Rhapsody In Blue

Priscilla Sue Wood, 1967

The title of this blog is “Memoirs of the Brain Damaged” and is based on the title of a 1965 book by Oscar Levant called “Memoirs of an Amnesiac,” which I thought was a very funny and appropriate title for my posts. I had seen Levant on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, which he had taken over after Steve Allen had created NBC’s late night talk show. Actually, at that time I only got to watch the late night shows during the summer, or whenever I had no school the next day, because I usually had to be in bed by ten. But when I was in the 7th grade Jack Paar left the Tonight Show because of its grueling schedule – at that time it was on 105 minutes (1 3/4 hours), five nights each week – for a weekly Friday prime-time hour at 9pm (Central time). There I got to see him with guests like Levant, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cospy, Woody Allen, Cliff Arquette (Charlie Weaver), and many other.

What I wanted to write today is about my first girlfriend Priscilla Sue Wood. We met just before my junior year in school, where we were both in the band at South Garland High School. She was a sophomore who played flute and she had an older sister, Winifred, who played piano. A year and a half earlier, spring of 1964, Winifred had performed at a band concert in our school playing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. One of the records I had played and loved as a child was Gershwin’s Rhapsody, that my parents owned that was on three sides of two 78rpm records – it is a 15 minute song that had to be split onto three sides. I had purchased a copy of that music and tried to learn how to play it every day for many years from the time I had taken piano lessons in the fourth grade.

I had dated a few times before 1966, but that was before I could drive and my parents had to take us wherever my “date” and I wanted to go, so that had only happened two or three times. By the time I met Prissy I had my drivers license and we could do what we wanted. I was even allowed to drive our 1959 Chevy Impala (the family’s first automobile to come with air-conditioning!). We dated throughout my junior year and then I got the opportunity to attend a summer seminar st SMU called the John Von Neumann Mathematics Seminar for Secondary Students, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It was a six week long program that required us to live on campus, so Prissy and I drifted apart. We had pretty much started breaking up even before that, but being gone through all of June and half of July put the end to our relationship.

A year later I went to college at SMU, but left after just one semester to go to East Texas State University in Commerce. Like her sister, she probably went to SMU – their mother worked there and so they got much reduced tuition. I never saw her again or even spoke to her. I did hear a few things, mostly from my mother who would tell me about her being mentioned in the newspaper. Prissy married someone who shared her musical skills and they worked with Fred Waring’s Philadelphians and at Burt Reynolds’ dinner theatre in Jupiter, Florida. Her husband died young, but I have no way now of finding Prissy – I don’t even know what her late husband’s name was.

I am hoping someone who reads this blog may know how I can get in touch with her, or can suggest how I might find her.

Hospitals I have known and loved

Honda CB175K3 Super-Sport

I was born January 8, 1950, at Florence Nightingale Maternity Hospital (now Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas), on Gaston Avenue, not far from my parents’ first apartment, and where my mother learned to drive a car. I have no recollection of that hospital visit.

Over the next five years I regularly was taken to the emergency rooms at various hospitals, once for a benign brain tumor, and at least three times after falling and cracking my skull. Those were part and parcel of my being a free-range child. When I was about four, I was diagnosed with bilateral cryptorchidism, the absence of both testes from the scrotum, which according to Wikipedia is the most common birth defect of the male genitalia. I had to visit a doctor for hormone therapy – twice weekly injections over six months. When that failed, during the summer I was six I was taken to Baylor Dallas on Gaston for two surgeries. I went through the same surgical procedures when I was fifteen, also at Baylor Dallas.

Just before my senior year at East Texas State University, I purchased a motorcycle from my friend Ronnie England, one of the trumpeters in Los Caballeros de Canción. It was a 175-cc Honda Super-Sport, that I had no idea how to ride. Five minutes after I left his house, headed to pick Jean up for lunch, I failed to negotiate a turn from Audelia Rd. onto North West Highway, flew over the handle bars and broke my jaw. The ambulance driver asked me to which hospital I wanted to be taken, and I just said, “Whatever is closest.” He took me to Presbyterian, where I spent four or five days while I got my jaw reset and wired shut. Fortunately it was a clean break between two teeth, so I had not broken any teeth, but I could not open my mouth for the next eight weeks. I ate only what I could suck through a straw. For the first four weeks I was still living at home, and Mom fed me so well I did not lose any weight. The last four weeks were spent in the frat house in Commerce, and fending for myself, I lost about twenty pounds!

The wires were removed on September 17, 1971, and my first meal – pizza – was picked up on mine and Jean’s way to see a Billy Graham crusade, which was the first event held at the newly-constructed Texas Stadium. I could barely open my mouth wide enough to eat.

It was thirty-two years before I would need to be in another hospital. In 2003 I took a job at the Tulsa County Jail to learn to become a Corrections Officer. As a part of that training I had to get some vaccine injections for tuberculosis, tetanus, and hepatitis. About that time I contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rapid-onset weakness of the limbs as a result of an acute polyneuropathy, a disorder affecting the peripheral nervous system. In my case I had no use of my legs and body from my shoulders down. Evan and I had gone to a billiard hall to play pool, but the next morning I had trouble standing up. Evan took me to the doctor’s office. My family practice physician was on a trip to China, and his substitute just told me to rest. The next morning I could no longer walk or even stand up. I called my sister Sande – a registered nurse – and described my symptoms, and she told me to get to the hospital immediately.

After spending a couple of hours waiting in the emergency room at St Francis Hospital, I discovered that even bathrooms designed for the handicapped were not able to handle patients in wheelchairs. Even with some help from Evan, I still ended up peeing all over myself. They finally asked me a few questions – I could not stand or walk – and put me in a room and helped me climb into bed. I spent exactly one month in St Francis, and left in a wheelchair, but able to walk a little bit.

Of course my most recent hospital visit was November 1, 2012, when I was hit by a car. After receiving CPR, which certainly saved my life, I was taken by ambulance to Parkland Hospital. At first the doctors told us – not me, I cannot remember anything until a few days before Christmas of that year – that I could probably go home in a couple of days. Then they realized that my brain was swelling too much and that I needed immediate surgery to remove a part of my skull, about the size of my fist. They stored that section of my skull in a refrigerator for a few weeks, when they decided my brain had ceased swelling enough and replaced that piece of my skull. I spent about seven weeks in Parkland followed by a couple of weeks at the adjacent Zale Lipshy University Hospital. I was then moved to the Centre for Neural Skills, where I lived for another seven months.

I have decided that as much as I like the attention I get in hospitals and other such rehabilitation centers, I think I have done enough of that and hope I can stay out of them for the future.

Air-conditioning

My parents moved to Garland from Dallas in late 1947. In 1940 the population of Garland was only 2,233. Today it is more than 100 times that size – 226,876 in 2010. Air conditioning is what has allowed Texas and the south to become the haven for all those families who have been freezing in the north to migrate to the south over most of the past forty years. Before the widespread use of air conditioning, few people wanted to live all year long in the south.

When I was in grade school about the only buildings that were air conditioned were at the State Fair of Texas. Since my father worked there during each fair (usually late September through the end of October), I spent days there every year as a child. Even that late in the year it could be very hot and we would always head for the Automobile Building where it was always cold. My father, who worked in downtown Dallas at the Federal Reserve Bank, has shown me photos from the 1950s where all the windows were open and every office worker’s desk had a ceiling fan above it. In the 1970s after those offices had been air conditioned, all those fans were removed and sold to people to use in their homes. Our house today, which was built in 1961, was the first place I lived where we had central air-conditioning. At the time it was built, only businesses and stores used ceiling fans. Now we have one in every room of the house!

Big Town Mall, located just off of U.S. 80 E. and Loop 12 in Mesquite, Texas, was constructed in 1959 and was the first enclosed, air-conditioned shopping mall in the Southwest. It was about a ten mile drive from our home, and was a frequent shopping destination for our family. I remember we parked at the entrance to Montgomery Ward where my father would buy us bags of movie-theater-style popcorn to carry as we walked around the mall. About that same time we bought our first air-conditioned car, a 1959 Chevrolet Impala (see the photo above). I remember there were billboards along the highways into downtown Dallas selling after-market air-conditioners that could be retrofitted to cars built without them. No, you probably cannot find a car built with it.

The first school I attended that was fully air-conditioned was my high school – South Garland – which opened in 1964. I had gone through kindergarten, grade school and junior high without the luxury of air conditioning.

Now when we leave our air-conditioned house in our air-conditioned car, we don’t go anywhere that isn’t also air-conditioned. You cannot live in Texas today without that wonderful invention.

 

Lists

Toroweap Overlook at the Grand Canyon

Probably the worst injury I have from my brain injury is memory loss. I can still remember things about my childhood and most of the years after that, but I cannot remember much about the five or ten years before the accident. I cannot remember anything about the work that I did in my five years at Callier Center. I cannot remember names, places, US states, cities, TV or movie actors, countries, and lots of things like that.

Through my rehab I have been learning many ways to help me remember. For instance to remember the state of Illinois, where I lived when I worked at State Farm Insurance, I can remember the city of Chicago, a city I have visited several times in my life, both from work and from family vacations (see photo above – not Chicago, but from a vacation.). And when I think of Chicago I can easily remember its state, Illinois. So when I want to remember that state I just think of Chicago. Another tool I have been using are lists. Fortunately I have been doing that most of my life.

As a child I made lists of what teachers I had for each class each year, especially after I got to junior high and high school, where I had multiple teachers each day. Like most boys – and probably girls, too – I kept lists of the people I dated or wanted to date, including when we went out, where we went and of course a rating system for each girl. At first I did this in a printed calender, but eventually bought a “little black book” to keep records of that. I don’t have that list any longer because just before Jean and I were married, I destroyed my black book.

But I kept making lists. About our vacations and the places I traveled for work, all the cars I have owned, all the places I worked, my salaries, the places I have lived, the cell phones I have owned, my bank and credit card accounts, recipes, musical instruments and stereo equipment I have owned, hurricanes I have lived through – eight, many of the people I worked with, went to school with, and from my college fraternity. And for some of these lists I kept pretty good details. For instance my list of cars also has the make, model, year manufactured, dates purchased and sold, whether they were new or used, purchased or leased, paint colors, engine size, cylinders, horse power, even the EPA estimated rating when available, where I bought it and how I disposed of it – sold, traded in, or handed down to my son Evan or my brother-in-law Bill.

Early on I used paper and pencil to make these lists, but in the 1970’s when I started working with computers, I used those to keep my lists. In the 80’s I started using personal computers and in 2003 I got my first smartphone, which I have been using ever since.

All of that was long before my brain injury, so it was easy for me to continue doing that. While I was at the Centre for Neuro Skills (CNS), even though it took me six months before I could remember enough to use my phone, I kept lists of my therapists, neuro rehab specialists, roommates, even the meds I was taking. I also made lists of thing I needed to remember like US states, countries around the world that were in the news, all my bills, my medical accounts – Blue Cross, COBRA, Medicare, Social Security, Fidelity (the holder of my five retirement funds – Oncor, John Hancock, Sabre, Nielsen, Hewlett-Packard), unemployment, and of course the ACA Marketplace (obamacare)!

So as you can see I was prepared for brain damage long before it ever happened. There area still may things I have trouble remembering, but now I have plenty of resources I created throughout my life to aid in my recovery.

My life as a musician

I grew up surrounded by music. My parents bought a piano before I was born. My mother was a very accomplished singer. When I was about five my father bought us a Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox so that my sister and I could play their records – extremely fragile 78 rpm disks at that time – without destroying them all. We had all of the pop hits of that time, from Elvis to Ricky Nelson to Rosemary Clooney (George Clooney’s aunt). We played that juke box constantly until there came a time when we could no longer find 78 rpm records in the early 1960s.

When I was in the fourth grade my mother arranged for me to take piano lessons from a neighbor.  Mom payed for the lessons by making draperies for her. At the end of the fourth grade we went to a program at Memorial Junior High where I would be attending in a couple of years to try out for band. It wasn’t really a tryout because they took everyone who wanted to join, but they did give us some kind of test meant to see if we had any musical talent. I had my heart set on playing the trumpet because I was a fan of Louis Armstrong, Harry James and Al Hirt. But the band director told us I did not have enough talent to play an instrument with only three valves and suggested I play the clarinet, which had dozens of keys. Then I asked about maybe playing the tenor saxophone, and he said I would need to wait until I got to junior high, where they had a tenor sax for that purpose, and my parents should buy me a clarinet where I would learn the same fingering skills and could easily move to the sax at that time.

So all the plans were in place for my future as a sax man and after the sixth grade I took saxophone lessons from Mr Moore, who would be my band director at Memorial. Then, just a couple of weeks before I started the seventh grade, Mr Moore told me that a new 7th-grade student had just moved into Garland who not only played tenor sax, but he also owned his own sax. The band did not need two tenor saxes, but they did need another bass clarinet and I should play that. So I did.

For four years I played bass clarinet in the band, but I continued to use the school’s tenor sax, so that if I got the chance I could step in and be the sax man. When I got to high school, I found that in addition to the marching band and the concert band, they had a “stage” band, a smaller group that played jazz band music from the 40’s. The stage band was made up of trumpets, trombones, an upright bass, a drum set and five saxophones – two altos, two tenors and a baritone! I tried out to play tenor and actually qualified for lead tenor, ahead of the student who played tenor all year round in the concert band. Jon Reed, normally a clarinet player, played lead alto, Arnie Burke played second alto, I played lead tenor, Mike Tomlinson played second tenor and John Meppen played baritone clarinet. I played lead tenor in the jazz band for three years, all through high school. After my sophomore year on bass clarinet, all of our tuba players graduated, and so our band director Mel Barto drafted several of us, including me, to play tuba, which I did during my final two years at South Garland High School.

I must also mention that for Christmas of 1962, I got a guitar. It took me a couple of years to get started with that, but I eventually did and learned most of the chords necessary to play it somewhat. I have already posted here about my experience playing guitar with Los Caballeros de Canción, but I also played with classmates at South Garland, where we did mostly folk and pop songs, like If I Had a Hammer and Greenback Dollar.

I never played in the band after high school, gut I did play guitar and Fender bass for many years. For a few years I also owned a string bass, that Jean bought for me for Christmas one year, but we sold that during a time when I was out of work and needed money to pay bills.

Truth is, I was never really very good as a musician. That music director who told me not to play the trumpet when I was in the fourth grade was correct. But I love playing, and only stopped when my shoulders got so painful from arthritis that I could no longer play guitar. But that’s okay. I can still play the radio and play a lot of music on my tablet and cellphone, and I am thrilled to play that, especially when I go out to walk.

I would certainly recommend that every child join the band in school. Most of the friends I still have from my school years are the ones I got to know in the band.

Number games

Learning numbers

I learned yesterday that a new brain is in the process of development. This is special to me because it will be our first grandchild. Evan and Mirjam are expecting a child due in seven months, about Cinco de Mayo!

My own father Ted spent a great deal of his time helping to focus his son towards success in life. I learned to swim when I was two years old, I learned to read before I was five, and, like him, he wanted me to gain a mastery of numbers. Whenever we were together he would have me count, add, subtract, multiply and divide in my head. When I was ten the Federal Reserve Bank, where he worked, acquired its first IBM 1401 Data Processing System (computer), and he was sent to Endicott, NY, to learn how to program it. After he returned home, he started working with me to learn how to count in binary arithmetic: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc, and later to program in Autocoder. In high school my nickname was “IBM.”

So after suffering brain damage, not only could I not read or even remember the alphabet, I did not know numbers or how to count. When I first arrived at CNS, two months after the injury, whenever the therapists needed me to answer questions to determine the levels and types of memory losses I had suffered, they had to test me orally. So, like Julie Andrews sang in The Sound of Music, I had to “start at the very beginning. . .  with A, B, C.” And mathematically, with 1,2, 3.

A different area of the brain is used for math than for language, so those two kinds of trauma recover at different rates. While I was still having trouble remembering which letter of the alphabet was which (and still do to some extent), I was more quickly able to recognize and remember numbers. That was partly because there are only ten digits – versus 26 letters – but also because of the early training I had received from my father. Thus after only two or three months at CNS, one morning I awoke to discover that a large portion of my numeric skills had suddenly come back. I could do basic arithmetic like counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. What I could not do (and still can’t) was doing that in my head – mental arithmetic. But that wasn’t really much of problem. Even in class I could write the problem down, make notes, and still find the answers. Outside of class I use my phone or a computer to easily handle anything dealing with math.

I was so excited about recovering that part of my memory, and so determined to get my reading ability back, that I announced to Kimberly, my reading/math teacher, that I no longer needed help with the math and we could focus on my reading. Of course, she did not believe me and proceeded to give me a math test. She gave me a page of one hundred arithmetic problems that I had tried and failed just a couple of weeks earlier – I had completely given up after struggling trough just five or six problems – and I quickly finished it and answered all of the remaining ninety some-odd problems correctly!

The math was BACK!

Los Caballeros de Canción

Dwight, Don, Paul, Ronnie, Jens, Ed, Jim and me

In the mid 1960s Herb Alpert created a hit song The Lonely Bull and built a band called The Tijuana Brass for live performances. This became very popular, especially with school band members because the music did not feature any singers – just musicians. My high school band director Mel Barto purchased a music book by A&M Records made up of several dozen songs recorded by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Mr Barto’s intention was to use this TJB cover band as part of the full band’s recruitment tours at elementary and junior high schools in Garland.

There were a number of South Garland High School’s band members who made up the cover band over the years but the beginning included Trumpet players Dwight Riley and Ronnie England, Trombonists Don Rawls and Ed Woods, Jens Stubblefield on bass – both stand-up and electric, me on guitar and piano, Paul Bond on marimba and vibraphone, and drummers Richard Rasominski, Jim Struve and Steve Brown – Steve was the only member of the group who was not in the band. The first thing we needed was a name. At home I had a Spanish/English dictionary which I used to create a name for the group. Looking through the dictionary I liked the phrase “the gentlemen of song” so I looked that up and came up with Los Caballeros de Canción. Some years later I was told that the correct translation of what I had used was actually Los Señores de la Canción, but by then the name I had created was established so there was no need to make any changes.

Dwight and Ronnie started looking for places we could play beyond the band appearances, so they got us gigs at our high school football team’s victory rallies and private parties at country clubs like the Dallas Country Club. We also got hired by El Chico Cafe at Medallion Center on Northwest Highway, between Abrams Rd and Skillman St., playing two nights a week and getting “paid” with dinner and all the tips we could gather in the sombrero we placed in front of us on the floor. We also played at a high school prom at L. D. Bell in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District.

At one of our rehearsals Dwight and Ronnie told us about having gone to see the Dallas Tornado Soccer team and mentioned that the team had two “half times” with nothing happening and that we should find out if we could provide that entertainment. I told them that Lamar Hunt, who owned the Tornado, was listed in the Dallas telephone directory (I used to spend a lot of my spare time doing things like reading phone books and yellow pages). Lamar Hunt was the man who helped create the American Football League (AFL) after he had applied for a National Football League (NFL) expansion franchise for Dallas but was turned down. So right then, on a Saturday afternoon, Dwight picked up the phone and called Lamar Hunt, who actually answered! After Dwight explained who he was and why he was calling, Mr Hunt asked Dwight to call an associate to arrange an audition. A few weeks later we all drive out to Bronco Bowl in Oak Cliff to audition, and were told that having us play at Tornado games was a good idea.

We played for the Tornado at least a dozen times at Arlington Stadium, the Cotton Bowl, P C Cobb Stadium and Franklin Stadium (in north Dallas). We also played several time as a result of those appearances, including at parties at H L Hunt’s mansion, Bronco Bowl and several other places.

In 1968 and again in 1969 the Caballeros were able to attend and perform at the annual Spanish Club conventions in Austin, Texas. Getting to make a road trip to Austin was a highlight of our activities. We also did a couple of concerts in South Garland’s auditorium, one of which was to raise contributions for Danny Gray, a classmate of ours who was killed in a car wreck May 11, 1968.

Overall we made a little bit of money playing several times each month for about four years. Most of the money we made was spent on equipment we needed for the Caballeros. When Richard was our drummer he used his own drums, but when he was replaced by Jim, we needed to purchase a trap set. We also needed to purchase an electric bass guitar for Jens because we would not always be able to use the schools string bass. Even with so many members in LCDC, we could still clear several hundred dollars a year, each. But for most of us, that was not the point. We enjoyed the playing and the experience so much that money was never an issue.

I have a Facebook group page about Los Caballeros de Cansión where you can find more photos and comments by fans and members of LCDC.