1957: Larry Vande Geest from Garfield School invites me to Wharton Field House for a show by a Grand Ole Opry touring company--I hear twangy bass guitar, loop-de-looping pedal steel guitar, and glottal stop singing for the first time in my life. The music is dazzling, but the night's indelible memory comes from the two lines converging at a table where one man wearing a black shirt signs autographs with both hands at once, giving two stunned kids whose careers in cursive writing are barely two years along the following message: "Best wishes--Johnny Cash."
