Rethinking Mexico

 

There is that first time that you go to Mexico. You get off of the plane full of anticipation. Some of your fellow travellers have changed into shorts in the plane washroom. You have been forewarned about responding to anyone at the airport trying to sell you something or trying to redirect you. You make your way out of the airport and start searching for the bus that will take you to your destination, most likely an all-inclusive resort. Once out of the airport you spot the palm trees right away and immediately are aware of the warm tropical temperature. This is sure going to beat the hell out of the frigid cold back home in most of Canada. You can’t wait to get to the beach.

Everyone is in great spirits. You recognize some people from the plane who are going to be on the same bus as you. It always takes some time for the bus to leave the airport. Sometimes the bus driver and a cohort or two will try and sell you a beer for 3 bucks a pop before you are on your way. If you are really observant you might notice a crucifix or rosary beads hanging by the bus driver’s seat. A man in a coloured tee shirt (red for Air Canada) makes a few announcements to the bus passengers after everyone has been accounted for as the bus finally pulls away from the airport. He tells you of some of the dos and don’ts in Mexico.

You try to get the lay of the land as you peer out of the bus window. You quickly realize that you are indeed in a third world country. You see rundown buildings, some of which look like they were never completed. You see rebar sticking out of the roofs.  Often these buildings house restaurants that never seem to be very busy. There are no grass lawns because of the dry climate. Locally owned vehicles are often secured behind metal fences. Mounds of dirt can be seen along the roads, giving the appearance that someone just dumped the dirt there and abandoned it. You may well come to the conclusion that most of the land in the area is of little value including the prospect of growing anything on it. You get the distinct feeling that there is a lot of poverty in Mexico.

But this is not your problem. You are here on vacation. Eventually the bus pulls up to the resort you will be staying at. The reception area is always enormous. Big is meant to impress you and your fellow travellers from north of the border. People have come from all over the US and Canada to get some rays and to forget about the snowstorms and digging out their driveways. It seems that in this tropical paradise there are 2 Canadians for every 1 American.

You check in and are offered some kind of colourful looking watered down cocktail. You can’t wait to get to your room and slip your sandals on. The room turns out to be better than you might have expected. They are usually quite large. Now it is time to check the place out. There is usually a really large pool, often contoured with a bridge. There is also a smaller “adult” pool nearby. You wander passed the pools to the beach. Most Canadians live nowhere near a beach and just being on any beach in the tropics in the dead of winter is part of the dream. You’re here. You made it. It is time to relax and enjoy.

You find your way to the large dining room. All the meals are buffet style. As you are led to your seats by the hostess you notice that the other guests have varying degrees of being exposed to the sun. Some are beet red. If food is your thing there is plenty of it. It is hard not to notice rather the number of rather large people with loaded plates waddling back to their tables. Being overweight is almost the norm at Mexican all-inclusives. To some the buffet is an all you can eat place. More discerning eaters look for the fresh fruit and salads. A little bit of cilantro goes a long way. Mexican cooks seem to take delight in torturing meat cuts. 

If it is your first time in Mexico you are probably going to let the minor annoyances slide a bit. After all this is a different country. You learn very quickly that you should get your pool towels early so you can reserve one of the more choice spots by the pools. Sometime around 11 a.m. the music starts. Usually it is some kind of fast paced techno stuff. A couple of things some of the poolside disk jockeys have as part of their routine is the Looney Tunes cartoon theme and the strange “ooah ooh” exclamation. I’m not sure if the “ooah ooh” is meant to startle or as encouragement to get in a party mode.

After a day or two of lounging around the pool and baking yourselves, you decide to venture into the downtown core of the city and get a feel for how the locals live. You notice that the sidewalks are higher than back home and you have to watch your step when you get to a curb. The high sidewalks were built to direct flood waters during the rainy season. You are accosted relentlessly as you walk towards downtown with offers to look at condos, fishing trips, or restaurant coupons. Store owners try to convince you to come on in. All the while on your walk you can smell car exhaust and you hear a lot of cars honking their horns. Not exactly peace and tranquility.

You decide to check out the Catholic Church with the huge steeple. Often this is where beggars with missing limbs like to hang out. Not quite an uplifting sight. You know enough to stay away from street food as our northern bodies are not immune to what may be in some of the ingredients. You quickly realize that almost every small shop is selling the same stuff as every other small or big shop. You are hard pressed to not want to bring home a blanket with the Green Bay Packers logo on it. Mexican straw cowboy hats are quite popular for some who like to hang around outdoor bars.

Back at the resort you venture out past the pools to the beach. To actually get to the water you have to get by the poor people dressed in white who are hawking everything from jewelry to mini parachutes. These poor folks stand out in the hot sun for hours on end hoping to take home a few bucks from a day of pleading for attention with “touristos” who mostly want nothing to do with them.

You decide that you would like to explore a bit more, have an “experience” or two. Deep sea fishing usually costs an arm and a leg and what would you do with the fish if you caught one? Taking in the Mayan ruins is well worth it but you can usually get to these destinations for a lot less by using public transportation instead of being part of an organized tour. Organized tours often include stops at jewelry stores and other places you hadn’t planned to visit.

You might consider swimming with the dolphins as a once in a lifetime experience. You pretty well have to do a booze cruise or a sunset cruise at least once when in Mexico. There are some other off the wall adventures to be had like a camel ride in the desert. Linda went on one of these where the tourists were not allowed to take their own pictures of the camels but were welcome to purchase photos taken by the tour company.

Booze Cruise Cabo San Lucas

The First Few Times In Mexico

Most Canadian and American tourists seem to end up in either Puerto Vallarta or Mazatlan on one of their first trips to Mexico. Both cities have beaches that are nothing to write home about. If snorkeling is on your list of to do things, forget about it at these destinations. For all intents and purposes you are smack in the middle of a huge tourist trap.

Puerto Vallarta

Mazatlan

A lot about visiting Mexico is about what age you are. If you are single and in your twenties getting pissed in some nightclub in Cancun during spring break or getting wasted in Sammy Haggar’s Cabo Wabo in Cabo San Lucas could be a blast. You kind of look like a bit of an idiot with arrested development if you are still hanging out in these places in your forties.

Cabo Wabo Cabo San Lucas

There are family friendly resorts that seem to work and it can be a lot of fun to enjoy the tropics with your kids. All-iclusives are a good deal for families as dining out for four or more can be quite expensive.

My experiences tell me that most who travel from Canada and the US to Mexico in the wintertime are usually over 50 years of age. Disco until dawn is usually not on their radar. In fact Mexico is crawling with Gringo tourists who are passed 60 years in age. Most are fat. There I said it! Most are well past the point of giving a shit what they look like. They just yank off that XXL tee shirt and let it all hang out by the pool. The one thing they know is that there is always somebody a bit fatter a few chairs away. I could lose a few pounds myself.

If you are retired and live somewhere like Red Deer, Alberta, Toronto, or Northern Ontario you might start thinking after a few visits to Mexico that you could handle several months in the wintertime of sunshine every day and not freezing your ass off. You could get a big hat and stay in the shade as much as possible so your old skin doesn’t wrinkle from the sun and avoid getting skin cancer. Somehere there has to be some small town away from the tourist areas that you could while away your remaining winters? What if?

There Is Always A Trade

I have to confess that I have never really spent any time in one of those small places in Mexico that some Canadian tourists rave about. The closest I came was renting a condo on a golf course once in Mazatlan where we had to buy our own food. The main drag was very busy and the beach sucked so I ticked Mazatlan off as somewhere I never wanted to back to. We did find a good rib place for dinner but that wasn’t enough to cut it. A few days ago a Mexican billionaire drug king pin was arrested in Mazatlan.

Over the last several years we kind of settled on Cabo San Jose about 45 minutes up the road from Cabo San Lucas. Between Linda and I we have been to Cabo San Jose 9 times in the past several years. One thing we really liked about the area was the long white sandy beach. Up until our last trip we would spend a day in Cabo San Lucas as a change of pace and walk along the waterfront with the huge crowds, often people from the cruise ships. It is a pretty town with a lot going on. We would take the “local” bus to Cabo which cost us under two bucks each. We would stop somewhere and grab some lunch.

Cabo San Lucas

Cabo San Lucas

Cabo San Lucas

 

Cabo San Jose

Cabo San Jose

Cabo San Jose

Cabo San Jose

Back in Cabo San Jose we would usually spend part of a day walking back and forth to the village. There really isn’t much there other than shops selling Mexican souvenir junk but the walks got us away from our hotel for a while. We would also walk up to a giant Mexican supermarket close by and pick up some sun tan oil or something else we might need. We would grab a Starbuck’s coffee next door. You might say we kind of had a routine.

After this last trip and coming down with a cold I got to rethinking our visits to Mexico and whether the whole deal was worth it. I’ve been there about 15 times now. I’ve known for some time that spending a whole winter in Mexico is simply not my cup of tea. I like where we live on Vancouver Island a way lot more than frying day after day in the sun in Mexico.

#1 Most Mexican people in resort areas could give a rat’s ass about tourists. We are simply marks that they can try to extract cash from. Try taking local bus transportation and you will notice right away that there aren’t many smiling local faces on board. On our last trip I bought a Bob Marley tee shirt. The vendor stuffed a sun faded tee shirt in the bag which he had substituted for the one he had shown us. Luckily we took the tee shirt out of the bag and discovered it was faded before leaving.

#2 Mexican food just sucks. At resorts it is horrible. It kind of kills any anticipation of enjoying a good meal. Meals are something one should enjoy on vacation.

#3 You kind of have to wonder a bit about a place where you have to drink bottled water. This includes brushing your teeth.

#4 If you have ever ordered a drink at one of those thatch covered bars by the pool and looked over the bar you just might notice how unsanitary the whole deal is. Pretty well everything behind the bar is a mess with things thrown all over the place. The drinks are poured sloppily and the liquor is watered down. Nothing ever seems to get cleaned up. There is no charge for the fruit flies.

#5 If you want to watch TV in your room you are stuck with mostly Mexican stations with lots of yelling in the TV ads. Without a laptop you are pretty well out of the loop as to what is happening back home.

#6 Mexican stage shows are mostly boring. Seeing one is more than enough. You also know the performers are being paid peanuts. 12 guitars is not better than one when the players hardly have a clue about how to play their instruments.

#7 Your hotel person from the airline you took is often full of shit and tries to direct you to places he gets a kick back on. On our last trip we were told to ignore time share people in the hotel. What are they doing in a privately owned hotel in the first place?

#8 At one resort we went to there was construction going on all day until 6 in the evening. On our last trip we had to get our room changed because they were shellacking hotel furniture below us and the fumes were coming into our room.

#9 At the end of your trip you always seem to be waiting for hours in the airport before you can go home but they still get one last kick at the can by selling you a slice of pizza for 10 bucks. On our last flight home the plane was delayed for hours because of the shortage of one oxygen bottle. 23 people had to volunteer to stay another day before the plane could leave. We weren’t one of them.

At this point in our lives we don’t care to ever go to Mexico again. It is one of those been there, done that kind of things. The history of the country is interesting but so much of the touristy stuff is just fake.

When we were leaving Vancouver for Mexico we ran into a couple from Campbell River, BC in their mid-sixties. They were about to go to Panama with no hotel reservations and just travel around the countryside. We admired their adventurous spirit but we know that’s not us. We are well beyond staying in 3^rd rate hotels in a 3^rd world country.

We had originally planned to go to Hawaii this year but thought it could get pricey with having to eat in restaurants and renting a car. We also considered Cuba but the best hotels are quite pricey and nobody who comes back from there raves about the food.

So what is the answer?

Next winter we plan to fly to San Antonio and rent a car. We will visit Austin and Padre Island. We can do it all for about the same price as going to Mexico. Sounds like a plan.

And….what’s the deal with Corona beer? You can stick a slice of lime in the bottle but it still isn’t beer to anyone with any taste buds.

Adios Mexico!

Mexican camel?

 

Those High School Dances 1962-1964

Was it that long ago?

If the 1960s ever come up in a conversation these days most people tend to think about the Beatles and the British invasion, long hair, bell bottom pants, the war in Viet Nam, peace marches and student protests, LSD and pot, the assassinations of JFK, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King. Other than the JFK assassination most of this stuff happened after 1965. The Beatles may have turned up in North America in February of 1964 and their music may have been different than what we were used to but their songs were not about social commentary at the time and lyrically not much different than what the US music industry was pumping out.

If you were a baby boomer born a few years after the Second World War you found yourself in your last 2 years of high school somewhere between 1961 and 1965. It was in those last 2 years that many of us went to Friday night high school dances. By 1961 most parents had loosened up a bit compared to the ultra-conservative 1950s when many they often looked at rock and roll as some kind of twisted evil foisted upon their sons and daughters. Times were slowly changing and some parents even got into doing the twist.

As baby boomers we had grown up with rock and roll, sort of. For every song like Yakety Yak or Runaway there seemed to be an equal amount of The Lazy Hazy Days of Summer and Moon River on the Hit Parade. There were only certain parts of the day when we could find rock and roll on the radio, after school, and in the evenings.

Before we ever went to our first high school dance many of us had checked out Dick Clark’s American Bandstand on after school TV. None of us thought that we were being manipulated back then. I recently watched a clip on YouTube that was about Dick Clark’s “rate a record” segment. A guy and a gal got to rate 2 new songs from 35% to 98% as to how much they liked the tunes. Saying something “sucked” was just not polite back then I guess. The first song was forgettable but got high marks by both raters. The 2^nd song was by Frankie Lane and was about a cowboy called Rango. It might as well have been “Rawhide”. The kids couldn’t dance to it. Still one of the raters thought it might be a hit. After this bit the studio audience hit the dance floor again and this time the tune was Mame played by Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass. “You coaxed the blues right out of the horn….Mame.” Yuck! Good old Dick was selling us out. This wasn’t rock and roll.

American Bandstand

Elvis finished his hitch in the US army and was making one crappy movie after another. The new Elvis didn’t have side burns anymore, the greasy hair was gone, and swinging his pelvis around was a thing of the past.

If we went to the movies we could see clean cut Frankie Avalon and large chested Annette Funnicello in beach movies with harmless biker type guys or the almost 40 year old virgin Doris Day being chased after by Rock Hudson.

Frankie & Annette

You might say we were living in a sexless world when it came to entertainment. But what did we know? As teenagers we weren’t in control. If you were a guy about the closest you could get to sex was slow dancing and feeling a couple of bumps through a sweater pressed against your chest. Sexual activity was fairly limited in high school back then. The pill was still a few years away. One of the benefits of going steady for a guy is that just maybe you might get proficient at unhooking a bra but that was about the limit.

So there we were, inching our way past Mr. Puberty and getting an interest in the opposite sex. We were like ripened fruit. Some of us were in all boy classes that made girls our age seem only more distant. Going to a high school dance was like a ritual of arriving at some sort of maturity. Not totally being an adult but on the path. We kind of had to figure it all out for ourselves. There were no elders we could count on to tell us what was expected of us. Dancing was something foreign to most boys unless we had a sister who taught us some moves. If we had any kind of plan at all when we first went to our first dances it might be trying to look cool with the always available option of needling one another.

The gym in the school was where the dances usually happened. It was fairly dark in there with most of the light coming from the hallway. It took a second or two to adjust our eyes. Once in a while we would spot some guy or gal from our high school that we didn’t expect to see at a dance. This was a whole new deal. Most of us stuck fairly close to our friends.

I went to 2 high schools in Montreal when I was growing up, West Hill High and Westmount High. High school back then meant grades 8 through 11. After my first year at West Hill I was informed at the beginning of the following year that I was persona non grata (not welcomed) and that I would have to find another school that would take me. It is kind of a long story but I ended up in The Boys Home of Montreal (Weredale House) where I attended Westmount High for 2 years. I then returned to West hill for 1-1/2 years before dropping out altogether. The following are some remembrances of those high school dances long ago.

Westmount High

I went to 2-3 Friday night dances at Westmount High when I was 15. I think the school held them about once a month. As Weredale boys we were allowed to go home on the weekends on Saturday mornings so getting out of the institution for part of a Friday night was kind of a bonus. Many of the Weredale boys had 2 fears, the first being what would we do if some gal asked us to dance (we didn’t have a clue about dancing) and the second being what if some babe asked us where we lived. Explaining that we had come from dysfunctional families and weren’t really juvenile delinquents could be a mouthful.

Of the 3 dances I went to I think I danced with a girl once and she did the asking. The rest of my time was spent on the sidelines with classmates and other Weredale boys watching couples on the dance floor.

The style at the time for boys was tight continental pants (cuffless) with white socks. The pant bottoms were a couple of inches from the tops of our shoes. Michael Jackson later recreated this look. The girls wore flowing dresses that were a few inches below the knees. Sometimes the girls also wore sweaters with little buttons down the front.

There was one dance at Westmount High that I remember in particular. All of sudden the dance floor seemed to part and everyone gathered around to watch a twist contest. The twist as a dance was having a second go around. A few years earlier Chubby Checker had introduced it and he was back for an encore with “Lets Twist Again”.

One of the participants was a guy named Norman Walker who had recently left Weredale and gone off to work. The other guy’s name I think was Michael De Tomasso and I think he was also at Weredale at one time. Both guys were dressed in tight suits, the shiny kind, and both wore polished pointy Italian shoes. No detail as to their appearance had been ignored including their meticulously coiffed hair with just the right amount of Brylcreem or Vitalis.

Chubby Checker

The twist contest looked like a man-o a man-o kind of deal right out of West Side Story. Instead of one foot coming off the ground an inch or two these guys were twisting that one leg well above chest level. The crowd was enthralled. It was hard to pick a winner. And then….it was over as quickly as it had started. The guys wiped their foreheads off with handkerchiefs and let the crowd try to figure out what had just happened.

Some of the Weredale guys must have thought that it was a win for our team. A team we sometimes didn’t want to be identified with. Everyone in our class knew who the Weredale boys were. On this one night, for a few brief moments, we were represented by two guys who were….too cool for school.

The Hampstead Hops

Back in the 60s Hampstead was an upper middle class area that bordered on the district of N.D.G. which was middle class. N.D.G. is where I grew up. Some distance away from where I lived was Hampstead School. Although it was a primary school for some reason it had Friday night dances. It might have been because Hampstead didn’t have a high school of its own.

Because it wasn’t actually a high school it seemed to draw teenagers from various backgrounds including Catholics and Protestants who went to different high schools. I know that the dances were chaperoned but I can only vaguely remember a few parents at the dance ticket table.

On some Friday nights there was a live band up on the stage. They usually played for about a half an hour. My guess is most of the bands didn’t have a big repertoire of songs that they knew. The rest of the evening the music came from a record player hidden behind the stage curtains. I don’t remember any disk jockeys.

I have to say I was always impressed with the confidence some young guy my age could have to stand in front of a band and sing to an audience. Where did they learn how to do that and where did the other guys learn how to play guitars? One night the singer was a guy who had grown up a few blocks away from me. I think his name was Tommy Angel. Another singer I remember was a guy in a slick suit with a cane with a silver handle. There is only one tune that was sung that I can sort of remember…..”I like, I Iike the way you walk, I like, I like the way you talk….”

The gym and stage at Hampstead School

I was about 16 at the time. Some of the girls had discovered make-up including eye shadow and whatever that pinkish stuff was that they put on their faces. Beehive hairdos or a facsimile there-of were common. As at most high school kind of dances the girls were crowded in one side of the room and the boys on the opposite side. Some of us boys were too scared to ask a girl to dance. Getting shot down could travel around the gossip mill pretty quickly. Some of us had our first dance as the result of the Sadie Hawkin’s dance which was announced on the PA system. A Sadie Hawkin’s dance was where girls could ask a boy to dance without looking too forward.

It could get a bit uncomfortable if some girl tried to teach us some dance steps. We guys could see the eyeballs on us from the sidelines even in the darkened room. The waltz seemed the easiest of the dances and often it wasn’t the boys who were doing the leading. After a while the boys kind of got the hang of things a bit and with our new found talent our confidence grew. We got to a point where we could do the asking.

There wasn’t any marijuana around back then but some guys might have a beer or two before turning up at the dance. Good old Mr. Courage. Once in a while there would be a fight out on the grass near the parking lot. One Friday night a guy named Morely, who I had gone to grade school and high school with, wanted to fight me. I think he had had a few beers. I tried to avoid his request a few times but found myself kind of in a spot. I wasn’t sure about my chances. Physically I thought he was stronger than me. Luck was on my side and I ended up punching him around for a few minutes before he gave up.

There didn’t seem to be any question about girls liking guys who could dance and had some smooth moves. Although kids were doing the monkey and the twist the jitterbug was still the dance to do to most of the faster music. Some guys were smoother at the jitterbug than others. I remember a dude named John Curtis who had the jitterbug down pat. That twirl thing when you look the other way or when you stick your hands out waiting for the gal to grasp on to them.

Mostly I hung around with a group at West Hill and they would all turn up at the Hampstead Hop. I would also see other kids from West hill at the dances, some of them from my class. For a while the group expanded to include some girls that lived in Hampstead and went to private schools like The Study and Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramps. I went out with a girl from Hampstead for a month or so.. One night she invited me to a dance at the MAAA (The Montreal Amateur Athletic Association) in downtown Montreal. It was an old money kind of deal in that members of the MAAA were pretty well all wealthy. I remember we did the bunny hop from the ballroom into another large room and back. It was kind of surreal to me considering I had been living in The Boys Home of Montreal the year before.

I had a friend who met a Catholic girl at one of the Hampstead Hops. They sort of started to go out with one another before she had to tell him that she couldn’t see him anymore because he wasn’t Catholic. One night I met my own Catholic girl. She knocked my socks off. She lived with her mother and I think her dad had passed away. We went on a date to the movies one night and we had a great time but for some reason I never followed it up.

I don’t know if it just me but for some reason when I was younger and in my teens and early twenties something used to come over me when the fall weather appeared. There was some kind of adrenaline thing going on. My heart seemed to beat faster and there was some kind of anticipation. In some ways I thought I was in a trance and living partly in a fantasy.

I remember walking a gal named Debbie home one Friday night. It must have been about 20 blocks. She wasn’t my girlfriend but had asked me to walk with her as a favour as she didn’t want to walk in the dark by herself. We talked about a lot of things. What we wanted to do with our lives, her unhappy home life. I kind of felt like a young Jimmy Stewart. We seemed to pass the lamp posts in slow motion. Just two people sharing our thoughts unaware of where our lives would lead us.

The last song played at the Hampstead Hops or any of the other high school dances I went to for that matter was always a slow dance. If you weren’t dancing to the last dance chances were you weren’t walking anyone home. Often the last song at the Hampstead hops was something like Roy Orbison’s Blue Bayou or the Beach Boy’s In My Room.

The Beach Boys

Roy Orbison

In November of 1963 JFK was killed and it was like the air was let out of a balloon for a while. In February of 64 the Beatles turned up on the Ed Sullivan Show. We didn’t know it at the time but changes would be coming rapidly in the next few years. We were kind of witnesses to the last of an era of innocence.

 The Campus Club

Sometime around 1963 there was a teen club just off of Decarie Boulevard in Montreal called the Campus Club. A local radio disk jockey, I think his name was Bob Gillis, was one of the partners in the venture. My guess is like Dick Clark, Bob thought there were ways to make a buck off of teenagers. I think I went there twice and both times the place was packed. The building was pretty modern for the times and had a wall made of large rocks. I don’t remember any live music happening there. It seems to me that the admission was fairly steep and they charged a lot for a coke. You don’t get rich selling cokes and the Campus Club wasn’t around for long. A few years later the building became a mob owned joint called The White Elephant Pub.

Montreal West Town Hall

I only went to one dance at the Montreal West Town Hall and I didn’t stay long. The reason that that dance sticks in my mind is that I ran into a guy who was in my class in grade 4 or 5. His name was Wayne Simmonds (Simmons). In grade 5 he seemed bigger than most of the other kids. He also had a bit of a cruel streak. One day when he was sitting behind me he was scraping his shoe back and forth on the floor. I asked him what he was doing and he asked me to pick up a piece of metal off of the floor. Unbeknownst to me Wayne had been making the metal turn hot by pushing it back and forth with his shoe. I burned my hand when I tried to pick it up and he thought it was very funny.

As Wayne got older he developed a reputation as I guy who liked to scrap. He was certainly out of my league. A few weeks after seeing him at the Montreal West dance I learned that he had died in a car accident in a stolen Jaguar XKE. It struck me at the time that his short life was like some songs that were popular at the time, Dead Man’s Curve or Tell Laura I love Her.  Wayne died too fast and too soon.

Victoria Hall

Victoria Hall

A few guys I knew and I went to one dance at Victoria Hall in Westmount. When I was a kid my grandfather took me to a number of children’s plays and musicals that he directed at the same venue. The night of the dance there were only about 2 dozen people on attendance and we bailed after an hour or so. For some reason I can remember the song Sugar Shack being played.

West Hill High

I probably went to about ½ a dozen dances at West Hill High. I don’t recall those dances ever having bands. I do remember that some of the teachers were chaperones. The last dance I went to at West Hill was after I had quit school. I had an interesting chat with one of my former teachers. He didn’t give me a hard time for quitting school and wished me luck. I was going to need all the luck I could get in the next few years.

The gym at West Hill High

Those high school dances were only a part of our lives for a few brief years. What “sweet” years they were.

To remember the times you have to remember the music.

If you are around my age here is a bit of a refresher.

1962

Mash Potato Time – Dee Dee Sharp

The Loco-motion – Little Eva

Baby Its You – The Shirelles

Soldier Boy – The Shirelles

I Know – Barbara George

You Beat Me To The Punch – Mary Wells
 

The Wah Watusi – The Orlons

Duke Of Earl –Gene Chandler

Once Upon A Time – The Lettermen

Town Without Pity – Gene Pitney

What’d Your Name? – Don & Juan

Sherry - The Four Seasons

Bobby's Girl - Marcie Blane

 

 

Sherry –The Four Seasons

Twist And Shout - The Isley Brothers

You Belong To Me - The Duprees

Sealed With A Kiss - Bryan Hyland

Let's Dance - Chris Montez

Don't Hang Up -The Orlons

Up On The Roof - The Drifters


  

The Peppermint Twist - Joey Dee & the Starliters

Hey Baby – Bruce Channel
 

Dream Baby – Roy Orbison

All Alone Am I – Brenda Lee

Palisades Park – Freddy Cannon

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do – Neil Sedaka

Twistin The Night Away – Sam Cooke

 

 

 1963

Sugar Shack – Jimmy Gilmore and the Fireballs

The End Of The World – Skeeter Davis

I Will Follow Him – Peggy March

Blue On Blue – Bobby Vinton

Deep Purple – Nino Temp & April Stevens

Be My Baby – The Ronnettes

You Can’t Sit Down – The Dovells                                   

 

I f You Wanna Be Happy – Jimmy Soul

Popsicles, Icicles – The Murmaids

Louie, Louie – The Kingsmen

Talk To Me –Sunny & the Moonglows

Just One Look – Doris Troy

The Night Has A Thousand Eyes – Bobby Vee

  
                                                         

 
 

                                               

 In Dreams – Roy Orbison

Surf City – Jan & Dean

Denise – Randy and the Rainbows

Wipe Out – The Safaris

Easier Said Than Done – The Essex

Surfin U.S.A. –The Beachboys

Hello Stranger – Barbara Lewis

 Hey Paula – Paul & Paula

Two Faces Have I – Lou Christie

Sally Go Round The Roses – The Jaynetts

Then He Kissed Me – The Crystals

Its Mt Party – Lesley Gore

I’m Leaving It Up To You – Dale & Grace
 

Sukiyaki – Kyu Sakamoto

My Boyfriend’s Back – The Angels

Rhythm Of The Rain – The Cascades

Ruby Baby – Dion

Blue On Blue – Bobby Vinton




 1964

 

I Want To Hold Your Hand – The Beatles

Oh Pretty Woman – Roy Orbison

My Guy – Mary Wells

Do Wah Diddy Diddy – Manfred Mann

Look Homeward Angel - The Monarchs

 Dancing In The Street – Martha and the Vandellas

Under The Boardwalk – The Drifters

Chapel Of Love – The Dixie Cups

Suspicion – Terry Stafford

Glad All Over – The Dave Clark Five

Dawn Go Away – The Four Seasons
 

                                                          Bread And Butter – The Newbeats

Baby Love – The Supremes

My Boy Lollipop – Millie Small

Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying – Jerry and the Pacemakers

Do you Want To Know A Secret – The Beatles

Because – The Dave Clark Five

For You – Ricky Nelson

Leader Of The Pack – The Shangrilas

Surfin Bird – The Trashmen

What Kind Of Fool – The Tams

You Really Got Me – The Kinks

Needles And Pins – The Searchers

Walk Don’t Run 64 – The Ventures

She Loves You – The Beatles

Last Kiss – J. Frank Wilson

House Of The Rising Sun – The Animals

I Get Around – The Beachboys

She’s Not There – The Zombies

I Saw Her Standing There – The Beatles

Going Out Of My Head – Little Anthony and the Imperials