PVP Village Writers

Author: Village Member Anne Herron

I dedicate this writing to Susan Valerie Gross, my college roommate at UCLA from Van Nuys High School. She taught me how to study at the big U, what classes might be stimulating, which professors were good, etc. If not for Susan, I could very well be flipping burgers to this very day! We were both language majors. It was Camus for her and Cervantes for me. I knew then that she was really, really, smart! Imagine, Camus is way, way intellectual and reading it in French??? We had many laughs and I benefited tremendously from her wisdom, savvy, and perspectives on the world. XO Susan!! Wherever you are!   
                  
My freshman year at UCLA could be described as atypical. By midterms I had every grade but an A in my 4 classes. I’ll tell you why when I get further/farther into this epic.

It was late one afternoon in the Fall when Abnormal Psychology class had ended. (Wonderful professor!) Susan and I joined the exodus of students heading back to the dorms. We stopped by the Student Book Store for some reason - maybe to buy a book? I was looking at the pens. I love pens. I became aware of two guys standing off to my left. One was tall, slender, blond, and nice looking. The shorter guy was not bad, either. They both were smiling. I turned my head away from them to see who they were looking at. I continued to buy a pen. Susan joined me. We walked out the door to begin our walk across the athletic field and up the hill to the dorm. Dinner would be soon .I had such a tremendous appetite back then! We were waiting in line to get our trays of meatloaf, mashed something, vegetable, salad and a brownie. Marcia, the dorm President was working behind the steam table serving the meatloaf.  She looks at me, waving her spatula in the air, points it at me and says excitedly, “You!” (Marcia also worked at the reception desk in the lobby of the dorm.) “You!  There’s this guy who wants to meet you! What is your room number? He would like to call you. He sings at Ledbetters on Westwood Blvd! May I give him your room number?” (Room number and telephone number were the same in the dorm, should you be curious - men were not allowed on the women’s floor. Does anybody remember someone shouting, “Man on the Floor? 

Well, what’s a girl to do? I raced around the steam table, grabbed a pen and wrote my number on her palm! I still wonder, all those years ago, did they jump in a car and drive around campus to the three dorms on the  hill? Did they inquire about me at all three dorms, until “bingo”? Maybe they followed us on foot? How did these guys describe me?

He called. We talked. He asked me out for ice cream at Will Wright’s on Friday night. Friday night arrives. He hands me a single rose. He was pleasant, mannered, with a Texas accent. This is all I remember of the first  date. Oh, we walked out of the dorm to the parking area, and he opens the  door of a champagne/taupe colored Jaguar XKE. I still get this tingly feeling when I think of that moment. Ah, the material girl still lives!

Saturday night I went with him to Ledbetter’s Folk Music Club and was initiated into the world of folk music. I sat in a chair in the middle of the small audience area and listened to him sing and play his twelve-string  guitar. Anybody ever hear “The Bells of Rimney” or “There Ain’t No More Trouble on the Brazos”? They are wonderful! As I sat in the dimly lit “club”  listening to his voice and the twelve-string guitar - well, who wouldn’t - I became enchanted, infatuated, and thrilled! Early on he gave me a photo that shows him leaning casually on the Jaguar, Madras shirt and all! On the back of the picture, he wrote, “This is like finding the Golden Fleece!” He signed his name with a drawing of a small guitar under it.

He came up to the dorm one Sunday evening and sang for an hour to about thirty students in the Fireside Lounge. I guess I was quite a curiosity being on the arm of this very talented, romantic, singer. Such sophistication, glamour, such elan, savor faire, in my V-neck sweater and pleated skirt. (Oh, my, I don’t think so.) We spent hours riding up and down the coast to Ojai in the Jaguar and and driving to other places in Southern California.

Funny about the Jag, it was on loan to him by his manager, Randy Sparks. His real car was “The Brown Goose,” a two-tone 55 Chevy Bel-Air  with “gronching” brakes. He played sets at the Golden Bear in Orange County, The Troubadour in Beverly Hills and Ledbetters in Westwood. I was always there listening, feeling that all his songs were just for me. Jag or Chevy, no matter, I was goo-goo-ga-ga.

As I mentioned my first semester grades earlier, at midterm, I had  every grade but an A in my four classes. He had the good sense to encourage me to study more and focus. I squeaked by. The whole adventure was pretty heady and distracting for this 19-year-old.

At some point he visited me at my home and met my mother. She liked him very much, but I could tell she was thinking, “I send my only child to University and she comes home with a musician! Not a doctor or  lawyer in sight.”

Around the holidays, he was having problems with his manager. He felt that Randy Sparks of New Christy Minstrels fame was not promoting his career. Sparks brought in a rather short blond guy with neither voice nor guitar skills to perform at Ledbetters as the featured second performer. An artist doing a first set or warm up is an insult. I knew there was going to  be a change. He very much wanted to pursue his career as a singer/ songwriter. A long-distance relationship was not going to work. Leaving school and following him was not going to happen. The thought occurred to me that he would be on the road in the future and the probability that he would meet, well, you know, “the romance of the road.”**

Life is funny. Kharma? We had crossed paths, enjoyed each other, but we ended it before the Holidays. What WAS that all about? I don’t know, but it sure was spectacular! His name was Henry John Deutchendorf, Jr. or John Denver. John found his dream, wrote and recorded his own songs and lived a life of purpose doing what he loved and valued. I guess you could say I am immortal in a teeny, tiny way, too.  I’m the girl on page 44 in his autobiography.   
                                     
P.S. I still have a demo album that John made. (One song on it called “Babe I Hate To Go” became “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1969.) On the back of the album, he had written “Ann, I still have lovely memories of you. John” I sometimes get out the 8x10 glossy showing his guitar in front of him on the floor, hands resting on the headstock. He’s wearing a navy-blue blazer, gray slacks, cordovan  loafers. Sigh! Then there is the lovely hand drawn and written note (dare I say. “Love”?)  My favorite of John’s songs is “Perhaps Love”
** John Denver: Take Me Home - An Autobiography with Arthur Tobler