Willie Lewis, Page 3
After I was released from the State Reformatory two years later on June 19th, 1966, things looked mighty bleak for me. I had $32 dollars in my pocket, the clothes I had been sent up in two years earlier (and they didn’t fit real well) and little to no real hope for much of any future at all, outside of prison life. About this time, though, fate took a hand. I went to visit my grandmother and she told me about this program she had heard about, from the guy who was supposed to be my parole officer, if I’d ever been given a parole. It was a Federally funded program for young ex-convicts called the Youth Opportunity Center, or YOC. I had nothing to lose, so I went down to the place, just to check it out. I talked to the director about my situation and they signed me up right there on the spot due to my dire circumstances, then started paying me $42 dollars a week to just NOT get into trouble (which I found a novel approach to keeping people out of jail, to say the least). It was their wish that we not do anything stupid enough to get sent back up the river again. All of the people (excluding the staff, of course) were youthful ex-convicts, so I fit right in. We did a whole lot of drinking and other crazy stuff, like smokin’ “wacky tobaccie” and then going out to Cherry Creek Reservoir to go crawdad hunting with a baseball bat. I never did get a single crawdad either. We did other fun things of that nature that were not exactly the things angels were made from, but wouldn’t get us put back in jail again (unless we got caught). The problem was, I could see that my life was just not going anywhere positive and I was just spinning my wheels. I knew that if I didn’t do something to change it, I would be back in prison again, sooner or later (most likely sooner). I had no real education, not even a high school diploma or GED and no future prospects at all, if, or when the program’s funding ran out. I talked to the director of the program about trying to get some sort of training, so that I might be able to find some sort of gainful employment after the program ended or before it ended, if possible. He said that he would help me get into any field of endeavor that I choose to become involved with, but first I would have to get a GED (General Equivalency Diploma) or I wouldn’t be able to get into any kind of a job training program. Apparently, they all required at least a high school diploma or GED before being allowed to enroll in any of them.
I stopped all of my drinking and messing around and got down to some serious studying. I took the GED test about three months later. I passed it my very first time out with some pretty good over-all test scores. I have always been pretty proud of that GED. It was the first thing I ever actually succeeded at and if anyone ever called me a dummy or stupid I could whoop out my GED and prove that I was neither one. After I received my GED diploma in the mail, I took it down to the YOC and I presented it to the director. He was pretty impressed and asked me what kind of training I would like to become involved in. I told him that I wanted to take up nursing. He found that to be an odd selection because in those days, there just weren’t very many male nurses. Nursing was considered a woman’s occupation, I guess, but I had done quite a bit of menial nursing type jobs while working in the hospital at the reformatory and had enjoyed it very much. After some string pulling, I was enrolled in the LPN nursing program at Swedish Hospital and started classes. I loved working in the hospital proper and all of the mental challenges that went along with the responsibility were very stimulating. I did extremely well in all of my instructional classes, as well as my on the floor duties. But again, fate took a hand, a very harsh hand this time. The nursing instructors found out about all of my past criminal activities somehow and then created a way to get me expelled from the nursing program about ten days or so before my final graduation was to take place. I was very disappointed to say the least and I went into a serious mental depression. I just about gave up on life in general for awhile. I had NO idea what I was going to do. I had studied and worked very hard for a whole year in nursing school, plus the time invested getting the GED and had nothing to show for it. However, I was still involved with the YOC program. I went back down to their offices and told them what had happened. They really stuck up for me and tried everything within the law to force them to allow me to graduate, but it all was to no avail. After that, I started hanging out with unsavory types again and drinking a lot. I was heading down the road of self destruction at a mighty high rate of speed and didn’t much give a hairy rat’s behind about it.
Mary Louise
It was also about this time that I really began to notice a young lady by the name of Mary Louise Sanchez, who worked downstairs as a receptionist. She had just turned eighteen and was the most beautiful woman that I had ever seen. She reminded me a lot of Annette Funicello. The trouble was, she really did NOT like me. I was a drunk, I was very crude, I was rude, obnoxious and just generally not very likable to a young woman who had herself together. She started going out with a friend of mine that I had met while in the State Reformatory. His line of B.S. was a lot smoother than mine was, so she picked him. I started dating one of her other friends, so that we could all hang out together and I could keep tabs on her. Then for some insane reason, my friend decided to steal a car that belonged to a very well known local television sports personality in and around Denver. He got busted and ended up in the State Penitentiary for seven to ten years, as it was his third fall. Needless to say, that pretty much ended his relationship with Mary Louise. Since I had cleaned up my act enough to at least appear to be civilized in her eyes, we started to date. I think that I had been secretly in love with her since the very first time I ever saw her, so when I saw my chance, I just naturally went after her
all out.
Mary Louise & Tina
Mary Louise always seemed to want to play music and dance a lot, but I didn’t own a record player at that time, or records either for that matter. She told me she had a lot of records of her own at home, so I took some of my “stash cash” money I had been saving and went down on Larimer Street where all of the pawn shops were. I bought myself a cheap, single-play, Arlens brand, used three-speed record player for $3.50 and about twelve really nice rhythm & blues 45’s. They were all early to mid 50’s doo wop and blues 45’s, all on the yellow and black Atlantic label that I’d had some experience with before. Just like that, I was back to collecting records again and didn’t even know it. There’s a stupid, but maybe interesting tale attached to the experience down at the pawn shop. After I had looked at all the singles and picked out the record player that I could afford, I started looking through their albums. There were copies of just about every Sun album ever made in there, in like brand new condition, I’m pretty sure. The Dance Album by Carl Perkins (I remember it because it had a very cool cover on it), the Rock House album by Roy Orbison, two Jerry Lee Lewis albums and all of the Johnny Cash albums. For whatever stupid reason, I didn’t buy a single one of them. I would like to think that it was because I didn’t have a whole lot of spare “cabbage” to be putting down on LP’s or even a decent record player, for that matter. Besides, the albums were $1 apiece and the 45’s were only a dime (and they were ALL by black artists), so I bought all the 45’s and left all of the albums there. At that time, I still associated all of those guys with country & western music anyway, so I didn’t feel any serious emotional loss for not buying them. I have regretted that decision many times since then. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t have had the albums around very long, anyway. I was always more of a 45 rpm guy and would most likely have traded them away. In fact, that’s exactly what I did with almost all of my albums over time, except for the oldies albums that I had re-acquired. Nobody wanted them because they had no real collector value or rarity and I had written notes all over the backs of them.
I had a small upstairs apartment on 9th and Bannock Street at the time and Mary Louise began coming over to my place fairly regular. I remember an incident in which she brought a couple of country & western albums over. A Hank Williams Sr. album and a Hank Thompson album. I asked her what the heck she planned on doing with them and she told me “I’m going to play them”. I told her “not on my record player, you’re not”. I guess she thought that I was joking with her, because she proceeded to take the Hank Williams album out of it’s cover and place it on the record player. She turned it on, picked up the tone arm and placed it on the album. Just about two notes came out of the speaker before I freaked out. I ripped off the tone arm and took the album off of the record player, opened up a window (I lived in an upstairs apartment) and threw it into the street, where it got ran over repeated times. Needless to say, that did not endear me to Mary Louise a whole lot. However, I discovered that she also had a pretty nice collection of 45 rpm singles as well. I asked her to bring some of those goodies over to play, as long as they were not hillbilly records. She started bringing over fifty records or so at a time and we tuned out. She had some excellent records, too. Nothing really super rare, I suppose, but a lot of very nice rhythm and blues and doo wop records. Cool singles like I’m Sorry by Bo Diddley, Rama Lama Ding Dong by The Edsels, Adorable by The Colts, Tears On My Pillow by The Imperials, I by The Velvets and many, many more. Of course, I wanted all of her of records, but she wasn’t gonna be getting up off of them without a fight. I knew that I couldn’t just take them from her, like in the old days, because she’d most likely stab or shoot me in my sleep. As together as she was, she also had a “tough cookie” side to her nature, in those days. Anyway, I hit upon a genuine good idea (for once in my life), I talked her into playing cards for them. She was a lousy card player and it didn’t take me very long to clean her out of every one of her singles. Once I had her records, I knew I had her for life (or at least for as long as still I had her records) and she moved in with me. Her mom was, to say the least, NOT very thrilled about the idea of her daughter moving in with a “jailbird gringo” (as she called me) and especially when she found out her daughter was going to move in with me without the benefit of marriage. At that point she decided that she really hated my guts. It took me almost twenty years to win the old gal over, but in the end my dynamic personality (and the birth of our daughter), finally did win her over.
Bo Diddley – I’m Sorry
Anyway, it turned out that Mary Louise had a nice collection of about 700 records that became mine. Around that same time, monophonic albums were being fazed out in favor of stereo and various stores all around town had monophonic album sales in bins of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of albums. I repurchased the complete Roulette and Original Sound oldies album sets that I originally had. If memory serves me, there were about twenty two volumes of the Roulette oldies albums and maybe fifteen volumes of the Art Laboe Original Sound oldies albums. I used these albums as a collecting guide to educate myself musically, as well as to aid me in finding all of the cool 45’s that Mary Louise and/or I didn’t know about (or didn’t have) first hand. There were so many cool mint albums in those stores at that time, we didn’t know what to do. They were ultra cheap too. We did buy a few, but not many. Mary Louise had picked out three or four hundred albums, but I told her to put them back. We didn’t have the money and I was much more interested in 45’s. The albums started out at $.88 cents apiece and then quickly dropped down to as cheap as four for a dollar. If I had the knowledge then, that I have now, I’d have robbed a bank, bought all those albums up and became literally a millionaire (after I got out of prison of course). The albums were all mint and shrink wrap sealed. Just about any 50’s LP a body can think of was in one of those bins of albums. I can remember seeing copies of the Charlie Rich Phillips International album, every Buddy Holly album ever made, as well as the Johnny Burnette Trio album on Coral, in quantity. By that I mean maybe ten or more copies of each album. Of course, we didn’t buy any of those at all. Mary Louise did buy a Mando & The Chili Peppers album on Golden Crest and a Ron Holden & The Thunderbirds album on Donna Records, but over time I traded both of them away.
Mando & The Chili Peppers – Why Can’t It Be
(Mando & The Chili Peppers often split their time between their native San Antonio and Denver)
Willie Lewis & Mary Louise at Herb’s Hideaway on Larimer
Stay tuned for Page Four of Willie Lewis‘ story.
