Nancy Nielsen and Boys/Girls and 1971

OK...that's a much more sexy headline than I can follow with an equally sexy set of thoughts from, oh, 30 years ago. But...headlines are intended to draw the reader in and, I noted, someone responded to my mention of a noted, A-list Eureka High hottie Nancy Nielsen (Class of 1975) by asking if her family built the A&W Restaurant over by Long's in Eureka.

I like to think I can save the world with a blog, but ... who am I kidding? I write what I'd like to read and I'd much rather read what people I know of from the North Coast are doing now that about the plight of the timber industry I knew was dying in 1976. I'm depressed a fair amount of the time (see the "Tagged" piece where I acknowledge I have extreme panic disorder that, tah dah, stems from depression.) So, I think all I want to know about the unemployment system is the shit-hole I fell into when I lost my job. We all have stories to tell.

So...Nancy Nielsen's folks didn't have anything to do with A&W that I'm aware of, but she did have scorching hot twin sisters Kim & Karen (Class of 1973) who ... oh, man, went to brother Matt's Eureka Midget League games when, yep, my nephew Frank Niemi was the star of Matt's Mercer Fraser, Co. team. So, while being the biggest doofus in Eureka, I got to spend a couple hours a couple times a weekling sneaking peaks at the Nielsen sisters and, particularly, Nancy ... who was younger and, I thought, cuter.

The thought never crossed my mind that they even knew who I was, beyond that I was Frank's brother...nobody knew I was the 16-year-old uncle of a 12-year-old nephew. I've mentioned...my half-sisters were crazy, right?

Back to A&W, I did play for the team A&W sponsored in the old Joe DiMaggio League. Don Scheluenes was a great man, a Eureka High counselor, who kept the league going in a bunch of local towns for years...on his own. He also set me and my friend Dennis Bills up with jobs at the Times-Standard stuffing inserts...as Teamsters members. Super guy! So, I had a connection to A&W...we got free root beer there after games. Never saw the Nielsens there, though.

One day, after spending half the night hearing my more outgoing friends bash me for not just talking to Nancy at a game, I was riding my 10-speed up Del Norte Street hill. Rob Dunaway, whose father's a Eureka big-timer, pulled beside us in his car. Curse that Dunaway was the Eureka High quarterback and had a car!

"Hey...Ted...my girlfriend's sister likes you!" he said, through a rolled down window. I knew he dated one of the twins and, really, thought he was a good guy generally.

I was, surprise, speechless. My friend said, "Nancy Nielsen likes...him?"`

Everybody knew everybody at all the junior highs back then. Eureka was a 3-year high school to sophs dated freshmen at the junior highs. We were all on the prowl...I just didn't know what to do when the prowl resulted in a catch.

"Yeah...she told her sister and her sister told me and...they wanted me to tell you if I see you..." Rob wasn't one of those guys so high on himself that you wanted to punch in the face just to getting to stop talking about himself.

"Nancy Nielsen likes...Ted?"

It almost hurt my feelings that my friend was so surprised that a girl we agreed was as hot as they come in 1971 would "like" me. (You all know what "like" means. Or, really, none of us knows what it means.) While my friend was uttering his disbelief, I think Rob gave me the Nielsen's phone number.

That snapped me back to reality. I'd never touched a girl. Never had any game. None. Zero. And, I was jumping up from being a D-List sophomore guy on the popularity chart who dated C-list girls (dated? Yeah, right!)...to being a D-lister confronted with a Triple A-list hottie freshman sending out word that, um, I should call her.

Remember how that all worked back in the day? Girls didn't walk up and say, "I want yo' hot ass Bobby, d'jew know? Let's do this!" There were machinations ... an order of how word got from the girl or the boy that, "I like you let's talk...and, really fast, let's get hot n' heavy..."

If I couldn't hold hands with Cathy Agnew -- first girl I ever went to a dance with at Winship -- how was I going to handle Nancy Nielsen? My ego was growing by the minute. I was 16 and...my stock was rising. What would a girls like her, who'd had all kinds of boyfriends, do with me. I may have seemed quiet and mysterious, but...I just didn't have anything to say.

There was a lot of angst, catching hell from my friends for not "making a move" and more, between the day I heard of the news and the day I went swimming at her house. It seems so...simple, compared to how boys and girls relate now, don't you think?

There's more story here...that'll bring back memories for us oldsters and make kids laugh out loud...

Maybe I'll wait and see if anybody cares to hear it before I write more.