1974
Entertainment

Music

I didn’t find the music of ’74 all that interesting, Elton John songs played a lot on the radio. Paul McCartney group Wings hand some new songs that I didn’t care much for, I got so tired of hearing Eric Clapton’s "I Shot the Sheriff" I would change the station when it came on.  "Time in a Bottle"  by Jim Croce was a nice mellow song.

Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto

One thing that Elizabeth imparted upon me was an appreciation of classical music and with records a dollar or two apiece at the twice a year record sale at the Campus Book Store I bought a number of classical music records.  There was Vivaldi, Handel, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, some oddities like Gregorian Chants and Chinese Classical Master Pieces, several records of Beethoven and even more of Bach.  One of my favorites was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor played by E. Power Briggs on the giant pipe organ at Harvard that has an opening like something out of a Frankenstein movie.  Then there was the Beethoven Piano Concerto incident. 

I wasn’t  sure where Elizabeth was living, or even if she had a permanent place, she would stayed with me a few days at a time off and on but she never left any of her possessions at my house other than her box collection of Beethoven’s five piano concertos which I played regularly.  I had built a record player stand, a simple thing made out of plywood, four feet tall, a couple of shelves, a place for the receiver-amplifier and the turntable on top.   I was sitting in my living room one day listening to Beethoven’s piano concerto number two after smoking some pot when I heard a car drive up.  Other than Elizabeth, I got few, if any, visitors, and I knew the sound of Elizabeth’s Volkswagen van so I new it wasn’t her.  So, I get up and look out the window and it was Mom and Dad.  They had never been to visit me before, not even in the three years I lived with Bill, so this was unexpected.  They get out of the car and come to the front door where I meet them and invite them in.  Mom sits on the couch next to me, and, not having any other chairs in the living room, Dad stands next to the record player stand.  Mom asks how I was doing and we make small talk for a few minutes with Dad not saying much.  Mom then looks at the coffee table and sees a small white tray with a small pipe and marijuana in it and she asks, “What is that?”  It was my cleaning tray that I used to clean the seeds from the pot so I just say “Marijuana” and Mom utters an “Oh” and Dad bumps into the record player stand causing the arm to skip across the record putting a scratch on it.   We talked for a bit more, then they got up to leave with Mom telling me that she hoped to see me at church on Sunday.

Pot cleaning tray made from plastic box from a medical test kit that I got from Hospital Stores when I worked there.

After they left I requeued the record from the start and found that when it got to the place when Dad bumped into the record player stand it had a skip in the record and when it made it past the skip, had a loud click on every turn of the record.  Next time Elizabeth came over I explained what happen and she got quite upset with me for ruining her record.  I told her I would replace it and asked where she got it at and she said the Campus Book Store so the next day I took a break from work, went to the store, and bought her a new box set like the one she had.  I still have her original box set which I  still have to this day.  I never listen to the record of the Second Concerto since it had the skip on it, but over time Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto known as the “Emperor” has become one of my all-time favorite classical music pieces.

Movies

The James Bond movie the Man with the Golden Gun came out and Roger Moore did a fair job at playing Bond but overall the movie was not that impressive.   I thought the Great Gatsby with Robert Redford was good, I had read the book.  I went to see The Towering Inferno mainly because it had both Seve McQueen and Paul Newman in it.  There were a few others I went to but overall there were no movies that became any of my favorites.

TV

Kung Fu  became my favorite TV show and I never missed an episode. All in then Family and Sanford and Son were still on but I watched them less frequently.  Westerns had pretty much died out with Gunsmoke the only remaining series with new shows although there were plenty of old show reruns.  Detective and police shows were becoming popular with Hawaii Five-O, The Rockford Files, Kojak, Mannix among them that I would watch if nothing else was on.