The fall brought a return to Bartlett High School, but things were really different. My friend Jessie Yancey had graduated and was now down at Northwest Mississippi Junior College in Senatobia playing football, and I spent a lot of time checking out the marching band, who were working on a Latin-tinged tune called "Suncat" that caught my attention. My homeboy Eddie Oliver was one of the tri-tom players in the percussion section.
Dances seemed a bigger deal that fall as well. There were more of them, and I went more often. The cheerleaders sponsored one in August to set off the school year, and nearly everyone came out for it. Even Jessie came back from Senatobia, and it was good to see him. Another dance in September was sponsored by the Streamliners, a predominantly-Black social club at our school of which I was a member. Unfortunately, since we were sponsoring the event, I had to work and didn't really get to enjoy myself, but it was also well-attended.
Around that time, a new unofficial social club appeared on campus called the Esquires. The group was founded by Eddie Oliver, Earnest Greenleaf, Tony Payne, Herbert Jones, Calvin Logan and Garrett Smith, and identified themselves by wearing grey T-shirts with the Playboy bunny logo and the word "Esquires" underneath. As I recall, their names were on the back of the shirts, and they tended to show up to dances in groups.
Unfortunately, Bartlett High School was soon at the center of some really bad city-wide publicity, which started with two young men who were not students walking onto our campus. I had seen them, one white boy and one Black boy, walking onto the campus as I looked out the window of the choir room, and knew I didn't recognize them, but didn't think very much else of it. However, later that day, a young female student who had transferred to Bartlett from Kirby claimed that the boys had forced her into a restroom in the main building and raped her. The accusation brought fear and sheer panic to students and parents alike, and soon the local news media was crawling all over our campus. Angie Carraway had been interviewed on Channel 3 news, and Bartlett's reputation was dragged through the mud for a week. And all for naught, as eventually the girl admitted to Bartlett Police that she had made the story up, because she was unhappy at having to leave Kirby High School.
Our star basketball player that fall was Ricky Fields, a friend of mine who drove a blue 1973 Chevy Impala, which he had tricked out with a jerry-built sound system made from house speakers, which nevertheless packed a huge punch. On warm afternoons after school, he could be heard around the football field jamming popular tracks like Whodini's "Five Minutes of Funk" or "Friends", or the Bar-Kays "Sexomatic." Of course, around that time, the big stars were Prince, with songs like "When Doves Cry", and The Time, with "Jungle Love" and "Ice Cream Castles."
In October, I recall going to see Bartlett play football at Millington, and I remember being impressed that the Millington High School Band came out playing "Push The Button" by Newcleus, which was one of the popular jams of the day. It was the kind of thing I would have expected from Hamilton High School or Westwood, but not Millington, which is probably why it made such an impression. Later that evening, there was a highly-advertised house party at Reginald Thompson's house on the Ellendale Road out from Bartlett. When I arrived, it seemed that there were more people out on the lawn of the house than there were inside at the party, but a lot of people I knew attended, including one of our female track stars Wendy Jackson, Ricky Fields, and an old friend of mine named David Manghum that I had not seen since we went to Shadowlawn Middle School together in 1978. I recalled that the Manghums had lived in an old weatherbeaten house on the grounds of Davies Plantation in those days, and both David and Priscilla had been at Shadowlawn. Also, one of our football players, Patrick Jordan, who everyone called either "Lackalo" or "Lolackum" for some reason, showed up toward the end of the night as the party was beginning to break up. As I recall, it began raining, and I don't remember ever making it inside. But I do recall that the DJ kept playing a rap song called "Rock Military" which was based on running cadences and which was clearly the most popular song around that time.
In November, my family headed out to Jackson for our annual family reunion. This year, it was quite a doozy, with four college football games in Jackson on one weekend including the one we were going to, Mississippi State vs. Alabama. On the Friday night, after eating dinner in the Passport Inn's restaurant, my dad, my granddad and I all headed out to Brandon, Mississippi to see Brandon High School take on Rolling Fork. I had especially wanted to go to that game to check out the Rolling Fork High School band, and I was not disappointed. Rolling Fork's band was all-Black, and their drumline played funky cadences through nearly the entire game. When the band played, they played "When Doves Cry" by Prince and the theme from the movie "Ghostbusters," and the football game was interesting as well. Of course, my granddad had to go down to the Rolling Fork bench, meet the coaches, and try to convince some of the boys to consider Mississippi State! He would have made a great recruiter. The next day, Saturday, featured games with Millsaps and Georgia Southern, Mississippi State and Alabama, and Jackson State and Texas Southern. My grandfather used to wear a houndstooth hat remarkably similar to Coach Bear Bryant's, and at breakfast, when he left it on a table outside the Passport Inn's restaurant, people began to suspect that Bear Bryant was in the restaurant. When my granddad finally went to retrieve it, the desk clerk said, "Oh, sir, please don't move that hat! People think Bear Bryant's in there, and they've been going in there all morning!" Because Mississippi State and Jackson State both had to play their games in Mississippi Memorial Stadium, ours was an afternoon game, and Jackson State's was at night which meant we could have attended both. But State lost to Alabama 24-20, and although I begged him, Dad didn't feel like going back to the Jackson State game, so after dinner, I listened to some of it on the radio, but of course the broadcast tended to exclude the marching bands or the drumlines. Normally, Mississippi State and Alabama would have been the game that everybody was talking about, but on this particular weekend, it was rather a huge Sunday game between Mississippi Valley and Alcorn State that people were pouring into Jackson for. Valley had hired a coach called Archie Cooley, who was nicknamed "The Gunslinger", and he started a kind of offense called the "Run-and-Shoot," and Valley had been scoring 70 and 80 points on opponents. On the other hand, Alcorn had a coach named Marino Casem who as I recall had once been coach at Southern in Louisiana. I didn't get to attend that game either, as we were checking out of the hotel and driving back to Memphis. But a record crowd of 63,000 turned out to Mississippi Memorial Stadium, the largest crowd in that facility's history.
November of 1984 was about when it became apparent that rap was catching on in Memphis. Ricky Fields used to talk about a club called No Name somewhere out on Lamar Avenue that he used to go to, and he would have mixtapes from a DJ named Sundown that he said used to DJ there, and he would play those mixes on the basketball team bus whenever we would go to an away game. I was a team manager at the time, and since I also worked for The Panther as a staff writer, the job allowed me to function as an embedded reporter with the team. On November 17, the city had the first really big rap show that I recall, which was billed as a Rappers' Convention. Ricky had told me about it, and I would have liked to have gone, but I knew my parents weren't going to take me down to the Coliseum for a rap show, so I went to the dance up at Bartlett instead, and the crowd was fairly small, as everyone had gone to the rap show.
The semester ended with something of a bang, at least at our basketball game with White Station in the Bartlett gym. One of the younger team managers turned the engine on to move the practice goals to the roof, and then forgot to turn it off. Once the goals were stowed flat against the roof, the engine kept running and running, and during the first quarter of the girl's game, I noticed a burning smell. I went to Glenn Essary, the building superintendent and warned him that something smelled like it was burning, but he said it was just that they had turned the heat on. Right at that moment, we both heard screams coming from the gym, and White Station cheerleaders were pointing at the roof and screaming "Fire!" Indeed, the practice goal motor had run and run until it burst into flames on the roof, and the game had to be halted. In those days, the Bartlett City Hall and Fire Department were right across the street from the school, but it still took them about five minutes to come over to the campus, by which time the fire had burnt itself out. But a nasty pool of black oil had poured out of the engine onto the court, and cleaning that up took almost 15 minutes. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and there was no significant damage.
