Gary Walker John Walker - The Walker Brothers No Regrets - Our Story

Of all the towns and places to be born, Glendale, north of Los Angeles, was one of the best. I was very lucky. California has permanent sunshine and within an hour or so you can get to the desert, the mountains, or beaches with miles of golden sand. Its a paradise; there is no other place like it in the world. It has everything you need for the good life.

Glendale is the ideal American town: its the kind of place where you might expect to bump into Mickey Rooney or Judy Garland, or star in a movie with them. The famous director Stephen Spielberg uses Glendale and its surroundings in his movies because it has a feel-good atmosphere and is visually appealing; he filmed E.T. at a house in nearby Sunland Tujunga, where I lived for most of my life, although by then it had changed so much over the years that I didnt even recognise it when I saw the movie.

Glendale enjoys mild weather, with the sky always brilliant and clear. It has several claims to fame. Number one would be John Wayne; number two is beautiful Forest Lawn, one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, known for all the movie stars buried there. When I was a teenager, I would take my lunch up to Forest Lawn, and Id sit and eat it next to WC Fields and Errol Flynn. When I returned, years later, I would discover a little stone statue of a fairy sitting on a rock, which marked the resting place of Walt Disney. It was the final time that my path would cross with his.

The third most famous thing about Glendale is that I was born there: Glendale Memorial Hospital proudly presents live at 2:10 am on 9 March 1942, Gary Lee Gibson!

My fathers name was Don Gibson. He came from the Great Plains, a region best known for ranching and farming. My mothers name was Violet Irene Bowen. She hailed from Oregon, and was to have a big influence on me. She had an hourglass figure, dark hair and brown eyes. To me, she looked like a film star, a cross between Jane Russell and Rita Hayworth. Everybody liked my mother; she was very friendly and outgoing, a strong, confident person with high principles. All she ever cared about was that I would have good health and great manners, and she taught me those well.

We lived in a white bungalow, a small, timber-framed house, quite plain compared with many others, but we were happy there. My mothers family was very close-knit; its members all lived together in one house and were very supportive of one another. There were my father, my mother and me; my grandmother Helen (Mama), who very strict; and my mothers sister Joyce, nicknamed Ant, whom I could talk to in a way I never could to my mother. Ant was married 11 times but she could never have children, so, in time, I effectively became her child and she had a strong influence on me. Later, because of her marital difficulties, she became an alcoholic. My mother was teetotal, which led to my aunts departing in acrimony. They didnt talk to each other for 15 years.

I was very upset, as I really liked my aunt. When I was about 16, Ant called in a drunken stupor from her home in San Bernardino and told my mother that she had slept with me. It was untrue, of course, but that did it for my mother, even though Ant was drunk. But they say that time heals all things, and it did in this case. When my aunt genuinely quit the drink, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, they got back together again.

Don, my father, owned a shop and sold doughnuts. He liked girls, and was not the family type. They split when I was too young to be shaken up by their divorce and the reason for it was never discussed. My mother then married an Italian guy called Phil Baloumo, a Glendale taxi driver and a very nice man. Thats when we took a small house in Burbank, and when I first became interested in planes. Grand Central Airport was near our house and I would go stand at the end of the runway to watch the bombers coming in to land, passing just above my head. I loved the airport and the planes, and eventually everybody at the airport got to know me. They let me sit on the planes because Phil was taking flying lessons there. But that marriage lasted only a year and I have no idea what became of Phil.