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Forty years in a file box
By Tim Carroll, flipside@tx.rr.com
Some things I save because they I don't have the heart to throw them away. That case of matchbox cars in the closet and my old baseball glove fall into that category. Other bits and pieces of my childhood never get tossed out simply because they were stuck in some box or file.
This past week I found one of those bits and pieces - a single pink index card. Handwritten on the card were the top twenty songs for the week of December 16, 1969 according to Cousin Brucie, the popular DJ at WABC radio in New York City.
Peter, Paul and Mary topped the charts that week with Leaving On A Jet Plane while Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye by Steam was second. I tracked the charts each Tuesday night for several years filling out the pink and blue cards song by song.
The box itself still sits in my top desk drawer 40 years later. Glued to the top are two worn stickers with the New York Mets and Baltimore Orioles logos representing the historic 1969 World Series.
In this age of computers, an index file box has lost its original purpose. In fact, the top-20 song list is the only index card I found. The box is overfilled, though, with stuff that can best be described as childhood flotsam. There is no organization or filing system to "the box." I just kept cramming things in until I ran out of space.
Grabbing a handful of cards from the box, I pulled out an mixed bunch of cards and photos. There was my 1975 Selective Service SS7 Form (draft card), a membership card from the South Bend Press Club that expired in 1984, and my 9th grade student ID card. My FCC Radio Telephone Third Class Operator Permit apparently expired in 1982 and I am happy to see that my wife Ann and I passed the Pre-Cana Marriage Preparation Program in March 1979. I haven't needed to prove that fact in 30 years but it's here just in case.
There must be 30 business cards from memorable restaurants and businesses that I will likely never return to. There's the Gasthaus zur Stadt Koblenz in Germany and the Downtown Music Gallery in New York City and Pete and Barb's A-1 Truck Stop Restaurant in Port Orange, Florida.
Thanks to Sears and JC Penney's, I have dozens of wallet-sized photos of my kids from those 50-picture sets we used to buy. We ran out of relatives and I didn't have the heart to toss out my kids' photos. They found a home in my little tin box next to a laminated prom photo and my deceased mother's driver's license.
My favorite find was a stack of Boy Scout advancement cards. There were initials scribbled up and down each one representing some knot or first aid technique I had mastered along the Eagle trail.
Squeezed throughout the stacks are random ticket stubs to events like the Allman Brothers and Les Miserable and a 1995 Allen Eagle game against Wichita Falls Rider HS.
Every card, photo and scrap of paper has a story behind it and that's probably why most of this stuff has survived. A more organized person might see this as a scrapbooking opportunity. I prefer to leave the stuff crammed into my 40-year-old index file.
Some might see that as a metaphor for life. I think it's just because I'm too lazy to clean it out. Either way, I can prove that I have an Indiana teaching license.
Just give me a few minutes to find it.
You can find old Flipside columns at http://flipsidecolumn.blogspot.com. Send column suggestions and comments to flipside@tx.rr.com.
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