A Childhood of Art and Music... I listened to the radio alot and watched lots of science fiction movies as a kid and had lots of favorite artists and bands and especially enjoyed classic rock like Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, Styx, and Journey. As a little boy it all started in the mid to late 70s at age 5, 6, and 7... when I had a huge crush on Olivia Newton John, Lynda Carter from the Wonder Woman tv show, and also an eye for the girls in ABBA. We lived out in the country in a town called Kittanning in Southwestern Pennsylvania... about an hour from Pittsburgh. I also liked bands such as Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, and Rod Stewart. One of my favorite songs on the radio then was "A Little More Love". At home I would read dinosaur books and watch Godzilla movies and make all kinds of monsters and dinosaurs and creatures out of modeling clay while my brother Bob played with toy racetracks and my sister Wendy had her girly toys and Barbie dolls. I started sculpting at the age of 3, and here's a photo of me around 4 or 5 years old on Easter. I was into scary movies and science fiction and wanted to learn about special effects and would sculpt the vampires and werewolves and dinosaurs and dragons I would see on tv. I have been sculpting and making monsters and spooky things since I was a little kid, and later learning about special effects and Halloween props when I got older. From a very early age and all the way through junior high, I was always drawing, painting, and sculpting. My parents would take the family over to visit my grandparents house to visit where we would spend time with them along with their 2 adopted daughters... Janet and Sandy... who were about 6 years older than me. They were both considered my aunts but were so close in age to me that I always considered them our cousins growing up. Grandma and Grandpa had this huge awesome basement with hundreds of clocks of all kinds and tons of cool toys they had collected through the decades for their foster children and my Dad and his siblings when they were young. Grandpa and my Dad both had a hobby of restoring clocks including grandfather clocks and other antique clocks that were on display throughout the house. But the basement was where they fixed them up and also where the toys were. We all played hide and seek down there when we'd come over and there were several rooms in the basement and a main central area right at the bottom of the steps with a bench swing, table, record player, and a big area to play. My little brother and sister (Bob and Wendy) and I would love to go play in the basement with Sandy and Janet and we would sometimes put a sheet over the table and sit under it and turn off all the lights and tell ghost stories. But my favorite part was listening to their records. They had the 45s back then and we played them on this little record player... songs like "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, the Bee Gees "Staying Alive", and Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think Im Sexy ?". They had records like Styx and J Geils Band, and albums or "LPs" like Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, and the Grease Soundtrack. For you younger readers, 45s and LPs were just what we know today as vinyl records. Singles with an A side and B side, or the big LP albums which stood for "Long Play". The big LP / albums sometimes had lots of cover art, inserts, posters, lyrics, concert photos, etc, inside them. It was the mid to late 70s to the early 80s and disco was all over the radio at the time, though classic rock was big too, and "soft rock" or what we now call yacht rock was also popular. Bands like Ambrosia "You're the Only Woman" and Dr Hook "Sharing the Night Together" were some of my favorites. I was just a little boy and only had AM radio and a few tv channels out in the country so this softer mello yacht rock and the pop / Top 40 stuff was about all I knew then I remember seeing these hard rock guys on TV all dressed in leather and outrageous costumes with their faces painted in all this wild makeup. There were lunchboxes and posters and all kinds of merchandise with their image on them. I dont think I even heard any of their songs yet, but they looked so cool like something out of a sci-fi or fantasy movie or comic book. The band was called KISS.

Classic Rock and Halloween Antics... Still in elementary school, I moved from the country in 1978 at age 7 from Kittanning to a place called Meadow Street in Natrona Heights about a half hour away that was a little closer to Pittsburgh. I was in the 2nd grade. There I made lots of new friends and now had more tv channels with cable than the rabbit ears on our tv and huge housetop antenna from our house in the woods and went from only having AM radio out in the country to discovering FM... and stereo ! I was now hearing Journey for the first time and they became my favorite band throughout the rest of my childhood with hits like "Any Way You Want It" and "The Party's over (Hopelessly in Love)". They would still be my favorite band on through my teenage years. REO Speedwagon, Styx, and other bands became favorites of mine. My aunt Sissy, short for Sister Margaret Walsh which was too hard for us to say when we were little, was a catholic nun and school teacher and just happened to play electric guitar! How cool is that? She would take us to amusement parks like Kennywood and Cedar Point and Geauga Lake all the time. I had another aunt, Marthann, who lived right up the street and that's where we'd usually have our birthday parties, 4th of July, and Halloween. Sometimes our friends from around the street would come over during those parties and holidays at my aunt's place. There were still 8 track players around from the early to mid 70s in some of our homes along with our record players, but we were all starting to get cassette player/recorders. The older kids were listening to Led Zeppelin, Kiss, ACDC, and Aerosmith on the harder rock stations. Grease came out at the movies earlier in the year and Olivia Newton John also had another new album out... "Totally Hot". I had seen scary movies on TV on Pittsburgh channel 11 WPXI's "Chiller Theatre" starring "Chilly Billy" Bill Cardille many late Saturday nights, and also watched monster movies on Science Fiction Theater and other scary programs on television, but this was the year that George A Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" came out at the movies. This movie scared the crap out of me and still does to this day. My aunt and mom saw how excited I would get when the commercial would come on TV so they took me to see it along with my cousin Marcy who was 5 years older than me, and her friend. Marcy's dad was a police officer and played an extra in the movie when they show all the military, hunters, and police heading out to hunt the living dead in the country side. We saw it at the Drive-In which was particularly scary and I cried. Not even 12 minutes or so in and there is this scene in the projects where a bunch of S.W.A.T. officers are battling the zombies as they raid an apartment complex to get some bad guys and during all the chaos, one of the zombies wanders out of a room and bites a chunk out of his wife's arm and shoulder. I wasnt ready for that and balled my eyes out and covered my face with a blanket. Even with all the nightmares it gave me, I became a huge horror fan and wanted to sculpt the zombies out of clay and watch more scary horror movies. 1980 rolled around and my favorite female singer, Olivia Newton John, had another movie out called Xanadu. I was 9 years old and in the 4th grade then and had the picture here taken for school that year. Halfway through the school year, it would be 1981. This would've been right about the time when Journey came out with their album "Escape" featuring songs like "Stone in Love" which i bought the following year. A couple more years in elementary school passed by and I was in the 5th and 6th grades now and listening to bands like Foreigner, Asia, and Loverboy. "Urgent" was one of the big hits then. I also liked soft rock like Hall and Oats, Ambrosia, Dr Hook, and pop songs like Rick Springfield, and New Wave bands like The Cars and Duran Duran. There were also bands and artists who I listened to that had songs that were kind of a cross between classic rock and top 40 / pop like The Tubes "She's a Beauty", J Geils Band "Centerfold", and Eddie Money. One of my favorites was Pittsburgh's own Donnie Iris and the Cruisers. It was during this time that I started getting Fangoria magazine and learning more about special effects and going to see horror movies. I had seen scary movies as a little kid on tv, but now I was a few years older and started going to the movies more and had lots of other friends to watch them with at the movie theater and to have all kinds of spooky fun with every Halloween like going to haunted houses or just scaring each other in the neighborhood. Such fun ! I would buy horror makeup and dress up like the Living Dead or put on a werewolf mask or be a vampire on Halloween... and I would even bite my friends and siblings! And this was all year long... not just Halloween. It was the early 80s and Def Leppard and Quiet Riot were on the radio and playing at the roller rink when we would go roller skating every weekend. Mtv was now a part of many cable systems and there were other video shows like TBS Night Tracks that ran for a few hours on Friday or Saturday nights along with a few half hour music video shows on the local channels. I wanted to start lifting weights and year after year I wanted a weight bench for Christmas or my birthday but my parents must've thought I would hurt myself, drop them or knock over a lamp, or break and smash the TV or something with them so I never got any. My mom, however, did let me take Judo for a several months in the 5th grade where I would learn how to defend myself, flip and toss people, learn different takedowns, and grappling. A few harder metal bands were starting to get airplay like Ratt "Round and Round". Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were also on the radio with "I Love Rock and Roll". Heart was another girl band that I would hear on the rock stations who had hard rockin'songs like "Barracuda", "Crazy on You", and "Magic Man". Some of these bands and artist's songs were a few years old already and from the late 70s, but I was now hearing them for the first time since moving from the country and quickly becoming a huge fan of what would later be considered classic rock.