In the summer of 1956, the year I turned 14, I worked as an In-Training-Counselor at Camp Strake, the Boy Scout camp just south of Conroe, Texas. I worked in the mess hall, which meant that we worked very hard at breakfast and again at dinner, but had most of the day to ourselves. This allowed me to spend hours each day swimming, canoeing, fooling around at the gun and archery ranges, or just enjoying the beauty of the piney woods.
The number two cook at Camp Strake was a black man named Louis, a fellow who tried to appear gruff, but had a real soft spot for us kids. He’s the one who cooked the armadillo for us - a good story for another day - and he was the owner of the only record player at the camp.
If what we heard over the summer can be taken as evidence, Louis only possessed two 45 rpm records – Fever, by Little Willie John, and (Come on, Baby) Let the Good Times Roll, by Shirley and Lee. Each of these discs had songs on both sides, but Louis never played the “B” side of either one all summer long.
That summer, young white kids from Houston were just beginning to discover “Colored” music. We weren’t buying music by Chuck Berry or the Platters yet, although that probably did start happening sometime that year. A few of us had begun to listen surreptitiously to Houston’s Negro stations – KYOK and KCOH – and within a few months, local country stations would see their formats moving toward Rock and Roll.
He never gave any hint that he knew we were out there, but I’ll bet Louis got a huge kick out of watching those little white boys in their Boy Scout shorts dancing the evening away in the sand and pine needles outside his cabin window.
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