1977

 1977








     For a rather hum-drum year in American history 1977 was an important one for Greg and myself. Beaten and aimless I enrolled in Library school at Cal-State Fullerton after taking out a $2000 loan and getting a part-time job working at Hollydale Park. Greg was a rather recent college graduate and  had experienced his first stint in the desert. He had a break that Summer that led to one of the most momentous events in his life. It is not like 77 wasn't memorable at all. Jimmy Carter became president, gas was 65 cents a gallon, Fleetwood Mac was the hot band, TV viewing was dominated by the show "Roots" and the movie and soundtrack to "Saturday Night Fever" was everywhere. Sitting in Timo's pad in Club Virginia I got a call from the Bobcat who was at Channel 5 I think and he invited me to join him for a freebie screening of some sci-fi movie I had never heard of but I went because I hardly ever went anywhere. I was one broke-ass bum. The flick turned out to be Star Wars and because of Mister Cat I saw it before anybody else. We were both blown away as it just was beyond anything out at the time. Oh yes, Elvis died Augusts 16th when I was playing catch with kids at the park and thinking about a couple of pals who were on a cross-country trip.  Greg and Kevin had already taken one major road trip east  in 1975 but in 1977 they were on a mission. It was Kevin who introduced us all to one Fred Exley and his classic novel "A Fan's Notes." It quickly became a sensation because it is  just a superb book. Yet, no one, even Smith himself loved the book more than Greg who read it countless times. The fellas drove across America stopping in  Kentucky and met that same Bobcat and then continued all the way to Alexandria Bay outsidce Watertown, New York to find the great author who had completed "Pages from Cold Island" a year or two before to little enthusiasm from critics. This is a story better told in first person by Kent but when Greg spoke of the fact that they managed not only to meet the man but to spend time drinking and having some pizza pie with him his eyes twinkled with delight. There the cousins sat on bar stools and chatted with the gentleman who had filled their lives with wisdom, sadness and a neverending appreciation for modern literature. Fred himself described it as a "lovely afternoon."

 "Mr. Blue had become the perennial mock-epic hero of his country, the salesman, the boomer who believed that at the end of his American sojourn of demeaning doorbell-ringing, of faking and fawning, he would come to the Ultimate Sale, conquer, and soar.”





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