Member-only story
1985: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 22: June 1, 1985)
Bryan Adams croons, Katrina and the Waves celebrate, Klymaxx calls a meeting, and Americans find out who Kim Mitchell is
As I’ve mentioned before, we lived in a brand-new neighborhood on Lubbock’s southernmost edge. Two streets had been laid out beyond ours, but only a couple of model homes had been built so far, and beyond those were alfalfa fields that seemed to stretch all the way south to Lamesa. I spent hours riding my hand-me-down gray Schwinn ten-speed down dirt farm roads until I wasn’t entirely certain where I was anymore, simply because I didn’t have a drivers license yet and there wasn’t much else to do.
When I didn’t feel like biking, I would walk the three blocks over to Earl Crow Park, across University Avenue in a more established neighborhood. I always brought my Walkman, a paperback, and my notebook, a black vinyl portfolio with one of the yellow legal pads I bought in 12-packs from my dad’s store. The spring and summer of 1985 was when I first realized that I liked writing and might eventually be okay at it, so I’d sit and work at one of the corrugated aluminum picnic tables with my notebook and a blue Bic Crystal pen.
There wasn’t much else to do in that park, because all it had was three of those picnic…