FROM ONE BEER LOVER TO ANOTHER, STROH'S...
Task 54, May 1 to May 8
“The great thing about being young and dumb is that you don’t know what you can’t do…”
It all started because one of my kids wanted to see the home video I’d shot in 2007. In this particular video my son, then age 8, hit an inside the park home run in Little League (it was less heroic than hilarious–he hit a grounder and after the opposing infielders made three errors, he trotted home); anyhow, I went looking for the tape.
Well it was originally shot with a big clunky video camera. Later I transferred all of that old footage to DVDs, and now, staring at them in 2026, I realized that I didn’t own a DVD player to watch the footage, let alone send it to my son..
So I had to figure out how to digitize a LOT of footage. I decided to do it myself–rabbit hole, meet well-meaning dad… I won’t go into the agonizing, moderately expensive, time-consuming, expletive-filled journey I went through, but as of a few days ago I can read/transfer/digitize DVD footage! Yeah!
But it wasn’t the home movies, or the techno-journey I took on, that I write about today. Hiding discretely among the family movies was a video labeled DAYTONA BEACH, 1975. “What the hell?” I thought. Eagerly I transferred the DVD and copied it to my desktop, then opened it and pressed “PLAY”.
The video flickered (It was originally filmed on my dad’s Bell and Howell 16mm. camera) and suddenly it was spring break, 1975, on the beach in Florida. Cars were driving back and forth on the sand (do they still do that?) and a number of my friends from BGSU were cavorting in the water. I could smell the tanning lotion and the exhaust fumes, I could hear the banter and the waves crashing, and once more I was 22, fit as an athlete and blessed with a glorious mane and skinny as a rail. I leaned back in my office chair and let myself be transported back 51 years, to a sweeter time…then I bolted upright and spasmed–it wasn’t sweet–AT ALL!
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I’d driven down to Florida with my roommate, Scott and his girlfriend, Kathy. (One of the most boring routes in America by the way, Rt. 75, shoots through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, then Florida. The highlight was passing through Macon, Georgia–you get the picture). Scott was a math major and a nice guy–but what had attracted Kathy to him some months earlier was that he was a guitarist in a local cover band (called Rat Punk. Jeez). Kathy was pretty, in a Mrs. Cleaver way, with a rebellious scratch that she itched with Scott. From my P.O.V. (the back seat of Scott’s Datsun), the fire had gone out of the relationship. When Kathy looked at Scott she didn’t see Keith Richards anymore, she saw Barry Manilow…
They fought incessantly, but the wrath seemed to fade when we hit Daytona Beach. We checked into our seedy motel and I left them to their own devices, and I went to the beach to meet our friends, which is where and when I took out my dad’s camera and took the footage that I was watching all those years later.
It was all “Beach Blanket Bingo” until I went back to our motel. Scott was standing in the parking lot, next to his car, screaming incoherently at Kathy, who was just outside our motel room door. Before I could do, or say, anything Scott ran towards the room. Kathy tried to shut the door but he barged inside. The door closed for just a minute, then Scott came tearing out, a suitcase in each hand, and jumped in his car. He saw me and pointed frantically to the passenger door, so I got in. Kathy, red-faced and gesticulating wildly, ran toward the car, but Scott threw it in gear and in a second we were flying down Biscayne Boulevard. I tried to find out what the hell happened, but he ignored me and leaned over and grabbed a suitcase from the back seat, and then, going 60 miles an hour and steering with his knees, he opened the suitcase and laughed maniacally. Inside the cheap Samsonite were Kathy’s stuff–her clothes and toiletries, and Scott began tossing all of it out into the street. A trail of bras, underwear, tee shirts and sadly, a stuffed animal all went flying in the wind. Some of it wafted into the oncoming lane, causing cars to swerve and drivers to scream.
He eventually ran out of clothes to toss and pulled over at a gas station. As he weeped into a pair of Kathy’s panties he said that they had broken up.
“No kidding” I thought. And it dawned on me: my suitcase was back at the motel. Scott eventually stopped crying, drove back to the beach and parked the car on the sand. Still distraught, he asked me to go have a beer. So we went a seedy dive called Mack’s Place. It was nearby and the beer was cheap. We poured Stroh’s beer down our throats for the next few hours, and while Scott poured out his frustration, I wondered where we were going to sleep that night–and how I could get my clothes. Around 6pm we walked unsteadily back to the beach to get the car.
Only it wasn’t there. Was it stolen? No such luck. The tide had come in and swept it out into the ocean, where it was perched on a sandbar. That sobered us up.
Scott started to cry again. I asked him for some change and went back to the bar and used a pay phone to call a tow company. They showed up an hour later. Scott spent the time sitting in the sand, quiet as a sphinx, staring into the dark. The tow truck driver took one look at the situation and said tersely, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Scott and I, dirty, tired, half-drunk, found our friends and begged them to let us sleep on the floor of their hotel room.
The next morning the tide was out and the tow truck was able to retrieve the Datsun, much to the amusement of the early birds on the beach, who pointed at the car and laughed at us. The tow truck driver left the car on the beach. We paid him seventy five dollars, which pretty much cleaned us out. Scott opened the driver’s side door and sea water rushed out. His suitcase was open and his clothes were soaked.
And the engine wouldn’t start. We begged the tow truck driver to wait while we used the payphone at the bar to call a car repair shop, then Scott called his dad and asked him to wire $200 to the local Western Union Office. My mother came through with $100.
We waited, hungry, tired and bedraggled, at Western Union until late afternoon. When the money came we used a pay phone to call the tow truck guy, then met him at the beach and drove with him to the car repair shop. The car repair guy told us to come back in 48 hours.
The next 48 hours were hell, highlighted by a) sleeping on the floor of an apartment laundry room, and b) fleeing from a group of BG rugby players, who happened to be friends of Kathy’s.
Finally Scott got his car back. The seats were water-logged, but it ran and we had just enough money to buy gas for the trip home. So we got in the car and sat on the damp seats and drove for twenty four straight hours up Rt. 75, through Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and the whole of Ohio to get back to school.
Two weeks later I found my suitcase sitting outside my apartment door.
None of that was on that DVD labeled DAYTONA BEACH, 1975. I closed the file and sat in my chair and burst out laughing.
Oh to be 22 again…
TASK: Take a trip back in time. You may enjoy it.