Tales from the Trails of a Rock ’n’ Roll Bus Driver

by Jerry Fitzpatrick

  During that time, I had discovered — along with millions of other people around the country — the AM radio sensation known as Beaker Street Beaker Theater. Broadcasting from Little Rock, this late night rock show from megawatt station KAAY 1090 was a gateway for all of middle America into more of the cutting edge music of the day. The host was Clyde Clifford (his real name was Dale Seidenschwarz, but come on... Seidenschwarz?) and because the show broadcasted late at night and on a 50,000-watt station, people from Mexico to Canada could tune in. I joined the crowd from the Upper Peninsula. Knowing it was coming from home base made it that much more of an attraction.

  Back then I got so much help and understanding from people who wanted me to get on the right track. I just didn’t get the message at the time. Before I was sent to Harbor House, I was staying with the LaFleurs, a family in Gladstone, Michigan, who acted as a transit family for troubled kids who needed a more permanent place to live. They were a great family, and they provided a great atmosphere. They even had kids of their own. Although the place was like Grand Central Station with kids being shuffled in and out — and the house did sit next to the railroad tracks — I was there for nearly four months. But when I left there, it was to go to a stricter program. I couldn’t resist being the troubled person that was inside of me.

  Maybe a problem with having a house filled with troubled teens is that we could be a bad influence on each other. Until that time my drug choices had only been marijuana. Wasn’t it just my luck that another kid there had a pretty good education with all kinds of drugs. Before long, we slipped into a drug store and took some over-the-counter stuff. Problem was, I had no idea what they were for. I only knew they were “downers.”

  This other kid told me not to worry and took a handful. Not to be outdone, I took several handfuls, much more than I should. All night long I was puking and spinning, and my ears rang for about a week before it was over. I scratched downers off my “to do” list after that.

  Other than that, what got me sent to Harbor House was a lot of little things. I broke about half a dozen house rules from jumping cars for a trip down the street to jumping trains for a trip to the next town, usually Escanaba. Jumping cars was easy. In the winter, there were enormous amounts of snow from the lake in Gladstone. With that came ice. Like any other kid, we would go out and play, but our games concerned grabbing the bumper of a passing car and letting it drag us down the street as our feet slid on the ice and snow. Since people got so mad at that, I guess the trick was not to get caught. Sooner or later, the LaFleurs and counselor assigned to me had had enough.

  Chapter 41 The Crimes Continue

  Harbor House was an old-style three-story home that had been renovated into a youth home. It was located in downtown Muskegon, just a few blocks from the arena. The lakeshore was beyond the arena. An old ship sitting in the harbor once ran to Chicago daily, almost straight west across Lake Michigan, with cars and passengers. The lakefront was a great place to escape to and think when it was warm enough.

  When I arrived at Harbor House, I was given a number as we all were. When you first checked in you were designated a number four. Do well, follow the rules, for a few weeks, and you move up to a three and get some privileges. Keep acting right, and move up to a two and just about all the privileges that could be had were at your disposal as a reward for being responsible and following the rules. There was only one 1 in the house. You really had to have your shit together to be a one.

  When I got there, the other kids, already set in their routines, gave me funny looks. It took me the whole weekend to become acclimated. That Saturday night one of the other kids overdosed on downers and alcohol. He stumbled in late and collapsed on the floor right in the doorway of his room.

  Then his heart stopped.

  The on-duty counselor in charge of the youth home that evening applied CPR until emergency medical personnel rushed in, took over and saved the kid who had just died in front of me. I, and others, stood watching the entire scene from the hall as they applied the defibrillators and somehow revived him. This tall, lanky kid with his enormous limbs flopping around each time he got a charge — I will never forget. Someone died and came back to life. I saw it, and at the time I didn’t even know his name.

  As the new kid, I was first assigned to the kitchen where every kid starts. In a group setting, everyone has a job to keep themselves, as well as the house, in order. Not taking care of chores meant not getting privileges. As a newbie, I didn’t have any privileges and would have to earn them. Working in the kitchen mostly meant helping Mary, a black lady who was in charge of the kitchen. She was a wonderful person who genuinely cared for the kids in the home, but she was able to put fear in our eyes with her approach. She gave the youth home a sense of home.

  The house was unlike anything I had been involved with. There were a dozen other kids, ranging from 14 to 18 years old. Each had his own problems, some self-inflicted and some by whatever chaos parents had caused. Two times a week we had group therapy. We would all bring our pillows, and if we thought someone wasn’t being honest, we would hit that person... with our pillows. Sometimes it got rough. We sat on the floor because there was no furniture in the room. We covered some pretty serious things about ourselves, and it got pretty emotional. It was a time that I started to understand why I was who I was. But I was still a young confused person.

  The kid who died? After he came back to life and returned from the hospital, he was punished. He was now the new four, I got bumped up to a three and was assigned another chore right away.

  Pete Stall was the director of Harbor House. He was a loud man with a baritone voice. He sang in a gospel group that had recorded several albums. I admired him instantly when he showed me one. The group had on matching red jackets, black ties and white pants. There was Pete right in there with the lineup. How impressive he looked on the album cover. I told him how I had already played coronet in the school band as well as drums and he encouraged me to keep on learning. Pete had lots of contacts in town because of his position with social services, so he secured various jobs throughout the town with businesses for the youths who lived at the house. He secured me a stocking position at a department store in the downtown area. Pete explained how important the job was and how hard it was for him to secure it. I started working a couple of days later. My job consisted of collecting trash from all the sales counters, stocking items in the store, sweeping the floors and generally doing what anyone told me to do. Everyone was nice enough at the store, and I was nice enough back. Of course with my Southern accent, it wasn’t hard for me to make friends and influence people. Everyone seemed to know who I was within a few days. There was a part of the store that had a music department. It was there I started migrating every day I came to work. I wasn’t interested in much else.

  I would arrive at the store just after the guard unlocked the back doors each morning. I would hit the second floor, looking for new music, studying the records arranged in a dozen rows. Everything. All types. But rock was the best. About this time a rock band named Black Oak Arkansas was bursting onto the scene. Naturally, with the Arkansas connection, I was becoming a fan and was learning everything about them. Rumor had it that they had stolen their high school PA system to do shows with and of course everyone thought that was the most rebel Rock ’n’ Roll thing in the world to do. Their music was edgy, and I liked it. Their first album had a map of the state of Arkansas on it, so I stole one of them. I grabbed a few others while I was at it. I just came in early, picked out what I wanted and put them in a bag by the exit door that I took to go home. It was all too easy.

  I started to get a collection stacked up under my bed. Didn’t even have a record player. I just wanted the albums. I had my eye on a player but didn’t get that far because of Pete. I came into the house one afternoon, and as I was hitting the staircase Pete’s voice echoed.

  “JERRY, MY FRIEND! COME INTO MY OFFICE, AND LET’S TALK.”

  As I topped the stairs to drop
off my coat and new records, from the hall I could see my bed, and I noticed that the blanket had been lifted up and all the albums were missing. As I entered my room, I freaked out and knew immediately I was busted.

  “Crap! Crap! Crap!” I danced around nervously before finally heading downstairs. Pete had a loud voice but rarely threatening. He always had a smile no matter the subject. As I rounded the corner to his office, the stack of records was on his desk. “Crap,” I muttered.

  “Jerry, my son, let’s talk.”

  It was simple. Big disappointment, major restrictions, back to the kitchen and writing a lot of forgiveness letters. Maybe some begging to avoid prosecution. I took the records back to the store manager. That was that.

  So I was the low guy on the list at the house … again. I couldn’t leave. I was pretty bummed with myself, mainly for getting caught, I guess, but I had let a lot of people down, and it hadn’t taken me long to do it. I didn’t have any music, and I sat in my room just waiting for time to pass. I also got the shit beat out of me at the next group session.

  By the second weekend, I was allowed to watch TV and move about the house, but I couldn’t go outside. It was winter and the wind from the lake made it seem even colder. At least there was heat in the kitchen. Muskegon gets its share of lake-effect snow, so staying in and staying warm was okay with me. Many of the kids in the home were on furloughs through the holidays, but I didn’t really have a place to furlough to that year. One Saturday night, I was downstairs in the main living room area watching The Midnight Special hosted by Wolf Man Jack. He introduced a band named KISS. I hadn’t paid too much attention to them because they wore makeup. I even giggled when they came on, but when they started rocking, I sat on the edge of my seat. Before they were finished, I was up jumping around and screaming whatever lyrics I had just learned from the songs “Firehouse” and “Cold Gin Time.” They blew me away with their stage show, and it started me on a whole new adventure in my quest for music.

  I hadn’t listened to many glam-style bands. It was a bit nostalgic for me when later in life I toured in the late ’90s on the Pyscho Circus tour with KISS. Before I was 15, I had attended several concerts on the glam side, but I hadn’t been in the front row. Muskegon had a small arena that the hockey club played in, and they had concerts there. I saw Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes about every month in that arena. Each time, it seemed Ted and the opening act’s guitar players had the guitar battle of the century. Ted had these huge stuffed animals on top of the amps and acted like a wild man. I saw Brownsville Station in that arena. Their hit “Smoking in the Boys Room” was on the radio, and I remember the drummer doing a flip over his set at the end of the show. He wore these black silk looking pants with silver chains on the legs. He would do a perfect flip, land on his feet and wave to the crowd. I don’t think I have seen anyone do something like that since. I was into what they were doing. Bob Seger played there a couple of times. He was a huge hit in Michigan, but my friends in Arkansas had never heard of him.

  I eventually got another job working at an Elias Brothers (known as Shoney’s in the South), a 24-hour restaurant. They had different names around the country, but they all had the Big Boy out front. I was a bus boy and dishwasher. The winters in Muskegon are cold… very cold. When the northwest winds blow across the lake, the wind chill is brutal. After a couple of years being in Michigan I was longing for the warmer climate I had been used to in the South. I had spent most of that winter inside as much as possible. Working in a kitchen helped keep me warm, so I put in extra hours to keep myself warmer. When spring was starting to creep into Muskegon, I wanted to get outside more to embrace the warmer weather.

  After working there a few days, the cook started having me help him when the morning rush started — about 5 a.m. or so. At first I would bring him ingredients and he would show me how everything went together. I was getting pretty busy in the kitchen after a couple weeks of informal lessons. The cook would go out back several times during his shift to smoke. If we weren’t that busy, he would smoke a joint. One night he came back in after smoking. “Fuck all this! I quit!”

  He left two waitresses and me with the place. We made it until the manager came in. He made me the cook. Gave me a raise and hired another bus boy. I was movin’ up.

  Chapter 42 A Carnie's Life For Me

  One spring day at Harbor House, one of the guys said he was going to do some work at the carnival that was coming to town. As a building helper, he would work for three to four days setting up the rides and booths and then tear them all down when it was over, he explained. He claimed he was going to make a few hundred bucks doing it, so I wanted in on some of that action. Big bucks to a kid in the mid 1970s.

  World of Pleasure Shows was based in Coldwater, Michigan. They were just starting their season as a medium sized carnival company that would grow in size as it moved around the country. As vendors joined en route, the fairs got bigger and bigger until they were state fairs in the southern states. More rides, game booths and food vendors joined the parade as the carnival moved south. Working mainly in towns in the upper eastern and southern Midwest – Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana. When the trucks started arriving into Muskegon, we went right to work. One minute we were standing around, and then the next, we were busy unloading blocks of wood for the rides to be set up. Measurements had to be made, and various amounts of blocks had to be placed wherever a ride part touched the ground. In order for the rides to get their certificates of operation, everything had to be level.

  It seemed like it took forever to set the rides, but once everything was laid out things started moving pretty fast. We worked several more days of twelve hours or more. It was hurry-up-then-wait kind of work — nothing to do for an hour or so then rush, rush, rush, to get something done. But it seemed kind of fun to me. Each accomplishment got me a pat on the back and a “Come with me, we got something else to do over here.” Within a couple of days most of the rides were in place, and the work slowed.

  One of the guys in charge of me turned me over to a guy who had five Crazy-ball games on the midway. He needed help setting up the tents and booths. His name was Mack Truck. No kidding. Mack had a contract with the carnival. He provided the games, he ran them, and he got his supply of merchandise from them at a discount. The guy who turned me over to him told me to look him up when the teardown started at the end of the week. Mack had a dually pick-up truck and a trailer that transported the tents, and he had an attractive girlfriend named Wendy.

  We assembled the roofs first. The whole process only took a few minutes. Compared to the rides, tent building was easy. Once the tent was up, we built the counters and set up the Crazy Board – a square table set in the middle of the tent area. It was topped with holes cut out of it about the size of drink holders. A clear plastic ring was around the board. Toss a ball into the ring. Win a prize. Keep playing and your prize got bigger every time you won. Simple. We had the booths all up, including the lights, by the end of the day. Mack told me he wished he had someone like me to work for him every day. He asked if I would be interested in working one of the booths we had just set up while the carnival spent the week in Muskegon. I explained I would be very interested. I was just trying to impress him, for what reason I had no idea. I told him I was staying at a youth home up the street and had some strict hours. But they would give me some slack since the carnival was around, and I would be working.

  So for that ten-day period, I went to work at Elias Brothers at 11 p.m., worked until 7 a.m. I went to the Harbor House and slept a few hours. By one o’clock I was headed back down to the fairgrounds to work until it was time to go back to work at the restaurant. A pretty grueling schedule for a 16-year-old, but at the time, it didn’t affect me much. I was excited to be doing something a little different. I was making lots of money and stashing it away. The Harbor House had me putting it all into an account. I was allowed a few dollars of each week’s pay to run on, but the majority of
it went into an account and was managed closely by the House staff. I was putting $100-$150 a week into the account all winter. After I’d paid for all my mistakes from the record stealing idea, I was starting to accumulate a nice savings. The carnival was paying me at the end of each day – $50 to $75 a day with Friday and Saturday nights paying me over $100. The house staff knew this and met me at the door each night and collected my earnings.

  Working my ass off for the money was not the reason for me being there. Something else was driving me to work hard. The pats on the back inspired me. I never had much desire to be the richest person on the block. My parents weren’t wealthy, and neither one of them taught me the value of money, how to manage it or what to do with it. One thing that had been constant in my life, however, was a strong work ethic. Many in my family, and outsiders who had an influence on my life, had been hard workers. Missing a day of work never entered their minds. Always doing extra, always working a little harder or longer seemed to be the way things were done. As a young person, I tried many ways to get out of work, but when I did work, I gave 100 percent.

  The week flew by, and on Saturday, Mack approached me with an idea. He explained I was the best help he had ever had. He wished I could work with him for the summer traveling from town to town. Since I was a ward of the state of Michigan and living in a group home, traveling with the carnival was not an option. He didn’t suggest I actually run away, but when I graduated from the Harbor House program, all I had to do was find him, and I would have a job for life.

  Wow. At the time, that offer looked very appealing to me.

  I had banked almost $500 that week. I couldn’t even count the cute girls I met. A little stuffed animal seemed an easy intro. I made a bunch of friends with the carnival workers, many from the South who realized I talked almost like they did. Living in the North for a few years had taken some of the twang out of my voice but not that much. It had been an incredible week of work, and I didn’t want it to end.