Let’s get back to the story. We were going to BYU when I left to take a vacation at the hospital. I wrote this before I went in the hospital and takes us up to David’s birth.
Now this was in 1968 or 1969 and there were no books of lists of records like there is today. No one had compiled what songs had made the Top 40. So, I told Ian, before you could gather the records, you had to know what records to gather. The first thing I did was to go to the BYU library and look up the microfilm of Billboard and Variety magazines starting in 1955 and I started writing. I filled notebooks, I still have them to this day. Each page was a week of charts. I wrote down every song that hit the Top 40 and put them in the notebook. Later I was able to transfer them to a computer and sort them, etc. But, in the beginning, it was all manual.
I spent many hours in the library pouring over the microfilm writing down the songs. That was the beginning of the collection. I don’t know if my grades suffered because of this. I’m sure I could have been doing homework or studying engineering stuff, but if you know me, then you know that the songs were very important to me. I don’t think, in the three years I spent at BYU, I did anything I enjoyed more than compiling those lists (outside of the family).
This was only the late 60’s, so I only had about 12 or 13 years to do to get caught up. Once I was caught up to the present, it was easy each week to keep up to date. I kept up to date and continued keeping track of the songs until the year 2000 when I retired from doing the Top 40.
Tomorrow: David comes into the world
Dad