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Welcome back.
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I'm Robin Hendrickson.
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Today's episode is titled The Old Crowd, and it is a song by Leslie Gore.
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And if you get a chance to listen to it, I think you'll be able to see why that connected with my theme today.
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In July, my sister and I and our grandsons made a trip out to Colorado to my friend Joyce's yearly pig roast.
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She has one every year, and in this pig roast, we celebrate our friendships and family.
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But more importantly, we celebrate that Joyce is another year cancer-free.
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And that's a great reason to celebrate.
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In attendance, every year, it's an ebb and flow of friends and family.
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Some years the families can come, and some years the friends can come, and other years they can't make it.
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But this year in attendance, there was Joyce, of course, myself, our sisters, Jinny and Dawn, Carla, Donna, Terry, and Joy.
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And kind of exclusively in the afternoon, we all sat around a table and we did hours of reminiscing.
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We talked about many topics and shared many memories.
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And we found out what we knew, what we thought we knew, and what we never knew.
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In our conversations that afternoon and the topics we discussed, there were probably a few bad memories, but for the most part, those were left way back in our memory.
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And if anything was brought to the conversation, it was in keeping with a conversation.
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What an absolutely wonderful experience to have all of us sitting around the table and sharing.
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It was a beautiful afternoon, and we all, I think, knew we had something special that afternoon.
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It was magical.
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I will just say it was magical.
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I am so very fortunate that we were able to get together and feel like hardly any time had passed.
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So as I stated, I went to Crawford Elementary, North Junior High, and Central High School.
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Now, in my times of going to Crawford, of course, we had to walk, I think it was about six blocks or so.
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You wouldn't believe that so many adventures could take place in that short amount of time, but there were lots of adventures.
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We had conversations on the way to school, we had fights, we had laughs, we had anything that a person could share in that amount of time before we got to school, we did.
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In my walk to school on some of my adventures, there was a pay telephone by a gas station, and every once in a while I would, well, I did it every day, practically pull down the little change receptacle, and every once in a while there was a dime in there.
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And that was my first feeling of what the lottery must have felt like because 10 cents really could do some stuff.
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Like I could go to the 7-Eleven and buy one thing for 10 cents or a couple of things that might have cost a nickel each.
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So I was at least 10 cents richer every so often.
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Plus, on the way to school, you might find somebody had lost a dollar, or you might find somebody had lost a quarter or a nickel or something.
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It didn't happen all the time, but it happened regularly enough to imprint in my head that there were things that were possible to find on the way to school.
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Now, one of the detrimental things about walking to school was that there was a huge amount of properties that had crab apple trees.
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And when, I believe it was probably in the you know, September, October or so, the fruits of those crab apple trees would fall on the ground.
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And those mean boys, and I'm sure there were mean girls too, but it was the boys that I remember starting it, throwing those crab apples at us.
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You know, they're tiny and they don't look very threatening.
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But if you get hit in the back of the head with a crab apple, there is an immediate searing pain to your brain that you have been penetrated with something that is not pleasant.
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And I, for one, hated crab apples.
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Plus, in the winter, the snowballs were terrible too.
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Those boys were so sneaky that they you never saw it coming.
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They would hit you from the back.
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So that equally made it a terrible experience because you never saw it coming.
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That was probably the most exception to the walk home that I had for anything peril related.
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And there thankfully was somebody that might be in their yard and make them stop doing it.
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But otherwise, they were not compelled to stop pelting us with either crab apples or the snowballs.
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So elementary school, we were still in our formative years, and there wasn't too much of going back and forth and going after school.
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I think maybe when we got in the sixth grade, we were able to go to our friends' houses.
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But when we got into junior high, that was a little more freedom that was afforded to us.
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I remember going to North
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Junior High.
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Again, that was a walk to get to school.
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And the same perils that happened in the elementary school would carry over to the junior high walk.
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But there weren't as many moments as I recall being in elementary school because I guess we did get a little bit older and didn't see the necessity to be that mean to people, although they did.
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They did still do it.
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In my memory of my junior high years, I remember that uh we went a couple of times and played around in Sand Creek, and there wasn't in my memory, there wasn't enough water at that time anyway to do anything like swimming, but we did a lot of wading and you know, sitting in the shallower parts of the creek, and it was fun.
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I didn't do it, like I said, only but a couple of times, but it was fun.
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And we had our swimming pool a block away from me was Moorhead Swimming Pool and Park, and many adventures took place in that area.
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The park and the swimming pool both.
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We would go and well, mostly it was just, you know, hanging around, sitting on the picnic tables and talking about any goofy thing that a seventh, eighth, or ninth grader could talk about.
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I would not want to exactly hear any videos and audios of what we talked about, but I remember that there were many pleasant days spent over at Moorhead Park and the swimming pool.
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I also remember that at the time Dark Shadows had premiered on TV.
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And after school, it was a race to get home to watch the next episode of Dark Shadows.
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I watched one of them, but I've never been really a vampire person, so Barnabas Collins did not trip my trigger.
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But my friends, ho ho, they absolutely could not wait to the next episode.
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So for as long as the Dark Shadows episode was on TV, my friends were incommunicado and I had to wait for them to get done with Dark Shadows before we had any after-school adventures.
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But it's a pleasant memory in the sense that although I wasn't a Dark Shadows fan in particular, I do remember my friends enjoying the episodes immensely.
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Also at the time, Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy came into our world.
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And of course, we all had our little famous people crushes.
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Mine was, of course, Ricky Nelson.
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And I also really loved Michael Nesmet from The Monkeys.
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And there were other ones like Michael Burns, who played a lot of episodic, uh, like oh, gunsmoke episodes.
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He was in the tragic
movie Journey to Shiloh.
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And Journey to Shiloh was the seven brothers.
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I believe there were seven, and they went to the Civil War.
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I think only one survived out of the seven brothers, and they were all heartthrob actors at the time that portrayed the characters.
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And Michael Burns was one, James Kahn was one, I think Jan Michael Vincent was one.
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Um, I think Don Stroud was one, and that's about as far as I'll get, so I'm missing a couple.
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But it was, I was so excited when I heard all the names that were gonna be in the movie, but the movie was terribly, terribly sad.
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Um, Michael Burns, I believe he dies in that movie too.
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But anyway, I am going down another rabbit hole.
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We all had our different heart throbs, but I was never on board that much with Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, or even Davy Jones from The Monkeys.
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I just didn't, they were all right, but they were not my cup of tea.
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But my friends, absolutely in my memory, Bobby Sherman was at the top of that list.
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And when I hear the song Julie Do You Love Me by Bobby Sherman, it's kind of tugging to me because it brings me right back to my junior high years and all that was in front of us.
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And each one of our lives took different routes and had different experiences and sadnesses and happiness and some dreams that got redefined, and some dreams that got put to the wayside, and hopefully some dreams that came true.
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I cannot hear that song and not be affected.
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And then we were on to our high school days, and we all kind of shifted a little bit.
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We were all still friends and aware of each other, but we weren't as probably we weren't as close as we were when we were in elementary school and junior high.
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But we were still friends and still had adventures.
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One of the adventures that I had uh was that we, and I'm a little shaky on who was all on this trip.
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I don't remember who drove us there, and I don't remember everybody was there, but it was probably Judy Joy and Joyce and I probably went.
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But we went to Casa Benita in Denver when it first opened.
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And I believe that was about 1974.
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So we went, in my memory, it was spring.
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It was a nice experience, exotic, because they had the cliff divers still at the time.
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It had its tropical or rainforest feel.
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I think it was like
a cafeteria, like you got a tray and you you went through the line and you ordered what you were getting, and then at the end you were paying, and then you went and sat down and had your supper.
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Now, this visit that we took to Colorado, my grandson and my sister's grandson came with us.
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And they, of course, are big South Park fans, and they wanted to go to, I believe it was Fairplay has a South Park, uh, like big store type thing.
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I'm not really sure what it was, but my sister said she didn't think that we were gonna invest our time to go there because we had other things to do.
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So what we ended up placating the boys with was a trip to Casa Bonita because that's been brought out in at least one of the episodes from South Park.
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And eventually the creators of South Park bought Casa Bonita and remodeled it, refurbished it so that it was back up to probably I would say even exceeded the splendor that it was when it first opened.
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So the boys were okay, that would be good.
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So it was not a cheap meal because we tried to get uh premier seating so that the boys could see the cliff divers, which was not as prominently visible as I would have thought for the money we paid, but that's an adult view.
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I'm only hoping that the boys in their view enjoyed our trip to Casa Bonita.
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When we were there, there was a few of the um employees there that was trying to explain the Casa Bonita to me, and I said in my normal, oh, by the way, yes, I was here the first year that it opened, and they were like, what was it like?
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And I told them my memory of it, but it was an eating place to go.
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It wasn't exceptionally great or exceptionally bad.
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In fact, about that same time in Aurora, the Taco Bell opened, and you could get, it was like a taco meat sloppy joe for 25 cents.
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And I thought that that beat Cosmanita all the way around.
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And so that's my assessment of the experience.
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That's how we'll put it.
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But I'm glad that I did it.
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I remember that they were raving uh about the soapopeas.
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Oh, you've got to have a sopopia, and it sounded so exotic.
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You've gotta have a soapia.
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So we go, and then of course, for dessert we get the soapopea.
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And when it came out, I went, my mom makes this all the time.
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It's it's fried bread.
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And they looked at me and I said, We have this, well, at least once a month, but maybe
a couple more times.
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And so I was not that impressed with the soapopoeia, except for the name, made it a little more exotic.
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But it was like what my mother always made for us at home.
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One of the other memories that I have, and I think this was probably in uh junior high, but it might have been in the I I do think it was junior high.
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We went to, I don't know if it was Army surplus or if it was the Salvation Army, but we all got it in our quest to wear military jackets.
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Army jackets and peacoats were the goal.
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And I remember Judy and Joy in particular, they and Joy in particular would get this peacoat, and it fit her so perfectly.
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And with her long, they had long blonde hair, it was so very striking.
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I lament the fact that I did not have a peacoat-shaped body, so I had to get a green army jacket.
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So that's what I wore to uh fulfill my need for military adornment.
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We probably shouldn't have been wearing those jackets, actually, when I reflect on that.
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But we did.
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And it wasn't out of any disrespect because we knew some of us really knew.
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I didn't, but there were other ones that actually knew what those military garments meant and might have been the cost of a loved one.
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But we were kids, we didn't think that way to a huge degree.
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Then, of course, we graduated and we went on to our next level of life.
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I graduated in 1975.
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In 1976, my family moved to Wisconsin.
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The bulk of my friends stayed in the Denver metropolitan area, and I would go home fairly frequently because my grandma still lived there, and I should say grandma still lived there, and other family members that we could visit.
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So going home really was a lot more of a visit than it ended up subsequently being, and the visits got a little fewer in between, and our distances, but we managed to still somehow keep in touch.
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And I said it earlier.
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I am forever grateful that Facebook came into my life.
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There is a lyric from an America song, Sister Goldenhair, that states, I am one poor correspondent.
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And I am one poor correspondent.
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I can't tell you how many letters and Christmas cards that I wrote and I sealed in envelopes and I addressed, and then I had to go to the post office and remember to get stamps.
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That was okay when it was a couple weeks before Christmas, and then it was getting closer to Christmas, and then Christmas would come, and then I'd be looking at those signs sealed, but not delivered Christmas cards.
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And then I'd say, well, you can't send them now because Christmas is over.
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So they, for many years, I didn't throw them away, but I'd pack them up in the Christmas ornaments box.
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And the next year, not because I was going to send them, but I was reminded to send the Christmas cards earlier.
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But that did not happen.
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For many, many, many, many years, that did not happen.
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And then finally I gave up and stopped buying Christmas cards.
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I have my dear friend Debbie sends me a Christmas card every year, and a couple of my other friends, Sandy, Lisa, and Mark, send me Christmas cards.
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And I appreciate getting them in the mail, and they make me happy.
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And I am sorry that I am not as good about returning correspondence.
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Then I discovered Facebook, and lo and behold, the opportunity to reconnect with so many friends from my formative years.
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I will be forever grateful for that.
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There's a lot of things on Facebook that I could do without.
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I'm not gonna lie.
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But the fact that I could reconnect with my friends from my childhood and other parts of my life as I progressed through the years, I will never, ever, ever be disappointed with that.
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Okay, I think that's where we'll leave this episode.
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Thank you for listening to my memories and from my nest tears.
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Tweet, tweet.