I grew up in a neighborhood of minor celebrities, in Cherry Hill, NJ.  My mother was a REALTOR who sold many of the Philadelphia Flyers' players their homes. Hockey players were the lunch-pail professional athletes in the 70s; they didn't get huge contracts.  They lived amongst the lawyers, engineers, and doctors but make no mistake about it; these guys were blue-collar.  Reggie Leach lived around the corner from us.  "The Rifle" was an aboriginal Canadian from the oil fields of Manitoba.  Often, he and fellow Manitoban Bobby Clarke would be watching us play street hockey from Reg's front yard, offering a tip or two.  Of course, we didn't know that the pair would be future Hockey Hall of Famers; we just thought of them as the guys that brought the Stanley Cup to Philly.

My love of R&B, soul, and funk music (and later hip-hop) was rooted in the neighborly encouragement from Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Leon Huff.  Mr. Huff's daughter was a classmate of my younger sister's.  He would occasionally reward me for washing his car or cutting his lawn with 15-20 minutes of The Sound of Philadelphia.  What I thought of as a special treat was really market research for Mr Huff; he was wondering if pre-teens would buy music from Philadelphia International Records rather than competitior Motown.

Muhammad Ali bought a Cherry Hill home in the early 70s to rattle Philadelphian Smokin' Joe Frazier's cage.  Ali would live in that home when he trained at the Cherry Hill Inn.  While Ali billed himself as "The Greatest", most of the Cherry Hill kids villified our neighbor for his derogatory remarks towards Smokin' Joe's looks and actions during the Vietnam War.

Speaking of boxing, middle-weight champ Joey Giardello was a regular at the 11AM Mass at Queen of Heaven Church.

The Garden State Park was across Route 70 from the Latin Casino.  Frank Sinatra et al played "The Latin" and were often seen "betting the ponies" at "The Track".  Philadelphia Phillie great Dick Allen would show up there and was great to all of the kids accompanying their parents for an afternoon at the Track.  Later in life, I'd meet Dick Allen in Phoenix, and thank him for the great memories.  Allen had a rough go of it,  in the 60s as a Phillie but I reminded him that his stint in the 70s influenced a generation of Little Leaguers.  I'd like to think the tear in his eye, when we embraced some 20 years later, was a positive feeling that his legacy as a Phillie would be for his second tour of duty.

Cherry Hill was a melting pot and nothing proved it more than the influx of Tran and Nguyen families to our churches.  While our parish priests were criticizing the Viet Nam War, the casualties of Communist aggression were sitting in the pews, soon after the Fall of Saigon.

I described THIS Cherry Hill, on Bloodhound Blog, when I told REALTORs to stop selling houses and start selling memories:

I grew up in the Jersey rendition, Cherry Hill. I’m the product of immigrants’ kids who got out of their ethnic “neighborhoods” and made it to the holy ground; the suburb.

Cherry Hill was great place to live in the 70s because it was the ultimate social experiment. Kids of all colors, creeds, religions, and ethnicities mixed together in a damned good public school system. We celebrated bar mitzvahs and first communions, ate pasta with gravy, danced the polka, and listened to Motown, Disco, and eventually hip-hop music. I call it the ultimate social experiment because you had these kids running around, learning tolerance and cultural respect, amid the conflict of the generational prejudices of our parents and grandparents. The enlightened ones were our parents. They bucked the clannish “trust nobody unlike you” mantras of the ethnic ghettoes in hopes of a better life for their offspring.

Cherry Hill was a white-collar town with blue-collar thoughts. The parents were lawyers, engineers, salespeople, skilled tradespeople, doctors, and middle managers at the RCA plant. They were mostly educated because their parents insisted, through broken English, that “an education was the ticket to the American Dream”. The blue collar roots came from our grandparents. They taught us how to curse in Italian, wax poetically like Joyce, and dance to Marvin Gaye, all while sprinkling in the Yiddish word or two.

How about another example of diversity?

Cherry Hill was home to the combination Chinese restaurant/ Jewish delicatessan, Ginsberg and Wong.  Few places were as rich with diversity as Cherry Hill in the 70s and that experience has had a profound impact on me.  So...

...if you ever see me dancing to the O'Jays at a Bar Mitzvah or playing street hockey in Orange County's Little Saigon, don't think of me as odd.

I just grew up in Cherry Hill.