Newspaper boys are no more. But once they were everywhere. Mostly Boomers and those before us. Young. Living in times so different from today that it almost feels foreign now. We ran small businesses. We bought papers, sold them for more than we paid, and kept the profit. Four, five, maybe more dollars a week….
I wrote this song in 2016. It’s a personal story about how I met Kim and how we grew our lives together. I hope you enjoy it. As a personal note, I wrote both the lyrics and the music, but I could never get through recording it myself. It was simply too emotional, too close…
I didn’t do drugs in my youth. I did music. My guitar, my banjo, and my Lindo Imperial accordion got me through some very stressful years at the University of Florida, School of Engineering. I worked, ran a house of 90 people in exchange for room and board, operated a forklift at a building supply…
I recorded this back in November 2023 – just messing around with singing while playing piano. Turns out, it’s a tougher skill than I imagined! I think of Ray Charles – nobody but him had that legendary charm and style.
A Grandfather’s (Papa’s) Reflection: When they’re young, we are the center of their world. It’s an addictive kind of love … whether you’re a parent or a grandparent. But as they grow, their universe expands, and our slice of it becomes smaller. It’s not about our importance, but rather the space we occupy in their…
In late 1975 I visited Lori, my fiancee, at her parents’ home we called the “Tree House”. It was a beautiful modern home that they had purchased from my dad a few years prior. Lori’s dad, Joe, had a beautiful Baldwin full sized grand, perfectly in tune, sitting in a place of importance, just under…
This is Ely singing karaoke at the Countyline Restaurant in Weirsdale, Florida on July 28, 2022. She’ll probably kill me for sharing this, but a Papa’s got to do what a Papa’s got to do. This was before she stepped fully into the stage world. Since then she has spent a couple of years performing…
Back in the late 70s, my wife took our very young son out to Colorado to visit her folks. I stayed behind in Florida. I was a builder then and had too many jobs going to break away. I missed her. I had a new Martin guitar I’d bought a few months earlier, and during…
Here is a bit of an improvisation I did on a nice Fourth of July. This is an amazing piano, a Clavinova 809. Behind it sits my Kawai grand, which is hard to beat, but the 809 gets surprisingly close. It is a perfect jazz platform and can do great trios. Just me and my…
This was Ely’s and my first recording together, done in February 2020. Ely was twelve at the time. She has always been an artist at the core, and we plan to record more when we can. I wrote this song, and it is my copyright, 2020. I wrote this song from memories of my newspaper…