When I was a senior at Highlands High School (Sacramento) in 1968-69, I ran with a great group of guys, including my best buddy, Ray Hunter, our shared best buddy, Pete Olson, our other best buddy, Jim Postak, and the only kid I ever knew who was allowed to smoke cigarettes at home, best buddy Mike Worsham.
Best buddy Roy Johnson worked at the Der Weinerschnitzel hot dog drive-thru on Friday and Saturday nights. My non-employed buddies and I would pull up to the window, and he’d give us a fast food bag filled to the top with french fries free of charge. We called Roy Lord of the Fries. We usually arrived close to midnight after a football game and pizza at Shakeys or an evening of mini golf and an hour or two imagining that four guys in Ray’s Ford Falcon might chase down some hot chicks in a GTO. We actually did that once and cornered the girls in a cul de sac. We had to let them get away because there were four of us and just two of them, and none of us had the guts or the know-how to smooth-talk them.
Our other best buddy, Paul Jimison, was our secret agent. He was a good guy and always available when we needed him to put on his old man pants and head into the mom-and-pop grocery in nearby Rio Linda to buy beer for us.
The store was named Shop-and-Save. It was little more than a rundown liquor and convenience store in a sketchy part of what passed for a town in Rio Linda. We called it the Stop-and-Rob because it was more accurate.
(You may remember Rio Linda as the Sacramento suburb made famous by my late friend and colleague Rush Limbaugh. He spoke of every yard in Rio Linda being adorned by a car on blocks and a broken-down washing machine on the front porch. Rush said he went there each Memorial Day to place a six-pack on the tomb of the unknown bowler. It was an apt description, and the folks in Rio Linda loved the notoriety.)
Paul Jimison was our age, but while the rest of us looked every pimply day of our 17 years, he already looked thirty-something in his little league uniform ten years earlier. When he let his beard grow out a bit, for four hours or so, he would put on his legendary “old man pants” (loose-fitting khakis, accessorized with muddy work boots and a too-tight flannel shirt) and could easily pass for one of our grandpas. He was never carded.
We were good boys—we really were. We loved our parents and respected our teachers. When we were lucky enough to go on dates, we kept our hands and our dirty thoughts to ourselves. At the end of the evening, we were available for a polite good night kiss at the door but didn’t insist on it. We were all Richie Cunningham years before the TV show Happy Days premiered.
None of that stopped us from occasionally being the bad version of good boys. That’s really part of the journey, isn’t it? Like our parents before us, we experimented with cigarettes and beer when we could get it, but that’s all. Even though this was during the late-60s hippy era, we didn’t do drugs, not even marijuana. All we wanted for a rowdy night out was a shared six-pack of beer and a pack of Marlboros to make us choke, cough, and feel manly.
That’s why when we needed Paul and his old man pants.
In 1968, a six-pack of Coors cost around $1.87, and cigarettes were 35 cents a pack. The four of us ponied up less than a buck apiece and sent Paul inside. He was back shortly with the Coors, the Marlboros, an assortment of Sugar Babies, Tootsie Rolls, and a pack of Sen-Sen. With 50 cents worth of regular in the gas tank, we were good to roll.
We howled with laughter and high-fives. Paul was our hero.
I have no specific memories of nights out with my buddies, just the still-lingering sense of camaraderie and fun of the great times that Ray, Pete, Jim, Mike, Roy, Paul, and I shared our blossoming manhood as brothers.
Dear Jim Postak, who has been gone for years already, was the young victim of a hereditary bad ticker. He was a charming and talented singer, a friend everybody loved.
I haven’t seen or heard from Mike Worsham since we graduated. He’s one of those special friends who seems to wander through your life and disappear. He was always smiling and laughing. I hope he’s well and happy.
The rest of us are in our 70s, waddling along on creaky knees as old men are wont to do.
The Stop-and-Rob was eventually shut down after being busted for selling liquor to minors, but it wasn’t Paul’s fault. Word of our success eventually spread to dumber teenage miscreants who assumed the store would sell beer to anyone tall enough to put their money on the counter.
The thing is, they didn’t know the secret of Paul’s old man pants.
(Today, June 20, 2023, is Paul Jimison’s 72nd birthday. Happy birthday, buddy. You finally look like a child.)
