After an absence of many years, I’ve recently returned to playing clarinet. I now play in a concert band, and enjoy playing classical music. Tonight, my wife and I were jamming some blues numbers, she on piano and I on clarinet. When we finished improvising St. James Infirmary in B minor, she said, “You’re good. That’s your voice.” With her that was a natural observation, not a learned kind of thing to say. Made me feel good.

Been going through old photos lately. My wife and daughter brought a box of old photographs, I took during the mid-fifties, up from the basement. A bit of nostalgia, as well as renewed perspective, goes along with seeing old photos.

Shown here is a picture of me leaning against my old '54 chevrolet, a used car not much on looks. The previous owner worked in the steelmills and coke-dust had ground into the finish, but that didn't matter because I also needed a car to drive the half-hour trip to the mills. At this time, I worked in the chem-lab of U.S. Steel, the best of the many jobs I had working in the steel mills.

The '54 chevy was the last of a model line made to look ancient by the awesome change of style in 1955. My chevy was a straight stick with a six cylinder motor, pretty simple fair, but it turned out to be a dependable car. When I returned to Indiana University as a student, this old chevy reliably took me the five hour trip to Bloomington. Traveling as many back roads as possible, I made pretty good time. On holidays, when I wanted to return home, I usually had a few fellow students as passengers; they helped with gas and also made the time go by faster as we told stories and sang songs.

For me, the mid-fifties were difficult days of work and worry about my future made easier by having a car. A car was like a passport to freedom.