He No Longer Iz a Show Biz Whiz

The Old Man keeps a pretty low profile these days. No spotlights, no blasts of attention, no screaming fans....oh wait....there never were any screaming fans. I had a couple of close calls with semi-fame, however. As most of you regular readers know, I spent a few years in a past life as a Top-40 DJ in Roanoke. Last weekend, we had our annual reunion. Twenty-five or so former "personalities" who had been on the air at that station gathered for an evening of reminiscing and recalling........well.....just recalling. Every decade since the '50's was represented, so the stories covered almost 60 years of radio history. While ageing is a reality, and we were all markedly changed, the spark, energy, and quickness of quip remained.


This weekend we will attend a High School reunion for the last five classes to graduate from our school before it was closed and the consolidated school took its place. It's been 49 years since I flipped the tassel, yet when I again see these folks, it will be as if no time has passed.


The point here, is that these back-to-back activities have floated me lazily down the nostalgia river, so it was back to the box of pictures to generate some blog post ideas.


Back before the radio "career" there were The Sportsters.




It was in the late '50s and we were the quintessential rock-n-roll band. White shoes and dinner jackets and one who was known around school as "Elvis" meant we were on our way. After all, it worked for Ricky Nelson. "Elvis" had a pretty decent singing voice and could also ham it up with some Elvis moves. Johnny was a good guitar player who would try about anything. I had carved a set of drumsticks out of scrap from Dad's workshop and learned to keep a beat by listening to Bill Haley and The Comets records. I moved on to real drumsticks and drums, but I still have those hand carved ones somewhere out in my shop.

We played around Bedford and occasionally ventured on the road to Roanoke and Lynchburg. We even made a record and the only thing that kept it from going gold was that we didn't sell 999,500 more copies. The Sportsters (named after a Harley-Davidson because we thought it sounded tough) drifted apart and faded away. No problems, just as the old Statler Brothers song says, "Life gets complicated when you get past 18".


So, The Old Man now, as our "Elvis" sang from the song One Night, "always lived a very quiet life". No show business, no drumsticks, no microphones. But like last weekend, I'll be around people who remember.....and that's cool.