Our repairman, Mr. Willis, came over and tried to fix it, but to no avail. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep it awhile," he said.

     Mr. Willis wound up keeping our television more than “a little while.” But it was my doing.

     “Don’t bring it back yet,” I told him after it had been repaired. “I don’t have the money to pay you.” Joe and I were in a financial pitch at the time.

     By then we were a family of six -- Rebbie was five; Jackie four; Tito, two; and Jermaine an infant. Depending as I did on the TV for their entertainment in the evening, I was suddenly faced with the challenge of keeping my children occupied in some other way.

     What I decided to do was sing with them. I figured I could manage a few songs while I ironed, sewed, or washed the dishes.

     I began teaching them the tunes that I’d sung with my daddy: “Cotton Fields,” “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round The Mountain,” “Wabash Cannonball.”

     The kids loved our singalongs from the first day. Even tiny Jermaine would bop in his chair to the sound of our voices blending together.

     JACKIE: The first time I heard my Mother really cut loose on a country song, I was impressed. Gosh, she can really sing, I thought. That’s how it all started for my brother and me -- harmonizing behind her.

     Our living room singalongs became a Jackson family tradition. However, I never dreamed for a moment back then about teaching my children to perform together -- nor even in the early sixties, when the “Motown Sound” began to vie with the likes of my favorite country songs for the children's attention.

     JACKIE: Motown Records exploded with a sound that everybody -- black and white -- loved. It was a sound that brought people together.

     Motown certainly brought my older children together by the radio. They had their ears glued to WWCA every day, listening for the latest releases by the new Detroit-based record label founded by songwriter-producer Berry Gordy.

     REBBIE: We’d also hang on to the deejay’s every word plugging an upcoming appearance in Chicago by the Miracles, the Temptations, or one of the other Motown groups. We’d die wanting to see them, although of course we couldn’t afford to. Still, the more fevered the deejay’s pitch, the more hyped up we’d get.

     As soon as the children heard a new record, they’d pool their pickles and dimes, or beg me for some change, and rush down and buy it at the little record store across the street from Roosevelt High.

     Naturally, when they brought the single home they’d want to put it on the stereo immediately, and dance to it in their stockinged feet. I was happy to allow their living room “sock hops,” especially after I’d just waxed the Formica-tile floor. Their dancing would keep the floor shiny for days!

     REBBIE: We were also really into the dances: the Jerk, the Mashed Potato, the Walk, the Pony, the Four Corners.

     Long before we’d ever heard the word Motown, Rebbie and Jackie were dancing stars in the neighborhood. When they were five and four, respectively they began winning dance contests at neighborhood block parties.

     Rebbie so loved dancing that she’d dance around the house all day after finishing her cleaning chores. “Mother, how can you just sit there?” she said to me more than once when a particularly good Motown song came on the radio. “Don’t you feel you have to move?” She’s the same way today. When a stagehand brought her a chair at one of Michael’s Madison Square Garden concerts in 1988, she said, “No, I’m gonna be dancing.” She danced in the wings for the entire concert.

     In fact, with the exception of Marlon, all of my children seemed born to dance. Marlon had to work very hard on his dancing, which paid off because today he’s an excellent dancer, too.

     But my older boys weren’t content just to the Motown songs. They wanted to sing them, as well. And they would, among themselves, in their bedroom.

     JACKIE: At first, Tito, Jermaine, and I would just fool around, trying to learn the songs off the radio. But all of a sudden we got good -- good enough so that people who were passing by our house would stop and listen to us, sometimes even sit down on the lawn. We had the window screens in by then, and they could hear us real well because we’d make a lot of noise. Once we captured their ear, we knew we had something going.

     They captured my ear, too. Rebbie’s, as well.

     “Mother, look at my arms -- I have goose pimples just listening to them sing!” she exclaimed one day. Another day I found her crying by their door because she thought their harmonizing was so beautiful.

     As I mentioned, the worsening crime situation in Gary ironically played a role in their development as singers. Many times Joe and I had to “ground” our kids, not because of anything they’d done wrong, but because we had spotted undesirable types milling around in the park behind the house. Jackie, Jermaine, and Tito often made the best of those times by continuing to hone their versions of the current Motown hits in their bedroom.

     Some evenings, when it was safe to do so, they’d sing outside on the corner, under the streetlight.

     JACKIE: We loved to sing outside, we could get great harmony because of the echoes.

     They got better and better.

     “Mother, we’re going to be on TV, just like the Temptations,” they announced to me one day.

     When four-year-old Michael began adding his voice to their vocal mix, I started thinking, Well, they do seem to have potential ....

     I was enthused enough about their singing to ask Joe to give them a listen. Because Joe had been working two shifts a day at the time -- the swing shift at Inland Steel and the day shift at American Foundries -- he hadn’t even heard them sing yet.

     But Joe didn’t seem very receptive. “Kate, I don’t have the time right now,” he said.

     Joe, however, did get a taste of his boys’ musical talent when he heard eight-year-old Tito play the guitar for the first time. There’s a story about how Tito came to “audition” for his father.

     Joe had a rule that none of his children could touch his guitar, which he kept in a case in the hallway closet. But Tito began taking out the guitar, anyway, while Joe was at work, and teaching himself how to play on it. “You know what your father said,” I’d scold him when I caught him. But I never forced Tito to put the guitar back because I inwardly approved of his initiative. I also praised his budding guitar talent to his father, who promptly gave Tito a box guitar.

     Tito and Joe’s brother Luther would play together when Luther came over to visit. My son improved steadily.

     Then one day Tito broke a string. Not having the money to buy a new string, he decided to take Joe’s guitar out. I saw him do it, but I didn’t say anything.

     Tito then promptly broke a string on Joe’s guitar. He put the guitar back in its case in the closet and braced himself for the consequences.

     When Joe saw the broken string, he immediately confronted the boys.

     “Who did this?” he demanded, holding up his now five-string guitar.

     “Tito,” the brothers immediately replied.

     At that moment I spoke up.

     “I gave Tito permission to take out the guitar,” I lied.

     Joe glared at me.

     “Why did you give him permission when I told the children they couldn’t touch the guitar?” he raged. “You’re encouraging him to disobey!”

     Joe turned to face Tito. “Tito, sit down,” he commanded. “I want to see if you can play the guitar.”

     Tito calmly proceeded to perform some of his favorite riffs. Joe couldn’t disguise his shock.

     “Boy, you can play,” he said.

     Soon afterward Joe came home from work holding a surprise gift for Tito behind his back: a shiny red electric guitar

     “Honest, Joe -- the boys have talent!” I told him once again. “I want you to listen to them!”

     Finally, Joe “auditioned” them as well.

     “They can sing,” he agreed afterward. “But,” he added, “I still don’t have time to work with them.”

     Soon after that I got a call out of the blue from a woman named Evelyn Leahy that confirmed my belief that the boys had something good going musically. Somehow she had heard that they sang, and she asked me if they would be interested in performing at a children’s fashion show that she was going to stage at a department store in Glen Park, a suburb of Chicago. I said I would check with them to see; they hesitated for about one second before saying “yes!” Up until that time, the only singing that they had done for others was for relatives in the home of one of Joe’s cousins.

     I then had a fateful exchange with Evelyn Leahy.

     “What do the boys call themselves?” she asked. “I want to include their name in the flyers.”

     “Oh, we haven’t come up with a name yet,” I replied. “But I’ve been thinking about the Jackson Brothers Five.” Marlon wanted to be in the group, too.

     Evelyn Leahy thought for a moment. “How about the Jackson Five, instead?” she suggested.

     “You know, that sounds much better.”

     Miss Leahy asked the boys to prepare three songs of their choosing. While the boys rehearsed the tunes by themselves, I appointed myself their costume designer. I decided to dress them in black pants and red shirts with “J5” and an eighth note embroidered in blue on the breast pocket. Cecille Roach, a Jamaican lady who lived down the block, did the embroidery work for me.

     On the day of the fashion show, we piled into Joe’s and his brother Luther’s cars and drove to Glen Park.

     We weren’t sure what to expect when we got to the department store. As it turned out, the setting wasn’t quite impressive as I would have liked for the boys’ public debut: A stage had been set up in the middle of the store, and there wasn’t a folding chair in sight. The audience of shoppers would have to watch the program standing up.

     Sharing the bill with the boys were a couple of other child acts. After a boy-girl dance team performed, it was the Jackson Five’s turn.

     Among the songs they did was a current hit, “Doin’ the Jerk,” by the Larks. Jermaine sang lead, while the others sang the background vocals. As for their instrumentation, Jermaine played the bass line on Joe’s guitar; Tito strummed on his electric guitar; Jackie hit the tambourine; and Michael banged away on the bongos. Marlon danced.

     JACKIE: I was embarrassed. I just wasn’t prepared to perform in a department store in front of my friends, including a couple of my little girlfriends. All of a sudden, we were into our first song, and I saw the shoppers converging on us, staring up at us. It was all a little bit bizarre.

     As Joe and I stood in the audience, I could tell that Joe was nervous. As if he was coaching them, he silently mouthed the words to each of the songs.

     As for me, I wasn’t nervous. Just proud. And just a little bit excited, thinking that maybe, just maybe, this was a start of something big for the boys.

     Embarrassed or not, the boys did fine. The crowd rewarded them with a hearty round of applause at the end of their set.

     “Before long, you’ll be performing in nicer places,” I found myself saying to them on the way home.

     Soon afterward Joe’s sister-in-law Bobbie Rose Jackson made a suggestion fated to put the Jackson Five on the musical track.

     “Why don’t you get these kids on the talent show at Roosevelt High?” she said. A graduate of Roosevelt, she explained that the annual show was made up of primarily of Roosevelt students, but the younger entrants were welcome, too. Strange as it may seem, that was the first I’d heard about the show, even though Joe and I now lived in the neighborhood for fifteen years. I soon learned that the show was part of a citywide program designed to identify promising young talent. Winners from the Roosevelt show and talent shows held at other high schools around Gary competed in the Annual Talent Search held at Gilroy Stadium. The search yielded Gary’s number-one young musical act of the year.

     I was all for having the Jackson Five compete. So were Joe and the boys.

     Two months later, Bobbie Rose called to inform me the auditions for the talent shoe would be held soon. The boys went to work.

     They were all business.

     “Who can we find to play the drums?” they asked. Just bongos and tambourine, they decided, wouldn’t do as percussion this time. A neighbor boy, Milford Height, had just gotten a set of drums, so they recruited him.

     Although Joe had by now expressed his desire to start working with the boys, he was still too busy to be much of a help. So I offered a pointer or two to the boys while they rehearsed themselves.

     For their two numbers, they decided on “My Girl,” a big Temptations hit at the time, and a tune that they wrote themselves to introduce each of the brothers. The latter song was designed primarily as a showcase for the dancing talents of six-year-old Michael.

     As the boys practised their set, I made the time to design another set of costumes. I decided on white shirts with red bow ties, red cummerbunds, and black pants. I bought the shirts and made the cummerbunds.

     The Jackson Five passed the audition at Roosevelt with flying colors. They must have made a big impression on the competition, too.

     JERMAINE: Finally the day of the talent show rolled around. We were about to go on when we decided to double-check our instruments, to make sure they were in tune. To our shock we found that the guitars and bass had been tampered with; they were way out of tune. “Someone doesn’t want us to win,” I said. We quickly retuned the instruments, and waited in the wing for our name to be called.

     The boys opened with “My Girl,” with Jermaine singing lead. The applause was loud and sustained. Then the boys launched into their original tune.

     JACKIE: When we had the crowd exactly where we wanted them, Michael laid down his bongos, took centre stage, and proceeded to do James Brown. He tore the house down.

     That night we were thrilled to return home with the first-place trophy. We didn’t have the money for an all-out celebration, but we happily made due with an ice cream feast.

     Making the Jackson Five’s victory all the more special to us was the fact that the boys had won out over a host of talented acts. Deniece Williams, one of the other performers on the bill, was fated to hit the top of the charts herself years later with “Let’s Hear It For the Boy.”

     REBBIE: I think the talent shows had a lot to do with our neighborhood -- and all of Gary, for that matter -- becoming a hotbed of strong young talent. Teachers were always encouraging kids to audition. When one group of kids got involved, others did, too, because they didn’t want to miss out -- the old competition father. So performing became the thing to do in Gary.

     Also, the kids didn’t lack for inspiration: The Motown Sound was definitely in its heyday. As I watched the show, I was struck by the fact that almost every one of the acts had a Motown flavor. Everybody, it seemed, was scheming on becoming the next Temptations.

     JACKIE: Music, everyone figured out, was the ticket out of Gary.

     Thinking back, I’m glad the boys had stiff musical competition in their own backyard. It made them work harder from the start to gain recognition.

     A few months after their triumph at Roosevelt High, the Jackson Five won the Annual Talent Search. Once again Michael stole the show.

     His moment of glory came during the boys’ rendition of the Robert Parker hit, “Barefootin’,” on which Michael sang lead. During the instrumental break, he suddenly kicked off his shoes and did the darnedest barefoot dance around the stage.

     JACKIE: To come up with an idea on the spot like that, at his age .... I just couldn’t believe it.

     REBBIE: Besides his obvious talent, the thing that struck me about Michael at the time was the fact that he didn’t have any inhibitions. In a setting like that, most seven-year-olds would get shy. But Michael’s attitude was: “I’m gonna go out there and do it!”

     The Jackson Five’s victory earned the boys their first press: a write-up, with photo, in Gary Post Tribune. I clipped out the article and pasted it in my brand-new scrapbook. By now harboring the same dreams of musical fame and fortune for the Jackson Five that I once harbored for myself, and, later, for Joe and the Falcons, I hoped that someday that scrapbook would overflow with articles about the Jackson Five.

     As for Joe Jackson, he made his thoughts about his and his boys’ future known when he prepared a tape of the boys’ performances to send to his brother Lawrence, who was stationed with the air force. Joe recorded this prediction: “These boys are going to take me out of the steel mill.”

     Yet, the several years that the Jackson Five spent chasing a record deal and professional stardom were fated to be tense ones. I worried that the boys wouldn’t be “discovered” in time.

     The boys are novelty now, I thought in 1966, when Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael were still only fifteen, thirteen, twelve, ten, and eight years old, respectively. When they get a little older, people are going to expect to do onstage what they already do now as children.

     Joe heard the career clock ticking, too. But at the same time we both wanted to be very careful with the boys and not rush into a management deal, for example, that we might later regret. In the end, Joe decided to take control of the Jackson Five’s fledgling career himself. Having had a taste of show business, Joe felt that he could do just as well, if not better, than any outside manager.

     He certainly moved ahead quickly and decisively. One of his first decisions was to invest in an array of equipment for the boys: more guitars, amplifiers, and microphones.

     “Joe, if we’re going to go further into debt, I’d prefer adding on a bedroom or two,” I complained. I had, in fact, been saving my Sears paychecks for the purpose of putting some money down on a remodeling job.

     But Joe was insistent: “Sacrifice now and let me buy the equipment, and someday you will be able to have a new house and more.” I gave in.

     But I vigorously opposed another one of his ideas: changing the Jackson Five to the Jackson Four. Joe didn’t want Marlon to be in the group.

     REBBIE: Marlon just wasn’t as coordinated with his dance moves as the other brothers. No matter how hard he worked at it -- and he’d work three, four, five times as hard as the rest of them -- he just didn’t seem to have it. He would be in tears all the time trying to learn the moves.

     At the time, Marlon was the least talented singer, as well. His lack of singing ability bothered Joe even more than his dancing.

     “If I keep him in the group, he’ll just mess up the harmony,” Joe told me privately.

     “Joe you can’t do this,” I replied. “Even if Marlon just stands there onstage and moves his mouth to the words, he’s got to be in the group.” I wanted musical success for my boys, but not at the cost of having one of them emotionally scared for life.

     This time I won out. But it’s a fact that Marlon never sang a word as a member of the Jackson Five until the boys began recording for Motown.

     Joe put the boys on a formal rehearsal schedule. The rehearsed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. If they had a show coming up, Joe adjusted the schedule accordingly.

     On a rehearsal day, the boys would have their instruments set up in the living room by four-thirty P.M .... , when Joe returned from work. I’d have dinner on the table, we’d eat, and then Joe and the boys would rehearse for the next two hours. If Joe had to work late, I’d run the rehearsal in his place.

     Sometimes things didn’t go smoothly.

     REBBIE: Occasionally Joe would try to get Michael to sing, or do something he didn’t feel like doing, and Michael wouldn’t cooperate. He had a little bit of an attitude sometimes; by then he knew that he was very important to the group as its lead singer.

     In the beginning, Joe would grow furious with Michael, even spank him. But a spanking would always backfire. Michael would then be too upset to continue, and the rehearsal would have to be called off. So Joe would try a different approach.

     REBBIE: What he and the older brothers would do is try to laud him on, play to his little ego. Sometimes that would work!

     It was one thing for Michael to dream of someday living in a castle. It was another thing for him and his brothers to understand that it took discipline and sacrifice to achieve a dream. They were still so young.

     JACKIE: Dad would tell us “Just keep up the good work. You’re going to make it. Keep going.” But sometimes as we rehearsed we’d see the neighbor kids pass by outside on the way to the park carrying their bats and gloves, and I’d want nothing more than to be outside with them, instead.

     The boys, however, could see that many hours they spent on their music yielded results. They became all but unbeatable on the Gary talent-show circuit. The only contest they ever lost, at Horace Mann High, was judged by children who, I suspect, were tired of seeing the Jackson Five win all the time. Whenever the boys would enter a contest, they’d hear the other acts grumble, “Oh, the Jackson Five are competing. We might as well drop out.”

     With nothing left to prove in Gary, Joe dropped the Jackson Five into a bigger talent pond, Chicago. Chicago boasted one of the premier talent shows in the Midwest: the Sunday night amateur contest at the Regal Theatre.

     The Regal was a famous theatre. All the Motown stars had played there, all the R&B greats. What made the Regal’s talent show so special was the fact that three-time winners were invited back to the Regal not only to perform on a super talent show with all the other multiple winners, but also to appear on the same bill with an established star.

     I stayed at home with my other children the first night the Jackson Five took the stage at Regal. Finally late into the evening the phone rang. “Hi, Mother, it’s Jermaine,” the voice on the other line said. “We won, and we thought that you might want to know .” My next two Sundays were replays: my nervous anticipation followed by a matter-of-fact victory call from one of the boys.

     The Jackson Five eventually won the Regal’s championship talent show, too.

     The Regal wound up placing the boys on the same bill -- albeit seven acts removed -- as one of the hottest R&B acts of 1967: Gladys Knight and the Pips. The group had just released a little ditty called “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

     The boys, Joe, and Joe’s assistant, Jack Richardson, returned home from the concert weary but jubilant.

     “Man, those Pips were some stepping fools!” Jack exclaimed to me.

     “No kidding, Kate, they’re really good,” Joe said. “But the boys were just as good.”

     After the Jackson Five’s Regal triumph, Joe looked around and saw there was still one more talent-show mountain for the boys to climb: winning the amateur-night competition at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre. He and Jack drove the boys to New York in our Volkswagen van to scale the mountain.

     Because the Jackson Fives reputation had preceded them, the Apollo entered them directly into the “Superdog” finals, their most prestigious amateur event. Once again the brothers won.

     “When we tore it down at the Apollo, we finally felt that nothing could stand in our way,” Michael wrote later.

     Indeed, their career now showed signs of really taking off. Before the Apollo, their only professional gigs had been their debut club date, at a small Gary tavern called Mr. Lucky’s, for which they earned all of eight dollars plus a hatful of tips; and dates at a few Chicago nightspots. (Regarding the Chicago gigs, I didn’t know that some of these clubs had strippers on the same bill until I read Michael’s autobiography. Joe and the boys obviously didn’t tell me because they knew what I’d say.) But after their Apollo victory, Joe landed the services of a New York promoter, who began booking concerts for the boys on weekends and during school vacations.

     MARLON: The promoter teamed us with a number of other young acts that were on the way to making it .... the O’Jays, the Emotions, the Vibrations and the Delfonics. Usually an established star headed the bill; we played a lot of dates with Jerry Butler for example. But sometimes, it was just us up-and-comers.

     We traveled to Philly, New York, Kansas City, St Louis.

     We made all those runs by VW van.

     TITO: I loved the idea of being on the road, of not being in Gary. Anything new was exciting to all of us. We didn’t care that we had to sit on our equipment for hours in the back of the van as Dad or Jack drove to the next show. We didn’t know any different.

     The only time I accompanied the boys to an out-of-state date was when they performed at a club in Milwaukee. Two things stand out in my mind about that night: the shocked looks in the audience when people saw how young the Jackson Five were, and the polished, professional performance the boys staged.

     The great thing about graduating from two-song talent-show appearances to hour-long sets was the boys’ chance to stretch out artistically, to offer a mix of ballads and rockers, to master the art of pacing.

     TITO: We always knew the latest songs on the radio. When something new came out from Motown or Aretha Franklin, we’d be on it with a snap of the fingers. We constantly moved our show around, often taking requests from the crowd.

     Each Jackson Five show, however, had its staple numbers, guaranteed crowd-pleasers. Among them: Jermaine’s rendition of “Stormy Monday,” and Michael’s version of “Tobacco Road.” Also, Michael always had his feet in the spotlight during a James Brown song

     Michael continued to astound the family with his dancing talent, and especially his ability to invent sensational new moves in mid-solo onstage. Many times the first words out of Joe’s mouth when he returned from a weekend gig would be, “Guess what Michael did this time?”

     As much as I approved of the Jackson Five’s hitting the road to increase their exposure, it was hard for me to be apart from them and Joe so often. Like a typical mother, I worried that they’d get in a car accident on an icy highway somewhere.

     While I kept the home fires burning, I continued to remain involved in the boys’ careers by making their costumes, often with Rebbie’s help. My biggest, and final, undertaking was making matching suits for them.

     One day a peddler came around selling shiny forest-green material. "Gee, this will make nice suits for the boys,” Joe remarked.

     “Yeah?” I said. “Who’s gonna make them?” My handiwork had been mainly limited to cummerbunds and vests.

     “You,” Joe announced. “You can learn.”

     Joe went ahead and bought the material, and I bought a pattern and took on the project.

     I ran into a few problems. There’s a PR photo of the boys dressed in the suits, and you can see that I had a hard time finishing off the back of Tito’s jacket. But all in all I did an okay job. The frustrating thing was that the boys outgrew a month’s worth of my work in no time. “Next time, Joe,” I said, “take the boys to a tailor.”

     By the middle of 1968, the Jackson Five were earning up to six hundred dollars a gig. I remember thinking, My goodness, my boys are making a lot of money now. It was enough for us to buy our first color television, a new washer and dryer, a new sofa, new lamps, and a new table for the living room.

     (The boys also continued to play Gary and Chicago dates, but for less money. I still have a bounced check for three hundred seventy-five dollars from a Chicago deejay, the boys’ “payment” for a Chicago show he promoted.)

     By then the Jackson Five had already had a record released, on a tiny Gary label called Steeltown. Joe had decided that it would be a good experience for them to go into the studio and cut a couple of sides, just to see what would happen.

     Steeltown provided the songs; the “A” side was “Big Boy,” a cute little boy-girl tune. The sessions took place at Steeltown’s downtown studio on a couple of Saturdays.

     One day soon afterward, Joe, the children, and I gathered in our living room with our ears to the radio. We’d been informed that WWCA would debut the record at a certain time, and, sure enough, it did. The moment we heard it we all cheered.

     “Big Boy” went on to sell no more than a few copies -- it’s a collector’s item today. Yet, the feelings of joy and pride I felt in hearing the Jackson Five for the first time on the radio are indescribable.

     So by 1968 my boys were seasoned, and ready for stardom. They just hadn’t been “discovered” yet. And they kept growing.

     “Joe, we’ve got to get them a recording contract before they get too old,” I fretted.

     Joe had been trying. Various record-label scouts had shown interest in the Jackson Five, but nothing had come of their talks with Joe.

     As for Motown, seemingly the logical company for the Jackson Five to record for, Joe had sent the company’s founder, Berry Gordy, a tape in 1966. But it had been returned three months later, and we had had no further contact with the label.

     The boys really needed a break.

     Finally, in August they got one. A producer for the “David Frost Show,” who had somehow gotten the word on the boys, called Joe and invited them to appear on the show. It would be the Jackson Five’s TV debut.

     The offer came a few days before the boys were scheduled to perform at the Regal Theatre with Bobby Taylor, a Motown singer with whom Joe had become friendly. Joe decided that he and the boys would do the concert, then fly to New York immediately afterward to do the Frost show.

     When he and the boys were traveling, Joe was good about keeping in touch with me over the phone. However, he didn’t call me from Chicago to let me know hoe the Regal show had gone.

     Worried, I put in a call to New York. But they weren’t there.

     Finally, Joe did call. But not from New York. Detroit.

     “What happened?” I exclaimed. “I’ve been scared to death.”