What a different time that was back in September of 1970. The Beatles had just broken up and Vietnam was getting ugly. But what did I care? I was getting my Suzanne Crough fix every Friday night at 8:30 (after having to get through "The Brady Bunch" and "Nanny And The Professor") so the rest of the world really didn't matter - except for maybe my third grade teacher who looked uncannily like Shirley Partridge, which pretty much made her Suzanne/Tracy's mom too in my eyes.
So desperate was I to get close to Susan that at one point in early 1971, I penned a letter to Reuben Kincaid, manager of the Partridge Family, (with a blind copy to Danny Partridge), letting him know that I was taking clarinet lessons on Saturday mornings at the church rectory.
Could the Partridge Family use a clarinet player? I certainly thought so at the time. If anything, I could at take the place of the mostly uselss Chris Partridge. I mean, that kid couldn't play the drums worth a crap!
So I let Reuben Kincaid know that I could be available to join the band on tour "at any time." While waiting for a response, I would be found out in my back yard, carving my initials with "TP" on a tree. (If you were to go to my childhood home, you would probably still find our initials carved on some of those trees.)
After about 8 weeks, I finally got a response to my letter but it wasn't from Reuben Kincaid. Instead, it was a generic letter from "ABC" thanking me for my interest in the show and inviting me to join the Partridge Family fan club, which included a quarterly newsletter, an official Partridge Family pin, and a glossy 8x10 photo of David Cassidy ("Keith Partridge"). Nothing about my request to join the band and absolutely nothing about Tracy. They were treating me like I was some 10-year-old girl!
Remember this was decades before the Internet so I couldn't find out any news about my Tracy, for all I know, she never even knew I existed, even though I thought about her every day for about three years (until I started to focus more on Susan Partridge). But for that period of time, Suzanne/Tracy was the girl of my dreams. She will never know what she missed out on.
