Sunday, June 20th, 1976

Got up to see L&H at 5 this morning and when they ween't on by 5:30 I went back to sleep!

No paper again. Dad walked uptown and bought one from that guy.

Father's Day. I couldn't come up with a present again but I gave mom some money to get him a pair of sunglesses he needs while they were out shopping later. I did make him a little card.

At first, I planned to stay home from MIDWAY 'cause we went to Church this morning for Father's Day and I didn't think I'd have time for both but Dad said I should go when it looked like we would. So I called Terry but he'd got some other guy I didn't know to go. Didn't feel like I could back out at that point, tough, so I went. He wasn't so bad although much more "irreverent" than us.

The movie was really crowded and good! We were driven out but had to hurry back to catch the bus. We just barely missed it though and it was because I couldn't run the last stretch anymore. Was having breathing troubles. We stopped at K-Mart while we waited but, after we ended up missing the next bus, too, Terry ended up calling his parents to pick us up. They weren't happy but they did it. After I got home I started looking back on it as kind of a fun day but certainly not during!

NOTES: Once again, I was a terrible son by not really doing much for my dad on Father's Day. I even made HIM go out and get the newspaper and then I went off and spent the day having fun with friends.

Well...not exactly fun and not exactly friends. I have no recollection whatsoever of this third guy Terry roped in on our movie excursion. Will ask him sometime if he recalls.

Neither do I have any recollection of our misadventures in missing the bus. When you left that particular theater on foot, you had to walk down a hill that was nearly a mile long. From there you walked under an Interstate overpass, up a slight hill to a neighborhood area (blocks from where Debbie lived but who knew?), then about another half mile through there to a large highway where one could then catch the bus. Beginning when the theater opened in 1974, we did this many times...sometimes both directions. That UPHILL was a killer! Literally, you would have to schedule your whole day around film excursions. My timing on getting us to the bus stops was normally quite good but, I'm presuming, thrown off by the extra person that day.

The film we saw was MIDWAY, a good old-fashioned World War II movie done up in the new cinematic miracle of Sensurround! Sensurround was a process where the theater was rigged to shake the seats at strategic points. It had previously been used in EARTHQUAKE and would later be used in ROLLERCOASTER. It was dumb and I don't think it was used much more if at all after that.

As far as the movie itself, you couldn't get any better in terms of veteran star power in those days--Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford, James Coburn, Toshiro Mifune, Robert Wagner...even Gregory Walcott from Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE is in the cast! The problem is that other than Chuck, most of them have glorified cameos at best, with the explosions stealing the picture. The thing was re-edited so much that one can find online comparisons between the various alternate versions.