Dear Flo,
Dear Flo,
I must really like you. This is hard work. I usually save my creative writing for my Christmas card, but I understand the spot you're in. My wife discovered QVC and now is impossible to buy for. Your brother can buy QVC, so what can you buy him? If he doesn't have it, he must not want it. That is why I think your gift idea is brilliant. You don't know any old stories about Jane, do you? Well anyway, let's get started.
I'm not sure how much I really remember about our vacations as little kids. The Kentucky Willis' would go to New Jersey one summer, the next year the NJ Willis' would head to the Bluegrass State. Either we were all black and white back then, or most of my memories were really from watching the old home movies. Anyway, we were all laughing and smiling all the time so it must have been fun. Either that or Bruce was a very good actor at a very young age.
The first thing that I am sure that I remember was probably around 1963 or 64. It was summer vacation in Louisville and Bruce and family were visiting. Bruce and I spent most of the time at Stonestreet Elementary School. During the summer, they ran a program that was known as "Recreation". Now maybe it had a fancier name, but to us it was "Recreation". We would go there in the morning and spend most of the day. There were games and arts & crafts and all sorts of fun things to keep eight- and nine-year-olds busy. What I remember is the arts & crafts stuff. We painted a bunch of plaster things for our parents. Important stuff, like ashtrays and paperweights. We found out that at the end of the week, there would be a contest. Our art would be judged and prizes awarded. They did the judging after they closed on Friday. Saturday was the day that Uncle Dave had planned to leave, so I volunteered to pick up the works of art and have mom ship them to Bruce the next week. I went to the school Monday morning. To my horror, all of Bruce's plaster junk was covered with ribbons. Ribbons everywhere! And my plastercraft treasures were only adorned with dust! A travesty. A sham! My stuff was much better and besides, he was a foreigner. What about my home court advantage? This was quite a blow at such a young age. I guess mom sent the stuff the next week and can also imagine that that plaster ashtray of his, complete with the blue ribbon, is sitting on Aunt Marlene's mantle right now, next to his all his Golden Globe awards. Perhaps this is what drove me to spend 4 years of college studying art. Isn't it strange what odd little bits of information stay lodged in your brain?
My first memories of New Jersey. These memories are in color, so they must be real. The ponies across the street from the house. The shop next door. And all the people. All sorts of cousins everywhere you looked. At the time, I really didn't know who belonged to whom, or how we were all related. From somewhere back in my brain, I remember going to see my grandfather, Pop Willis. I really don't remember him, but I remember the visit. He was at the top of some tall stairs in the shop. I just remember someone leading me up the stairs and I was scared. I guess it all turned out OK, I just don't remember any more than that. As I said before," Isn't it strange what odd little bits of information stay lodged in your brain?"
That concludes the young kid portion. From now till the end of this thing everybody is pretty much grown up. At least as grown up as a teenager can be.
I guess it must have been the summer of 1971 that Bruce came for an extended visit to Louisville. It was really a good time. Bruce and I were the same age and good friends, so it wasn't like I felt stuck with him for a month, although I'm not quite sure how he felt about it. He got to know a bunch of my friends that summer. Don Overmyer, Bruce Bohannon. Dave Emery and Randy Jones and Jethro and Dennis and others. And let's not forget the girls. Bruce was a bit shy, but I managed to get him to talk to a female or two. Let's see, there was Lynn and Jackie and Robin and Susan and Leta and Debbie and Judy and no wonder I said we had a good time! Let's start somewhere near the beginning.
We started the vacation in a cabin on Nolin Reservoir. Nice place in the country to water ski and to fish. We spent the first day or so teaching Bruce to water-ski. He learned eventually and actually by the end of the week he looked like he had been skiing for at least a week. We also did some fishing. We weren't really good at this fishing thing, but did manage to catch a gold fish. Not any ordinary goldfish, but a monster. This guy had to weigh 10 pounds if he weighed an ounce. And he (I am assuming he was a he cause he didn't seem like a sissy fish to me) was as long as my arm. Not my little bitsy teenage arm from 1971, but the size of my 2000 manly arm. What a fish! I think we let it go…or maybe we dropped by accident, and it swam off into the sunset before we could get a picture of it. I don't remember that part of the story as well as I remembered the exciting manly parts. Speaking of manly things, it was really hot out there on the lake, so my mom let Bruce and I split a Budweiser. Just Bruce and I, not one sip for Nancy or Teresa.
Another thing that I remember about Nolin was the little country store down the road where we bought food for us and gas for the boat. It had a neat little one-syllable name, something like "Bud's" or "Al's". I remember the baloney. None of that fancy pre-sliced supermarket pre-packaged baloney for us. Big ole hunks of baloney, wrapped in brown paper. And this is where we got gas for the boat. The boat had two big red gas tanks, maybe 10 gallons each. And every time we went to the store, we filled them up. It probably cost 40 cents a gallon. When we got back to the cabin, Bruce and I had to carry them about 150 yards down the hill to the boat. After we got them in the boat and hooked up, we had to walk back up the hill and wash off the gas and oil that we spilled all over our legs. Remember Bruce?
Beck's pool. This is where the majority of the girls listed above enter the story. My friend Dennis was dating Lynn Beck and the Beck's had a swimming pool. I found that it was a good place to hang out because the Beck's were really nice people and the pool was always full of 14 and 15 year old girls in swimsuits. This is the same reason that I thought Cousin Bruce would enjoy visiting the Becks. I was right, although I gained more from the arrangement than Bruce did. I asked Lynn and Jackie to invite even more girls to their house to meet Bruce and one of the invitees ended up being my high school sweetheart for most of the next three years. That would be Robin, and I still wonder what ever happened to her. I hope she's happy. I don't believe Bruce actually ended up with a girlfriend from all his time in the water, but he certainly enjoyed himself.
The whole time Bruce was in Louisville, we never missed church on Sunday. It was fun because we had a big youth group with lots of kids, many of them of the female variety. One weekend we had a slumber party at church. We had these on a fairly regular basis. Probably 40 kids and 362 gallons of hormones. Now I'm not really sure if you are supposed to measure hormones by the gallon or by the pound, but we had a lot of them. The wild and crazy kind of hormones, whipped into a frenzy by the smell of Clearasil. What a time! This was back when we all had school girlfriends and church girlfriends. Each slumber party usually produced at least 4 or 5 little romances. Some lasted years, and ended in marriage, and some were good for about a week. Most were the 24-hour kind, but it was a fun 24 hours. We always started about 8 in the evening. The chaperones would try to keep us all in sight, but it was a big church and a lot of kids. About 2 or 3 am, the leaders would finally gather everybody in Fellowship Hall and force us to sleep. Boys on one end and the girls on the other, separated by a big divider curtain. You could always tell who was with whom between 8 and 2 by the way they lined up across from each other on either side of the curtain. You could slide your hand under the curtain and hold hands with your new love as you fell asleep. Of course, since you couldn't see under the curtain, you may have ended up holding the hand of some eighth grader's ugly next-door neighbor that she brought cause her mom thought it would be nice. It was a chance you had to take though. It was at this slumber party that Bruce met Judy. Had this slumber party taken place earlier in Bruce's visit, we may have spent more time at church and less in the Beck's pool.
It wasn't long after the slumber party that Bruce had to leave. I really don't remember how he got to Louisville, but he left in a car. As the vehicle was leaving our house, we started the Willis goodbye. This is when all the kids chase the car down the street, yelling and waving goodbye. If it's an old station wagon, we could keep up for about 1/4 of a mile. Anyway, this is when Bruce leans out of the window and shouts; "I stole 2 of your shirts!" Remember when I said that your mind stores odd information? I can describe those shirts to the button!
The next summer, Wayne got to go to New Jersey. All by himself, without the aid of parental guidance. Was the boy from Kentucky ready for three weeks "out East"? Please be aware that trends, fashions, music, lifestyles and life in general usually start out on the East and West coasts and work their way to the Midwest very slowly. Usually settling in Kentucky about 2 years later. I was about to learn a lot and do a lot of things for the first time.
I really don't remember in what order these events occurred, so I'll just rattle them off as they come to mind. I remember sitting around a campfire between the house and the shop. All sorts of Cousins and Uncles and neighborhood kids. A jar full of money was buried somewhere and the uncles were passing out hints and clues and riddles to help us find it. Kind of a great big treasure hunt for all the kids. We moved from the house to the apartment. The apartment was on the second floor, and I think my strong teenage back was one of the reasons that I was invited to New Jersey. After we finished moving, Uncle Dave gave Bruce and I beer, but I'm not supposed to tell my dad. So, don't! I remember Bruce and I being told to take out the garbage as we left one afternoon. The trash bin was all the way across the parking lot, so we put it in the back seat of Flo's boyfriend's car instead, although there is the distinct possibility that we did it just to be mean. Brothers and cousins are like that sometimes.
Bruce's musical tastes were a bit different than mine. We both liked the same basic typical popular stuff, such as Allman Bros. and Led Zeppelin, but he knew about a lot of other people that weren't well known in Louisville, like some guy named Springstein or Springsteen or something like that. Not sure if that guy ever caught on. We went to a concert in Philadelphia at The Spectrum. The bands were Dr. John, Wishbone Ash and maybe but I'm not sure J. Giels Band. This was my first official rock concert. I really enjoyed what little that I remembered of it. I did a few other things for the first time that evening. Well, maybe the second time.
The summer I was in NJ happened to be very hot and nasty. About 150 degrees and 120% humidity. Bruce had a summer job working at the Howard Johnson's Motel. This is the source of one of my all-time favorite stories that I tell on myself on a fairly regular basis. We went out there one night to party with a few of his friends and co-workers. We hung out at the pool and in the laundry room for most of the evening. As we were leaving, I grabbed a handful of "moist towelettes" from off the maid's cart. As we went driving through the dark country night, it was getting rather hot in the backseat of what I think might have been an old Falcon. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a handy towelette to wipe the dirt and grime and sweat from my face. It refreshed for a second, but then my face began to tighten up. What was going on? My face felt funny. As we pulled into a service station to buy some gas and steal a quart of oil, there was finally enough light to read the little package in my hand. It wasn't one of those little towelettes like Colonel Sanders always gave you to clean the chicken grease off your hands. No sir, this was a little towelette for shining your shoes! I had just applied a coat of shoe polish to my face. No wonder it felt funny. My heart stopped. A mirror. I had to look in a mirror and see the disaster. What were Bruce's friends going to think about his cousin if they realized that his idea of having fun was going out on the town made up in "black face"? Luckily the good people of HoJo's had sense enough to provide the shoe polish in "neutral" I quickly excused myself and scrubbed my face with gas station restroom soap for 5 minutes.
We did other things that summer. We went swimming in a quarry and shopping at a place called Cow Town. Saw a production of "The Fantastics", complete with dates. I don't remember the name or the face of the girl that I was with. I think that is because good-looking girls usually hang around with girls that aren't so pretty, so that the good-looking ones look that much better. Bruce was dating the good-looking one and I got the other. Of course, there is the possibility that they were thinking the same thing, but don't let it worry you Bruce. You have a fine personality.
I really don't remember much else. I mean it was 30 years ago. Damn, 30 years.
It was a few years before I would see Bruce again. We wrote stupid letters to each other a few times and even phoned a couple. The next time I saw Bruce was in November of 1973. Marky was getting married, and Bruce was in Louisville for the wedding. He drove to Bloomington, Indiana to pick me up at IU and take me home. I decided at the time that if I left my suit at school, Mom would insist that I go out and buy new clothes for the wedding. I was wrong. Mom did care what I looked like at my sister’s wedding but told me I was crazy to think I was getting a new suit and then told me I had better come up with something quickly. Bruce and I drove around to all my old friends' houses, begging articles of wedding clothes. I sure look stupid in my sister’s wedding photos.
The years passed. We wrote and called every now and then. I ended up married and in Indianapolis, and Bruce was in New York. Around Christmas in 79, I had a chance to go to New Jersey on business. I set it up to stay in NYC with Bruce for a couple of days after the business stuff was done. He met me an hour or so late at the airport. We took a bus straight to Montclair to do a little partying with his old college theatre buddies. I must have looked pretty confident, strolling into a party with a suitcase in my hand. We may have stayed there that night. The next day, we went to Bruce's apartment. It was on the top floor of an old building. All of the modern conveniences that a person could ever use. Of course they were all in the same room. An interesting place in a unique neighborhood. How I enjoyed watching the local merchants ply their trade on the street corners 24 hours a day. I must admit that the boy from the Midwest, though I had graduated from Kentucky to Indiana, was out of his element. The second night there, Bruce and I went to a small club. We drank a little and Bruce got up and played with the band. On the way home, around 1am or so, we approach a group of guys sitting out in front of a building. Visions of West Side Story danced through my head! A real gang. All the nasty stuff I had heard about New York was starting to ring true. They were going to say something; we would ignore them and walk a little faster. They would start to follow us; eventually we would start to run. The chase, the confrontation and then you know what happens. Well, they did say something. They said, "Hey Bruce, how's it going?" Bruce waved and answered, and I felt stupid but never said anything about it until now.
Not to sound like a final episode of "The Wonder Years", but that was the last time I saw Bruce before he became Bruce Willis. When things started happening, we recorded it all on VHS. Watching and cheering and bragging and telling friends to stay up late cause Bruce was going to be on Letterman that night. It's been a long time now, and Bruce Willis is known all over the world. But Cousin Bruce is my favorite.
That’s all,
Cousin Wayne