I'm not sure what I'll be putting in here, but I promise to keep it as interesting as possible. Meanwhile, you are invited to visit my original blog at http://santiagoveraguas.blogspot.com/
where you'll find my latest "News of the Day" articles - these are stories that I've found interesting enough to share with the world outside of my regular email friends.
Welcome aboard!
June 30, 2018
And hello again!
I've been very busy the last week or so putting together blogs for my grandchildren, or rather, updating them, after having some pains in my chest and going to the hospital a couple of times until I realized that a heat rash on my chest wasn't a heat rash after all but a secondary effect of a virus called Shingles.
Shingles affects mostly older folks, which is why I've never had it before. But I did have chickenpox as a youth, and the virus from that apparently remains in your system for a long, long time until eventually emerging in about half the cases as Shingles later in life. According to the Mayo Clinic website, "after you've had chickenpox, the virus lies inactive in nerve tissue near your spinal cord and brain. Years later, the virus may reactivate as shingles." And it hurts like hell.
So I figured I was dying because of the pains in my chest so I got busy and started typing away in Elena, Devin and Drew's blogs about how much I love them and wish their father would wake up and realize that he's hurting them too when he doesn't let us communicate with each other.
So, I'm also thinking that I should also put in this blog some personal remembrances of my past so that when the kids finally get around to reading all this stuff, I will have left them something about myself too. It would be a lot better if I could just write them, but their dad won't allow that, so I'll put it here instead.
Here's an updated picture of myself, taken last year (2017) on the front porch of our house in Villas del Sur in Santiago. The tooth I broke when I was about 15 and had capped still looks great, but the others surrounding it have darkened a lot, so that's the only thing I've done with this picture - to fix my teeth. Otherwise, this is me pretty much as I look today while taking a selfie of myself.I'd love to show you a decent picture of my car, but unfortunately, it's broken and has been for the last seven or so years when during a horrendous rainstorm I accidentally pulled out in front of this dude from David who was accelerating over the speed limit trying to get out of town and didn't realize there was the worst intersection in Panama directly in front of him with me pulling out.
The car really wasn't hurt too bad. But the driver's side airbag deployed and fixing that and the damage to the left front has proved to be nearly impossible after my shitty insurance company wouldn't cover the damages. I left the car at Elsie's brother's house (he's a mechanic) and he tinkers with it every couple of months. He even got it to work a few months ago after bypassing the car's computer system.
But enough about the car. Let me try to give you a short synopsis of my life up to now and how I wound up in Panama.
I was born to John W. (Johnny) Shultz and Ruth Eunice Moser Shultz on September 27, 1940 at the Rowan Memorial Hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina. The hospital was torn down many years ago to make way for the Interstate highway that was built through Salisbury.
My dad was working as manager of Radio Station WSTP in Salisbury and my mother had been working at the Carolina Theater in Winston-Salem at the ticket booth but probably quit that job when they moved to Salisbury from Winston-Salem. It was there in Winston-Salem that they met and fell in love.
Mom was originally from either Muscatine, Iowa or Humboldt, Minnesota but moved to North Carolina to live with her closest sister, Edna Moser Cook, after getting into a wee bit of trouble and, according to my Cousin Jerry, after having an abortion.
Anyway, dad met mom at the ticket booth and couldn't keep his eyes off her and they were married. Along came me shortly after they moved to Salisbury.
When I was two years old, my dad got an offer to move to Martinsville, Virginia to become manager of Radio Station WMVA. He had been born in Martinsville and gladly accepted the job. We moved there in 1942 and moved into a first floor apartment at 628 Mulberry Road.
My grandmother, Jessie Pedigo Shultz, purchased a house just up the street in, I believe, 1944, at 611 Mulberry Road and moved there from the Staunton, Va. area with her older brother, John Harden Pedigo who was a rather famous retired lawyer having practiced mostly in the State of Washington.
When I was about 11 or 12, my dad built a house at 607 Mulberry Road on part of my grandmother's property, and we left the apartment and moved there.
At about the same time, when I was in the fourth grade at Patrick Henry Elementary School in Martinsville. I was taking piano lessons at home from Paul Zentmeyer, who had his own touring band and worked as an announcer at WMVA. I wasn't very good at piano, so Ruth Pace, the choir director at school, suggested I join the choir. It turns out I wasn't very good at choir either, but I definitely was showing some musical talent, so I decided to join the band.
Every male student in school with any musical talent wanted to play the trumpet, so I did too, and they put me in the band along with about 22 other young men. Ralph Shank, the band director, suggested I try something else, and I took up the baritone.
Turns out I wasn't very good at the baritone either, although I do remember one Easter when my parents gave me some Easter chicks and I loved penning them up in our garage and then chasing them around scaring them half to death, chasing them and blaring the baritone at them and then watching each one fly up into the air and try to escape. (I'm glad that evil streak died out early in my life!)
By the seventh grade, Mr. Shank realized the baritone wasn't my best instrument and he needed an alto sax player in the high school band, so he suggested I try playing one of those instead. My dad bought me a used Paris Selmer (made in Elkhart, Indiana, but I didn't know the difference), and I took to it like the proverbial duck to water. I was good. Very good. Excellent, in fact. I loved playing the alto saxophone and the more I played it, the better I became.
I was so good that The Melody Boys, a high school group that had been organized by members of Martinsville High School and was so good that they were hired to play at events around town, well, I was so good at the alto sax that they asked me to join the band, and I was only 13 at the time! Can you imagine that? By the time my senior year rolled around at MHS, I'd accumulated four Virginia State Band 1st Place awards and a whole drawer full of countless others. I had even formed my own band, Warwick Shultz & His Orchestra, after all the rest of The Melody Boys had graduated from high school.
The school voted me as the 1958 recipient of the prestigious John Philip Sousa Band Award and, when I wasn't doing so well with my senior grades, and should have been placed in the class of 1959 anyway since my birthday was at the end of September, it was decided to let me take a fifth year as a senior. This made me eligible for the Sousa award an unheard of second time, and I would have won it easily if I hadn't gone against Mr. Shank's wishes and told the band before they voted that I didn't think it was fair for them to give the award to someone twice. I really did want it, and Mr. Shank wanted me to get it too, but I was embarrassed to take the award from someone else who also deserved it, and I already had one of the awards under my belt, so I preferred to let someone else get it even if I was eligible as a second year senior.
I went on to college at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. I was going to major in Philosophy and took some classes under an old schoolmate of my father's, but that turned out to be a joke when I found myself with half a dozen philosophy books stacked up on my desk in the dorm and not a single one had been opened. Soon, very quickly I might add, I switched my major to music, and then college was a breeze after that. I played first chair alto sax under Dr. Emerson Head and was featured in a number of concert performances, garnering even more awards at band camps and symposiums while I was at college. I really was pretty good at it if I do say so myself.
And it makes me so happy to learn from son John than Andrew, my youngest grandson, has taken up the alto sax himself at about the same age I did when I was in Martinsville.
This is a picture that his dad sent me last week of my youngest grandson with his brand new Yamaha alto saxophone. He also sent me the link to a short video and, honestly, he has a very nice tone especially for just starting out. I am so very happy that he is taking up the sax just like his grandfather! ;-}
I had been on the radio a little while at WHEE during high school, so when I went off to college, I got a job with the college radio station, WFDD. And when the top-40 station in town needed a part-timer, I applied for the job and was selected to work the Sunday morning shift at WTOB, the number one station. Later, I took a part time job with WSJS, also in Winston-Salem, but when I left college and moved back to Martinsville, I continued with my radio career and pretty much left music behind for the rest of my life.
In 1954, my dad got together with a close friend of his, Phil Hedrick, a radio engineer from Winston-Salem who worked at Radio Station WSJS, and together they built and opened up Radio Station WHEE in Martinsville.
At about the same time, he had begun to dabble in politics and had run for the office of City Mayor and won. I believe he didn't win a single district, but accumulated the most votes by coming in near the top in nearly all the districts. A remarkable achievement!
My dad had a drinking problem, however, and lost the next election which apparently depressed him greatly. More to come later.
October 15, 2018
Over the years, I've added videos and soundtracks into YouTube and somehow wound up with two different accounts. I've tried to combine them but wound up being afraid that one or the other would dissolve and never work again, so I've kept them both.
The first channel is currently located at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNxn8J5XXepLC1hkxFNO2sA
I have no idea how much longer the folks at YouTube will allow me to have it, but it's free, so enjoy it while you can. There's some neat music by Kai Winding and Jimmy Smith that I used back in the 1960s for my Sunday Session radio show, a short film I made in 2009 when attending my 50th Martinsville High School reunion, and a tribute to my great band teacher and friend, Ralph Shank.
The second channel is currently located at https://www.youtube.com/user/rs99cool/featured?view_as=subscriber
There's a nice cut by Art Farmer doing Jubilation which is a tune I absolutely love, and some other stuff I don't know why is there. You have to page off to the right to find some dog videos and a video of my goddaughter Diny from 7 years ago. But the best thing about this channel is the children's videos that I sent to my grandkids several years ago in care of Brenda and John that they never showed to them. That angered me royally, to say the least, but I've since found out that they don't want me to contact my own grandchildren and as much as I've argued and pleaded with them, they won't budge. The videos are extraordinary and I hope the kids get to see them eventually.
