R and I attended grade school together at Mt. Pleasant, but I have no recollection of her or any of our interactions during that period, other than I thought she was beautiful, unique, and had more than a crush on her.

I do remember one interaction with her, our only one in fact, and it occurred a few years later in the fall of 1978. I was a ninth grader at Gardiner Junior High and and R was a ninth grader at Ogden Junior High, another school in the Oregon City district, the one where my father taught and coached. R must have moved at some point and thus we didn’t attend the same junior high school, a great blow to me.

In the next couple of years, I would see R when Gardiner traveled to Ogden for football and basketball games. I don’t think she was a cheerleader. But she was in the stands and perhaps we even said hello. All I know now is that she transfixed me and I wanted to meet her again. There was something in her look that was totally different than the look of the girls I was attracted to at Gardiner. I liked it and didn’t know why.

So I got out the phone book and dialed every number with her last name. It worked! We talked on the phone a couple times and she agreed to come see one of my football games. We were playing an afternoon game at Rex Putnam High School, not far from where she lived.

We massacred Rex Putnam and it turned out to be the best football game I ever played. I scored three touchdowns, one receiving, one running, and one on a long interception return.

R saw it all, sitting alone half way up the grandstands. On the sideline I waved to her and she waved back. I think we talked briefly after the game before the bus took the team back to Gardiner.

We talked that evening on the phone. She congratulated me on my performance and we set up a meeting at her house in Gladstone. She would be alone.

The next Saturday, I rode Tri-Met bus #33 down McLoughlin Blvd. to Roethe Road, where Wendy’s stood. I may have told my mother I was going to the library. I know I walked to the bus stop. It was a nice day.

I got off the bus and started walking up Roethe Road with the directions to her house. I really had no idea what was going to happen with R but wanted something to happen. It already had because here I was walking to her house and she was alone.

The directions were sound. I knocked on the front door. R opened it and I beheld a young woman with hair straight her to her ass, wearing flared blue jeans and a white macrame halter. She wore no makeup. She looked like an adult.

R led me downstairs to some kind of carpeted den full of trophies. She put on a 45 record, Dr Hook’s “Sharing the Night Together.” I think it played on repeat for the next half hour while we talked. What we talked about I no longer recall. Her voice was raspy, husky. It was unlike any female voice I had ever heard, then or now. It was a late night FM radio DJ voice and she 14.

She lit a cigarette. I’d never seen anyone smoke and I liked it. I think she offered me a drag but I declined. She smoked and we kissed. We made out and she took breaks to finish the cigarette. Then she lit another one. Dr Hook kept on playing.

There was more making out and some touching over the clothes here and there.

And then that was it. I said goodbye, walked out to catch the bus, and rode it back to Oregon City.

R and I never met again. I don’t think we even talked on the phone after the encounter. I barely remember seeing her in high school the next year. She might have dropped out.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

The uncontested facts surrounding The Rock Legend of Don Harrison are:

Don Harrison was his real name. The legend unfolded in a music classroom at Oregon City High School during the 1979-80 school year. I was a sophomore and Don Harrison a junior and we were enrolled in a Beginning Guitar course taught by a young female teacher who favored Peter Paul and Mary and the folky ”Blackbird” Beatles, not the “Get Back” rockers. There were approximately 12 other students in the course, all boys, and I have no recollection of any of them. Don is it. Don was rock. The legend involves Deep Purple’s 1973 rock classic “Smoke on the Water,” but not all of it. Only its famous riff, a riff so monumental, so colossal, holy, heavy duty, perhaps the greatest rock and roll riff of all time.

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Smoke on the water / fire in the sky

The Rock Legend of Don Harrison is: Don Harrison played the immortal riff from “Smoke on the Water” every class period of Beginning Guitar, he played it all period long, over and over, every day of the semester, and Don Harrison never missed a day of class. He played only that riff and nothing else. That was it. He didn’t know how to play anything else, or he wouldn’t play anything else.

If that isn’t a rock legend, then rock legends don’t exist.

Smoke on the water / fire in the sky

Let us return to my youth and I will I try to recall the details of The Rock Legend of Don Harrison with accuracy. It’s all a little hazy, imprecise, and I am going deep into the vortex of my memory to get the story right and set the record straight. Because what is a legend if it’s not true?

In 1979-80, I knew absolutely nothing about rock. I didn’t own any rock records. I suppose my first education in rock was watching Don Harrison live rock and roll right in front of me.

Don was a big dude, long haired, and wore faded Levis and threadbare rock t-shirts to school every day. I definitely remember a Ramones t-shirt, because I’d never heard of the Ramones. I can’t remember him ever wearing a coat or carrying a bag.

He hated disco and I recall many tirades against it. He once lavishly praised Rocket to Russia and I thought he was talking about American Cold War policy. Turns out it was a Ramones’ record released in 1977. How he heard about it in Oregon City in that era seems impossible to reconstruct. Did we have a record store in town then? No. Did Don find his way to Crystal Ship or Music Millennium or For What It’s Worth record shops? He must have.

I believe Don played an electric guitar, yes it was electric, but I don’t recall the model. He didn’t use an amp because the teacher wouldn’t allow it. The rest of us played cheap acoustic guitars provided by the school and sat up front for instruction. Don sat toward the back, on the highest row of a classroom constructed with risers for choral music. He towered over us as he riffed away—The One and Only Riff.

Smoke on the water / fire in the sky

You know, when I think about it, Don nailed that riff. How could he not. He only played it over 32,000 times that semester if my math is right, and it is because my stepfather, a former high school math teacher crunched the numbers:

A nine second riff

A 52-minute period

Five periods a week

Eighteen weeks in a semester

= over 32,000 times

Smoke on the water / fire in the sky

If that isn’t a world rock record of some kind, then I don’t know what a world rock record is.

The guitar course consisted of the teacher sitting on a stool, holding a guitar, showing us chords, chord progressions, finger picking patterns, and playing and singing songs we would try to learn and perform. I have no memory of what the teacher looked like but her name was Jeri, she insisted we call her by her first name, and she was incredibly kind and encouraging. She would hand out mimeographs of chords and songs and we would get to choose which songs to practice. For tests, individual students would retire with her to the office, which was glassed in on three sides, almost like a recording studio, and play a song for her. She did not require singing.

Occasionally, Jeri would have the class play a song together and attempt singing the lyrics, which never went over too well with high school boys. The only ones I remember are: “On Top of Old Smoky,” “America the Beautiful,” and “This Land is Your Land.”

Not very rock and roll and Don never joined us. He just sat by himself and riffed away, perhaps dreaming of being in a rock and roll band that played only one song, but played the living shit out of it.

Smoke on the water / fire in the sky

I have no idea how Jeri handled Don’s eccentricity and I recall no public confrontations between them. He certainly wasn’t a discipline problem and had perfect attendance, which is saying a lot for a rocker. I do recall him taking the semester final. We all watched.

Whether Don passed the course or not, who knows? What a dilemma for a teacher! I suspect Jeri flunked him. How could she not? I supposed if he had passed with a “D-” it would have dimmed The Legend. A D- minus is hardly rock and roll.

For my semester final, I played and sung Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville.” I think I earned a “B” for the course. I still can play the song by heart.

After the semester, I lost track of Don Harrison. I don’t recall ever seeing him again and we never had another class together.

Is Don alive to refute or corroborate this story? I don’t know and have conducted no research. I sense that any high school junior boy who played the “Smoke on the Water” riff 32,000 times in one semester is surely dead by now. If he’s alive and found Jesus or became a Yoga instructor, it would taint the legend. In his death, rock lives.

As for the riff, I never learned how to play it.

Smoke on the water / fire in the sky

I had another great coach in my youth: Big Jim Ritacco. He coached my summer baseball team for four years. He went by Big Jim and his son, Little Jim, was a friend and teammate who lived four houses away.

Big Jim was big, really big, and drove a tanker rig for Chevron or Mobil and always seemed to wear some shirt or cap with a Chevron or Mobil logo. He must have organized the team and a few other fathers pitched in to help. Our home field was the hard pan diamond at Mt Pleasant. I played second base and pitched. I was the lead off batter and hit left handed but threw right handed. If truth be told, I never cared for baseball as a player. Too much standing around and the uniforms were uncool.

I remember very little about my baseball career except I was pretty good and our team was pretty bad. I think we had one winning season and other teams routinely kicked our ass with football-like scores of 35-3 or 21-0. This was long before the 10-rule mercy rule.

None of that losing really mattered because it never mattered to Big Jim. He never yelled. He never got down on his players. He never let us get down on teammates. He never worked the officials. He never swore. Everyone played whether the game was on the line or not (it usually wasn’t) and that included a girl on our team who was so weak and uncoordinated she could not swing a bat completely around or throw to first base if she fielded a grounder playing second base. Big Jim stuck her in right field and treated her like a daughter. I’ll never forget one opposing player ripping a shot over her head. It kept rolling, rolling and rolling, all the way to the school, about a thousand feet away. She retrieved the ball and then threw it toward the infield…it went 30 yards or so and she jogged to it, picked up, and threw it again. This went on for what seemed like forever until I, playing second base, trotted out to meet her, picked up the ball, and winged it to the catcher.

After we retired the side, Big Jim took the center fielder under his arm on the bench and told him he was supposed to be her cutoff man and he had let his teammate down. He told him to apologize to her. He did. This was the mid 70s.

Big Jim clapped and encouraged, he cracked jokes. After every game, he bought us all ice cream at Dairy Queen, A & W or some other joint, and paid for it himself with a fat roll from his pocket. He was one of the most supremely kind men I ever met and later remembered his coaching style (along with Doug Bansch’s) when I got into coaching football, basketball and tennis at various elementary, junior high and high schools.

My baseball career ended in junior high and I lost contact with Big Jim. That is, until one day, toward the end of my ninth grade year, I was hanging with Little Jim at his house when Big Jim showed. He told me he was umpiring baseball for kids and wanted to know if I was interested in becoming an umpire for the upcoming summer season. It paid 13 or 14 bucks a game. I said I was interested. He tossed me a rule book, told me to read it, and that I had to take a written test over the basic rules and procedures. If I passed, he’d take me up to the diamond, guide me through the process, then I would be on my own, a single teenager, in effect, supervising adults. I had to buy my own equipment and uniform, but the gig came with a patch. A patch!

And that was how I became a baseball umpire for four summers. It was the only official job I ever held growing up. Other Pioneers were slinging fast food or working retail; I was calling balls and strikes three or four times a week and some tournament games on weekends.

I could easily write a book about those umpiring days, but two high (low) lights will suffice here: 1) I had to eject a coach who was profanely berating his own kid, who happened to be pitching at the time. The coach also happened to be my former grade school principal! ; 2) I walked off the field in the fourth or fifth inning when parents in the stands, from both teams, all obviously drunk, were insulting one another and threatening to fight. I asked both coaches to get their sides under control or I was leaving. I think I even told the coach of the home team that he would be forfeiting the game because of an obscure provision in the rule book, something about public safety. (I knew the rule book!). Both coaches failed in settling down the mob and I went over to the head scorekeeper, signed the book as a forfeit, walked to my Dasher, and drove away. I called Big Jim when I got home and I swear he was prepared to drive up to Mt. Pleasant and kick someone’s drunken ass.

Consider this dynamic. I was a teenager in charge of adults, highly competitive adults, and in charge of them in a public arena where everyone was watching and their kids’ pride was at stake, not to mention an American male’s ego and sense of self worth.

It was a unique way for a kid to study the adult human condition while also interacting with it in split second moments that required instant, informed judgments. In retrospect, I think it might have been superb preparation for becoming a writer or at least how not to suck as an adult.

From my senior year journal:

9-15-81

I can say with all complete honesty that I hope Oregon City loses every football game they play. Why do I have this feeling? There are numerous reasons.

1. The value of football at this school is blown way out of proportion.
2. The administration in this school bends over backward to promote spirit. While this in itself is not bad, it’s all the bastards do.
3. Every other activity is overshadowed.
4. If you don’t belong to the “crowd” you are labeled an eccentric.
5. Many more.

I had a love-hate relationship with football in my Oregon City youth. It went from sheer joy during the grade school years, to something more competitive and somewhat sinister in junior high, and finally, the target of my hostility in high school. Actually it wasn’t football’s fault. It was the people who ran football. But not at first.

Doug Bansch, my fifth and sixth grade flag football coach at Mt. Pleasant Elementary was the best and kindest football coach I ever had. We lost one game in two years. Our team scored at will running the pro-set, full house T, I, run-and-shoot, and shotgun offensive formations, all color-coded with options for the quarterback to call audibles. We ran a dozen gadget plays. We shifted, motioned, and executed seamless walls on punt and kickoff returns. We were virtually never penalized. Bansch used to bewilder opposing coaches with the highly unconventional ploy of occasionally repeating a successful gadget play—on the very next down or offensive series if we hadn’t already scored using it. I used the same strategy when I coached seventh grade football and my team executed Bansch’s ingenious tight end reverse, a play that scored almost every time I called it.

Even though I didn’t quarterback my grade school team, I was the team leader, and Bansch somehow understood I possessed the uncanny ability to design successful offensive plays on the spot. I knew this to be second nature because I’d been doing it since I first gathered into a sandlot football huddle and no else spoke up. But doing it in an actual refereed game was something else altogether. Thus, it was quite unexpected during the course of a close game well into the fourth quarter, as our offense drove down the field, when Bansch sent in a runner who told the huddle, “Mr. Bansch said let Matt design a play.” I did, and a halfback option pass run to our left, thrown right handed by our fullback, netted 25 yards.

That constituted blind faith in a young player by a young coach and I always remembered it. But even more memorable, was when Bansch accorded me his highest honor by entrusting me with the ultimate pre-game responsibility. One day after practice in my second season playing for him, he took me aside and announced my new job was to chalk the field before every game. He then dumped a bag of lime in a roller and showed me how to do it.

Bansch taught me a lot of football but more about sportsmanship. Other coaches taught me football but very little about sportsmanship. It’s a strange thing as a kid to see an adult running up the score on another team. I had coach in junior high who was particularly notorious for doing that, and once ran up the score on my father-coached team at a crosstown rival. I scored three touchdowns in that game, against my Old Man! We beat him 50-0. On one of the touchdowns, I ran right past him on the sideline and sort of nodded in apology.

There was the kid on my junior high football team, with a locker in the locker room next to mine, who lived in a chicken shack on his family’s egg farm, and smelled worse than any other human being I have ever smelled, who never talked about girls, but only about trapping beavers and other small woodland creatures. He was an offensive lineman with no cleats who practiced in worn suede shoes that I now recognize as Hush Puppies.

I am ashamed of my participation in bullying a player on my eighth grade football team. He was too poor to afford cleats and played in hand-me down black loafers! This bullying was aided and abetted by a coach. He made the kid hold up the blocking dummy almost the entire practice and absorb huge hit after hit. He never quit and I think he made one special teams tackle all season.

I quit playing organized football my sophomore year in high school. I broke my ankle in a JV game and that was it. A short time later, I started writing a novel about my high school football experience. I never finished it and don’t think it had a title. This fragment was lost decades ago, but it had a Holden Caufield kind of narrator, a defensive back, who loathed everything associated with high school football, except for the actual playing of the game and the chess of being a smart defensive back and trying to outguess the opposition quarterback. I got about 25 pages into it before abandoning the idea. I wish I could read it today.

Bank shots! What is there about a deep shot that kisses the glass so perfectly that it ricochets through the rim and hangs the net in a peculiar sideways fashion? It’s a work of athletic art. Or was.

I must return to the Portland Trail Blazers of my youth and the last NBA player to ever wear white (or black) canvas Chuck Taylors in an NBA Championship series, Herm Gilliam, who was, naturally, a Portland Trail Blazer, who helped them improbably win the franchise’s only NBA title in 1977 by playing the game of his life in Game Two of the Western Conference Finals. He rained jumpers in against the sun-soaked LA Lakers and will never be forgotten in certain tiny quarters of Oregon history as long as I’m alive and remembering the immortal radio announcer Bill Schonley’s calls describing Gilliam’s shake and bake, Red Hot and Rollin’ moves.

On Sunday, June 5, 1977 at approximately 2:02 pm, the Portland Trail Blazers defeated the Philadelphia 76ers 109-107 in Portland’s Memorial Coliseum to wrap up the franchise’s first (and still only) NBA title. I was a seventh grader.

Seventh grade marked a turning point in my life, the time when I began to cultivate a reclusive existence, a practice that has endured, in fact deepened in my adulthood. What it all meant back in 1976-77 is that I experienced every Blazer game, either on the radio or television, absent other humans. I lived with my older sister and mother but they were completely uninterested in professional basketball, as was my father, who lived less than a mile away. It was just me and Tex, our fat beagle, together in the garage, listening to Schonely’s calls on a dinky AM radio, or if a game was broadcast on television, which was rare in those days, watching it in the den.

I preferred the garage because on the vacant half of the two-car structure, I had constructed a Nerf basketball court, a 20-foot full court that replicated in precise detail, to scale, the hardwood floor of the Memorial Coliseum. And I mean right down to the Blazer logo. Masking tape marked the court’s boundaries, keys and free throw lines. Briefly, I considered using two discarded windowpanes for glass backboards, but attaching them securely to the wall proved problematic, potentially injurious, so I settled instead for plywood lifted from a nearby construction site. Two reshaped coat hangars served as rims and I persuaded my mother to buy apples packaged in plastic netting because the purchase provided the perfect material to fashion into nets that actually hung on the rim when a long range shot drilled through it. My mother also bought me Nerf balls by the dozen because Tex demonstrated a savage dislike for them if one rolled his way.

On my court, listening to the radio, I reenacted the games in real time to the best of my ability, also supplementing Schonely’s play-by-play with my color commentary. In the course of four quarters, I must have sprinted up and back the court 500 times and strung together a 10,000-word running monologue. I would address Schonely by his first name Bill and often repeat some of his magic phrases: climb the golden ladder, bingo, bango, bongo, lickety brindle up the middle, my o my, you’ve got to make your free throws, rip city!

Before each Blazer game, I laced up my low-cut white Pumas adorned with a black swirling logo. These were the same sleek leather sneakers I wore as the starting point guard for my basketball team. I distinctly remember the Pumas because they marked the first time I had not worn Chuck Taylor Converse All Stars while playing organized basketball.

As I played, I mimicked the Blazers’ trademark shots: Hollins’ ugly, lefty, sidearm jumpers, Lucas’ stutter-step, flat-trajectory, outside shots, Twardzik’s pinball, contorted drives down the lane, Steele’s throwback set shots, and the playground spin moves of Gilliam.

But it was Walton’s shots, the jump hooks, bank shots and dunks that I liked mimicking most of all. In particular, I remember simulating one of his playoff dunks, the now legendary jam in the face of Los Angeles Laker center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the fourth quarter of Game Three of the Western Conference Finals that quite obviously ranks as the greatest basket in franchise history. I can hear Schonely’s voice as if he made the call yesterday. Something about his urgent, heightening narration of the play must have unhinged me in some fashion since this image of Walton dunking over his arch rival, Portland over Los Angeles, Oregon over California, Tom McCall over Ronald Reagan—with the game on the line—has remained concrete and vivid in my mind ever since: Lucas bats the ball away, keeps it alive, over for Walton! Lucas with the steal! WALTON, OVER JABBAR! OH BABY, HE’S FOULED!

As I return to those long sweaty make-believe hours in the garage, I wonder what my mother must have thought of me, for surely she heard the running, the play-by-play commentary, the clapping, the yelling, the squeak of sneakers on concrete, the low noise of the cheering home crowd after a spectacular play when I ran over to the radio and turned up the volume. Not once did my mother ever interrupt me. No one ever did. Perhaps my mother sensed that the Blazers were my best friends and we were playing hard and well together.

The Blazers won it all that Sunday afternoon and the media quickly spread the news that our heroes would be honored the following day, and just as quickly, people devised hooky plans to attend. In what was then and still remains the largest public gathering in Oregon history, an estimated 250,000 fans swarmed downtown streets and rooftops to celebrate the championship by watching a parade of players, coaches, their wives or girlfriends and kids that began at Union Station and culminated with a rally at Terry Shrunk Plaza.

But I did not join the throng that day. That Monday happened to be one of the last days of school and for some reason, strictly my own, certainly not my mother’s, I chose not to ride a Tri-Met bus with some friends to witness the spectacle. As I recall, back at Gardiner Junior High, only two out of my regular six teachers and half the students showed up. I remember sitting in half-empty rooms filling out worksheets and viewing filmstrips, doubtless fantasizing about the downtown celebration.

We did not watch the parade on television at Gardiner, and I’m unsure if it was even broadcast. That evening, I viewed a few clips of the parade and rally on the local news and that was it.