Saturdays in My Life
The other day, I was listening to one of our Sirius channels in the car when they played one of my favorite songs from the 70’s — “Saturday in the Park” by the group Chicago.
As soon as it started, I remembered many of the lyrics. “Saturday, in the park, I think it was the Fourth of July….People watching, people laughing, a man selling ice cream….”
That song brought back memories, all right — including the times I had played it when I was a DJ on Saturday afternoons at KSUE Radio up in the northeastern California hinterlands. During the week, I was the station news director. On Saturdays, I was a DJ.
Good thing they were paying me so much — $500 a month for a mere 70-hour workweek.
But after hearing “Saturday in the Park,” I started thinking about other Saturdays in my life. Now, don’t get me wrong. I can’t possibly remember anywhere close to the more than 3,700 Saturdays I’ve been alive.
But I can remember a few that stand out. And since I’m retired and have time to write, here I go.
But — first — spoiler alert (as writers always tell readers before they reveal “who did it” in mystery novels or TV shows). The incidents I remember below are not nearly as important (except for the marrying ones) as the time Sharon and I spent with our children on Saturdays and every other day of the week.
Bradley and Amy were, and are, the most important people in our lives, and we spent many hours with them as they were growing up, attending their sports games (or coaching their teams), taking them on trips both foreign and domestic, watching them graduate from schools, and much more.
So what you read below is simply a sample of silly (and sometimes serious) memories that flash back. I’d say they had nothing to do with real life — except they were real life — much of the time, mine.
One of the earliest Saturdays I can recall was when I was around 5 years old. I had a tricycle that I was riding right over the top of one of our backyard flowerbeds in Fresno.
How do I know it was a Saturday? Because I still remember Dad coming home from a half-day at work — he had to work five-and-a-half days back then — and giving me the “what for” in no uncertain terms after what I’d done.
I never did that again.
During many of those early years of Saturdays, I remember watching Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese announce the baseball Game of the Week on CBS. Diz was unforgettable — using colorful descriptions of players and plays, singing the “Wabash Cannonball” and advertising Falstaff beer.
All in glorious black-and-white.
I also remember playing wiffle ball with my across-the-street neighbor Bob on many Saturdays after the CBS game was over. Since the game started on the West Coast at 11 a.m., Bob and I usually began our games around 2 p.m., even on the hottest Valley summer days.
Well, we were young and could do it.
On Saturday nights in the mid-to-late 1960’s, I’d often take walks through our neighborhood, with my transistor radio tuned to NBC’s “Monitor” on KMJ Radio. I grew up with “Monitor,” and it helped inspire me to a career in broadcasting that lasted decades.
At Christmastime in Fresno in the mid-’60’s to early ’70’s, I’d walk our neighborhood on Saturday nights to see holiday lights the neighbors put up. I remember those frosty and crisp nights with the smell of fireplace smoke and the glorious lights that sparkled from bushes and eves outside homes. Sometimes I’d see lit Christmas trees inside.
When I got to college at Fresno State, I’d often spend Saturdays at the library. I loved that campus and spent as much time as I could there during my four years.
I got my first part-time job at Channel 30 in Fresno in the summer of 1970. I went from being a floor director (giving cues to the news anchors) to a film editor the next summer to an announcer-director in 1971. (Yes, that’s a photo of me as an AD at 30. Oh, my. So young.)
And as an AD, I worked weekends and filled in on vacations. My weekend shift generally began at 4 p.m. Saturday and ended when the station signed off after midnight.
And one of those Saturday nights was memorable because it’s when my technical director (who was a bit older than I was) and I decided we wanted to see an “adult” movie at the local “art house” known as the Fine Arts Theater.
Well, we were young. (That explains many things, right?)
The problem was, we were running, on-air, an old black-and-white movie on Channel 30 that was scheduled to end after 1 a.m. The movie house’s last showing of the flick was scheduled to end around 1:45 a.m.
So Doug and I came up with this great idea: During our commercial breaks, we’d let the movie we were airing keep running. In other words, while we were in the two-minute break, the movie would keep rolling through the projector but not be seen on-air.
I remember it was a murder mystery that had about five killings. But that night, because we had kept the projector running, Valley viewers saw only three of those murders.
And no one knew.
Doug and I got to the movie theater in time to see the last half-hour of this garbage film. It was the first “adult” movie either of us had ever seen.
There were perhaps a dozen guys in the theater when we walked in. After a couple of minutes, we had seen enough — of the movie and the audience — to know this had been a truly bad idea. We scurried out, and since that Saturday night, I’ve never seen another movie like that.
During those Saturday nights in the summer of ’72 and early ’73, my college buddy Ken was working part-time at 30 as floor director when I was AD. And on one of those nights — in June or July — we both took the night off so we could go to Monterey on the coast.
We had dinner at a fine place (no, I cannot remember where) and then drove home in my ’71 blue Ford Pinto. Well, Ken drove. I had imbibed a bit too much and was relegated to the driver’s seat.
Somewhere along Highway 152 on the way back to Fresno, I needed to stop and relieve myself in a farmer’s field. It was dark, and I was not in the best condition — which might explain why I failed to notice the farmer was flooding his field with irrigation water.
Yes, I fell in. And Ken saved me that night from that water-logged field.
That was 53 years ago. Ken and I are friends to this day. (He did not continue in broadcasting, opting instead for a great government career in DC and, eventually, as city manager of San Luis Obispo.)
Then there were the six months in ’73 when I was news director at KSUE in Susanville. One Saturday in early spring, a young lady whom I had met at Fresno State in the radio-TV-journalism program came to visit me. I had big plans to impress her.
First, I drove her up to the hill overlooking Main Street in Susanville. Lots of kids used that hill as a lovers’ peak. But there were two problems. First, it was Saturday morning, not evening. And second, my Pinto — my sparkling, only two-year-old Pinto — would not start after we had parked and looked at the view.
So I had to walk down to a repair shop on Main Street. The repair guy drove me back up to my car, where the young lady was waiting. He did something or other to fix it.
Then I drove the young lady down to a casino in Sparks, Nevada, about 90 miles south of Susanville. We spent the evening having dinner and gambling a bit before heading back to Susanville around 3 a.m.
It had started snowing. I nearly fell asleep at the wheel. Somehow we got back safely, and the young lady proceeded to sleep in my bedroom while I took the couch.
I’ve never seen her again, but I know she’s had a wonderful married life, with children, for more than four decades.
It was the next year — 1974 — when I met Sharon. I was a reporter at Channel 30, and she was a news story. I met her on Valentine’s Day, and we started dating after she graduated from high school in a few months. Our first real date, of course, was on a Saturday, and it was memorable because it was our first date and because when I showed up at her house, my left hand and wrist were bandaged over the top of a dozen stitches, and her leg (we cannot remember which) was bandaged from her knee to her toes.
In spite of that, we somehow made it through that first date, when we went to Bass Lake. And a year later (July 5, 1975 — a Saturday, of course) we got married. This coming July, we will have been married a half-century.
Now fast-forward to July 15, 1976, when three men kidnapped 26 children and the bus driver from Dairyland Elementary School after they had visited the Chowchilla Fairgrounds swimming pool.
That was on a Thursday. On Friday, I reported that story for CBS News in New York. On Friday night, they all had escaped from the truck trailer that had been buried at a quarry in Livermore in the Bay Area.
And on Saturday, July 17, we were so short of staff at 30 because of the kidnapping follow-up stories that I anchored sports on our early newscast. And that is what you see in the photo.
In 1979, we moved to Ames, Iowa, where I was an assistant professor of Journalism at Iowa State University and Sharon was a producer at WOI Radio, which Iowa State owned.
It gets cold in Ames once the calendar turns to October, and I recall going to several games during those years when we were bundled in everything we had. Sometimes there was snow on the ground.
But you had to see Nebraska and Oklahoma play. They always buried ISU, but it was fun to watch the big-timers in action.
After a couple of years, we decided we’d had enough blizzards in the Midwest, so we moved back into TV in the warmest place we could find — Phoenix.
My old Fresno buddy Al Buch — the best news director I ever worked with — hired me at KPNX to, first, produce weekend newscasts. That meant spending Saturday and Sunday nights in the newsroom. Soon enough, I would become executive producer of all the station newscasts — but those first weekend nights were especially fun.
In the spring of ’83, we had moved to Detroit, where I was executive producer of the 11 p.m. news at WJBK-TV. At least two memorable things took place on Saturdays there.
First — two of our producers decided to cook a pig in one of their backyards and invite many of us in the newsroom over for dinner.
They knew as much about cooking a pig buried in a backyard as I knew about nuclear physics.
By the time we all there late Saturday afternoon, the pig had been buried and supposedly been cooking for hours.
But during those hours, our hosts had been drinking beer. And drinking. And drinking.
They were, simply, loaded when we arrived. They had pretty much forgotten the pig. When they dug it up, it had, of course, not cooked. Not a bit of it. They had simply put it on top of charcoal and buried the pig and the charcoal. The charcoal had been extinguished immediately.
So they dug that pig out of the ground, cut it up, and proceeded to microwave it. And that’s what we ate that Saturday night in Detroit — microwaved pig.
Another Saturday night there proved eventful — and frightening. My news director, John Howell, his wife Donna, and Sharon and I had driven into Greektown in downtown Detroit for a fine evening of excellent dining.
The problem came when we left and tried to find our way out of Greektown. You see, Detroit in those years had never recovered from the 1960’s riots and subsequent abandonment by the giant auto-makers.
Downtown was a dangerous mess — and Greektown was this tiny enclave of fine food and safety.
Well, since all four of us were from California — in fact, John and I had worked together at Channel 30 years earlier — we had no idea about street patterns.
He was driving, and we immediately got lost. No Google maps, you see. At one point, we wound up dead-ended on a street, with no idea where we were.
We thought this might be “it” — that the headlines the next day might read, “Stupid Californians Drive Into Fatal Danger.”
But somehow we made our way out. We never went to Greektown again.
From Detroit we hustled off to Buffalo. John had gone as news director and hired me as assistant ND. Neither of us was there long — only four or so blizzards, as I recall — and then we went our separate ways.
Sharon and I wound up in San Francisco, where we had an absolute giant array of memorable experiences, including many on Saturdays.
Among them — times with our great friends Bill and Polly Monson. I had met Bill when he was teaching broadcast journalism at Fresno State and he became my mentor and friend. Bill and Polly often came the Bay Area to see us on Saturdays. The four of us went to lots Oakland A’s baseball games (the weather at the Oakland Coliseum was far warmer than at Candlestick in SF), and we celebrated several of our birthdays up there.
One never-to-be forgotten Saturday night, Sharon’s parents drove up from Fresno, and her dad and I went to the Fairmont Hotel, where the legendary Mel Torme and George Shearing were performing.
During our off-and-on dozen years working at KPIX-TV in San Francisco, we took a two-year sojourn to Los Angeles, I worked as an executive producer at KNBC-TV and Sharon taught school.
And on oh-so-many of our Saturday nights there, we attended games at Dodger Stadium. Those nights were always warm, and the view of the mountains from the stadium was spectacular.
I know, I know. You’re wondering how many more Saturdays I’m going to regale you with. Well, not many, so hang tough.
We moved back to the Valley, where we had grown up, to raise Brad and Amy. Sharon became an administrator with the Fresno School District, and I became a reporter-anchor at KMJ Radio. Then we retired to the Central Coast about eight years ago.
And during many of our Saturdays on the Central Coast, we went out to lunch with Paul and Sharon Finlayson, who were our neighbors in Paso Robles.
I mean — we really went out to lunch. Almost every weekend for years.
We hit lots of culinary hot spots from San Luis Obispo to San Miguel and beyond and plenty of places in between. It was a grand and glorious time and a great retirement.
But Paul and Sharon moved to Montana, and we decided that medical care on the Central Coast was not good, so we came back to the Valley.
First we moved to a Madera County subdivision called Tesoro Viejo, and it was (and is) great.
But when my brother passed away about a year-and-a-half ago, we decided to renovate his condo near Fig Garden Village in Fresno and move in.
It’s a great complex in a fine neighborhood, and it’s much closer to shopping and doctors than where we were at Tesoro.
And about a month ago — yes, on Saturday, March 15, 2025 — came a momentous moment. Amy and Steve got married in the Bay Area of California. I’ve written about that in my most recent blog.
And on a far lesser but still interesting (for me) note — this past Saturday, April 12, 2025 – I took my first walk long since we moved here down Van Ness Boulevard near our place.
It’s in what Fresnans know as “Old Fig” — grand old houses built by people with big money in the early 20th century.
And it has tons of Deodar trees lining the boulevard — trees lit up with hundreds of thousands of lights during the holidays, when Van Ness becomes known as Christmas Tree Lane.
It’s a world-famous two-mile stretch of sparkling lights. My parents first drove me through Christmas Tree Lane when I was about 5 years old. Yes, 70 years ago.
It was a wonderful walk this past Saturday, which wound up at Starbucks in Fig Garden Village.
I loved it and hope to do it on a whole lot of Saturday mornings.
And there you have it. Memories of a few of my Saturdays extending almost my entire life.
Now, no worries. I’m not planning future pieces on “Mondays In My Life” or any other days. (Though it has been said that when you’re retired, every day is a Saturday except for Sunday.)
Remember, this piece was inspired by Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park.”
I don’t think that group created anything involving those other days.