Lawrence Eyre's Country Music Memory

Gene Lavern Flambo brought Johnny Cash to the Quad Cities.

Lawrence Eyre

Fall,1957--Larry van de Geest from Garfield School invites me to Wharton Field House in Moline for the concert by a Grand Ole Opry touring company--I hear twangy bass guitar, loop-de-looping pedal steel guitar and glottal stop syrupy singing for the first time in my life. I am dazzled by the music, truthfully, but the night's indelible memory comes from the two autograph lines that converge at a table where one man wearing a black shirt simultaneously writes with both hands, giving two stunned kids whose careers in cursive writing are barely two years along the following message: "Best wishes--Johnny Cash."