Tape title stories

  If Romo saw that he would flip        One of those sweet little bon bons of everyday life Greg captured and kept alive for forty years much to my amusement. It came from my unexpected marriage when I was 36 years old and most of my parents hopes for my normal-heterosexual life were in their last gasps. Not only was I getting married but I was marrying a Jewish girl and her family had money. It all happened quite suddenly as I had my heart broken by another Jewish girl in October of 1982 and then found a mate at Central library by the next Summer. While the marriage is a whole nother story the semi-elopement wedding and reception the following month hold many a fond memory. We got married in the South Gate courthouse on December 10, 1983 with just a few people there (Timo, Auntie Teresa, Mu and the parents of both bride and groom.)  We went to lunch at Musso and Frank's then off to Laguna for a mini-moon. The next month we planned out a reception for abo...

  Go to sleep close your eyes and watch TV A funny but bittersweet tale from the days of wine and roses in the Creason family that has been plagued by the terrible disease of over-indulgence of booze. The patriarch led the way to the use of strong drink and some of his heirs followed suit down this destructive road . Some managed with great self-control to release the hold of John Barleycorn but not before some setbacks. In our time alcohol was offered as the solution to stress and a show of hospitality to guests. The struggle only ends in the last breaths. Sister Cheryl was in the grips of  intemperence for a few years when she lived around Southern California with four children and an absent father who moved to Colorado. She took up with unsavory characters who were amenable to this sad habit and sometimes the kids had to struggle. While they all turned out to be sterling people and upstanding citizens the drinking was hard on everybody. So this story involves a night when a...

  Just looking for the cat A longtime favorite from far back in Gate history is this tale of my young and horn-dog brother who did what many boys do when their testosterone makes them become naughty. Stephen was maybe a young teen and we still lived at 9400 Annetta with our two sisters and a dog named Gretel. My big brother was aware of the allure of girls very early and even went out on a kid date when he was in 5th or 6th grade wearing a terry-cloth Hoppalong Cassidy t-shirt. Being this was mid-50's we had a swimming pool, car port, and rumpus room in the rear of our lot thanks to me burning the garage down in 1955. Big sister Cheryl was maturing earlier than we boys and invited a girlfriend over for a sleepover that gave Stephen some ideas. Having an the impossible opportunity of seeing the opposite sex in their birthday suits made him lose good sense and he crept out into the back yard and quietly stationed himself under Cheryl's window right where a hibiscus plant grew whi...

  I looked up and there was chambers doing a number on my penis... Warning: this post has a mention of sex in it obviously                                                                     Chambers     This story comes from Greg who found an intriguing combination of theater and politics  in a PBS show called "Concealed Enemies" that ran in 1984. The show dealt with the Alger Hiss scandal and the dreaded House on Un-American Committee hearings in the late 1940's. Whitaker Chambers was a writer and editor for Time magazine and former Communist party member who testified in the hearings. Chambers dropped a bombshell in his testimony when he appeared by accusing well-repected diplomat Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Hiss vehemently denied the charge and was set to reveal that Chambers ...

  What about Daugherty?!      Greg was gathering material for his satchel full of stories from the beginning of his awareness in the world of our beloved South Gate and vicinity. He could give you word for word a conversation he had at Bryson Avenue school in 1958 or scenes from his three years at Pius X High School where many of us recieved our psychic scars and a sort of education. There was no shortage of characters at Pi High and Greg told of ordinary kids with extraordinary opinions and passions. One of these Warriors was the manager of some of the teams at the school in the years 1965-1968. This guy was not the typical wimpy water boy just hanging with the jocks but an ambitious young future executive with his sights on running baseball franchises or possibly taking up umpiring as a profession. Pat Mooney was the young go-getters name who was a couple of years ahead of the class of 70 lads. He had a lot of his future planned out and was intense about his goals ...

  Kill the beast... Warning: the post contains some reference to sexual situations...sort of       This one comes from a daring PBS production of a trilogy of novels by the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre called "Roads to Freedom" We watched all thirteen episodes in 1972  despite the rather grueling pace and identified with the narrator  Mathieu Delarue. The protagonist was a world weary philosophy professor who wanders World War II Paris with the Nazi occupation looming in the near future. We young punks in our early 20's felt we were world weary and often repeated the dark thoughts of the characters. The show was cutting edge since it featured some nudity and an actual homosexual character who was portrayed in a sympathetic way. "Roads to Freedom" was yet another example of how sophisticated, intellectual programs existed on KCET that were part of our lifetime education. While none of us had ever read the fiction of Sartre we did learn to appreciate the exis...

  Glen!....Disco!     This one goes back to my short but eventful stint at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner newspaper in  a time of my life when I was desperately searching for romance. During the years between getting fired at UCLA and trying to work for my Dad I was a lost soul in the mean old world of LA. Finally, aftter scraping bottom I was taken in by Timo and got back on my feet enough to get an MSLS from California State University at Fullerton. The big lie of Propositon 13 passed and the possibility of getting a job in public libraries became impossible. So, I was forced to accept the low-wage post at the Herald where I worked in their library that was being rehabilitated by newspaper veteran Anne Sausedo. I met many interesting people and being just 30 years old I was always hunting for a woman to call my girlfriend. All of the ladies at the Herald passed through the library and I found most to be inaccessible, attached or just crazy. Journalism is a terribl...

  Boop was hot      If you ever wonder what three young sophisticated college educated young men might discuss in their leisure the anwer is in this tape title. After we had come up with solutions to end world hunger and cure numerous incurable diseases we might wander from the path of normality and explore other weighty topics from pop culture. Some individuals might wonder what came first, the chicken or the egg or how many dimples there are on a golf ball. What my friends once talked about were the cartoon heroes of our youth. I personally loved Mighty Mouse and Greg liked the filmed television version of Superman. Sometimes we went retro and took up the fandom of animations from the past. I loved Felix the Cat many decades after the character began in an Australian studio after just after World War I  I watched Felix from 1958 to 1960 and then in re-runs on channel 13 into infinity. We began discussing our favorite cartoon characters including "the roadrunne...

  Why aren’t you dating     I have always sworn that in our hometown and especially in our small neighborhood the women were the engines that drove our lives. While we had good male role models like Roy Whitney or John Sheehy it was Margaret Knowlton, Imogene Stanley, Kathy Carroll, Charline Creason and Olivia Whitney who literally were the show-runners who raised us to adults who stayed out of prison or the flophouse. This tape title comes from the powerhouse Mom we respectfully called Big O, also known as Mrs.Whitney or Olivia which I never called her. Olivia had opinions that today would be called conservative but she had a heart of gold that had nothing to do with politics. Big O was kind and generous to us despite not getting hip with the hippy stuff we tried to adopt later in our childhoods. She was quite liberal with the Whitney's friends and fed us, let us hang out in her home and gave us plenty of advise. Olivia with her soulmate Roy came out to South Gate from S...

  Thank you Za Za     The many hours wasting teenage time watching local TV may have rotted our brains but it did fill us with hours of campy, absurd dialogue. Cashing in on the surfer craze in So Cal channel 9 aka KHJ created a show called  "Surf's Up" with host Stan Richards.  Richards was a DJ on radio station KHJ where they also celebrated Hot Rods and other fleeting fragments of early 60's pop culture. "Surf's Up" was an hour long show on Sunday evenings with the surf sound of the band "the Challengers."    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSGindvHIto    I doubt we could ever endure an entire hour but we did dip into the show a few times just to make jokes about this lame attempt to be cutting edge surfer cool as expressed by middle-aged executives. Stan Richards was supposed to be a film maker dealing with the surfing lifestyle after seeing the success of the very cool "Endless Summer" that made some dough at the time. However, R...

  God dawg excuse your self     This one is short, simple and slightly gross. However, it lived on in the vernacular of one Gregory Paul Sheehy and Bob Bobcat Brian for forever. It comes from the Saturn street experience where the boys held court for a few good years, living a bachelor pad existence every day of their tenancy. Strange thing about Saturn was that it was not a pad featuring lots of alcohol but there was plenty of smoking.  To be precise Old Gold and Winston cigarettes and all manner of pot and hashish if available were the chief vices. It was a time when the fellas went back and forth between WLA pads, visiting and dreaming of their future involving mates and happiness/contentment. Mostly it was dreaming both day and nocturnal. In the case of this tape title it was a Summer night with the windows open to let in the warm air and let out the warm smoky air. We know from study of human physiology that "when a man stands, he belches. This has been proven b...

  Their eyes were glazed like they were on hop     This is one of the rare but deeply personal stories told by my Dad in his more relaxed moments. Unfortunately much of his fascinating early life was obscured by alcohol and stress from a job that was extremely demanding. When he had a moment and was in the mood he had some great stories. We were never sure if he actually graduated from Huntington Park High School in 1931 but prospects were thin in a great depression plagued America. One third of his job-aged peers were out of work and many wandered the country trying to find a way to earn any kind of living. BC set out on many journeys across the U.S. during these hard times and by the date he settled down and married Charline he had been to all 48 states and probably broke many a law along the way. He hitched rides or rode the rails in risky positions that could have ended his life at any time. He committed small crimes and seperated rubes from what little cash they had ...

  Glen ’s a sissy name...   This one is from Creason family lore but Greg used to repeat it for fun. I had a redneck Uncle Hank who had a farm up in Paso Robles when the area was totally rural. Our first visits as children to "the farm" were exciting since the place covered many acres with a dozen cows, pigs, Dandy, a horse, a chinchilla hutch and a bull named Carl. There was a small farmhouse, a barn, an outbuilding of bedrooms above a milk shed and the garage. There was also a natural hot water sulphur spring that was tapped into an old clawfoot bathtub by the barn where you could soak until you were like putty.  Kids could roam about the farm and not be expected to actually work which began very early before we suburban brats ever saw the sunrise. Uncle Hank was a strongly opinionated man who was ultra-conservative and would have been MAGA if he had a chance. He hated communists, homosexuals, non-Catholics, intellectuals and Sigmund Freud (pronounced Frude). There are ...

  No mister Putnam he dead     J ohn Sheehy used to say there were more horse's asses than horses and there was no greater horse's ass than radio and TV commentator George Putnam. George had a stentorian voice and a conservative bent that was as phony as his Talk Back radio show. " In 1965, Putnam narrated a film titled Perversion for Profit ," in which he warned viewers about magazines containing nudity and homosexual material, saying homosexuals were perverted and misfits, as well as implying they were child molesters."  Putnam was sort of the face of LA TV news when we were younger on the local channels (5, 11,13) and sometimes had in-studio guests that might put forward kooky ideas live. One night, as Jack, Greg and I watched in the front room on McNerney George had two young entrepeneurs appear with a foolproof mousetrap. Of couse everyone wants a better mousetrap and these two dapper gents set up this complicated metal apparatus in front of the cameras wi...

      I told Carroll      When it came to Mister Walter O'Malley, Greg and I had love for the old capitalist that was part gratitude for the Dodgers and part admiration for his ability to create a gold mine in LA with sheer guts. Normally, neither one of us would like a millionaire who worked one of the biggest boonswoggles in local history but we chose to overlook all of his faults and just loved "the O'Malley" He faced up to the ultra-powerful Robert Moses in New York and thumbed his nose at a man once seen as holding power equal to the president of the United States. O'Malley was not a real baseball man but a lawyer who took over in 1950 with the drive to make mountains of cash by using his cunning and expert management. We laughed at photos of the man smoking huge cigars, sitting in a golf cart at LA Country Club or enjoying a day at Santa Anita in a clubhouse box. We listened closely to a fairly rare interview with the old sage where he deemed Vin Scul...

  It’s mick somebody hit him      Just a sentence from an old documentary about the Rolling Stones called "Gimme Shelter" that we all watched with great fascination in the early 70's. The world seen in the film was far from South Gate or Maywood but the band was at its peak and we dug the Stones' records. In a very good decision I once refused an invite from Billy Hogan who had been determined to roll up to Altamont to see this "free concert" given by the Stones. Bill's idea was to go by motorcycle all the way to the show to avoid the huge traffic jam that was predicted. 350 miles on the back of a motorcycle with a Hogan hold did not seem like a wise choice even in my drug-addled brain on Winter break from UCLA. Bill eventually stayed home also and avoided being in one of the most chaotic scenes in rock history. With all those youthful juices flowing we attempted many a leap into the unknown grooviness of the love generation but this one we experienced y...

  Aced it      This one comes from an incident in the late 1960's involving my brother and Billy Hogan. Stephen was living in Married Housing on Sepulveda in WLA trying to finish school and support his family. Although he was a brilliant student with a very high GPA he kind of ran out of gas on the final lap. Partying hard was part of the college experience. He had two non-major classes to complete and was willing to do anything to pass these annoying responsibilities. Problem was, he  did not attend them but focused on smoking pot and drinking Oly beers. I remember the name of the teacher was Tom Foggins and the class was Geography. Now, as a fine big brother Stephen opened his doors to me and my pals while supplying us with beer at his parties. At this same time I was attending Compton College, prepping to join my bro. in one last quarter at UCLA. At Compton I had to great pleasure to go to classes with Billy and Paul Knowlton. Both of these young scholars wen...

  Blow out your candles Laura     This quote is central to the joy we gained from appreciating the arts, in this case the great plays of Tennessee Williams. The interest was mostly created by cousin Michael who listened to the spoken word records made by Williams of plays and poetry on Caedmon records. Michael could recite the lesser known "the Yellow Bird" word for word with great emotion. The love of the delicate sensibility in "the Glass Menagerie" was begun from those spoken words but continued in listening to the full play with David Wayne, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris and Montgomery Clift. This caused a fanatic reaction leading to watching the 1950 film version with Kirk Douglas as the gentleman caller, Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda, Jane Wyman as Laura and Arthur Kennedy as Tom. The dialogue is brilliant and each  version brings out the great qualities of the play. In the case of the David Wayne version the final scene is wistfully delivered and touches the hear...

  Reggie what you doing with that bag on your head Just a story of a dumb ass criminal that circulated among the fellas over the years. It involves a former NBA player who made some very bad choices and squandered his talent and money. Reggie "Bad Boy" Harding was one of the very first kids to jump from high school directly into the NBA where he played for the Detroit Pistons in the mid-1960's. At 7-feet tall with superior athleticism he was one of the best centers in the league that featured Wilt, Bill Russell, Walt Bellamy and Nate Thurman. Yet, Reggie was a bad seed and could not stay away from drugs and his criminal friends in Detroit. Because of his extraordinay height he got away with rapes and robberies that should have put him away for life.He ended up back in a ghetto with a heroin habit and a bad reputation by the late 60's. Harding ended up doing two years in the pententiary and when released he walked into a gas station in his neighborhood he had robbed tw...

  Bullshit poppycock  and wizardry see also:     Have you looked in the mirror yet Maybe you’ve gone and never known     Heading back fifty-three years to the initial consciousness expanding experience in my little house on Seminole in Lynwood. The year was c.1971 and we had been getting pumped up to try LSD for months. Finally, I got a few orange barrels from Doctor Craig and set out to learn the secrets of  Cosmic apotheosis. Kaleidoscopic. Hallucinogenic. Psychotropic Consciousness.  In other words we were ready to trip and as novices we had no idea what was ahead. This was the great orange sunshine LSD that Tim Scully and Nick Sand had produced in Northern California to turn on everyone in the world. The purpose was to give to the people the glories of turning on, tuning in and dropping out.  As mentioned in another post I tape-recorded the beginnings of the voyage through the efulgence of my 400 square foot pad. Greg and I were the ...

  You’re in the red zone!      Creason family drama from a beer soaked night on Terraine avenue in Long Beach where my parents maintained a mostly pleasant and peaceful home for thirty years. It figures that one of my least favorite in-laws would be the cause of a kerfuffle in the dining room of the pad where many a fine family dinner was served by my Mom. For some impossible to understand reason my sister married a louse named Tim Lacefield who sometimes worked as a psychiatric technician which is a nice word for orderly in a nuthouse when he wasn't on disability for a fake back injury. Lacefield was ignorant and seemed to only be interested in a few things in life including dope, fishing and sex. His conversations ran from the gutter to lower than the gutter and I believe he was and is a legit sociopath. He was tolerated because of my dear and gentle sister but after a cruel experience I had with the dumbass I disliked him as much as any other kin except maybe one ...