Go Back to 1977, Do It!

Growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s was a great time to come of age. My memories are in living color of going to Dog n’ Suds restaurant for a Coney Dog, a trek to Dairy Queen for a Buster Bar, or traveling to Ithaca on Wednesday night for slow pitch softball. That along with 4-H softball provided farm kids with a social life. In the fall I would be a big strapping 8th grader on Coach Paul Murphy’s football team. There was controversy when a 7th graders helmet got filled with mud and leaves. Two ruffians did this while I contributed by saying “do it, do it, do it”. The back story is this unnamed 7th grader was picking on other teammates, and this was our idea of team justice. The problem was that this scholar was a wrestler for Coach Gary Gutknecht. When Mr. G saw the shenanigans, he immediately punished the 2 perps and me. We had to do army boot camp like conditioning for two weeks after practice. That just about killed me. One of these days, we are going to put this incident to a trial on the radio to prove once and for all that I was wrongly included in this incident for saying “do it, do it, do it”. Even though Gary is one of my best friends, it is time that justice is served. While I was plodding down highway 58, he was driving his 1972 brown Impala with the radio tuned to WLS. Some of the songs I heard while gasping for air doing crab crawls the length of the football field were Life in the Fast Lane-Eagles, Smoke from a Distant Fire-Sanford Townsend Band, Jet Airliner-Steve Miller Band, Da Doo Ron Ron-Shaun Cassidy, Telephone Line-ELO, Cold as Ice-Foreigner, Don’t Stop-Fleetwood Mac, and Undercover Angel-Alan O’Day. These were also songs that I would try to catch on the radio so that I could tape them and make a cool mix tape on my Panasonic stereo.

I hope you will join me for a trip back to 1977 during this Saturday night’s Those Were the Days radio program on WRCO. It will be a blast as always to play trivia games, take your requests, and hear your stories. Last week it was great to talk to first time callers such as a listener from the Marshfield area that downloaded the Civic Media app just to listen to Those Were the Days! Thanks to the folks in Cazenovia for dedicating a sign and the corner of the broadcast booth to little old me. What an honor from such wonderful supportive people. I appreciate the fact that they didn’t beat me up during my first visits back in the day and we are friends today. Kudos to John and Mark and some of the other apostles. A big shout out to Jeff Even the unofficial Mayor of Cazenovia.

Phil