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The Want List,

or K-Mac's Personal Scavenger Hunt

Sure, it's a bit of a long shot--after all, it's not as though this site is logging a hundred thousand hits a day. But maybe, just maybe, you're exactly the right person to help me find someone or something I've been looking for. It's happened several times already, and it always brightens my day.

Most of what follows has very little to do with what I do for a living, but rather a lot about my checkered past and my idiosyncratic interests. There's an E-mail link at the bottom of the page, just in case this is my lucky day. And thanks in advance for keeping your eyes open.


AUTHOR'S COPIES

Sometimes we are the last to know--especially when foreign rights are controlled by a book packager or a publisher, rather than by the writer's agent. If you can help me find copies in good condition of any of the following editions for my brag shelf, please E-mail me! (And if you happen to know of any editions not listed on my Novels or Short Fiction bibliographies, please tell me!)


PEOPLE

RAYMOND POSEY, LeROY EARNEST, DONALD LANGE - friends from Fairview days. I have no idea if I'd have anything in common with any of them now, but the remaining memories are fond enough that I would like to know something about the roads they travelled--rough or smooth, dark or bright, even uphill both ways.

DONALD was the son of Fairview's Baptist minister. His family moved to somewhere in New England after the fourth or fifth grade. I can't remember his house (on Sumpter or Essex Road, I think, near the Leiters), so we must have been mostly playground friends. I remember him as athletic, popular, and cheerful.


(Roy Earnest in recital garb, about 1965)
LeROY and I had a longer history together. He lived on North Collings near Ironsides, just a few houses west of Yorkship School. Memory tells me that he lived alone with his older sister, under circumstances I was never privy to. I remember being invited over to dinner and how anxious she was that the dinner turn out all right, as if it were something she hadn't done often. LeRoy was, like me, very interested in science--of all my friends then, he was the one I could always talk with about space flight or the latest Popular Science/Popular Mechanics gee-whiz that had caught my attention. Roy was another of Miss Richards' strings students--I think he played violin. He had the look and habits of mind which said that he'd end up in a laboratory some day. We played chess instead of Monopoly, and flew balsa airplanes instead of playing basketball. I remember our attempts to build model rockets., and that he burned the tip of his nose with the fumes from a prospective rocket fuel he was concocting in the basement (why didn't we know about Estes? we'd have had a blast). LeRoy disappeared abruptly from my life sometime before the 8th grade; I never heard from him or knew where he and his sister had gone.

RAY was another of my music friends. He lived on Wasp Road at Kansas, and my memories of that house seem to be summer memories. I think he was another violin student; he was the only boy I knew who'd taken piano lessons long enough to be considered a pianist (I was never more than a piano player). Ray shows up in photos of "the guys" that I took outside Yorkship in the last weeks of eighth grade, but I have no clear memory of where he went to high school, except that he didn't go on to St. Joe's with me. A nagging memory suggests that his family moved in Vineland or other parts south (Jersey).

Ray Posey (left) and Tom Weiss (right), 1968

Found 6/12/2001! Many thanks to Michael J. Ruiz. THOMAS WEISS - (Nickname: Tom) My best friend from the street where I grew up--Cushing Road, in Yorkship Village, aka Fairview Village, a section of Camden NJ. I lost track of Tom more than twelve years ago, sometime shortly before I moved to Michigan from Indiana; I remember a phone call with a lot of talk about marriage and relationships, circa 1985-86, which was probably the last contact. Wherever he's gotten to, he's likely to be making music, even if only for the pleasure of it--he played trumpet for several years before making himself into a fine keyboard player with a fondness for Chick Corea-style jazz. In the late 70s and early 80s, Tom was in working bands in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area.


THINGS

BOOKS

MISCELLANY


If you have a lead on any of the above, please E-mail me with the details.


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