What did Larry look like as a kid, I wonder..?

My daddy died in the spring of 1966; I was 5 going on 6.

And it was a bit spooky to me because at that age  I was on the cusp of really understanding what death was, but young enough to still be puzzling the implications. Now, I'll tell you, when Walt Disney died that December after Dad did, I was really starting to get nervous. Two of the Adults that I really felt warm and comfy with, went "Uhggg" and dropped dead.

You just don't have a whole lot of experience at that age. Is this normal, do the Old Ones pop off suddenly like this? (When I was older I learned: well, yes, they do) But when you are 5 going on 6 you are formulating what is normal; what is not. "Normal" always seemed to be scampering around me. Others seemed to have tamed it for themselves but I found it to be a greased pig then as I do now.

Adults as a species were something that I somewhat feared as they never understood me and I rarely understood them. I knew that they felt that John, Paul, George & Ringo were the devil with shaggy hair. But my brother & sister, who were quite a bit older than me, thought that they were groovy. Ray was a god and Diana was a goddess so their opinion were just a skosh more relevant to me than adults. Despite this, I knew it was best to keep my mouth shut. I puzzled the possibilities of these guys, why would they be hated by some and revered by others? What relationship did  their music have that was so abhorrent to adults and their music?

Wasn't music, music? I really didn't understand music anyway. Ray had me convinced that listening to two radio stations together was special music he called a "medley". I'm sure that my mother passing by as I listened like the RCA dog to the discordant noise of two stations whose signal bled over the other worried her that not only was she husband-less, her youngest child was showing signs of being  truly addled.

See, when I was 5 going on 6, I was three and half feet tall, I had a little skinny body, and even at that age, a size 9 head which in profile was shaped like a football. That big goofy head was covered with little tiny yellow hairs that some thought made my orb look like a light bulb. When this is you, you are already skimming pretty close to Freak.

Add to this was the fact that even then I was plagued with rotten teeth; I had either presented nothing but a gaping black hole where teeth should have been or shiny silver capped teeth grinning out at you like some goofy boy-pumpkin. I know of only two photographs of me smiling back then that still survive. With a flash to light up the subject, you saw not much other than reflected light from these silver covered teeth on the photograph.

I always had scabs somewhere visible. I was clumsy, no doubt about that, but at 5 going on 6, I  feared the death of others, not the possibility of my potential demise. Gravity seemed to be another elusive concept. My shirt would be covered with whatever I had eaten thus far that day, whatever color of Kool-Aid I had fancied; with a gaping teeth, some things just never made into my pie hole.

I would talk like a freakish adult with that squeaky little voice that little boys have then. I asked my mother, "Do you think that Lawrence Welk looked like Paul from the Beatles when he was their age?"

She looked at me trying on different faces, seeing which one fit this particular moment. She gave up. "That's nice, dear", she said distractedly as she went for the bottle of, what she told me was, adult grape juice that she kept on the top shelf in the kitchen.

I shrugged my shoulders and went back into the living room to listen to another medley.