Lyle

“A guitar. That’s all I want for Christmas,” was my chant the year I was 14. “I’m sorry, son, we just can’t afford it,” came my mother’s steady reply. With that, the stage was set for my greatest Christmas gift ever.

In point of fact, a guitar had been purchased in the early fall, but since I was not privy to that information, for months I subjected my parents to teen-aged sighs whenever entering or exiting a room. I had been taking second-hand lessons from a girl in the neighborhood who had been learning from Lee Ruth - a Gandalf-bearded guitar wizard who taught finger-picking. She would learn a new song from him, and come back and show me the mysteries of “Stewball” or “Banks of the Ohio” or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” But, I could only play when I was with her, and her parents let it be known that they thought we were spending too much time together. My musical future seemed bleak.

As Christmas approached, a logistical problem arose for my parents. We were scheduled to travel south five hours to spend the holiday with friends in the Bootheel of Missouri - how to get the guitar there, since one of my jobs was to help pack the trunk. Mother’s solution was to say to my father, “Jim, I don’t feel well. Will you make me a pallet in the back seat?” They maneuvered me out of the house on some pretense just long enough for the guitar to be placed in the floorboard of the massive Buick, swaddled in blankets and sleeping bags. Mother rode like a queen all the way down the Mississippi River road.

Christmas morning came, and when I walked into the living room at Dick and Polly Spitzer’s house, there was my guitar in a stand next to the tree. Oh, what a Christmas! I spent the entire day with the guitar in my hands. Years later, I asked my mother how she had chosen my guitar, a plywood model with the brand name of Lyle, out of all the guitars at Ken Shepherd’s Crazy Music. Her reply was vintage Virginia Dare Newberry. “Oh, that was easy,” she replied. “I just love that good-looking Lyle Wagonner on the Carol Burnett show.” Who knows where I would be today if she had been a fan of Dean Martin.