Peeping and Hiding

Wichita Falls, Texas, 1963: In my apartment I played my stratocaster. I was thin and trim in those days, and I'd picked up a girlfriend for a week or two, by the name of Mary.

I don't recall how I met her, but she had a teeny-tiny little apartment some dozen blocks away from where I lived, and so who knows? Maybe I met her on the street. But I'd met her somewhere, and always an eager experimenter at that time, I'd fetched her to my place for a while.

I didn't think she was a truly pretty girl, but she was eager and earnest, and ... well ... those are good qualities, with the right timing.

And Mary was a devotee of something called Sloe Gin. It's a weird kind of sweetish alcohol beverage, and she'd been drinking quite a bit of it that day there in my apartment, and she came to sit on the carpet about a foot away from where I stood, playing my statocaster.

I was rocking out. I must have thought I was pretty cool, and I was having a good time.

And ignoring Mary, for she commenced to writhe around my legs.

For just a minute there I thought I was probably Keith Richards.

But then other thoughts intruded, and we shall now pass over later events of the day. In silence.

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Michael Murphy - North Texas Troubador

1308 1/2 W. Hickory Street, Denton Texas, Spring, 1963: The movie 'Hatari' was unmemorable, but the Henry Mancini song called 'Baby Elephant Walk' had been on the radio for weeks and weeks and weeks.

That warm day, an abundance of visitors from the HobNob to my miniscule apartment somehow drove us all to clamber up onto the flat roof. We also had beer. That may have been part of it.

On the front edge of the flat roof, with our feet dangling two stories above Hickory Street, we lined up to tell stories and watch the students and passers-by across the street on the campus.

Michael Murphy had brought his guitar.

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How to Write a Sales Script

San Francisco, Many Years Ago: Back in those days, I ran an answering service and later a voicemail company from an office on beautiful, scenic Geary Boulevard.

Fueled by a talk I heard at a trade convention, I began to experiment with 'scripted' sales presentations on the telephone. The lady giving the talk had claimed that a scripted sales presentation got more sales than just 'winging' it.

But first you got to write down the script!

How to do that?

Well ...

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Margaret's Lime

Henrietta, Texas circa 1970: Darrel Blain went to school with my brother, David Strickland, and sometimes rode his bike out to the farm near Hurnville to visit. Like any kid growing up in Henrietta, his mother bought his clothes at John's Drygoods, and the Library Rummage Sale was a big deal.

But he was enterprising, and he got a job at the 'Lo Boy, cooking burgers and making cokes.

Then one day, there was this lime.

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Accumulation

Nocona Texas, 1969: Bob Standley is my brother-in-law, because he married my sister Mary. But some time before they got married, when he was in high school, he had a Chevy Malibu.

He had a little job, I think it was at the boot factory, and he had to be very careful with his money. Each week on Saturday, he took $2, and he'd fill up the gas tank -- it was a long time ago -- and there was money left over to go to the drive-inn movie, and to buy a nasty little cigar called a Swisher Sweet.

Every week he followed this $2 routine, and so as to conserve his money, he drove his car only when he had to, so that the gas would last through the week.

But then one Saturday, something strange happened.

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The Snipe Hunt

Somewhere in Kansas, Summer 1960: I was a truck driver on the wheat harvest, working for the Moser family. We cut the grain and hauled it to the grain elevator for the farmers, and we moved north as the grain ripened.

On this particular afternoon, Jake, Old Man Moser's son, was driving his pickup, and myself and another driver riding along, returning from the town. Somehow in the conversation, the other driver mentioned snipe hunting to Jake. Jake picked up his cue.

"Yeah," he said, "I've heard they have snipe around here. In fact I think I heard some the other night."

"What's a snipe?" I said.

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Wizard in a Cave

Henrietta, Texas, 1951. My mother played her nice radio in the evenings, and we listened to Green Lantern, the Phantom, the Great Gildersleeve, the Lone Ranger, and the Inner Sanctum. Not long after, television would arrive, stealing drama from the radio, but in those days radio was one story after another.

Hobby time went well with radio. For example, my mother was a great and wonderful crafts person, and made marvelous things. As we sat in the evening with one lamp turned on, she was making colored flower stencils on pillow cases.

I had a project too. She'd bought me a drawing toy called a Magic Slate. This cardboard rectangle has a gray plastic sheet attached, and a pencil-shaped wooden stylus. With this stylus, you write or draw upon the gray sheet. Whenever it's filled up, or you get tired of it, just lift the sheet and all the writing vanishes, and you can start over. Oh, the sheer magic of it!

That night we were listening to Inner Sanctum, which was a scary show about some sort of bird or a bat. But I wasn't scared. My mom was making stencils and I was a Wizard in a Cave.

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Tale of Quacking Duck

Henrietta, Texas, 1971: After Dr. Strickland had died, but before we moved to the farm, I'd finally completed my Bachelor's Degree at Midwestern University, so I lived in our home on the west side of town. (Just across from where Eddy Frank lives now.)

There, in a back room, while waiting to see if I'd be accepted into the University of Iowa or some other school with a Creative Writing department, I wrote stories every morning.

Everybody was warned not to bother me. I was an artiste!

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In the Shadow of the Space Needle

Seattle, Summer 1961: My friend Lefevre and I looked up at the towering building and gawked like hicks. Eighteen years old I was, just graduated from high school.

"Gawrsh," I said.

It was a grand adventure. The best one yet.

In study hall, while studying Life magazine, I'd seen the photographs of the Seattle World's Fair. Photographs of the towering, unique 'Space Needle'. It was far from Henrietta, Texas. It was on the West Coast, way north of fabled California, where I was born but really didn't remember

Jerry was three years older. He'd graduated earlier, an artist, and he was working at a ritzy department store in Wichita Falls, arranging their windows, and I found him in a back room, standing over an empty Coca-Cola bottle, holding an unlit cigarette four feet above the bottle.

"You see," he said, pointing to the shadow on the floor, which showed him, the bottle, and the unlit cigarette in his hand, "if you get the shadow lined up right, you can drop the cigarette into the bottle." He let go of the cigarette.

It fell four feet, and slithered into the coke bottle. As always, I was impressed. But I had bigger game on my mind.

"Do you want to go to the Seattle World's Fair this summer?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "We'll camp out, and take v8 juice and lettuce. Just the ticket."

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This Newfangled Daylight-Savings Time

Dallas, Texas, Spring 1966: Living in Dunia Bean's apartment on Gillespie street, I worked at the Cabana Hotel. The Cabana is a clone of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, complete with oversized statues of Venus, David, and the rest of the crew. Inside, a vast two-story lobby with greenish marble floor and a round sunken area with sofas enough for a football team.

Overlooking this magnificance, our front desk where I worked with Dick and Earl, dignified alcoholics. Dick taught me how to get big tips at crowded times, and Earl as a young actor fought swords with Errol Flynn in the movie Captain Blood. That was a while back.

But this was in the spring, and for the first time since the war, Texas was going to have Daylight Savings Time. We were all abuzz.

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The Canyon

Henrietta, Texas, 1952-1957. To the northwest of town, the homes came to a sudden stop, at the Canyon. We boys called it the Canyon, but our town being built on Texas rolling hills, it wasn't exceptionally magnificent. Except to us, of course.

A stream or creek emerged from the rock, and fell twenty feet into a small pool, in which lived a legendary large fish. From the pool, when there was rain, the outbound creek trickled and cut through a wide and expanding sandy basin.

To either side, the long arms of rocky shelf stretched, reaching down to meet the plain, and beyond, a hazard of tumbled woods, open plains, and a great and empty distance.

For us boys, this was Heaven.

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A Cottage in East Grinstead

East Grinstead, Sussex. 1968. When I went to study in England, I wore my warm railroad clothing, because I feared to pack my oily boots inside my suitcase. Lucky, as it turned out, because my suitcase went on a two-week vacation to Madagascar, and England was very cold.

With a roommate I had a front room, looking onto the sleepy village lane. My roommate maintained a running battle with the early birds. In the early morning dark, an invisible milkman left bottles on the step. The quick little birds then swooped down to peck holes in the tin-foil caps, and they siphoned off the cream with their narrow beaks. Each morning, the roommate swore at the holes in the milk caps.

That and the heater.

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Network Answering Service

San Francisco, 1976. But it actually started with Lamont Johnson, a jazz piano-player in Los Angeles, in 1969. At breakfast, he told us roommates his great new plan. We would start an answering service, for musicians!

"A what?" I asked. He explained it. Answering services used switchboards to answer the phone when the musician was out. I knew how to operate a switchboard, because of my hotel jobs. As soon as we had a switchboard and some clients, we could all take turns. He showed us listings in the Los Angeles yellow pages. Not one of these answering services specialized in serving musicians!

It sounded like a swell idea. Quickly we were recruited. Me and another guy were sent to obtain an endorsement from the head of the Los Angeles musician's union. I made up some charts with pictures of statistics going up. We got an appointment.

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The Corduroy Coat

Denton, Texas, 1965: Paul Miner had this camel-colored corduroy sports jacket. It had leather buttons, and leather patches on the elbows. He loaned it to me one day.

On that day, wearing the corduroy coat with my round glasses and unruly hair, being a hippy and all, Patty Cake said, "You look like Bob Dylan."

I said, "Who?"

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The Abandoned Road

Dallas, Texas, 1966. On this particular day, my girlfriend and I decided to take the psilocybin before heading out. Driving the Morgan from Dallas to Shady Shores was an odd adventure. It was about thirty miles, and seemingly many days driving.

I knew of this place from years earlier. College roommates and I had lived nearby, and some scouting trip discovered an abandoned roadway that had once run atop a dam built across Lake Dallas. In a concrete building halfway out, remnants of the dam's machinery remained, huge wheels and vast pipes, going nowhere.

Whoever these mysterious builders were, they were fickle, for after building the dam across the lake, they'd cut a hole through it, so it was no dam any longer. Just a finger of elevated land reaching toward, but not touching, a finger of land from the other side. On the elevated crest, earth and stone and even trees, and the once roadway ran, and stopped at the cut.

Just the spot for our picnic.

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