The Observation Deck

It's 11:33am as I begin typing here. This morning, I was looking at many posts, the signs, the box photos (great pics btw) and the city in general. During the 20 some years on the road as a "road musician", I saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. Big cities, burbs, and small towns were the norm. But ..I still choose Lakewood as my home. Now that both my mom and dad passed, we could go somewhere else, but we choose not. For each negative someone highlights, they seem like blessings compared to some places we performed at.
Vegas was great. Grand openings of luxury hotels were fantastic. Then, there were the little hamlets. One had a bar, a gas-station and a Krogers. At night, the teens brought out their "detroit" iron and leaned, in the Kroger parking lot. That was the recreation there.
That community, at the time, didn't even have a name on the highway.
(Thought, lets send THEM some signs, and make them feel good?)

When you get to the root of the matter, I love this city. Who knows, maybe someone will put signs up to explain the signs that are already there. Someone might build boxes to cover the boxes. Most likely some executive thought of that already.

Compare our hospital, the efficiency of the Police and Fire departments, and the
EMS crews, who do amazing things every day, to XXXXXXXBurg, in so many other states, let alone Ohio, and we have it pretty darn good, in my opinion.

Here, if you ask for directions, someone is bound to assist. It might not be where you want to go, but hey, yano ? So I join Brother Gary Rice and my Adopted Earthly Dad, Bob Rice, and lay down a few choruses of "HAPPY" by Pharrell Williams and pretend we know what those signs all mean

Hi Mark,

Hummm.....That's one tune that neither Dad nor I know.

Sure like the title though.

Mark's absolutely spot-on as to some of reasons that we like Lakewood. We've been here since 1958, and in spite of what some may believe, we really don't think that it's changed nearly as much as some might have you believe.

And for us at least, that's a very good thing indeed.

Now as then, this town and its people start growing on you and before long, we all start to become a virtual extended family. Many of us Lakewoodites came here from other places, leaving close friends and relatives behind, for the simple reason that the Greater Cleveland area often provided better opportunities than the hills and hollers and the small towns that we came from. Here, we developed new friends and new virtual families.

It's been so good, and we're glad that we came here...

...as others have said; the small town feel and the big city advantages, all wrapped into one.

Merry Christmas to all.

Gary, with Bob Rice

Here's a link to "Happy" by Pharrell Williams ..Enjoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Sxv-sUYtM