Insight: Kung Fu Fighting, Mr. Bojangles and Brandy

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

What would you pay to own the soundtrack of a significant decade of your life? For me, the answer to that question launched a special quest unlike any other I have undertaken.

Ed Pierce has just completed acquiring all 25 music CDs
in the 1990 series issued by Rhino Records called
'Super Hits of the 70s Have a Nice Day.'
COURTESY PHOTO
 

It all began sometime in the mid-1990s at a music store in Melbourne, Florida. I had the day off from work and went to this store to purchase some CDs for my home stereo system. There were many fascinating bands and recording artists to choose from but an odd-looking CD in a bargain bin caught my eye and it was part of series of CDs issues by Rhino Records to salute the 1970s.

That decade was when I truly came of age. It was the time in which I graduated from high school, went to college, got married, started my career and joined the U.S. Air Force. I purchased my first car in 1972, met David Bowie in 1975, traveled to Europe in 1977, and became the owner of a pet cat in 1978.

As far as music goes, I collected what I could afford based upon my earnings at the time and the vinyl record albums I purchased were a luxury after paying the rent, buying groceries and writing a check for my auto loan every month.

But 20 years-plus after the 1970s, here I stood in awe of a CD I was holding called “Super Hits of the 70s Have A Nice Day.” The front of the CD was a photo collage of cultural icons of the decade including depictions of Elton John, Richard Nixon, Richard Pryor, Lindsay Wagner, Richard Roundtree, Rod Stewart, and characters from the 1970 film “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

Inside the CD, I discovered a compilation of 12 different 1970s tunes sounding just like they did when they aired on the AM radio in my 1974 Mercury Capri. Buying the CD and taking it home, it was indeed like turning the dial and finding a radio station playing the top hits of that era.

The playlist for the “Super Hits of the 70s Have A Nice Day Vol. 2” was like a time travel adventure. There was “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” by Edison Lighthouse; “Ma Belle Ami” by the Tee Set; “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum; and “Reflections of My Life” by Marmalade. There were two tracks I had never heard of before called “For the Love of Him” by Bobbi Martin and “Little Green Bag” by the George Baker Selection.

Also featured on this CD were “Which Way You Goin’ Billy” by The Poppy Family; “My Baby Loves Lovin’” by White Plains; “Hitchin’ A Ride” by Vanity Fare; “United We Stand” by The Brotherhood of Man; and “Everything is Beautiful” by Ray Stevens. The CD tracks on this edition closed with “Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me” by Robin McNamara.

After a few months I stored the CD with others in my collection and hoped that someday I could find others in the series. Months turned into years and then into decades and I got busy with life and stopped looking.

Last summer when I rebuilt my stereo system, I was thrilled to own a turntable again and started to collect vinyl albums once more. As part of my stereo system, I own a 5-disc CD changer and brought a box of CDs up from the basement to my music room. Inside, I rediscovered the “Super Hits of the 70s Have A Nice Day Vol. 2” CD and it sounded fantastic when I played it.

That got me to thinking that perhaps someone might have other CDs in the “Super Hits of the 70s Have A Nice Day” series for sale. I first looked at two different locations of the Bull Moose music store without luck. Then I saw some CDs in the set listed on both Amazon and eBay.

Ordering one or two at a time at a reasonable cost online, I started in May on a quest to collect all 25 CDs in the series. I soon found out that some of these CDs are more valuable than the others.

For instance, Vol. 24 and Vol. 25 CDs are genuine collectors’ items because they were the final ones issued in the set in 1990. And for some strange reason, Vol. 11 and Vol. 14 are also hard to find and priced extravagantly.

My wife thought I was slightly insane over the past few months to be frequently checking the mailbox to see if any packages containing CDs had arrived for me on any given day. I was on a mission and would not be deterred.

Finally on July 3, I am happy to report that the last “Super Hits of the 70s Have A Nice Day” CD that I was seeking arrived via Fed Ex. It was the Vol. 11 edition, and I paid more than $10 extra for it than the other CDs. Not sure what the fuss was about for that one as none of the tracks on it are spectacular, unless you like “Playground in my Mind” by Clint Holmes or “Dueling Banjos” from the “Deliverance” film soundtrack.

Now I’m on to another obsession. <

Insight: Ghosts of Halloween Past

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

Growing up I always looked forward to wearing a costume for Halloween, but to be honest, I’d rather have the bag full of candy than spend hours debating about what to wear when going trick or treating. 

Our family lived in a large tract subdivision with many houses and streets available for visiting on Halloween. These were the early 1960s, prior to the arrival of fun-size and mini-Halloween candy, so virtually every treat handed out in my neighborhood was of generous proportion, except for the occasional apple tossed in my bag.

This was also before McDonald’s and Wendy’s first opened for business, so I never received a gift certificate for hamburgers or fries in my Halloween bag either when the evening’s haul was examined closer.

One year my mother went to Woolworth’s and bought my brother Doug and I some Casper the Friendly Ghost costumes, but by the time the next year had rolled around, those outfits were too small for us, so she made us costumes instead. That consisted of her buying terrycloth bathrobes and coloring them purple with RIT dye in the washing machine.

Once the bathrobes were a shade of bright purple, she put Elmer’s Glue on the collar and shoulders and then sprinkled gold glitter over the glue. She added a gold sash and fashioned a king’s crown out of one of my father’s shoeboxes. Like the robe, she gave the crown sparkle by using glue and gold glitter.

That year we went trick or treating as kings. It just so happened that a few months later I was able to recycle my costume for my role as one of the Three Wise Men in the Our Lady of Lourdes School’s annual Christmas Pageant.

I can recall another year when I was about 10 when my brother went trick or treating as a hobo wearing a long old black coat, a bandana and his face covered with charcoal to appear dirty. That same year I was a cowboy with a brown vest, brown chaps, and a brown cowboy hat. To complete the look, my father painted a mustache on me using brown paint from my Paint-By-Numbers watercolors set. Looking back, it was an outrageous outfit and reminds me now of the “Cowboy” representative of the Village People band of the 1970s.

For some reason my mother seemed to always suggest dressing me in a clown costume for Halloween, an abhorrent idea that I always instantly rejected. To this day I loathe clowns and have little respect for anyone named Winky, Bobo, Bubbles or Jingles.

Many of the boxed Halloween costumes of those days were made of rayon, which made them extremely itchy and hard to wear after several hours.

I remember one boxed costume set I talked my father into buying for me was a skeleton outfit and another year he agreed to buy me a “Hot Stuff the Little Devil” costume at McCurdy’s Department Store. The little devil attire came complete with devil’s mask and a plastic pitchfork too.  

Through the years I went trick or treating as a wizard, a policeman, an astronaut, a magician, a pirate and one year as the cartoon character Underdog.

As I got into my teens, the last time I went trick or treating I wore a King Kong rubber mask I had purchased with my own money I had earned from delivering newspapers on my after-school paper route.

Years passed before I attempted to wear a Halloween costume as an adult. Sometime in the 1980s I remember attending a party with my wife and we went as a gangster and the gangster’s girlfriend, with my wife wearing a men’s grey suit, a fedora, and an orange necktie, while I wore a bright yellow dress and a Carol Channing-style blonde wig.

Years later the newspaper I was working for in Florida had an annual Halloween costume contest for employees and for three years in a row, I won that event with an assortment of humorous outfits. One year I was dressed as an old woman with a paisley dress, a gray wig, a hairnet and a walker and I followed that the next year with a Michael Jackson costume that featured a dyed chef’s jacket, black wig, and sunglasses. I donned a Flavor Flav outfit with a horned helmet, a zany lavender blazer and large clock hanging from my neck for the year after that.

The last Halloween costume contest I entered there, I went as a pregnant bride and wore a size 20 wedding dress I had ordered from eBay and a long blonde wig. Unfortunately, that costume didn’t win, but the looks I received from the newspaper circulation manager while changing into it in the restroom before the contest were priceless to say the least.

I won’t be wearing a costume this year to answer the door for a new generation of trick or treaters, but at least one tradition will endure at our house. In a throwback to my youth, we have three boxes of full-size candy bars to pass out to kids while admiring their imaginative costumes. <

Insight: Closing the book on a lifelong obsession

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

More than 56 summers have passed since I first laid my eyes on what would become a lifelong obsession for me, completing an entire collection of all 598 Topps 1965 baseball cards.
From the time I stepped out of R’s Market on Monroe Avenue in Brighton, New York in July 1965 and spied my friend Billy Whitney on his bike in the parking lot thumbing through a freshly opened pack of five cards he had purchased there for a nickel, I was hooked. The vibrant colors and team pennants were the first thing that I noticed about the cards, and he gave me three cards in his pack that day which were duplicates of what he already had in his collection.

So my 1965 collection began with Card #142 Pitcher Bill Monbouquette of the Boston Red Sox, along with Card #114 Outfielder Jim Hickman of the New York Mets and Card #90 Third Baseman Rich Rollins of the Minnesota Twins.

I took the cards home and carefully placed them in an old shoebox on the shelf of my bedroom closet and throughout the rest of that summer, any spare nickels I had were used to purchase packs of baseball cards at R’s Market. With each new pack I opened, I dreamed of finding the most valuable cards in the set at that time, Card #350, Outfielder Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, or Card #250 San Francisco Outfielder Willie Mays, that I could trade to my neighborhood pals for seven or eight other 1965 cards to build my collection. Mantle or Mays never showed up in any of my new packs, but once I discovered #Card #300 Pitcher Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers and I traded it to my neighbor David Ronner for four Baltimore Orioles cards, including Card #33 Outfielder Jackie Brandt, Card #15 Pitcher Robin Roberts, Card #94 Catcher Charley Lau, and Card #290 Pitcher Wally Bunker.

Trading the 1965 Topps Koufax card was something I came to regret as an adult because the price to replace it skyrocketed after he retired the following season and at age 36, he became the youngest player ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

As I returned to school in the fall of 1965, I had about 125 cards in the shoebox and I would sometimes pull them out and read through the statistics on the back of each card, marveling at the lengths of their careers or the far away cities or towns that they once played in. For example, I noticed that Card #157 of Shortstop Zoilo Versalles, the 1965 American League Most Valuable Player, indicated that he was born in Havana, Cuba, and played his first season of professional baseball in Elmira, New York in 1958. Or that Outfielder Jerry Lynch of the Pittsburgh Pirates (Card #201) led the Piedmont League in batting in 1953 at age 22 while playing for the Norfolk (Virginia) Tars.

As I continued my education on into high school and then college, I occasionally pulled out the shoebox and wondered how I could add to my collection of 1965 cards.

In 1982, I found a chance to do that when a sports card store for collectors opened near the U.S. Air Force base that I was stationed at in Arizona. I was able to purchase many common 1965 Topps cards from that store, and added Card #260, Hall of Fame Pitcher Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers, from that store.

When the internet came around, I found some more cards I needed for the 1965 set on eBay and others I ordered from a sports cards dealer in Ohio. I’ve upgraded cards in the collection that were in less-than-ideal condition and protected them carefully to ensure they remain in pristine shape.

As of this morning, I’m down to the last card to acquire before finishing the collection, that being Mickey Mantle, Card #350. Earlier this week, I acquired Card #477 Hall of Fame Pitcher Steve Carlton’s rookie card and the week before I had purchased Card #300, Pitcher Sandy Koufax, which was the card I originally flipped for four others.

I’m about to close the book on the 1965 set and my wife and I have decided to sell it and use the money from it to help pay for a new roof for our home. The complete set of cards is worth thousands and I’d rather put it to good use than have them stored away unappreciated.

The 1965 Topps baseball card set has long been my obsession, but if you think I’ll miss them, think again. I do have other sets I’m working on, and I’m not done yet with this hobby. <