Sid drove his old flathead engine car home and we followed in Honest Al’s flashy red Alfa Romeo. The farm was in a lovely part of Vermont, farm fields stone walls, and mostly long straight country roads. But soon Sid took us up into the hills, where paved roads gave way and dirt roads took over.

I have to think that for the low-slung Alfa there may have been some scary moments where rocks threatened to rip out the oil pan, but we made it.

Sid and Barb’s place was a funky farm house on a noteably steep hillside. I remember gardens around the house, but not much in the way of fields. It might have been dark when we finally arrived.

Sid’s “arbitrarily good wife” greeted us warmly, and the two kids seemed happy to have visitors. There was a girl and a boy, a few years apart.

Barb’s kitchen made a powerful statement about her values and prissy housekeeping was not her thing. Dirty dishes and pots and pans covered the counters in slanted heaps, to the point where it would have been difficult to add one more coffee cup to the arrangement.

Sid and Barb were not hippies; they were really from the beat generation. The house was generally funky, but finding a place to sit at the big (handmade?) wooden dining room table was not hard.

I expect that Barb made and served us dinner though I have no memory of it and given the state of the kitchen I might be blocking out dinner memories.

Sid liked his beer and extolled its health benefits. And he would often talk in the morning about the value of having a beer with breakfast to ease a hangover. He always called it “the hair of the dog that bit you.”

Starting that first night Sid gave us impassioned lectures about the importance of alternative energy and getting off the grid, for both political and spiritual reasons.

I would think we must have spent the night there, but again, no memory of exactly where we slept, and I doubt we had packed for overnight.

What was supposed to be a day trip to meet with Hurley and Remaily had turned into something else; when we met Sid we went through the looking glass and entered an intriguing new world; trivia such as tooth brushes and clean clothes did not enter into it.

One clear memory is that Sid and Barb’s son was stricken with cystic fibrosis and they had to do an elaborate process of clapping him on the chest and back every night before bed to clear his lungs. It was actually done in a matter of fact way, but seemed like a rather loving nightly ritual.

Honest Al and Sid had bonded deeply over technology stuff: Sid was in the throws of co-inventing the Synclavier, one of the first electronic synthesizers, and there was a lot of energy and excitement about it. And it did become a breakthrough product used by major musicians including  Frank Zappa, Pat Metheny, and Pete Townshend.

Here is a quote from Sid’s partner Cameron Warner Jones:

“Over forty years ago, Sydney Alonso and I invented a musical instrument that revolutionized the music industry.

Frank Zappa spent the last ten years of his life composing music on my instrument; for that I am honored.”

From time to time we would drive back up and visit Sid again, more often in the funky used cars that I drove, such as the $25 Ford Fairlane that I bought from a great fellow named Sal in Charlestown.

I had gathered that car insurance was not required for a car registered in Vermont and that was pretty attractive in those days of relative poverty.

I needed a Vermont mailing address so I got a post office box from Varney’s general store in South Strafford. And I must have gone to a registry office somewhere in Vermont, but have no memory of that.

But I did have to check my mail from time to time, which meant driving from Cambridge to Varney’s store to look in my mailbox.

One morning I set out very early for Vermont, but first had to stop at MIT to get something. There was a light coating of snow on Mass Ave and not a car in sight. So I pulled into a parking spot, and for some reason decided to back up a little bit – and backed right into something. Somebody had appeared out of nowhere and pulled up right behind me and I hit his car. But not hard enough to do any damage. But to this day I never ever assume anything about other drivers; if on a snow-covered empty street a car will pull up right behind you as you park, then absolutely anything can happen. This awareness and that unexpected early morning surprise car stays with me every time I drive.

Visiting Sid with those iffy cars always meant parking facing down the steep driveway so that if the battery was dead I could still jump start the car by rolling it down the hill and popping out the clutch.

(In those days all our cars were standard transmission by choice and by pride; it took many years of city traffic before Honest Al or I would give in to automatic transmissions. Also, you can’t jump start a car with auto transmission by rolling it down a hill.)

At one point I went to visit Sid and Barb in my Opel Kadett, a tiny low powered import. It was midwinter and I didn’t have snow tires plus which at night and in winter I was iffy on the route. I went down a long hill and then could not make it up the other side. I backed up and tried a few more times and my experience growing up on our own steep hill paid off: I was finally able to race the car over the hump, find the right road, get to Sid and Barb’s and not freeze to death on a lonesome dirt road at night in Vermont.

I mentioned in Part One that the guys we ran into at the farm were very comfortable in standard old male-female roles: they loved having their women folks cook and clean while they drank and told stories. And I guess for a while the women folk went along with it.

But on one of my trips up there Sid told me that the women folk had in fact had a major political awakening and announced to the menfolk that the free ride was over and they were just not going to be 1930s housewives anymore. Sid told me that he understood this, but that the old system had felt right to him until he was informed otherwise. 

One Vermont trip really stands out. There were some big holes in the floor of the $25 Ford and some loose sheet metal. On the drive up we came to a large snow drift right across Route 89, deep enough that I didn’t think we could easily drive through it. So I speeded up as much as I could, hoping to power our way through. But the loose sheet metal under the driver’s side floor stuck down and scooped up massive amounts of snow which filled up the car up to my knees. I had to dig myself out of all that snow before we could drive on.

On the drive back I had covered much of the radiator with cardboard in order to get more heat out of the car. And of course, was speeding. In those days we generally drove at 95 miles a hour. So a Vermont trooper thought that 95 was too fast on a snowy highway and pulled me over. I rolled down the window and got the license and registration ready but just as the cop walked up the radiator boiled over since, with all that cardboard, it was not getting any air with the car stopped. 

The policeman looked at the steam pouring out from under the hood and said, “You have enough problems.” and walked away and drove off.

Honest Al was apoplectic that I had gotten out of a serious speeding ticket by dumb luck.

We both started to get busy in our careers and didn’t find time to drive up to visit Sid and Bard and the kids. Plus which we were both dating females who we assumed would just not appreciate the funkiness of that old farmhouse and kitchen with heaps and heaps of dirty dishes.

It appears that both Sid and Barb got divorced, both remarried, and both had more children in the next marriages.

There is not much about Sid online, but there are various articles about the “legendary” Synclavier that he co-created.

Sid passed away in 2022, and according to the funeral home announcement, the boy with cystic fibrosis, who Honest Al and I
were very fond of, passed away in 2007.