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(thanx to Tom Elliott) |
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(Pics in this row from Yamato alumni site) |
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The Teen Club was the staff of Brat life! It was where everything
happened or originated from. The ulterior motive, of course, was
to keep us unruly brats off the streets of Tokyo. It worked .. most
of the time. There was always something happening at the Teen Club.
I can't really speak for the others at Grant Heights or Tachikawa or Yokota
or Fuchu .. but ours at Washington Heights was happening! Even today,
I still remember jam-packed calendars of activities they had planned for
us.
<= A dance contest at Tachikawa's Teen Town, where interlopers from Wash Heights invade the locals' turf to grab the prize money and run! |
Part of the reason that I thought ours far superior to the others
.. and we compared notes at school .. was our Teen Club Director, Mrs.
McCall. She was a whirlwind at organizing events. There were
parties and parties and parties .. name a holiday and we had a party.
It was a huge room with a 40 foot ceiling, couches, chairs, pool tables,
ping pong (no video games yet) .. and music. Music ALL the time, 
and
usually because someone would bring in their 45 rpm record player (big
spindle and that's all it played) and the latest records they'd gotten
from the States. Americans got the newest popular hits at the BX
after about a four month delay. In case you've forgotten those songs,
click here for the Top 100 Singles of 1959
and 1960. 
A hot new song would come on, and everyone would get up and dance.
Whoever brought in the new records would get really pissed if you didn't
put them back in the paper sleeves. The carrying case was usually
a Japanese pasteboard box with a cheap latch that sometimes slipped ..
and a half dozen new releases smashed to the ground. As we all recall,
this was a time when Japanese products weren't the world standard.
One summer, one of the guys in my Senior class, Bill McCain .. he
was the official "brain" of the class .. came up with an idea that absolutely
boggled my mind at the time .. and still does today. He convinced
the Teen Club at Grant Heights to allow him to set up a "radio station." 
He
agreed to play the latest American hits for several hours a day, and he
would be the disc jockey. 
He
went down to
.. one of my FAVORITE places in the whole world .. where there are thousands
of stalls that sell nothing but electronic parts. Each stall specializes
in something .. resistors, wires, tubes .. anything you wanted was there
.. and the cheapest place on the planet (in 1959) to find it. At
Akihabara, Bill brought back everything he needed for a complete radio
console, with amplifier, speakers, turntables, faders, special effects
.. all the works. Except, it really wasn't a radio station, it was
just Bill spinning records and announcing the songs and an occasional lame
joke. 
The radio
station even had call letters .. Radio TEEN. 
But,
no signal went anywhere but that room. And here's the punch line
.. Bill wrote to all the big record companies on his "official" radio stationery
and asked them to send him free records. That's what they do .. record
companies send free product to any radio station that requests it, because
it helps their sales. Bill knew that. No one from a record company
was going to come to Japan to check on it (they didn't have multinational
staffs then) 
or
even call him. Soon, he started getting boxes and boxes of records
from the States, all 
addressed
to Radio TEEN at the Teen Club, but it didn't have "Teen Club" on the address.
The Teen Club Director would receive the boxes and give them to Bill.
He eventually had a "network," with phone lines connecting his studio with
the Teen Clubs at Wash Heights and Momote Village and the swimming pools
at Camp Drake and Grant Heights. By the end of that summer, we figured
he had amassed a fortune in vinyl .. literally thousands of all the latest
releases. You can see how he needled F.E.N. (Far East Network) Radio
in the Class
of '60 Will & Testament, later in this publication. With that stroke
of genius, Bill had gone from being just (!) another straight-A brain to
Mr. Cool. Way to go, Bill! You can hear Bill on this archived tape on the FEN website from 1960.
(Ed. note: an update on the Radio
TEEN story from someone who actually participated in this masterful
scam, Bob Davis.)
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I read with great interest several items on your site. I was especially interested on your words about Radio TEEN from Green Park. I moved to Green Park around Feb-Mar, 1958 from Castle Heights in Nagoya and to Johnson in summer of '58. Bill and I cooked up the idea for Radio TEEN while on a retreat up around Fuji and even had letterhead printed so we could get promotional records from recording companies. I remember there was an article in Billboard that mostly repeated a press release Bill had sent them. The article really pissed FEN and there was a threat of shutting us down for a time. After I returned stateside summer of 59, Bill expanded to other Teen Clubs via the phone lines and I recorded tapes for Bill for awhile to get him some more current music. |
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That was the real problem. If FEN had seen
their way to more than 1/2 hour of hits per week, there wouldn't have been
a market for what we were doing. On occasion I wonder what happened to
Bill, but until I stumbled onto your site, I couldn't figure an easy way.
Does anyone have any idea?
Best Regards,
Bob
Davis
(Ed. note: another update on
the Radio TEEN story - what happened after the founders returned Stateside?
Fred Kemp, Narimasu '61 was
there to keep the torch burning.)
Jazzbo,
I arrived in Grant Heights in June of 1960.
I had spent my junior year at Zama because my father was stationed there,
but he was transferred to Camp Drake and my mother and I went with him.
I had been president of the teen club in Sagamihara, so the first thing
I did when I touched earth in Grant Heights was check out the teen club.
Man, there was this great radio station coming over the loudspeaker in
the ballroom and throughout the club, Radio TEEN, with a disc jockey calling
himself the "Knight at the Turntable."
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I'll never forget the little jingle that kept
being played:
"The most popular station,
And then: "This is Radio TEEN,
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This was Radio TEEN, and I was snowed. I had never thought that "kids" could put together something like this. I was a new guy so I laid low for a while, but within three or four weeks I was trying to get a job as disk jockey. Little did I know that there wasn't exactly a line at the door for blowing hours at a time in a broom closet talking to a microphone and a wall. Eventually, this fellow let me work his turntable arrangement and I learned to love it. I don't remember his name, because he quickly left (graduated or got transferred), and soon Radio TEEN was left to this other fellow and me. I don't remember his name either. |
By late fall I was talking the Teen Club director into getting equipment from the signal corp, especially wire, and the Grant Heights telephone exchange into letting Radio TEEN put its signal out over telephone lines to houses. Each housing unit in Grant Heights (duplexes and quadplexes) had about ten telephone lines into the external box on each building, of which only three or four were ever used.
| So by early spring of 1961, Radio TEEN had gotten permission to put our sound over these telephone lines. We had been going to the pools and teen clubs in Grant Heights and Washington Heights, and I think to some enlisted clubs in either place, but now we had the chance of really getting into homes without needing a broadcast tower. I envisioned this radio empire spreading across Japan, bringing real rock 'n roll to the masses that FEN had systematically deprived because of its puritan policies. Earth-shaker. Earth-mover. And, oh, so young. Well, I probably hooked up 30-40 homes, and who knows if those folks ever did plug the line into their hi-fi amplifiers. Didn't matter to me. I was on a roll. |  |
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potentiometers, and eventually, through the hobby shop, two beautiful 9-inch Gerrard self-adjusting turntables. Then, as I was graduating, the coup d' grace. The teen club director (lord I wish I could remember his name!) said we had received money to knock out the end wall, which bordered a sort of foyer, and put in double-paned glass so that the disc jockeys could see out and, more importantly, be seen. This happened just as I was leaving, and I was sure that the ability to escape the closet environment would make Radio TEEN a much sought-after volunteer job. |  |
I don't know what happened to Radio TEEN after that. It is, as a memory, inextricably entwined with memories of the people I knew and hung out with, people like Ceila Dame, Don Huntley, Bob and Betty Gillum, Sherrill Graham, George Knox, Sid Brain, Patsy Olsen, Gene Phillips, Jim Reilly, Al Estes, Charlie Faulkner, and Karen Steward. These names stay buried for decades, and then you come across Jazzbo's pages and, wow!, zingers right to the heart.
Thanks, Jazzbo, for the hard work (I develop web pages and I know) in putting these sites together. It is truly an emotional experience coming across your work.
Fred Kemp
Narimasu '61
A sure-fire way to ruin your social life was to get Mrs. McCall pissed
at you. She would ban you from the Teen Club for infractions like
smoking, coming in drunk, starting a fight or any other uncivilized behavior.
Another was gambling .. *cough* .. one of my favorite activities.
When we lived in the paddies, I had a lonnnnnnnngggggg bus ride into school.
I used that time to great advantage. I played poker. I had
started playing at about age 12 and found I was really good at it.
I would arrive at school with everyone's lunch money
on a daily basis. Now, the bus ride wasn't as long, and I was jonesing
for my poker fix. Every time I would try to start one at the Teen
Club, there would be Mrs. McCall looking over my shoulder: "You boys aren't
playing for money, are you? If you are .. out the door." "Oh,
no m'am, Mrs. McCall, we're just playing for fun .. for these matchsticks."
It was making me crazy, since this was the only place to hustle up a game.
And, there were some major suckers around .. mainly several kids
whose dads were with the Philipine Embassy .. they had so much money that
it was just obscene. One of them had a gold watch .. a gold watch!
.. and more jewelry than Mr. T. I knew that I could nail him for
$50 to $100
every
time he sat down .. he was an awful poker player .. and that was not to
be sneezed at! Sometimes, the game would have to 
drift
outside on the hill or at the pool. At least, there was no hassle
at the pool. It was a hard choice, either hustling poker games for
some major spending cash, or getting tossed out of the Teen Club.
I couldn't give up the Teen Club, so my poker winnings dwindled significantly.
That's how important the TC was to me.
What I would not have missed for the world were the road trips!
Omigosh! What a blast .. for the most part .. with one exception.
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