…A little crossover from The Buzzard never hurt anybody back then. Buzzard Morning Zoo (one of the original morning zoos, even before Mark & Brian in LA & Bob & Tom in Indianapolis I think) w/Jeff & Flash…& kid Leo…& Len BoomBoom Goldberg & Ruby Cheeks…& th’ Coffee Break Concert…or somethin’ like that! Jeez, what a relatively chill time in America that was…when we only had 3 channels of shidt & WUAB & (I think) WVIZ on teevee to choose from; …little did we know…they were the best of times (to some degree.) Had I only ran away from home & joined the circus way back then…I might have stopped to smell the roses. No clue what MMS is really like now. Prolly a ClearChannel station…with a corporate-band song…commercial ad…corporate-band song…commercial ad format?
1979: The year the Kardiac Kids began to take form; that was the year my dad & I saw the Browns vs. Dolphins from those cold-ace-from-lake-effects pine planks of the Dawg Pound together (just about b4 anybody outside of Cleveland began calling it that.)
Always was a blast to see Sipe hit Logan in the corner of the end zone…’specially to send the game into overtime…a play or two after a very rare Ozzie incomplete or was it a Brennan save across the middle?, I can’t recall, …& that laid-back-bad-azz Clay Mathews (Chevrolet) ~ although ’79 was still early in his career so I may be getting ahead of things ~ & Lyle Alzado killin‘em on D that year. Third quarter, my dad tells me he got beeped…& has to go to work…here’s a coupl’a fins…catch the RTA home, sorry son…got’a run. So I sat there for the rest of the game & overtime, partying with every stranger around me…with a part empty bag of home-made chili dogs rapped in foil (bartering swag for the vodka & orange juice & rum & coke being drank from Lawson’s milk containers ~~ no, probably thermos jugs [it’s all hazy before plastics got big] back then). Back then nobody gave a rates ace what u brought into the stadium…& good for us then. & the cardiac kids won it in the first possession of overtime with a (fckn zoned-out) Brian Sipe (activated drive ending in a) pass to Rucker for a TD! The place went maaad, I hugged a lot of strangers…then weeded myself out and up the grimy road to the square to catch a bus home. Tell mom dad had to go to work.
Found out later that m’pop had a girl he was seeing downtown round-about those years…so prolly he had a meeting planned all along & our game day was part diversion/part sincere. He was a good guy once in a while while I knew ‘im, …shining even on occasion, …but I suppose he was doing things like ‘at often enough to ‘av had a gnarly effect on mom; …& us kids pissed & moaned, …sheeez…damm selfish of us. …chuckle…. Good ‘ol Sam Rutigliano & the KKs & that old cold stadium. Used to fish all-night @ Edgewater Park too, haven’t been there is years ~ I presume they still have the big fireworks display over the shoreline to WMMS accompaniment?
