Sunday, 15 September
 |
| Palace Bar |
Good Morning Jessicca…
Rod Stewart sang the number one song of 1977, just in case you were
wondering – Tonight’s the Night
(Gonna be Alright). It’s thirty-six
years ago so you wouldn’t remember it. I
barely do. The Eagles sang Hotel California that year. Jimmy Buffett made a name for himself with Margaritaville. I was working the morning shift at KYCA radio
in Prescott, Arizona that year and living in a converted laundry room at a
trailer park that bordered the town’s Whiskey Row. Its oldest establishment, the Palace Bar,
celebrated its first 100 years of existence in 1977. On the night of its official birthday that
year, a country group named the Wilburn Brothers entertained anyone willing to
go out into that cold December night air and pay nine dollars at the door. Prescott is a mile high mountain town and the
temperature was sixteen degrees that evening, as I remember. I had switched to working evenings by the
night of the big celebration and I always walked to and from work because I
didn’t have a car. KYCA was a green
stucco building next to its transmitting tower in a field beyond the railroad
tracks. At the time you could say this
marked the edge of town.
There were two cats that called the radio station home. The duties of my evening shift, besides
playing the Top 40 hits of the day, included feeding the cats and vacuuming the
carpet. Lou Silverstein owned the
station back then and he often did live remotes from places like local car
lots. His on-air name was Lou Magillicutty. His wife, Nancy, did the shift starting at
ten in the morning. It was a real Mom
and Pop operation and you had to stay on top of things to keep the station
going. After all, the entire town was
only 15,000 back then, not counting the local Indians living on the nearby
Yavapai reservation.
A guy named Steve did news and sports for the station. It was an old cowboy town and there wasn’t
always much to report. I remember one
morning Steve led with the story that someone had taken a power mower out of
the pickup truck of Ed Somebody-or-other.
He’d parked the truck overnight on an off-street near the town square
and, wouldn’t you know it, someone stole his damn mower. Naturally he called the police and described
to them the purloined article, just in case they might run across someone using
it while they cruised about the town in their squad car. Chances are, though, it’s rusting somewhere
in the desert among a scattering of empty beer cans. As I remember, there wasn’t a big need for
mowers in Prescott back then.
I know the movie Rocky came
out in 1976 but I think you could still see it at our local theater in 1977. At least its theme song, Gonna Fly Now, was one of the hits of 1977. Bill Conti’s rousing instrumental wasn’t big
with me and I tended to ignore it. I
preferred playing music like Foreigner’s Cold
as Ice. I don’t think it really
mattered what I played. I had the feeling
no one was listening, anyway… not even Lou and Nancy. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember having
any commercials during my shift. I was
strictly a public service, sort of. I
fed the cats and did all my vacuuming in the space of a four minute song. Around eleven at night I said, “Good Night”,
shut down the transmitter and turned out the lights. It seemed to me during those walks home that
the stars’ light was somehow more precise on the coldest of winter nights.
One other thing about 1977 – the satellite Voyager 1 was launched. It
was announced this week that the spacecraft has finally gone beyond our solar system
and is now traveling in interstellar space.
In 40,000 years time it will be closer to the next nearest star than it will
be to our sun. Imagine that. Who will be around to remember by then? In 40,000 years the cows will have learned to
count to ten. They might give it a
thought.
Love,
Dad
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