NHL 95

The Becketts that adorned the wall above my closet door in early 1995.

Karl’s arrest is an interesting event. For one, I have talked with Karl about it, he, the main character of that story can’t tell me when it happened. He remembers it happening, he doesn’t have the mad cow that bad, but if I were to tell him it was in July, I guess he would just have to say, “I guess it could have been.” Which is only slightly crazy to me, for one I do get that people forget details, but the other half of my brain says, going to juvenile hall for the night, that memory and its details would probably stick.

Now luckily for Mr. Karl, There are some pretty solid leads in my memory of events to place his arrest at the first weekend in February. I think for some reason original I had this happening in between the NFC championship game between the Niners and Cowboys and the Super Bowl, but as I even stated in an earlier draft, the Super Bowl was on the 29th. No Karl was arrested on either February 4th or 5th, 1995. The exact day is murky to me, I think it is the 5th. If I am correct, Karl had a jazz band play-a-thon on Saturday as a fundraising event for the group at DHS. That night Marty and I came over, he was tired from playing Jazz all day, then the events we just went over ensued.

Some of that is probably rehashed, the important part for that story was that it was his mother’s birthday weekend, his folks were out of town, thus the whole series of events. Since it was his mother's birthday, that means hey look here, it’s my 17th birthday.

So, on what I believe was Sunday, February 5th, my parents stay home from church I believe so that Dad can help out with trying to rescue Karl from kid prison and because Marty, Chris and I woke them up at like 3 in the morning with tales of Karl being hauled away by the police, interrupting their sleep. Now I always have the weird caveat of me not remembering where Jake was this weekend, to be honest though I don’t remember where he was the weekend before either. But there is some weird memory I have of Dad doing all his calls in the office made out of Jake’s room after he moved out.

I just mention that in case somehow, I find it was later in the year, but nothing else matches up with that. For reasons I will get into, the NHL had a lockout that just ended in January, and the first game I watched after getting NHL 95 is listed on Hockey Reference as happening on Feb 12th. So, for Karl’s sake he can tell people with a pretty good assurance he was in kid slammer for the day of February 5th.

Fine, the meat of where we are going now. Mom, at home his Sunday oddly with the strange turn of events is now stuck with, Me, Marty, Chris M. and then eventually J.F. and at least two other friends that came over to hang out while the Karl watch was on. See, as things do, word spread of the event, probably through those of us connected with the event. Possibly Jake had a hand in this, it would make sense. Other than J.F. though I don’t remember who all came over. It is possible one of the bodies I remember in the front room was Jake and since the game I am about to pine on was an NHL game he just didn’t care or chime in on things.

Beyond that, I know Nate was stationed back at home on Karl’s parent watch, so interestingly I think Nik is one of the more likely candidates to be over to play video games and await the return of our newly hardened hero after his time in the slammer. But, yeah, we had this collection of boys on a weird Sunday and Mom drove a couple of us down to Woodland to whatever the video game boutique was called at that time, Funcoland, or Babbage’s, or some form of small video game chain that was in the process of being merged together into the GameStop brand.

What got be to pick out EA’s NHL ’95 as my birthday/Karl is a convict day present I don’t know, but it is what I picked. To be honest I think it was because it was a simple game, we could all play back at the house. And so with the game in town Mom drove us back to the house, baked goods and we started down the path of playing the SNES and NHL ‘95’s decent team building setup.

The team building aspect of the game is what actually took ahold of our group of on edge teen boys, well and one J.F. Once we got into the game most of the time was spent selecting a team to manage and then holding trades in the front room. I even remember having a notebook our to track player rating and trade conditions.

Because of the sheer fact that it was my game, I got first choice, and being 17, I looked for the team with the best player ratings, which happened to be the Detroit Redwings, and selected them. At the time I had no idea of who was really who on the team. I played some of NHL 93 I think it was, and the players were all jersey numbers in that, and for whatever reason I remember Trevor Linden was the player on the Canucks that I found and used to win games.

J.F. even sited something about Detroit’s early exit from the playoffs the year before to the San Jose Sharks as some reason I shouldn’t pick them. But to me, the most points meant the best trades I could make with everyone, so I ignored him.

Thus, I got invested in players named Yzerman and Fedorov. Both easy to pronounce now, but odd mouthfuls back then. As the fondness for building my team grew and the popularity of playing my games with everyone, by, what seems to be next Sunday I turned on ESPN, or maybe ESPN2, one of the two, too watch the game that night, which just so happened to be the Redwings versus the Los Angeles Kings.

Oh, what an interesting game to start our on. Now, before I get into why I do need to be a little honest, back in the late 1980s, 88 to be precise, during the heyday of my sports card collecting, that spring I got real into the NHL playoffs. I followed them, probably on ESPN again, every day. At that time, I was deep into Baseball of course with the whole card collecting thing, and my two baseball teams were the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. Well in and around this time the Boston Celtics were a dominant franchise, so I latched onto them. Thus, when I started watching the hockey playoffs that year, I got behind the Boston Bruins.

I got behind Ray Borque and Andy Moog and they became my team at that time. And they marched through the playoffs, which in Hockey are a season unto themselves. Interestingly one of the more outlandish things to happen during the playoffs happened that year, which I don’t remember, involving the Bruins and the opposing teams coach, in which the coach got suspended for a game. There are some amazing sound bites from that event, but I don’t remember the off-ice stuff, just cheering for the Bruins. I also think there was a game in the garden, where Boston played, where the lights or something went out. It was eventful.

So, when they got to the finals I was really invested. They met the Edmonton Oilers and lost. I was crushed. For some context, I am pretty sure this year in basketball, which I wasn’t that invested in, the Celtics lost some late into the playoff run, so I was on a little down note. But earlier in the year was the fabled game that the San Fransico 49ers lost to the Minnesota Vikings, a game the Niners were supposed to glide through on their way to winning it all. Making this lost for the Bruins seem even more sour.

See, at this point I am only ten years old. For the most part, especially in football, it seemed like my team, the good guys, always won. Now in the course of a few months the bad guys kept winning. So I did the reasonable thing and blamed the poster boy for the Edmonton Oilers, Wayne Gretsky. That of course is a name people know outside of hockey fandom. Some argue he is the best hockey player ever. I think that is a hard argument since his greatness is measured in scoring stats, but half the players on the ice job is not measured by scoring statistics so we already have a offense is best leaning bias. Plus, for me, in rational argument, think there might be some hockey intangibles that other players had in spades over him, a long with good scoring and then there is the era we are about to walk into here, the mid to late 1990s when the game changed and he wasn’t even the best scoring player in the league anymore.

And that is where we are. 1995, February 12th. My video game team in real life, the Red Wings are facing off against the Kings, who now house the Great One, Wayne Gretsky. Thanks to J.F. always adding that nickname when we were trading players around, my animosity had resurfaced. I had a reason to be invested even more in the game. What I watched was the first half or so of the game be dominated by Sergie Fedorov. There is that Russian name from earlier. It felt good.

Interestingly the game would end in a 4 to 4 tie. Kind of anti-climactic, but Fedorov, a guy who was rated at something like 99 points on my SNES version of him, scored the first four goals in a row of that game and just looked some much greater, than well, Wayne. I picked the right team.

Also, a spark was lit. I wasn’t just a weird little kid, Hockey was fun to watch, and I did the worst thing, I got invested in my SNES teams real life season. Beyond that, remember back in the 1980s, I said because of the sports card collecting I started picking teams to watch in all the major sports, well, now back into Hockey I started buying Hockey cards.

I think, and I could be wrong here. But I think that fire was lit by J.F. being, on occasion, a cartoon character we all lived with in our actual lives. When making all the teams one of his main goals was to get hockey legend Owen Nolan, which I say with some jest, although Nolan did have a decent career. However, at the time he was a young player and J.F.’s bro-crush on him was weird, like his basketball man crush on NBA legend Bobby Hurley.

In his pining about Owen Nolan, he had a weird way on saying something about having, or wanting and “Owen Nolan rookie card”, which was from one of the Upper Deck sets a few years prior. But it was his odd inflections that made it sound so ridiculous. It’s hard to explain, sometimes I just don’t think J.F. is a real person and all of us were just mildly hallucinating him in some form of mass hysteria of having someone who could always be more ridiculous than real life.

Man though did I for around the next year or so get into Hockey Cards. I bought them, I sorted them, I completed sets, I got on the internet, yup the old command prompt driven pre-Netscape internet and found hockey card usenet groups to find people making trades locally as to be able to complete said sets. I for a small time was all in on the hobby. It was doing this that got me familiar with all the teams of the era and players.

And boy was this my time. The mid and late 1990s was a transition time in hockey, in which teams started playing defense. Which I loved, but the sports media now calls the “dead puck era”. Sue me I liked the suspense of a defense winning championships, and the goals being earned. To hockey as a whole though they watched as starts like Gretsky went from 200-point seasons to sub 100 or lower.

The 1994 season, which as I said only started mid-January because of a lockout situation between the league and it’s players was one of the first to really show this new paradigm off. Those Red Wings, which a year prior scored a million points, one every game and then crashed in the first round of the playoffs to the bottom seeded San Jose Sharks. Those Wings with their amazing video game scores, instead of hitting a brick wall with the changes in the wind, actually were one of the first teams to change.

That loss the year before caused their coach to move a focus off these prolific scores they had, like Fedorov, and build a team with more of a chance to go all the way through the playoffs. And I got real behind this. While watching them win games that season I found out it had also been 45 years since Gordie Howe and the Wings had won the whole thing, so now I was invested in the idea I was watching sports history unfold too.

We barreled through the playoffs, losing only 2 games on the way to the Stanley Cup finals that year. I was stocked. All that stood in the way, the New Jersey Devils, which I defacto had gotten into, because, well they also switched to a new defensive scheme that was confounding the other division in the playoffs. I was pretty stoked. Then the Red Wings got swept and it wasn’t even competitive.

Anti-climax, but oddly I was okay with it. I liked that these two teams changed the narrative and stymied the league into watching them play in the finals. As we see above, even with the wings loss, as Karl steps on my head I am wearing a Devils championship shirt. This may mark the only time that my team lost a championship game and I was like, whatever, cool, we’ll get them next time.

Too boot, now months into this Hockey fandom and with the collecting I had found other things to enjoy. And one was the less powerful smaller market teams in the league. I spent real money on a Quebec Nordiques jersey, an Ottawa Jersey and a Hartford Whalers hat. Look at that list, only one team is still around, the Ottawa Senators. Oh, hmm, the I got into the Quebec Nordiques, I wonder how that might play out over the next couple years.

The obsession would get real though, take a look at the fall 1994 bulleting board:

                We’ve got Star Wars, specifically Star Wars the Role Playing game characters I was developing and getting into, then we have the 4th of July, 1995:

                The Star Wars have given up real estate to Hockey Goalie drawings. The top of my computer desk has all the sets I am working on with the cards, I am putting Beckett’s pricing guides featuring players I like up on the wall. And the game, the game bought to ease us while we waited tensely for Karl’s freedom that Sunday afternoon was now so popular that later in the year, when NHL ’96 came out, well, we have to upgrade to the new years version right, it will be more league accurate and have all the new exciting rookies!

                Hockey seemed here to stay. During those baseball card years Dad and I would go watch, mainly A’s games, from time to time. Which of course, if you have climbed through my story chronologically you know. Well, those San Jose Sharks that had pushed out my beloved Red Wings in the 1993, they were, are, well in San Jose. Dad and I can go to games.

                The last sort of addition to the main narrative of becoming a hockey fan from this one game was that Dad and I for the next couple of years would attend a few games. Hockey wasn’t like baseball where you could get cheap bleacher tickets, but the Shark’s did have this system where a dad and a son could, say on a lazy Saturday, decided to drive down to San Jose, get a lottery number and then possibly be able to get some same day tickets. Which is what this guy and his dad would sometimes due when the winds would blow that way.

                Karl getting busted for being a drug addict and not because a cop felt slighted by a cap gun prank gone wrong, resulted in a series of events that gave me the second hurrah of going to sporting events with my father, and for that I would let Karl get arrested as much as he wants. These games were important enough that decades later, as Dad started to slip away from us, I drove through unfamiliar highways in North Texas to take dad to a Texas Rangers game. Yeah, I know, gross, the Rangers.

                We managed to see the St. Louis Blues at least once in San Jose, I remember that, and of course there was a preseason Sharks game in Sacramento one year that we got early tickets to and got great seats for. Watched Tony Granato fight the whole Sharks team that afternoon. It was pretty cool. Got Dad and I out of Mom’s hair for an afternoon, if we didn’t win our ticket lottery we could scope out trading card stores for collectibles, it was just all wins.

Ewww, no shut out.

Back to the NHL video games. Our friend J.F. had a small active group of friends back home in Salinas that were playing the game as well. Whether this was 95 or 95 I cannot recall. But his childhood chum, Chad, had an infamous enough blow up that J.F. not only told us about the meltdown, but brought us the above one-page newspaper headline.

I only note this as being par for the course. While it seems extreme on some accounts to take a joke this far, this was to me a quintessential part of multiplayer gaming before the internet became almost the only way to play with others. There was a whole different dynamic to being a bad loser and bad winner when all the contenders shared the same room, had to hare the dinner table, and so on.

I miss that. What Chad did was rage quit. Which online is as easy as disconnecting from the game that is embarrassing you. In this case his bad sportsmanship behavior added a lifetimes worth of extra memories. I don’t know, maybe this is also a monument to taking the NHL games too seriously.

Figure 1 Hard to get a picture from behind of me of the hat, but there it is a screen capture from a home video in 1999, then a old school selfie of me in the hat before it broke with the Quebec jersey on from graduation night (spoiler) 1996. He jersey can always be seen hanging on the outside of my closet.

With my birthday coming on the heels of Karl’s arrest and a new hobby leaking in we should check back in on Jake and the rest of the house. Jake was a gamer. Just a pencil and paper gamer for the most part though. He was living at the L street house but not doing a lot of SNES, and very little PC gaming. Interestingly Pencil and paper gaming is what led Marty to find out more about J.F. beyond him just loving the video arcade and Street Fighter II. They would play Ninjas and Superspies at J.F.’s apartment and just solidify J.F. being more than a SF2 nerd. He was now also Marty and Chris M.’s ride places!

Now we know I was mainly into my own game on this front (MGRG), but with Jake I did dabble once or twice with more published titles. One time in the Ninth grade Jake tried to get some of the young ladies we knew to play, and I think needed me to come along to validate the effort. And so, I was there for that adventure never getting off the ground. That attempted game was remembered as the time our friend Heather wanted a baby dragon for her character and Jake almost blew a fuse in this head over it. I guess it wasn’t with the spirit of the game enough. Let the girl have her little dragon Jake!

With that failure I always would find the games setup so much more tedious than it probably needed to be. But this was probably due to teenagers and not the games. Jake if I recall mainly stayed with Fantasy and AD&D, but Keith, Sam, the Chrises and then notably as I said Marty and JF branched out into some other realms. I believe one of the games was called Rifts, and that seemed to be more successful. It helped that the main crux was that the publisher produced some sort of rule set that was interchangeable. So, I think, if I recall that JF’s super spies could work in the same universe as the Rifts RPG books. Which was cool, especially since the Rifts books included the vehicles from Robotech from those beloved golden age of kids cartoons back in the 80s. Making it all seem cooler to me from my beginners standing.

I would also try real hard to get the Star Wars RPG going from time to time with the crowd. But I never got Jake to do it, instead I managed a small amount of times with J.F. and Chris M. and then just Chris M. eventually. It became like my word perfect created game, something that was played with two people most of the time, which is sad because that would have got me more into playing dice based games with everyone. I mean they had the Rifts game just sitting there with its Robotech stuff.

Then in 1995 the seemingly innocuous advent of trading card games changes for a time how Jake wanted to “game”. Jake decided he wanted to learn how to play Magic the Gathering (MTG). MTG was essentially taking the ideas of the AD&D tropes and smashing them into a tradeable card game. Trading cards always made sense to kids, by the mid-90s baseball cards had been an American institution since what felt like the dawn of time. Both Jake and I had collections of Sports trading cards, so I guess gaming trading cards were a simple step into combining likes.

Somehow Jake convinced Chris K. into letting us have his giant box of “unimportant” MTG cards to play with. Chris K. had picked up the game earlier, probably around the summer in 1993 when we stopped having him over every day and had amassed a giant collection of these cards.

Chris K. came over with this massive box of MTG cards and taught us the game. Afterwards I wasn’t much into it. Of course, years later I realized that was because he was doing the equivalent of giving us cards to randomly play against him with. This was in turn was like handing an infant B.B. gun, whereas he was bringing a howitzer to the table. This solely for the enjoyment one would get from popping the heads off ants that are already firmly stuck to the ground. Kind of an unfair way to access the game. Jake though stuck with it. As an adult though who has come back to the game, I do try to remember what that was like and try not do it to others.

I did play some at the time with Jake since he needed someone to learn with. Although he did start spending his own money on more cards, the next big story for him with MTG was in March when he wanted a box of MTG cards for his birthday. His mom now was a long way away, so this duty fell on my parents. The boxes weren’t cheap either, around a hundred dollars or more. So, Jake lobbied it to be a gift for both of us, after all just a few weeks back I had a birthday, and I think I might really have just got the NHL game. And so my dad obliged. On Jakes birthday we sat in his room and opened an entire box of cards. We didn’t get the card he was looking for either, the Royal Assassin. But he did seem fairly happy with his score.

I was able to help Jake, a bit, test his deck building theories after that. MTG, beyond being a trading card game which sort of means nothing besides that the cards are for playing with and can be bought and traded, was a deck building game. You used the cards you got out of the packs or from friends to build “decks” that were playable by the game’s rules. This is why giving us a thousand random cards didn’t help us against Chris K. who had finely crafted his deck with the best sixty cards there were, leaving us no change, or in other words leaving us a pellet gun for a nuclear war.

But playing MTG in the 90s is more memorable because of the night Jake double booked on young ladies. This was one of our classic sitcom moments growing up. Jake, playing house with a young lady friend of ours, was surprised by another young lady climbing through my window. This young lady, Liz, we have met before of course when Jake took his tumble through the skylight. She was still Jake’s girlfriend at the time, so he was obviously not available to let her in his room. So, I stalled, and I stalled with Magic, or MTG cards to be specific.

We sat there on my bed and learned and played MTG while Jake either figured out a covert way of getting the other young lady out of the house and then acting like he just got in, or some other such nonsense. Who knows I wasn’t on that end, it was just another evening of Ryan entertaining Liz as Jake figured his stuff out. This had happened before with some other weekend plans, one was when Liz climbed a tree to fire objects at automobiles as we waited. This night we just gamed and eventually Jake showed up and all was well. As an adult I don’t always feel so great about being Jake’s interference man when he made poor decisions. But I figure, especially in this case, I would have rather done that then let Mom and Dad know we were smuggling girls in through my bedroom window.

When Jake eventually moved out this year, that box of cards Chris K. brought over would stick around. It would take another five years though for the cards to ever get a second glance again.

In the span from Fall of 1994 through Spring of 1996 though it felt like a ton of things happened. We had the silly little punk band, Jake jumped through a skylight and yeah, he even lived in the L street house for a while. More things did happen then, you know. Life’s patterns though become so mundane that details can become sketchy.

One thing oddly both Jake and I had tried out the mohawk look during my junior year. Although mine was more of a cut, with my hair being so curly. I really just looked like a teenager with an ill-advised haircut. I guess Jake didn’t look like much more than a kid with a bad undercut. That was until the time we tried and spike it, which did work out. However, since he used wood glue to make the spikes, the day after was a comedy of him holding the spikes in tall glasses of water trying to dissolve the glue. I know he spiked them to go to a punk show, but I don’t remember who it was for and with whom, so I don’t know if all that hassle was worth it.

Jake spiked his hair to go to a concert of some variety. One I don’t think I went too, I think I just help him setup and set-down. Perhaps it was the show he went to the bay area with our friend Brendan to go see, or maybe it was a band I didn’t like. I don’t really remember the circumstances to be honest. It seems strange in retrospect, but I lack the details.

I on the other hand never spiked mine at all. So, it really was just a bad cut in the end. I wont lie I did have a big aversion to hair products like gel and spray at that time, still kind of do. So, I never really had a moment where I was willing to forgo that just to have spikes. My mohawk was a weird story though, I got it from Alyssa’s boyfriend Mike during a weekend where I was mad at my folks.

I don’t remember what set off that weekend, But it started pretty normal. It was before Jake moved in. If I remember things correctly there was a teen center show that Friday night. This was an excellent show in which the opening band, which we did not like, ended up being on the receiving end of our harassment.

Being Sixteen I guess at the time and a junior in High School, I decided as we talked about our contempt of the band to show it. Karl, who at that time had a part of his personality be that he ate chewie candies like Dots and Jujyfruits. Happened to have a finished box of the latter sitting on the table next to where we were hanging out at the back of the venue, which was the Davis teen center.

I grabbed his box, folded the open side panels in to add some shape to that side, then flicked the box towards the stage like some nobleman throwing a tomato at the court jester. Then something magical happened. Sideways the box flew perfectly like a frisbee would and travelled all the way through the teen center crowd until it met its destination. That destination was the strumming hand of the guitar player on stage.

Floored at the one in a million throw, now other kids that enjoyed chaos wanted in on the action. Luckily for us, unlucky for the band, Karl’s monster truck had a bag of newspaper rubber bands in it that I had stuck back there for no reason at all I can remember. We ran outside, procured said bag and then mayhem ensued as the band had to suffer through their set while kids fired rubber bands at them.

It was somehow during this night that I ended up hanging out with Alyssa and her boyfriend. It was at her apartment that I was convinced to get the mohawk cut. I was pretty easy going and didn’t think much of it. I ended up getting home either extremely late or maybe even extremely early the next day. Now mind you since like the summer of 1993 I had a pretty good agreement with Mom about it being okay to be out late.

But somehow this time, when I came home with the mohawk cut the wheels went off the bus. And accusations got thrown at me. Mom so appalled at the idea of the haircut actually wept. I on the other hand got really angry. Thanks to my parents being a lot more liberal with things I had for the last couple years been pretty good about not stepping over that line. Now sitting here seeing Mom cry over a hair cut she thought was evil and getting unsubstantiated accusations thrown my way I made up my mind.

If you’re going to accuse me, then I might as well. Well I said something like that, then turned around and stormed back out of the house. I walked over to Jake’s (since this is before the move back in 94) and told him the story, told him I was mad, and then told him we had to go to 7-11 and shoulder tap so we could get torn up that night.

This is my one and only teenage shoulder tapping story. I wasn’t a big drinker, I wasn’t trying to put myself in a bad position since I liked my life. That night, being accused I decided to be the kid they were looking for and Jake and I got some unethical adults to buy us alcohol. We went back to his room and got drunk.

On a side note to this night, Jim showed up that night at Jake’s apartment with a jar of his liquified poop. Yeah that’s something alright. Seems like a week earlier or so while playing some sort of truth or date variant, or gambling, I don’t know something stupid. Anyway Jim was on the loosing end of something and Jake said he wanted him to poop in a jar and store it with vinegar and then give it to him. Jim obliged and then the three of us went to the near by fright train tracks where Jake destroyed the specimen.

This was a weird time for all three of us then. Jake’s mother was on the verge of leaving him behind, Jim was still recovering from a broken femur that had put him out of commission most of sophomore year and I was doing some classic rebelling that night. Somehow that strange night ended with Jim and I hanging out at the small K street park nearby and talking about old Spanish Immersion stories.

Eventually I came home after that. I think my outburst and subsequent disappearance changed Mom and Dad’s perspective on things somehow. Mom never came to like the haircut, but she accepted it and obviously we went back to not cultivating me into the kid they were afraid they had that night.  So when Jake got the same cut while living at the house, not much was said except for Mom wondering what was wrong with us all getting these dumb cuts.

Figure 2 Me and Jake around Christmas of 1994, me with the mohawk growing back out. unfortunately there are no pictures of Jake with his cut that i have found so far. The second picture is of me the right before I got rid of the cut in summer of 1995.

Jake’s Mohawk opens up another alley though that hasn’t been touched. That alley is the local college radio station KDVS. I know I droned on about our high school bands, but there is always even more going on with music then just that. But you might ask, how does a haircut link up? Well, it was at this radio station that Jake received the hairdo, or was it a hair-don’t? That little joke there Jim loved so much actually harkened back to our elementary school days. Thank goodness Jim and I went over those stories when I got mine.

KDVS was UCD’s college radio station, it was run in the basement of Freeborn Hall and was open to anyone who volunteered to work at the station. Some radio programs then were run by non-college students, who had put in their time to earn a show. It so happened that at this time, Alyssa’s boyfriend Mike, who was very much into the old school punk rock scene, had given his time to the station and had his own show. Of course, as was the fashion to non-student genre radio shows, his show was assigned the prime hours of 2 to 6 a.m. Sunday mornings.

One such “morning” Jake and I decided to go visit old Mike at the station. What we arrived to was him, the previous shows DJ and Alyssa all giddy over Alyssa’s head shaving antics on the previous show with her newly purchased clippers.

Now as one could imagine, running a show of non-mainstream music from 2 in the morning on doesn’t garner a large crowd. In fact, I would say most of the listening audience were probably all people we knew, which makes Jake’s next move this night extra fun. While on the air with Mike, Jake started to toot his own horn, for no real reason other than to just do so. While doing so Jake made a statement that shaped the next hour or more of the show. If anyone could call into the show and stump him with a technical guitar question, he would allow Alyssa to shave his head. At the time Jake just had really long hair he had been growing since elementary school.

In another part of town, tuned into KDVS this night was Karl. Karl upon hearing this statement quickly went to his bookshelf and began a search for some guitara obscura. Back at the station, since the caller base wasn’t very high, I think we just got a call from Marty trying to mock Jake a bit, but in time we got our call from Karl.

Now if you want me to remember the question, not going to happen. But he threw a question at Jake and Jake knew Karl had thrown him something he couldn’t answer. He still tried to fake an answer but Karl called him on it and so he forfeited his locks to the gods.

Cutting his hair ended up being a task for Alyssa though. Jake’s hair was thick and not primed for shaving. As the show went on, we could catch screaming coming from out in the hallway through the “soundproof” studio. Eventually though Jake came back not with a bald head, but with his own mohawk after Alyssa gave on the full head shave.

This affair with the radio station would continue. Years later Marty would convince me to come with him to volunteer and get our own radio show. That wouldn’t last the day though, as when they asked us to go break down boxes in the back, Marty decided it wasn’t worth the effort and we moved on from that endeavor. But there were other less memorable guest appearances over the years but the last tale of KDVS isn’t a fun one.

Near the end of high school Chris K. and his then girlfriend had done their volunteer time and had one of those late-night shows. This is when Chris K. went from slightly on the outs with the crew, to one of the most hated teenagers in a few social groups. 

I don’t remember the full story, but somehow around this time Chris K. and his gal had become known for running scams, some electronics thing with returning used items in the boxes of the new item they just bought and so on. So, his moral compass was looking to be on the fritz. And that’s when Mike  contacted me and Jake about trying to get into his dwellings to see if we could retrieve the stolen material he took from the radio station.

Seemed that over the course of their shows at the station Chris K. began pilfering some of the titles in the extensive library they had there. After being expelled from the station he wasn’t willing to give into demand and kept the stolen goods and now desperate we had been called into attempt to recollect what wasn’t his. It didn’t work, we got shunned away at the door and Chris K. went from friend to someone we’d call over for time to time when we had some fun group thing to do, to a complete pariah to everyone. For a long while his mug was immortalized at the station with a giant paper dunce cap. His fall from high school grace complete. This was when we lost Chris number two.

By the tail end of junior year, Jake had really sold into the punk rock scene, as it were in suburban Davis for a while. He was though still at heart very much into metal and transferring over to Death Metal specifically for a time. Marty and Jake never really got along well, which is another interesting dynamic since any given afternoon at the L street house if you go into the back of house both of them were there.

Then there was this one day I came home from somewhere, I don’t remember what I was doing and it’s irrelevant for now, to Marty in Jake’s room sitting with him just hysterical over the subject matter of Cannibal Corpse, a rather colorful Death Metal band known for some explicit lyrics. This was super odd, for one they didn’t get a long, and I was out doing whatever and whatnot, so Marty just came over and initiated a death metal hang on his own. This also was peculiar because Marty, of course, was full on into pretending he understood the gangster rap scene around this time of his life. We got to hear lovely rants about what color who was representing and all that jazz that comes with proving ones credibility to listen to that genre.

Jake would eventually add latching onto an album by WarrenG, so even though not the best of friends they did have an exchange of culture, I guess. With Y.S.S. going strong though and Jake having his music, me having mine and then Marty throwing in another, that made the back of the L street house and interesting place. Music always playing in the background, and it’s not what you think that sticks around with you. Chris M. spent years at the house, always seemed to latch onto whatever was the newest album brought around. With one exception for Simon and Garfunkel, I don’t remember why he had any of their music, but I remember him having it. But if I really want to add Chris M.’s tastes to the list with Jake and Marty here it’s not a music album that I associate with him, no it was a stand-up album from Denis Leary that Chris M. would, for a while, play when we went to sleep at night. That was the quintessential Chris M. album in the house.

So, when nostalgia hits these days, it can come from a multitude of genres. Musical identity was a big deal to a lot of teenagers and whereas adults wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between us and what we were representing, it was a defining factor as kids. And it was everyone’s influences that live on. Sure a few years prior to late 1994 early 1995, we went through the musical awakening with Keith’s skate punk that he introduced to me and Chris. H. along with the other albums that were coming out then. But as time grew on, we started taking in everybody’s albums. Jake could blast through said Cannibal Corpse album, switch to some Descendants, and then transition to Yngwie Malmsteen.

Jake and I would do a lot of just hanging out though with the Descendants blasting on the CD player. The CD player I may have yoinked from Mom years prior when we were starting our deep dive into music was technically a portable player. It was this sort of a slick early 90s not quite boombox. So, we could insert batteries into it and go places and have music when we were there.

Jake more so than me got obsessed with finding “a hang out spot” and so many afternoons and evenings were spent hunting for a place we could hang out and preferably plug in the stereo and eat some Taco Bell. Jake had grown to love the saying “Just chillin’ eating a burrito” so we ran with it. Sadly, sorry Taco Bell, Taco Bell had become sort of the downtown meal of choice. On minimum days teens would book it downtown to the poor establishment and ran sack cheap tacos. One time in the ninth grade a group of us that included Jake, Chris K. and Chris M. just got small soda’s and abused the refill system to try and see if we could empty the Dr. Pepper from the soda fountain. We sat outside since the location couldn’t handle all the customers, and just poured the sodas out on the driveway and returned and filled them up again.

That minimum day back in ninth grade continued on past the soda wasting though, remember now we have gone back for this side story to the ninth grade which is pre summer 1993, or the BBS summer, notice Chris K. is hanging out with us, so he hasn’t over stepped his bounds in the L street house and hasn’t stolen from KDVS yet. It’s odd that his story comes out so non-linearly but this particular minimum day also marks the day I remember most as the change in attitude of the “core” friends and Chris K.

So, as I said, we were being very mature that afternoon sitting behind the taco bell and pouring our Dr. Peppers into the parking lot when Heather, from the AD&D baby dragon game and Lacey a friend of hers that I knew through church, so a friend of mine too, and sister to Denis from the scout camp story (it’s hard sometimes to do single sentence introductions), walked up to our party. Lacey informed me that there was a church event going on, bear in mind by ninth grade I very rarely attended church anymore. The event was a youth trip out to a roller-skating rink in Carmichael if I recall.

Now I am not much of a roller skater, in fact I believe at this point in my life I had tried the activity a grand total of zero times. But when Lacey suggested I bring Jake along since she was bringing a long Heather, I decided, sure I can’t fall on my butt a lot. So, the two of us hatched a plan to meet in a little bit at my house. I don’t remember what parent was driving but I would assume it had to be hers since both of mine would have been working.

With that plan in place, I informed Jake of the new plans for the afternoon and we decided it was time to start walking back to the L street house. Chris M. and the others involved in the soda operation followed suit and went on to do their next half-day activities except old Chris K. he walked all the way back home with Jake and I. Now I don’t remember when it became apparent that Chris K. had invited himself on this trip, but Jake and I did notice every time we hinted that maybe this wasn’t an all-hands-on deck for fun trip, he just ignored us.

When the time came, as we wondered he just followed us and got in the car. I can’t explain how much people are unwilling to start controversy. I guess I can a little bit, if you have read my story about the second Star Wars prequel AOTC. Where Jim and I just decided to sit in the front of the line, and no one said anything until we entered. Even then the guys behind us in line let us come in with them as long as they got to enter the theater itself first. And they even asked us permission to do so. Well, this became one of those situations.

At least the four of us kids, late alone knowing what the parents were thinking, which could have been who is this extra kid or nothing at all. Anyway, the four of us just kept wondering what we could say to give him the hint, but no one was willing to start a scene over it. I usually was pretty good about saying no to things, but somehow, he worked around that. To be honest, I think Jake and I told him no at one point and he said something like “I am sure it’s not big deal to have one more guest.” And we were so confused by the response that we just looked at the girls and shrugged. Either way his ploy worked, we just drove off with him in the back of the car.

As I have been known to do when skating is involved, I proceeded to have an afternoon of nose dives onto waxed plywood. Later in life on ice this wouldn’t be so bad, and I don’t think it would have that day, but the trip had a weird Chris K. attachment to it. It didn’t help that Chris K. seemed to have as much fore knowledge of skating as I did. Changing the dynamic of my skating lesson into a skating class.

Now as life goes on nothing much ever happened with the Ryan/Jake, Lacey/Heather dynamic, the only other main hang out I remember was Jake’s blow up over how Heather’s AD&D character was developing, although I kind of remember some vague noneventful regular teenage “hang outs” if I scrap at the back of my lost memories archive in my brain. But Jake and I did start to saddle Chris K. with some negative feelings for pushing his way into our little church sponsored double date. Along with that it was really the first time we noticed that Chris K. didn’t care about anyone in the group except Chris K.

Since these stories are being told backwards, we see that this attitude of his developed into a non-flattering personality trait by the summer, leading to less group time during junior year, which is really when a lot of the fun stuff happened during high school. Then eventually leading to whatever he turned into when he was willing to steal from the very entity that, pre-internet, was the main source we had as kids of non-pop music in town.

In ways it’s kind of a sad story. I did manage almost a decade later to at least talk to him like once or so, but that is it. Here is to hoping that whatever caused his turn in high school eventually made him decide to change paths and his adult life has been prosperous and not filled with CD theft and VCR scams. I know somehow in like 2010 a picture of him DJing somewhere popped up and I used it as a super bowl ad. I paired him with some bears to take on the actual football teams.

But that was a junior high minimum day, this was though a few years later, we were mature now. Right? Let’s get back to Jake’s search for a hang out spot. Eventually Jake fell in love with the stairwell of a hotel downtown as the place to be the “hang out” spot. It worked for a while until employees found out there were two teenage boys living in the stairwell. Jake was possessed with keeping the spot for a bit, which he dubbed the “wishing well” but eventually we just keep moving around. That was the final solution to that saga, Jake and I would just load out and find whatever place possibly had electricity, that we could sit at while being stupid and of course where Jake could, if he so desired, eat a burrito.

That is not to say we didn’t go out and do more classical kid activities. After being an avid movie enthusiast with Chris H. and Jared in 1991, I stopped going as much. Getting cable in my room was probably a big part of that. We could, when needed borrow the VCR, watch movies. As well as on television when they came on.

However, on occasion going to the theater was still there. I had hit up a couple over the years, A group of us went to see the film Wayne’s World when it came out, and Chris K. and I also hit up Alien 3, or Alien cubed if you remember the logo design. Alien 3 may have been the first R rated movie I was just let in to without question. But theater viewings where down.

During mid-90s on cable there was a big Brady Bunch resurgence. We all loved it, well at least Jake and I did. Maybe it was that Marcia Brady transcended male teenagers need to watch modern young ladies, Marty even admitted to understanding how she drew people to the show. So, what luck there was when a movie parody of the series came out in 1995. Jake and I got together with some young ladies and hit up the local theater. Then wound-up having way more fun with the movie than anyone else there had.

This was sort of the norm that was developing. Jake and I developed a distinct sense of humor that some of the young ladies, especially that we hung around through Jake weren’t getting. I remember one evening Jake and I antagonized his girlfriend Liz and her sister by constantly switching back to Amazon Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death from their intended viewing of the Never-Ending Story. We liked satirical silliness, and a lot of our peers weren’t there yet (still waiting?). But the Brady Bunch Movie somehow was the pinnacle of all of this.

Not all things were Jake-centric though. Sometime during Junior year Karl and I were doing the hang out thing with no real plan, but there was that VCR we could borrow. There was a newish video rental store that had opened downtown in an old bank. We decided to go looking for something to rent, maybe, you know no big deal. This not having a plan thing was getting normal around this time, once Karl was gifted the Monster Truck that year going places in the danger vehicle constituted most of what was planning.

In the video store they had used to old bank vault to make a special “Cult” movie section. This also included a very small selection of non-children friendly animated series and movies. By this time in in the mid-1990s everyone knew what Akira was, but most of the titles in the anime section were a mystery. So, we took a chance that night on a series called Ranma ½ under the idea if it was good, there seemed to be a lot more tapes to watch and that I thought I had heard it mentioned in passing once.

So, in a pleasant English dub that night, we watched the first two episodes of Ranma ½, a story about a teenage boy that went on a martial arts training mission with his father to China. There he got cursed that anytime he fell in water he would turn into a teenage girl, and his father, had a similar curse, except he turned into a Panda bear. Then only hot water would transform them back to their normal selves. It was ridiculous yet animated seriously enough to be something completely compelling to watch. And thus began a year or more period where Karl and I would rent videos out of Lightwave Video’s vault and learn the tale of Ranma Saotome.

Chris M. being over a lot, caught on the Ranma ½ train as well and over time was just as into the series as we got for that year. Luckily for us nerds, we found there was a Street Fighter II clone of the game with Ranma ½ characters called Ranma ½ Hard Battle. During Chris M.’s Video Game Swappers era* he managed to hold onto a copy of this game for quite some time. Giving us another fighting game to compete on. Which was fun, but the video game would end up being most memorable for its Instruction Manual.

*Real quick I referenced a Chris M. era and this not being his childhood write up there is no explanation of what it is. I’ll try to give it a quick explanation here. Chris M. either late junior year for Karl and me, or the early the next school year (95-96) had put together a small savings thanks to the King High Summer work program that his elder brother Marty used when he found his addiction to talk radio.

So, Chris M. went in and invested in his own SNES system at home. At this point he was no longer living in the K street apartments, in fact now it was only Chris K. left there. Instead, he was on the other side of town near the University Mall. In the Mall then was a video game store called Video Game Swappers, which as the name implies, sold new and used video games and dealt in trade. Now the trades weren’t great, for anyone that has dealt in retail stores trying to get used product to resell, its much like the baseball cards I dealt with when I was younger, kind of a you give them two they give you one trade.

So, for a long span of time Chris M. started with some expensive games he bought with his newly swollen wallet and then continuously traded down the ladder of store credit once he completed the games. Depending on one’s point of view, thank you Obi-wan Kenobi, he either feed all his games into the Video Game Swappers machine to come out with junk at the end, or he managed to stretch his initial titles out into multiple titles over many months. In the end its really how much beating the games but not being able to go back to them matters to him. If down the road he wished he really had Final Fantasy III to play again and is disappointed with Fischer Price’s Ring Toss for the SNES (not a real game I just can’t think of some low-cost junky title to put here), then maybe the Swappers got him. But if not, good on him, he spent 50 bucks for something like eight games. Back to the story…

So that instruction manual for the Ranma ½ fighting game. Senior year of High School, Chris M. and I had a second period art class, with Gay, that was the teacher’s name not us being teenage boys. At the beginning of class there was like a ten-minute silent sustained reading “time”. One particular day Chris M. decided to use this time to read the instruction manual for the game, cover to cover. However, Gay was not amused at his choice.

How this incident then escalated is anyone’s guess. The debate over the validity of the quality of his reading material was at the core of their discussion. I distinctly remember Chris M. pointing at the front cover and saying, “It says BOOK-let, that implies it is a book.” This use of a technicality to continue the issue that Ranma ½ Hard Battle’s instructional counted as literature of a standard okay for school got out of hand. She put her foot down on it being an ineligible title, or even a book for that matter. Then someone, maybe me not naming names here, may have drawn a similarity to her banning of reading materials to the practices of the Nazi’s and reading materials during WW2.

Chris and I both ended up getting sent home. My mother didn’t know what do to with us, so we made lunch, watched TV, and possibly played some Ranma ½ Hard Battle with our new knowledge gained from some source on the matter.

image 89 It does say BOOK on in it. Karl and Chris M. during a SNES session that I am pretty sure was Ranma ½ Hard Battle for a while if memory serves.

 So, school. The first half of junior year I went over the pattern Marty and I had. Then just went into the new adventures of teenagers with more freedoms. There is however somewhere during the year a change in the pattern after Christmas. The details are not going to be exact but here we go. Let’s see how many points we can remember.

One key thing is that Marty turns eighteen in here somewhere. He is still in fact about a year and a half older than everyone else. This seemed to be the same time his focus turned toward becoming a peace officer. Marty began talking about penal codes and even had us play games where we used J.F.’s Eagle Summit as an automobile for him to pull over and he would pretend to arrest us all. It was a very strange time.

The big crescendo, if I am using my musical terms right, was that now with him being an adult he could own a firearm. That was his big gift for reaching maturity, he wanted a Glock. And anyone that knew him knew he was going to get one. Then when he got it, we got to hear him talk about cleaning it and hallow points. But most of all we got to hear about how guns are fine as long as people follow standard safety procedures.

This went on for a while. Marty’s law enforcement dream was also going to require he be a licensed driver, so he began that road as well. This didn’t involve me at all, instead it involved JF and oddly little Jake from the BBS and not my Jake. I wouldn’t know much of it if not for one fateful day I came by to get Marty at the apartment they lived in across the street from the post office.

Marty was in a story telling mode when I got there and was regaling me and his mother with how he was driving so well and little Jake thought it was dangerous and scary. Marty’s mother interjected with some statement about asking why he was driving so fast ad to be careful of the cat that was begging for attention during Marty’s animated tale. Marty’s response was then class sitcom stuff. He said “Mom, if I can drive x miles per hour down the road, I’m not going to step on some stupid ca…”

As he began to say cat, he moved his foot up I the air to show a stomp, slammed the foot down and stepped on the stupid cat. Marty of course was a cat lover and was embarrassed more than he showed, but the cat was fine, it was just an example of Marty believing he had more control over the situation than he did and a cat almost getting caught in the crossfire.

Cat in the crossfire. So it was somewhere down the road at that same apartment, which means before senior year, so maybe during the summer, it is all hard to date, the important side note is that Chris M. and the Ranma ½ game had to be senior year. But later after the I wont step on a cat story Marty was hanging out in the his bedroom I believe at the time, long story has to do with the boys clashing heads. Anyway he decided he was Wyatt Earp or some cowboy while sitting around in his room and started twirling his beloved Glock around presumably his trigger finger.

And a hair trigger it was, suddenly a bang, and Marty had fired an accidental shot of into his west wall. The bullet, which Marty had forgotten to double check to see if it was in the chamber of the gun, flew through the wall, out the stucco  and into the ground outside of the apartment. A scary situation to be sure in the moment.

Luckily it wasn’t another apartment attached to his west wall, as well as luckily there were no kids playing outside on the lawn where the bullet made its final descent. Instead with a shock all that really happened was some internal and external damage to the west wall of his room. Well and some damage to his reputation as a gun safety expert with the rest of us. However, luckiest of all, was that his cat, his beloved feline, was sleeping just mere feet above where Marty’s stray shot went through the room.

In cat fashion though, unphased the cat slept through the entire incident. The end of the tale is other than a lifetimes worth of teasing, Marty had to patch up the destruction and that seemed to be about it. It was an accident, sure a little more diligence would have stopped it but whatever. Now and for forever though whenever I drive by the post office, I think of the time Marty shot a hole through the apartments there.

Back at school this year I continued with the 4-h program, I think at the end of the day, when I had what classes is a little sketchy. This would be when I had to take what we had learned and present a lesson to a class full of fourth or fifth graders I don’t remember exactly which grade to be honest.

We had an elementary class though we would go and visit once a week though. It was at the new elementary school for the time, and after a few weeks of being high school helpers we each of us in the program had to present our lessons.

Mine was one paper mulch cups. And was about making, well, paper mulch, cups. It was pretty simple and went surprisingly well. I think since mine was a short demonstration and then hands on activity that it lent itself to going pretty well.

Over the course then of the year, us in the program got pretty used to our weekly elementary school visits. We were assigned table groups to work with when not presenting and bonded pretty well. We got to know the kids and their ins and outs. And things seemed just fine. Then there was an incident.

One day following the day of a visit, our teacher sat us all down and said she had something to say. It seemed the day before something had happened that caused a parent to contact some number of adults involved and start investigating the prior days behavior.

Initially without getting specific she had us go over the visit and what happened and what was said. When it was my turn I got quite a scare because I was asked about what jokes my kids made. And well I had a table with if I recall three girls and then one boy who was maligned with an ailment that made him a little physically different. He was a cool little guy though and he and the girls would joke a lot and thought nothing of it, no one every reacted poorly and I took it as normal. But then it got put in focus, I mentioned that no one said anything bad, and waited nervously.

Only to find out that wasn’t the issue. After having us all go over what we saw and heard that day we got to the final group. Sunjeev, from junior high school was in the program. Yup the one that used to tease Keith with Marty back in seventh grade. He then slowly admitted to the story our teacher was trying to get to.

Somehow, during the course of working on the lesson that day, he, a high school junior, had got to throwing insults back and forth with one of the elementary school girls. The apex of which was after she made fun of him for something he simply called her fat.

Now since we all knew the kids, his statement wasn’t a lie, but as anyone over the age of about six knows, you don’t throw that out as an insult, especially when you are double someone’s age. Might not be double I don’t remember what grade we were dealing with. But the fact is you just don’t say that to a little kid even if it’s true.

Feelings hurt, that girl went home that afternoon, told her mother about the big meanie and especially considering what a continuation High School’s reputation can be, things blew up. It was in all honestly one of the more ridiculous things to then have to sit through meetings on and express feelings about. Because I will say, barring that incident the kids liked us there and it was a solid class, it was something different than the norm and was almost worth looking forward too.

But he kind of destroyed some of the parents trusts that we weren’t all just criminals coming into class to put down their children. And we had to spend a lot of time defending ourselves while still pointing out that Sunjeev did a real dumb thing. In the end the cross-age part of the program was cut off, and I don’t even think the program continued on at all beyond that class. All because someone got into it with a little kid.

A copy of the the letter/assigment our class was given due to the incident, looks like it actually happened right at the end of 1994.

Now by years end Chris M. seems to have switched to coming in the mornings. I think as he got used to King and Marty stopped being a morning student, or maybe student all together, my memory on why Marty wasn’t there all year is fuzzy. Like I said he was 18, and one could fulfill there graduation requirements and not have to attend, but I remember that Marty and Jake both didn’t do normal graduation. One did the G.E.D. and I think the other did the equivalency test, but I don’t remember the exacts on that. For now I am just going to assume Marty tested out of High School and because of this Chris decided to start coming in the mornings.

And there is really only one reason I know he was there at the end of junior year and that was that the Ranma ½  fight didn’t start the Chris M. and Gay feud. Nope it happened earlier, and as funny as the booklet incident was, Chris M. would at the end of this year go on his magnum opus, questionings Gay’s sanity on a paper she made him write to keep him busy during the last day of school.

That paper ended junior year. We started a journey through two high schools, and here at the end Jake has moved out, and the end of the year is Chirs M. and I goofing around an or around the last day of school like freshman year and class registration day. With everything that has happened its nice to see things stay the same too.

Chris M. throwing the nerf football to Marty before the fireworks and a screenshot of the game Powerhouse.

The great summer of mystery. So, and I probably went over this to some small details already, but summer 1995 doesn’t seem to have a family trip associated with it. Much like 1993, and so what summer of 1995 was seems to be a mystery in my mind. Probably due in part to our L street house behavior not really changing with school. Much of the tail end, beginning of the last school year and beginning of the next could be summer stories, like Marty’s shootout with the wall.

However, one fourth of July story that remains is definitely from that year. Let’s see if I can set it up right. By the time of day this happened I assume that Marty had spent the night on the 3rd. This makes some logical sense, because this would fit around the time that Chris M. got grounded for something silly like 6 months from spending the night at the house.

That banning stemmed from an earlier event where J.F. told Marty one afternoon that he had a “vision” that Chris had been out with me, probably Jake and so on the night before late at night. Now this wasn’t much of a vision. As especially in late 1994 and early 1995 going out at night on the weekend in a group was pretty ordinary. Somehow though this vision was enough for Marty to use with their mother to get Chris M. locked away for a while, the whole situation honestly just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Since Jake moved out before the end of the ‘95 school year though, it does make sense that summer of 95 left a lot of time for Marty to do what he wanted, Now an oddly conflicting issue is that the game Powerhouse, which I remember playing as it was the new title in the house that holiday claims to have a release date of July 25th 1995. Which makes this all odd. Because it wasn’t a download of some beta, since I still have the CD-ROM disk to this day, and it is for windows 3.1, which I played it on, which means if I waited a whole year to play it on the fourth of July it would have been in Windows 95. So that release date makes me wonder how we had that copy.

Anyway, Marty and I got up and decided to play basketball at Chestnut Park. It was probably about 11am when we did so. And it was insufferably hot, triple digit style. When we walked home and laid our carcasses on the gray couch in the front room the mistake of that endeavor took a while to get over. Oddly I can just remember wanting to get back and figure out that weird Powerhouse game, while feeling like the sun had taken my soul.

Where this leads is, for some reason or another, Mom and Dad did not want to go to the usual fireworks spot this year, and instead Chris M. came over and then the three of us walked with their Mother over to the greenbelt on the other side of the community park where the fireworks show was held and watched them from there. I think this marked the first time ever in Davis that I didn’t go to the same hill with Mom and Dad.

The summer itself must have been odd, no trip I can remember, Chris being partially banned, Jake’s weird move away to the punk rock house. I don’t remember exactly how long I had my CD-ROM drive at this point, but the fact I was trying a game like Powerhouse, which was maybe not the most exciting game ever,  points to a weird time for me this summer. In early June the first hockey playoffs I had watched since the 80s would have ended in a sweep of the Detroit Red Wings, which had become my team thanks to the NHL franchise league we built on the old SNES EA game the day Karl got arrested, by the New Jersey Devils. Thankfully being a teenager, anything Devil related was cool, so I wasn’t sorely dissatisfied with the outcome.

But that meant hockey was over and the Niners wouldn’t start their title defense until school started. So, I think I spent a lot of time with the ACER from Incredible Universe that summer. Here is where research and my memories get even weirder. I know I was playing a lot of PC based hockey games, I still have Brett Hull Hockey 95, which I was into because it had the full line substitutions in it unlike the SNES EA game. However once Mom got the new PC, I remember getting EA for the PC and playing that, but I can distinctly remember Mario Lemieux, or some other Pittsburgh Penguin being on the cover art, but that version doesn’t exist until 2002. Which I would have 100 percent had on the PS2 and not on CD ROM. So, what was the version I was playing that summer in the office?

This adds to the cloud of what went on for these three months in 1995. I guess it was just such a huge transition that it just can’t fit itself into any framework in my memories and therefore that summer sits as loose memories. It was a strange time, we went from Jake to no Jake, to not a lot of stuff going on back to the Goldfish BBS starting and the house getting out of control again in the span of a few months, so these three down months in the middle don’t work right.

What the Windows 95 box and contents were, one of the lone adds i can find for egghead software online, and an almost similar version of the ACER mom bought.

A big event for the computers at the L street house in 1995 was the release of Windows 95. Shortly before the start of senior year and the 1995 NFL season, what had been mainly referred to as Chicago windows through our BBS lives was coming out to retail in its official capacity. Thus, really the first major series of upgrades was to hit.

Prior to this, upgrading say, DOS, was a pretty easy process, and Windows prior to 95 was just a shell that you executed from DOS. Windows 95 aimed to change that, although it was still kind of a DOS shell, the way it handled the system was going to be different in an attempt to appease all the MAC drones that thought life would be easier by clicking on icons versus knowing your command prompt. However, with the new OS did come a lot more stock utility, and DOS was still there, so we upgraded both my and mother’s computers. Here is where I don’t recall some details. For Windows 98 that was coming down the road, we executed OEM copies to keep cost down from Fry’s Electronics. But I am pretty sure in 1995, we had Incredible Universe. Along with that, sometime during this phase mother bought herself a new computer, and ACER built Pentium system to replace her old 386sx.

That computer did come from Incredible Universe, so it makes me think that most likely we bought Windows from there too and not from Egghead near Howe about Arden in Sacramento, which had been for the first years of our PC lives our major source of software purchases. I can remember buying my systems first CD ROM drive along with a Rebel Assault and the 2000 Almanac CDROM titles there, mainly because I had to borrow some dough from the folks, so Mom had me call Dad at work on a pay phone at the nearby Pizza place in the little shopping center that Egghead was located at and ask him for a loan.

When he asked me how I was going to pay it back, since I was jobless at the time, I said I could do manual labor. He said okay but to remember that Manual can be a hard boss. I know this is sad to say, but it’s one of the last cute little jokes I remember Dad saying, with his stress at work, my getting older and spending more time away from the folks during this time and Dad’s walk to his early onset Alzheimer’s I sadly didn’t get a lot more of these gems.

We purchased upgrades instead of the full retail version. Mainly because they were cheaper, this would come to be an issue later on down the road when I would want to do fresh reinstalls. Humorously enough I still have one of the upgrades in storage to this day (2022). Getting setup to upgrade my system also got me to move my mess of computers into the living room. By this time, I was still using my 386dx but I also had my own Pentium PC by then. So, I setup the computers on the little end tables we had in the room and started installing the Rolling Stones endorsed operating system.

Learning how to manage a world with computers booting straight into a new OS while still needing to use DOS for a tone of software made for an interesting time. Goldfish BBS, which was created during this time was run on Renegade software still, which was all DOS based, but now the base system was running Windows 95, too boot there were two computers running everything for the BBS, so we had a weird mush up of Windows networking and DOS BBS software keeping the whole system running.

For a while too, most of our big Windows programs were designed for windows 3.1, so the early days of Windows 95 was this beautiful mess of three styles of software being jammed onto one screen. (It would be a couple years before I started using two monitors to manage software.)

The absolute disaster that was the front room with my computers in it.

This all being said, Windows 95 does hold a memory like DOS, of times when I felt like the computers were more fun to operate. Sure, at the time I probably cursed the name of Microsoft and Bill Gates, but here we are on a webpage, which the 90s section is themed after the Windows 95 default desktop.

The Rolling Stones involvement with the windows 95 “theme” song was also implemented into every opening kickoff that year during the NFL season. So, when the Niners started their Super Bowl defense against the New Orleans Saints and beyond that year, those games would do their subliminal advertising for windows. Of course, then with the PCs in the front room I couldn’t help but tie the season and working on the computer together.

After the 1994 football season, my anticipation for the 95 seasons was high. Now fully free of any church obligations, I could be up at 10am for the start opening games for the 49ers. I followed the season like it was its own religion. I did ESPN Gameday for the breakdown on who was coming for our crown, checked the sports page in the Sacramento Bee every day and then followed up Sunday’s games with NFL primetime. To this day, even old highlights with Chris Berman and Tom Jackson hold as much warm feelings as movies and books that would have been formative at the time. And the highlight music works the same magic as the Final Fantasy or Star Wars soundtracks. Actual real time travel.

This season I was able to coarse Dad into getting tickets for a game even. So, it was during week three, we went to Candlestick Park to see the Niners play the New England Patriots. This was a big deal, at this point the Niners were still rolling and the Patriots, well this is going to sound weird in the modern games reference decades later, but at the time they were my Madden football team on SNES games. Why? Because they were a perpetually terrible team year in and out, so they were more fun to rebuild. Thus, they were my unofficial second favorite team of that era.

Anyway, that in mind Dad and I went to see my two teams for at it in person. Outside the stadium Dad got roped in to signing up for a credit card when they offered him two things, ONE, a free 49ers t-shirt and a VISA card with the Niners logo printed on it. He managed to successfully score us two shirts which we put on over our existing shirts, and when we entered the stadium, hours early because I wanted to see warmups, we were clad in these silly bright white T-shirts with big red 49er visa cards printed on the back.

We proceeded to then watch our defending champs beat the Patriots and get to see the likes of Steve Young and Jerry Rice do their thing. Our seats were decently close to the field on the “far” endzone. I call it the far endzone because while close to the action we were also at the limit where they could sell people seats in those sections without the main grandstands blocking the view.

See Candlestick Park, which I think was becoming 3com park at the time, was a multiuse venue. At the time the Baseball Giants also played there, and so they had different stands they could pull in and out for the different dimensions of the sporting event. This made a weird angle that put some seats that would have been in the baseball outfield instead behind the main grandstand that ran parallel to the football field.

Well, why bring all these details up? As luck would have it, there is a very low-resolution copy of that day’s NFL primetime on YouTube. And as luck would continue to roll, there is one shot of the 49ers coach George Siefert during that telecast where you can see two bright white shirts sitting in those odd seats on that said of the field. Since Dad and I didn’t think to being a camera to the event, this is as close to a photo for this memory as I will have.

The season however would not just pickup from before though. Steve Young would get injured and for a while in the middle of the season we had to endure with a quarterback named Elvis. By the end of the season though we seemed back in form and on our way to beat the Cowboys again on the way to the Super Bowl when early in January of 1996 the team forgot to show up for their Divisional round game and got sent home earlier than normal for the first time in years. To say this turn of events was scarring is pretty accurate, it was quite the shock.

Goldfish BBS, started its life in 1995 probably, it’s section is in the BBS area of the website, it is also embedded below: