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I’d like to thank Jana DeLeon for creating her wonderful Miss Fortune World, including the delightful town of Sinful and all of its quirky residents. I’d especially like to thank her for allowing us to borrow her town and characters to play around with.
Thank you for reading my story. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you did enjoy it, I’d love it if you’d take just a minute to write a short review.
I’d like to share a few thoughts on the story:
Although I fictionalized the majority of the story, quite a few events included in the text actually happened. We all know the name Carmen was stricken from the lists of future hurricane names because of the massive damage it did in late August, and early September of 1974.
On Labor Day Eve, September 1, 1974, in Austin, Texas at the University of Texas’ Memorial Stadium, there really was a day-long concert, called “ZZ Top's First Annual Texas Sized Rompin' Stompin' Barn Dance and BBQ,” and as Gertie lamented, there wasn’t a single comma in the entire ad.
It was also ZZ Top’s last annual concert. The stadium didn’t host another concert for years because of the damage done by the estimated 80,000 attendees. Someone carved out the shape of the state of Texas in the astro-turf and at one point during the long wait between bands, some of the turf caught on fire and sent clouds of smoke billowing throughout the stadium.
It was Bad Company’s first-ever, live concert appearance, and Jimmy Page really did land by helicopter to accompany them on the guitar during their second set. Joe Cocker was so drunk when he took the stage, he actually projectile vomited while singing ‘You’re So Beautiful.’ Roadies were finally called upon to drag him off the stage.
The concessions ran out of everything during the first few hours of the concert, forcing people to get creative in obtaining food and drink in the one-hundred degree heat. Human pyramids and blanket tossing kept the concert attendees occupied during the intermissions between acts, which went on for hours, and caused numerous accidents. First aid stations were kept extremely busy throughout the entire day.
ZZ Top wasn’t very well known back then, they were a regional act, and the members of the band wore rhinestone-encrusted nudie suits and cowboy hats for their performance that night. They had little facial hair in 1974; their signature long beards were grown much later.
Paul John Knowles (April 17, 1946 – December 18, 1974), also known as “The Casanova Killer”, was a real serial killer who was on the run, traveling all over the country, during the summer and fall of 1974. His killing spree took the lives of at least eighteen people by late November when he was apprehended. He claimed to have killed dozens more, but only 18 deaths by his hand have ever been verified. He was fatally injured during a shoot-out with an FBI agent while trying to make an escape on December 18, 1974.
Toledo Bend Reservoir, east of Milan, TX, and west of Many, LA, was completed in 1969. To this day, the lake is best suited to shallow-draft power boats because of the large number of trees and stumps that still remain in the body of the lake. Walter’s rubber raft wouldn’t have lasted long in the recently flooded lake.
And, last, but certainly not least, Friday, September 13th of 1974 was the debut television broadcast of "The Rockford Files" starring James Garner on NBC-TV.