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“You can’t go home again.”---Thomas Wolfe
A friend of ours unfamiliar with Gainesville wafted into town the other day for the festivities at Heartwood, dropping anchor at the Holiday Inn near campus. He walked from 13th street to downtown through the recently constructed canyon walls, past the sterile, empty retail spaces-to-be and offered an opinion. “Very nice little town,” he chirped, “I don’t see what all the complaining is about.”
Right. You don’t miss it if you never had it.
What it was back in the day, the way we were then, is hard to explain to an alien. The stretch of University Avenue from NW 18th Street to the railroad tracks at NW Sixth was the soul of the city, filled to the brim with funky, colorful little businesses managed by kids who figured it out on the go. The real estate in which they were were housed was in varying stages of distress but nobody was polishing the chandeliers or waxing the floors. There were odd eateries and hippified juice bars and peddlers of strange garb; there were sandaliers and waterbed merchants and used record stores and waffle dives and homey saloons run by motherly barkeeps who might carry a customer or two when they were down on their luck. Not to demean the qualities of erstwhile Thirteenth Street with a musical shrine on one end, a health food emporium in the middle and a soul-stirring prairie on the other. Nor to lessen the lure of downtown with its lively rock palace and a certain bar with an odd name, which grew old with its customers. We took all this for granted at the time, it was the way things would always be.
But you don’t miss it if you never had it.
Some of us can go back to our old homes and find the buildings still standing, if clothed in new raiment. The neighborhood is still there, rearranged, freshly painted, a few less trees. We can drive by the old high school, drop in, wistfully patrol the corridors, walk on the stadium turf, remember lost loves and first kisses. At least some of the places and things we knew then still prevail, continue to connect us to the glories of our past.
In Our Town, all the old lights are blinking out. Our weathered shrines have crumbled, replaced by pale-faced steel and chrome of little character and no charisma. The politicians smile and promise it will all be for the best but everyone knows they are creatures bred of serpents and hungry for gifts from the demons. We wander here and there, smiling on a rare occasion when we discover some shard of the long-lost past, some shred of a memory which assures us that yes, we were part of a special time and place which now exists only in the recesses of our aging minds, almost blotted out by tall buildings which hide the sun. But a visitor to a new town sees none of it, looks around and smiles.
You only don’t miss it if you never had it.
Reflections In A Broken Mirror
Sister Mary Albert used to tell us “You can like it or you can lump it, but that’s the way it is.” The Truth, of course, is that we can like it and lump it. If Austin in the Southwest and Berkeley on the Coast and Madison near our northern border are less than they once were, they still have their moments, as does Gainesville. Seventy-eight thousand vibrant, blossoming college kids inject energy, enthusiasm and the appropriate degree of foolishness into the Hogtown brew on a regular basis.
Wunderkind Dave Melosh, presides over the core of a lush local music scene in his magic village at Heartwood, the city government does its part with free Friday concerts downtown and there are endless smaller venues of every description pumping out tunes every night of the week. The city has produced eight Rock and Roll Hall of Fame musicians over the years and there might be eight hundred more roaming the territory on weekend nights, filling up bars and eateries large and small, delivering everything from pop to punk to front porch backstepping.
The city is bordered on the south by the remarkable Payne’s Prairie, a venerable state park and preserve of 23,000 acres populated by alligators and bison and wild horses descended from stock brought to the area by Spanish explorers. Now and then you might run across a river otter, bobcat, black bear, coyote or any number of other critters hiding out in the underbrush. Cars line up every evening on both sides of Route 441 to watch the sun settle in the west. People hike across the prairie, kayak out there, get married midst its glories and are buried in its soil. When the waters are particularly high, gators swarm the fences, dance along the interstate, rout traffic and giggle to one another. This almost never happens in Pueblo or Poughkeepsie or Pascagoula.
Back when the Gainesville Sun was a real newspaper, their hometown motto was “We like it here.” We still do, just a little less. If anyone out there has some influence with the powers-that-be, would you please escort them into the nearest drinking emporium, buy them a beer and ask them if they would kindly give us our funk back?
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| Mssr. Levine |
Thanksgiving
We’re grateful for wives who help keep the train on the tracks and The Reaper in a ninety-acre corn maze. We’re thankful for winters without chain tires, azaleas in February and Florida beaches year-round. We appreciate the otherworldliness of Cedar Key, the quaint streets of St. Augustine and the serenity of Orange Lake. We are thankful the ancient dame called University Auditorium has stood the test of time and allows us to still play on her stage and walk her halls.
We’re grateful for friends like human dynamo Gina Hawkins, All-American Girl, who always shows up for the Big Game with her shoelaces tied and her chinstrap tight. We’re thankful for Sharon Yeago, who daily battles through adversity to analyze the problem and get the job done. We appreciate Tom Shed, a grizzled veteran of the Music Wars, who knows his way through the jungle and will let you ride in his sidecar. We’re grateful for old pals like Michael Davis, Richard Allen and Allen Cheuvront, who show up at the door with manna from heaven and say “Don’t think twice, it’s all right.”
We are grateful to Patricia McKennee for inventing a new hair color, flying 3000 miles across the country in the middle of the night to help out at The Last Tango and regularly kicking the crap out of anyone who gives Bill a hard time. We’re grateful for Daniel Levine, Professor of Art History, a wry observer of the human condition who brightens every room he enters, wards off foolishness with an elite sense of humor and leaves everyone better off than he found them. We don’t know much about Art but but three-quarters of what we do know emanates from Danny. We are thankful for the chameleon Anna Marie Kirkpatrick for dressing down and acting up to make our musical productions as bizarre as possible and to Cathy DeWitt for always showing up with a smile on her face and singing “Gold Watch And Chain” a lot more often more than she’d probably like.
We are grateful for Flying Pie readers like Marty Jourard, Court Lewis and David Matthews, who often send long and colorful reviews off-Facebook and for the 13-year regulars like Carolyn Holmes, Sharon Cinnie, Nancy Kay and Kathy Scanlon, who show up every week, rain or shine. We’re thankful for our roving reporter Kathleen Knight, who prowls the back alleys of Weirdsville and sends us all the latest chicken news. Last and least, we are grateful to Sheriff Will Thacker for getting up early on Thursday mornings to check the column for errors. We love you, Montana, but ditch the banana. You don’t want people mistaking you for Chiquita. Or worse even…Donovan.
And Thank You, Gilbert Shelton
Sixty-one years ago, I spent Thanksgiving at the College Station, Texas home of Gilbert Shelton, whose father owned a Firestone store in town. It may have been payback for Gilbert’s invitation to spend a holiday at my family’s place in Lawrence, Massachusetts a year earlier when he was working for a hot rod magazine consortium in Manhattan. Or it could have been to insure he’d have at least one bent companion during his stay in the straightest town in Texas. But that’s not what the thanks is for. The thanks is for inviting me to Austin in the first place. For all the fame that city has garnered since, the year 1962 might have been its crowning achievement and Gilbert Shelton was at the heart of it.
It’s not as though I’d never been loose on the land before. I traveled from Massachusetts to Oklahoma for college, worked a few months in Champagne-Urbana and a few more in New York City, lived in rowdy dorms, roomy fraternity houses, small apartments, ratty hotels, exposed to the best and the worst. But this Austin….it was unlike anywhere else….a place of hills and parks and Spanish architecture with a burly river running through it, filled with crazed and brilliant people with tachometers turned up all the way, living large, living now, often with ambitions larger than their means, slinging themselves around the pinball machine and devil take the hindmost.
Arriving in town with a crippled vehicle, I put it on the shelf and walked everywhere from Shelton’s condemned apartment on East Ninth Street. You don’t really know a town until you explore it on foot, look in a few streetside windows, catch a whiff of its scents, listen to the margins of a few bizarre conversations and espy its citizens going about their day-to-day. I trod across the Colorado River bridge on South Congress, traipsed through the capitol grounds, explored the vast and colorful University of Texas campus, eyeballed the array of shops on Guadalupe Street and sat around the UT Chuckwagon with a cadre of would-be intellectuals bent on saving the world if someone would just let them do it.
The capital of Texas was packed then with extraordinary characters, writers and poets and artists and musicians and mad scientists and yodeling barkeeps and teenage blues singers, all looking to plant their flags. Austin was a bright island of hope and possibilities in a stubborn conservative ocean and the best and the brightest gravitated in its direction….no….ran headlong towards it before, like the mirage it might have been, it disappeared entirely. Their talents, imagination, drive, ardor and sheer will built a shining village on a hill the likes of which few had seen before. These new citizens of Austin poked and prodded at restrictions, pushed the envelope, advanced into unknown territory and celebrated its uniqueness. Keep Austin Weird became the motto of the city and almost noone objected. Young people across the land heard about this wondrous place and all of them wanted to move there. Eventually, everyone did.
But even Paradise loses a few residents. In 1963, Gilbert Shelton and a few hardy comrades emigrated to burgeoning San Francisco and opened a comic-book empire called the Ripoff Press. Ex-UT student Janis Joplin moved west at the same time to try her luck as a bawdy California chanteuse. And several other Texas explorers joined them, ever in search of the next great place to be. A few months earlier, on December 26, 1962, I turned my repaired vehicle in another direction and headed east, foolishly looking for another Austin.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
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| Remembering the Old Sod. Downtown Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1940, Bill's birth year. |
