82: Karla Bonoff, "Personally"

By Wm. on July 29, 2024

My Papaw, Mom's father, turned 80 years old on August 4, 1982. A big celebration was held--if memory serves--on Sunday, August 1, at "the farm," my grandparents' home on the outskirts of Union, an old, large stone house with plenty of surrounding acreage. It was a grand time, a hit in all ways save for one thing.

My grandfather missed it, hospitalized for heart issues.

Papaw had suffered a mild heart attack three years earlier. Significant chest pain cropped up just days before the party. In the end it turned out to be a false alarm, as tests showed no further heart damage, and he would be back home before long. While I'm sure anyone who came from far away might have gone to see him at the hospital, it wasn't quite the same as honoring him with everyone else around.

My grandfather passed away a little over a year later, in mid-October 1983, of complications from bladder cancer. This was the first death of a close family member since I was ten, and maybe that's why I chose to write about him the following fall in my creative writing class. My first go at the assignment centered on his final weeks and getting a phone call from Mom right after he'd died. What I really wanted, though, was to tell about him as I'd known him growing up, and that required a change in approach. I elected to go with a fictionalized account of the 80th birthday party.

I don't know why it's handwritten and not typed, a little over ten pages long. This copy has no marks on it, so I'm wondering now if I ever submitted it for review. I doubt I've looked at it since college, and I'm seeing it's surprisingly granular in its details in places. My older cousins' children are playing with Star Wars figures outside; a volleyball net is being set up on the front lawn; there's conversation in the food line about the National League West division race (I correctly observe that Atlanta is currently in first place but mistakenly write that Houston is lurking several games back when it was really San Diego); I toss a Nerf football for a while with a cousin. Perhaps there are things about the day I remembered two, but not forty-two, years later?

A number of real-life aunts, uncles, and cousins are mentioned by name, but there are a few distant relatives specified that either I don't recall or that were made up: cousin Charlie from Missouri and his wife Ada, Mary from Pennsylvania, and John, who I claim is a grandson of Papaw's sister and living in Georgia. I have to believe in retrospect that almost all of the scenes and conversations are simply devices for me to communicate information about my grandfather as I knew him. You see some of that in the first page above, and later I bring up the three large gardens he kept, his stint as Director of Student Medical Services at a regional state university (he'd been a general physician prior to that), his and Gran's 50th wedding anniversary party five years earlier, and the increasing health concerns that would within weeks lead my grandparents to move off the farm and into a smaller place owned by their church. Soon thereafter the house was placed on the National Register of Historical Places.

The end of the story is definitely a fabrication. A cake with eighty candles on it is brought out, and spontaneously everyone decides to caravan to the hospital to show it to him. The guest of honor finally makes an appearance.

In spite of all the license I'd taken so far, I can easily imagine a conversation along these lines taking place between the two of us during that stay.

Before I twigged the temporal connection to the party, I spent some time looking at the Top 40 chart from 7/31/82 and noticed a few mildly interesting things for chart goofs such as me.
--Seven of the first ten songs Casey plays (following the countdown of last week's Top 3) won't make it out of the 30s. Three of the first four on the show will peak at #37, and four others will stall out at #33, #32, or #31 (two). Just one cut from that first hour--"Eye in the Sky"--will reach the Top 10;
--Sixteen songs are in the same position as the previous week. This was the period where Billboard's chart methodology led to that kind of thing on a fairly regular basis. Note to self: someday look through the 1982 and early 1983 charts to count the number of tunes on AT40 that held steady each week;
--Of those sixteen, five would go on to climb higher, and one--"Don't You Want Me"--was pausing on its way down. In my early charting days, staying put was almost always the death knell for a song's progress;
--Only five songs on the show are lower than they were on 7/24, all of them between #11 and #17.

Karla Bonoff's one and only Top 40 hit, "Personally," was one of the five holding in place whose ascent wasn't quite over. She's at #20 on this show and would go on to spend the next two weeks one position higher before quickly tumbling down the Hot 100 (35-93-out; steep falls such as that were another common chart feature of the times). In the clip below, Andrew Gold is on guitar and appears to be singing backup. He does play on the record, but it's really Don Henley and Timothy B. Schmitt doing the background vocals.

No, we didn't personally take a cake to room 317 West the afternoon of my grandfather's party. But the inclusion of a room number is another one of those curious details that makes we wonder how much I remembered at the time I wrote "Happy Birthday, Papaw." It wouldn't have been the last time I saw him at Booth Memorial, as he spent his final days in that very hospital.