I'm trying to remember how we planned vacations in the pre-Internet age

As I mentioned a few days ago, my family and I recently took a fun and relaxing vacation to Bethany Beach, Delaware. I booked our rental house through the VRBO app. We navigated the 9-hour drive using Waze. And of course we looked up information about local attractions online.

At no time during the planning or execution of this vacation did I speak directly with anyone. It was all facilitated by the little electronic miracles known as smartphones.

So now I'm wondering, how did we do all of this before, say, 1996? How did we plan vacations without the Internet? I simply cannot remember.

Here's a good example: At the end of my freshman, sophomore and junior years of college, I took trips to the beautiful city of Montreal. Each time I did this, I brought a friend (Kevin in 1989, Nate in 1990) or family member (nephew Mark in 1991) and we drove the 10+ hours from Wickliffe to Southern Quebec.

As I look back on it, I wonder:

• How did I make hotel reservations? That is, how did I know my hotel options, and where did I find the correct phone numbers to call? I couldn't just Google that information back then.
• How did I purchase (in advance) tickets for the two Montreal Expos baseball games we attended? Did I send them a letter or something? How did I know how much the tickets would be? Where did this information come from?
• How did I know the correct driving route to cover the 560 miles from my house to Downtown Montreal?

I can't remember how most of this was done, but I do know the answer to that last question.

The two options when it came to long drives back then were having a road atlas in the car with you and/or ordering a AAA TripTik. I always had the atlas handy, and at least once I remember getting the TripTik, which was a paper printout of very thorough driving directions provided by the helpful folks at the American Automobile Association.

Many of us back then had the special ability to decipher an absurdly detailed road atlas map while safely driving a car at 60MPH and trying to figure out exactly where we were and where we were going.

But what of the first two points? It's not like they listed Montreal phone numbers in the Cleveland Yellow Pages. How did I figure out who to call and what their numbers were?

I think the two answers were (a) library books, and (b) directory assistance.

Back when libraries mainly loaned out actual books, there was an array of destination-specific travel guides you could borrow when planning a trip. If these guides had been published in the previous 5-10 years, the phone numbers in them were probably going to be accurate. So those certainly helped.

There was also directory assistance. As long as you knew the area code of the place you wanted to go (in this case 514 for Montreal), you could dial <AREA CODE>-555-1212 and ask the nice person on the other end of the line for whatever phone number you needed.

There was a charge for this, of course, but it worked.

So I guess that's how I mapped out these trips to Montreal: Books, long-distance directory assistance, and large bound driving maps?

All I know is we somehow found our way there and back, and those vacations remain some of my most memorable.

But I'll be honest: I would much rather go the smartphone route. Fewer fines for overdue library books and no separate charges for each Google search. Technology has spoiled us far more than we probably realize.

Happy birthday to the guy with whom I recorded an album

Today is my friend Nate's 50th birthday. He and I have been friends since high school. We always shared a love of music, technology, and sports (particularly baseball).

We also had a little two-man band together in the late 80s and early 90s. It has been a while, but I've written about the band before. We called ourselves SRO, which as I've mentioned is ironic when you consider we never played a single gig that was truly standing room only.

But we did play gigs. And we recorded an album together.

"Album" is perhaps too grandiose a term here, but we did collaborate on an 11-song cassette that a few people actually bought with real money. Of the songs on that cassette, all but one were originals written by Nate, the exception being Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" (which we covered because Nate could play it on the piano and people love that song).

The album was/is called "Sandlot Tunes." If you have a few minutes free and no real purpose in life, you can click here to listen to some of it.

The recordings are a bit dated, limited as we were by our musical tastes at the time and the technology available to us. But many of the songs still stand up and are pretty catchy, if you ask me.

Anyway, it was a cool thing to have done, and it led to me continuing to make music now whenever I get the chance, even at the age of 51.

All of which is good for the soul.

And the mind. I may not be able to recall what I had for dinner last night, but I can just about tell you the key in which our most popular song "X-Squared" was written (A-flat, I think).

Anyway, happy birthday, Nate. Someday we'll get together again and jam.

One time I lied on the radio...and you can hear it here

I'm pretty sure other cities have equivalent programs, but there is a long-running local TV show in Cleveland called "Academic Challenge." Each episode, three-person teams from local high schools compete against each other by answering questions on history, math, science, general knowledge, etc.

I was on the Academic Challenge team when I was in high school, and we won our match in 1987 against Copley and Magnificat high schools.

Back then, you only appeared on the TV show every other year. In the off years, you could compete in the WERE radio "Whiz Quiz."

The Whiz Quiz was similar to Academic Challenge, except there were only two teams per episode as opposed to three, and of course it was on radio instead of TV.

My senior year was one of those off years, so we went on the Whiz Quiz to compete again Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary (Lebron James' alma mater, though it should be noted that Lebron was still a toddler at the time, so he was not in attendance).

The show was live, and that particular week it was broadcast from Baldwin Wallace College (now University).

As team captain for Wickliffe, one of my jobs was to give quick bios about my two teammates, Diane and Nate, and myself. As we were driving to BW and discussing that little "meet the team" segment, our advisor, the legendary Mr. J. Patrick Penrod, said to me, "You know, you can say anything you want and no one will know."

I could make up stuff about the three of us and just say it? Live on the air? I was in!

Diane and Nate very wisely wanted to keep their bios entirely factual, but I decided I was going to run with it. When it came time to introduce us, I ran down their impressive academic and extracurricular resumes. Then I got to myself.

Most of what I said was true, but at the very end I added, "In the fall of this year I will be attending Yale University to major in baroque symphonic composition."

This, if you haven't gathered, wasn't the least bit grounded in reality. I was going to John Carroll University and I knew it. And I don't think it's possible to major in "baroque symphonic composition."

You can hear a recording of the whole thing by clicking on the following link. Our team intros start exactly at the 10:00 mark, with my little fib coming around 10:39: https://soundcloud.com/scott-tennant-192532351/wickliffe-vs-akron-st-vincent-st-mary-were-whiz-quiz-1988

We went on to win by a pretty decent margin, as I recall.

If that had been the end of the story, it would be a good one. But there's an interesting coda to it.

That episode was recorded in March 1988. Fast forward about five months to my first day as a student at John Carroll. I walk into my very first class in the Jardine Room. As I enter, I look to my right, and who do I see sitting there? Why it was Joe Rinaldi, captain of that St. Vincent-St. Mary team we had defeated on the Whiz Quiz.

I looked at him, he looked at me. He recognized me immediately. For a second he looked confused, and then he asked me, "Did you lie?" I laughed and admitted I had. For the next four years any time I would see him on campus, he would say, "Liar!" Or, "Hey, it's the liar!"

He meant it in good fun, but he also conceded that the idea of going up against a team captained by someone attending an Ivy League school had been a little intimidating.

We psyched 'em out? All the better. Mission accomplished.

Why getting the band back together is rarely a good idea

For a few years in the early 90s, I was in a band.

I use the word "band" in an extremely loose sense, in that there were only two of us: Me and my friend Nate. We called ourselves SRO, which of course is an abbreviation for "Standing Room Only," which in itself is funny in that we never played a single show in which you couldn't find a seat.

All told, we really didn't play that many shows in the first place. Our busiest time was the summer of 1991, when I was a junior at John Carroll University and Nate was a sophomore at Case Western Reserve University. We played something like 8-10 gigs that summer, I think...maybe fewer, I don't know. Like all things, the number tends to inflate as I get older.

I like to think we were an entertaining live band. There were only two of us, so we kept ourselves pretty busy during our shows. Nate is a keyboardist, but seeing as how he only has two hands, he couldn't possibly cover all the parts in our songs by himself. So he always brought his desktop computer to every show (this was before laptops, remember), and the computer would control our bass, drums and other elements as needed.

I, meanwhile, played saxophones, wind synthesizer and miscellaneous kindergarten percussion toys I picked up at various music stores when I had a few extra bucks in my pocket.

A wind synthesizer, for the uninitiated, is an electronic instrument that you play by blowing through a controller, like so:

(NOTE: That's not a picture of me. There are subtle differences between me and the guy shown here, not the least of which, I'm guessing, is talent.)

Anyway, that controller is fingered like a saxophone – so it wasn't a huge adjustment for me – and you can vary the volume and pitch of what you play by blowing harder or softer, and biting on the plastic "reed" in the mouthpiece.

The controller is hooked up to a digital tone generator, allowing the player to sound like just about anything at all, from a tuba to a distorted guitar to a bagpipe. It was always a fun conversation piece.

Most of the songs Nate and I played were originals written by Nate himself. Nate is, was and always will be a genius. Like one of those literal geniuses whose natural insight and intelligence is obvious from the moment you meet him. More than anyone I've ever known, Nate combines a left-brained knowledge of mathematics and mechnical principles with right-brained passion and creativity. The result was some really cool tunes, most of which he cranked out over a three-year period from 1988 through 1991.

We recorded one album. No, really, we did. It was called "Sandlot Tunes," and it included several Nate originals along with a cover of "Linus and Lucy" (the piano song Schroeder plays in the Charlie Brown Christmas special that everyone dances to). I still have the entire 10-song album in my iTunes library.

The recording was done in Nate's basement over several days in the hot summer of 1990. Without Nate's technical skills, we never could have made good use of the mixer/recording device we rented for the purpose, and "Sandlot Tunes" never would have come to fruition.

Eventually Nate and I both married and had kids, and we ended up living several hundred miles away from each other. The last time we played together was April 1994. I've often thought it would be fun to get back together and play some of our old stuff, but I realize it probably wouldn't work for several reasons:

• I threw out my Casio digital horn (a contraption similar to the wind synthesizer) several years ago after it stopped working, and a few of our tunes depended on the sound and feel of that instrument.
• I'm not sure Nate still has the 90s-era sequencing software that powered the computer that drove our live performances.
• We're old and rusty.
• You can't go home again.

Re: that last point. Nothing is ever quite as good the second time around as the first, especially when there are two decades of time in between. So it's probably best to just let good memories be good memories.

But hey, if you're ever interested in hearing some homemade early-90s electronic pop tunes, let me know. I can send you the files!