“I’m Your Captain” is a huge sledgehammer for me on multiple levels, and I was thinking about it just last night. I've mentioned that in 1979, between my Jr & Sr yrs of HS, I was an exchange student for the summer to West Germany. The last night of the stay all 170 of us Amis (as the Germans called us) were in the city of Bremen (we were actually there for 5 days), and nobody wanted to go home. So a dozen or so of us decided to stay up all night & long story shortened a bit, I wound up making out on the dance floor of a discotheque with a girl named Anne Thistleton from Parkersburg W. Va. (which is just across the Ohio River from Ohio). By the luck of the draw, Anne had become best friends that summer with the girl she was always lumped together with alphabetically, Susie Thiele, who was from nearby Cincinnatti. Anne was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and very sharp, but Susie was blonde, very curvaceous and brown-eyed in that way that just kills you on a blonde, albeit a couple inches shorter. So it didn't take much for me to swap with the 3rd person on their row of seats on the charter back to JFK, and I sat in the middle all the way back with these 2 babes & I stayed up all night again with the girls simultaneously sleeping on my shoulders. Then we hit JFK, promised to keep in touch, etc. But we really did.
Later that fall, I found out that my HS was going to have Thur & Fri off the week before Thanksgiving for a teachers’ conference, and it just so happened that Anne was planning a visit to Miami U. of Ohio (just outside of Cincy, alma mater of Ben Rothlis****er), and the Bearcats of Cincinnatti U. were playing their arch-rival in football in Miami that same Saturday. Susie’s older sister went to Cincy, but her boyfriend was in a frat at Miami OH, so we had good tix waiting for us. And to top it off, the Iggles were playing that Thursday night in Cincy (which was 2 weeks before the fateful Who concert there which I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past).
Okay, back to Grand Funk. We arranged a get-together in Cincy from Thurs evening to Sunday afternoon, and I hopped the for 8-hr Greyhound from St. Louis to Cincy. The bus ran down I-70 to Indy before I had to change buses Cincy, and in at the transfer I wound up sitting next to another totally hot blonde, who turned out to be Don Felder’s cousin heading from Chicago to the show. The Iggles show was awesome, and they debuted their “Joe Walsh for President” material, and also “Seven Bridges Road”, which got overplayed for a while, but was breathtaking, live. The next day we chilled for a bit & then headed out to Miami OH, where I was about to have my very first taste of college life. Anne was a Nat’l Merit scholar and thus had an official hostess for the weekend, Susie had some older friend from her HS to stay with & I was being put up in the frat house with her sister’s boyfriend. And somewhere along the line that night the two girls and I wound up sitting in a dorm room with Susie’s friend, getting stoned, and listening to the friend’s boyfriend’s roommate who was an aspiring bassist play “I’m Your Captain” several times through with the stereo on full blast. Talk about an indelible memory.
And this was the first of only a single handful of Div I NCAA football games I ever attended*, and now Cincinnatti has an outside chance to play for the national championship, or at least go undefeated.
*Dave, I think every other D-I game I’ve ever attended has been in the guise of pretending to be an LSJUMB member.
