I was nine or ten years old in 1966 when I was in the Tucson Boys Chorus. We were about to leave on tour from the Temple of Music and Art downtown. Going on a three month tour with 37 other boys on a bus had been kind of abstract. I was just kind of kibitzing around the bus when I heard the engine start up like a roar. In a panic, I ran upstairs and hid in the costume closet in what is now the Cabaret Theater at the Temple of Music and Art–a place I have spent a considerable amount of time. My dad finally found me and he said, “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to go.” “Yeah, I want to go,” I assured him. I sobbed all the way out of town. Our first concert was in Moab, Utah. I learned I could overcome a fear, and that I am a musician.
I was at the very first and second Tucson Meet Yourself festivals. There were no event t-shirts, so I, along with some friends that knew something about silk screening, set up a tent where we literally got the logo and made a photo silk screen. We would let anybody silkscreen any object with the festival logo. We didn’t take any money for it. The thing about being young is that you don’t know things are impossible so you try them anyway. You don’t always get what you’re looking for but you end up doing something no one else would have tried.
-Jim