My dad would have been 82 years old today. It’s been roughly a year and a half since he passed beyond the veil, and it’s still a little weird that he’s gone.
I realized when I was writing my last post about my Dad that there was an awful lot I still didn’t know about him. I was learning new stuff about my dad all the way up to his funeral.
I’ve had this photo of my mom and dad for years and I still don’t know exactly where they were or what was going on. I can’t tell for sure if it was Halloween or New Year’s Eve or just a random costume party that had nothing to do with either holiday. For all I know, it could have been a normal party and that’s just how they dressed back then.
I do know that I have no memories of the two of them being that happy together. I know this is many years before I was born- it might even be before they had kids at all.
I also know that this is the only photograph of my Father where I can see my own face in his. In every other picture, we look like two very different people. In this one, I see myself.
I would love to be a time-traveling fly on the wall, to be able to observe them at this point in their lives. I wonder what else I might learn about my parents, after all this time.
Do you have any old pictures of your parents from a mysterious time before?
As far back as I can remember, Dad always got us into whatever the latest and greatest technology happened to be.
In 1980, we had a Tandy Color Computer (TRS-80) model one, with a whopping 4k. We even had a newfangled data cassette drive, so that we could record and play back programs off audiocassette.
Back in the 1980s, there were computer magazines that had programs in the back that you could type in to make your computer do something. I’ll never forget the time that I was typing in a four-page BASIC program and I ran out of memory… Dad always said he meant to get the upgrade to 16k, but he never did get around to the upgrade.
1980 was also the year I talked Dad into getting us an Atari 2600 so I could play Berzerk. At least I think I talked him into it. It’s entirely possible he wanted it just as much as I did because I distinctly remember waking up from a sound sleep late one night to find Dad hunched over the controller, guiding Pac-Man through his dot-filled maze in the dim glow of the tv screen.
In the same time period, we also had a TI-994a, which had some program cartridges you could slide in on the right side. We had a couple of game cartridges and one or two other programs that I never paid much attention to. There was one music program cartridge that played a jaunty little tune when you locked it into place, and I loved that thing even though all I ever did with it was slide it in to hear the song.
Dad also had a knack for getting us into trial services. Between the years of 1983 and 1986, Knight-Ridder and AT&T piloted an interconnected videotex machine called Viewtron in homes in South Florida. Dad was fascinated and immediately signed us up. This consisted of a box that you plugged into your tv with a little wireless chiclet keyboard (a big deal back then!,) and it dialed into a set of servers. There was weather, shopping, a digital dictionary and encyclopedia, and an early “CB Chat” system. I remember using it to research reports and projects for school, but the part I loved the most was the chat system. Viewtron was ahead of its time, with all kinds of services that we take for granted now, and it folded after just a few years.
Flash forward to 1984, and Dad once again signed us up for something new and exciting- our family was charter subscribers to the new Prodigy dial-up service. Some of my earliest uses of something like e-mail were done in the message boards on this service, and I made my first “Internet friends” during this era. Alas, I lost touch with all of them when we left Prodigy a few years later, but it was still an interesting time.
In 1986, I got the first computer that was just mine- a Commodore 128. I used it for word processing, to write reports, and I dialed into BBSes with it, but mostly I used it to play games, and I loved that it used the same type of joystick as the Atari 2600. To this day, I still prefer one stick and one button for my gaming- the newer game consoles have far too many sticks and buttons and I can’t ever remember which one of the eight or ten buttons does which action.
My brother had an Atari computer in his room, an Atari 800 I think, and each of us spent time running a BBS on our respective machines for a while. A BBS is a Bulletin Board System, and these were popular when computers used separate modems to dial out on a telephone line. Most BBS setups had message boards, some games which were called Doors for some reason, and a few other things. Some allowed the sharing of files, and some were set up as multi-node, which meant you could have multiple people connected and those people could talk to each other- this was an expensive setup because each node required its own phone line. Another early feature of BBS life was FIDOnet, an early form of long distance messaging where the FIDOnet nodes would call one another and messages would be sent from node to node to reach users across long distances. I loved running a BBS in the early 1980s, partly because I loved that sense of community, and partly because I loved being able to jump in and chat with whoever happened to be on my computer at the time.
Here we are, more than three decades (and dozens of new computer systems) later, on what would have been Dad’s 81st birthday. He used to say that he wished he would have paid more attention and learned more technology when we had all those computers in the house all those years ago, but I think he did just fine.
I started a new job about two months ago, doing some pretty neat stuff with a great technology company, and I can’t help but wonder if my life would have taken a very different path if Dad hadn’t encouraged my fascination with technology so much over the years.
I was clicking around today, when I learned that Bell Biv Devoe has released “Run,” their first new song in fifteen years. I watched the video, and then I fell down the Wiki-hole. It started with an idle curiosity about just how old Ricky Bell, Michael Bivens, and Ronnie DeVoe are. I also thought that Bobby Brown was dead, for some reason, but I was mistaken about that.
For me, those names, along with Ralph Tresvant, are still forever-linked with New Edition, the band they all shared throughout most of the 1980s. I used to have their first singles (Cool It Now, Mr. Telephone Man) on 45 rpm vinyl, the cassette singles of my youth. In late 1985, thirteen year old me played the hell out of my All For Love cassette. I still occasionally hum their song about staying in school.
There’s a verse in one of the songs, where the band members are listed off: “Ronnie, Bobbie, Ricky and Mike,” says Ralph Tresvant, and “Hey Ralph!” says one of the others. I’m not actually sure who has the line, but that little back-and-forth has been stuck in my head on and off for thirty years.
Fast forward to April of 1986. I was in the eighth grade, and my father had secured tickets to the two of us to see the “All For Love” tour in the West Palm Beach auditorium! This was my first ever concert, although I’ve seen at least 128 other musical acts since then. I didn’t know it at the time, but Bobby Brown had just left the group, so he wasn’t part of the 1986 tour.
Dad was a very good sport to take me, because this entire event was way outside of his comfort zone. The general admission system wasn’t very well organized for this show, and getting into a seat involved a fair amount of pushing through a crush of people. I was a small kid at that point in my life, so it was extra crazy for me.
I still have the ticket stub for this show. I still have almost all of my ticket stubs. This one is kind of amazing because it was printed by a ticketing company that no longer exists (Bass Ticket Outlets), for a concert venue that no longer exists (the West Palm Beach Auditorium).
What was your first concert? What was your favorite?
Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV. 