This past weekend Premiere offered up American Top 40 shows from 5/6/78 and 5/12/84. It'd been eight years since either had been rebroadcast, but that's just recent enough that I already have PastBlast blurbs (originally Facebook posts, actually) for both. The song I picked from '78 was "Let's All Chant," and I don't say too much beyond expressing affection for it, both then and now. The '84 selection was "Time After Time," chosen because it allowed me to tell a story from my college radio station days.
In those very early days of writing material for what would become this site, I didn't think that much about tying together the shows that Premiere features and what had been going on with me at those very moments. If I had, it might have occurred to me that I know exactly where I was on the evening of May 6, 1978--at a track meet, the Boone County Invitational. My sister, a 7th grader, was already making her presence known as a sprinter (though greater success came later). I was on the boys' team but wouldn't have qualified for any of the finals, allowing me to tote my transistor radio around and listen to Casey when he came on at 8pm. My peculiar memory allows me to place myself in those bleachers, straining over the cheering of the crowd to hear "Dance with Me," "You Belong to Me," and "Take a Chance on Me" all debut (at #40, #31, and #30, respectively). My chart from that show doesn't offer evidence of hastily scrawled songs and artists on it, so I imagine I took notes in the moment and transferred the information later. As for six years later, it's only been in the last year that I realized I spent the very early hours of May 12, 1984 with friends Warren and James, putting the finishing touches on a cassette we recorded to send to a new friend in the Nashville area.
Just six years apart in time, but what a gulf there was between being an on-the-cusp-of-puberty 8th grader and a wise fool in college. There's no doubt I changed plenty over that period, but the core, a skinny guy known for academic achievement, being socially awkward, and his knowledge of pop music, was present throughout. A great deal happened in the world over that period, including a lot of not-so-great economic stuff: high inflation in the late 70s, serious recession in the early 80s. I can look back and see how very fortunate I was to be able to be oblivious to much of that. My parents did whatever worrying over and planning about finances that was needed and never let on to Amy and me. We didn't live extravagantly but I'll admit that I never felt deprived, either.
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Graduation for the class of 2025 is tomorrow at my institution. I finished turning in my grades for the term a couple of days ago, so next week it'll be on to writing year-end reports of various sorts--ah, the sweet, sweet life of a department chair. I haven't enjoyed this semester all that much, a combination of always seeming to have too many balls in the air, chairing a committee that I don't feel qualified to run, and the ongoing challenges and frustrations that accompany working at a college that's been struggling financially for a long time. I'm glad to have this one (mostly) in the rear view mirror.
This past week I've been thinking a bit about the sophomores I had in my classes, by which I mean the students who graduated from high school two years ago. (The 'SO' classification I see in my institution's internal systems is a measure of the number of credit hours earned to date and also a completely unreliable measure of how long one has been in college, due to the proliferation of dual-credit classes offered and taken in high school.) Those students were wrapping up their 8th grade year in May 2019; needless to say, a lot has happened since then. I'm pretty certain I can notice the effects of COVID-era math instruction in a lot of my charges these days, though I'm generally careful to say when asked that my sense is that the pandemic only exacerbated trends that were already in place with respect to middle school/high school math preparation.
I now know what happened with me and many of my peers following that midway point of college, of course. The last four decades have had their bumpy patches to be sure, but my generation for the most part has done alright. I try hard not to wax political in my social media and on this blog, but let's just say (with understatement) I'm concerned that governmental actions at multiple levels being taken in recent months will result/are already resulting in damage that will reverberate through the prime decades (and beyond) of so many of today's twenty-year-olds. I don't envy them.
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I'll close by seeing what wisdom about any of this is on offer from Donald Fagen and Paul Weller (who had songs debuting on 5/6/78 and 5/12/84, respectively). I can't say that this brother is fully free, but I do plan to spend my remaining years being what I want to be.
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