"Summer breeze, makes me feel fine....blowing through the jasmine in my mindddd" sang at the top of our lungs in a bad falsetto by three almost grown young men driving down the road in a 1964 Ford Fairlane with glass pack mufflers and 50's on the back.  Oh, I almost forgot the, "Click Click" as the eight track changed to the next song.

No AC, but the windows were down and we had the cooler iced up.  It was the summer after our high school graduation (1979) and before the start of college in the fall.  Jeff Rideout, Kevin "You're barking up the wrong tree" Barks and myself were headed out of the city for one of the several camping trips that we took that summer.

The last summer that we would end up spending together before we took off on the wildly varying paths that all three of us eventually ended up taking.  Of course, we didn't know that then.  We were just some buds who wanted to get away from the prying eyes of the parents and any other authority figures that might want to intervene and stop us from smoking dope, drinking beer and otherwise enjoying life and one another's company.

The campsites varied, but we always picked one that was as far away as possible from the other campers and that had electricity.  No, we didn't have a camper, but we did have a stereo!  If my memory serves me it was an old Panasonic tuner with a Marrantz tape deck and two Electrovoice speakers (we left the Garrard turntable at home on the camping trips).

My life at that time revolved around that stereo system that I had purchased from the CMC Stereo store on Watson, out by the old KSHE studios.   Finally purchased after 6 months in the lay-a-way, we lugged that stereo all over the place and didn't find it odd at all to lug it down to Meramec State Park where we would plug it in and rock out to bands ranging from Alice Cooper to Benny Goodman (can you imagine the looks on the old couple who were walking their dog around the campgrounds when they saw the source of those wicked horns?).

These were my "sounds of summer" at least for that period of my life.  The windows down and the stereo cranked up.  It's funny, to this day, there are certain songs where I still expect to hear that familiar "click click" at certain points in the song.  Close your eyes and think back to listening to Styx and tell me that you don't remember, "Why must you be such an angry young man "click click" when your future looks so bright to me!"

It's funny, I can almost remember it all as if it were yesterday.  That is until I remembered that the Fairlane got totaled on New Years Eve during our Junior year.  I guess that it really doesn't matter because regardless of which car it was that we were driving, the emotions were the same.  Three young men with their entire lives ahead of them, some fine Columbian and the ever present cooler full of beer on a hot summer day.

No, it really doesn't matter which car we drove to get there.  I guess that in a sense, "The Song Remains The Same".

R.B. "Bob" Mitchell

ValueList Real Estate Services, Inc.

Bob Mitchell is president of ValueList Real Estate Services,  St. Louis' largest discount/full-service real estate and mortgage company.  If you would like to find out more about Bob, ValueList or our flat-fee listing program, please feel free to visit our web site at valuelistre.com