THE WINNERS: FIRST PLACE: James C. Potter Salem, Va.
“When I Met You”
Blame it on Feb.9, 1964. Like many baby boomers, watching the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” was a turning point in our youthful lives. The Beatles and other bands in the British Invasion gave us an immediate love for R&B and pop music. We were inspired to take up guitars and drums and sing our hearts out.
My brother Don, our friend Nic Baker and I formed a band based in Nic’s Salt Lake City basement. We covered countless songs from such bands as the Kinks, Rolling Stones, the Animals, and (most of all) the Beatles. Over the next two years we started writing our own material—songs we rediscovered in 2003.
During the heady years of 1964-1966, our basement band NB3 (Nic Baker Trio) wrote more than a dozen songs. Fortunately we kept the lyrics and chord progressions (recorded for posterity by Nic, the group’s designated typist) in a bright-yellow plastic binder.
On June 22, 1967, the Potter brothers left Salt Lake City, Utah. Around noon on that bright sunny day, Nic walked up the street, his dog’s leash in one hand, the yellow binder in the other and gave us the song file. Somewhere deep inside me, I knew this file of Baker/Potter pop songs would someday have a profound effect on my life. Since this was the only written record of our musical odyssey, I always stored these transcripts in a safe place. I was never sure why, but I still kept them.
Throughout my years in high school, then college, then a 28-year career with an international telecommunications company, plus marriage, kids, dogs and day-to-day life, I kept the song folder in trunks or boxes that followed me from state to state. I would occasionally reflect fondly on the songs inside, while subconsciously whistling a familiar melody from long ago. Somewhere in the house (and in the back of my mind) was a treasure neatly packed away and stored in some basement or attic.
Fast forward to December 2003. My career had suddenly ended with a company-wide initiative offering generous volunteer early-retirement packages. What would I do in my spare time that had previously been dictated by a career that followed the principle that “the management clock has no hands”? Immediately, two thoughts came to mind: (1) find that old song folder, and (2) find Nic Baker.
I found the file neatly stashed away in a large box in the garage. I carefully thumbed through the lyrics, which were fast approaching their 40th year. When I told my brother Don about this rediscovery and showed him the lyrics, he commented that their antiquated state made each lyric sheet look like Papyrus.
My great memory and fertile imagination have always compensated for my feeble academic skills. As I combed through the archive of the Baker/Potter catalogue of pop songs written when we were teenagers, all the melodies and harmonies, chord progressions and drum rhythms surfaced. I asked Don if he would be willing to resurrect one of the songs and record it professionally. We’d try to recreate the sound of pop music in 1965. Don agreed, so in a long one-day session in August 2004, we recorded “When I Met You.” But we agreed that only if we could achieve the sound we strived for as kids would we record the remainder of the dozen songs. What we found was, we could. As it was, the recording process required 20 months of diligent planning, performing, editing and polishing these sounds that once captured our adolescent imaginations.
The search for Nic was even more difficult. Thanks to the Internet, we found him after 18 months, discovering that he lived just a few hours from us, not halfway around the world as we had begun to believe.
To say that Nic was surprised to hear from us is an understatement. But to learn that we were revisiting all the old songs from our past was, well, shocking! Don and I recruited Nic’s musical services for piano accompaniment. We had come full circle, bringing our dreams to life and completing what we had started almost 40 years earlier.
If not for that fateful handoff on June 22, 1967, this project would have never seen the light of day. And the magic of 1965 never would have been reborn.
Eight years ago a leap was forced on me when I was laid off from my job of 21 years. At 53, I felt I was too young to retire, but too old to start over. I had never lost a job before and found it to be a humiliating, demeaning experience, one that sent me into a severe depression and forced me to reassess many of my own values. I knew that I was too bitter to ever return to the oil industry that had been my security blanket since 1972, so I took an entirely different direction. I had always been an active investor, so I decided I could utilize that experience and become a licensed stockbroker. That went well for a couple of years, but I soon realized that I hated cold-call sales. I also learned that investing other people’s life savings was different than putting your own at risk, and that I wasn’t comfortable with that, especially in a bear market.
I retired from any paid employment for a while in 2005, and found that experience very unrewarding. I was one who needed some structure in his life to get going in the morning. I was writing newsletters for a couple of local nonprofit organizations at the time, and the director of one of them offered me a job as his assistant. I only wanted to work part-time, so that is what we agreed to. That was in June 2005. In August, Hurricane Katrina made its appearance, destroying our agency, my house, my boss’s house and my boss’s church (he is an ordained minister). In one day, hundreds of thousands were forced to take a leap that none of us could have ever dreamed of. The one constant in all our lives was that nothing was the same as before, and as we have slowly come to realize, life will never be exactly as it was.
In 1999, my career had been taken from me. In 2005, most of my physical possessions had been taken as well. I could not emotionally handle the rebuilding of my house; I left that entirely in the hands of my wife, with the assistance of her two sisters. But I did find new purpose in my new job at the nonprofit organization, which was now a full-time commitment because of the demands of the situation. I raised funds through grants and restocked the facility with furniture and computer equipment once the building was restored to usable condition. My presence at the center left the director with time to concentrate on rebuilding his church and his own house. The hurricane has provided me and others in the business with a mission to restore our community to a fully functional state, and make it a place others will want to relocate to, to work and to raise families.
Some boomers did our best to hold onto our ’60s-based values, and we settled the one place on earth where we thought we could manage to keep them forever. Wearing a backpack, traveling the world between jobs and between men, I landed in Kathmandu in the late 1980s.
Then 35, I was the age when prudently one should settle into a career, get a mortgage, and start a family, but instead I was single, uncommitted, still searching. In Kathmandu I found kindred souls, a couple of thousand runaway American boomers who had pioneered a geographical Neverland, where they retreated deep into dharma, alternative lifestyles and entrepreneurial careers. That phase of our lives lasted a long while … as we mated up, gave birth to our own set of echo-boomers, celebrated our 40th birthdays … then 50th, and even 60th.
Eventually, reality caught up with us. By 2001 it was time to rethink the alternative lifestyle. The times had changed, even in remote, peaceful, funky Kathmandu. The new realities were overpopulation, pollution and civil war. It was time to go home, to a place I had spent most of my life avoiding, a small Mississippi Delta town in a forgotten corner of Arkansas. I didn’t expect to stay long, but as it turns out, I’m still here, as so much of the 21st-century world grows ever more confusing, overcrowded and inhospitable. This is one place where global economics, global wars and global warming seem to have little effect, one of those kinds of places that once prompted Mark Twain to quip would be a good place to be at the end of the world, because everything that happens here happens 10 years later than elsewhere.
My new ambition is to accomplish the same modest feat that challenged my parents and grandparents: just hold my ground. No more does it seem important to struggle to make a difference. Now, the struggle is merely to make a living. Those traditional middle-class values that seemed boring back in the ’60s and ’70s suddenly seem like good common sense. The longer I stay, the more I realize how many once-opportune places in America now pose an economic struggle. The Mississippi Delta at least offers affordable mortgages—indeed, I pay just $400 a month for a spacious waterfront property that could easily cost millions elsewhere. And even with scarce jobs, at least the area is not glutted with underemployed college graduates who make it hard to even land a job interview, much less a job.
My new second-career job as a university professor connects me to both the younger generation and to some interesting boomer colleagues who stayed put while I moved on. While I have no desire to live outside America again, I’m glad to have done so back when so much of the world was cleaner, safer and less crowded, when you could be proud to flash an American passport. I’m glad to have traveled the world before the credit-card crowd inflated the price of the world’s tranquil away-from-it-all bungalows from $2 a night to $200 a night. For those of us way out there in Kathmandu, it was a great leap to get there and live out our dreams—and another to come back home to a very different America from the place we left.
