go.Jimmy.go

It’s funny how certain dates get permanently lodged in your memory.

I’m not talking about the obvious ones, like birthdays, anniversaries, and other milestones we’re supposed to remember. I’m talking about completely ordinary dates that, for some inexplicable reason, refuse to disappear.

July 21, 1979, is one of those dates for me.

That was the day my father came home with a big black electronic box and announced something along the lines of, “Hey, family, there’s this new thing called HBO. Check it out!”

The concept seemed almost futuristic. We hooked this strange contraption to our television, turned the TV to Channel 3, twisted a dial on the box and—presto!—we could watch movies that normally never appeared on television.

Why I remember the exact date we got HBO is anyone’s guess.

But there’s another seemingly insignificant date that’s also stayed with me:

August 10, 1981.

I was eleven years old, just a few weeks away from starting seventh grade, and blissfully unaware that another summer on the South Side was beginning its slow march toward September.

And what a summer it had been. Days were spent swimming in our backyard pool with my siblings and cousins, riding bikes, playing NeRF football and drinking water straight from a hose. Nights meant sitting around the fire roasting marshmallows and chasing lightning bugs barefoot through the backyard.

There were no phones in our pockets. No social media. No streaming services – hell, outside of HBO there were only 3 channels worth watching on the television. If someone wanted you, they called the house—and hopefully your mother didn’t answer first.

And of course there was music. Lots of music.

Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 filled the airwaves on those summer weekends. Although when you’re eleven years old and school is out, every day pretty much feels like Saturday.

Our little AM/FM radio usually sat on the picnic table on the patio, providing the soundtrack to the summer.

One of the songs I remember hearing constantly was Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration.” Even today, hearing those opening notes can instantly transport me back to that patio during the summer of 1981.

Other nights, we’d sneak inside and watch Smokey and the Bandit on HBO. Jackie Gleason would unleash one of Sheriff Buford T. Justice’s tirades, and I’d laugh like I’d never heard it before.

But the summer of 1981 brought something else into my life: my first tape recorder.

You remember the kind.

Mine was one of those Panasonic jobbies with the giant red RECORD button. To record something, you had to press PLAY and RECORD at the same time—a maneuver every kid somehow mastered with one thumb.

Today, it seems prehistoric. Back then? It was cutting-edge technology.

I recorded everything. Conversations. Sounds around the house. Music from the radio. Mostly, though, I recorded myself doing different voices, giving news broadcasts and interviewing imaginary people.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have seen where my life was headed.

Then, on August 10th, 1981, after listening to one of Casey Kasem’s famous Long Distance Dedications, an idea hit me.

Why couldn’t my cousin and I have our own radio show?

We could be the DJs. We could interview each other. We could talk about the music. Best of all, we could record songs directly from the radio and play them during the show.

And just like that, The Weekly Top 20 was born.

There was only one problem.

We needed music.

To keep our show relevant, we spent the next few hours hovering around the radio, waiting for songs we liked to come on so we could record them onto cassette.

Looking back, I suppose we were among the earliest eleven-year-old music pirates.

Originally, I envisioned an actual Top 20 countdown with twenty complete songs. Reality soon intervened. Recording twenty songs would take forever, my eleven-year-old attention span had limits, and there was a perfectly good swimming pool outside calling my name.

We eventually managed to get three or four songs recorded during what I proudly refer to today as “pre-production.”

My cousin and I spent most of that afternoon creating our masterpiece.

Between songs, we interviewed each other, introduced the records and offered whatever musical commentary two eleven-year-old kids felt qualified to provide.

Our number-one song for the week of August 10, 1981, was Air Supply’s “The One That You Love,” which had actually topped the real charts just a few weeks earlier.

Not bad.

Our highly scientific chart also included Foreigner’s “Dirty White Boy,” Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” and Styx’s “Come Sail Away.”

Eventually, we wrapped the show.

I can still remember taking the cassette and carefully writing our show’s title on the label:

THE WEEKLY TOP 20

Then underneath it:

August 10, 1981

The moment I finished, I made a beeline for the patio, where Mom and Dad were sitting.

I couldn’t wait for them to hear it.

There was no audience. No ratings. No advertisers. No podcast downloads or YouTube subscribers. Just Mom and Dad sitting on the patio listening to something their son and nephew had spent an afternoon creating.

And when they smiled and laughed at what we’d done, it felt like we’d made the big time.

My cousin and I immediately began discussing next week’s show. We talked about what songs we’d include and, naturally, what we’d do with all the money once The Weekly Top 20 inevitably went into national syndication. The possibilities were endless.

Then we celebrated our newfound broadcasting success the way any two eleven-year-old media moguls would — we jumped in the pool.

All these years later, I still think about August 10, 1981.

Technology has changed beyond anything that kid sitting beside a Panasonic tape recorder could have imagined. Today, we could create that same show with a laptop or even a phone. We could edit it, add effects, stream it around the world and have it available to thousands of people within minutes.

It would sound infinitely better, but I don’t think I’d change a thing.

Because maybe the magic wasn’t really in the recording.

Maybe it was in sitting beside my cousin on a summer afternoon, pressing PLAY and RECORD at the same time and believing we were creating something important.

And perhaps, in our own little way, we were.

I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life writing stories and interviewing people. Looking back now, I can’t help wondering if a tiny piece of that journey began that afternoon, with a cheap Panasonic cassette recorder and an imaginary radio station.

But there’s something else August 10, 1981, gave me.

Every once in a while, I’ll be somewhere and hear Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” come over the speakers.

Suddenly, I’m eleven again.

The swimming pool is waiting.

The radio is playing on the picnic table.

Mom and Dad are sitting on the patio.

Summer feels like it just might last forever.

And The Weekly Top 20 is about to go national.

At least in my mind.

*****

P.S. — A quick book update:
If you’ve been enjoying the stories I share here about memory, childhood and the strange ways the past stays with us, you’ll find some of those same themes running throughout my brand new novel, “The Seventh Echo” —although things get considerably darker in Fairmont.

The Seventh Echo — available August 18.