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She was in the sixth grade in 1970 when she fell in love with the boy in the singing group.
Not that she'd ever met him. She was a 12-year-old suburban girl who listened to his records and watched him on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was in a so-called "family group" - brothers and a sister and their mother who made records and toured the country. The group had a different image than the Beatles or the Who, but they had a couple of big hits.
"I was at the age when girls get crushes on boys, and the boys pay no attention, "she said recently. "you know - you would like a boy, but he would throw his gum at you."
So she devoted herself to the singer. "At recess we would play jump rope, and we would say who our husbands would be. I always said his name." She started to buy the popular teen magazines of the day just to look at his pictures. She discovered that in the backs of the magazines, there were pen pal sections; she could write to other girls who like the same group.
Through the pen pal network, she was able to purchase snapshots of the boy and his singing family. "Some of the fans got to take pictures when the group was in their towns," she said. "I literally had 300 or 400 pictures of him and his family."
She wrote to him many times but never received a reply. Her older brothers persuaded her that his group's music was terrible and turned her into a Rolling Stones fan. In the seventh grade, the boys stopped throwing their gum at her and began to take an interest in her.
Now she is 29, a copywriter with a large advertising agency. Recently at work she and some of her co-workers were reminiscing, and she said she wondered whatever happened to the group.
An art director said, "One of them was in a Bud Light commercial that we did."
She asked which one. It turned out it was the boy of her dreams.
She got out a videotape of the commercial. She had seen it before, but had not noticed her old fantasy boy. He didn't even have a speaking part. He was just sitting at the bar - a bit player. "He was a man," she said. "I guess I wanted him to have freckles, and that cute upturned nose, and that long, long brown hair."
The next day her art director friend handed her a piece of paper. "Here's his phone number," he said. The art director had phoned the boy idol's agent and the boy idol had said it would be OK for her to call.
So she did. They spoke for about 10 minutes. She tried to explain about once having the 300 or 400 snapshots of his family, but all he said was "Oh, yeah?" He told her he had been married and divorced; he was vague about what he was doing now. She got the impression that he was trying out for more bit parts in commercials.
Part of her was thinking, "Why didn't this happen when I was 12 years old?"
But part of her was thinking: "When I was 12, in my head he always said all the right words, and always wore all the nicest clothes, and when I was having a bad day, I would think about him at recess and he would be there. But I don't know anything about him. I never did."
Bob Greene is a native of Bexley. He writes his column for Tribune Media Services.
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