That Summer of '78

or A Whole Lot of Temporary

Me and Sandy Harley ©2024 Patrick T. Power

NOTE: I've decided to abandon my Substack account because of that platform's decision to create a partnership with right-winger Bari Weiss's organziation. I will migrate what few posts I've published there to this site. This post was originally published on 9 November 2024. I've since done some minor editing

My former mother-in-law died a little less than two weeks ago, and as is my wont, I started ripping up my apartment trying to find photographs I’d taken almost thirty years ago on film to see what I might have of her. I didn’t take near as many photographs in my film days as I have since going digital, but I tended to have my camera at all the family get-togethers so that there would be some kind of record of the events. Somewhere along the line, though, I stopped putting the prints into photo albums and stashed them and the negatives away for I don’t know what. Typically, I would get double prints, so I could share the extras with others if they wanted something so I still have two copies of a lot of them. When Kodak began offering Picture Discs with low-resolution scans of the negatives, I cared even less about keeping an accessible archive of the prints.

All that to say that I found a handful of photographs that I knew I had around here somewhere, but had no clue where I might have stashed them. But I guess as the saying goes, the minute you stop looking for something, you find it. So along with the photographs that I was looking for, I found the ones I’d been wondering about, as well as something to write about.

As the school year was wrapping up in Bowling Green, Ohio in the spring of 1978, my older brother Mike suggested that I come out to Minnesota to work for the summer. He’d been living in the Minneapolis area for a couple of years with his then-wife Carol, and son Christopher, and they’d just had a newborn daughter, Angela, in February. If memory serves, he was the Operations Manager at the Big A Auto Parts’ distribution center in Edina.

It’s weird now in this age of internet and text immediacy to think about that conversation because we didn’t really talk all that often. Long-distance charges were a thing back then, and it tended to keep calls few and relatively short. Did he call me to suggest it? Did I call him just to chat and he presented the idea to me? Had I mentioned that I didn’t have a job lined up for the summer and it just popped into his head? I’m coming around to the likelihood that I answered the phone and after a few niceties, he asked “What are you doing this summer?”

I worked at the campus media center during the school year, processing film and doing copy photography, and again if memory serves, I had worked the previous summer at Commercial Aluminum Cookware (later known as Calphalon) about halfway between home in Toledo and school. After working full-time there for over two years, I decided I wasn’t going to work fifty hours a week the rest of my life in a polishing powder-filled factory—despite the relatively good money—and off I went to school. I stayed on in a part-time capacity for a little while, but I became a persona non grata with the newish, buttoned-up manager when I drew a life-sized comic-caricature of him. He decided the company no longer needed a part-time employee.

Anyway, however the offer came to pass, I agreed to go to Minnesota. Before heading out, I recorded a bunch of my albums onto cassettes for the ten- to twelve-hour drive. Dylan had just released Street Legal, so that was at the top of the list; I also no doubt included most of his discography in the mix. At about the same time, Springsteen released Darkness On The Edge Of Town, so I recorded that along with his first three records. I had only become a fan of his after Born To Run had come out so I was still kind of getting to know his stuff—I had to bring all of it. The Allman Brothers’ Brothers and Sisters also made the cut—the record was five years old at the time, but still a goodie. There are two songs from amongst all the tapes I brought with me that I can’t not associate with the trip: the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” and Springsteen’s “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle—both for very different reasons.

Within a week or two, I packed up my 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle and was on my way. I stopped in the Chicago area to see my mom’s brother, Skip, and his family, and I spent a night there to break up the travel. At that time in my life, I could drive for hours with nary a break, but aside from that overnight pit stop, I tried to get there in as little time as possible. I took I-94 through the heart of Wisconsin, and as I made my way into the greater Minneapolis area, Brothers and Sisters was playing. It was raining a bit, and as traffic was getting thicker, I had to keep pace with it. It was then that I discovered that there might not be a greater driving song than “Jessica” (and, I might add, for dancing in your chair).

I took I-35W south from I-94 to where Mike lived in Burnsville. The highway would become more and more familiar to me over the course of the coming weeks as it was my way to and from work each day. (35W crossed the Minnesota River near Bloomington by way of a bridge that twenty-nine years later suffered a catastrophic collapse.) Traffic was backed up as I approached Burnsville and because I abhor sitting in a non-moving vehicle, I got off the highway and followed a route that took me west of Burnsville, near Shakopee, where I would cross another stretch of the river. It probably didn’t save me a bit of time but I was at least in motion.

I started work the following Monday. I stocked car parts for the other workers—assemblers—to pull for orders. I learned later that I was getting paid a dollar more per hour than my peers, which ruffled a few feathers—something I didn’t know when I was hired. I don’t know how my co-workers found out. I enjoyed the people I worked with, though. Too many years have passed so names elude me, although I’m pretty sure one of the four or five guy assemblers I regularly cavorted with was named Steve Gilford. There were a couple of women assemblers, too… one a quiet blonde who seemed suspicious of me, and Sandy Harley, with whom I'd become smitten.


Sandy Harley, July of 1978 ©2024 Patrick T. Power

At first, I didn’t know what to make of things with her, whether she was seeing someone or not. My social clumsiness meant not asking, I guess, and I wasn’t about to ask my new co-workers, but eventually we started going out. I think one of our first dates was to go to a blues show at The Cabooze, but when we got there, it wasn’t happening. I never figured out why. We drove around for a bit and eventually found another place with live music. The band played Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” during their set, which I thought was pretty cool as I was a big fan of his, and I drank my first St. Pauli Girl. I also attended my first classical concert with Sandy—French flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal was the guest conductor with the Minneapolis Philharmonic. I bought his Suite For Flute And Jazz Piano that night. Sandy also turned me on to the Lamont Cranston Band, a local boogie-blues group that had—it was rumoured—caught the ear of John Belushi and was going to appear on Saturday Night Live that fall. We saw them at a place in Shakopee… Doc Holliday’s maybe?

The Minnesota Kicks, Minneapolis’s team in the now-defunct North American Soccer League, was a pretty big deal at the time, as was something new to me, tailgating, so a few of the guys and I met up at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington to party on a couple of occasions. It was at my first tailgate that a couple of young women approached me seemingly out of nowhere. Had I been eyeing them up? They me? We chatted for a bit and one of them gave me her phone number and maybe even her address. It was the first time something like that had ever happened to me. Her name was… Sandy. In the weeks that followed, I picked up the phone and dialed six of the seven numbers a couple of times, but things seemed to be moving ever-so-slightly forward with Sandy number one, so I stopped and put the phone down.

Sandy, the first one, lived upstairs in a beautiful old Victorian house near Lake Of The Isles, an area made famous in the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. We hung out there on occasion, and went canoeing on the lake once. We also picnic’d and sunbathed (mostly) at a couple of other downtown lakes, Harriet and Nokomis. The above photograph was likely taken at one of the two. I seem to recall that Lake Calhoun (which I just learned is now known by its original Dakota name Bde Maka Ska was the least of Sandy’s favourites for reasons that escape me now.

It’s interesting to me how as I write this, more details from those twelve weeks or so come to my memory’s surface. I had been a pretty major collector of rare Bob Dylan recordings for several years, so I was immersed in reading Larry Sloman’s On The Road With Bob Dylan: Rolling With The Thunder, reading it in the car during my lunch breaks. Dylan’s film Renaldo & Clara had been released in January and I’d obtained a recording of just the audio earlier in the year, so I was pretty thrilled to get a chance to actually see it in Dylan’s home state when the cut version was released.

On the 9th of August, Springsteen performed a show at The Agora Ballroom in Cleveland and it was broadcast live across the country—all three hours!—and I listened in the solitude of my room. It cinched my Bruce fandom. And wouldn’t you know it… “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” was his first encore.

As the summer wound down, Sandy and I made a trip to the north shore of Lake Superior for a camping weekend. We stopped at her parents’ place (in Anoka, I think) and I met her mom and one of her brothers.


Sandy and my Super Beetle ©2024 Patrick T. Power

On the way up—actually a bit out of the way—we passed through Hibbing Minnesota, where Dylan had grown up. We didn’t tool around town looking for his boyhood home or anything, we just drove through on the main drag, stopping to get gas, then passing by the high school. I guess I wanted to say I’d been there since I was so close. We also made a brief stop at the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Open Pit Iron Mine, one of the other three things for which Hibbing is famous… the other two being that it’s the hometown of Roger Maris and Greyhound bus lines. The magnitude of the open pit mine is both breathtaking and heartbreaking.


Me, somewhere along the way

We camped at a totally rustic site and the only vivid memory etched in my brain is that when I washed my hair in the lake, it was so cold—despite being near the end of August—it felt like by scalp was on fire. And yet somehow, others were diving in and swimming as if it were a reasonable thing to do. I just couldn’t imagine doing to my whole self what I’d done to my scalp.

On the way back to the city, we stopped in Duluth. Sandy had gone to the University of Minnesota-Duluth so she showed me a little of the campus and told me that most—if not all—of the buildings were connected so that people wouldn’t have to deal with the sub-zero temperatures during the winter. Much of the city is built on hills, and although I had never been to the city in which I now live, I told her Duluth looked kind of like a mini-San Francisco. We went out to the North Pier Lighthouse and I snapped a series of photographs with her 110-cartridge-film camera that I later mounted as a panorama in a photography class.


Duluth panorama — Photo by Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

Possibly the worst moment of my summer came shortly after returning from the camping trip. I was working one day when out of the blue, Scott, a guy who worked in the office and was best buds with Sandy confronted me. He wanted to know why I had written on one of the walls of a bathroom stall that I’d had sex with Sandy during the camping trip. Of course, more vulgar terminology had been used. First of all, we hadn’t had sex, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me to write such a thing, and two, I’ve never in my life told another person—must less publicly boasted—about my private moments with a woman. It’s just not my nature. Scott seemed convinced of my innocence, that someone else had done the deed in my name. I can’t recall if I confronted anyone about it. I think the guys I hung out with liked and respected Sandy, so I didn’t really suspect any of them, but you never know. Sandy never knew until I brought it up with her many years later. I’m so glad she didn’t know about it then as it would have crushed her to know that her work mates talked about her like that.

There are a few other details I recall about the trip, such as learning that just before I’d arrived, Mike had quit smoking when his toddler son, Chris, decided he wanted to eat something from one of the ashtrays. I helped Mike with some decorative landscaping around the house, which mostly meant shoveling white stone around the patio area. Also, Mike rented a copy of the brilliant Das Boot and I somehow managed to fall asleep. I think I babysat the kids once so that Mike and Carol could have a night out. Pope Paul VI died while I was in Minneapolis, and I recall watching Wimbledon during that time and playing pool on the table just outside my room. Big A had a company picnic and we played softball. I recall one of the bosses, Dennis was his name, I think, blasted a ball over my head in center field. I got the last laugh, though, as I threw him out at third base. Also, I won a digital watch in the raffle. The battery wore out within a year or so and I never replaced it. It was the last watch I’ve owned. It had an alarm setting that played a classical piece that I can’t at the moment recall.

So much, of course, is a blur these forty-six years later.

Sandy and I remained in touch briefly after my departure. I made a surprise trip to see her on Hallowe’en that year. It didn’t go well. Scott had moved to Madison, Wisconsin by that time, so I stopped to see him on the way home seeking solace. I think she and I exchanged a couple of letters after that, and after I’d gotten married four years later, my wife and I visited her. As I think about it now, both she and Penny probably thought it was a stupid idea but neither said so. Sandy moved to the San Diego area at some point. After Big A, she went to nursing school. I don’t know if she ever got married (I guess it’s weird that I never asked), but she had a daughter twenty-some years ago. Despite that I’ve been to San Diego a couple of times for work since I moved to California, my trips were short and getting together wouldn’t have been practical. Sandy died four years ago on my son’s thirty-third birthday, 16 February 2020. In a weird kind of synchronicity, in just three days from now, on the 12th of November, she would have turned 68.

I also maintained a connection with the second Sandy for a little while. We exchanged a few letters, I sent her mix tapes (one of which I recall opened with Dylan’s “Girl Of The North Country”), we talked several times on the phone. Despite that it all seemed pretty great, it just sort of ended because sometimes distance makes decisions for us.