It’s funny how a song can evoke memories of times long passed. I’ll never forget the song from July 1966, and where I first heard it. I was visiting a childhood friend, Tom Colvin who’d moved away after 4th grade. We were best friends during our elementary school years. On their last night in Enumclaw, he and his sister Julie slept over at our house. Somehow, three years later, Tom and I hatched a plan (made real by our mothers) where I’d stay with the Colvins for a week.
I didn’t know it then but I’d just played my last game of Little League baseball. Playing second base, in the second game of a double-header, a sharp grounder hit a rock bounding into my face and producing a nasty fat lip. I left the next day to visit Tom. Back then parents had neither the time nor inclination to spend six hours driving kids from Enumclaw to Port Angeles and back again. So Mom drove to Tacoma and placed me on a Greyhound bus. It was a long ride. The bus stopped at a half dozen towns along the way. I remembered my mother’s final directive, “Now make sure you get off in Port Angeles!” I called their home from a payphone to say I arrived, but it took some time for Mrs. Colvin to pick me up. In those 30 minutes, I discovered what shabby places bus stations really are, despite the allure of vending machines and pinball.
The Colvins lived in a daylight rambler several houses up from Highway 101. It was next to a two-story motel and restaurant, where Tom’s brother Jeff worked. That week was cloudy each morning, a summer weather pattern typical near the sea. Tom’s sister, Janet owned just about every one of The Animals’ albums. Most mornings we listened to their songs time and again until the marine air lifted and we went out to play. Mickie Most was a record producer who made pop stars of the Animals and would soon do the same for a Scottish folk balladeer about to become a groovy, trendsetting pop star. His name was Donovan.
Towards the end of my stay, Tom and I went to a beach party on the Straights of Juan de Fuca at Crescent Beach. Tom was popular with his friends. I was a shy kid from Enumclaw with a fat lip. There were lots of junior high girls, each pretty in their own way, but none turned their attention to me.
Someone’s car radio was playing in a time before “boom boxes.” I heard the song of that summer . . . and every summer for the next 45 years––Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.” Memories of that moment are etched in my mind. The teenage girls no longer mattered. The syncopated beat, sing-along melody, and hip lyrics did.
At week’s end, I joined the Colvins and visited their friends who owned a cabin at a nearby lake. It was a serene and sunny Sunday when my Port Angeles vacation came to an end. I said goodbye to the Colvins and my family picked me up, coming from nearby Hood Canal, where they’d spent the first half of our summer trip. We ferried across the straights to Vancouver Island and made our way to Salt Spring Island where Mom reserved a cabin for the second week of our planned vacation.
There wasn’t much to do at the faded resort of rundown cabins where we stayed. There was no television. With little to do and the sun shining warmly each day, we had to figure out ways to have fun. Near our cabin was a small inlet with a narrow channel opening producing strong currents when the tide ebbed and flowed. We built a makeshift raft of logs and planks and at high tide rode the Tom Sawyer-like raft down what we pretended were rapids into the larger bay beyond.
In our cabin, a radio played, but the Canadian stations weren’t playing Donovan. But, I must have heard Brian Hyland’s “The Joker Went Wild” thirty times that week. I Googled the song and found out for some strange reason, it was the number one song on Vancouver’s Top 40 station that week.
It was there I played the only round of golf I ever played with my father. The course was dumpy and so were our rented clubs. The grass was bone-dry, so balls rolled easily along the fairway. Dad, Barry, and I knocked balls about and putted across bumpy greens. We didn’t keep score.
We soon exhausted things to do on Salt Spring Island, so cut our stay short. Our holiday ended in Victoria, where we kids insisted upon staying at a motel with a pool and television. That evening on the local news broadcast, the reporter told the story of a police crackdown on prostitution in the city. I asked Mom, “What’s a prostitute?” She dissembled an oblique explanation. There was a hint of the end of summer in the air.
I saw Tom Colvin one more time before our friendship was set aside. His family visited Enumclaw and we spent an afternoon fiddling about in a makeshift tree fort we made in the empty lot behind our house. Much later Tom landed in Portland, but in days before the internet looking up an old friend was well-nigh impossible. Years passed and I’d hear occasional reports of his doings from friends of friends.
Quite by accident, we reunited one Friday night in July 2017 at the Bellingham Bells baseball game against the Port Angeles Lefties. He was there with his P.A. buddies. I was there to see Jim Clem, who coaches for the Bells and once pitched for the local Peninsula Community College team. All of Jim’s baseball pals were part of the group that Tom came with.
Our worlds united on a warm night when two schoolboy chums reconnected 51 years later. Tom and I spent the couple hours at the baseball game reminiscing about our lives long ago and today. By game’s end, we said goodbye. Three-and-one-half-hour later, I was back home with new memories of another day.
Tom and I became Facebook friends but we haven’t seen each other since. When our lives might next intersect, only fate knows.
* * * Afterword:
This story has a sad ending. Four years after our reunion, his sister, Julie responded to a Facebook message I’d sent when my essay was first published. She told me Tom suffered from dementia and needed to be placed in a home. Like many suffering from diseases of the mind, some long-term memory remained intact, but his short-term cognition was impaired so frustration ruled his world.
Early on the morning of Aug. 29, 2022, Tom passed away. A Celebration of Life was held on Oct. 15, 2022, which would have been Tom’s 69th birthday. I attended with Jim Clem whose team’s game in Port Angeles led to our 2017 reunion. I introduced myself to his children, Jesse, Rick, and Angela plus other family members.
At the Celebration several people told me the same story. Though much of Tom’s memory was lost, one of the stories he told his family during those last years was of a friend from Enumclaw who met him at a baseball game and reunited a friendship forged so many years ago. May you rest in peace, Tom Colvin.