School’s Out!

This is the week it happens around here; Tuesday is the last day of school in the area for everyone but the seniors who have already graduated.

I remember like it was yesterday that feeling of freedom that coursed through every vein in my body as I packed all the stuff in my locker into my backpack and strode out into the bright sunshine without a care in the world. Well, almost! One of my teachers, a real hard case assigned summer reading, three long boring books. That may be common today but it was something new back then and I had a mind to not do it. It dawned on me that they needed to make accommodations for new students in the class who did not receive the assignment at the beginning of summer. I would read them along with all the new kids when the fall semester started. What a rebel I was back then. I always worked better under pressure anyway.

Of course, there would be the obligatory summer job to contend with. For all of my high school summers, that was a paper route. The first summer it was with the afternoon paper, the Jacksonville Journal. The latter two, was the Florida Times-Union the morning rag. Between my sophomore and junior years I had my own route in a neighborhood near mine. Between my junior and senior years, I was hired by Mr. Roberts who had a huge “motor route” with 500 customers. Up at 4, to meet him as he drove by on the way to the drop spot to pick up and start folding the papers and placing green rubber bands to hold them together. After the couple of hours folding and throwing, the job always ended at the local Toddle House with coffee and apple pie for him. For me it was a Pepsi and a chocolate pie. Ahhhhh! The breakfast of champions.

The great thing about having a paper route for a summer job is that it left a lot of free time for being just a kid. Bike rides with friends and schoolmates who also ran paper routes around the neighborhood were common; like the time we decided to ride over to Cassatt Avenue to find the home that Pat Boone lived in while he was a kid in Jacksonville. Sometimes we would ride to the neighborhoods where the girls we all had crushes on lived. On lucky days, we would be invited to sit on the front porch or in the back yard for lemonade and conversations.

It was during these quiet summers that my love for radio was born. I would lie in the St Augustine grass under the Barren Mulberry tree with my transistor radio listening to my favorite DJs on the two rock and roll stations that were all the rage; WPDQ and a brand new station, WAPE that went on the air for the first time on March 1, 1958. Both stations had that old school radio experience going on, but WAPE had the big advantage; 25,000 watts of power as opposed to the 5,000 watts that the limit for WPDQ, Also adding to the advantage, at least for me, was the fact that I was a mere 5 miles from the WAPE transmitter site and over 10 miles from the WPDQ site. You could hear The Big Ape from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. I could almost hear them without a radio, especially when they increased their power to 50,000 watts and went to a 24 hour per day schedule. Each of these stations had their own unique style; WPDQ was more mainstream; playing everything from standards to doo-wop while the Big Ape mixed in more rockabilly and country crossovers.

With such great local radio, I didn’t listen to “skip” from the far away stations like WABC and WCBS in New York, WLAC in Nashville, WWL in New Orleans, WOWO in Ft. Wayne or WLS in Chicago in Jacksonville, but I did that a lot when I started being involved in radio as a college student in Columbia, SC.

Those early listening days were long before I saw the inside of my first radio station. I could just imagine the beehive of those control rooms with all the excitement going on. WAPE had a swimming pool outside the station that passed under the lobby wall and came up right in front of the master control room window. Hearing the DJs talk about the young ladies in their bikinis dancing to the rock and roll right in front of their eyes definitely caught my teenaged imagination and I knew right then and there that radio was what I wanted to do. Radio and flying jet planes that is. That sounds a little like wanting to be a surgeon or a fry cook, don’t you think?

The jet plane part of my teenaged dream came from the fact that our house in Lake Shore was under the pattern for US Naval Station, Jacksonville and close to the one over at Cecil Field, the Master Jet Base for the Navy. There was always something passing overhead. I am so fortunate that I got to do both; Radio DJ and fly!

The down side of summer vacation was the separation from many of my classmates until Labor Day and the start of school. My High School, Bishop Kenny, was the only Catholic high school in the city. My classmates came from all over the city. While it was true that I also had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, their classmates lived closer than many of mine so there was more demand for their time. Many summer afternoons were filled with pick up baseball games on the playgrounds down at Lake Shore Junior High, now Middle School. In the fall, it would be football. Every now and then, one of the girls in the neighborhood would bring their record player out into the driveway and there would be an impromptu sock hop. Good thing for that too. If I could not dance all summer long, my two left feet would grow two more left feet. Trust me, that is a sight that you could never get out of your mind.

I saw a news story yesterday about store owners not being able to find adequate summer help this year. While many of the kids are working summer jobs to save up money for college; those jobs are competing with a lot of internships and volunteer opportunities so high school students can fill in their extracurricular activities list which is more and more important when it comes to applications to college. Students in the band and on sports teams don’t really take a full break in the summer anymore. It seems a little sad to me in a curmudgeonly way. There is no time for lying in the grass, looking at contrails between the clouds while listening to rock and roll on the radio and figuring out what they want to do in life. Oh MY!