Ever since grade school you had this thing about exploring – especially the neighborhood and particularly on your bike.
You and your trusty Sting-Ray – you’ll have it til you’re 30.
Tooling down alleys, looking for cool stuff. Always the dumpsters – always behind stores on Pico.
Lots of rotten vegetables, shredded paper and stuff that both looked and smelled bad, but every so often you’d hit paydirt. Store going out of business. Business shutting down – typewriters and boxes of pens – business cards for people who don’t work there anymore. Books. Jackpot.
Junk to a lot of people – strange treasures to you.
There was that one day, though – that day the company that had no name on the front door, went out of business. You could tell they were out of business because the dumpster was overflowing, junk and trash spilling out into the alley.
You hit a goldmine. A stack of film reels – 16 millimeter. Must’ve been twenty of them. Maybe more but there was a layer of coffee grounds you’d have to negotiate and that was usually not a good sign.
You grabbed as many as you could, tossed them in a box. Fastened the box to your bike with bungee cords you always brought with you.
You had nothing to watch them on and no idea what was on them, but your buddy who was in the Audio-Visual club at school had just the thing.
He had keys and you had a box of films – match made in heaven.
You snuck into school Sunday night and made your way to the Audio-visual room where all the film projectors were lined up.
Your buddy, who prided himself on being able to run any projector and fix any broken film, suggested splicing them together on one reel so you didn’t have to jump up and thread a new film every ten minutes.
Sounded like a plan.
So with all the precision of a brain surgeon, he spliced the films together onto one enormous reel and got ready to thread one of the projectors.
Just then a door slammed and metal wheels started ambling down the hallway. You froze – janitor – Humphrey; the guy who had a habit of calling the Police a lot, shuffled past your door.
When he got out of ear-range, your buddy tossed the giant film reel in a library mailer and put it on a shelf – you’ll get it in the morning.
You held your breath long enough and escaped without the film and without Humphrey.
Your last class of the day was Health Ed – the place you learned everything about sex and influenza.
As luck would have it, they were running a film that day – diving into the reproductive portion of the class; funny feelings and the do’s and don’t’s of good dating. It promised to be a cure for insomnia.
But not what was on the film. Instead, the class was treated to a half hour of the spectacularly endowed Virginia Bell doing a striptease, accompanied to the delighted giggles from the boys, “eeew-gross” retorts from the girls and a perplexed teacher, who swore up and down this was the right film but was wondering where the narration came in.
The film was confiscated, dragged off to the Principals office and never seen again. Nobody knows who did it. The secret was safe with you.
After school; with the radio on and tuned to Reb Foster at KFWB, you kept wondering if maybe diving into the dumpster, covered in coffee grounds and dragging up the remaining film reels wasn’t such a bad idea.
You had all night to think about it.
Here’s an hour’s worth of Reb Foster from KFWB on January 21, 1966.
