SKF NOTE: Tom McLaughlin is a friend, newspaper columnist, and a retired history teacher. He’s been writing his blog a long, long time. I enjoyed Tom’s recent story, Window on The Doors, about his chance meeting with John Densmore and Jim Morrison in 1967, when Tom was age 16, and The Doors weren’t famous.

Tom McLaughlin

Fifty years ago, I worked at the newly-built Holiday Inn at the intersection of Interstate 495 and Route 38 in Tewksbury, Massachusetts,  the town in which I grew up. I’d started in the summer of 1966 as a dishwasher, then a groundskeeper, and ultimately a porter carrying room service trays, vacuuming the lobby, setting up tables in function rooms, and emptying ashtrays. My father would often pick me up on his way home from work. I had my learner’s permit and he’d let me drive the rest of the way in our 1966 Chevrolet Biscayne.

Rock-and-roll groups stayed there when playing concerts at the Commodore Ballroom in Lowell. One of my jobs was putting red plastic letters up on the marquee to welcome them. Sometimes my father couldn’t drive me home and I’d hitchhike. One such evening in 1967, a late-model Buick Riviera pulled over and I hopped in. Driving was the drummer of The Doors, John Densmore.

Read Tom McLaughlin’s account of what happens next.