1978 Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

1977 versus 1978

Proctors

When I noted that I could remember specific years in my past, someone wanted to know how. As it pertains to 1977 versus 1978, it was easy. The first year was terrible, and the second year was pretty great. Not that 1977 was ALL bad.

I should start with the autumn of 1976. Ostensibly, I had graduated from SUNY New Paltz. By that, I mean I had enough credits to graduate, but I still had a course I was supposed to finish.

The Financial Council, the student government entity, hired me to sell concert tickets. While it was fun, and I got to attend some concerts for free, it didn’t pay enough to live on.

So, I must have called my parents in Charlotte, NC, and asked if I could live with them for a bit. I don’t remember the conversation, but I ended up there. My father had only moved down there in the spring of 1974, and my mom and baby sister in the autumn of that year. In January 1975, my other sister and I kidnapped our maternal grandmother and brought her to Queen City as well. So, my family didn’t have a lot of history there.

I’d help my parents sell costume jewelry. For many reasons, I hated it, except for the Kansas incident.

The big hassle about the city was that it was extremely difficult to get around. Most of the buses routed through the intersection of Trade and Tryon. If you wanted to go from Miami to NYC or LA to Seattle, imagine going via St.Louis. I did go to the library and saw the movie Gaslight, which was a small highlight. My family also watched the miniseries Roots, except we missed the first half hour of the penultimate night.

Skyscrapers and everything

By May 1977, I’d made my way to the apartment of my sister Leslie and her then-husband Eric in Jackson Heights, Queens. At least I had a semblance of a job: selling renewals of TV Guide magazines and the annuals of the Encyclopedia Americana or Brittanica.

I knew how to get around the Big Apple. Five days a week, I took the #7 train to the E train to Manhattan and back.

It wasn’t all bad. I met my friend Deborah, whose wedding I attended in May 2023 in France.

But the place was a bit unsettling. It was the NYC of the Bronx Zoo and the Son of Sam. Right before I left, I voted for Mario Cuomo for mayor over Ed Koch in the Democratic primary. Of course, the incumbent Koch won.

Back to the Paltz

I left there to go to my old college town. Crashing on my friend Lynn’s sofa, I tutored freshmen taking political science courses. They didn’t understand the three parts of the federal government; their real shortcomings were that they didn’t bother to read the books.

While I got to hang out with some old friends and met a new friend, Judy, I wasn’t getting enough hours.

The Capital District

I migrated up the Thruway to Schenectady, staying with Uthaclena and his then-wife. After Christmas, she suggested I apply for a job as a teller at Albany Savings Bank in downtown Albany. It seemed to be in my skill set, so I did. At the beginning of February, I got the job. However, I knew I would not love this career, even during the training process conducted by an excellent teller but a subpar instructor.

It turned out that Pam, the Innovative Studies coordinator at New Paltz, had also migrated north. Her beau, Paul, was in charge of a program operated by the Schenectady Arts Council, funded by federal grant money. I would be the bookkeeper. Moreover, I would make $8,200 per year, far more than the six grand I would be making at ASB; I had more money in my drawer at the beginning of the day than I was making annually. It became an easy decision when I spent an hour trying (and failing) to find a nickel shortfall in my drawer.

I started working at the Schenectady Arts Council. Immediately, my primary task was to contact businesses to see if they’d like to advertise for an event designed to help renovate Proctors Theatre. This old vaudeville venue had seen better days.

I also ran a biweekly Artisans Arcade; sang with Susan, the secretary, at nursing homes; was a partner with Darlene, the choreographer, when she taught dance to school kids; and served as the acting director when Paul went on vacation. I generally loved the job.

Although the funding suddenly disappeared on January 23, 1979, and it was greatly disappointing, it got me to where I needed to be.

Sunday Stealing: the best thing

irrational

Once more, Sunday Stealing is purloining from How Far Will You Go?

1. What’s the best thing to inherit other than money?

Good health, I suppose. I would say a long life, but if one’s health were awful, that wouldn’t be so great.

2. What one thing would you most like to happen tomorrow?

I’d like to write a blog post. I’m falling behind and my reserves are rapidly shrinking. What should I write about?

3. Who is the person with whom you’ve been most infatuated?

I wrote a whole blog post about this in 2008. And I’m sure there were others, not to mention the ones I knew personally; we won’t get into THAT!

4. In what part of the day does time go slowest and fastest?

It ALL goes pretty fast. My list of things to do doesn’t seem to shrink.

5. Whose thoughts would you most like to read?

djt. What’s really going on there?

6. Who is the person you’d least like to touch?

Odd question. What are they, lepers? I suppose the person others think they ought not to touch would be the person I would be most compelled to touch.

Genes

7. What is the best quality you inherited from your parents?

My father had a good musical ear. My mother was very kind.

8. Who is the friend you most often disagree with?

There is one, who I am not going to name. This week, I shared what I thought was an interesting upcoming musical release but it was pooh-poohed. Whatevs.

9. What’s the best ritual of your daily life?

It’s playing Wordle (485-game streak) and Quordle.

10. What is the most useful job you’ve ever had?

I’ll pick working at FantaCo (May 1980-November 1988), a comic book store/publisher/convention place that became a “third place” for many patrons. I balanced the checkbook, helped order products, wrote and edited a few magazines, et al. A lot of things I learned were useful in being a business librarian (1994-2019).

11. In which year of your life did you change the most?

Lessee, 1972. Or 1974, 1977, 1978, 1983, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004. If pressed, I’ll pick 1978. 1977 was the year I bounced from New Paltz, NY to Charlotte, NC to NYC, and back to New Paltz to Schenectady, NY. In 1978, I got a job I liked at the Schenectady Arts Council in a metro area I have lived in ever since.

12. What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten for free?

A trip to Barbados, courtesy of the game show JEOPARDY! It wasn’t totally free in that I had to pay taxes on the value of the trip; the trip’s value was $2100, if I remember correctly.

13, What is the thing you are best at?

I can connect numbers with events, such as those years in question 11.

I can walk under ladders

14. What was the luckiest moment in your life?

I don’t know about THE luckiest, but I thought of this event recently. As a college student in New Paltz, NY in the 1970s, I often hitchhiked from my hometown of Binghamton to school and back. Once, I walked just outside New Paltz village and found a white and orange metal sign with 17 on it. To get home, I would take NY-299 W to US-44 E to NY-52 W to NY-17 W to Binghamton. I put up the sign, and about five minutes later, a guy from the CIA picked me up and dropped me at Exit 72 just above my grandma’s house in Binghamton. BTW, the guy was from the Culinary Institute of America, not the Central Intelligence Agency.

15. What is the single most important thing you have ever learned?

People are irrational, motivated by factors they don’t always understand themselves. This week, a person in my neighborhood drove past a Road Closed sign. They must have thought, “Surely, if I can drive past the sign, I should be able to get down the block.” Nope, the road construction was at the end of the road. They had to turn around in someone’s driveway and return to the main street. I got just a soupçon of delight from this.

Halloween 1978 with Sid and Shirley

makeup debacle

I have no recollection of any Halloween costume I wore as a child. If there were pictures, I’ve not seen them for years, if at all.

Perhaps there were a couple of times I think I dressed up in college, but they’re lost on me as well. The year I turned 25, in 1978, I remember, perhaps because there was a picture.

My girlfriend Susan had a friend who was having “a Halloween costume party. I’m not sure that I had any costume ideas, but Susan did, and when she suggested, I embraced it. (Or so I remember.)

“I had a beard and a mustache at the time, so I shaved them. Then Susan and a couple of her friends made me up. We found a dress in a second-hand store, a wig and shoes from somewhere, and we went to the party, she as ‘Sid’ and me as ‘Shirley.’

“I affected a high pitched voice, but frankly, I figured that people would know it was me. After all, I was still a six-foot black person. Much to my shock and amazement, no one recognized me! Well, not until later in the evening, when my ‘five o’clock shadow’ starred to appear.

“The Halloween of 1978 inspired me to dress up for several years thereafter, though never again in drag.” I have pictures that I need to scan. My favorite was a skull mask, a wizard’s hat, and my college graduation robe. There’s a picture with me leaning on a car, reading the New York Daily News comics section.

Another involved a Frankenstein mask, beret, and a seersucker jacket. I’m sure I bought both masks from FantaCo, where I worked. Boy, were they warm.

My daughter did Halloween for a few years, often utilizing dance outfits she wore when she studied ballet. I was not inspired to dress up as I took her house to house.

SamuraiFrog

Still, I relate to the sentiment of my buddy SamuraiFrog: “This is my favorite time of year, but it always brings with it the disappointment of seeing some of my fellow Halloween lovers being total hypocrites.

“Seriously, if you’re a person who starts visibly celebrating Halloween in August, don’t turn around and attempt to dampen anyone else’s spirits just because they start getting excited about Christmas in November or October. Don’t try to make people feel bad about being excited about something you’re not, you selfish prick.”

Makeup debacle

I know it wasn’t for Halloween, but Justin Trudeau’s brownface debacle seems seasonably appropriate for discussion. TIME magazine obtained a photo of Canada’s prime minister at an ‘Arabian Nights’-themed party at a private school where he was teaching in 2001.

In response to the photo surfacing, Trudeau apologized for his actions, agreed that the photo is racist, and said it “was a dumb thing to do.”

There have been many debacles, for Halloween and otherwise, about blackface. Megyn Kelly, who’s only about 14 months older than Trudeau, ended up off her NBC News show for suggesting that blackface on October 31 was no big deal where she grew up in upstate New York. But Virginia governor Ralph Northam is still in office.

On a hopefully less problematic topic, here are Halloween costumes on Pinterest. Also, 29 Best Halloween Events Near You, From Festivals to Costume Contests.

My Favorite Years QUESTION

Note that we DIDN’T pick 2004, the year Lydia was born.

Possibly around the time I was writing about nostalgia, the Wife and I were talking about the favorite years in our lives.

I picked 1969, the year I turned 16, and my parents let me have a huge party. I had a girlfriend, I got elected president of the student government, which made me an irritant to the new principal, and I was figuring out who I was politically, especially compared to the transitional 1968. Music was great that year, too.

Then there was 1978, the year I worked at the Schenectady Arts Council, got a girlfriend, and finally stopped my nomadic existence.

1984 was the year after Mitch Cohn was fired from FantaCo and Raoul Vezina died. This made Tom Skulan more dependent on me to deal with the day-to-day stuff, while he worked on publications and the “big picture” stuff. Yes, affairs of the heart played here too.

Carol and I both picked 1998, the year before we got married, for different reasons. Her reasons are her own (she can start her own blog – unlikely). For me, it was going to Detroit (visit friend, Motown museum, Ford museums, Tigers game), Cleveland (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), Washington, DC (visit friend, take JEOPARDY! test), and Boston (appear on JEOPARDY!) Interesting that neither of us picked 1999, the year we actually GOT married because that first year in that half a house she owned was tricky; buying OUR house in 2000 was definitely a vast improvement.

And we both picked 2003, which was the year Lydia was finally conceived. Carol and I went to Poland Spring, Maine after that. Note that we DIDN’T pick 2004, the year Lydia was born; that took some getting used to.

So what are some of your favorite years, and why?
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My Favorite Year with Peter O’Toole – Final scenes