So here's my story...

I was born in Huntington, Long Island, New York. My dad, Charles (Chuck) Kingsley was from Port Washington, Long Island, New York. Dad was a Navy flight instructor during WW II and was stationed at the US Navy base that was located in Norman Oklahoma during the 40's & 50's. Dad met my mom, Elise Johnson, at the Monterrey restaurant (now known as 'the Mont'). After the war he moved to Long Island and was a captain for Eastern Airlines. I have a great sister, Karen, who is alive and well. I also had a cool younger brother, Scott, who died of AIDS in 1984. 

As a youngster I was pretty shy and a little overweight, but somewhere around my tenth or eleventh birthday that would start to change. My friend Myles’s Father was determined to make his son a top-notch ball player. As I understood it his father had made it to the New York Giants baseball team, unfortunately a severe ankle injury in spring training ended that dream. Myles Sr. was even more serious about turning his son into a great baseball player. Myles played short stop and needed someone to throw to at first base after he fielded the dozens of balls that were hit at him by his father. When it was time to switch over to batting practice someone had to play the outfield when Myles had his turn at bat. So, there I was learning to play first base, the outfield, hitting, and in the process running myself into pretty good shape. My confidence grew and all this work helped me in every other aspects of my life. Myles and I kept this up on our own time for the next four or five years.

I went to Lloyd Harbor grade school and Cold Spring Harbor High School in Long Island graduating in 1966. Most summers I played baseball on Long Island. In the early 60's I spent two summers at Ted Williams Baseball Camp in Lakeville, MA. I idolized Mickey Mantle, but it was hard to beat Ted Williams in the flesh. Ted was at the camp almost every day and you could hear his sharply pointed advice from long distances. His direct way of correcting you was usually peppered with profanity. I was elected to the Ted Williams Camp Hall of Fame in 1962 - I'm still waiting on my photo with Ted presenting the award to me...       
                         An Inning with Ted Williams - a baseball camp story

Summer vacations also included almost yearly trips to Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle. My mother's father, Neil R. Johnson, and his brothers ran a family farming and ranching business which also included some oil & gas production. Their operations were started by my great-great grandfather, Montford T. Johnson, in the Indian territory in and around the Chickasaw Nation many years before statehood in 1907. Montord's eldest son, E.B. or Ed, continued the growth of the business after the Dawes commission broke up the Chickasaw and other Indian nations before statehood and eventually turned the business over to Neil Johnson's generation. 

Back in Long Island, my friend Barry Lapidus and I used a boat and scuba gear to make a little spending money in Cold Spring Harbor and Huntington Harbor. Our little freelance operation we jokingly called the "K & L Diving Company" performed light underwater salvage, finding lost anchors and other items and cleaned barnacles and algae from the bottoms of racing sailboats. 

By early 1964, the pendulum was starting to swing away from our beloved baseball toward a new area, rock and roll music.  Inspired and stimulated by the Beatles, the British Invasion and innovators like Bob Dylan some friends and I decided to start a  rock & roll band - The Mayhems. I borrowed a snare drum from a neighbor's dad and we started learning to play songs by the Beatles, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones and other popular artists of the day. As time went on I acquired a set of blue sparkle Ludwig drums and The Mayhems played local high school dances,  sock-hops, battles of the bands and any other gig we could get.   

On November 11, 1965, The Mayhems opened for the popular group the New Christy Minstrels at Cold Spring Harbor High School. We used their amps and drums to make changing bands quicker and easier. In the picture from left to right are: Mike Collins (bass & lead vocals), Neil Kingsley (drums & vocals), Myles McLaughlin (guitar & vocals) and Joe Arena (lead guitar & vocals). High school was basically going all right excluding periodic delusions about playing professional baseball or playing in a famous rock and roll band. Fortunately I got to live out those fantasies even if it was only on a very amateur level. Both of those activities brought me a lot of pleasure. I was also lucky to have had two long-term, nice, smart, funny, and caring girl friends through high school. 

By 1967 baseball was back to being a past time. Other than the occasional trip to see the New York Mets at the Polo Grounds or Shea Stadium those baseball Saturdays were spent in Greenwich Village looking for Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley records or going to the Fillmore East, Central Park Shaeffer Beer Concerts, the Cafe A-Go-Go, or the Academy of Music Theater to see The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Animals, The Cream, The Blues Project, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and many other bands.  

Home life began to get a little stickier in the early 1960s. We lived on Camel Hollow Road in Lloyd Harbor. There was Savage's Pond across from the entrance of our road and a beach on Cold Spring Harbor at the other end. There was a road association that organized periodic work days to make road improvements which also included building a boat house, a large float for swimmers, and jetties that would captures and to make the beaches easier on the feet. During the 1950s and early 1960s the communal cooperation between the families on Camel Hollow was really something wonderful to behold. The majority of the fathers were either engineers or airline pilots and the projects they took on, especially at the beach, were impressive.

Life was getting a little dicier for my father and his flying career. Starting in the late 1950s aviation was having some growing pains of its own. There were a number of crashes in the airline industry caused by engineering design problems, midair collisions, 'mad' bombers, weather, and some possible pilot error. Dad lost two fellow Eastern pilot friends in a very short time and the stress was apparent even to his children. What we didn't or couldn't know in those days is that he was falling into a deep depression that would cost him his career in professional aviation and eventually tear the family apart in a divorce. It would take over ten years to repair our relationship with our father.

This too is a period in which the United States still has a military draft and a rapidly expanding armed presence in Vietnam. Every eighteen-year-old male has to register for the draft. In those days in New York State registering for the draft was a double-edged sword because it also meant that a person was legal to purchase and drink alcohol. The easiest way to stay out of the draft if that was your desire was to finish high school, attend college, and stay in school as long as possible. Many young men who didn't feel strongly about going to college took a long strong look at applying seeing that the military option had some possible lethal consequences. I was pretty much in that camp. By the end of my senior year, for whatever the reason, I was very much adrift. Our high school guidance counselor recommended applying to three levels of colleges with the third level being the fall back or the guaranteed acceptance. I applied to the University of Oklahoma wanting only to get away from home, stay out of the draft, and away from Vietnam. There was nothing about that experience that I was interested in participating in.

The summer of 1966 was spent playing some baseball, performing at a few house parties with The Mayhems, going into New York City, up to Woodstock, swimming, mowing yards, scrubbing boat bottoms, driving home often just before sunrise on the Lloyd Neck Causeway listening to the Stones playing 'Paint it Black' and drinking a good deal of beer with my friends and fellow graduates. The night before I left for Oklahoma I (very) tearfully put my French exchange student girl friend on a Pan Am flight back home to Paris. I finished the night off at my favorite bar, The Village Inn, careening home in our maroon 1963 Chevy station wagon in time for three hours of sleep. Early the next morning the family retraced my route to the airport with a heavy heart and a numbing hangover as I headed west. Ah, talk about change.   

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