35 – Don’t Bring Me Down – ELO – 1979

Don't Bring Me Down - ELO 

            Even though it comes from 1979’s “Discovery” album, when I was already back at Accutronics, working on getting my thesis into shape so I could submit it and then defend it, it still puts me in mind of Western Illinois University. It reminds me of the primitive, off-brand, portable cassette player I had at the time. As soon as I would buy an album I would tape it and then play only the cassette. On my Advent home deck, in my Mustang, or on my Sonee Walkmun. This kept my albums in pretty good shape.

            I recall listening to tapes in the room where all the Grad Assistants (GA’s), for History, Math, Psychology, and Economics, had desks. Each major had a group of desks pushed together and we used them between classes to camp out and kibbutz with the other GA’s.

            History GA’s were the lowest paid of all (reflecting what an MA in History is worth in the real world), since we didn’t teach any classes (like the Math GA’s did). We proctored exams and made ourselves available for tutoring (though in a year and a half, I don’t think any of the 5-6 GA’s were asked to do any).

            We received $210/month, plus all tuition and fees (the real payment) for 10-15 hours of “work” (sitting in a 100 level class to take notes and prepare for tutoring). Rent in the Graduate and Married student housing was $130/month, leaving $80/month for food and entertainment.

            On of the most interesting classes in Grad School was Historical Research. Each week we were exposed to a different way to look at data and sources. The first project was a gigantic scavenger hunt, we were given a list of 35 questions and had one week to get the answers from the Reference section of the library.

            Questions like: Who was your congressman on the day you were born? How much cotton was produced in the US in 1854? And what was the population of Chicago in 1897? All of us taking the class scurried about the library for 2 or 3 days, then we got smart and got together and shared locations and books used to answer the questions, thereby reducing our overall work.

            Remember now, this is pre-Internet, 1977, and everything was in a book (“What’s a book, grandpa?”) somewhere in the Reference section of the library, not a few keystrokes away on your laptop.

            Another week we completed a project whereby a computer (it took up a whole room in another campus building) was used to collate data and generate a graph (as I recall). We spent 1-2 days keypunching data onto IBM cards, then took the whole stack over to the computer building (making sure not to drop or mix them in any way) and handed them to the tech who fed them into the computer and the next day you came in and picked up your report/graph.

            One thing for sure, I would have killed to have had a word processor in 1979, when I was working my thesis into shape. I hand wrote my first draft of each chapter, as I do for this blog, (I write it out on lined paper I print, because my handwriting is small. Lines are .125 apart, and I write on every other line to allow for revisions).

            My thesis was written on narrow ruled paper (.250 wide lines), one hand written page becoming three pages typewritten, then typed on my Sears portable electric typewriter, and submitted to my thesis advisor, Dr. Victor Hicken. WIU had very specific requirements for the thesis when ready. It had to be a certain font, on a certain bond paper, and three copies were needed. All were bound in leather, one is in the WIU library, one is in the WIU History department, and I have the third.

            My mom typed up my final draft on a typewriter where she worked at the time and I submitted it in early 1979. Then Dr. Hicken came back with several revisions. If it was a word or two, I could retype the page (once I found a typewriter with the same font at Accu), but if the revision was a line or two, I would have to re-type the page, plus all the following pages of that chapter.

            What a pain.

            Plus, Dr. Hicken felt my thesis needed some maps of the battles my regiment fought in. (I wrote a history of the 36^th Illinois Regiment, called the Fox River Regiment). I had to find a book that was not covered by copyright anymore so I could photocopy the maps and use them in my thesis. I found one at the Abraham Lincoln Bookstore in Chicago.

            It did get me a date with a cutie at Accu who retyped several pages for me. I had a huge crush on Bev, but she was out of my league. After doing the typing I paid her back by taking her to see William Windom play “Thurber” at Aurora’s glorious Paramount theater and then to see the Blues Brothers live at Poplar Creek.

            Poplar Creek was an outdoor arena in nearby Hoffman Estates that seated 10,000 in the covered pavilion and another 20,000 or so, on the lawn. I invited a friend from Blackburn who lived in the area, Mike P, and my best friend from Accu, Jorge B. plus their wives, to go along.

            We got a large pizza from the Pizza Stop (long gone) in Cary and dragged it all the way to Poplar Creek, where the guards at the front gate patted it down (it was in a large, flat, paper bag) before letting us bring it in to eat as we sat on the lawn.

            This concert was the night before the movie opened and the crowd was shouting for “Rawhide”, since Steve Dahl had been playing it in the weeks leading up to the show. Even though they didn’t play it, it was still a great concert. Steve Cropper and “Duck” Dunn, from Booker T and the MG’s, horn section of Tom Malone and Lou Marini, Paul Schaffer on keyboards, and others, plus Dan Aykroyd with his harmonica in the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, and John Belushi being John Belushi, cartwheeling onto the stage at the start (“Everybody needs somebody… everybody needs somebody… to love”… “Someone to love”).

            Doesn’t get much better…

Everybody Needs Somebody - Blues Brothers

            A couple nights later I took Bev to see the Blues Brothers movie in McHenry, where the audience went wild whenever a scene shot in the area came on screen (much of the exterior shooting of the final car chase was filmed on Route 12 in Lake County, and another scene, with a huge PA megaphone attached to the roof of the Bluesmobile (“Tell your friends!”) was shot at Bang’s Lake in Lake Zurich). It was my last date with Bev, though we remained friendly at Accu.

            Oh well. (See11- To Be What You Must, for a refresher on my philosophy).         

34- Jekyll and Hyde – 1979 and 48 – Northern Lights – 1978 – Renaissance

Jekyll and Hyde - Renaissance

Northern Lights - Renaissance 

            For the life of me I can’t remember how I learned about Renaissance. It was likely they were mentioned in an article in Rolling Stone, which I subscribed to from the mid-70s to around 2005, when I dropped it due to budget constraints.

            I seem to recall reading somewhere that their sound was almost medieval, a rock combination of Jethro Tull and Gregorian chants (or something like that). I checked my collection of back articles I cut out of Rolling Stone and reduced on a copier to 8.5 x 11 and put in a binder and can find no articles about them.

            As a fan of medieval history (23 – Year of the Cat) I thought they’d be worth a listen. In the pre- iTunes days it was hard to get a sample of a group, especially one with no airplay (at least not on any station I was listening to in the mid-80s).

            You would just go out and take a leap of faith and buy an album and hope it was listenable. I found Leo Kottke this way (see What’s All This, Then?), buying an album just because his name was mentioned in a Stereo Review article about Cat Stevens. It didn’t even say what sort of music he performed; it just said Cat listened to him.

            Renaissance has an interesting sound on most of the mid to late 70s albums (some of the early albums have songs that run 9-10 minutes, which is a little too self-indulgent for me) and Annie Haslam has a great voice, showcased especially on “Northern Lights”.

33 – Six Months in a Leaky Boat – 1982 – Split Enz

Six Months in a Leaky Boat - Split Enz -1982

            From another album, “Time and Tide,” that I bought back in the day after viewing the MTV video.

            Reminds me of the summer of 1982 when I was preparing for my entry into Southern Illinois University Law School in August.

            When I went to Blackburn in 1975, my plan was to go to law school and become a Nader’s Raider, but when I went to see my advisor my second day on campus, John Van Gelder Forbes, eminence grise (though, in fact about my age now) chairman of the History department, in his cramped, overflowing office up the back stairs behind the chapel, he told me I had little chance of getting in.

            He said I needed a 3.8 GPA to get in. If I hadn’t been sitting, I would have fallen over; I got light headed as I saw my whole future disappearing into a pipe dream. I was transferring from ECC with a B average (3.0) and there was no way to get to 3.8, even if I went 4.0 for two years, the average would be 3.5 for the four years.

            I was crushed. I went back to my dorm and used the pay phone (the only phone in the dorm with an outside line, there were two other phones in the dorm for intra-college calls) to call home to tell them I was quitting.

            Luckily, my folks talked me off the ledge and told me to try another advisor. The next day I talked with Dr. Richard Piper, of the Political Science (Randy Newman shout out!) department, and he got me back to solid ground by telling me that there were law schools that would take 3.5, or less, so I changed my major to Poli Sci. A few weeks later I saw that I was closer to a Social Sciences degree so I changed to that, and about a month after that I came full circle, back to History, mainly due to Dr. Michael G.R. Kelley, a great, charismatic teacher who would be my major influence at Blackburn.

            My last semester at BU, having been on the Dean’s List all three semesters, I took the LSAT and only got a 610. That, plus my GPA, kept me out of the schools I applied to. So when Dr. Kelley told me he would recommend me for the assistantship at Western Illinois, I jumped at it.

            As I’ve written earlier (6 & 9 – Disarm, 1979, 23-Year of the Cat, 24-Mr. Blue Sky) Western was an interesting time. When I completed my MA in 1979 I was already back at Accutronics, where I stayed for several years until I got the bug again to go to law school. I re-took the LSAT, and with no new prep, improved my score by 100 points. That, plus my 3.90 GPA at WIU, got me in at Southern Illinois law school in 1982.

            SIU Law School was almost brand new in 1982, the building was on their fraternity row and the dorms were directly across the street. As a reader, I looked forward to throwing myself into law school. Little did I know that I’d be reading from the time I got up, around 7 AM, to midnight, most days. I was reading case law, text books, and law journals, spending most of my waking hours in the Law library. I was swamped.

            And the classes for the first year student were all mandatory, Contracts, Torts, Property, Legal History, and Legal Writing. Torts was taught by a professor who had seen the “The Paper Chase” too many times, I think. He would look down at his seating chart, call out a name, then when he was through with the first person, he would continue down that row. When called upon, you would stand up and he would begin to throw hypotheticals at you, until you were so addled he’d finally feel pity and pull the hook out of your mouth and move on to the next person. (I’m sure not every student felt that dread, as he came down your row, but I sure did)

            I had previously had only one experience like that in college. At BU, as a History major, I was required to take American Constitutional Law with John Van Gelder Forbes. Dr. Forbes, and his wife Lydia, the head librarian at Lumpkin Library, were institutions at BU. During WWII, Dr. Forbes was a conscientious objector, he was a Quaker, which must have been a hard row to hoe.

            My senior year, BU brought a comedian on campus for a show, John Roarke, a gifted mimic, who did a great Groucho. I don’t know if he was told that Dr. Forbes’ wife was named Lydia, but he sang Groucho’s signature song, “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”

            Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
            Lydia the tattooed lady
            She has eyes that men adore so
            And a torso even more so
            Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopedia
            Lydia, the queen of tattoo
            On her back is the Battle of Waterloo
            Beside it the Wreck of the Hesperus, too
            And proudly above waves the red, white and blue
            You can learn a lot from Lydia

            When her robe is unfurled, she will show you the world
            If you step up and tell her where
            For a dime you can see Kankakee or Paree
            Or Washington crossing the Delaware

            Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
            Lydia the tattooed lady
            When her muscles start relaxin'
            Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson
            Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopedia
            Lydia, the queen of tattoo
            For two bits she will do a mazurka in jazz
            With a view of Niagara that nobody has
            And on a clear day, you can see Alcatraz
            You can learn a lot from Lydia

            Come along and see Buffalo Bill with his lasso
            Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso
            Here's Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon
            Here's Godiva but with her pajamas on

            Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopedia
            Lydia, the queen of them all
            She once swept an admiral clean off his feet
            The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat
            And now the old boy's in command of the fleet
            For he went and married Lydia

                        (words and music by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg)

            Quite the scandal, I recall.

            Con Law was an 8AM course on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. (At BU, Tuesday and Thursday AM classes also met on Saturday. Because everything on campus was student run, through the work program, Saturday AM classes kept you on campus until noon, at least. Afternoon classes on Tuesday and Thursday were longer, since they didn’t meet on Saturdays).

            For our Final exam the first semester (it was a two semester class) we would have an oral test. Each student would be asked to stand to answer two questions. A large part of your grade depended on your answers. Dr. Forbes also had another requirement for this class; you had to memorize the first ten amendments of the Constitution and go to his office and write them down with no mistakes.

            For the final exam, he asked the men to wear a shirt and tie and the ladies dresses. I got a bug up my butt for some reason and refused to wear a tie (I hadn’t brought one to school with me and I wasn’t about to go out and buy one for one day) so I wore a sweater. He never mentioned it and the exam went OK. I think he gave an A to everyone that semester.

            The good thing about the Torts class at SIU was he followed his seating chart religiously, and you could work out whether he was going to get to you on a particular day. One day, however, he called on me once and I sat down thinking I was through for the day when, several minutes later, he called on me a second time. Crap! I stood up again and he peppered me with hypotheticals until he let me loose.

            I had never examined my reason for studying law, beyond working for Ralph Nader, but this experience let me know that my future was not likely to be in a courtroom. Lacking the ability to think quickly on my feet, I probably would not be the reincarnation of Clarence Darrow or “Judd for the Defense” or even Lionel Hutz.

            After the class, several people came up to me and asked, “What did you do?” to get called on a second time. I never knew. No one else had ever been called on twice in the same class period. I had not had any contact with him outside the class and had never been anything but terrified in his class.

            I wish I could remember what the hypotheticals were about, but luckily my mind is pretty blank about much of my time in law school. All I remember about Torts is that you can’t use life threatening force to protect property, i.e., a guy set up a shotgun aimed at the front door of an empty property so that someone breaking in would be shot as he came through the door. A thief did, was shot, and successfully sued the guy whose house he was breaking into,

            I remember nothing from Property, Contracts, or legal History.

            I do remember going out to the movies in Carbondale. I vividly recall “The Road Warrior”, “Pink Floyd’s The Wall”, and, especially, Stephen King’s “Creepshow”. A group of people behind me went nuts during the section with E.G Marshall and his battle with cockroaches, yelling directions to the screen, “No, don’t go there, don’t open that door!”

            At SIU that year I also had my first exposure to William Windom doing James Thurber. I had been an avid reader and collector of Thurber’s books, along with those of Robert Benchley and S.J. Perlman, and had been a big fan of Windom in “My World and Welcome To It” a TV show where he played a character based on the writings of Thurber, as a put upon married man who fantasized, much like that great Thurber character, Walter Mitty.

            I saw him do a different one man show of Thurber, in Aurora’s Paramount Theater, several years later.

            The main thing I didn’t like about law school was you had no idea where you stood throughout the semester, there were no tests or quizzes, your whole grade was determined by the final exam.

            Also, I never “got” legal writing. I had written a Master’s Thesis and had it accepted, but legal writing is different, and I had a hard time with it. There was a format that had to be followed and I was unable to make my writing fit it, for some reason, certainly not for lack of trying.

            When I took the finals I was burned out. I looked forward to getting back into the real world where I could read junk that had nothing to do with the law and watch crap on TV.  I did not have a good feeling about the tests. In the law, there is no right or wrong answer. You have to be able to argue both sides of any issue, ‘cause you have to be able to argue the position of whoever’s paying your fees.

            When I came back to school after Christmas/New Year’s break, I checked my results and they were dismal. You couldn’t flunk out after one semester, but I was near the bottom of every list. I went to my room, got my stuff, loaded up my 1979 Mustang, sold my books back to the book store, withdrew from school, and drove home, tail between my legs.

            I didn’t go back to Accu right away (see 3- No More Lonely Nights), but my dreams of being a Nader’s Raider were over.

32 – Here Comes My Baby – Cat Stevens – 1967

Here Comes My Baby - Cat Stevens

            Hearing this song, written when Mr. Stevens was 18 years old, takes me to a specific place and time:  Accutronics in my first month there, January 1974. I had been hired to be a shear operator for the grand salary of $2.65/hour. The normal start rate was $2.30/hour, but I was a college student so they thought I might have some smarts.

            The main job of the shear operator was shearing, obviously, though I was also required to unload skids of laminate, the copper covered material that’s the basis of all printed circuit boards, and load and unload 55 gallon drums of ferric chloride, the acid used to etch copper from the laminate to create the circuit traces on the boards.

            What the job entailed was taking large sheets of laminate, ranging from 36”x48”, up to 36”x72” and cutting them into smaller process panels (12x16, 14x18, etc.) to be imaged, etched, and punched. The material of choice in 1974, for most of the boards we built, was a laminate called XXXP, which was paper/phenolic based. It needed 10-15 seconds under a quartz heater lamp before shearing.

            My very first day, the supervisor put me on a smaller, manual shear, to shear some process panels into strips for the punch press operator to feed into the die. He just showed me where to shear and left me alone to shear panel after panel. Each time I’d step on the lever the blade would come down and make a crackling “zzzzip!”, and the strip would fall into a wooden box on the other side. It was my first 10 minutes in the shop; I thought it was supposed to sound like that.

            The material was manufactured by Dynamit Nobel and was the most brittle and dangerous material around then (dangerous because if you didn’t heat it enough the shear would fracture it into razor sharp edges. I brushed up against a stack with my hand once and was shocked when I saw about 10 cuts on my knuckles that bled like a stuck pig)

            Then, a roving inspector, a wonderful lady named Henrietta, came by to check on me and said, “You’re not heating these up. The shear is fracturing every piece!” I looked down at the pile of cracked strips and said,”No one said anything about heating them!” She went off to get the supervisor, who then showed me the heater box you were supposed to use to heat up the panels, and on I went.

            On the power shear, the one I was hired to run, we had a quartz lamp that hung perpendicular from the wall, and was adjustable in height. You would look at the shear order, set the shear bar to the required width with a crank that moved it, and then manually set the back gage to the size of the final cut, usually the same distance. (A six foot sheet would typically have 4 – 18” cuts in its length, and 3- 12” cuts in its width).

            At the time I worked it, it was a two man operation. I would heat each of the 3 cut areas, and then feed it through the shear to a guy on the other side who would grab it and hold it against the bar on his side, I’d step on the pedal and the motor would drive the blade through the material, making a clean cut. I’d push it through again for a second, and then a third cut, then pull it back against the bar gage on my side making the final cut. All within about 10 seconds, so the material would not cool and fracture.

            Many of the jobs at Accutronics back then required two people, one to feed, the other to catch. This changed as time went on and automation came in (Today, almost all laminate comes pre-cut from the vendor). Nowadays most processes have a machine to feed the boards and an accumulator at the other end to catch and stack them. You just need a person to set up the line itself and it runs on its own.

            However, the labor intensive nature of the jobs back then caused you to have to make conversation with your partner. Usually, I had a radio playing (as did a lot of other people) and you’d talk about music or have trivia contests. Anything to pass the time.

            One day they had this sort of biker dude work with me. I was 19, naïve, a little scared of the guy in T-shirt and engineer boots. I wore, and wear to this day, button down shirts and either Converse suede One-Stars, Red Wings, or desert boots.

            Steve B. (the biker dude) and I sheared away and then the Tremeloes’ version of this song came on. “I like this song,” said Steve. “You know who wrote that?” I asked, starting a trivia contest. After several guesses I told him, “Cat Stevens.” “No!” “Yeah, when he was about 18” “I never knew.” And I went on to describe Cat’s early pop star career, tuberculosis, and rebirth as sensitive singer-songwriter in 1970. It was the beginning of a work friendship that lasted until Steve left a year or so later.

            Accutronics in the 1974-1980 time period was a very fun and interesting place to work.  Cary, Illinois, had a few businesses, but no Mickey D’s or other fast food places. High school and college aged kids went through Accu as a rite of passage almost, along with a group of bored housewives and mothers who also passed through there.

            Most of the college aged kids stopped through on their way to something better, whether it was college or a different job. Nobody planned on staying there forever, especially me, but here it is 40 years later and I’m still in the biz.

            But like I said in “To Be What You Must…” (number 11), I wouldn’t have it any other way.

            This song also reminds me of another friend I made almost 20 years later, at Dynacircuits, Oscar. S. They used to play music over the PA in the office. One day the Tremeloes’ version came on and I asked Oscar, “Know who wrote this?” starting up a little trivia quiz to pass the time.”No.””Cat Stevens!” “Who?” “Cat Stevens!” “Never heard of him.”

            It became a running gag for years after with Oscar at the two other board shops we worked together at. Some song would come on the radio, maybe AC/DC, I’d ask Oscar, “Who wrote this?” he would reply, “Cat Stevens?” and laughter would ensue.