The TV Generation

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I hope you are all still enjoying gobs of turkey, wine, pie, football and family the entire 4-day weekend...I love this holiday.  Safe travels, and enjoy every minute of it.  So anyways I was sitting at work this past Wednesday afternoon listening to the 'Monkees Greatest Hits' on cd....then I started thinking about the TV show that they did and how I used to watch it when I was VERY little.  I was born in 1966 and the show ran from 1966 to 1968 so I must have watched the syndicated episodes, but cripes that was a long time ago and I still remember it very well.

Then that got me thinking about all the other shows I used to watch when I was a kid.  The more I thought, the more and more shows came to mind that I remember very well.  And not just shows I occasionally watched and remember the names of, but shows I watched practically every single episode of...either in the morning before school, after school, at night, or before I was even in school.  And I remember the commercials from back then as well, as I have dozens of characters and theme songs in my head that will seemingly never go away...Mr. Whipple (please don't squeeze the Charmin), Madge (you're soaking in it), Rosie (the quicker picker-upper), Mikey (let's get Mikey!).  And knowing the whole:  "two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-all-on-a-sesame-seed-bun" Big Mac jingle made me one of the cool kids in 2nd grade.

TV was huge in our house.  Me and my 2 sisters Jan and Cindy literally worshipped it.  "TV control" was always a big deal as we would fight over who got to turn the knob and decide which of the 4 available channels that we would watch.  I remember when we got our first color TV in the early 70's and it was put in 'The TV Room'.  Shortly afterwards my 3 year old sister Cindy inexplicably tried to move the 5,000 lb beast early one Saturday morning and managed to knock it off the TV stand and cracked the case...it was like the world had come to an end.  Fortunately my Dad, who can fix anything, was able to get it working and the world was right again, but those were anxious times.  One of my earliest TV memories was sitting on the couch with my Dad watching the moon-shots on our black and white TV.  It was such a huge deal and all the grown-ups were talking about it.  It was hard for a 4 year old to make sense of it when we would watch the guys on the moon on TV, and then we would go outside and look up at the moon and think that that is where they guys in my TV-room are.  I of course wanted to be an astronaut.  Actually, a football player, a cowboy and an astronaut.

I guess I also know 'TV' on another level.  I have a relative I chat with on the phone occasionally who's real name is Bruce and he shares my last name.  He has appeared on numerous TV shows, including Perry Mason, Big Valley, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Kojak, The Dukes Of Hazzard, etc.  I am also email-friends with a woman named Lydia Cornell who was on the show Too Close For Comfort that me and my sisters used to watch every week in the early 80's.  For geographic reasons with her being in California and me in Minnesota we do not know each other in person, but I have a feeling that if we lived in the same state we would be buddies.  She is a really good person, extremely cool, and I like her a lot.  Check her out at:  www.LydiaCornell.com or http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lydia-live-todhd or on Facebook.

I have a 2-year old daughter named Autumn and we let her watch one TV program per day.  Either Sesame Street or Yo Gabba Gabba.  Unless it's Sunday and football is on (poor li'l thing loves the purple Minnesota Vikings...Percy Harvin is her favorite player) she gets ONE show at the most per day.  But a quick memory check from when I was little brings up literally dozens and dozens of TV shows that I watched religiously.  Did I do anything but watch TV?  Seriously.  Mom?  What up?  I am not complaining and I do not think I am warped (as we are warned nowadays about kids and TV viewing) but holy crap I watched a LOT of TV.  Not counting all of the Saturday morning TV shows that me and my sisters would watch religiously every week, here is a quick list of the shows that I remember very well from the late 60's through the 70's.  I am sure I left out a few, but here are the shows that I remember watching regularily.  After I made this list I googled "1970 tv shows" to help jog my memory for more, but 90% of these I remembered off the top of my head.  And I don't just remember the shows, but I still remember the theme songs, the characters, plots...everything.  What is wrong with me?  Do these names bring back some memories?

The Monkees

Too Close For Comfort

The Beverly Hillbillies

Andy Griffith Show

Hogan's Heroes

That Girl

Family Affair

Price Is Right

Let’s Make A Deal

Family Feud

Wheel Of Fortune
Star Trek

Gunsmoke

Big Valley

Bonanza

Davy Crockett

Daniel Boone

I Dream Of Jeannie

Bewitched
Gilligan's Island
Flinstones
The Jetsons
McHale's Navy
The Little Rascals

Leave It To Beaver
My Three Sons

Love Boat

Fantasy Island

Baretta

Mannix

McCloud

Columbo

McMillan & Wife

Barnaby Jones

Cannon

Police Woman

Hart To Hart

Night Court

Happy Days

Laverne & Shirley

Mork & Mindy

Welcome Back Kotter

Taxi
Hee Haw

Sonny & Cher

Donny & Marie

Captain & Tennille

Tony Orlando & Dawn

Sesame Street

Electric Company

Zoom

Mr. Roger's Neighborhood

Captain Kangaroo

6 Million Dollar Man

The Bionic Woman

Love American Style

The Odd Couple

Barney Miller

WKRP In Cincinnati

Kojak

McCloud

Three’s Company

Dukes Of Hazzard

B.J. And The Bear

Grizzly Adams

Little House On The Prairie

The Waltons
The Dick Van Dyke Show
I Love Lucy

Mary Tyler Moore Show

Rhoda

Phyllis

Maude

Bob Newhart Show

All In The Family

The Jeffersons

The Gong Show

Soul Train

MASH

Brady Bunch

Eight Is Enough

The Partridge Family

Quincy

One Day At A Time

Sanford And Son

Chico & The Man

Good Times

What’s Happening

Different Strokes

The Facts Of Life

Alice

CHIPs

Starsky & Hutch

Rockford Files

The Hardy Boys

Charlie’s Angels

Greatest American Hero

Wonder Woman

The Incredible Hulk
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
Emergency
Adam-12
Man From Atlantis

Night Stalker

Kung Fu

Motorcycle Incidents

I have had a few minor motorcycle ‘incidents’ over the years.  Minor, but memorable.  The first one that comes to mind was back in December of 1988.  I had traveled to the San Francisco Bay area with my girlfriend Lona, my best friend Mark Smith and his girlfriend Christy to see the Grateful Dead’s 3-night New Year’s Eve run of shows at the Oakland Coliseum.  We were staying at our friend Vickie Page's house in El Cerrito just north of Oakland, and her brother had a sweet new Honda V65 Magna motorcycle.  This was a large powerful 1100 cc motorcycle.  At the time, the motorcycle I was riding back home in Minneapolis was a 1976 Suzuki 185cc Enduro…a very fun bike, but small, old and not that powerful.  Vickie's brother was out of town for the week, so boasting that I had been riding motorcycles for years I begged her to let me take the bike out for a ride.  After refusing at first and then hesitating, she finally relented making me promise I would go slow, just around the neighborhood once, and then bring it right back.  "Okay, no problem." I said, but the 22 year old in me was just dying to get on that thing and tear it up.

Keep in mind this is a very hilly area with houses perched on the hills and the driveways all short and steep.  The bike is in the garage which is beneath the house.  I got on the bike, which was facing out towards the 20 foot driveway that is probably on almost a 45 degree angle up to the street.  It is basically a ramp.  So I’m revving up the bike, showing off, confident in my abilities.  However with my little 185cc bike I had to turn the throttle all the way full just to get the bike to start moving forward.  With my hands used to that method, I released the clutch and turned the throttle wide-open as usual.  Well of course with this 1100cc monster engine beneath my legs, it responded to my full-throttle by instantly shooting forth like a rocket.  I held on to the handlebars for dear life as the thing shot up the driveway ramp, flew OVER the road, hitting the sidewalk on the other side of the street and bouncing into a chain-link fence.  The entire trip lasted approximately 1.2 seconds, so Vickie got her wish of me just taking it for a short ride.

On the other side of the chain-link fence was a children’s daycare center and of course all of the children were outside playing when this maniac suddenly comes roaring out from the underground bat-cave and goes airborne in a mad attempt to take them all out.  So they’re all pointing and screaming and running away as I’m laying there on the sidewalk in a heap with this big beautiful blue motorcycle on it's side.  The engine kills but the tires are still spinning as I extract myself from the bike and struggle to get it up.  All my friends who had witnessed this came running up the driveway, making sure I wasn’t hurt before laughing their asses off at the spectacle of me shooting up out of the garage like an unguided missile.  Miraculously I was unhurt besides a couple of bloody scrapes.  The only one who was not laughing was Vickie.  She was worried that her brother would kill her but a quick inspection revealed only a few scratches, and fortunately her brother had laid it down a week earlier going around a corner so it was impossible to tell the new scrapes from the old scrapes...we were off the hook.

The most recent incident was just last summer when I asked my friend Ernie to come over with his pick-up truck on a Saturday afternoon to help me bring my motorcycle in to the shop...the same 1985 Yamaha Maxim 700 from my blog a couple of weeks ago.  The carbs needed work so I had to haul it in to Minneapolis to get it fixed.  It's a fairly big bike.  For some reason I assumed Ernie was bringing some wood with him for a ramp to get the bike up to the bed of the truck.  Nope...he thought I had wood.  So the trick now was how to get this 500 lb hunk of metal from the ground up onto the bed of his truck.  We hunted around and found some 2x4’s in my garage…not wide enough or long enough, but they will have to do.  Wait…Ernie spots a 2x6 up in the rafters.  We bring that down…about 6 feet long.  Better, but is it long enough and can it hold a motorcycle?  Hmm.  We decide to brace it with a metal folding ladder I have. 

So we park Ernie’s truck down by the street, with the open back of the truck facing up towards the house.  We put the ladder from the ground to the truck and then laid the board on top of that.  Unfortunately the board is about a foot shorter than the ladder.  We figured screw it, by the time the bike is that far up the board it will have enough momentum to go that last foot.   We joked that we should get the video camera from inside so Ernie could film it to send to Youtube or America’s Funniest Home Videos, but sadly we neglected to do that.

So I sit on the bike, back it up to the top of my short, steep driveway, and gave a couple of pushes with my feet and start heading the 20 feet down till I get to the ramp.  Well…it went great until I got almost to the top of the board and then the bike stopped…I didn’t have enough speed.  “Uh, oh.” I said quietly as me and the bike slowly started tipping to the right.  You know that feeling you get right before something painful is about to happen?  Like when you were a kid and you are going over a jump on your bicycle and then in mid-air the bike starts nosing downward and you know you're going to go over the handlebars and it's going to hurt a lot?  Well I got to revisit that sad, helpless feeling on this particular afternoon.  As we started to tip I instinctively put both my feet down to where there would normally be ground, but of course there was nothing but air so I braced myself for the 4 foot fall off the side of the board while sitting on this 500 lb anchor. 

I managed to jump off sideways but still hold on to the handlebars while the back of the bike hit the ground.  Somehow the front tire stayed on the bed of the truck while the back was laying on it’s side.  Ernie’s eyes were like saucers as he ran over and helped me grab the bike and lift it up off it’s side.  But now what??  The front tire is still on the truck, the back is on the ground, and I’ve got sharp pain and future deep bruises on my left ankle and right hip.  We noticed some neighbors who were having a graduation party down the street all gathered out in their driveway with beers in hand pointing at us, but they didn’t think to come over and help.  Then a neighbor from the other side of the house came running through my yard to help.  He grabs the handlebars and somehow me and Ernie muscled the back end of the bike up on to the truck. 

I was in pain and dripping sweat, but we got the b*stard safely on the truck and tied it down.  There was plenty of cosmetic damage with a broken signal-light, dented exhaust pipe and numerous scratches on the side, but we both got off pretty good considering.  Same lesson learned in both 'incidents':  never attempt a tricky motorcycle/ramp maneuver when not running video.  That was just plain dumb in both cases.

Naked Oops...

Back in the early 90’s when I was living in Madison, WI, my girlfriend Lona and I had heard about these awesome 2-day/1-night canoe/camping trips down the Wisconsin River.  You drive to the town of Prairie du Sac and park your car at the canoe outfitter place on the river.  They fit you with a canoe, paddles, life-preservers and a map, and you supply your own tent, sleeping bags, cooler, whatever…and off you go!  You paddle down the river, camp on one of the millions of ever-shifting sandbars, and then the next day about 20 or 25 miles down river you pull out at the town of Spring Green where a bus is waiting to take you and the canoe back up the river to where your car is parked.  Inexpensive, and very cool.

So day 1, it was a beautiful summer day and we were happily floating lazily down the river, occasionally paddling when we felt like it, and just enjoying the sun and nature.  I had a line in the water and wasn’t catching any fish, but I didn’t care.  We would stop at sand bars, swim, fish, fool around, eat, whatever, and then back into the canoe.  Occasionally we would see another canoe or kayaker, but it was pretty sparse and we felt like the wilderness was all ours.  But then about mid-afternoon on the first day we spotted off in the distance a whole bunch of people on a huge wide stretch of beach.

We were enjoying the beautiful wilderness so much we decided we would just blow past the crowded beach and keep to ourselves, but then as we got closer we realized everyone was naked…it was a nude beach!  Cool!  We had just got back from a 2 month trip to Greece.  It was our second trip there and all the beaches are topless and many totally nude, so being naked was nothing to us.  We loved and missed Greece and figured this would be a small way to sort of get back there in our minds.  So thinking it would be extra cool to arrive naked, we peeled off our bathing suits and happily paddled over there.

We pulled up on shore to the nearest part of the beach and while Lona lingered back at the canoe gathering some towels and beers and such, I hopped out and walked up shore a little ways to look around.  Suddenly I noticed two guys heading towards me and I flashed them a big smile and said ‘hi’ and proceeded to make small talk.  We chatted for a minute and they were incredibly nice, but then one of them offered me his towel and said I could borrow it if I wanted.  Huh?  Why?  “Uh, no thanks, we have our own.” I said, as I motioned off towards Lona who was just starting to walk up the beach with towels in hand.  They both glanced over at her, frowned, and without a word just turned around and walked away.

That was weird.  Lona walked up and I told her what happened.  She started looking around and then said:  “Do you notice anything strange about this beach?”  This was before I got lasik surgery and I did not have my glasses on, so I squinted hard and looked around at the sea of flesh.  It seemed like people were staring at us.  Maybe this was this a private beach?  Wait, that’s weird…the beach was packed but there did not appear to be any women anywhere.  Just then another dude walked up to us and with a friendly smile says:  “Um, excuse me, but you might be a little more comfortable over there.” and he points about a quarter mile down the river to the far side of the beach.

Oh crap, we were at a men’s gay beach.  The far side of the beach was full of dudes and chicks and was the hetero side, but the side that we had pulled up to was the gay side.  We tried to nonchalantly walk back to the canoe, but when we got there we quickly jumped in and paddled away, feeling all the eyes on our naked butts as we made our escape.  We were a tad embarrassed so we decided to not even stop at the hetero side…we just kept paddling as fast as we could down the river and back to nature.  We did not bother to put our suits back on however and enjoyed much of the rest of the trip au naturel.

King Of The Road

So it was the spring of 1989 and I was in college living with my girlfriend Lona and 2 other girls at a house in Dinkytown (a campus-town near the U of M in Minneapolis).  I woke up unusually early one Sunday morning, sat up in bed and for no reason at all I suddenly decided that I needed a motorcycle…not just the little dirt-bikes and enduros I had previously owned but a real motorcycle and I wanted it today.  This was of course before the internet so I grabbed the Sunday paper and a pen and started looking.

So many choices...but then one personal ad jumped off the page and caught my eye…a 1985 Yamaha Maxim XJ700 with only 28 miles?  “This is not a misprint.” it said.  Really?  No way!  So I quickly called and a scared, meek little voice of an old woman answered.  I was puzzled and she was extremely nervous and unsure of herself, but I made arrangements to drive down to her house in Bloomington, MN and check it out right away.

Well Lona gave me a ride there and left when it quickly became apparent that I was going to buy the bike.  The deal was that this little, lonely old lady owned this kickass motorcycle and was selling it because her husband had bought the bike new in 1985, rode it once, and died of cancer.  She explained that it was his dying wish to own a motorcycle and ride it before he died.  He got to do that, but it had been sitting in their garage ever since because she was afraid to sell it.  She thought that when she put the ad in the paper she would be inundated with mean, leather-clad, biker-gang types coming over in the middle of the night, riding their bikes all over her lawn and making a lot of racket. 

After 4 years she finally worked up the courage to sell the bike.  I was the first person to come look at it and she was so happy to see that I was a nice, normal fellow who had no intention of hurting her or her lawn that she immediately took to me and hugged me, gave me milk and cookies, and proceeded to tell me all about her husband.  I was there in her kitchen for what seemed like hours as she told me all about his life, his sickness, and his death.  Then she wanted to hear my life story.  Eventually we came around to talking about a price for the motorcycle.  The thing was of course in mint condition and had been $3,000 new I believe.  She had only been asking $2,100 but she gave it to me for $1,800.  A way cool, basically new, black Yamaha Maxim 700 for $1,800!

I thought I was finally going to get to ride off into the sunset on my new bike, but then she said she had something she wanted to give to me.  She went upstairs and came down a few minutes later with a leather keychain that read:  “King Of The Road”.  She said:  "I know it seems silly..." and then went on to explain that she had gotten it for her husband after he died and put it in his Christmas stocking on her first Christmas without him...and she wanted me to have it.  So of course she starts crying and then I’m practically crying and we’re hugging each other and I was starting to think that maybe she was going to try and adopt me.  Then she insists on getting the camera.  So we go out to the driveway and she takes a bunch of pictures of me on the bike in various poses, and then she has a neighbor come over and take pictures of the two of us.

Finally it was over, we hugged some more, said our goodbyes, and as I rode off I was trembling with a mixture of excitement and sadness at how I got the bike.  I still have and love it to this day.  It has been my main bike ever since, I take good care of it, and often-times I think of that sweet old lady and her 'King Of The Road' when I am riding it.