No. 718 – Magic Man

Performer: Heart

Songwriters: Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson

Original Release: Dreamboat Annie

Year: 1976

Definitive Version: None

At Hastings Junior High, the first class everyday, at least in seventh and maybe eighth grade, was home room. After that, we’d break up into our math, English, social studies and science classes—my first exposure to rotating classrooms. My home-room proctor was my English teacher, Mrs. Goldsmith, whom I’ve mentioned.

Home room was based on alphabetical order, so I was in with a bunch of kids whose last name started with a C or a D. It was with some bemusement that I noted that Marty, who should have been in my home room, wasn’t.

It seemed illogical that my parents still could arrange it so Marty and I weren’t in the same class, but I had no other explanation for it. You would think that they had more important things on their mind, what with the pending divorce and all.

In those days, Hastings made announcements over the p.a. while the home-room proctors took attendance. Before the announcements, they’d play music, and it seemed as though every day in the early fall of 1976, this song was the one that was on during home room.

When I hear this song, I can remember the feeling of creeping fall—changing leaves and cool temperatures—and how nervous I was to be going to a bigger school with bigger and tougher kids … and girls who had breasts. And I think of Rick Colletti.

Rick was the first new kid I met at Hastings. He had gone to a different elementary school—Windemere I think—and although we weren’t really friends, we were friendly all the way through high school.

Actually we had little interaction after seventh grade. He played lacrosse and guitar and hung out with a cooler group of kids than I did. And then he—like most junior-high- and high-school kids I knew—completely faded from my life.

So you can imagine my surprise when just before my final quarter at Medill in the fall of 1987 at a meet and greet for incoming students, I once again met Rick Colletti.

We laughed and couldn’t believe the coincidence that we would be in the same class—the magazine-publishing project. What are the odds of two kids from the same seventh-grade home room taking the same graduate-school class 300 miles away 11 years later?

We worked together on the market-research component of the magazine project and hung out quite a bit during that time. I liked that I met up with someone from my old school whom I could show that I had changed since then. For someone who was often belittled in junior high (although never by Rick), this was important to me.

Our reunion was short-lived, and when the magazine-publishing class ended, we once again went our separate ways—Rick to continue his studies at Northwestern and me getting my first job in Michigan City, Ind.

About a year or so later, maybe two, I got my Medill magazine for alums one day and read that Rick Colletti had been killed in a car crash not long after graduating. He wasn’t the first of my former friends or associates to have died suddenly, and he wasn’t even the closest, but I definitely felt a shadow cross my heart when I read about his untimely passing.

So now it’s impossible for me to hear Magic Man and not think of him.