Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.

While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!

Personal life

By the time I turned 26, most of my life since adolescence had been consumed with looking for that one person that I could be in love with and who would love me in return. There were lots of guys along the way who I fell for, but all of them, with the exception of one, were out of reach. That one person who I did connect with stayed with me for 8 months from the summer of 1979 to early 1980, and I was quite happy for the bulk of that time. I loved having a companion. I felt complete, and I had a real friend. When we broke up, I was devastated, but I was young and resilient, and I survived. Work and school kept me busy, and I had lots of friends to spend time with. I have to admit, however, that those years when I was single again, between the summer of 1980 and winter of 1984, were rough. I hated being alone, I hated the bar scene, I partied too much, and I hated myself for trying to pretend I was straight when I dated women. Then one day in the middle of December, 1984, Brent Bates showed up in my life, and we fell in love. He was nine months older than me and was from Muskegon, Michigan. I spent the next six years of my life with him. Little did we know when we met, where our relationship would take us.

Brent moved in within a month after we had met, so he must have been settled in with me by the end of January. The house on Manlove St. that I had moved into the previous summer was nice and roomy, and there was plenty of space for two people.  Once again, I felt that I had what I wanted—to be in a relationship with someone I loved. The first 8 months of our time together were exceptionally happy ones.  We got along well and while we came from different backgrounds and had a lot of differences, we did our best to communicate openly and to understand one another.  We also both enjoyed partying and had fun going to concerts and movies together.

Brent worked in the shipping/receiving department at Mervyn’s Department Store when we met. He was a conscientious person, with a strong work ethic. While he had just a high school education, he always sought to improve himself in one way or another. Within a couple of months after having moved in with me, he bought a new car, a little white Toyota Tercel. He was very proud of that car, and he took very good care of it. In July, we drove it across country to Michigan to visit his family. It was a fun trip, and my second road trip east. Unfortunately, I don’t remember many details about the trip there or the trip back. It’s all one big blur. However, I do remember our arrival. When we got to western Michigan, it was very late at night, and I was asleep. Brent decided to surprise me and he parked the car in a wooded area near Lake Michigan, outside of Muskegon. When I woke up I couldn’t believe my eyes. The scenery was beautiful, with gorgeous tall trees everywhere. And Lake Michigan! My god, it looked huge. It was like being near the ocean and quite a sight to see. I’ll never forget it.

When we got to Twin Lake, a small township north of Muskegon where Brent’s family lived, everyone was happy to see Brent again, and they were very nice to me and immediately treated me like family. We stayed with Brent’s parents, but at night, we slept in a small trailer away from the house. Brent’s dad was a bit weirded out about our relationship, but he came around in time. We hung out with his family for about a week, and while we were there, Brent took me to meet his uncles. One of them had a friend who lived on Duck Lake, which was just north of where we were staying. We went on a nice long boat ride while there. We also went out into the country and visited an old cemetery with graves from the 1800s. As I noted, Brent’s family was very nice, and while I found them to be a bit on the conservative side, they accepted our relationship and seemed happy that Brent had found a partner. Brent’s mom and his sister Teresa were especially kind to us.

About a month after our trip, Brent brought home two kittens one day that a  friend of his from work had given to him. They were very small, and irresistibly cute. We named them Cleopatra and Frederick, but called them Cleo and Freddie. They were so adorable. It was fun watching them play together. They got along well and  we kept them until we moved to Nogales in early 1987. It was nice having pets, and these particular cats shed very little cat hair, which was a relief. 

By September, Brent was presented with the opportunity to become a manager in the shipping and receiving department at Mervyn’s. The only catch was, he would have to move up to the Phoenix area to take the job. He decided to go for it, and before we knew it, he had moved out of our house and was living in an apartment up in Chandler. We visited each other regularly, but it was a difficult period for us. Being apart was a drag, to say the least, but we managed. We were both quite busy and that helped the time go by. By the following Spring, Brent realized that he wasn’t doing so well in his new job, and he came back home and landed another job working as a tile setter.

Work

I continued to work at Fry’s part time, about 25 hours a week, but I became increasingly unhappy with my job. I loved my co-workers, but the management staff were another story altogether. Some of them were nice, but there were others who were big jerks. After having worked for the company for nine years, I just couldn’t wait to leave. The job sure did pay well, however, and that’s why I stuck it out. I enjoyed having spending money. I’m not sure when I decided to become a union steward, but in the summer I attended an all day union stewards seminar. I worked hard to recruit new members to the union, something the management of the store wasn’t too thrilled about.

My education

I think I’ve always wanted to be a librarian. Ever since grade school, I would love to go to the library. I loved to read, plain and simple. My sister Becky would sometimes take me with her to the public library when I was a kid, and there also used to be a bookmobile that would park on the corner of 22nd and Cherrybell once a month on Tuesdays, and I would walk to it or get a ride to visit it whenever I could. In junior high, I would have joined the library club, but that was not something “boys” were supposed to do, so I bowed to the peer pressure and didn’t bother. In high school, however, I volunteered in the library at lunchtime and after school, and became friends with the librarians who worked there. One of them, Ms. Koster, bought me a brand new copy of the Joan Baez songbook as a thank you gift for having volunteered and another, Jeannette Bahr, helped me get a job at the UA library my freshman year. My English/newspaper teacher, Jane Cruz, had also enrolled in library school around 1975, and I was intrigued by her stories about someone named Dr. Trejo and the program she was in, the Graduate Library Institute for Spanish Speaking Americans.

I had received my BA in 1982, and for a couple of years, while I still took courses here and there , I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I tried the graduate program in sociology , but as I’ve previously noted, things didn’t work out. I finally decided that I would try something else, and enrolled in Library School late 1984. I got accepted, and started the program in mid-January, 1985, determined this time around to complete the program and graduate, and to find a job as a librarian either in a public library or an academic library as quickly as possible. By the time I entered the program, Dr. Trejo had retired and the GLISSA Program had folded. I was one of just a handful of minorities in the School when I began my studies.

So there I was, getting ready to pick my first few courses in my new program. I have to admit, I didn’t know what to expect as far as what was offered was concerned. I knew that librarians built collections and helped people with their questions, but I didn’t know much else about what librarians actually did or what they had to know to do their jobs. It was a good thing that the school provided some guidance on course choices. There were required courses and elective courses. I decided to tackle the required ones first, so for the first semester, my classes were: Foundations of Library Science, Collection Development, and Basic Reference. The foundations class was supposed to cover the history of libraries and key issues and topics within the profession, such as ethics and community analysis. The basic reference course covered the tools one uses to answer factual questions, as well as tools that help people find more in-depth information. The collection development course covered things like the publishing industry, censorship, how books are reviewed, collection development policies and other topics. I found all three of these classes to be very interesting. There were exams throughout the semester. The ones for basic reference were held in the Central Reference department in the UA Main Library. The professor for the class was Dr. Donald Dickinson. He became my favorite teacher, and I took several courses from him while in Library School. I didn’t keep any documentation for the basic reference class,  but I did keep all of my assignments from my other two classes. They were both taught by a woman named Gladys Stalschmidt, a recently hired professor. Unfortunately, she  had difficulty maintaining control in her classes. There were two women, in particular, who talked incessantly in our Foundations class, wasting everyone’s time with their long, boring stories. They drove everyone crazy. Many students complained about Professor Stalschmidt’s inability to control the class, and as a result, she didn’t last long at the school. I really liked her, however. It’s too bad some people had such big mouths. They ruined the class for a lot of people.

My assignments for both classes are available here:

• 1/24: Essay in collection development class on growing up with reading and books.
• 2/12/85: Assignment one in Collection Development class
• 3/4/85: Exam in Collection Development class/Stalschmidt
• 3/13: Assignment 2 in Collection Development class
• 3/14: Exam in Foundations class
• 04/01/85: Collection Development class, assignment 3
• 04/16/85: Foundations class assignment 2
• 04/29/85: LS 503 Collection Development selection project
• 05/08/85: Foundations class assignment 3

I ended up getting all A’s this particular semester. I was off to a great start.

In early May, the Mexican American Studies department held a convocation for Mexican American students. The guest speaker was the legendary activist, Jose Angel Gutierrez. In the late Sixties, he founded “La Raza Unida”, a political party in south Texas that had quite an impact in communities along the Rio Grande. The party spread to other regions of the Southwest, including the Tucson area. Gutierrez also authored several books, and was a revered leader in the Chicano movement.

When summer rolled around, I decided to do volunteer work at the Valencia branch of the Tucson Public Library. It was an interesting experience, but I didn’t put in as many hours as I would have liked. I also tried to get involved with the Tucson Lesbian and Gay Pride committee, but I dropped out after just a couple of meetings. The summer went by quickly. I received great news by summer’s end, and that was that I was being given a lot of financial aid. I was quite excited and humbled at the same time. I was, for a change, getting recognition for doing well in my studies.

In August, I enrolled in several classes, including Introduction to Information Science, Research Methods, the History of the US , Library Management and  Cataloging. By October, however, I reduced my course load by dropping the research methods class and the history class. With Brent gone, I felt depressed, and I didn’t do as well in school as I could have. I even missed an important AZLA meeting, where I was supposed to receive the Alice B Goode Scholarship. Believe it or not, I really enjoyed taking cataloging. The professor, Margaret Maxwell, was a real pro, and she knew her stuff, and taught it well. My management class was taught by a lady named Helen Gothberg. She was very nice, and I did well in the class. My other class, Intoduction to Information Science, was essentially all about computers, which were just starting to catch on in the wider world. It was at this time that pc’s and word processors were starting to become more affordable. While I didn’t care for the class, I did learn the fundamentals of using databases, spreadsheets and word processing software.

Here are some of my management class papers from the Fall semester:

• 09/26/85: Planning paper in Management class
• 10/15/85: Library Management budget exercise
• 11/14/85: Management class performance project

I ended the semester getting A’s in cataloging and management, and a B in Info. Science. One year down, one year to go!

Radio

When the year started, I was still hosting the Friday morning music mix and I was running the board for my friend and landlord, Ted Warmbrand, who hosted a program on Saturdays titled “Music from the Living Loom.” Ted was a challenge to work with at times, but he has always been a good hearted soul, so I didn’t mind helping him out. I loved doing my morning mix show, as I could play both Latin music and music in English, spanning a wide array of genres. There were guidelines in place, of course, as to what we should emphasize (lots of contemporary jazz. I called it elevator music), but we were also given a lot of freedom to play lots of different types of music. I particularly enjoyed adding leftist leaning, political music to my mixes, and found that overall, people really liked what I had to offer. I even got to produce a couple of special tribute shows, one on Aretha Franklin and another on Billie Holiday. I also came out on the air around this time. I vividly recall playing a song called “Glad to be Gay” and saying during the introduction, “I dedicate this to all of my brothers and sisters”. As luck would have it, one of my own siblings was listening at the time too! If he didn’t know I was gay before, he knew at that moment, that’s for sure!

Unfortunately, over time, the management of the station started to crack down on those of us who were stretching the boundaries of what was considered “acceptable” for daytime programming. One day sometime in March, I decided to play a tune titled, “Shoot First”, by Judy Collins. It’s an anti-gun song. After the show, I was called into the program manager’s office, and he let me know that he did not approve of my musical choices that day. I had also been getting harassed by Roger, another station manager, for bringing in my own music. That was enough for me. I decided right then and there to hang up my headphones, and I quit, which in hindsight was a bad move, but I was stubborn and didn’t like the idea of not having creative license to play what I thought I should be able to play. I had other things going on anyway, such as work and school. I have kept several cassette tapes of my shows from this time period. At some point, I’ll have them transferred and included in my Chicano Connection archive. Here are some of my playlists from the time:

• 01/11/85: Playlist for morning music mix.
• 01/19/85: Playlist for radio show covering for Kidd Squidd
• 02/08/85: Morning music mix playlist
• 3/1/85: Morning music mix playlist
• 07/04/85: The Chicano Connnection Revisited playlist

My time away from the station didn’t last too long. One night at a street party, I ran into the station manager, Paul, and he asked me to come back to host one of the Thursday night Latin slots,  from 11pm to 1am. While the hours weren’t great,  I was happy to be able to go back, so on June 11, 1985, I started back up again at KXCI and called my new show “The Chicano Connection Revisited”. I would continue doing this show until the end of 1986, when I graduated from Library School.

Friends and family

I spent most of my free time with Brent during the first eight months of the year, so I didn’t get to see my old friends too often. I really missed them, but being with Brent, working, doing the radio show and going to school took up all of my time.

Sometime in the middle of the year, my good friends Ron and Jane moved with their two children to Washington DC, where Ron had landed an important position with the Catholic Church. I attended their going away party. It would be years before I would see them again. I regret that I had drifted away from them after high school, but I was young and immature, and distracted by lots of other things along the way. I’m just glad I didn’t lose complete touch with them. I would always try to see them when they visited Tucson, but those times seemed few and far between. In recent years, however,I’ve visited them in Washington a couple of times and they’ve also come to Tucson to visit. Today, I feel just as close to them as I did while in high school. As I think back on it, they were always there for me. I just didn’t realize it.

In July, my dad’s eldest brother Raul, died. He was the only one of my grandparent’s children to have been born in Mexico. He and his family lived in Superior since the 30s. His wife Prudence had died the year before. I wrote a blog post about him a while back: https://bobdiaz.net/2020/02/19/happy-birthday-tio-raul.

My buddy Richard and I stayed in touch throughout our lives, but our friendship wasn’t the same in the mid-80s. He had become very involved in sports and was on a softball team, and unlike me, he was just crazy about the Grateful Dead and was always going to their concerts. We clashed more often than not. We never stopped being friends, however, and we found time every now and then to hang out together.

My two buddies Scott and Tim each got married in 1985. Scott, the guy I had a giant crush on and for whom I wrote the song, “My Kind”, married a young woman named Penny Aldridge, who he had been dating for a year or so. I missed his wedding because I was traveling home from my Michigan trip with Brent, but I did get to participate in Tim’s wedding as a member of his wedding party. He married a woman named Chris Fox, a fellow UA student. The festivities were held in Trail Dust Town, and we all had a blast.

Scott and Tim both became police officers with the Tucson Police Department after college. What an amazing coincidence! I never dreamed Tim would become a cop. He just didn’t seem like the type. He was such a freak, with all that long hair, his guitar playing and his love for partying. He even moved on from the police department and went to work for the FBI, which was even more shocking. While I knew that Scott liked hunting and shooting guns, it came as a huge surprise to learn that he too had joined the police force. I lost touch with both of them long ago, but I think of them often. They were good guys. I miss them both, but so many years have gone by, I wonder how we’d get along now.

Another death in the family occurred in late December. My cousin Charlie Mendoza died from burn wounds he received from a car accident that took place near 22nd and Country Club on December 27. His brother Richard, who was driving the car Charlie was in, survived. Charlie was only 19. It was a terrible tragedy.

I didn’t spend much time with my friend Dennis in 1985. Unfortunately, he got sick, and by January of 1986, had passed away. He was a great friend, and we had a lot of fun together. His death was heartbreaking. He was the second of my friends who died of AIDS. The other was Leonard Brown. I had met both of them through John, my ex, back in 1979. They were real characters, and I think of them often.

My mom and dad were doing well at this time in their lives, although my mom still struggled with her aches and pains. My dad retired from the mines, and he and mom spent most of their time taking care of their grandchildren and great grandchildren. By 1985, my niece Belisa had three kids, Michelle had one, and my brother Rudy also had two. Fred’s daughter Edessa also spent a lot of time with my parents. Our family would continue to grow as the years went by. Becky and I were the only two who didn’t have children, but there were already plenty of grandkids to keep my parents busy.

Other stuff:

We were in the midst of the Reagan era. He had just won re-election at the end of 1984, so we were in for another four years of terrible fun.  His administration was corrupt to the core and there were indictments and resignations taking place throughout the year. Reagan also continued to ignore the AIDS crisis, which hit Tucson pretty hard in 1985. He was also secretly funding the Contras, and a big scandal broke out that would continue for another two years.

On the bright side, there were lots of concerts that took place in Tucson that Brent and I both attended, and there were some great movies that came out as well, along with a number of great albums by some of my favorite artists. The following visual chronology includes many of these as well as other memorable events, places and topics.

A photographic/graphic chronology of events and activities for the year:

Here is a playlist from July 4, 1985.

For more information about my tio Raul and his family check out the blog entry I wrote for my tio on his birthday in 2020.

A great song….

Here’s one of my favorite Dylan tunes from the above anthology. It was recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall .

Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.

While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!

For this segment of “My Life in Pictures,” I’ve decided to include the bulk of the text at the beginning of the post. Photos and graphics follow.

I was a busy guy in 1984. I continued, as in previous years, to work 25 hours a week at Fry’s. I was also enrolled in graduate school at the University, hosted two weekly radio shows on KXCI, and continued to participate in Teatro Libertad. While I knew that graduate school should take priority, it didn’t. The bulk of my energy, aside from working, was spent preparing and hosting my two radio shows each week, and in attending Teatro Libertad meetings, where we planned and rehearsed for a number of local performances and our next big production, La Vida Del Cobre, Acts I and II. I also continued to find time to go out and have fun, attending lots of concerts, going out dancing, and partying with my friends.

WORK:

By 1984, I had already worked for Fry’s Food Stores for eight years. I’d been a cashier and stocker since the age of 19. The pay was very good, and while working with the public could be challenging at times, for the most part, I enjoyed meeting new people each day, and I generally got along well with my co-workers. The actual work itself, while at times physically demanding, was easy. I was a very fast cashier and could bag groceries with lightning speed. In the summer, I worked on the night crew stocking the shelves, but it was difficult keeping a night schedule, as I often had daytime obligations. On top of that, some of the guys I worked with were homophobic jerks, but I managed,  although I must admit, there were times when I hated my job. I knew I needed to keep it for a while longer, however, at least until I was done with school or had found something better. My annual earnings at Fry’s, for part time work, weren’t bad. By the end of the year I had earned $15,000. I spent it all on rent, food, bills, books, records and fun. I didn’t save a dime, unfortunately.

SCHOOL:

I had been accepted into the graduate program in Sociology the previous year, and while I had enrolled in a class called Social Psychology in the Fall of 1983, I ended up withdrawing from it. I don’t even remember attending it. I tried again in the Spring, and this time took a class called Political Sociology, with a teacher named Doug McAdam. Our big task for the semester was to write a dissertation-level research proposal. Dr. McAdam wanted us to have experience doing this kind of work, as we would all have to write such a proposal at some point in the future, that is if we wanted to pursue our PhDs. I chose to study the American Indian Movement, and I ended up writing a research paper, missing the mark on the assignment altogether. Dr. McAdam was a nice guy, and he ended up giving me a B in the course. I guess I wasn’t exactly sure what he had meant by a “research proposal”. I was disillusioned by the end of the semester, and ended up dropping out of the program altogether. My heart wasn’t into it anyway. I was too busy with my other activities to take my studies seriously. What can I say? That was the truth.

In the Fall, I tried taking a mechanics course at Pima College, but quickly dropped it after just two sessions. There were no teachers in sight. I guess I had enrolled in a self-study course or something. It was an awful, but brief experience, and I got the heck out of there as quickly as I could.

By the end of the year, I made up my mind that I wanted to be a librarian once and for all so I applied to the graduate program in library science and got accepted. I was given several scholarships, along with financial aid so this time around I didn’t have to pay for my education out of my own pocket like I had when I was an undergraduate. I couldn’t wait to start school again in January.

KXCI

Most of my attention went into preparing and hosting my two radio shows, the Chicano Connection, which aired on Thursday nights from 7 to 9pm, and the morning music mix, which aired from 9am to noon on Friday morning. I devoted approximately10 hours a week altogether to this work, both in prep time and in being on the air. My shows became quite popular, and I would receive letters from fans as well as get lots of phone calls while on the air. On Saturdays, I would help another host, Victor Blue, with his bluegrass show by “running the board” for him. He was a very nice man, and I enjoyed the music. Those of us who did this work for other volunteers were known as “techies”.

During the summer, Kathy Hannon, who I knew from Fry’s as the representative from the United Food and Commercial Workers union, wrote a  newspaper article about me for the union newspaper. In the article, she mistakenly noted that I had taken the KXCI radio course the previous summer for free. I actually paid nearly $500 to attend the course. I was earning good money at Fry’s at the time, and was able to afford it. It was a great investment in my continuing education.

Sometime in June, I decided to stop hosting the Chicano Connection, and just focus on the morning music mix. I can’t remember exactly why. I think it had to do with the fact that I didn’t have that much Latin music at the time, and the station’s collection was sorely lacking. It would take a while for me to build my own collection of Latin music, but I did, slowly but surely.

Later in the year, I went up to Phoenix to a Buffy Sainte Marie concert that she did as a benefit for the Heard Museum. One of the station staff members, Martha Van Winkle, invited me along, as she was scheduled to interview Ms. St. Marie after the concert. When the interview started, I just took right over and talked my head off. I was a huge fan of Ms. St Marie’s,  and we had a great interview. I’m not so sure that Martha thought so. It was supposed to be her interview, not mine. I just couldn’t help myself!

I have compiled all of the playlists from this time period on my Chicano Connection Archive page. They can be accessed here.

TEATRO LIBERTAD

In the first few months of the year, I spent an average of 8 hours a week in meetings and rehearsal with the members of Teatro Libertad. In the Spring, we performed at various community events and also co-wrote part II of La Vida Del Cobre. We performed the entire play, Act I and Act II at various places in Tucson, and later in Ajo and Clifton. Our performance at the El Pueblo Neighborhood Center on May 19 was attended by a packed house, and we received a resounding standing ovation at the end of it. It was such a great feeling and we were in seventh heaven.  We had put our hearts and souls into our work, and it had paid off nicely. A week after our El Pueblo performance we traveled to Santa Barbara, California to perform the play at TENAZ, an international theater festival sponsored by a California group called  El Teatro de la Esperanza. Unfortunately, we forgot part of our props back in Tucson (our slides), and we basically bombed, because we were upset over having forgotten them and there was tension between some of the individuals in the group. A critique of the play was given the following day, and we were subject to some rather harsh feedback that included some very mean comments by a former member of our group. It was unnerving and depressing. We didn’t even have an opportunity to respond. That evening, some of us took off to the beach, while others attended a Poncho Sanchez concert that the festival organizers were sponsoring, and we let all of our frustrations out by dancing the night away. The trip home was sad,  and seemed to take much longer than the trip to the festival. We were crushed.

But as they say, the show must go on. Our performances in Ajo and Clifton in June  went well,  and the copper strikers enjoyed the play, especially Act II, a lot. In early July, during the first year anniversary of the strike, we were in Clifton again. What was supposed to be a happy occasion, a rally and a picnic, turned into a riot, however, and the Department of Public Safety ended up shooting tear gas into a crowd of protesters. I was there too, and got hit by the tear gas. I had never experienced being tear gassed before, and my eyes were burning so badly, I wanted to gouge them out. I went running through the street in search of water so that I could drench my eyes in it and I finally found a hose and turned the water on full blast, rinsing my eyes out as much as I could. It didn’t help much. The burning in my eyes was an awful sensation, and I’ll never forget how painful it was. I wasn’t even participating in the rock throwing, although some of my friends were.

By September, we had decided to organize a festival called “Bedtime for Bonzo” where we featured a skit called The Beggar and the Beast. We had first performed this skit at Café Ole, and then outdoors at Carrillo Elementary School. I played the role of the beggar and was planning on continuing to play it at the Bedtime for Bonzo program until I injured my foot at Fry’s. I could hardly walk, much less run around on a stage. Someone else in the group ended up playing the part of the beggar.

In November, R.G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe came to town and did a workshop with the Teatro in November. We were finally getting some professional training, and I learned a great deal in just one day. However, by December I had announced that I was leaving the group. My friends Juan and Teresa had left earlier in the year, and I felt it was time to move on too. I had a great time being a member of the Teatro, and made some lifelong friends along the way, but I needed to get serious about my education. I was so tired of working at Fry’s.   

PERSONAL LIFE

My personal life continued to be a drag for most of the year. I dated a woman named Ann for about a month early in the year, but finally just told her I was gay. I just couldn’t stand lying to her any longer. She immediately thought I had given her AIDS, but of course, that wasn’t true because I never caught the virus. It was an awful time to be gay, that’s for sure. Gay men were dying by the thousands and the Reagan administration did absolutely nothing about it. It was tragic. At the gay pride picnic at Himmel Park in June, I ran into my old friend Leonard, who John had introduced me to back in 1979, and he did have the virus. He was one of the first of my friends to catch it. He ended up moving to Bisbee and eventually passed on. Other friends that were around at the time included Lee, Scott, Peter, Tim, Dennis, Frank, Richard, my Fry’s friend Debbie Spedding, and my Teatro friends. I partied some with Richard and we went to several concerts together, but he had become a sports fanatic, and we weren’t as close at this time in our lives as we had been before. I continued to go out a lot and I partied way too much. I was so lonely, and longed to meet someone I could have a steady relationship with. That’s all I wanted. As luck would have it, in December I did end up meeting someone. His name was Brent, and he was a tall blonde guy from Michigan. A woman named Ila Meyer, a lesbian folk singer who I had heard perform at the Shanty, introduced us. Just like that, we started dating and before we knew it, he moved in and we were a couple. Our relationship lasted for six years.

I attended lots of concerts and bought lots of records in 1984. I was lucky to have such a good job and be able to afford it all. Some of the concerts I attended and music I bought are included below. I’ve also included a few other memorable events.

This song by the Pointer Sisters was released as a single on 4/11/84. It first appeared on the album Break Out the previous year.

My only paper this semester was in Sociology 510, Political Sociology, with Professor Doug McAdam. The title of it was “Political Process and the American Indian Movement: A Research Proposal.” I missed the mark, and got a B on it. This would be my last effort at writing anything related to the study of sociology. I soon dropped out of the program.

Here’s a list of my radio shows from 1984:

The Chicano Connection, January 5, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, January 6, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, Jan/Feb, 1984–exact date unknown. (Playlist only).

The Chicano Connection, Jan/Feb, 1984, exact date unknown #1. (Playlist only).

The Chicano Connection, Jan/Feb, 1984 exact date unkown #2. (Playlist only).

The Chicano Connection, February 23, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, February 24, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, June 22, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, June 29, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, August 17, 1984, Part 1. (Audio only).

The Morning Music Mix, August 17, 1984, Part 2. (Audio only).

The Morning Music Mix, September 14, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, September 21, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, October 12, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, October 26, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, November 2, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, November 30, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix, December 21, 1984. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix Date Unknown #1. (Playlist only).

The Morning Music Mix: Date Unknown #2. (Playlist only).

Things to know up front:

You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.

Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.

While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!

I have always thought of 1983 as the year I came out of my shell, and as the beginning of one of the most creative and productive periods of my life. As I’ve noted previously, I had always been a very shy person.  I had very little self-confidence and could never comfortably get up in front of a group of people, for example, and give a speech or a presentation without getting all nervous and feeling sick. 1983 would be the year I started to overcome these obstacles.

After I graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in May of 1982, I decided to take a six month break and just work at the grocery store. It got boring, however, and I missed school.  By the end of the year, I had taken the GRE and got very good scores. I was ready to go back to school, so I enrolled in three classes in the Spring of 1983 at the University of Arizona as an “unclassified” graduate student. Just for the heck of it, I took beginning Russian with my friend Scott, a course titled Latin American Political Development, and an Introduction to Sociological Theory, a graduate course in sociology. I also worked at Fry’s the whole time, continuing the pattern I had established when I entered college—to work part time, go to school part time and to have fun part time, which included going to lots of concerts and various events in the community. Unfortunately, as I was starting to get serious about studying sociology, this arrangement was becoming a bit difficult to sustain.

I’m not sure when I did this, but sometime near the beginning of the year, I applied to formally enter the graduate program in sociology at the University of Arizona. I had done very well my last two years of college, primarily because I so enjoyed taking courses in sociology, and learning about things like political power and social movements, as well as Latin American and Chicano history. I figured that the graduate program in sociology would allow me to continue in this vein. I really had no idea, however, what I was in for. Before I knew it, I was confronted with the fact that sociology is a social science, and as such, a student at the graduate level was expected to learn how to be impartial and study the topic with an objective lens. Sociology isn’t just about learning about how social movements work or how political power manifests itself, it’s about theoretical framewoks and paradigms, comparing and analyzing events, about using data to extract trends and develop hypotheses about why and how things happen in the social world. It’s about theory, and includes the study of great thinkers like Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, among others. These guys wrote for a 19^th century audience often in German or in languages other than English. They were difficult to understand, and I, at this point in my life, was very opinionated, and wanted to change the world for the better, not study it. Also, sociology at the graduate level was a full time endeavor, and I just didn’t want to let go of my job at the grocery store, even though I was offered a stipend when I formally entered the Sociology graduate program. Needless to say, I didn’t last long in the graduate program. I took just a couple more courses, but by the summer of 1984, I had fully checked out of it. Other stuff had popped up and held my attention.

Here are a couple of samples of the work I did this semester:

Sociology 500 Midterm Exam March 8, 1983, Dr. Fligstein

“Cuba”, (paper written for Professor Seligson’s “Latin American Political Development” class Political Science 447, The University of Arizona, April 28, 1983).

In late 1982, I had joined Teatro Libertad, a leftist, mostly Chicano street theater troupe.  As a member, I had to learn how to act and sing in public. I was very nervous and scared at first, and I’m sure I was awful, but I didn’t give up and just kept practicing, and before long, I was able to perform in front of large groups of people without much difficulty at all. I got over being shy, and it felt great. The Teatro performed  a number of skits in a variety of places throughout the year and by year’s end, we had also written and performed  the first act of an original full length play called, “La Vida del Cobre” or the Life of Copper, about the 1917 Bisbee copper strike and deportation.  I played several different characters in La Vida Del Cobre, and contributed a lot of the music to the play. I had a great time, and being in a group like this helped me strengthen my self-confidence and performing abilities. I was doing political theater, and working to raise people’s consciousness about the power structure and the social realities in which they lived. I felt like I was making a difference.

In terms of my personal life in 1983, I was a mess. I was still in love with my friend Scott, but as the year unfolded and the AIDS crisis became more serious, people started acting strange, and I lost a few so-called friends. Scott also pulled away from me. He found himself a girlfriend, and we drifted apart by the Fall. My friend Frank and I had our ups and downs too, as I was always restless, and could never see myself as his lover or companion. He was a lot older than me, and had his own busy life that kept him on the road constantly, but he kept popping in and out of mine. There were others that came and went too. I was friends with a guy who worked at Fry’s named Henry at one point, but he was really not a good influence on me, as he was into being a little badass cholo, always getting into mischief.

There was also a guy named Peter, with whom I became quite infatuated, but that went nowhere either. It seems like all the guys I was attracted to were straight, and that was a major bummer.  As I’ve mentioned before, I also still tried dating women, and there were a few here and there that also popped into my life at the time. One woman, named Lee, was also in my Russian class, and she actually got to visit the Soviet Union over Spring Break. She sent me lots of Russian souvenirs, including a balalaika. She was very nice person. Overall, however,  I felt lonely and unhappy, and after having had a taste of what “married life” was like when I was with John in 1979-80, I longed to have a steady male partner. It would take a couple of more years, however, before I found one.

Early in the summer of 1983, I signed up to take a course in radio programming from KXCI, a brand new community radio station that was planning on going live by the end of the year. I paid $475 to attend the radio course over the summer. (It was not free, as some have mistakenly written). My love of music, which I had been indulging in since childhood, was finally going to take center stage, and I was going to have the opportunity to share the music I loved with the whole community. Over the past 10 years, I had been collecting albums and had immersed myself in learning all about contemporary urban folk music, soul music, jazz, oldies, pop and other musical genres. I also had some basic knowledge of Latin music, but it would soon deepen and it quickly became a major focal point in my continuing musical education.

The radio course lasted a few months, and by late Fall, the station was ready to go live. I was a devoted volunteer at the time, and did a lot of work at the station.

KXCI and Teatro Libertad were where my heart was at this point in my life. I wanted to convince people to become politically active and to take a stand and work to make the world a better place. I had signed up to take a graduate course in Social Psychology with Dr. Patricia MacCorquodale in the Fall, but I withdrew from the course before the semester was over. Academia, it turns out, wasn’t for me, at least for the time being. I couldn’t see myself as a professor doing boring studies, writing boring papers, and teaching all the time, although teaching probably would’ve been more fulfilling than doing research. I would take one more sociology class the following Spring semester, but that would be it. After that, I was done with the program.

As the station went live, I was given two slots to fill in the programming calendar, one a Latin show on Thursday nights which I dubbed “The Chicano Connection”, and the other a morning music mix program that took place on Friday mornings from 9am to noon. I was still rather shy and wasn’t a great announcer when I started, but again, I kept at it, and got better over time.

My knowledge of music and my shows were also starting to get noticed out in the community, and I quickly became known for playing stuff that nobody else was playing or was long forgotten. Senator Dennis DeConcini even wrote to the station early on and noted how impressed he was with me and Kidd Squidd. I was in heaven. I even played political folk music, but this would eventually get me into trouble.

Here are more of my playlists from December, 1983. (click the title to see the list).

The Chicano Connection, December 15, 1983.

The Morning Music Mix, December 16, 1983.

The Chicano Connection, December 22, 1983.

The Morning Music Mix, December 23, 1983.

The Chicano Connection, December 29, 1983.

The Morning Music Mix, December 30, 1983.

Even though my personal life was a drag,  this was indeed an amazing time in my life. I had some wonderful friends, many of whom I haven’t seen in a long time. For one reason or another we all just drifted apart. Some have moved away, some are still in town, and others have passed on. As I was thinking back on this particular year, I was overcome with emotion for the first time since I started this writing project. I really miss these folks. I still love them with all my heart. They were all wonderful, talented people. I’m lucky I still have friends like Ron and Jane. Our friendship has stood the test of time.

There’s one final thing that I want to say about this particular time in my life. I have a few regrets, that’s for sure. There are some things I did that I should not have done, and over time I’ve paid the price in one way or another for these mistakes. I likely hurt a few people along the way, and to this day I feel very sad about all of that, but I realize nothing can be done about it now, except to say I’m sorry to those who find this and know what I’m talking about. It was all so long ago. I was young and still had a lot to learn at the age of 24. Some things I figured out pretty fast, while others would take a lifetime to finally figure out.  Overall, I feel pretty good now and I am happier than I’ve ever been. I look forward to continuing writing my life story. I’ve come a long way on this project. 24 years down, 37 more to go…Stay tuned!