Remembering John Lennon

New York, December 9, 1980: In the evening, John Lennon returned from the recording session at The Record Plant in New York. The limosine let him out in front of The Dakota, the gothic stone building pictured in the movie "Rosemary's Baby", and as he and Yoko Ono approached the building, Mark David Chapman called out "Mr. Lennon?" and shot Lennon five times with a .38 revolver.

Lennon was hit in the torso and the back. He called out, "I'm shot," took a few steps, and collapsed. When policed arrived, they found Chapman standing nearby, the gun on the ground. A building security guard asked Chapman, "Do you know what you've done?"

Chapman replied, "I just shot John Lennon."

Police rushed Lennon to the emergency room at the Roosevelt hospital, but he could not be revived.

Something died for many of us that day.

The sound of the Beatles, coming from the radio, startled us, back in the day. Those were college days for me. But perhaps you remember when you first heard their harmony, the enthusiasm, the sound was new and fresh.

A memory floats, quiet, like a blossom in a busy stream, and rushing around a bend, is gone.

A Tale of Toblerone ...

A Movie Theatre near Picadilly, London, 1968: Funny how memories come back to you. Pointless little things, a turn of phrase, the way some trees looked against the clouds on a dim horizon.

One of the moments in my life that I remember, from time to time, from 40 years ago, and still laugh each time, was a snippet of conversation overheard, when I first sat down in a theatre in London, to watch the film Barbarella.

The film had not yet begun, and I gradually became aware of the two guys in the row right behind me. Being American, it seemed to me that their cockney accents were thick as bad pudding.

Said one: "I'm going to the confession, mate."

Said the other: "Get us a Toblerone, eh?"

"Save me seat?"

"Guard it wi' me life, I will!"

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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Captured by the Black Bart Gang

Henrietta, Texas, 1956 or 1957: I'm not sure of the date. In the terror of the memory, some parts are vague, unreal. It was when I attended Junior High, which at that time was in the old, two-story brick high school building near the center of town.

Life was exciting and new. My friends and I were in the big school, with the big, grown-up kids in high school, and some of them had cars. My home life was shaken up, for my mother had married Dr. Strickland, and we'd gone to live in the flat of rooms above his office. This was on the other side of downtown, across from the hospital, and right on the main road, Highway 287, which ran through the center of town.

I had a friend named Bobby Mitchell, I had been to their house, and so I knew his older brother, Mike Mitchell.

Mike generally ignored me, or treated me with disdain. He was at that age when teen boys begin to think themselves wild and dangerouos, and that's what started the trouble.

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Peeping and Hiding

Wichita Falls, Texas, 1971: 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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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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