PURPLE SERENDIPITY ALL AROUND

by Steve Steinbock

I’ve been going on about serendipity for several weeks, and if you bear with me, it will all be out of my system in another column or two. Meanwhile, I have a story to share with you that smacks of serendipity, or kismet, or just dumb coincidence. Or maybe I’m just being delusional.

Something prompted me to start reading Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix. I’m not sure what it was, but I did. It might be because I saw him once, when I was a child. It was a rainy summer day in Seattle, and Jimi was doing what would turn out to be his final live show in his home town. The concert was at Sick’s Stadium, the same ball park where my dad took me to see minor league baseball and where I tasted my first wad of Double-Bubble Bubble Gum. My grandmother lived across the street (Empire Way, later renamed MLK Way) from the ball park, at Stadium Vista Apartments. I used to watch ball games either from her deck, or sitting atop the dumpster on the hillside above Empire Way, overlooking the field. It was 1970, and I don’t remember any of the songs Jimi performed, but I do remember how the rainfall shorted out Jimi’s guitar, giving him a pretty severe shock, and forcing him to sit out for a few minutes to recover. I was only twelve or thirteen, so the memories are as fuzzy as his amplifiers.

Getting back to the book, I was moved by the sensitivity with which author Charles Cross chronicled Jimi’s difficult childhood, his parent’s on-again/off-again marriage, the poverty, about how after he graduated from Leschi Elementary School, he attended Meany Junior High until his family moved and he had to switch to Washington Junior High.

Wait a minute, I thought. My mother went to Leschi Elementary, and then on to Meany Junior High. Then her family moved, and she had to switch to Washington.

Like Hendrix, my mother also attended Garfield High School. My mom was six years older than Jimi, so she would have never met him. But she may have crossed paths with another Garfield graduate, Quincy Jones.

I was intrigued, also, to learn that Jimi’s first live gig — not a very successful one, I might add — was held at Temple De Hirsch, the very synagogue I grew up attending.

But the biggest coincidence was when I read how Elvis Presley came to Seattle, and fourteen-year-old James “Buster” Hendrix just had to see the King of Rock and Roll in action. “Elvis played at Seattle’s Sick’s Stadium on September 1.” Cross writes about the 1957 show. “Jimi couldn’t afford the dollar-fifty ticket, so he watched the show from the hill that overlooked the stadium.”

There’s only one hill overlooking the stadium. Does this mean I’ve been experienced?