1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 5 - We'll Meet Again Old Friend

This is part of a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. This fifth article is all about the friends we make, the friends we lose, and the friends we keep.

Thirty years ago I walked across a stage, strutting like pro wrestling icon Ric Flair, grabbed my diploma, and began the slow walk from childhood to manhood. My sister Kate recorded much of that graduation ceremony on my old Sears camcorder. I cherish every second of it.

Even today, as the young faces pass by the camera on that tape, I remember so many of them like they are frozen in time. I feel as though those people who held the greatest importance in my life back then still do today.

The classic 1986 film Stand By Me has an iconic quote at the end that sticks with me to this day. Richard Dreyfuss as Gordie types: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?"

I wasn’t twelve when I graduated high school, but that line perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the friends I had back then. I’ve never had any like them since.

We were all learning and experiencing life for the first time together. We were succeeding, failing, laughing, loving, achieving, hurting, rebelling, being overwhelmed, and clinging on to each other as we rose and fell with the waves of teenage life. Those friends I made were not just friends; they were lifelong brothers and sisters.

When looking back at the people I called my friends as I graduated high school, I don’t look at a strict timeline. Many of those I’d have taken a bullet for I had already known for years by the time of caps and gowns. It was as if I already knew I’d found my tribe.

Doing some work in photography class.

Making friends is hard at any point in life. As an adult, it can feel like you’re applying for a job. As a kid, you’re putting yourself out there hoping that a stranger finds you worth getting to know better.

Being as shy and introverted as I was during my childhood, it’s a wonder I made any friends at all. Without luck, I’d have had to wait for a kickball to roll my way and use that as the opening to befriend whoever retrieved it.

My two oldest friends, Barry and Matt, came into my life through luck. Matt grew up across the street from me, and Barry happened to live a few doors down from my aunt. I’d go and visit her and invariably end up with Barry. I met both of them around the age of seven. Barry ended up being one of the most important and influential people in my life.

It’s interesting, as I sit here mining for memories going back 40 years, how I can’t remember those first meetings with people who went on to become chosen family. Oh sure, I can give you the Cliff’s Notes version of when someone crossed paths with me. I can share some early memories. However, the first meeting is a blur in virtually all of these cases. I guess you don’t realize that someone has become an integral part of your life until a certain amount of time has passed.

Hasan lived a few streets over from me. I know we bumped into each other during the summer before 6th grade. We built a bond like steel. He came from the city to Cape Cod and taught me about late 80’s/early 90s Hip-Hop. We played basketball. Rarely was it one-on-one because he’d crush me every time. So we’d do these two-against-zero games against opponents we called the ‘invisible ghosts.’

Tim lived further away, but our origin story is similar, revolving around a shared love of basketball. I remember sleepovers at his house often being punctuated by freshly made donuts the next morning by his parents. It was the Jerky Boys, walks through the woods to get to a nearby strip mall, and countless hours of me trying to figure out how to defend his patented ‘Fishy Swim’ fallaway jumper.

John I had seen around in middle school, but only when we sat next to each other in Freshman English did we connect. It was our just slightly wacky sense of humor that made us friends. I wish I still had my English notebook where we’d one-up each other with foolish lines and drawings, rarely paying attention to what the teacher said. To be honest, I would have had an easier time hearing an ant speak than that teacher, though.

Rob, much like Matt, happened to live close by. Our families were heavily intertwined, but it was only when I entered high school and bought a camcorder that we truly connected. He and I were the typical feral Gen Xers. Out all day on our bikes, going places we’d probably have needed permission to go, junk food, caffeine, crazy ideas, and laughs that brought tears.

Liam was another stroke of luck. We happened to work at the same job at the same time. Standing side by side with him, preparing food while music blasted loudly off the walls, ended up becoming some of my fondest memories of high school. Some funny lines we said back then we still bring up to this day.

There was a massive influx of new friends when I got to high school. My high school saw two neighboring towns’ middle schools combine into one blended family. It was an interesting transition. I played for the basketball team in middle school. A few of the new faces in the halls of the high school were once rivals on the other middle school team. It took a minute to realize we were all on the same team now.

New faces like Steve, Greg, Mike, Kevin, Pete, and others quickly went from strangers to major parts of my crew. Our interactions varied depending on the person. Greg, Mike, and Kevin became frequent subjects of photos during senior year.

An attempt at an artsy photo of those three.

I was taking a photography class and had to practice using a film camera. Those three would pose, or something like that, in the middle of classes. It was my job to hit up the darkroom and develop the foolishness that we created. To this day, Mike insists he wasn’t in any of those photos. The joke is on him, though. He has aged very well, so he looks almost the same today.

During high school, I was at the mercy of my bike, walking, or occasional rides to hang out with friends. I didn’t get my driver’s license until senior year, and even then I had infrequent access to a vehicle, what with me being one of five kids and having a mother working full-time and going to nursing school full-time.

It was a different era in the 1990s. You didn’t sit inside on a phone, playing video games, or watching television. Well, sure, we did all of those things to a degree, but for the most part life consisted of calling friends, quickly getting off the phone, and getting out of the house to have some sort of an adventure.

You quickly learn who your ‘ride or die’ friends are based on the level of stupidity they were willing to join you on. Wandering through the woods? Sneaking into a construction site to explore half-built houses? Hanging out of the back of a station wagon riding a skateboard? Drinking Jolt and creating caffeine-soaked skits with a bulky camcorder? These were only a few examples of what I’m talking about.

Yes, we drove something like this while someone rode a skateboard out of the back.

A classic ride-or-die story happened freshman year. Hasan and I went to a party at another friend’s house. It was in the next town over; we must have been dropped off there. It was populated by probably 8-10 more kids, but it was over thirty years ago, so my memory is hazy. What’s not hazy is how the party ended.

I am sure we were loud. I think there was at least some alcohol there, but I don’t think Hasan and I had more than a few sips at most. It was when the red and blue lights started flashing that we knew the jig was up. The police were there.

All of us 15/16 year old kids scattered. People were going in all different directions. Hasan and I though stuck together. One wouldn’t leave the other. We ran through yards, behind houses, tearing through trees and bushes until we were safely behind a nearby strip mall. It was part terrifying and part exhilarating.

At the strip mall, I called my mother to come and pick us up. We stood in front of a darkened store and waited, letting our heart rates come down. The fact that we hadn’t drunk worked in our favor. When my mother showed up, we didn’t reek of alcohol, so when we told her the story of what had happened, it was believable.

I feel like growing up in the 90s, I had a lot of near misses when it came to danger. I don’t think I’d have gotten in much trouble if the police had snagged me, but who knows? Being a minor, I knew I could do nearly anything I wanted with little repercussions.

That doesn’t mean that I went out defacing people’s property, or starting fights, or stealing. It just meant that the voice in my head telling me something was dangerous kept quiet a lot of the time. Maybe it wanted to see how I’d react to adversity?

I find it interesting that I didn’t go out drinking, or smoking, or partying until all hours of the night, and yet I feel my high school years were filled with adventure. That comes down to who my friend group was.

What the ‘cool kids’ would have thought of as adventures I saw as dangers not worth the time or risk. Now I can’t say for sure that if I was asked to go out drinking and partying and randomly hooking up that I would have said no. I can say that, looking back at the classmates who got DUI’s before they were of legal age and those who held their own children before holding a diploma, I am happy with my choices in friends and adventures.

I chose wisely when it came to friends. I also didn’t restrict myself to any certain subset of people. Only in the last few years have I noticed just how all-encompassing my friend groups were. Yes, I said ‘groups.’

I can rattle off a handful of different groups of friends. These had very little, if any, cross-pollination with other groups. I tried to be friends with anybody who wanted to be friends. It’s the way I was raised by my mother. I tried to fit in with anyone while also staying true to who I was.

Being seen as a poser is a kiss of death in any generation. If you lose your authenticity, you lose credibility. At least that’s how it was in high school. The way I navigated those waters was by amplifying traits around certain groups. I never hid who I fully was; I just shined a brighter light on the things I had in common with the people I was with at the time. Does that make sense?

I must have done a good job in my choices of friends because, as I said earlier, I still consider many of those same people my friends to this day. There are also no friends, not acquaintances but friends, that I regret knowing or having in my life. I think it’s rare to look at your friend group and not find someone who turned out to be a bad apple. I mean, unless we all were bad apples and none of us noticed the difference?

Friendships in high school changed and evolved along with all of us. You start with needing rides to someone's house to using your bike or your own car. Adventures go from walking to the corner store on a summer afternoon to driving to Boston for a killer, loud, AC/DC concert. Relationships could come and go, but friendships tended to stay.

A replica of my concert T since I have no clue where it is.

In my life today, I have more than a handful of friends of over thirty years. Now we don’t get to see each other all of the time due to work, family commitments, and location. That being said, if a friend reaches out to get together, I try my best to move whatever I need to see them.

I still remember inside jokes. I still remember certain foods certain friends liked. I still remember who was in what class. Mainly, I still remember how these people made me feel and why they became my friends in the first place. I think that is the most important thing.

Over time, specific memories might fade. That’s just the price of doing business in life. Feelings remain, though. If I hear any of a few dozen names from high school, whether they are still fixtures in my life or not, I get a smile and a blast of warm positive feelings.

We were all teenagers. We all went through the experience of finding ourselves in the world. If we are lucky, we have a solid crew of friends to navigate the choppy waters with. Very few grow up on one straight, clear path. It’s typically filled with twists, turns, dead ends, heartbreak, confusion, anger, and possibly, if a Gen Xer, indifference.

To wrap things up, I found one song that stuck out to me as far as my high school friendships went. Not surprisingly, it is a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. They were a band that made you cool if you listened to them, along with the Beastie Boys. At least it was in my circles.

The song is My Friends off of their less-than-stellar One Hot Minute album from 1995. The entire song weighs heavily on my memories of high school. The hook, I guess, is the lyrics I gravitated toward.

I love all of you
Hurt by the cold
So hard and lonely, too
When you don't know yourself




It’s a perfectly fitting sentiment. We were growing up, trying to find ourselves, but also knew that even as alone as you might have felt at times, if you were lucky, you had some friends to stand by you through those formative years.

In my next post, I will take a look at my family dynamic during senior year and a look at the role of family in the life of any high schooler. All families are created differently, as was mine.

John Morgan and Pufferbellies: In Their Footsteps - Cape Cod History

c. Kings of Cape Cod

    One of the last true nightclubs that remained from Cape Cod’s Golden Age of the 1970s and 1980s, Pufferbellies’ story began in the waning years of the 19th century as part of the height of the railroad era in the United States.  

    The 12,000-square-foot brick building which would a century later house a legendary and sometimes infamous club, started its life in 1895 as a railroad roundhouse owned by the Penn Central company. The double-thick brick walls, which were installed to soften the sounds of the old-school railroad engines that would enter the roundhouse, would come in handy when the argument for turning the building into a nightclub came into play.

    Penn Central filed for bankruptcy in 1970 with many of its properties on Cape Cod going into limbo.  Much of the rail line east of Dennis would eventually become the route for the Cape Cod Rail Trail.  The twelve acres of land located between Iyannough Road and Center Street was seen as a prime location for a revitalization of Downtown Hyannis.  In the Summer of 1978 Leonard Healy, then-owner of the nearby Velvet Hammer nightclub, had attempted to purchase the land and had his offer rejected.  The property went back on the auction block.

    It was around this same time that a burgeoning Cape Cod legend was looking for a spot of his own.  John Morgan had been supplying locals with countless hours of fun with his ‘John Morgan Happy Hours’ for over a decade by the time of Healy’s failed bid for the former Penn Central property.  

    Morgan had debuted on the Cape at the Chuck Wagon in Harwich in 1965 when just out of college. He moved on to the Improper Bostonian/Your Father’s Mustache in Dennis Port before leasing the Sandy Pond Club in 1971 for three years and calling it The Groggery at Sandy Pond. Morgan played to crowds dotted all across New England, and these people became devotees. 

    On Cape Cod, after leaving the Sandy Pond Club he settled in as a regular performer at Dick Doherty’s Crystal Palace in Hyannis where Morgan remained for seven years. Eventually, Morgan had visions of his own nightclub and even offered to buy the Crystal Palace, but Doherty was not ready to sell.  So Morgan was on the lookout, which brought him to the former Penn Central property in downtown Hyannis.

    In late 1980, Morgan purchased the former railroad roundhouse from the Eldredge and Bourne Moving Company for $100,000 ($385,520 in 2025).  In early 1981, he made a pitch for a new nightclub, a place where the younger generation, locals and visitors alike, could congregate.  His plan was a 700-seat restaurant and club to be named Pufferbellies, another name for a steam locomotive.  The new nightclub was approved and from its opening on May 8, 1981, it became an immediate hit.

    “We knew it would be a home run,” Morgan said, “but it turned out to be a Grand Slam.”

    The 12,500-square-foot brick roundhouse could hold 1,500 people with a stage, three bars, and even an outdoor volleyball area. Although seen as mainly a nightclub and bar Morgan did receive an outside dining permit in 1983 so that if anybody did choose to eat they had the option of enjoying fresh air.  

Pufferbellies in 2013(Wikimedia Commons)

    Of course Morgan continued to draw in the crowds to his Happy Hours, so popular were they that special drinks and specials like two-for-one were not necessary to bring in the masses.  They came to see John Morgan, sing along with him, and be a part of the crowd. Musical acts from Boston-based The Freeze to nationally known ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic would come down to the Cape to take the stage at Pufferbellies early on.  In later years bands like Blue Oyster Cult, Sevendust, and Powerman 5000 would grace the stage.  The new nightclub was a hit.

    One big reason for the routinely packed Pufferbellies was the advertising campaign. The brainchild of Morgan and local radio DJ Gary Titus. Morgan bought "a thousand ads" to play on popular Cape Cod radio stations 106 WCOD and Cape 104.7 WKPE.  Titus put them together, and they hit the airways, making sure that twice an hour, people heard an ad for Pufferbellies.  The campaign worked. 

    Morgan had a staff of one hundred employees at his club dressed in button-down Oxford shirts with his nightclub’s name embroidered on them.  This was a stark contrast to some night spots at the time which simply dressed their employees in t-shirts.  Morgan’s care and attention to detail paid off.  

    After five seasons of running Pufferbellies Morgan was getting burned out. For example, Morgan stocked his club with only Budweiser beer. To keep up with demand, Morgan bought an entire tractor trailer worth of beer at a time. That adds up to a staggering 2,300 cases of beer.

    “It took a lot of work to have 1,500 people come in for the afternoon,” Morgan said, “and then have to get them out, clean up, and bring in another 1,500 for the night.”

    All of this added up to Morgan selling his nightclub in 1986 to Peter and Jeanne White, who owned the Boston Fish House, for $3.1 million($9 million in 2025).  He still performed his Happy Hours, but as far as he was concerned, his nightclub-owning days were over.  

The iconic sign and entrance in 2014(Google Maps)

    Within a few years though, Morgan had bought back his nightclub, however, the place was not the same. Without Morgan at the helm, Pufferbellies had suffered. More than that the times were changing in the late 1980s into the early 1990s.

    The liquor liability laws affected business. Harsher drunk-driving penalties made patrons think twice about heading out to clubs. These were a few of the things that led to Morgan shortening the club’s schedule. For the majority of the 1990s, Pufferbellies was only open two days a week, with Morgan saying in 2001 that business was only "a twentieth of what it was in the 1980s." He had wanted to use the brick roundhouse building for other purposes such as conventions, weddings, or other functions, but it never came to be. The changes eating away at the club continued until 2015 Morgan happily sold the property once and for all to the HyLine Ferry for $1.96 million.

Pufferbellies' website in 1999.(Archive.org)

    At its peak Pufferbellies was the place to go for fun and entertainment on Cape Cod. Morgan remembered how in the days before cell phones everybody had to make plans to meet out somewhere and there were fewer options, the drinking age was eighteen, plus the large Baby Boomer generation was in their prime.  

    Now there is an overload of options, the drinking laws are different with the age being twenty-one, and the Baby Boomers are becoming senior citizens. Times have changed but Morgan fondly remarked: “We had a lot of fun.”

    Pufferbellies was the last of the giants of the Golden Age to fade away. However, John Morgan didn’t miss it once it was gone. He kept himself busy performing his Happy Hours and drawing in big crowds even as his health began to suffer. Right up until the end, John Morgan remained one of the Kings of Cape Cod.  

    John Morgan passed away on August 27, 2024, at the age of eighty. He was a major driving force behind what made the Golden Age of Cape Cod nightlife so special.

    I’d like to share a few personal John Morgan memories to close out this blog.

    When working on the book Cape Cod Nights in 2017 and 2018 I had a dream list of people to interview. At the top of the list was John Morgan. He was friends with my Uncle Bob but I tried not to use that as an in-road. I wanted my book to be reason enough for him to give me some of his time.

    I was thrilled by how accommodating he was. Friendly, warm, and very forthcoming with any information I needed to make my Pufferbellies chapter of the book the best it could be. I referred to him either as ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr. Morgan,’ although I think he would have preferred I simply call him John. To me it was showing respect to a man of his stature.

    All of the quotes attributed to John Morgan above are from my interview with him in 2018.

    I was honored that he came out to the launch of my Cape Cod Nights book. I made sure to acknowledge him to the audience so that he could get the rousing cheers he deserved. This became a fun running gag as my Uncle Bob, seated next to him, would raise his hand several times during my event so that he could again announce that John Morgan was there.

    It was through following the Kings of Cape Cod group on Facebook that I learned of John Morgan’s health issues in 2023. He hosted his final legendary Happy Hour on June 12, 2024, at Jake Rooney’s in Harwich. I could not attend, but little did I know that I’d get a special parting gift from the man himself.

    I got a message on Facebook from John Morgan on June 8th. He told me that his daughter had played my podcast episode where I recounted the story of Pufferbellies. He told me it was great and thanked me for capturing those memories.

    John Morgan thanked me. I responded how thrilled I was that he enjoyed it. I also thanked him again for being a part of my Cape Cod Nights book. I finished it off by thanking him for all of the good times he gave to so many Cape Codders. Yes, I also called him Mr. Morgan again.

    His response was a simple ‘crying tears of joy’ emoji. John Morgan passed away only two months after that message. I am so honored that he took the time in his declining health to thank me, me, for capturing memories of the Golden Age. John Morgan created those memories, all I did was write them down.

    Thank you, Mr. Morgan, for everything. Cape Cod was a better place for decades because of you.

    For those interested a memorial bench has been created in the memory of John Morgan. It is being dedicated on April 26, 2025, at the Hyannis Transportation Center at 209 Iyannough Road in Hyannis. If you are reading this after that date, the bench is there for you to visit.

c. Kings of Cape Cod