right. Yudy’s was gone; on its exterior was now the logo of a nationwide coffee chain. So too were gone a number of the quirky little taverns and shops I remembered. Slowly, the eccentricity was giving way to the chains. At least the Holiday Inn, which was hosting the conference, was still on that weird split-level lot. I pulled in, got my room, and then hiked up the hill to a pizza joint on Broad Street. After that, I walked over to Jackson Street Books, where I happily prowled the shelves and brought back a couple of treasures, and I spent the evening reading away, happy as could be.

If being away for five years was a shock, it was far more so when I came back nine years later. Bobby had invited me over for a visit to his home, back when he lived a few miles over, and then to dinner in Athens with a friend of his, a former network correspondent who now taught at the university. So much more had changed, so much more had become streamlined and franchised. There were signs, still, of the old Athens – Wuxtry Records remained, proud and unbowed, exactly as I remembered – but the town I had known was slipping away, ever more.

Every time I’ve been back, something else has been missing. Jackson Street Books closed in the middle of the last decade, as the realities of the weird new world of commerce proved too much for an independent bookstore to overcome. The Holiday Inn that I stayed at two decades ago is now an empty lot, soon to host yet another of the gigantic construction projects taking place around town. (I’m writing this from the Holiday Inn Express a couple blocks west, which replaced it.) Tall hotels and apartment complexes now flank the uphill approach to Broad Street. The Varsity, which used to be just outside town, is closed. The university itself, as all large universities seem to these days, has expanded its footprint and huge new buildings have appeared in places I remember as sleepy blocks of town. (Although Wuxtry Records remains – bless them – and it’s become a ritual for me to buy another t-shirt when I’m in the store. I can never have enough Wuxtry t-shirts.)

I know it’s progress. I know that you can’t want a place to remain the same forever. I also know that a place rightfully belongs not to the sentiments of those who cast their hopes elsewhere, but to the people who live there now. It belongs to them, and not to the “remember when” types.

It all comes back to that line about “I’m going over there to chase some ghosts.” I think I mean it not just because I miss Yudy’s or Jackson Street Books or any of the other places that amazed and amused back then. I think I also do it because, inside, I miss the times that those places represent. I miss the optimism of the kid who loved visiting those places, and a time in my life when it seemed all things were possible. Or maybe I over-romanticize those times because, when you know how the story turns out, memory becomes a luxury. Time and sentiment can sand the rough edges off the past’s realities and uncertainties. Plus, when your present reality has its own uncertainties and scary moments, it provides a distraction. (Memory is both blessing and curse, isn’t it?)

But I have to remember, always, that what didn’t go my way three decades ago made possible all the wonders my life has now. Change one thing – no matter how insignificant you think it was – and it doesn’t play out the same. It’s possible that if UGA had let me in three decades ago, I’d be a best-selling historian or some media darling, dividing my time between my homes in various parts of the world. Or it’s just as likely that it could have gone the other way and I’d be working in a box factory somewhere. And yet I wouldn’t want to trade that coin flip for what I have now: a life that, for all its weird angles and worries and things yet to be fulfilled, still provides a lot of contentment and contains an awful lot of love. It feels the way an honestly good life should, and it all happened because things didn’t go my way.

The rest? It’s a nice place to visit, and in my reveries I often do.

But I’m not sure I would live there.

A few years ago I transferred all the tapes I could to DVD. From time to time, I’ll pull a disc from the archives, go through it, get some screen captures and make some snarky observations. And for this first installment, why not go back to the very first tape to go through the machine? Over the years it got re-used a lot, so there’s no through-line to what we’ll find, but it’s an interesting crazy quilt to look through. So, here we go.

There’s a somewhat muddy report from Nightline, reported by Ken Kashiwahara, about assault weapons. I got this screengrab for the vintage WLOS-TV ident, obviously.

Then a report from the CBS Evening News about Clint Eastwood’s run for mayor of Carmel-By-The-Sea.

And then some of the Dec. 15, 1984 Saturday Night Live, hosted by Eddie Murphy. He gives his thoughts about the dolls and action figures available at Christmas…

…and there’s also a favorite sketch, in which Bishop Desmond Tutu and Doug Flutie are guests on the same talk show. Tutu accidentally breaks Flutie’s Heisman Trophy and tries to repair it, and it…doesn’t go well. It’s a hoot.

A vintage ID for WYFF-TV! The “arrow” 4 and the Proud N, all vintage goodness, along with a promo for the syndicated version of Happy Days.

Sundays used to mean the fishing programs. You could watch the larger-than-life Roland Martin on another channel, or wait around until 12:30 for Championship Fishing With Virgil Ward on Channel 7. (“From the lakes of northern Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico….”) But my brother the outdoorsman was a big fan of Bill Dance, whose low-key demeanor hid a goofy sense of humor.

I loved this commercial. It made the Daiwa MagForce reel seem like the coolest thing ever. My brother ended up buying one, likely because of seeing this ad so often.

Why is Bill Dance showing us all this airline-supplied footage of a Delta 727?

Why, it’s because his special celebrity guest this week is the Lovable Lush himself, Foster Brooks! And they’re going fishing together. Bill picks him up at the Memphis airport. It sure looked different in 1985 compared to how it looked when I was there in 1998, when it was a huge hub for Northwest Airlines. (And since its de-hubbing after the Delta merger, it’s been modified yet again.)

But not all is fun and games at WYFF-TV. One Sunday night in 1985, a fire broke out in the station building. While they were able to stay on the air, their ability to originate local programming took a hit. The next day, the noon news originated from the front yard.

A glimpse of the damage inside gives you an idea of what they were up against.

Fortunately, some other stations in the market pitched in to help keep them going.

General Manager Doug Smith joins Kenn Sparks at a somewhat worn anchor desk to give an update on how the station is doing. It’s awkward when you are your own top story.

Lunch is delivered while the program’s on the air, much to Kenn’s bemusement. At one point he jokes that they considered calling the noon newscast Brunch With Kenn. Kenn Sparks was a cool cat as it was, and is at the top of my list of best local newscasters ever, but it’s impossible to overstate the aplomb with which he handles this most unorthodox newscast. He’s always in command, but can still find ways to roll with the weirdness of the moment. It’s a master class and it’s beautiful to watch.

They’re back inside for the 6 p.m. news (which was handy, as I recall there were storms in the area that evening; at points you can detect weather-related interference on the recording). Carl Clark and Carol Anderson are in an obvious temporary studio. The audio’s not the best. There are lags in rolling the stories. But they’re still going. It’s what you have to do.

This grab from a story about the night before is of interest, not only because it shows the temporary setup they were operating from, but because of one very vivid memory I have. That Sunday night, we had my grandparents over to watch a movie with us. I seem to recall it was Hang ‘Em High. The television set didn’t have a remote control, and in those days, the youngest child was the remote control. I followed my father’s commands to rewind the movie and find something on television. When I punched the button for Channel 4, the picture was…weird. It was the familiar “arrow 4” and call letters, but at a weird angle and with strange lighting, and the sound of equipment running in the background. It was the scene captured by that TK-760 you see above, aimed at the logo on the van at top right. It startled me. We didn’t find out until later what had happened.

Charlie Gertz! He was one of a kind. He’d been a weather forecaster in the Navy, got into television, was a longtime weatherman for WTOP-TV (and was good buddies with Willard Scott at crosstown rival WRC-TV), and eventually came to Greenville. He had this marvelous deep, froggy voice and a somewhat monotone delivery that local radio hosts loved to parody (seriously, say the word “Saskatchewan” around someone who grew up watching Charlie Gertz). There was an ongoing promotion where you could win an umbrella that had “Charlie Said It Would” printed on it. His forecasts included an aviation forecast, which I thought was awesome. He also owned a local tavern, and one of the running jokes around the region was whether Charlie had a couple before he came to the station. It didn’t matter. He was awesome. I miss him.

The local newscast ends with a report on the landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery earlier that day, on a mission that carried seven crewmembers, including a French scientist and a Saudi prince. (I had no way of knowing that many, many years later I’d get to watch in person as Discovery took to the sky, let alone that I’d someday be up close with that great spaceplane at a big museum in Virginia.) 1985 was a banner year for the Shuttle program, and big things were in the works for the following year. Which leads to the next story, with a lot of well-dressed people on a stage in Washington:

Why are they there?

Looking at that now…oof.

Next is the last few minutes of the M*A*S*H episode “Life Time,” which always captivated me because of the clock in the lower corner. I didn’t fully understand the concept when I was a kid; now, through mature eyes, it’s a brilliant and gripping episode. For whatever reason, our ability to pick up WLOS-TV that night was ratty. It could have been my parents had the antenna turned that night for some reason.

There’s a bonus: Bob Hooper (longtime morning host on WESC radio) in a promo for Bowling For Dollars, which occupied the 7:30 slot until Channel 13 picked up the Wheel Of Fortune/Jeopardy! duo:

From November 1986 – because, remember, this tape got used a lot and I tended to save some segments and record over others – an Hour Magazine interview with Buzz Aldrin. I watch this and I’m struck by several things: Buzz was 56 when he made this appearance, and the Apollo 11 mission had only been 17 years prior to this moment. And now, Buzz turns 95 in a few weeks, while I’m only a handful of years younger now than he was here. eek.

Then there’s the special commemorating the 35th anniversary of Today, which NBC aired on a Saturday night in January 1987. Now Today is about to turn 73. Somebody I met once or twice gave this special a fairly thorough going-over some time ago, so I’ll let that post speak for itself.

And then there’s a few moments from an episode of the brilliant miniseries Fresno, which Carol Burnett and her wonderful group of friends did as a spoof of prime-time soaps. Somewhere there’s a tape on which my mother recorded the whole miniseries. I need to find it.

At the end is a segment of the brief “We The People” series CBS did to commemorate the upcoming bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. This segment features House speaker Tip O’Neill, an icon of the era’s politics, a dealmaker of the sort they don’t make any more.

There’s the tail end of another Bill Dance episode, with this blast from the past: an ad for Jim Walter Homes!

“And we save money by using a character generator typeface we got secondhand from CBS!” (If you know, you know.)

A very, very brief glimpse of an ad for Pale Rider, which was Clint Eastwood’s return to the Western genre. (Here’s the whole thing. I thought it was a cool ad, and I loved the music.)

An ad for Sherwood Chevrolet featuring the once-ubiquitous Dave Campo, whose out-loud style stormed onto our region’s screens in early 1984. (This will give you an idea of what he was like.) You loved him or hated him. I was fascinated with him.

One of the treats of summer vacation was getting to stay up late and watch Johnny Carson. It was a special treat when I could watch on the big color television in the den. One night I captured Johnny simultaneously spoofing Rambo and Fred Rogers, in “Mister Rambo’s Neighborhood.”

Sign of the times: John Palmer with a bulletin about the ongoing saga of TWA Flight 847.

Sometime that summer I’d caught a repeat of a “Best of Saturday Night Live” that had the “Buckwheat Shot/Buckwheat Dead” cycle on it. I was speechless with how brilliant it was and started taping SNL episodes in hopes it would get repeated. It didn’t recur that year, but my quest did yield a different moment of brilliance: the Christopher Reeve-hosted episode that featured Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad, which is just shy of perfection itself, and a reminder how good the “ringer” season of SNL could be.

The “Saturday Night News” segment also featured another favorite bit: Rich Hall’s hilarious spoof of Paul Harvey. Sometimes he was a better Paul Harvey than the real Paul Harvey.

Next is the August 5, 1985 rebroadcast of Living Proof: The Hank Williams Jr. Story. My brother was a huge Bocephus fan at the time and wanted me to record it for him. At one point earlier in the day we got into some kind of tiff and I threatened to delete the timer setting for it if he didn’t knock it off. We must have settled it, because there’s the recording:

It’s not a bad movie if you keep in mind its origins, which is that it’s a made-for-television movie produced by Procter & Gamble, and it’s going to bear the hallmarks of a made-for-television movie. Including the casting, which gives us John-Boy Walton as Hank Jr.

And, to be fair, he acquits himself well in the non-concert scenes. But in other scenes, he does his own singing. That in itself wouldn’t be that big a deal, except that in other performance scenes they use actual Hank Jr. tracks, and they don’t sound anywhere near alike. The movie closes with Hank Jr., his demons behind him, recovered from the mountain-climbing accident that nearly killed him, making a triumphant return to stage. Richard Thomas is in full Hank Jr. get-up: the clothes, the beard, the sunglasses and cowboy hat…and he looks like a kid going out for Halloween as Hank Jr. But I can’t harp on it, because given its limitations it’s okay, and it’s earnest, even if it also leaves a lot out, but it gives you an overview.

But this bit of casting really makes it, if you ask me:

Not to mention Clu Gulager! (And a small part played by a pre-stardom Naomi Judd.)

And since this is a Procter and Gamble production, it means all the ads are going to be for in-house products. Including the ads where the Ronald Reagan-looking guy presides over the replacement of an upscale restaurant’s regular coffee with Folgers Crystals!

In the closing credits, I saw this and thought it was a hoot. I read the book not long after seeing this movie, and…yeah, “suggested by” is an apt characterization. (And all kidding aside, it is a very good read that stays with you.)

Only part of this at the end before the next recording cut it off, alas, but here’s future Folgers spokesdriver Tim Richmond for Old Milwaukee. Little did the people at home realize just what a wild man Tim Richmond was in real life. He was a heck of a good racer, a first-class character, and we lost him much too soon.

The tape runs out with part of the repeat of the Nov. 10, 1984 Saturday Night Live, with George Carlin (Saturday Night‘s very first host!) making his return to Studio 8H. Alas, the tape runs out right in the middle of the great 60 Minutes spoof.

And there you are. Tune in again, someday soon, when I again run out of post ideas and dive into the miles-deep recesses of my video collection.

From time to time, I’ll dive into the archives, take a look at what was happening back then, and provide some commentary and recollections as appropriate. And for this first installment, let’s go back to 1979. As it happens, the 19th of November is a day I remember very vividly. Let’s go to my hometown paper from that afternoon.

Here’s the above-the-fold for the Greenwood Index-Journal from that afternoon 45 years ago. Yeah, there’s word about three of the American hostages freed from Tehran getting to Denmark; there’s a brouhaha about government officials going on trips; the SALT II treaty’s in jeopardy. But what I remember is that story in the center of the page. That morning, a C-54 cargo plane had crashed into a forest a few miles from my hometown. The two pilots were killed and the aircraft was destroyed.

As it happened, the airplane (which itself had a long and interesting history, far longer than is worth telling here) was full of dope. It had flown through the night from South America, staying low to escape detection, and was trying to land in a farmer’s field in the countryside. From what I’ve been able to piece together, they ran into fog and couldn’t land, and of course there was no way they could put down at a proper airport without risking their cover being blown. There are reports the airplane caught fire. Whatever happened, the airplane lost altitude and descended into a thickly-wooded area just off a county road. Its landing gear snagged a powerline by the road just before the crash, a few minutes after 6 a.m.

That afternoon, after my brother and I got home from grade school, Dad loaded us all into the truck and we drove over to the scene. Dad was assistant chief of the local volunteer fire department and a former magistrate, and knew just about everybody among the local authorities, so we were able to get right up to the scene. I’ll never forget the sight of that huge airplane sitting in the middle of a scorched stand of pines, everything forward of the wing box crumpled up and gone; the bulldozer moving things around, the various and sundry pieces of the airplane strewn around the ground (a stray bit of instrumentation; a shard of aluminum that one of my parents picked up, flexing it in amazement that this big airplane was made of such thin metal). The cargo had been rounded up and impounded, and the bodies had been taken away. All that was left was what was left of the poor airplane. (Much of the wreckage remained for years, tied up in legal and insurance haggling, until it was finally released. Most of the airplane was cut up and hauled away by a local scrap dealer who vowed never to cut up another airplane. The stuff that was left behind stayed a few more years. The trees finally grew back and now you can’t tell anything ever happened there.)

The other vivid memory was the smell. Plane crashes have a smell to them. It was the first time I’d encountered that smell: ground saturated with spilled aviation fuel, scorched foliage. I haven’t smelled it in a long time but it’s vivid in my memory. I smelled it again a few years later when a little Piper went down in the woods outside Bradley. It’s a smell that means death. I hope I never have to smell it again.

Let’s see what else was going on that day. Thanksgiving was coming up:

There’s too much about that layout to make me think it was an accident.

Oh, those nutty environmentalists! And so soon after Three Mile Island! (And why does everybody in this cartoon remind me of the Duke Brothers from Trading Places?)

If you were a kid attending a Greenwood-area school in the ’70s and ’80s, chances are your class got a visit from J.D. Ravencraft. He would bring this custom-built, padlocked wooden case with seized drugs and paraphernalia displayed inside and give talks about why drugs were bad. When he visited my kindergarten class, he gave us all a ride in the police van after his presentation. For some reason I’d get a little scared when he would show up. I don’t know why; he was always nice to us, but very serious about his work, and at my young age I couldn’t catch the subtleties.

The first visit to our many bygone merchants of yesteryear. Meyers/Arnold was one of those upscale retailers that seemed too ritzy for our working-class family, and looking at the ads I think I can kind of understand it. All that purposeful lowercase text says “your family can’t afford to shop here. go to k-mart and sky city and roses instead, you riff-raff. or to jcpenney if you’re feeling fancy.” Not to mention that artwork. The man in his robe looking away sternly, with his ideally sculpted hair; then there’s the gal next door in her underwear and that giant ’70s hair. Hmmm.

The big thing back then was department stores having portrait studios – or having mobile portrait studios show up for a few days. When we’d see a big RV in front of a store, my brother and I dreaded it because we knew we’d get dragged in for portraits. I hated it. Oh, sure, now they’re keepsakes in their weird color-faded glory, but six-year-old me hated having to wear my Sunday clothes and sit in this obviously phony setup while some man I’d never seen in my life coaxed me to smile when I didn’t feel like smiling. Grrr.

Instead, let’s let the soothing thought of Tom T. Hall bring us back to happiness. Tom T. was one of those presences I grew up with. I’ve always loved him. I miss him.

Greenwood had two movie theaters then: two screens at the Apollo on the 72 By-Pass, and the Auto Drive-In. The three-screen cinema at Crosscreek Mall had yet to open. It’s gone now, as is the Apollo. The Auto held on for a while, went under, but miraculously came back. It’s a treasure. I have so many memories of going there.

My folks went to see 10 at the movies about this time. I was six and had no idea what any of it meant, though I had seen the commercials for it. I only knew I rode Bus 10 to school and couldn’t figure it out.

The Greenwood Humane Society regularly submitted these pieces to the Index. They seldom failed to depress. If Sarah McLachlan music had existed at the time, you’d be hearing it.

The Index would often run pictures like this, letting the staff photographers show off little scenes they found. It’s a little bit of poetry amongst all the news. Some of these are particularly beautiful, as this one was.

McCormick was only a few miles from my hometown; it was where my dad worked, where our family doctor was, where the pharmacy and the dime store and the Red & White grocery store was. And once a year they’d hold Gold Rush Days, a festival premised around the gold mine near town. They’d have a thing set up where you could pan for gold, and somewhere back home I have a little vial with some tiny gold flakes in it from my attempt long ago.

Two big businesses from Uptown Greenwood: Winn’s Shoes and, across the vastness of Main Street, Toy Box. I only remember going into Toy Box once or twice, and I don’t recall going to Winn’s Shoes, although I was there the morning in 1994 when the sign from the now-closed store was craned down and donated to the Greenwood Museum. Toy Box was doomed after the Circus World toy store opened at the mall. Winn’s held on for a while but the inevitable happened, especially with the chain stores coming in.

Sky City’s your place to go for K-Tel! We somehow crammed 24 songs onto a single side of an LP! Buy now! Odd recollection: the restroom entrances at the Greenwood Sky City were down a shallow ramp. The Bi-Lo was next door. Many years later the Sky City building was demolished and a new Bi-Lo was built on the site. Go figure.

More shopping. Greenwood Supply was this huge brick building with building supplies, sporting goods, you name it. Near the back, next to a room that had range hoods and other appliances on display, was where the doorbells were on display. And they were functional. When you’re a kid, that’s catnip. John B. Lee was the big store for musical instruments and did big business to students who took music classes. (Although I think my brother’s guitar came from a discount showroom in Augusta.)

Cedric’s Fish and Chips was a popular chain around here for a while. I didn’t know the legend of Cedric back then, so I didn’t get the reference. I was amused by the name. We never ate there, though. If we were going out to eat, back then it was going to be at the Bonanza steakhouse (which later became the Bill Fuller Family Steakhouse).

Let’s now take a tour of long-gone supermarkets. They’re having big sales, what with Thanksgiving coming up. Here’s from the Big Star, in the K-Mart shopping center:

Community Cash, over on Montague:

The Winn-Dixie, which for some reason my parents thought was upscale (although it was where my grandparents shopped):

The Hoggly Woggly:

And the Bi-Lo, where we went. They used to have big plastic cows atop the facade, and kids used to try to steal them as a prank. I remember Mr. Harold letting me ride on the lower level of his bag cart when he’d take our bags out to the car; the Wometco vending machines along the back wall of the refrigerated food section, and I loved the soda machine that dropped the little cup down, filled it with ice, and shot your drink into it, and you’d retrieve it from the little sliding door. The kids these days will never know such pleasures. (And to add to the weirdness, Wometco owned the ABC station in Asheville, which we used to watch.)

The headline at the top is timely, since our younger cat has become very much a zaftig princess.

On to sports. The 1979 season ends with the King extending his reign (a story told in the great book He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back):

And this young up-and-comer served notice, too. I’d keep an eye on him for next year.

A little more shopping, and this is certainly a pretext for a sale. (I keep wondering about a seafood joint offering a Buddy Rich special.)

Heeeeere’s clothing!

The comics section. These three fascinated me as a child. The Born Loser resonated with the Rodney Dangerfield albums Dad played just loud enough for me and my brother to hear. Winthrop was…Winthrop. And Eek and Meek was just bizarre, which I think is why I kept coming back.

Then there was always They’ll Do It Every Time, which for some reason the Index often ran in the classified section:

Another moment of weirdly appropriate layout: a headline about a Mafia trial…below a picture of a group touring the Greenwood Packing Plant, where pigs came in one end as complete animals and exited the premises in Carolina Pride packaging.

An ad for the Midland-Ross facility in Greenwood. Just about every year there would be a little aviation show at the county airport and Midland-Ross would bring in its flying laboratory, a tricked-out Beech 18.

There’s dozens of these little houses in the mill villages around Greenwood, near the old textile plants (or, in some cases, where the plants were before they were knocked down). Look! It’s on the Old Duke Rate! Buy it now!

And what’s with these little gas-sipping cars from overseas? Ain’t got no room for nothin’ in them things. And no horsepower!

Not when I can get me a 1975 Caprice wagon for $2395! Yeah! It’s the car that thinks it’s a house!

The back page of the back section. I remember when these full-page cigarette ads were often on the back pages of newspaper sections. Probably brought in a good bit of ad revenue. That’s counterbalanced by how many people from my life are dead because of these damned coffin nails.

And that’s all for today. We return you now to your regularly-scheduled present.