As The (Rotary) Wheel Turns

Across the country and around the world travelers will find small metal signs tacked to buildings and billboards that represent service club such as Kiwanis, Lions Club and Rotary. If you are not a member of a service club, it’s easy to ignore the signs that are often dented and faded. For many years, however, traveling businessmen and tourists have sought them out to locate meetings and connect with club members far and wide.

Each service club has its unique traditions and goals but they are all more similar than different. Millions of people around the world meet regularly in service clubs for fellowship and the desire to help others. They tackle problems such as eradicating polio or providing clean drinking water or conquering the causes of blindness. They also eat a lot of food, tell a lot of bad jokes and generally have a lot of fun.

One of Allen’s oldest service groups is the Allen Noon Rotary Club, which was chartered in 1978. Allen’s first club was the Jaycees who were formed in 1968. In fact, many of the early Rotary Club members were also part of the Allen Jaycees.

A fellow who called himself Orville Fudpucker was responsible for bringing Rotary to Allen. Orville, whose real name was Terry Dobbins, was chairman of the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) board in Plano and made it his personal goal to start up an Allen club. His Plano club sponsored the new Allen group and Orville attended almost every Allen meeting that first year.

He made contact with Charlie Claytor, an Allen homebuilder and Carl Gilliland, an insurance agent. Charlie’s son Mike was the club’s first president and Carl fell in as president-elect. In all, twenty-five members made up the charter group including familiar names such as ET Boon, Don Rodenbaugh, Newton Buckley, Mike Long, Don Brazeal, John Horn and John Pierce.

The club first met in the old one story cafeteria which sat on McDermott behind the old red brick school on Belmont. Both buildings were razed for construction of the new First Baptist Church in the late 1990’s.

Our lunches were catered by Tinos in Plano, according to Carl Gilliland “but we had to drive down to Plano and pick them up each week. Tino Trujillo was a big supporter of the Rotary Club and deserves some credit for helping us get on our feet financially.”

“We really had no clue what Rotary was when it started. We just listened to Terry (Dobbins) and started recruiting members,” said another charter member Buddy Camper.

Like most service clubs, the Rotary meeting space moved as the club grew and its needs changed. They first moved to St. Jude’s Catholic Church, then the First United Methodist Church, then the Allen City Hall courts building and Chase Oaks Golf Course. Today the club meets each Wednesday at noon at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel in Allen.

Each hour long meeting includes an informative program of about 30 minutes on almost any topic of interest to club members.

The club’s first program chairman, ET Boon, admitted that good programs in the early days were hard to come by. “We pulled in every elected official in the city and county and then brought in police and fire chiefs, football coaches and school administrators.”

One of the more memorable ones, according to Boon, was Billy Clayton, who was speaker of the house in Texas and running for governor. Several days later our Rotary speaker was indicted (but later acquitted) on bribery charges.

Charter members Carl Gilliland and Newton Buckley have remained with the Allen Noon Rotary Club for 33 years.

As Allen has grown, so have the number of service clubs. Our community now benefits from a morning and noon Rotary Club, a noon and evening Lions Club and a noon Kiwanis Club.
Despite the growth, the goal of Allen’s service clubs remains the same; to benefit the community and groan at corny jokes. Some things never change.

I-35 Attractions and Distractions Part One

Pulling out of my Allen driveway several weeks ago I found myself dreading the 300 mile drive (race) to San Antonio along I-35.

It’s difficult to say how many trips I’ve taken down I-35 but each time I seem to notice something strange or different. On this particular trip I finally took time to jot down just a few of the I-35 sights that fellow road warriors have passed by for years. The list is referenced by the mile markers that count down the distance to the highway’s end in Laredo.

Once I see the Dallas Zoo’s giraffe sculpture I know that Dallas traffic is behind me and the long haul begins. The statue is the tallest in Texas at 67.6’ and was built in 1997. It is no coincidence that the giraffe is 5” taller than Sam Houston’s monument which opened three years earlier. (425)
If your house stayed cool this past month, you can thank the folks at Owens-Corning and the massive plant in Waxahachie that produces fiberglass insulation. The company best known for its Pink Panther mascot, was founded in 1938 when Corning Glass and Owens Illinois joined forces to create glass fiber. (403)

Approaching exit 387 travelers spot one of the weirdest sights along the trip – Bruco the 240’ giant caterpillar. Bruco (Italian for caterpillar) is the headquarters for the Monolithic Dome Institute. The Institute was created by David South in 1975 to study alternatives for building construction. His company builds 100 monolithic domes each year which have been used for gymnasiums, churches and private homes across the United States and 52 countries. The Institute’s property on I-35 also includes 25 smaller dome home rental units. (387)

The exit also features an abandoned restaurant shaped like the Starship Enterprise. The place was called the Starship Pegasus Restaurant and featured roadside food, entertainment and photo opportunities with aliens all under, what else, a monolithic dome. (387)

Just far enough from Allen for a stretch break is Carl’s Corner. Originally owned by Carl Cornelius, the “town” became a favorite stop for truckers in the late 1980’s. Carl and his friend Willie Nelson co-founded a bio-fuel business in 2004 and turned the Carl’s Corner Truck Stop into Willie’s Place. The truck stop operated as a Willie Nelson museum, saloon, theater and headquarters for BioWillie fuel. Apparently the enterprise never made a profit and Willie’s Place declared bankruptcy. Travel Centers of America bought it at auction and have converted it into a modern Petro Truck Stop. The museum and theater are gone but the classic Carl’s Corner sign still invites travelers to stop in. (374)

The best way to ruin lunch in Waco is to stop for gas in West; the “Kolache Capital of Texas.” The Little Czech Bakery at the Czech Stop cranks out 200-600 kolaches a day and moves a fair amount of peanut brittle as well for 24 hours a day. My favorite Czech Stop memory was standing in line outside in the late November cold with Allen Eagle and Plano East football fans. Both teams had won big football playoff games earlier in Waco and fans needed some comfort food for the ride home. (353)

With almost 200 miles to go and so many more distractions, we will need to stop for some kolaches and continue our tour along I-35 in next week’s column.

Seventies Schlock For Sale

I passed a garage sale recently and one item caught my eye. It was a water bed frame and headboard. The sign said best offer and it was late in the day. I’m guessing that the husband will dutifully haul the massive frame back into the garage where it will sit for another decade.

Sixties memorabilia always catches my eye but I still find it hard to get nostalgic for seventies stuff. I don’t look for it and I often cringe when I see it being slightly embarrassed that I owned many of the tacky objects. Many others do not share that opinion and openly sell their seventies stuff on E-Bay. Here are just a few examples of seventies memorabilia that you too can own by visiting www.ebay.com.

What better way to make a seventies statement than in an American Motors Pacer. I found a 1977 hatchback with 99K in poor condition listed at only $550. It would make a great conversation piece even if it doesn’t run.
Music is important so bid on the new Sears Underdash 8-Track player. It is listed at $199 and has never been used says the owner. You will also need to stock up on music so consider the lot of twenty-four 8-track tapes and leatherette case that are listed at $7.85. Tapes include Foghat, BTO, Mountain and The Eagles.

If disco music is more your style, check out the DecoGlam vintage platform shoes (size 8) for $20. The red shoes will match the vinyl high waisted disco pants for $19.99 and the polyester atomic print disco shirt also for $19.99. An outlet on Long Island is selling vintage mood rings for $4.50 to complete the ensemble.

Decorating the hot tub room with seventies stuff is easy with Ebay. A six-pack of unopened Billy Beer is going for $17 and a 1979 Skylab Protective Helmet is $8.99 today. Go all the way and bid on an original Bell Telephone phone booth starting at $999. Shipping is not included. Calls are only ten cents.

Friends will be impressed or confused when you display your Dallas Tornado soccer pennant ($9.95) and even your kids will be amazed that you spent $225,000 on an original Roger Staubach rookie football card. Amazement may not be the first reaction you get from your wife however.
Speaking of collectible cards, you can re-buy your Jaws movie trading card collection (volume 1) from 1975 for only $1.99. A similar set of 1977 Star Wars trading cards start at $36.99. An original copy of the Saturday Night Fever lp in good condition is about $15 and an autographed photo of John Travolta from the movie Grease will set you back $199.

My favorite seventies item was a “Hard Side King Size Water Bed and Frame” with headboard, mirror and a black light. The heated bed is only $300 but the listing states that the owner will only deliver it within 20 miles of Billings, Montana.

How much will it cost to recreate the seventies in your house? Figure it out on a vintage Texas Instruments 2500 Calculator. The unit, which cost about $135 in 1972, has dropped in value to $99 in 2011.

Summer Daze Not Purple Haze

Before a summer job, before a driver’s license, before girls (sort of), was the summer of seventh grade. It was 1969 - the year of Woodstock and the summer of love. If it weren’t for the news coverage I would have missed them both. I did own a pair of button down purple hip hugger bell bottoms but that was as radical as it got in the Carroll household that summer.

My interest that summer was in filling hours of idle time with my friends playing games, eating bad food and wishing we were 17 years old (New Jersey’s painful driving age).

Lacking the ability to text my friends, I would wait until 9 a.m. to phone them because my mother insisted it was improper to call earlier. Eventually I would hook up with my two buddies Gary Costa and Bill Garrabrandt.

A typical day would start with a game of three-way stickball against the wall of a local school. The outcome was predictable because Bill always won but it filled the time which is a theme you will see repeated in this column.

In “the old days” eating lunch out with friends was never considered. Fresh cold cuts from a local deli on a Kaiser roll or the classic peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread were standard lunches that could be hustled at any one of our houses. The three of us could polish off a half gallon of milk in one sitting although Tang was the drink of choice at the Costa home.

Our afternoon routine usually involved a trek for dessert. We might hit the local candy store where thirty cents could buy three Hershey bars. A more adventurous trip would be a bike ride to Howard Johnson’s restaurant which sat in a rest area along the Garden State Parkway. Ho Jo’s as we called it featured 28 flavors of ice cream and a weird mix of travellers and locals. It was a longer ride from home but it filled the time.

Now well fed, we would cruise the nearby Brookdale Park looking for girls. If we came upon a pack of girls (and they always travelled in packs) we would enchant them with our cycling abilities and charm as we rode bicycles with no hands and shouted at them. This mating ritual sometimes led to an invitation to hang out and fill the time until dinner.

None of our families ate dinner at the same time so we could scout the best meal or meals in advance. If Gary’s mother was cooking a great meal we would get ourselves invited. If we got excused from the table quickly, we could score a second dinner at my house an hour later and so on.

I was surrounded by NY Yankee fans so most evenings were spent in someone’s basement or front porch watching the game. A bag of Wise potato chips and a full bottle of Brookdale Soda each would get us through the ninth inning.

A ten o’clock curfew meant I rarely saw the end of any Yankee games because the Mets dominated the television in my house. I’d then finish off the day with a bowl of cereal and some Johnny Carson with the folks.

Then it was off to bed - satisfied that I had filled the time in more summer day.

Waiting For Walk-In Temperature

My swimming pool reached walk-in temperature this week. Walk-in is not a precise measurement but it’s easy to identify. If you walk into the pool and wince, shriek or balk after the second step then the pool is not ready. If you walk straight and say ahhh – you have reached it.

Living in Texas has certainly spoiled me. Only hot tubs reach walk-in temperatures “up north.” Swimming pools are reserved for the hopeful, the hearty and the foolish. For the first month of summer the hopeful owners clean out the dirt, leaves and occasional dead animals before filling their pools with icy cold tap water. The hearty ones then jump into the chilly but invigorating waters while the foolish ones wait until late August for the water to reach 75 degrees. The hopeful ones then drain the pool after Labor Day determined to use the pool more than five times next season and so on.

Growing up I never would have imagined that I would someday have a pool in the yard. Above ground pools were a luxury that only two of my friends had. The rest of us just waited and hoped we get an invite on hot summer afternoons.

The biggest obstacle wasn’t parents, it was older siblings. We would ride bikes across town to my friend Jack Granger’s house only to find an older brother and friends settled in. Like lions at the kill, sharing was not an option. We just hung around until they finished.

My other friend Steven only had younger sisters so the chances of getting a dip were better. The problem with Steven’s pool was the gang of kids who hung out there. They often combined my two biggest fears –diving and heights into an even more dangerous activity. Using a ladder, the kids would climb onto the garage roof and then leap from the roof into the 5’ swimming pool. The cannonball dive was the preferred technique although a few good ones would quickly drop the pool down to 4’ making it riskier for the last few kids. Most of our time though was spent playing Marco Polo or beach ball baseball.

Our family’s cooling off destination was called the East Hanover (NJ) Swim Club. It was modest 100 yards by 200 yards and could hold about 5,000 people on a busy day. The smell of crinkle cut French fries, chlorine and Coppertone permeated the air while sixties rock and roll thumped out of the jukebox. Today, a corporate park sits where we used to swim with no historical signs to mark the spot.

I never intended to own a pool in Allen but it sort of came with the house. For years our pool resembled a water amusement park with furious games of water basketball, diving competitions and underwater aerobics. Inflatable toys and diving sticks littered our yard and noodles surrounded the pool. Those years of “look at me-look at me” have now mellowed into the afternoon float and the evening dip.

I was reminded of those more hectic afternoons in the pool last week when the LeForte family of five came to visit. Out came the inflatables and the pool toys and I even heard “look at me” a few times. They only had to be reminded of a few pool rules: no running, no potato chips in the pool and please stay off of the garage roof.

It Looked Like a Classic To Me

It was a weak moment. I had been driving by it for several weeks on my way to Elkhart (Indiana) and barely slowed down. Then one day I stopped.
Assuming the price was out of my range, I walked up to the trailer and knocked on the flimsy door.
“How much for the old Buick?” I asked.

“I’m asking $400 and it’s in running condition,” he said. “You won’t find another one like it. Not much else I can tell you about it.”

His hard sell tactic worked and I bought myself a faded green 1953 Buick Special.

Let me insert a little background information here. I had owned a 1957 Chevy through college in the late 1970’s and wanted to relive that fun ten years later with this old Buick. It was one of several miscalculations I made in purchasing the roadside dream.

A 1953 Buick 4-door sedan weighs 4,315 pounds and is a 17.5’ long. Once it rumbled up to 55 mph the only thing that could stop it would be a 53 Cadillac or a train.

If the car seemed a little rough during the test drive, I failed to notice. After all it was a classic, a collectable. I might even drive it in the Mishawaka Fourth of July Parade someday.

I stopped for gas along the way home and was disappointed when the car wouldn’t restart. I called the previous owner who offered little sympathy and muttered something about flooding the engine.
I opened the hood and stared blankly at the engine. It was an inline or straight 8 engine that was massive by today’s standards. I pulled off the peculiar air filter and promptly spilled motor oil on the engine. It was my first experience with an oil bath air filter.

The car eventually started and I drove the behemoth home to show my wife. She was more bewildered than angry and I later agreed that calling her before buying the car may have been a good idea.

Over the next two weeks I came to realize that owning a 1953 Buick Special was not a good idea either. It smelled badly of motor oil that had been spilled on the old carpet. The exhaust system was exhausted and the brakes were shot. The car had great curb appeal – it just drove like a tank.
I swallowed my pride and parked the car out front on our country road. A few days later a gentleman and his son rolled away with a $300 bargain.

The lesson in all of this is that one man’s dream car may be another man’s nightmare. Leave the classic car restoration to the experts or at least to the guys with lots of tools in their garage.
Speaking of classic cars, the Foundation for Allen Schools hosts Allen’s fourth annual Customs and Classic Car Show this Saturday at the Village of Allen Shopping Center outside Dick’s Sporting Goods store.

The show, which is free to the public, is a drive-in event for custom and classic car owners who compete in numerous categories including a People’s Choice Award. Bring the family and cruise the car show on May 21 from 10 am – 2 pm (weather permitting).

The ABC's of 45's

Buried deep in my old stereo cabinet is a tattered red portfolio full of 45 rpm records. Each page is a sleeve that holds one record with a 3” hole to reveal a colorful label.

Thumbing through the book I can name almost every record without reading the labels because those labels are so familiar. The odds are good that orange and yellow swirls on a Capitol Record label means Beatles or Beach Boys. The solid red Columbia label belongs to my oldest record: The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. The record is completely unplayable but I can’t let it go.

The light blue pattern signaled the Rolling Stones on London records and the solid blue label with the white whale was undeniably Happy Together by the Turtles.

Something I never realized about record labels was how often they changed in the early days of rock and roll. The most striking example was Elvis Presley who began his career on the colorful Sun label but hit his stride with the black label of RCA Victor Records. RCA was one of the five major labels in the 50’s along Decca, Columbia, Capitol and Mercury Records.

Beyond the big ones were hundreds of small labels owned by companies that came and went and merged throughout the early 1960’s. Anyone who owned a stack of 45’s will remember some of the more familiar ones like Bell (Box Tops, Delfonics), Roulette (Tommy James), Dot (Pat Boone), and Scepter (BJ Thomas).

Teenage record buyers weren’t all that concerned about who owned what but many new labels in the 1960’s were derived from bigger companies. Columbia Records owned Colpix (later Colgems) the familiar label for The Monkees. Atlantic or Atco owned Stax Records and Kama Sutra Records (Lovin Spoonful) merged with Buddah (Melanie).

The 1960’s ended with many of the same big companies dominating record sales although Motown, MCA and the Beatles’ Apple Records gave them all a run for the money.

I didn’t start this column intending to lecture on record label history. I wanted to say that thumbing through the 45’s was like visiting with some old friends. These guys were played over and over and over again on a cheap phonograph that quickly gave them a scratchy background noise.
I asked for the record “album” one Christmas so that I could haul my collection of singles around to friend’s houses. We would sit and play take turns playing the new ones or if mom allowed, we would stack them on the grownup’s phonograph.

While the 45’s were gradually phased out by lps in the 1970’s we continued to have listening sessions in basements and attics and later dorm rooms. I can tell you where I was when I first heard many of the classic rock albums that now fill my IPOD.

Simply listening to a new recording is something that has been lost with the advent of digital music and headphones. Listening to a new song is more of a personal experience in earphones or the car although accessibility to music has never been greater.

My meager 45 rpm collection included 24 records. Today my IPOD has over 10,000 songs inside of it, including files for every 45 in that old collection. I’d love it if I could have some friends over and we could play them all. They just don’t seem to have the time. I understand though. According to I-Tunes, my collection is 23.1 days long.