Early in 1943, my family moved from Madison, Kan., to Eureka, some 25 miles to the south. We had been there about three weeks and I was out riding my bicycle. And there on the front lawn sunning herself was a pretty redhead.
Somehow, I managed to get a conversation going, which eventually became long sessions — purely conversational — in the front seat of her family car parked in the driveway.
I told her I had a job with the Jeff Klein Band playing a dance every Saturday night in Memorial Hall.
“Can you sing?” she asked me one evening in the ’39 Ford.
“Sure,” I replied with the confidence of a 16-year-old.
She wanted to hear, “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.”
When I had finished, she told me it was Jim Dunham’s favorite song. Dunham was in the Army.
The relationship fizzled and I started another one. It was uncannily like the first. This time the girl asked me to sing “Moonlight Becomes You.”
“That was Corky’s song,” she said. I didn’t know Corky. He was in the Navy.
Another encounter was even stranger. I was about 17. After the Saturday night dances, a woman stopped at the door of my car in front of the Rexall and talked music. She eventually got in the back seat and I stayed in the front. She was eight or nine years older than I. She wore a fur coat, the first I had ever seen except in the movies.
Later, we rode around together in a restored Whippet Coupe. Her favorite song was an Ink Spots hit. She asked me to sing it every time we met.
Then one morning before work, my Dad, looking grave, called me into the living room.
“You’ve been driving my boss’s girlfriend in car and he wants it to stop,” he said. In those days, a petroleum engineer outranked production men, so my Dad had no choice. It was me and a music-loving woman or his job.
I decided he ought to keep his job.
Music can lead you to places you never expected to be.
My proudest moment came as a fifth-grader playing trumpet in the Madison High School Band. We performed for the veterans in the VA Hospital in Wichita. The Kansas Highway Patrol escorted the caravan all the way to Wichita, and I rode in the front seat with the superintendent of the Patrol.
He gave me free rein of the siren all the way. What a gift to a fifth grader — playing with the “big kids” and free rein over the siren. It can’t get any better than that.
Contact Ted at tblankenship218@gmail.com.
