1973 stands out in my mind among many of the years I have stomped through. Life was very good. I was in my second year working as a full time volunteer at a community center, for $40 a week, mostly doing draft counseling, writing some grants, working on the crisis/help hotline of The Sixth Chamber, handholding people on bad acid trips, referring people to doctors, and talking people out of committing suicide until they could actually talk to someone who knew what theywere doing.I was living at a new apartment complex east of Kent, Wash., with another fellow worker at The Sixth Chamber. He was on public assistance, and had a welfare aparment--two floor, two bedroom. We split the subsidized rent of $37.50 a month. Although I did kick in my $18.75 a month, along with me came my dearest friend, Scooter. Scooter was broke, jobless, probably depressed, and parked himself on our couch for the three months between college terms.
Scooter didn't work that summer, but somehow scraped by. Once a week, however, there was an escape. The Sundowner Tavern, virtually located within our apartment complex, ran a special on Thursday: all the draft beer you can drink for $2. The doors opened at around noon, and the special continued until closing time (2 A.M.). You can imagine the potent forces that coalesced sometime around midnight. A gigantic welfare complex where no one worked, and a fair number of the denizens were on "mental disability." Endless beer, virtually free, and wackjobs with time on their hands, and a grudge against the world. Considering how bad it could have been, I don't remember that many fights or arrests, and the ones I do remember usually involved another friend of ours, Mel. Somehow Scooter survived the couch, the lack of mon and food, and still succeeded in having at least a couple of girlfriends on the line. He would serve one more term surfing my couch in utter poverty--in the fall of 1978, when he joined us in New York City, a city where he still rests his bootheels.
I am hoping Scooter is lurking here and can amplify this story. I know it has to be better than I am telling it. There must be some juicy anecdotes that have slipped my mind...
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Scooter here, usually I am happy just to sit back and enjoy the show at All This is That but Jack, we called him Johnny in 73, got me thinking. He says that I may have been depressed, maybe/maybe not, but I did have a lot of time to kill that summer and, as he points out, very few dólores to fund any meaningful diversions.
I had gone from tending dogs to the dogs in two summers and had nearly depleted my savings account after paying for freshman year at WWSC and my share of body work to repair Mel’s parent’s Pontiac Le Mans after Phil K, Kev & I put it into a ditch during a night of carousing while Mel prudently elected to ride shotgun.
Mel misdesignated drivers to his advantage on more than a few occasions in those years and when he didn’t the cops usually learned about it.
I remember that Kev played softball for a local men’s team in Kent that summer but he always joined me at the Downer on Thursdays. Mel and Phil K would come by regularly too but Johnny less frequently because he had a job and a girl friend and I believe adhered to a fitness regimen then that frowned on 12 hours of brews guzzling. Anyway, all of us, with the exception of David Fuller (RIP) were still underage in 1973 but we never, I mean never, had a problem gaining entrance to drinking establishments.
In the early 70’s WA had begun to roll out a new state photo ID that replaced the bifurcated WSDL and State Liquor Photo ID cards that folks had to carry previously. The new ID/DL used a process that impregnated a dense fibrous paper backing with the licensee’s vitals and photo and then sealed the face with a fine but durable laminate overlay. This new photo DL quickly made the State Liquor Card obsolete. While some youngsters purchased faked up generic out-of-state IDs from shops along Seattle’s 2nd Avenue they would only pass muster at skid row dives, so we relied on Mel’s obsessive compulsivity to create nearly perfect WA State issued DL’s with modified birth years.
For a few years Mel would periodically cook up some tea and then patiently scour magazines, novels, textbooks, trade and professional journals, telephone directories, and newspapers in search of the perfect pica/font to match the DOB stat on the WADL. He had assembled an impressive file of matches by 1973.
His strategy was simple. He instructed us to make a claim to the DMV that we had lost our license so that if we had a real run in with the heat we could always present a valid DL. Once the replacement DL was in hand he would set up shop. He worked at a brightly lit table fitted with a square of picture frame matting. He always used medical implements instead of paste up tools. I had had access to scalpels and hemostats from my year at the veterinary clinic and Mel had built a fairly extensive kit of medical supplies for this and other endeavors.
He affixed the license to the matting with two hemostats and set about altering the last figure in the birth year. He was a master in this procedure by the summer of the Downer. He would cut a tiny square around tiny figure, taking exquisite care not to pierce the backing of the card. He extracted the character and a slight layer of backing leaving a void that read 195 . He then embedded a perfectly matched “”0”, “1” or “2” into the void. Once the card was relaminated even we had trouble detecting the alteration. By the time we reached majority age most bartenders had learned that shining a flashlight through the back of the card would highlight the incision around the altered birth year so the jig was up by 74 or 75 but I don’t remember the cards failing any of us, ever. How about you, Jack?
Oh, it's important to note that none of us could grow a respectable moustache until our thirties and most of us could have passed for high school students until our mid 20's. That's a fact and it proves the mettle of these IDs. To watch a bartender or bouncer go from scowling disbelief to increudlous befuddlement whenever we presented the ID for the first few times was priceless. No body believed to see us that we were of age but the cards didn't lie. And after we were established in the bar Downer or otherwise they never asked again.
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