Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip Spence

PROLOGUE

MYTH AND TRUE

He was almost the guitarist of Quicksilver Messenger Service. He could have been a Doobie Brother. He was the drummer of the Jefferson Airplane. And he most definitely co-founded Moby Grape back during that season of possibilities, the summer of ’66.

At that point, Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence was a psychedelic poet of the Bay Area; an impish, happy-go-lucky rock star. Then, as the Summer of Love dawned, he’d storm on stage at the Monterey Pop Festival like a man on fire. Moby Grape’s debut album had just been released and they were garnering critical praise.

But he didn’t stay with his bandmates for long. By the next summer he was gone, locked up in New York City’s Bellevue psychiatric hospital. The story goes that he’d tried to attack two of the band members with an axe.

According to popular legend, Skip Spence hopped on a motorcycle in December ’68, after release from the prison ward at Bellevue, and rode all the way down to Nashville, Tennessee… in his pyjamas, no less. Arriving in Music City, he reputedly got off the motorbike, swept into Columbia Records’ studio, and recorded his first and last solo album. Accompanied only by himself, with no other musicians.

With a new decade fast approaching, Oar came to vinyl in the spring of ’69, just months after Skip’s own release from hospital. On its first pressing, it sold only 700 copies and was long believed to be Columbia’s worst-selling album. But now, after decades of lingering in out-of-print banishment, Oar has classic status. You can even find it in a deluxe boxset version.

And that was it. Spence was done with rock’n’roll; done with the music business. From that moment, he’d only make fleeting cameo appearances at gigs and on other artists’ albums.

In the 1970s/80s, he spent time in mental wards, halfway houses and jails, or lived on the street. After losing his children for decades, he was reconciled with them in the 1990s – only to become terminally ill.

Shortly before he passed away, Skip Spence made one last recording, for an X-Files tie-in album. It was reportedly rejected because it was too spooky… for The X-Files. Really?

• • •

Not all of this can be true, can it?

Well, some of it is and some of it isn’t. Skip Spence’s life was like his lyric, ‘myth and true.’ To untangle the myth from the truth, we’ll need to trek through the narrative of his life, riding the turbulence along the way.

To get to a starting point, we need to travel back to post-war Canada, in the city of Windsor, province of Ontario, south of the Detroit River.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM WINDSOR TO OHIO

It was cloudy on that spring day, with the temperature climbing to an above-average 62F in the afternoon. On Thursday 18 April 1946, in Windsor, Ontario, for three cents you could pick up the evening edition of the Windsor Star.

A banner headline plastered near the top let everyone feel the chill of the Cold War: ‘MORE RUSS[IAN] SPY ACTS TOLD’, it read in big, bold letters. The story gave an update on the preliminary hearing for Israel Halperin, a Queen’s University professor charged with committing acts of espionage for the Soviet Union. (Mathematician Halperin would be cleared at trial, but the age of anxiety was only just beginning.)

Under the smaller headline ‘GANDHI TALKS WITH BRITISH’ was a two-paragraph report on the father of modern India’s seventy-minute conference with members of a UK cabinet mission. It marked the final days of the British Raj, as the vast nation moved towards independence. A short piece titled ‘Crowds Jam Jerusalem’ described the security measures undertaken in the Middle East’s much-disputed holy city, in the hours leading up to Good Friday.

Then there were stories on starvation in South Africa, a steel shortage in the US, China’s ongoing civil war and the debate over nationalising coal in Canada. Scattered throughout these pages were self-help articles on parenting, with such titles as ‘Parents Worst Offenders Spoiling Child’ and ‘Make Unpleasant Only Things Child Shouldn’t Do.’

On here there were four fleeting birth announcements, with the final one reading: ‘SPENCE – Mr. and Mrs. A.L. (Jack) Spence of 2237 Howard Ave., wish to announce the birth of a son on April 18th, 1946 at Hotel Dieu Hospital.’

It should have been ‘Jock,’ not ‘Jack.’ Nevertheless, arriving nine months after his father returned from fighting in Europe, Alexander Lee Spence came into the world at the dawn of the Baby Boom.

In the months leading up to his son’s birth, Alexander Lett ‘Jock’ Spence worked as a salesman for Electrolux, peddling vacuum cleaners door to door. Once considered to be luxuries, these appliances were becoming regular items in homes across North America in the early days of post-war consumerism.

Gwenn Spence packed her travel bag in the hospital room, ready to leave with her husband and baby boy. At 5ft7, she stood nearly as tall as Jock as they exited the maternity ward. Brought home for the Easter weekend, little Alex Spence’s first mile-and-a-half journey would have circuited east along Giles Boulevard then southward on Howard Avenue.

On the way, they would pass Spence’s Market at 2279 Howard Avenue. Jock’s uncle, James, had first opened his grocery store towards the end of the Great Depression. Just past Spence’s Market was where Jock and Gwenn were living, the home of Jock’s father and stepmother, Alexander Llewelyn (Alex) and Violet Rose (Vi) Spence.

With the arrival of a new baby, the semidetached home was getting crowded. Alex and Vi had their own young son, 5-year-old Paul Spence – Jock’s half-brother. The younger couple had been living there since Jock returned from the war, but they were hunting for their own place to live. Before the winter, they would relocate to East Windsor.

Alex and his family, meanwhile, were also on the move. Applying for 4-C resident visas in the US on 22 November, Alex, Vi and Paul received six-month permits a week later.

On Friday 2 December, Jock’s father and his family moved out of Windsor, trekking due south. Driving through the D&C (Detroit-Canada) Tunnel, they were starting a journey that circuited all the way down to Phoenix, Arizona. The temperature in Windsor and Detroit that day would climb to 26F, while in Phoenix it reached 78F.

After settling into much warmer surroundings, Alex found a job in the hospitality industry – at first in room service, before going on to become transportation manager of the Paradise Inn, a swanky resort hotel at the base of Camelback Mountain. In short order, the family moved into a lot at Phoenix’s Evergreen Trailer Park at 1928 East Thomas Road.

Meanwhile, Jock stayed on with Electrolux in Windsor, whilst playing the occasional gig as a semi-professional piano player and selling the publication rights to some of his own songs.

He had written his first song in 1930, when he was 15, living with his two brothers, two sisters, mother and stepfather in Brockville, Ontario. Throughout late 1936/early 1937, he regularly headed to Schenectady, New York, to perform live on WGY Radio.

By 1940 Jock settled in Windsor, renting a room on Victoria, an affluent avenue lined with massive Victorian- and Edwardian-style homes. His father and stepmother had lived a couple of miles to the south in the more modest Howard Avenue neighbourhood. Whilst working for Electrolux he performed on both sides of the Detroit River, opening the Palace Hotel in Windsor’s east end in May 1941.

The following spring, in March 1942, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in Hamilton, Ontario. After completing a five-month training program at Camp Borden, Jock got his wings on 30 April 1943.

As with so many pilots at the time, he was transferred to fight in the war in Europe. Whilst serving, he continued to both write and perform music. Some of his songs were even aired on the BBC, like ‘Only Yours’ and ‘Too Much Illusion.’

Jock also covered ballads like Cole Porter’s ‘In The Still Of The Night’ and ‘Maybe’, the latter made famous by Perry Como and Eddie Fisher. His own writing was in this same romantic style.

Returning to Canada in July 1945, Jock was discharged two months later, at age 30. Still gigging in Windsor and Detroit, he became a member of the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada, Limited (CAPAC) in January 1946. Over the next few years, he sold over a dozen songs to publishers in the US and UK.

On 12 June 1948, Gwenn gave birth to a daughter, Sherry, at Hotel Dieu Hospital. Three months after, on 16 September, Jock applied for a US residency visa. It was denied. A lingering 1934 conviction for fraud – back when he was 19 years old and struggling in the throes of the Depression – was cited as the reason. He decided to appeal, awaiting a verdict from the US Department of Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Service for ten months.

Meanwhile, the Spence family moved into a new home on Lena Avenue. Located on Windsor’s western edge, the compact bungalow was in Old Sandwich Town, a part of the city that somehow missed out on the post-war boom.

Before the end of the year, Gwenn’s 66-year-old retiree father, Arthur Henry Reed, moved in and the household grew to five. Born in Berlin, Ontario (renamed Kitchener during the First World War), Arthur had worked as a travelling salesman for decades – residing mostly in Toronto, the Canadian prairies, where Gwenn was born, and for a portion of the 1920s, Chicago, Illinois.

In January 1949 Jock took the plunge and started working fulltime as a musician. He was contracted to play nightly at the popular Commodore Club on Chatham Street, in Windsor’s downtown core. His daily trek was three miles and his working ‘day’ ran from nine in the evening until half past one in the morning.

• • •

One day in mid-June 1949, the temperature climbed to 87F in London, Canada. Although it was well above the city’s average high for the month, a strong breeze provided steady relief.

With brown hair, brown eyes and a pencil-thin moustache, Jock Spence strolled along a well-kept geometric lawn. Standing 5ft8, weighing approximately 175lbs, he ascended a gentle hill on the campus grounds of the University of Western Ontario in his airman’s uniform.

Standing atop the hill was a Gothic-style structure made of a combination of limestone and sandstone. At the midpoint of the building’s front façade was a tower 130ft tall, built in honour of local servicemen killed in the First World War.

During the more recent conflict, Jock had flown with the Bluenose (434) Squadron of the RCAF, formed at RAF Tholthrope, England, in June 1943. Located about ten miles north of York, the air station served as the squad’s home base for half a year.

Though he kept his medals and dog-tags in a small wooden box for the rest of his life, he spoke just as little of his combat experience as many other veterans. Yet tales of his wartime antics were passed down through the family.

Jock’s first cousin, James, was stationed at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, with the 419 Tactical Fighter Training Squadron. According to family folklore, Jock sometimes flew a Handley Page Halifax heavy bomber south to visit his cousin. The two would sometimes fly to London for some much-needed R&R, dancing and socialising.

On 13 August, a team flew over the Italian Alps to Milan on Squadron 434’s first bombing raid. In December, Bluenose Squadron moved 35 miles north to RAF Croft on the northern edge of Yorkshire. In two years, the squadron’s 2,582 pilots would fly 198 missions with 484 aircrew operational casualties and eight additional casualties. The overall casualty rate was approximately one in 5.25.

Whilst in Europe, Jock flew over thirty missions to targets scattered across France and Germany. During these months he was either on a dangerous sortie or waiting for one to begin. In neatly printed handwriting, he kept a record of each. On 9 September 1944, he flew to Dortmund, Germany, in a Halifax bomber. Starting at 3:46 in the afternoon, the mission ran for over five hours and ended at 9:06 in the evening. He summed it up in a fifty-word entry in his log:

‘Very concentrated, very large orange coloured fire, jettisoned 2 – 500lb bombs hung up, both port engines hit by flax, D.N.A. [distinguished networking agent], fuselage holes, mid under holed, mid VG [velocity vs. gravity loads = flight-operating strength of aircraft], injured left upper arm, engines hit by flax over target area, feathered port inner engine on account of oil pressure, effort looked good.’

In such no-nonsense terms, Jock Spence chronicled a string of perilous missions. Those sorties were now half a decade in the past and a world away from this quiet, late spring afternoon in London, Canada.

Still, on Tuesday 14 June 1949, sixty-five RCAF pilots received awards of valour at the university. Field Lieutenant Alexander Lett Spence was given a rare Distinguished Flying Cross. Of Canada’s quarter-million pilots in the Second World War, including nearly 100,000 serving overseas, Jock was one of only 4,018 to receive the award.

A story in the Windsor Star reported on the ceremony that same day. In her column, Annie Oakley (not the sharpshooter of Annie Get Your Gun fame) quoted the official citation:

‘[Flying Officer] Spence has completed a tour of operational duty during which he has attacked many heavily defended targets. On one occasion during attack on Aulnoye-Aymeries, [France] two engines of his aircraft were seriously damaged and the flight engineer was seriously injured. Despite these harassing circumstances, this officer pressed on and successfully completed his mission. He has at all times displayed courage, devotion to duty, and a fine fighting spirit.’¹

Jock Spence’s mission to Aulnoye-Aymeries started at 6:32 in the early evening of 25 March 1944, ending over six hours later at 11:40 p.m. Jock’s log for that mission, which could so easily have proved fatal, totals just 22 words:

‘Bombing good, A/C [aircraft] hit over target don’t know by what, engineer wounded, starboard engine U/S [unserviceable], made crash landing at Friston, crew safe.’

On the day of the awards, Jock had a whole entourage with him. His mother and stepfather came all the way from Ottawa in the east; his wife, son, two brothers (Bert and Tom) and cousin followed him to the campus from Windsor. A photograph taken in front of its arts building shows Jock standing proudly with Gwenn and their 3-year-old son, Alexander Lee (‘Skip,’ as the family always called him), in front of them. (Sherry Elizabeth, their daughter, remained back in Windsor, having just turned a year old a few days earlier.)

After the ceremony ended, the sixty-five pilots scattered back to various towns and cities. Jock had to get back to Windsor quickly. He was in his twenty-fifth week of entertaining at The Commodore Club, just a few blocks from the Detroit River and directly across the water from downtown Motor City.

Formerly The Windsor Club, the upscale lounge had become popular among local businessmen. Filling both piano and vocal duties, Jock took requests in The Marine Room nightly. The schedule was hard work but steady, giving him a chance to make a living as a professional musician. In time he became a steady draw, earning a reputation for his vast repertoire of tunes. In the Windsor Star of February 1949, Annie Oakley laid on the acclaim: ‘Catalogued in his cranium is an amazing number of songs hits, old and new. The listener has only to joggle his memory with a title, and out it comes.’²

Less than two weeks after the awards ceremony, Jock’s application for residency status in the US was approved. On 1 August, five days after her husband took the bus through the D&C Tunnel to Detroit, Gwenn crossed the border. For the next two months, the couple remained in Detroit as Jock finished his run at The Commodore. Playing his closing night on 25 September, he then headed down to Covington, Kentucky, for a run of shows in the Kentucky-Ohio border town. As reported in the Windsor Star, the musician – who, as a war hero, had become something of a local celebrity – began his journey south on 5 October.

But Gwenn’s father soon took ill and they had to return. Arthur passed away at the Hotel Dieu Hospital – which, over the last three years, had seen the births of his grandchildren Skip and Sherry – in early November. He was buried a few blocks away in Windsor Grove Cemetery. On 23 November, Jock and Gwenn drove back across the Ambassador Bridge to Michigan with their two children. The Spence family would never again reside in Canada.

Initially, the Spences lived east of central downtown Detroit, renting a modest two-storey home on Springle Street – a few miles from the affluent city of Grosse Pointe Parke. Jock also had a cousin nearby: Gordon Spence, who lived in Detroit’s west end with his wife and two sons. Like Jock he was a 4-C immigrant, having settled in the city in March. Following in the footsteps of Alex, Gordon worked as a customs officer.

For a time, Jock returned to work in sales, but the family didn’t stay in Detroit for long. In May 1951, he sent a postcard to the Windsor Star from a gig in Salamanca, New York. ‘Still usin’ my fingers to good use,’ the pianist wrote. By the time the newspaper received it, the Spence family had relocated to Ohio.

Two months later, Jock was performing 250 miles south at The Embassy Club in Knoxville, Tennessee. Over the next few years, he took all sorts of gigs in and around Ohio: short- and long-term engagements, some in restaurants, others in hotels. It meant the family was constantly on the move.

Through the late autumn and winter of 1951/52, the Spences lived a couple of hours east of Cincinnati in Portsmouth, a small city on the north bank of the Ohio River, directly across from Kentucky. Performing at The Trade Winds, a restaurant at Eighth and Chillicothe Street, Jock played nightly except for Saturdays. Billed as ‘The Sensational Sentimentalist’ in the Portsmouth Times, he later moved to The Coral Reef, a dinner club on Gallia Street. At both venues, performances started at nine or ten in the evening and ended at two in the morning.

But Portsmouth itself was struggling. After reaching 40,000 at the dawn of the Depression, the city’s population would decline to about half that by the end of the century. Unable to find more gigs in the city, Jock started to look elsewhere. By the summer of 1952, he was playing nights at Stein’s Hideaway on Poplar Street, Cincinnati, in the largely working-class Over-the-Rhine neighbourhood.

The family also found time to trek back northeast to Flower Round Lake in Lanark County, Ontario, in the summer of 1952 or 1953. Jock drove the entire 750 miles. With highway speed limits hovering around 50mph, the trip would have taken at least 15 hours.

Skip and Sherry were both under 8 and had never travelled such a distance in a single journey. Switching from the bustle and industry of Cincinnati to the quiet greenery of the Lanark Highlands was a new experience for the kids, but for Jock it was a homecoming.

Lanark County blankets about 400 square miles of southeastern Ontario, circa thirty miles north of the line that runs from Kingston to Brockville, west of the Ottawa Valley, and just south of the city of Renfrew. It is covered with towering maple, hemlock, oak and beech trees, as well as wetlands and patches of the rocky Canadian Shield.

For thousands of years, the Anishinaabe and Iroquois lived on the land. In the first half of the 1800s, much of the area was settled by immigrants, predominantly from the Lanarkshire region of Scotland. On arrival, they found themselves thrown into a rugged lifestyle where survival depended on the success of crops, wellbeing of farm animals, availability of firewood and sturdiness of winterised shelters. Among those early migrants were some of Jock Spence’s ancestors, including the Deachman and Lett families who came to Ontario from Scotland and Ireland in the 1820s.

Over the decades, the land was logged, farmed, mined and settled. Sixty years later, in 1884, the Kingston and Pembroke Iron Mining Company completed a rail line that ran over a hundred miles up and down the county, from Kingston to Renfrew. Known as the K&P, the line wound through lumber and mining communities like Robertsville and Wilbur. Along the way, it passed by a quiet village named Flower Station, located at Flower Round Lake. It was still operating as a commercial rail line when Jock, Gwenn, Skip and Sherry made their way to Flower Station in the early 1950s.

Jock’s mother, Effie Elizabeth Deachman, had been born in Flower Station on 19 May 1893, as the second of ten children. Her parents – Alexander Monroe ‘Sandy’ Deachman and Margaret Catherine Lett – lived their entire lives in Lanark County. When Effie turned 17, she started working as a mail clerk. Before she reached 20, she was living with her husband, Alex Spence, nearly 2,000 miles away in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, by which point the couple had their first child, Vivian, born 10 December 1912. But the young couple returned to Lanark, where Jock was born on 29 December 1914 – the second of five siblings.

Alexander Llewellyn Spence had been born on 5 July 1890, to John and Mary Ann Spence in Fergus, Ontario, a largely Scottish town about 75 miles northwest of Toronto. He was their third son, but Alex never got to know his own father. Just one week after he was born, John Spence passed away of a glandular disease after suffering years of tuberculosis.

All at once, Mary was a widow with three young sons, John (who was 5), James (4) and Alex (only a week old). A year and a half after losing her husband, Mary Spence married William Crickmore, a local farmer who himself was a widower with three children of his own. In 1896, the two had a daughter together, named Myrtle, and just over a decade later the family moved to the newly established city of Saskatoon in the Canadian prairies. Until William’s death, in 1930, the couple ran a farm toiling through much longer winters and colder temperatures than those of Southern Ontario.

Arriving in Saskatoon as a teenager, son Alex soon found a job as a fireman but later worked as a locomotive engineer. By the time he was 22, he was married to Effie.

By 1921 he and his family journeyed west again, living north of Saskatoon in Rosthern. But this was where the couple divorced. Effie would remarry and raise her five children with her new husband, Clarence Giffen, in Brockville, Ontario – just south of Lanark County.

Meanwhile, Alex Spence settled in Windsor, where by 1928 he became a customs officer. A few years later, at the age of 48, he remarried to Vivian Rose Saunders and had a son, Paul James Spence.

Though Jock would later join his father in Windsor, he spent his formative years in eastern Ontario. Raised by his mother and stepfather in Brockville, he spent many of his summers as a boy and teenager about seventy-five miles north, at Flower Round Lake. Today, it isn’t much different than it was when Jock visited in the 1920s, or when his family travelled there three decades later.

Surrounded by a few cottages and lush greenery, Flower Round Lake has a perimeter of about three miles and a maximum depth of approximately 40ft. Effie and Clarence had a cottage with two cabins there, called Fairvale. Over the years, Effie (whom Skip and Sherry called ‘Aunt Effie’) and Clarence (‘Uncle Bunky’) rented out the lakeside cabins in the summertime.

If visiting Flower Round Lake was a kind of pilgrimage for Jock in the early 1950s, it was an adventure for Skip and Sherry. At one point, the children made their way down a path that ran from the cabins to the lake. They found a small rowboat at the water’s edge and, after Skip talked his sister into testing it, pushed the boat into the water and climbed inside. The oars were heavy, but somehow Skip and Sherry managed to row themselves further and further out into the deeper waters. Sherry still recalls getting into a lot of trouble on that summer day, at the point when their parents found them.

But that wasn’t the end of their adventures. Sherry remembers how Skip locked her in the outhouse and, not long after that, she got stung by a deerfly, which kept her off her feet for a few days. Knowing how deerfly bites can be serious, Gwenn quickly treated her daughter with a home remedy. Sherry recalls her tending to the swollen leg with bread soaked in evaporated milk.

At this time, there was no longer a refrigerator at the Flower Round Lake cottage. ‘I know we had to eat our oatmeal with evaporated milk,’ adds Sherry, ‘which was totally gross!’

In taking his family to Fairvale, although they may not have realised it at the time, Jock Spence gave Skip and Sherry a view into their father’s youth. Though he had settled hundreds of miles away from Lanark County, he had roots and family there. Years later, it would also be his final resting place. At his own request, Jock was buried just a few miles from Flower Round Lake, at Clyde Forks Cemetery, on 7 May 1965.

Skip Spence never returned to Flower Round Lake after visiting as a child. His family had to make the long journey back to Ohio, as his father needed to get back on the treadmill of performing gigs.

In the autumn of 1952, Jock was performing at the Barr Hotel a couple of hours north of Cincinnati, in Lima. Unlike Portsmouth, Lima was growing in the post-war boom, especially after the city’s Tank Plant resumed its manufacturing output during the Korean War. But that gig didn’t last long. By June of 1953, Jock was playing at The Tropics, a Tiki-themed supper club in Dayton, Ohio. Having recently reopened after a fire, the club featured a large piano bar stretching across the restaurant’s Bamboo Room. Then, a couple of months later, he shifted to another Dayton venue.

Jock Spence dressed in a tuxedo for his gig on North Main Street, one of his last performances in the city. At number 210 stood an eighteen-storey structure, with a dark-brown-and-white brick and terra cotta façade. Constructed in 1929, at the last moment before the Great Depression, the structure was built in a Beaux-Arts style well matched by its Art Deco interior.

By 3 December 1953, Jock had been playing the cocktail lounge at the Dayton Biltmore Hotel every night for three months, except Sundays. His run had started shortly after the newly redecorated Kitty Hawk Lounge was unveiled.

The lounge would see visits from some legendary figures over the years, including Elvis Presley – who’d stay at the Dayton Biltmore on 27 May 1956, five months after making his first recordings for RCA Victor in Nashville – and John F. Kennedy, who’d give a speech at the Biltmore on 17 October 1960, twenty-two days before he won the presidential election. Nearly thirty years after Jock’s run at the Biltmore, the building was designated a federal historic site.

Playing there was a highlight of his time as a gigging musician in Ohio, but change was in the air. Jock and Gwenn had been in the US for just over four years by the end of 1953. For much of that time, the family had been living in Ohio, where Jock was constantly on the move, finding long and short-term gigs across the state. To find some measure of stability, the family then trekked all the way to Phoenix, Arizona – adopted city of Jock’s father, Alex.

For the next few years, a silver Airstream trailer at the Evergreen Trailer Park would be home to Gwenn, Skip and Sherry. Jock, meanwhile, found himself back on the road, working in sales and pursuing gigs in restaurants, clubs, hotels and resorts; occasionally sending letters and money home to his family.

CHAPTER TWO

PHOENIX

It sounded like a buzzsaw. The hum of the engine was deafening as the crop duster glided through the blue sky. Looking down, the boy could see most of the city and the river that flowed through it, from east to west.

From Salt River, the much narrower Grand Canal wound northward and then veered to the west. Just below the canal, where North Twentieth Street met with East Thomas Road, was the patch of land where the boy lived. But it was difficult to pinpoint it in the distance.

Evergreen Trailer Park looked like two horseshoes fitted together with a road running between them. At the park’s entranceway was a large, open, green space. From up above, the trailers were like little dots on the ground. When the plane turned south they went out of view. After gliding south for a short while, the pilot turned the crop duster around and the buzzing sound of its engine changed.

Heading north again, the boy gazed into the less familiar distance. Looking to the northeast, he could see the larger buildings of the city’s downtown core as well as hundreds of smaller homes in surrounding residential communities. They looked like tiny boxes from high above.

Extending out from the city were clear patches of land. Some of them ran all the way over to a line of mountains that towered along the eastern edge of the city limits. At the very bottom of the range the boy could see Camelback Mountain, which he’d encountered numerous times up close. Standing 1,300ft high, Camelback marked the southernmost peak of the Phoenix Mountains. Scattered around its base were a handful of resort hotels, which he could just make out from his vantage point. His grandfather worked in one of those hotels.

As the plane turned around, the buzzing sound of its engine changed, moderating its tone again as the crop duster gradually lowered its altitude. Soon, all the hotels around Camelback Mountain disappeared behind an assortment of other buildings.

As the plane descended almost to the ground, the boy’s stomach lurched. After a few short moments it was all over. The crop duster came to a stop and the pilot, a man in his sixties, helped his young passengers out of the cockpit.

Skip had never flown before. Neither had his sister. In all their time living in Phoenix, the two had never seen the city from above. They thanked the pilot, whom the children knew as Mr. Shook. Mr. and Mrs. Shook lived just across the road from the Spence family at the trailer park. They were an older couple who did not have children of their own, but did have six Dachshunds that Skip and Sherry played with whenever they visited.

Gwenn and her children had moved into Evergreen when they first arrived in Phoenix, around 1953. They lived in an Airstream trailer owned by Jock’s younger brother, Bert, while the lot itself was once the home of his father, Alex.

Around the trailer was a little, white-picket fence and near its entrance was a small garden with roses and sweet peas. The Airstream itself was of a fair size, with a dining space to the right of the entrance and a little kitchenette. At the other end, to the left of the entrance, was a small bedroom area. Just outside the main entranceway was a cabana that served as a living room.

At night, Skip slept out in the cabana while his mother and sister took the bedroom. Their pet cat – named Purr, because it purred so loudly – slept wherever it wanted. At a window directly at the head of the bed was a swamp cooler, where cockroaches could scurry in from time to time. ‘But mostly they could be found in our outside bathroom, which had a sink, toilet, and shower,’ Sherry Spence recalls.

When Gwenn sometimes took her children to visit her best friend, Dorothy Hose, Sherry would ask if she could take a bath. For the kids, getting to use a large washroom with a bath was a luxury.

The couple who managed the trailer park had a son of the same age as Sherry. But apart from him, the young Spences were the only schoolchildren at Evergreen. Most of the folks there were older than their mom and many were retired.

While the Spence children would visit with some of the older residents of the park, like the Shooks, over time Sherry and the managers’ son became close friends. His mother was an Avon lady, making her a little glamorous in the eyes of the children. Six decades later, Sherry still recalls being crushed when she had to say goodbye to ‘HD’ (Harold Dean), the day that her family moved away from Evergreen Trailer Park.

Working at a local dress shop, Gwenn had to leave her kids on their own sometimes. Though they didn’t have bicycles, they got up to all kinds of adventures and became the closest of siblings. Even getting to school was like setting out on a quest. They had to cross East Thomas Road, adjacent to the trailer park, which seemed so wide and busy; then they’d make their way across a large field and through a residential area.

One day they trekked all the way to the shopping centre where their mother worked. Somehow, the pair became separated as Sherry fell behind. As the Arizonan afternoon sun beat down on the streets below, she had to make her own way home. ‘It was so hot out you could fry an egg on the sidewalk! And I wasn’t wearing shoes,’ she reminisces.

And of course, there other were mishaps along the way. Not least because Skip’s sense of abandon and carefree nature were forged in his early years.

When the two were alone at the trailer one time, Sherry decided to make a mud cake. She carefully arranged some mud in a cakepan in the trailer’s kitchenette and decided, as it was a birthday cake, that it needed candles. After placing a few in the cake, one of the kids lit them and managed to catch the curtains on fire. Somehow the fire got put out before the trailer burned down, but the two found themselves in big trouble with Gwenn.

Another time, when their mom arrived home, she was shocked by Skip walking up to her to excitedly show how he’d shaved his eyebrows off. As she was taking it all in, Sherry jumped out and announced, ‘Me too!’

Then, while playing catch, Skip accidentally hit his sister in the head with the ball. With blood gushing from the wound both siblings became frightened, even a little frantic. In tears he brought his sister back to the trailer, before she was taken to a doctor to be stitched up.

Evergreen Trailer Park did not have a swimming pool, so Gwenn sometimes took the kids on a bus to a nearby public pool. Sometimes they went on their own, and it was whilst swimming that Skip recognised a teenager at poolside. He climbed out to approach a local celebrity on the rise.

The teen’s parents had moved to Phoenix a few years earlier because of his asthma. But he’d sang country music at the Grand Ole Opry Roadshow with his brother and had been on local and national TV. Within a decade, Wayne Newton would have his first Billboard hit with ‘Danke Schoen’ – a Vegas-style tune Bobby Darin had given him.

Starstruck, Skip completely forgot about his sister as he chatted with the singer. Meanwhile, in panic mode, Sherry was frantically dog paddling to keep her head above water. Luckily, someone else came to her rescue.

Sherry recalls seeing very little of her own musician father during those years, but she does remember taking a trip to The Broadmoor, a palace-like hotel where Jock was performing. ‘It was all full of swank,’ she muses. The hotel was about 800 miles northeast of Phoenix,