Janice Williams Loves Austin

September 30, 2008

Back in the Swing

Filed under: Music — Janice @ 11:21 pm

I have got to get back in the swing of writing. I truly enjoy writing and I have plenty of ideas to write about . . . until it comes time to sit down and DO it. Sometimes the things I thought about writing about just seem too long and involved and complicated to get into THIS time and I swear I’ll get to them later.

The summer music series are over and I am grateful to have my evenings free again. The shows were great fun every week, but with the heat and the commitment, it just seems like the end of September cannot get here soon enough. Of course, now that there is beautiful weather that calls for us to be outside, it would be nice to be having shows on the weeknights! The dilemma.

I’ve learned a lot about musicians and their organizations this year. Alejandro Escovedo was the finale of the Shady Grove “Unplugged at the Grove” series. That man is really a superstar right now and riding high. But you know what I liked about him? He and his band arrived on time and diligently went to work setting up their gear and getting a good sound check done. Before they took the stage, they changed their clothes and all looked very sharp on stage. Then they put on a SHOW. They entertained! They weren’t there to have a jam session on stage and play some songs and drink some beer. They were performers. And the folks that they had working for them were professionals in all that they did, too. I wish all musicians would pay heed. Oh, and they were very nice people, too. Each one I met was gracious to me. They were kind to their fans and signed autographs and paid attention. So from Leno a couple of weeks ago to a “little” gig in their hometown (that was packed to the rafters).

September 20, 2008

Boots

Filed under: Family — Janice @ 12:34 am

I am excited for Mark tonight. He has new boots. No, not the new boots he bought for his stepfather’s funeral (and I’m so glad he bought them and a new suit, he looked so nice). No, he inherited some great boots.

Mark’s stepfather, Les, was one of a kind. He passed away at 95 years old two weeks ago. He loved clothes and he loved bargains. He loved to go to garage sales and buy clothes. Last week I stood in awe at his GIANT walk in closet–well, okay, technically it was a bedroom–that was full of suits and shirts and ties and sweaters and hats and BOOTS. I counted just the pairs of shoes that were visible–on the floor, on racks around the room, on the floor in the closet visible, but without leaning INTO the closet to really see them all–and I counted 90 pairs of shoes. And that was just this one room.

But the pair of boots that you would sit up and take notice of, were the “John Wayne boots.” I think I had only seen these boots one time during our marriage, but Mark and Les had talked about them many times. Apparently, Les went into the store of a custom boot maker in Mexico at one time on a shopping expedition. Les lived in Mexico at various times, so this may have been near his home or maybe it was on a vacation, I don’t know. But this was back in the 1970s. Les saw a beautiful pair of boots and asked about them and learned that this was a custom pair of boots handmade for John Wayne. But John Wayne had ordered them and had never returned to get them. Les couldn’t resist a story like that so he bought the boots. I don’t think he could even wear that size, but who could pass up owning John Wayne’s boots?

Mark has coveted those boots for 20 years and we admired them again last week at their house. This morning he had a phone conversation with his mother. Les’s sons had been over to her house, helping her with some of the paperwork and clean-up that comes after a death. She offered them anything they wanted of their father’s clothes. They took some shoes and some ties, but both said that they didn’t want the boots! So those boots were quickly claimed by a stepson that will wear them proudly (if a little tightly) and put them on display in the museum we call our home in honor a great actor and a man that resembled him–not in features, but definitely in character.

September 17, 2008

The Boys

Filed under: At home — Janice @ 12:57 am

I haven’t written about the cats in a long while. And when I start looking at pictures, wondering which would be good to upload here, I get bogged down in all the good pictures and trying to decide, etc. etc. So I sort of randomly picked this older photo of Nathan, Jr. to put up tonight:

Nathan Jr.

If there is a a cute and interesting position to be in, he is going to find it.

With the cooler weather, I opened the window to the bedroom last night. It has no screen, but it leads out onto the screened in porch so the boys could come and go all night long to their heart’s content! They did enjoy that, but I think they ended up staying inside more than out, they like warmth more.

Opening the window reminded me of a time a year or so ago when the weather had this fall change that is so wonderful. At that point, we had not allowed Nathan outside for a long time. Once he was gone for five days and after he came home with his collar gone a few times, we decided he was going to be a totally indoor cat.

So one night it was cool and wonderful and I decided to open the window so we could enjoy the night air. I did NOT check to see if that window had a screen on it. I didn’t even think about it. The next morning, not long after sunrise, I groggily started to wake up and opened my eyes to see Nathan Jr. halfway in and halfway out that window, on his way in. He had a look on his face like a guilty teenager that had been caught in the act of sneaking home after a night out. I thought surely the screen had fallen off or something and was quite alarmed to discover that window didn’t have a screen and I had so willingly opened Nathan’s escape hatch!

Now with the screened in porch, they get plenty of fresh air and safe visits from the neighbor cats. Nathan almost had an adventure today, though. As I got home and was trying to unlock the door, bring in groceries, and disarm the alarm, Nathan darted out the front door. He hasn’t done that in a long time. He didn’t go far, he just went to the front garden and chewed on a few plants there and sniffed everything well. I gave him a few closely monitored minutes out there and then scooped him up, brought him in, and fed him. And he immediately threw it up, grass and all.

September 16, 2008

Radio

Filed under: Radio stuff — Janice @ 12:07 am

I’ve been thinking tonight about my 30th anniversary in radio, which is coming up (or can you call it an anniversary if you aren’t in radio anymore? Divorced people don’t get to celebrate wedding anniversaries anymore so I guess probably not).

I think September 23 is my actual anniversary of my first experience on the air. I was in college at West Texas State University (Canyon, TX). Now as I look back, I find that some of the chronology escapes me, but I think I had taken the intro classes that were required and was eligible to be “on the air” on the college station that September. The station call letters are KWTS and back then we called pronounced that “Quits,” which was very clever. The first semester they called it that they had the slogan “We’re calling it quits.”

Jamey “Ham and Eggs” Neill was the station manager at KWTS 91 and had been in radio since he was 16 and he taught us all we needed to know to be Top 40 disc jockies. I still have my notes from our first teaching session and it is pretty funny to me now, the things I didn’t know. But we all had to start somewhere. Some of it seemed overwhelming at the time. I remember him showing us four bins in the wall that contained the albums that the station used on the air (yes, vinyl!). He was just going over where everything was and he said, “This bin is K, this is W, this is T, this is S.”  I was frantic, writing it down, thinking, “Why are those letters so random?” and then realized those were the call letters and it sort of made more sense then.

Back then we had an index card file with a card for each song. I am not going to go into the whole method of radio of the time (since it is OBSOLETE now), but the cards would tell you where the song you needed to play was. We had to go GET the record… some were on 45s and some were on albums. Some were currents (new songs) and were in one place and others were re-currents or oldies and were stored in a different place.

The kids that had already been on the radio in previous semesters were the only ones on the air the first few weeks of the semester while we learned the ropes, then we were all scheduled for our first shifts. I remember my first 3 hour shift was scheduled for Wednesday of that week. But I got sick sick sick that week. I don’t remember what I had (nerves?) but I couldn’t be on the air. So my first shift ended up being a SIX hour shift on Saturday night.

If you’ve never been a disc jockey, you have no idea how hard and exhausting that first shift can be! And SIX hours? I started out pretty strong and was doing well, but at some point in there I was becoming overwhelmed and falling behind and panicking. Getting the records and cueing the up along with thinking about what to say all added up to heavy duty stress! About that time, our manager Jamey came up to the station to see how I was doing. No, he probably had been in the next room all along, but somehow knew that I was freaking out at this point and came in. He pulled out the song “The Core” from Eric Clapton’s Slowhand album (which was new at the time and is now a classic). That song is about 7 minutes long. Being the rule-follower that I am, I couldn’t see the logic in putting that song on because it wasn’t part of the FORMAT! But Jamey was there to give me a break and he had me put on that song and then I had a few minutes to relax before jumping back in it and scrambling until the end of the shift. I survived somehow. I remember going home that night and sitting on the stairs in the living room and telling Mom and Dad all about it. It was quite a rush to be on the radio and I loved it.

That was my debut in radio, but my beginnings in professional radio were just a few weeks later. I got that first all-night job at KBUY the first week of November. Funny, Jamey (we’re still friends 30 years later!) sent me a news story from the Amarillo newspaper the other day. That old radio station I started at in Amarillo — well, the building– is now a club/restaurant. There was a big drug and alcohol bust last week and they arrested something like 70 people in there! Drugs, underage drinking, gambling, the whole bit! It’s changed a LOT in 30 years.  I suppose I have too?

September 14, 2008

Hamburgers

Filed under: Austin, Food — Janice @ 1:31 am

I’m back… I know it has been a while. Mark softly commented yesterday that I needed to update my blog. It has been a rough ten days or so and I haven’t really wanted to write about death and sickness and people I love that are gone, so I’ll start back with something more innocuous.

We had a pretty good burger today! Mark needed to run some errands so I went along for the ride to Precision Camera and McBride’s Guns (what a combo! but that is my husband for you). We also grabbed us a burger at Hill-Bert’s on Lamar. Mark had never eaten there. I had picked up a burger a time or two when I used to work up at 38th and Lamar by the Heart Hospital, but it has been several years.

The hamburger was good, pretty good, and made me reminisce about the good burgers of my youth. Mark said the best hamburgers of his childhood were at Del’s and he had seen it in Richardson last week, still in operation.

My childhood hamburger was the Lot-A-Burger on Western Street in Amarillo. It was not far from the end of the street we lived on (King Drive— though we always called it King Street). I suppose if I had continued to grow up in that house, there would have been times I might have just walked down and had a hamburger at the Lot-A-Burger, but as a toddler that wasn’t an option.

It was special times when Mom and Dad would stop on our way home from somewhere and let Mackie and I walk up to the order window and place the order for 2 hamburgers and 2 junior burgers. I remember one time when we ordered 4 junior burgers and had to go back to get more for the folks because the juniors were just too little. To the side of the Lot-A-Burger, they had a picnic table that you could sit on to eat your burgers. We never did that, but we would go and stand on the table to look in the window while they put together our burgers: Spreading the mustard and mayonnaise and adding the tomato, pickles, onion, and lettuce. I remember being delighted when the woman (probably a 15-year-old girl, but she seemed like a “grown up”) pretending to swipe us with mayonnaise through the glass. Being noticed by her was a thrill. We’d take our sack of hamburgers home to eat them. I don’t recall ever having drinks or fries from the Lot-A-Burger, just the burgers. And they were great.

When we moved to the country between Amarillo and Canyon, we had a Stuckey’s two miles from the house at the intersection of Rockwell Road and the highway. As we were “building” our house (we moved it from town and had to add the electricity and water and, well, everything) we would get hamburgers from Stuckey’s.

Once we settled into the house, our favorite to-go hamburgers came from the Mr. Burger and the 2-B Burger (both the same franchise, I’m sure) in Canyon. Those were great burgers and they carried me on into college and my Freshman Fifteen.

The kind of hamburger we used to have just doesn’t seem to exist anymore. There are restaurants in town that win awards for their hamburgers and they are good, in their own way, but they aren’t like those hamburgers from those days. Back when they grilled the bun on the grill and it was hot and maybe a little greasy. Cupp’s in Waco can come close on a good day, making it exactly right. But I heard about a dozen Whataburger commercials on TV tonight and the Whataburger, though good, will never come close to what we had back then.

And I guess I should mention the everpresent McDonald’s. I am in that age bracket that can remember a time when McDonald’s was NOT part of your food options. The first I heard of McDonald’s was after we moved to Colordao in 1969. One time we went through a car wash (also a new invention) and got coupons for 2 for 1 Big Macs so we got those and brought them home. I remember Mom and Dad thinking they were pretty good, but I thought that was just about the worst thing I ever put in my mouth. Somewhere along the way I became brainwashed and think they are fabulous now–though the 1200 calorie price tag keeps me from eating them (well, that and I can’t eat them while driving). When we lived in Colorado, McDonald’s advertised that you could have 2 hamburgers, french fries, a Coke, AND change back from your DOLLAR!!! Geez, now that sounds like when you see a menu in a museum with a 75 cent t-bone or something. TWO hamburgers, french fries, a Coke AND change back from your dollar. Of course, they weren’t “hamburgers” in the sense of the Lot-A-Burger, they were miniature dry replicas of what a hamburger should be, without any of the additions except two pickles chips and a squirt of ketchup. But, still, my best friend Jane and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, and anytime we could walk to the McDonald’s up on Academy and Palmer Park Blvd., we would do that and spend our dollar. That was also the bygone days when only “men” worked the counter at McDonald’s. I don’t suppose they employed girls at all at that time. You would walk in and about five boys would jump to attention and say, “May I help you?” Yes, an era that is gone in more ways than one.

I worked for McDonald’s in high school, so I do appreciate the things that they taught me as an employee. It was definitely a better work situation than the Chinese restaurant up the street.  And, if I could put together a really good burger today, it would have a grilled bun, a skinny, but wide patty, some lettuce and tomato and pickle and a good squirt of Big Mac sauce.

September 4, 2008

Cremation

Filed under: Cemeteries — Janice @ 3:16 am

I had an interesting conversation with an old man tonight. He brought up the subject of our friend Danny Roy Young that passed away two weeks ago and had such a moving memorial service last week. He told me that Danny had been cremated. I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose if I had thought about it, I would have assumed that the family may have had a private burial before the day of the memorial service.

But this man reminded me of my dad when it came to this subject. When my great aunt Edna passed away, she requested to be cremated. Her daughters honored his wishes. You could just tell that Daddy didn’t think that was the “right” thing to do. I knew if his own mother had requested cremation he would have gone against those wishes, knowing she wouldn’t “know” and he would have had her buried. This man said that he went to the funeral home and was shocked that there was no visitation! They allowed him to sign the guest book, he said, because they knew him, but “they weren’t supposed to.” I couldn’t catch all he said because he was sort of mumbling, but he said, “There would have been a lot of people at that ’service’ if it had been a funeral.” Or words to that effect. I told him that I had been there and I knew the church’s capacity was 800 and there were people sitting in the aisles, lined around the walls standing, and standing in the glassed in nursery, too. I just really don’t believe that anyone had the thought that day, “Gee, there won’t be a casket and a body, why should I bother to go remember my friend?”

I can go either way on cremation, just like I am on most subjects in this world, I don’t come down adamantly on one side or the other. With my genealogy addiction, I like cemeteries and gravestones and the “final resting place” scenario, but from my spiritual view, the body is just an old pair of shoes you kick off when you die and where they end up isn’t important.

***

I fed my genealogy addiction with a friend tonight. Isn’t that one of the signs of trouble? When you start encouraging others to join you in your vices? A friend at Hill’s has mentioned curiosity about her family, yet she doesn’t know the names of her grandparents. I have tried to help her look up a few things, but it is really difficult with only a last name and also with someone that was alive so recently. You really have to go back a couple more generations to start finding much. But tonight I was helping her a little more. She called her mother and got a couple of names. I searched and googled and searched some more, but found nothing that would lead us any further. Bored, she showed me some of her family photos on her myspace. They were cute Polaroids of her as a little girl with family. She showed me one picture and said, “And that my Grandma Hopps, she was my grandmother’s mother.” Aha! We got back an extra generation and had an unusual last name, too! I did a search, knowing the name and what part of the country she lived in and came back with a hit that gave us her maiden name. We searched that and found all of her husbands (3!). We found that her parents were from Prussia and Germany. We found her grave in Oregon. I tell you, it is rush when I find stuff like that for my own family, but it was just as much of a rush to find it for someone else, too! And the way I keep needing to find more ways to feed this habit, it’s good that I’ve found more people to research. Now what is it they say about “Do what you love and the money will follow?”  Hello!! Universe!!

September 2, 2008

Cars

Filed under: At home — Janice @ 2:35 am

“I like cars, I guess you could say,” is one of the quotes from my father that we frequently remember and giggle over. There is a long story behind the quote, as you can imagine. I’ve been thinking about Daddy this weekend as I made the last payment on my little car! Hooray, Freedom From a Car Payment Day!

I was ferrying Radney Foster’s bus driver to his hotel Thursday night and he was commenting how we are no longer the audience that advertisers are aiming for. Something was said about my car being paid for now and he said, “And you’re not going out to buy a new one tomorrow, are you?” Nope. And if that is a sign of being old, I can live with that.

When I got to think about it, this is about the fifth car in my life that I had paid for and had no interest in moving on from it. For the last five cars, I’ve pretty much driven them until they couldn’t be driven anymore.

The current car is a 2001 Honda CRV and is a great vehicle. Thank you Howdy Honda! You sold me a gem. Right now it has about 140,000 miles and I plan to drive it way past 200,000.

The previous car was a Nissan Sentra. It was reliable, but I never had the good feel for it that I had had for Hondas, so it didn’t stay in our driveway too long.

Before that was my favorite car of all time… my Honda Accord. I think it was a 1990 maybe? I got it soon after Mark and I met and he helped me figure out how I was going to pay for it (I didn’t quite know at the time he’d be marrying me to help share the payments!). I had been unemployed for a long time and had just gotten a very low paying job, so financing a car was a tough hurdle. I’m sure the interest rate was some crazy 20% or something. This was the car I really did drive until I couldn’t drive it anymore. It had 212,000 miles when I sold it. And it was still a really good car. But it had had several instances of not being so reliable. I had just gotten to Austin and one of my first days on the job, while I was still living in the hotel, it wouldn’t start. A few weeks later we had moved into our new house. Mark had gone on his first out of town gig after the move in. I went to the grocery store at midnight and stocked up on everything a new house needed, including lots of frozen foods. I put it all in the car and turned the key and heard a BOOM! I thought I had been shot. Turns out the battery had sort of blown its top. So I was stranded with melting groceries. A kind South Austin Samaritan took me and the frozen stuff home and I got the car towed the next day. A few more instances like that happened. One night after midnight I took the 8th Street exit off of I-35 and the car died. I coasted into the police station. Good place to be disabled! A kind police woman took me home and we sent the tow truck after it the next day. Yes, I had to cut the cord and let it go.
Before that? You guessed it. A Honda. Now this was a brand spanking new 1987 Honda Civic. I remember shopping for it and deciding to get a FOUR door car because I was about to have a new nephew! Funny, though, with having to have car seats and all, the boys rarely rode in that car at all. I usually ended up borrowing my sister’s Honda for jaunts with the kids. This car was the only brand new car I have ever owned and I learned that owning new is not that big of a deal. I’d much rather have the savings than the new car smell. I drove that car from 1987 to the summer of 1992 when it was fully paid for and way past 100,000 miles. But a rainy day and a slick street and I totaled it on Belt Line Road in Dallas. Not a bad wreck, just a less-than-high-value car and it wasn’t fixable.

Before the Honda was the first car I ever bought and paid for myself. It was a fabulous Mercury Capri. The Mercury Capri was pretty much the equivalent of a Mustang. Very sporty. I wasn’t keen on the color when I got it, but I learned to love it. It was orangy, coppery, maroony…. hard to describe. It was metallic paint which was definitely on my “do not want” list, but the deal was so good I gave in on that. I learned buying this car how EASY it was to buy a car. I had no idea that they would make it so simple to sign away my salary for the next four years and drive off in a new car. This wasn’t really a used car, I don’t think, maybe the dealer had been driving it. It wasn’t “used” but it wasn’t brand new.

Okay, if you’ve stuck with me this far, now we get back to the interesting cars of my life…the ones Daddy bought. The last one Daddy got for me was a Mercury. I truly can’t remember the model now. It was a big car, a two door sedan and it had a stick shift on the floor, almost like a truck. That was very unusual even then. It was a creamy yellow car with tan vinyl seats. I never was very keen on this car and that’s probably why it was my last that Dad got me. I was ready to move on and buy cars that I liked after this one. Daddy was a Mercury man. That was one reason I continued with a Mercury as my first car. I didn’t want him to think I hadn’t paid attention!

Before that Mercury was my Pinto! Yes, the exploding car! I really loved my Pinto. It was a cute little sleek white car with blue trim and my first 8-track player. It was my first standard car (followed by two more) and it took a lot of practicing on country roads to figure out how to make it go. I remember Mackie and I getting about a mile from the house on my first ride. We stopped in the middle of a busy road (well, busy for way out in the country). We traded drivers. And she/we could NOT make that car go. We tried and tried and tried and it died over and over. Finally we discovered we were in 3rd gear and that solved lots of things. I am glad that car and I both survived college. Even without the exploding gas tank, we had some wild rides. I fell asleep driving to work on the midnight shift one time and scraped the whole left side on the concrete highway barrier. Yes, that woke me up. Fortunately I woke up driving, not at the hospital.

I think the Merury Cougar was before the Pinto. Now THAT was a hot car!! Red and white and sporty. This was the sporty version of the Cougar before they got big later on. This was a hand-me-down car from my sister. I don’t remember what car she moved on to when I got this one, but I was thrilled to get the Cougar. Mainly because I got to get rid of . . .

The 1967 Mercury Montclair. This was the family car from 1969 until 1971. Daddy bought the family a fabulous Mercury Marquis in the prettiest cream color. It had electric EVERYTHING and an 8-track player! That car was IT!! But the non-electric Mercury Montclair moved down the ladder and became Mackie’s first car. She did get to have it repainted and she show a shocking brilliant blue with a white top. You knew it was her coming! She drove it from 1972 until it got passed to me in 1976. In a strange quirk, I inherited it on my 17th birthday. Daddy had found Mackie something new and she moved up and I lost my first cool car and got the Mercury. I was very used to driving a much smaller car so on my first outing in the Mercury, I whipped into the parking spot in our drive in front of Mom’s car like I had always whipped into it (in my full year of driving experience). This car was MUCH bigger, however, and I dented the right door on Mom’s front fender. Not fun to have a wreck on your birthday. Since it was a “celebration,” Mom said, “Don’t tell Daddy. I’ll tell him later.” At dinner I remember Daddy leaning over and saying “Well, how’d you and ol’ hoopty get along today?” ….”Fine….” I squeaked out, ready to cry. Later Mom told him I’d had a wreck and he felt bad that he’d made it worse unknowingly.

Now the cool car I had less than a year? A 1964 1/2 Mustang…. candy apple red with baby moon hubcaps. Oh, what a car! When Mustangs first came out when I was five years old I thought they were the coolest car ever! Everyone did! I wanted one in baby blue so bad! I knew they were $3000 and wondered if I could come up with $3000 if I saved all my pennies until I was 16 and able to drive. Turns out I didn’t have to. On my 16th birthday, it was a rainy Saturday. Mom said that we were going to go into town and go shopping and let me pick out a birthday present since they hadn’t bought anything for me. For weeks, everytime she had asked what I wanted for my birthday, I said, “A car.” I was beginning to feel bad because I would say it so automatically and she had made it clear that I would NOT be getting a car for my birthday. That day she and Daddy and I went to town and went to some stores. Then Daddy had to make a stop by “George the Mexican”’s house. George worked in Daddy’s survey crew. We stopped there and Daddy went in and Mom and I waited and talked in the car. Daddy came out after a while and got in the car and said, “He says it needs a new water pump and that’s all.” I said, “What does?” He said,  “That.” He pointed to a cute little red Mustand sitting on the street. He had bought me a car after all! You know, I don’t think we even got out and looked at it at that point, just the knowledge that I owned a car was enough!

Since the Mustang needed a water pump, I wasn’t going to get it immediately. A week or so later (it seemed like forever), Daddy came home on a Friday night and said that the car was finally ready. I said, “Let’s go get it!” No, he said, we’ll go get it tomorrow. The next day we got a phone call that the car, while sitting in front of George’s house, had been rear-ended. The whole car had to go to the body shop now and it was several more weeks before I finally got it. But I did get that candy apple red paint job because of that wreck.

That car was a fun little car. I remember the brakes going out while I was at the Spudnut Shop in Canyon on a Saturday morning and me not having sense enough to call Daddy…. I just drove it home. Crossing the interstate? No problem, I just put it into reverse to make it stop when absolutely necessary. Dad and another of his “boys” (as the crew was called) pulled the engine and installed another. Daddy cussed that Mustang for 12 long months before he got rid of it and I moved on to the Mercury Montclair. A big come down for a high schooler.

So how many cars has that been? I’ve lost track. And if you’ve read this far you are probably wishing I would go back to the silence of last week! See what happens when I go off on one of my stream of consciousness tangents?

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