Where it all began

I’ve been wondering lately how to conclude this blog. After all, I can’t go on writing about my Rick Springfield crush forever, right? Today I think I found a good way to do this.

I was at my dad’s house today – the house where I grew up – and I decided to check in his backyard shed to see if there was any Rick Springfield memorabilia from my childhood there. And there was! I don’t know why I didn’t think of checking there earlier, I guess I just assumed it got thrown out at some point.

Let’s just say that I understand now why one of my aunts once expressed concern to my mom about my Rick Springfield obsession. I guess I was a little obsessed. Not only did I find a big pile of the posters that covered my walls throughout my junior high and high school years, but I found scrapbooks filled with articles and pictures that I clipped from teen magazines, fan club letters (I had forgotten that “Hard to Hold” was originally called “Forever One,” which I remembered after finding a letter showing that I joined the “Forever One” fan club, too), concert ticket stubs and even a “How Well Do You Know Rick Springfield?” quiz that I wrote for a  high school assignment, which involved working in small groups to create a newspaper. I also found a dusty copy of a book titled “Rick Springfield.”

As of today, this blog’s 189 posts (this is #190) have had about 12,500 views since I started it 21 months ago. I know the majority of the hits were from random “Rick Springfield” searches, but for those of you who followed the blog, thank you for reading it and I thought I’d share these super cool findings with you.

A 1985 newsletter from the RS fan club – announcing the birth of Rick and Barbara’s oldest son, Liam. Also a mention of RS’s nomination for a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He finally got his star on May 9, 2014.

I made two scrapbooks, made from  pieces of construction paper taped together and filled with clippings of articles and photos.

 

 

“Don’t Talk to Strangers” sheet music

I forgot about this magazine!

Quiz from high school newspaper assignment

Not sure what those brown spots are, but I’m going with it’s just old.

I thought it would be fun to unfold all the posters and spread them out on the floor of my dad’s living room to see them once again. There were quite a few!

From this angle, you can kind of imagine how my bedroom walls looked with the posters:

Then I folded all the posters away and stuck them, along with the rest of the discovered treasures, safely in a drawer in my childhood desk at my dad’s house to look at again another time.

Thank you so much for reading this blog – and thank you to Rick Springfield for all the years of joy and inspiration (hopefully you won’t think I’m too much of a nut after seeing all this). I’ve had so much fun writing it and reconnecting with my inner teen – and this journey to the past has had a significant impact on several aspects of my life.

Thank you also to all the generous RS fans out there for sharing videos and other information. (To new RS fans, check out the “Rick Springfield sites” page on this blog to find sites where you can find nearly everything you’d want to know about Rick Springfield – there are also Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts that will keep you posted on his latest work.)

Maybe I’ll see you at a future Rick Springfield concert!