PLUNGING INTO THE NEW YEAR

The WABC Top 100 of the Year, played exclusively from the day after Christmas to New Year’s, was the 100 songs you spent the last year cheering on, hating or tolerating just to hear what was going to come on the radio next.

I have a CD with parts of Bruce Morrow and Bob Lewis’ shows from New Year’s Eve 1967 and the fun is in how random the playlist is. There are no algorithms here based on time of day or demographics. Sometime after 1 a.m. Bob Lewis plays To Sir With Love (#1), The Happening (#19), Somebody to Love (#55) and Winchester Cathedral (#77). While counting down to midnight, Cousin Bruce played, in order, C’mon Marianne (#73), Sunday Will Never Be the Same (#56), Pleasant Valley Sunday (#34), Portrait of My Love (#96), Release Me (#63) and To Sir With Love (#1). (Admittedly those aren’t great stretches of music, but it gives you some idea of how sprawling the playlist was. And apparently WABC’s broadcasting license was at risk if they didn’t play the number one song at least once an hour.)

I played Top 100 bingo. On a sheet of paper numbered to 100, I filled in the blanks as I heard songs played during the week. You could get the top 20 pretty quickly, since they were played most often, but I don’t think I ever ended with a complete list; there were always a few elusive songs that only seemed to be played when my radio wasn’t on.

As somebody, somewhere in the tri-state area was taping WABC that night so it could be played back on a computer in 2017, my family was visiting our friends, the Kannars, for a New Year’s Eve party. That afternoon I watched Green Bay edge Dallas in the final seconds for the NFL championship, although today the storyline is more about the weather the game was played in. Forecasts in Green Bay called for highs in the 20s, but overnight the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees, from 13 above to 16 below. Factor in blustery winds, and wind chill dropped to 36 below zero at kickoff. (BTW, not a good month for Wisconsin weather. On December 10, Otis Redding was killed when his plane tried to take off in a sudden, fierce storm in Madison, 135 miles away).

New Jersey was having its own weather problems that night. Listening to the news on the WABC tape, it was snowing or sleeting depending on where you lived. The roads, said the newscaster, were “extremely dangerous.” When we left the Kannars’ party well after midnight, there were several inches of snow on the ground and no plows in sight as our Nova fishtailed home.

A day of eating crackers, dip and pepperoni put me in the bathroom when we got home and I promptly clogged the drain trying to flush too much toilet paper. It was nearly 2 a.m., tomorrow was a holiday, we had no plunger and only one toilet. A phone call to the Kannars. Yes, they had a plunger. My father and I were back on the road, where the plows still hadn’t come through. He didn’t seem happy with me as we swerved through the neighborhood. And while the party was long over, it didn’t stop him and Mr. Kannar from having a nightcap, while I sheepishly held the plunger and hoped to God it would work.

Finally back home, I anxiously stood in the doorway of the bathroom as my father plunged, then hit the flush lever. In the earliest hours of 1968, the reassuring whoosh of water making its way down through the house was a sound that was, for me at least, already at #1 for the year.