Like a lot of young boys I was attracted to cowboys.  My mother used to make me cowboy shirts that I wore all the time.  I always had some kind of cowboy hat.  I would put it on and look in the mirror to see if I looked very authentic.  I never had much experience with horses, but I was always ready to beg for a dime from my Dad when we went to Sears’ or to a hardware store when there was a mechanical pony that I could ride.  It was partly because of this interest in cowboys that I came to share my father’s interest in music.  From the time I was very young my parents had taught me how to sing songs.  In these days none of our cars had radios and we often sang together in the car.  Then my parents often took me to church and Sunday school where we used to sing simple church songs.  My father loved country western music.  He had taught himself how to play the guitar by studying books and had purchased a brand new Gretsch Synchromatic arch-top guitar after returning from the war.  It had an electric pick-up and he added an amplifier and was very proud of this beautiful new instrument.  One of my Dad’s friends was named Harry Miller, an accomplished musician who played guitar, saxophone, and clarinet.  Sometimes my father played informally with Harry, who performed with the somewhat famous group called the Harmonicats.  My mother liked Harry’s wife, I think, and they used to socialize when I was quite young.  I also recall one night a few years later when a man who my father had met came to our house (on Queen Avenue) with his guitar.  He dressed in country western attire and they played their instruments in the basement, shared songs and drank cold beers.  I remember listening to his very Hank Williams version of  “Your Cheating Heart.”  He did other songs that I knew.  I listened to them for quite awhile and then I guess I went to bed.  I think the two of them were making plans to go to the Flame Café downtown to hear live country western music, but I think my Mom got wind of it and I’m not sure if they went or not.  I never saw the man at our house again.   

Sometimes after work or on the weekends my father would bring out the guitar and I used to sing along to his songs.  We sang songs like “Back in the Saddle,” “Cool, Cool Water,” and “San Antonio Rose.”  We sang them so many times that to this day I recall most of the words.  My father also had a laptop Hawaiian steel guitar that I considered quite exotic.  Dad had served in the Pacific during the war and had spent some time in Honolulu.  Among the G.I.s the Hawaiian sound was quite popular.  I watched with some amazement as he attached special plastic or metal picks to his right hand  fingertips and thumb while using a steel bar in his left hand to create a unique and pleasing metallic sound.  Somewhere along the way I had received a plastic toy guitar with four strings, but I was not allowed to play with my father’s serious guitars.  But one day he brought home a real guitar for me to use.  It was small and the neck was square, not rounded, so it must have been considered a laptop guitar.  But my father took it out to the garage and brought out his wood plane and rounded out the neck.  He let me help him to sandpaper it smooth and then stained it to match the rest of the guitar.  He found a rope that we used as a strap so I could hold it up.  Now I was in business!

Dad set me down in front of a music stand and took out some simple music and began to show me how the strings represented notes and how these notes would change as I moved my finger along the frets on the neck of the guitar.  He explained how to tune the guitar and showed me the scales using catchy ways to remember their order (“E-G-B-D-F “ could be remembered by “Every Good Boy Does Fine”).  With good reason my father wanted me to learn the basics of note reading prior to learning chords.  He could place the sheet music on the music stand and play notes with some facility.  When he came to a part that he hadn’t mastered, he continued to stop and start until he had it down, and then moved on.  When I followed his example, however, I soon became bored.  He would encourage me to keep trying, but I began to rebel against this aspect of learning the guitar.  This was quite stupid on my part, since knowing how to play notes and read music is basic to being a musician.  Yet I resisted his efforts to teach me to read music and I used to make excuses to leave, such has having to go to the bathroom, and I would leave my Dad playing by himself.  Sometimes we had arguments over this behavior and finally my Dad told me that if I didn’t want to learn there wasn’t much he could teach me.  He did however, begin to teach me some simple two-finger chords, C, F, and G and I found that I could play along with him when he played in the key of C.  

When I was five years old my parents signed me up to perform on the Jimmy Valentine show, a Saturday morning talent show for young children on KSTP.  I didn’t play the guitar well enough at the time so I sang “Back in the Saddle” and I believe my father accompanied me outside of the range of the camera.  Prior to the beginning of the show I saw all the toys that were to be offered to the performers.  I was infatuated with a “Slinky” that I had seen on television.  My parents told me to select the big tricycle instead.  No, I wanted the slinky.  “O.K.”, they said, “if you can win the bike, take it, and we’ll go out and get you a slinky.”   I sang “Back in the Saddle” and won the right to select the gift of my choice.  I chose the bike and later got the slinky as a bonus. After a few days the slinky got kinked up and didn’t work so well, but the tricycle served me well until I graduated to a two-wheeler.         

    Dad encouraged me to continue playing the guitar and I got a better on the simple chords progressing from using two fingers to three, but I still resisted learning to play notes and to read music.  I remember my father helping me to place my fingers properly on the strings.  The positions seemed awkward and it was somewhat painful to hold my fingertips tightly against strings where the crossed the frets on the neck of the guitar (later I understood that the bridge of my first guitar was relatively high and that made it more difficult to cover the strings).  In our household we continued to sing songs and at family gatherings my parents would encourage me to sing a few songs.  I found it easy to memorize the words and soon lost any fear of singing in front of people.  During this period I remember a couple of early summer mornings when I walked two blocks to a little bakery located on 24th and Bloomington.  I would go to the back door off the alley and knock politely at the door.  The ladies working inside came to the door and I told them I would sing them a song because I really like cinnamon rolls.  They laughed and sang one or two songs.  They gave me a couple of rolls and I ate one and brought the other one home.

THE RENO KID’S DAD

    Summertime on Queen Avenue allowed me a great deal of freedom.  School was out and my grandmother or my step grandmother came to the house to watch the children while my parents worked.  One day I took out my guitar and started strumming it again.  I hadn’t been playing with my father for a while.  We were both busy and I knew that I had not been following his instructions as he wished.  He wanted me to learn, but didn’t want to push me.  It was up to me.  I found some sheet music to songs that I already knew.  I looked at the words and the chords above them: C, F, G, etc.  I recall I didn’t want anyone to hear me play at home so I took the guitar and sheet music and went across the street into the hollow and sat on the old truck of a fallen tree.  I started to hum the songs and play the chords.  Gradually my ability to play the chords and move back and forth between them improved.  For several days I worked on three of four songs until I began to develop some good callouses on my fingertips and thumb.  Before long I was able to play the songs without looking at the sheet music. 

One day when my Dad was in the house I sat in my room and began to play some of the songs. My father heard me playing and I believe he was surprised that I had picked it up again and had made some progress on my own.  A few days later he took out his guitar and we played some of the songs together and I could see he was pleased with my progress.  I still resisted learning to play and read notes, but I steadily improved in playing chords.  Before long my parents arranged for me to perform on television on the “Slim Jim’s Country Western Show” on KEYD.  I borrowed my Dad’s Gretsch guitar and played on the Saturday Morning show, which was like a little Grand Ole Opry for little kids.  I probably sang “Back in the Saddle Again.”  Slim Jim was a neat old guy, a Swedish-American country western afficionada and a fairly well known personage in the Midwestern country western circles.  I think I played one or two more times on the kids’ show.  Then one Saturday Slim Jim asked my parents if they could bring me back to play that night on the “Westerners’ Show”.  They said yes and it was fine with me, especially when I learned that they were taking me out to get a new cowboy shirt (and maybe a cowboy hat) to year that night.  “The Westerners” was exciting to us because we were able to mingle with several fairly serious performers and musicians.  We didn’t talk very much, although everyone was polite and friendly.  Of course most of them were more concerned with their own performances than with chatting with my parents and I.  There was a guitar player named Half-Moon and a very wide bass player appropriately named Haystack.  I focused immediately on their high quality instruments: the acoustic guitars and mandolins, the drums, fiddles, bass, and steel pedal guitars.  And I liked looking at the clothing they wore which reflected the Grand Ole Opry styles that I had seen on television.  There were brilliantly colored silk shirts and some incredible cowboy boots handcrafted of exotic leathers.  The lady singers wore bright make-up and fancy country style dresses.  One of the guitar players sported a beautiful pale brown leather jacket, with beaded designs and long, long fringes on the sleeves.  I don’t remember much about my performance, but I guess it was satisfactory.  I think I sang “Mansion on the Hill,” but it might have been “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” or Eddie Arnold’s “I Really Don’t Want to Know”.  I recall feeling really stimulated by the whole experience and it all seemed to end quickly.  I was happily surprised, just as we were leaving, when they handed my Dad a check made out to me for $7.50.  It made me feel really good.  And the next day my Dad and Mom took me to a store and I used the money to buy a light brown suede jacket with fringe.  I loved that jacket and wore it constantly until I grew out of it.

My parents managed to set up various venues for me perform, like schools, picnics, and other little local events.  Also Dad belonged to a Masonic group that conducted a lot of charity activities including talent performances at schools, hospitals and other places where professional performers didn’t visit.  A few of the members had worked with my father or were acquainted with him from earlier years.  As I recall they were mostly small businessmen or skilled workers who were active and outgoing and liked to have fun, and I remember quite of few of these men quite clearly.  We began to participate in shows they produced on Saturday evenings at various institutions around the state.  My father thought I needed a more exciting stage name and somehow we came up with “The Reno Kid.”  I guess I knew that Reno was in Nevada and I certainly knew the Reno was farther west than Minneapolis.  In any case I knew that it was a lot more intriguing than my own name, so that’s what we used.
>> Read the article in the Minneapolis Argus

Dad made a financial arrangement with me.  For every hour I practiced he would contribute one dollar to a fund that would allow me to buy a new guitar.  He let me look through the Sears’catalogue to find a guitar I wanted.  The one I selected was the best they offered and it cost more about $200.  It was a Silvertone Espanada “Black Beauty,” a shiny black “F-hole” with dual electric pickups and chrome trim all around the body.  We set up a little music room on the second floor in the walk-in closet and placed all our music equipment: guitars, music stands, amplifier, and all the sheet music (it’s interesting to note that we didn’t bring records and record player; we didn’t own one).  I kept track of my practice hours on a sheet we pinned on the wall and as I chalked up the hours I got better and better.  One day, even though I hadn’t reached the 200 hours mark (but I know I had logged more than 100 hours), my Dad said we could order the guitar.

When the new guitar arrived we played more together and since I now had my own guitar, Dad began to join me on the stages in many of these performances.  Although I was always willing to play on my own, and experienced only small amounts of “stage fright” I especially liked it when my Dad was beside me on the stage.  To this day I can recall the songs we played.  My mother utilized her sewing talents to fashion some matching country western shirts for us to wear at these performances and I recall feeling really grown up when my father and I would carry our guitar cases into the backstage areas, set up our amplifier on the stage, and tune our guitars before the show began.  My mother was always with us when we did these shows and, a few years later when I was in fourth and fifth grade, my sister Cynthia also performed as an acrobatic dancer, so it was a real family affair.  It was interesting to visit all these institutions around the state, including schools, churches, hospitals, sanitariums, and even reformatories and prisons.  

One summer my Dad and I went to the Minnesota State Fair and, among our many activities, we visited some of the exhibition booths of the country western radio stations that operated in the Twin Cities.  We were able to meet some of the singers and performers as well as the disk jockeys that we listened to on the radio.  I thought it was really interesting to see them in real life.  I was struck by the fact that their voices sounded so different, and yet so similar, to what we heard over the airwaves.  And adding a face to a voice was enlightening.  This period was a lot of fun for the Reno Kid and his Dad and we shared some memorable experiences.