the 70s kid

By Hugh Gallagher

Starting a blog now may be a bit difficult. If I had started this 20 years ago I would have had something to write about everyday with all that was going on, but now my life is filled more with “have to” instead of “want to” and who wants to write about what they “have to” do.  So this blog is not only filled with my pointless viewpoints but also with guest bloggers pointless viewpoints, as I am going to ask others to step in and write some of the blogs too.  Hope to have something new posted every week…
 
I notice a lot of blogs are pretty much designed to sell you on something, I think I’m going a different route as my subject matter today is about a typical summer day as a kid back in the 70s… well, typical for me.  Even if I can sell you on it, it can’t be bought.
 
I can remember Saturdays that would last forever.  Not in the way that when you go to work and you scream “this day just won’t end!”  It was a great day in that you just did nothing but what you wanted to do all day long.
 
I lived by my summertime law.  During school they would force me to go to bed early, but soon as summer broke I vowed never to go to bed before 2 am, usually I would be up until 3 or 4 am.  I arose sometime after 10 am and devoured a couple bowls of Count Chocula before I began my day.  My best friend Eric would come by and we would begin the two mile walk to Ballweggs.  Ballweggs was a large drugstore that had a lunch counter with a line of red stools.  The place would always be packed and we would stand around waiting to pounce on the next two open seats so we could get our greasy burgers with fries and a chocolate shake.  These counters were great.  There was another one at the other end of town at Schwartz drug store which was even larger.  I can remember a more low rent one at a Woolworths in the next town over, loved to go there because when you ordered a banana split you got to throw a dart at balloons on the wall to see how much you would pay for it.  If you missed you paid full price, if you hit the balloon you paid the price inside the balloon.  Got a couple free splits with that little game.
 
After scarfing down our food we would wander over to the comic section.  The magazine section in Ballweggs was not very good, but the comic section was pretty awesome.  Besides the usual Spiderman and Batman we always searched out new #1 comics and any horror related comics (why did DC Comics always have such awesome covers featuring things that never actually happened in the comic?).  After our selections we would head down to the Five and Dime store.  An extremely tightly packed small store that always had an awesome selection of model kits.  Vampirella, Wolfman, Dracula, Phantom of the Opera… I had them all at one time.  We would buy our toxic paint and model glue and the adults didn’t bat an eye.  Unlike a most of the kids, that would take a paper lunch bag, squirt their tube of model glue into it and then put the bag over the nose and mouth to suck in the fumes to get high, we actually built models with ours.  Once we got back to my house we set up the plan to meet later to go to the Wildey, the local one screen movie theater. I would then climb into the tree in my back yard that had this huge limb that I would lay on to read my new comics.   Maybe it wasn’t that huge and I was just a scrawny little kid… either way I loved laying in that tree.

One year in the Ballweggs parking lot they had the Bonnie and Clyde car in a trailer. You paid a fee and you went inside to the see the car and lot of photos.

Once I read through the comics it was time to venture to the other end of town.  I would get on my bike and go to Whirleys grocery store.  This was an old time store that had only had two isles with an old wooden floor.  This tiny little store was a relic that very few used but it did have one gem that always drew me in… the magazine rack.  There was a small magazine rack right inside the door that was always filled with awesome magazines.  Whoever stocked these shelves must have put all the magazines that would not sell anywhere else because there was always an array of Witches Tales, Ghoul Tales, Psycho, Nightmare, Scream, Warren Publications and even the occasional Castle of Frankenstein.  This was my all time favorite place to go for horror magazines, as I never knew what I might find.  I absolutely loved the Eerie Publications like Witches Tales.  They had those colorful gory carnival covers with reprints of horror stories from possibly the 50s.  Little if any credits were ever given, you had to imagine where all this b&w carnage was coming from.  I was one of the few kids that actually liked these magazines, and anyone that knew me would always offer these up in trade for my comics or my Conan magazines as they knew I was a sucker for them. Unfortunately I have very few of them now, they seem to finally be a collector item.  They were considered more of throw away magazine back then.

After perusing Whirleys, the next stop would be Schwartz drugstore.  They had the largest magazine rack of anyone but it tended to me more mainstream, but occasionally you would find a gem in the mix.  I attempted to buy a Playboy there but they would not sell it to a 12 year old kid, so I decided to steal it.  I remember a time when I had just bought Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies album (yes, when it came out) and I went into Schwartz with my oversize album bag trying to muster up the courage to drop the newest Playboy inside the bag… the perfect crime.  I would lose my nerve and leave, walk around outside the store for a while and then come back again.  I must have left the store four times within an hour range, you think that alone would have thrown up red flag to the employees.  Never feeling like I had the opportune moment I finally gave up and went over to look at the spinning comic rack that they had tucked in the corner.  As I was looking through the comics I saw a stack of Playboys behind that rack that had not been put on the shelf.  I quickly grabbed one up, tossed it into the bag and made a mad dash to the door.  Raging hormone heist was a success… and I never stole again.  The sad part was I would not have stolen in the first place if they would have let me buy it.  They never questioned my National Lampoon or Heavy Metal acquisitions
 
Back at home Eric’s mom would pick me up to take us to the Wildey theater. We saw a lot of movies there.  TALES FROM THE CRYPT, WILLARD, THE POSIEDEN ADVENTURE, SEVEN UPS, ASSYLUM, the list was endless.  I saw BILLY JACK so many times I could tell you which version you were going to watch by the first few edits (there was one that showed a lot more skin). Our favorites were horror, then action, but we were going see just about anything as this was a time of a giant one screen theater, your options were limited. The Wildey was really big, beside the large downstairs it also had a balcony that was opened when the crowds got too big.  But we were always sneaking up there to sit by ourselves.  It had all the grandeur of an old movie house, but things had gotten dirty, stained up and basically ran down. This had no effect on us, we loved the place.  Our weekly ritual was to watch the movie and then as soon as it was over we ran to the pay phone to convince the adults to let us stay to watch it again.  We never paid for a second viewing, and sometimes we would watch the same movie three times only paying once.  Mrs Duffy ran the place and she was someone you did not want to mess with.  She would go down the isles with police style flashlight and break up any make out sessions, or grab a rowdy kid by the ear and drag him out of the place.  A short frumpy woman, she didn’t take crap from anyone.  She knew we had not paid to view the movie multiple times, but as long as we kept buying candy and popcorn, and the theater wasn’t too crowded, she rarely kicked us out.

The Wildey theater closed in the 80s but then was bought by the city in 1999. They dumped a bunch of money into it and reopened it a few years ago. Not like it was originally , it is still a really nice theater but unfortunately highlights bands more than movies, down to only showing one old movie a week on Tuesday night.

After getting picked up it was now time to convince the adults that we needed to have a sleepover. The prime pick was always my house because most rules were out the window.  My mom had died when I was eleven, my dad was an over the road truck driver, so my usual guardian was my 18 year old sister.  Once we got to my house summertime rules kicked in… any time we had a sleepover, no one would sleep.  We would hit the TV for any horror movies or anything good to watch.  Video had not been invented yet, no cable, we only had six channels that I can think of and all of them went off the air between midnight and two am.  After which we would break out the albums, my Alice Cooper collection, Edgar Winter band, Black Sabbath, Chicago (wow, how did that get in the mix, loved Chicago for some reason, still do) and listen to music while we drew, looked at comics and magazines, contemplated what we were going to do with our lives (none of which ever came true).  I also had a drum set that go nuts on, probably more for my own amusement, made prank calls, climb out the window and run around outside for a while and hook up the 8mm projector I got out of the back of comic to show one reel silent horror movies on the wall. All the while drinking soda and consuming any food that was edible. It was a total night of whatever you felt like.
 
Around 6 or 7 Eric would get tired and call it a night and would walk home (we did a lot of walking back then).  I would crash until 1 or 2 in the afternoon and then start my madness all over again. 
 
It was great time.  Entertainment had to created, or had to sought out with effort.  A kid today that has access to everything at any time and gets instant entertainment whenever they want it, they would not have survived in my early years.  We actually had rotary phones in my house, if were weren’t home we had no answering machine.  You could literally leave for the day and be totally unattached and unreachable by anyone.  Now, with everyone’s phone serving as a new appendage, it is hard to imagine someone alone in the elements without any way to contact someone on a whim.  I would like to think I could still survive those days but I would probably be lost myself.  But, I’m glad I lived through them, it was fun time and I believe we appreciated things more as things were much harder to come by then.  You treasured stuff because you may only see it once, and a lot times it was probably a piece of crap, but you saw it and that alone made it special.