I remember well the first time I heard this song. I was seventeen years old, no I’ll not making that up just for the sake of today’s song of day, I really was seventeen just like in today’s song when I was seventeen I dreamed of being king. I may had first heard this song on the radio but if I did I would had been sixteen so I didn’t pay any attention to it. I listened to song on a 45. Because there might be some out there who don’t have a clue what a 45 might be. A 45 is (really I have to explain this!) a 45 is a small record with a big hole in the center, on one side is one song and on the other side is another song called the B side. You call take a small stack of 45s and put them on a record player then as if it was magic a 45 would drop, then the needle would move over, all by itself! and play the bottom record, after the song was over the needle would move of the record then the next record or sometimes the next 2 or 3 records would drop and the needle would play the next record, in the seventies that was as high tech as it got. I guess today it would be called your playlist.
But why did we have stacks and stacks of 45s we didn’t buy them. Growing up in the seventies me and my older brother and sister were, looking back on it now, very lucky. The grandparents that were Mama’s parents was Granddaddy and Grannie, I’ve wrote about them before, Granddaddy was a WW2 POW, who took us on his 115 mile rural mail route, not together but each of us separately making each grandkid fell special. But today’s story is about my other set of Grandparents, Daddy’s parents, Papa and Mama Mann, They lived just a mile down the Highway form my other grandparents. They had a house and on the same land Papa had a Skelly Gas Station beside the filling station was Mama Mann’s Ann’s Drive In. Going to the drive in was a kid’s best dream. Mama Mann would let us make our own ice cream any way we wanted to , I usually put chocolate syrup on my ice cream. But the very best thing about going to the drive in was Pinball! Yes there was always a pinball machine there and Mama Mann would give us all the quarters we needed to play. We would play pinball for hours. Along with the pinball machine there was a pool table that we played a little, but nothings beats pinball! That brings me to our 45s, there was also a juke box which being the seventies played 45s. They would change out old records for new ones, so Mama Mann gave us the old 45s which included today’s song. I miss those times at the drive in I consider myself blessed by those memories however I’m still the king of nothing.