The Cranky Drummer

After Pop and Mom had listened to me bang on whatever I could get my hands on around the house and watched me play “air drums” for a couple of years, one day when I was around ten years old Pop brought me home a pair of drumsticks and a Ludwig model #354 gum-rubber practice pad (see catalog photo, above). The sticks were not even a matched pair — one was a Ludwig 2B model, the other was a Slingerland 5B model; they were quite different in weight, diameter, balance, and in shape near the tip — and they both had been well used by the time I took possession of them. As an adult I’ve often wondered where Pop got his hands on such a motley pair of sticks. (Maybe he won them in a poker game.) But when I was ten it didn’t matter — at last I had real drumsticks instead of wooden spoons and cutlery! And I worked out for hours on end with those sticks on that rubber pad, which I placed on an old wooden chair that had a stoutly-padded yellow vinyl seat cushion. With the practice pad as my snare d...

I met my first love when I was eight years old and my love for her has continued to burn in my heart right up through today. In fact, it has gotten stronger over the decades. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my whole life up till then. Her name was Gretsch . She had a very sexy pair of tom-toms and she wore a beautiful sky-blue pearl wrap. And of course, she belonged to another. When I was eight, most of my neighborhood friends had formed a Cub Scout den, and like any red-blooded eight-year old American boy, I didn’t want to be left out, so I had my folks sign me up. Although dressing up in the uniform was fun (we got to wear them to school on the days of our den meetings) and I enjoyed the boisterous den and pack meetings, ultimately I turned out to be poor scouting material because I was an overly-cautious kid (read: a chicken shit). And photographic evidence has subsequently revealed that I looked incredibly dorky in my blue Cub Scout uniform with the yellow nec...