Q: When you were 17 did you have a job? A: I had a summer job. If I remember correctly, I started to work in 1966 – when I was 15 – and I worked for $1.15 minimum wage an hour. It went to $1.25 over that summer; I thought it was a huge raise. When I was a junior in college, I had a high-paying job as a construction worker, doing road work for $3.25 an hour, which was outrageous money. Q: What was your first car like? A: When I was 16, my father needed a car; I bought it in 1966. We bought a 1961 Chevy Corvair – which Ralph Nader says is unsafe at any speed. It was 6 years old; I paid $250… I had one of the first sound systems in the back seat in my Corvair. I had an early 8 -track tape player that would run from electricity or the car adapter of the cigarette lighter and so I would run it on the back seat, and it actually folded out and had speakers on both sides. Q: How much was gas to fill it up? A: I have paid as little in my lifetime for gas as 24.9 cents a gallon. Q: Where did you hangout when you were 17? A: We had a hangout which was the local drugstore. I remember this explicitly because I drank 16 oz. bottles of Pepsi, which cost 12 cents and a 2 cents deposit if you took it out of the store. Q: Was the drugstore the ‘cool place’? A: It was the only place. We would just hangout like after school, in the evening. Q: What music did you listen to? A: The old school. When I was like 15, 16 and 17, Mo-Town was huge. The old Mo-Town sound was pretty good, but then some of the new stuff started to filter in. A lot of it was really based on old blues. Led Zeppelin and things were just getting popular when I was 17… I’ve always liked all kinds of music; I could surprise ya. I still have about 15 hundred vinyls from the old days, but they’re not worth anything anymore. [In] 1967, probably the most influential album of all time came out. These people hung around with Bob Dylan the previous year. Q: What was the album? A: The Beatles, “Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Q: What was school like? A: The teachers when I was in high school must of had a huge bet. I don’t know how much it was for, but they notched their paddles every time they used them, and I know that the winner took all. If you looked sideways, you were out in the hall getting paddled. Q: Did you ever get paddled? A: The worst one I got was, well, everybody had to take Woodshop and everybody had to put their own stuff away, and I forgot to put away my extension cord one time… I told the shop teacher – he took it easy on me – I’m a little disappointed, I thought you could hit harder. So the next day, I put everything away, but my buddies got it back out… I didn’t notice. Oh, did he beat me. Q: What do you think is different for 17-year-olds now? A: Life has not significantly changed really… Same thing, complaining that there’s nothing to do. The only thing that was different in high school was we probably spent more time in cars than you do. If we had nothing to do we just spent time cruisin’. There were some people that drank, but for the most part we didn’t drink in high school, which I think has significantly changed. There were a few and they were the ‘bad kids.’