Childhood Seeds Produce Adult Fruit!!!

Recently I have had a few flashbacks from my childhood that I normally do not remember or associate my current activities with. But all of our adult lives are primarily dictated by the way we have spent our childhood.

The memories that I will be sharing in greater detail are funny now but did produce some pain back then.

After my days of collecting comic books were over, I starting collecting records and I have the vast majority of my vinyl collection still.

I would DJ at various family parties and events and even did one event before two turntables became popular with a turntable and 8-track tape player;)

I could not even drive to this party that I remember doing this!!

I spent many summers later with my cousins in our own pretend world of radio broadcasting and we even did an all nighter playing music which was tough.

Many of my friends in junior high and high school did not get my mixtapes which would always have one fast uptempo side and a side of slow jams.

Or I should say that the slow jams side was not understood when I had my tape player on the bus while everyone else mostly had their girls for the bus ride home;)

The comments during or after such bus rides were probably the most painful although no one ever said "turn that off". It was more like "where's your girl?"

But I absolutely had the best, hottest, and newest music for any moment.

Our station was entitled WEFUNK and we played our "national anthem" at every sign on of Parliament's "P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up) which had a radio-styled entry to the song.

When a toy electronic device came out entitled Mr. Microphone that allowed you to hear yourself through a FM radio, we went crazy and knew that we hit the big time then!

One of our neighbors eventually became a real, on-the-air DJ for the local R&B station and we lived vicariously through him. What's up Youngblood, The Teenage Legend on WCIG-FM 107.1 in Mullins, SC!!!!

We kept a serious music chart just like Billboard for at least 4 years that ranged from the top 10 songs and expanded it to the top 100.

One recent memory of it all brought back the memories of how we came to operate our radio station.

We started out actually as a small club of my first two cousins Mike and Adrian and myself. The club was called "The Smokey The Bear Club" and we would help control the seasonal fires from a southern ritual called "burning off".

We kept the fires from getting too close to the houses and one season our experience was truly tested as my mom started burning off while the wind was too strong and suddenly picked up;))

I do not exactly remember what was the recent trigger that brought back all of these memories, but I did enjoy the flashback itself!!!

We collected dues as well and I was the treasurer. It is now funny to remember that my cousin Adrian fell behind in paying his dues since he was visiting so often one summer. We collected dues whenever we all got together from 5 cents to 25 cents to $1 per get together.

We played baseball and all other sports primarily as a team as well. We were great baseball players but got beat virtually every Sunday just like Charlie Brown and his team;))

Our main opponents had a home run hitter that kept our inventory of baseballs low. We had to buy new baseballs just like athletes buy tennis and golf balls;)

The only time that I really remember finally beating them was when the home run king was absent.

Before I forget, playing baseball was a whole lot easier after a recent burning off because there would not be any tall grass in the outfield which caused more balls to be lost than anything:))

All of us have not gotten together at the same time since my mom's funeral in 2000 and it was a short moment then.

But I do plan on bringing these memories up when I travel to SC soon and hopefully they will have a new perspective and angle that I may have not been aware of.

I do see how all of these experiences have help to shape all activities and endeavors undertaken since then.

Pretty much anything I have done and hope to do on the internet has its roots in WEFUNK and The Smokey the Bear Club.

I just hope to expand our childhood experiences into greater adult fruit and pull on the hours spent just like David out in the fields with the flock of sheep and witness it all coming together in a greater, positive, perfect storm.

I will never forget my years as a bedroom DJ;)