in '62

 

"Where were You in '62?" reads the headline from ClassicCars.com in my email this morning, featuring images from American Graffiti, the graduation night film with Ron Howard and other favorites including beloved cars and memories and loaded with scenes from Mels drive-in. 

And who remembers dancing cheek-to-cheek with the girl of your dreams, head over heels smitten, and certain this was forever? In '62 we were nine years beyond American Graffiti graduation night, but our world of the fifties to early sixties was a place of the dreams to return to if you were a White American. Safe, no gun problems. For us teenagers here in Panama City, a date was "dragging main" back and forth, up and down Harrison Avenue from the turn-around on the Bay at the Civic Center to the Tally-Ho at our city's northern border. Bay High, reared against the sky. 

Our other, Jimmy's Drive-In on east 6th Street, the building's still there.  

And we had a third drive-in out in what my parents and grandparents called Little Dothan, I think it was the Chicken Box? Maybe Robert or Carl remember? Close to the Kaiser-Frazer dealership, a couple blocks past where Buddy Gandy's Seafood Market is now, on the same north side of US98 West. Chicken Box? Linda and I were abruptly dismissed as customers, curtly invited to leave one evening because the car-hops saw us smooching in the front seat of the station wagon. She came to the open window, snatched our tray, said "Good Night!" and walked away. We had been dismissed. What, 1952 or 1953? Seventy years ago. My senior year at Bay High, Linda was a junior.

It was after WW2, we grew up in a safe America, except that the Korean War was in full violence. 1952, '53, a Bay High hero, Billy Hamm, may already have been killed in Korea. 

But the question, "Where were you in '62?" My first ship, the beloved destroyer, was already memories. The Navy had me at Naval Station, Mayport, where I made lieutenant, we were living at Neptune Beach a block back from the Atlantic Ocean, Malinda was four years old. June 1962 the Navy transferred me to the Univ of Michigan and we lived in a WW2 student housing project in Ann Arbor. Joe turned two while we were there, we called him Jody then. Somewhere here is a photo of him sitting on a picnic table under a tree in front of our apartment, while I gave him a haircut. It would have been summer '62 or spring '63.

"Where were you in '62?" I still had miles to go and promises to keep!

W