Toni Bach
 


 

Memories of Toni Bach
by John Bogert
 

Note: Toni's memorial is an excerpt from an article written by John Bogert that appeared in the Daily Breeze -      a Torrance, California newspaper

Even now, at an age when this sort of thing is increasingly likely, it was hard to see my first car date listed among the dead on my high school reunion Web site.

There was just a name, Toni Bach, and a picture of her taken in 1967 at the Burdines Department Store studio. In those days, before the art-directed cool-guy color layouts of modern yearbooks, we were all set up for future ridicule - bubble-haired or surfer fluffed - by the same disgruntled photographer.

On sticky south Florida summer days we'd borrow faux gowns or white dinner jackets off hooks in dim changing rooms with Toni surviving all this better than most, looking sharp-eyed and pretty in a picture taken two years after that first date - a date played out in a ratty 1958 Ford that had already been hard-used by two sisters before it got to me salt-corroded with a dashboard sagging from the smacking it took to jerk the radio's vacuum tubes alive.

If it had been any other date in that lost age of dating, in the last moment of a time when boys met parents and opened doors, when home-arrival times were clearly stated and fatherly violence implied, if it had been my third date or 20th, the details would not remain as clear. But there they were waiting to be recognized when I saw her name on a list that included too many good people.

My older cousin clued me in on the handshakes and mom-compliments, on the back-by-11 promise. I even threw in the name of the movie we were going to, though we didn't go to a movie. What I didn't expect, what delighted me in my nervous state, was Toni standing there in a Villager dress with a smile on her face that said, "Get me out of here!"

It was a sudden and mutual moment of exultation come to us at the very apex of the American century. We had wheels and we were going out alone in a car for the very first time. I remember Toni wrapping both her arms through mine as we walked away from her front door, away from a beaming mom and a frowning dad, who ran a shoe store and wore a tie in the house. I remember how this girl, who would take such delight in touching pinkies when we passed in hallways, took a small leap into the air.

"We're alone!" she told the warm October night.

I know the date, too, or nearly. I turned 15 on Oct. 7 and this was the following weekend, a meeting arranged even before the state of Florida took my ability to parallel park between concrete-filled barrels and the fact that I hadn't wrecked in two years of provisional driving as proof that I was qualified to hurl around in a 2-ton junker with a 90-pound girl tucked under my skinny right arm.

Sure, it sounds criminal now. But then it felt like we had both been loosed from the chains holding us in a stultifying low-Earth orbit, from an envious year of watching juniors and seniors enjoying lives that resembled Chevy commercials.

She said, "I don't want to waste the night in a movie."

Why sit still when we could drive and drive? Which is what we did, heading north on the dream highway, A1A, a sandy-shouldered two-lane stretching north past the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach through flat, moonlit, balmy infinity in a Florida that had not yet been loved to death.

With all four windows down and the radio tuned to WQAM Miami, powering past coconut palms and a softly breaking sea, this was surely a hint of the heaven to come.

And I can't recall ever again feeling more in control of my own life and destiny, more in charge and invincible as the salty nighttime wind passed through us like a ghost of possibility.

Like that night, like all things good and bad that we knew so little of, Toni and I didn't last. I don't recall why, exactly, other than we were 15 and convinced of our uniqueness on this Earth.

There was, after all, so much ahead, so many other pretty people and so much to be done, an infinity of things that quickly passed.

Submitted by John Bogert 7/30/07
 

 

If you have memories of Toni you would like to share, please contact the webmaster:  graham@stranahan67.com