Brain Cells on Parade

A couple people (and you know who you are!) have asked me for more trips to yesteryear in this space, so here we go. This is all stuff I came across just today. Some of it had not seen the light of day for many years.

This first item is a small plastic pin. I procured it in the late 1970s at a restaurant in Richmond, Michigan during my one and only visit to Buffalo’s (or Emil’s, depending on who you asked). At the time, they raised buffalo out back and would slaughter one every January. They would then butcher it and serve it in various forms until they ran out – buffalo steaks, buffalo burgers, and buffalo what-have-yous. On the first Sunday after the slaughter, the annual meeting of the Buffalo Club would take place there. I was brought along by a member and distinguished myself by chickening out and ordering a tuna salad sandwich while everyone else was ordering some form of buffalo meat. When the waitress arrived at our table, laden with plates, she called out in a loud voice, “OK, who ordered the tuna salad?” The entire place came apart, with a loud call arising, demanding to know who was the big coward. When my hand went sheepishly up, it was determined that I must atone for this in some way. After some debate, it was determined that I must go behind the bar, stand on a chair, and kiss the mounted swordfish above the bar mirror. I did so in grand style and was then left to eat my tuna salad undisturbed, though I’ve never returned there.


The ticket stub from my very first concert – Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band at Pontiac Stadium (later to be christened as the Silverdome). The opening acts were Elvin Bishop, who had a big hit with “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” followed by Todd Rundgren, who hit the charts with “Hello It’s Me” among others. This was just before Seger released his breakout album “Night Moves.” One local paper mentioned that Detroit was probably the only city in America at the time in which Rundgren would have opened for Seger rather than the other way around. I remember being shocked to realize that the people seated in front of me were smoking dope, and it made me worry that the police would suddenly show up and arrest us all. Yeah right – there I was in a stadium with 80,000 people, and I thought these were the only people there doing anything illegal. Boy, was I young!


A couple of Topps baseball cards from 1974. So what? Well, you might notice that these two fellows play for Washington in the National League. The problem is that there was no team in Washington in either league that year. These guys played for the San Diego Padres. Supposedly, a deal was in the works to move the Padres to Washington, and the deal fell through right before the start of the season, but not before Topps had printed these erroneous cards. I don’t think they’re worth a great deal, since there was quite a rush for these error cards, but I’ve hung onto them as curiosities.

Yes, that’s me. This is from my ID card for my junior year of high school. Some years after the fact, I showed this photo to Lavinia Moyer, who was the Artistic Director of the Attic Theatre in Detroit. She immediately burst out laughing and said, “Oh my God – that’s the crowd I hung out with!” I didn’t ask her to elaborate, but I decided it was about as good a reaction to this photo as I could ever hope to hear.


That’s me in the foreground and the Grand Canyon in the background. Taken just a couple months before I moved to Chicago.


A New York City subway token circa 1978. This is slightly enlarged so you can read the wording. It’s actually about the size of a quarter and made of brass, with a Y-shaped hole in the middle.


This was a cat we had for many years. If you can’t see her left rear foot, it’s because she didn’t have one. Since she had only 3 legs, we named her Easel. She spent most of her life wanting to be left the hell alone.