Saturday, June 12th, 1976

Got HUSTLER after all.

Spent most of the day just fooling around because I didn't feel good at all due to the heat.

Mr. Deters brought a prospective buyer for the apartment house around this morning to look the place over and check everything out. I'd hate to see him sell it, though.

Watched one of the "Road" flicks on the tube.

Most excitement of the day was when we got the battery compartment on Dad's headphones stuck for a half-hour!

NOTES: Always loved the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour "Road" movies. As a child I used to think there must be hundreds of them because they ran them all the time! There were, in fact, only seven, however, the last being made just after I had been born. Around this time in 1976, though, Hope let on that he was planning a new one with Crosby to be shot the following year--THE ROAD TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH! Crosby was recovering from an accident where he fell off a stage, though, and late in 1977, he would pass on. Not sure they ever even had a script.

Mr Deters was the man who owned the house I grew up in. As a small child, we lived in no less than 4 different apartments by the time I was six. In 1966, they tore down the place where we were staying so we had to find someplace else...again. My dad found a perfect apartment--high ceilings, 2 bedrooms, a huge living room, a good-sized kitchen and a nice pantry area that was almost another room! Lots of closets, too, and big oak sliding doors between rooms! All in a big, gorgeous old building just three blocks from the Ohio River (uphill so no fear of flooding) and one block from the Licking River. $85.00 a month rent! Only problem was...they didn't allow children. My father convinced Mr. Deters to make an exception for me. I ended up outlasting both parents, Mr Deters and the later new owner and was living there with the woman I would soon marry when we finally left in 1991...when the rent was raised to $850.00 dollars per month!

Mr Deters wasn't around much and I came to look at him as a surrogate grandfather figure. It would be years later before I realized just what an important man he had been in the area. He was a former newspaper reporter, a successful attorney, a real estate mogul and the Chairman of the Board of the Cincinnati Airport. In 2008, in my capacity as a manager of one of the Airport's retail stores, I attended a meeting in the boardroom there...and there was Mr. Deters' picture, still prominent on the wall amidst years of other Chairmen over the years. I was not happy at all when he eventually sold the apartment house...nor was I happy with the person he sold it to most of the time. But that's another story.

As far as my dad's headphones, Mom and I had bought him a pair of the old cover-the-ear headphones (Princess Leia style) that were actually a battery-operated transistor radio! State of the art technology in 1976!