Jeff 2017 Baby Boomer Stuff
This is the website with the most recent material. I have three other historical websites,
just click on one of these inks:
https://sites.google.com/site/osbornschoolashlandohio
https://sites.google.com/view/gettysburgcollege1972/home
https://sites.google.comCivilWarMaterial
The flight of birds. The flight of man. Man's similarity to birds. Birds similarity to man.
These are the subjects at hand. And we will deal with them for the next hour or so and hope that we draw no conclusions; else wise, the subject shall cease to fascinate us and, alas, another dream would be lost. There are far too few.
Subtopics include: A.L. Garber Company, Little Rita Rosebud, RAF Chicksands, Goodfellow Air Force Base, 1961 Ashland Ohio, Ashland Country Club, Camp Mowana, Mudstock, Jeromesville History, Ashland Ohio History, Austin Healey 3000, Mercedes 190SL, Bickershaw Festival Mudstock, Daisy BB Guns, Brewster McCloud, Mimsy Farmer, Betsy Jobs, Growing Up In Jeromesville Ohio
Here is a completely unrelated thing I sent to several friends about
my early days in California - roughly 45 years ago. A nostalgic look
at better times:
I was just thinking of my first year working at the NLRB in Oakland and living
a few doors down from the Cal-Berkeley stadium. A situation that I
probably could not duplicate today given the cost and the traffic
congestion. Even though then I was entry-level civil service and
making less than $20K.
I was renting the third floor of a house (see attachments) along with
two guys who were going to law school at Boalt (Berkeley's Law
School). I think we were paying $600 a month/$200 each. The owners
of the house had expanded their attic and it was large enough so that
we each had a bedroom on the eastern side and the western side was a
great room/kitchen. That side was 40 feet of glass windows facing the
bay. At night you had a panorama of lights from Hayward to Mill
Valley.
The house was up in the Berkeley hills. It was surrounded by sorority houses.
Parking was sometimesdifficult but most days I took a bus that dropped me
off a few feetfrom the main entrance to the NLRB offices in downtown Oakland. Even
when I drove you could usually get a parking spot near the house after 6PM.
At one point I took that bus to Kaiser Hospital for an operation,
spent two nights there, and took the bus back to the house.
Sometimes I took BART home and got off in downtown Berkeley. There
was a student bar along the walk to the house full of video games. On
those nights I would stop, get something to eat, drink cheap draft
beer, and play video games.
Plus I was just a few months from working on a frac crew in the
oilfields around Hobbs, New Mexico so the sudden improvement in my
life was like a fairy godmother had granted me a transformative wish.
At the time I appreciated everything, especially relative to the
oilfields, but looking back on it I don't think that I had enough
perspective to fully appreciate it. I certainly had no idea that I
would never again have it so good even though I would have far more
disposable income and personal privacy.
Lyrically, "Fake Empire" is a commentary about a generation lost to disillusion and apathy. Vocalist Matt Berninger further explained that it is about "where you can't deal with the reality of what's really going on, so let's just pretend that the world's full of bluebirds and ice skating".
Only love is progress.
So what does Jeff do with his retirement? I must confess to often directing my inner hippie and endlessly playing the end credit sequence from the "Alice In Wonderland" movie. IMHO the best ever end credit sequence. The song is great and the lyrics are my life story, but my addiction is to watching the mushrooms grow. Try it... When do you first notice a mushroom?
Claymare : We do not wish to seem inhospitable but, gentlemen, you must leave.
Ayelborne : Yes, please leave us. The mere presence of beings like
yourselves is intensely painful to us.
Sheridan Whiteside : Is there a man in the world who suffers as I do from the gross inadequacies of the human race?
This is the website with the most recent material. I have three other historical websites,
just click on one of these inks:
I am blown away by this Shen Yun video promo, the best video promo I have ever seen. I do not know the name of the music they used. I am absolutely in awe of the spinning dancer at the 1:30 time code point.
Why is surrender powerful?
When we surrender, we turn our ego and self-will over to a deeper wisdom and knowing within us—our higher self. When we surrender to our higher self, we let go of the painful distortion of certainty, duality, and separateness, and we embrace the truth of uncertainty, connection, and unity.
A remarkably powerful image and the saddest story I have ever read. About the only way I have found to reconcile it is through its parallels to the song.
Leave It To Beaver
Leave It To Beaver ran from 1957 to 1963, 235 episodes over six seasons. It premiered on October 4, 1957 although there had been a pilot episode with a different cast in April 1957; only Jerry Mathers and Barbara Billingsley were in both the pilot and the regular episodes. The final episode was broadcast on June 20, 1963. It was the first prime-time show to have a series finale.
What this meant for me was that I started watching at the beginning of second grade and stopped watching at the end of seventh grade, coincidentally tracking along with Beaver as he experienced each grade at the same time as me. Wally was in eighth grade when Beaver was in second. Beaver skipped a grade at some point, probably seventh grade, and ended up a year ahead of me.
So the authenticity of the show was being tested by me each year. Mathers was two years older than I was but easily passed for my age initially. Veronica Cartwright was only a year older and Karen Sue Trent (above clip) was two years older, at the time of their appearances they looked roughly the same age as the girls in my class. Even this slight age difference was minimized by the episodes being broadcast several months after they were produced.
By age 14 & 15 Mathers had hit a post puberty growth spurt and had grown too tall for a pre-teen, which is why he was skipped forward a grade. The casting was an obvious mess in the 11th episode of the sixth season (Beaver the Sheep Dog) as he towered over the three girls from his class. This was completely unrealistic as girls in 8th grade girls are generally taller than the boys. It is said that the series ended after that season because Mathers wanted to have a normal high school experience, but a more fundamental concern was that he and Tony Dow (who had already been stalled for an extra year in high school) had outgrown the show's demographic.
Hugh Beaumont was eleven years older than my father. Barbara Billingsley was almost exactly two years older than my mother. But that age disparity would not have been something I would have noticed at the time.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Mary Katherine hates the people in her town. Whenever she is forced to go among them she uses a trick to keep from reacting. She imagines all of them dead and then imagines herself walking on their bodies. Author Shirley Jackson had a real gift for this sort of story telling.
One of the best things my high school US history teacher did for me was help me understand that no history is an exhaustive representation of anything. She made me aware of silences. When you allow students to have the agency of knowing that history is not always as authoritative as we tend to imagine, it actually invites them to establish a deeper intellectual relationship with the past. It allows us to think about why certain scholars might have chosen to represent certain aspects of the past in the ways that they did.
It’s liberating, as a student of history, to realize that so much of it is manufactured. This is essential not just for those of us who write history, but also those of us who are consumers of it. We have to know that the histories presented to us consist of narratives based on decisions people made to represent some aspect of the past. It’s all distortion in some way. It’s important to know that our narratives and origin stories about the past … well, we create them.
“We don’t know anything more than a dog that watches the moon.”
"We've codified our existence to bring it down to human size, to make it comprehensible,
we've created a scale so we can forget its unfathomable scale"
"When I touched this thing, for a few minutes, it felt like anything was possible. So why can't the opposite happen.
What if the monitor is just a giant pin, but instead of making you think positive, it makes you think negative,
and it — it's convincing the whole world to feed the wrong wolf."
I think that David Gemmell's statement offers a spiritual explanation of our individual purpose.
We are here to let the nobility of spirit within each of us grow.
Or to put it more I simply acknowledge that I am the tyranny of evil men but that I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.
There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon you."
Now... I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, that meant your ass. You'd be dead right now. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. See, now I'm thinking: maybe it means you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here... he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. And I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.
August 12, 2022
Just returned from the Ashland Monument Company where I ordered my tombstone,
including on it the Rainer Maria Rilke quote at the end of this Jojo Rabbit clip.
‘Doing good is hard – Even beginning to do good is hard.’
Damn 'em all. They changed it, changed it all around. Smeared it all over with blood. I'm finished with it. It's like roping a dream now. I just gotta find another way to be alive, that's all. If there is one anymore.
At one point in the Razor's Edge, a minor character, a defrocked priest, says to Larry Darrell in a working class bar, "You sound like a very religious man who does not believe in God." The story is really about godliness, or what Maugham calls "goodness" in the end. And some people have it, and share it, and make the world better, God or no God.
Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.
Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.
May 4, 2020 (fifty years ago today)
Above is the link to my Kent State University page. What strikes me as most interesting fifty years later is that "the man" (the repressive right wing establishment) has become the ones demonstrating against pandemic restrictions, mandatory vaccinations, and their general marginalization. And it is state governments that are (with a few notable exceptions) holding the moral high ground.
With Ohio Governor Mike DeWine a huge improvement on James Rhodes.
"Keep your powder dry and your pecker hard and the worm will turn."
girls together outrageously
"Do Me In Once And I'll Be Sad, Do Me In Twice And I'll Know Better"
Muddy Goppup standing there
Roses held by him
Stopped to catch Kee Lee Da Da Do
But the circle would not permit it
This circular circulation
I circle continuously
To prepare myself for memories
And have a talk with me
March 3, 2020
A timeless and iconic work of art by Norman Rockwell that depicts Ruby Bridges being escorted to an all-white school in New Orleans by four U.S. Marshals after the school board was forced to desegregate in 1960 by Federal Judge Skelly Wright since they didn't comply and desegregate the school after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954.
This piece was painted by Norman Rockwell for Look Magazine in 1964 and was his first assignment and illustration for the publication.
On November 14, 1960, the William Frantz Elementary School was integrated when its first black student arrived. Her name was Ruby Bridges. Ruby Bridges arrived at the school escorted by federal marshals. People threw things and screamed, white parents withdrew their children from the school, and only a single teacher in the entire building would agree to teach her. At the end of the day, Bridges was escorted back out of the school by federal marshals. She was six years old.
https://www.richlandsource.com/ashland_source/ashlands_pump_house_property/
"Pump House Ministries has operated out of 400 Orange Street since 2003, when Jim Landoll and Marty Myers gave the ministry a 14-acre industrial complex that included all the former F.E. Myers and Landoll buildings."
These are three names that will live in Ashland County infamy although the city itself ultimately signed off on this scam. Other towns re-purpose their rust belt buildings into artist's lofts and useful tax generating retailers, but some (like Ashland) permit a small-time grifter to swoop in and destroy both the city coffers and its heritage. In 2003 a staggeringly lazy city council saw a way to save themselves work. With dodging work the prime motivator it is little wonder that they shirked their responsibility to perform due diligence as it would have made their wishful thinking impossible to sustain. Most likely the city will end up writing off hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes and even more in clean-up costs, throw in a couple of murders and you leave quite a legacy.
1 July 2016
Cottage Restaurant in downtown Ashland Ohio
Almost forgotten Cottage Restaurant in downtown Ashland. My grandmother was a waitress there. I believe it was closed by 1960. Since then it served for many years as the Eagles Lodge and is now the VFW. The stonework facade is long gone or has been covered up for years. The Eagles were there during the secret agent craze, their sign said F.O.E. which we thought a wonderful name for an international organization of evil like Thush, KAOS, or S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
10 July 2016
Pat Woodell
Unnoticed by me last September was the passing of this baby boomer icon. Although she was one of several especially beautiful cogs in the "Petticoat Junction" franchise I think she also was one of 60's television greatest lost opportunities. Check out her 1966 appearance as Eddie Munster's teacher in "A Visit from the Teacher" (Episode 2-32) for some textbook suppressed sizzle. Tragic that it was not better utilized.
During my research on Pat Woodell I unearthed the above photo of the "intended" cast. Of interest is Sharon Tate on the far right. Tate was originally cast in the role of oldest sister "Billie Jo", but she walked away from the show during pre-production on advice from her manager who did not feel it was a good launching pad for her career. The show did not suffer as her replacement, Jeannine Riley, was an inspired selection and arguably television's all-time hottest babe. But it would have be nice to have access to an alternative universe where Sharon played the character.
The show pretty much fell apart in 1965 when both Woodell and Riley left after two seasons for what they hoped would be bigger and better things. Lori Saunders was a perfectly adequate replacement for Woodell - what with the Bobbie Jo character continuing to be frustratingly underutilized anyway - but they could not find anyone remotely on Riley's level.
In retrospect Henning's casting of his talent challenged daughter hurt the show a lot more than it seemed at the time, as favoritism toward her came at the expense of bringing out Woodell's repressed eroticism and Riley's obvious talent for parody. On the other hand for the first couple of years I considered Linda the best eye candy on the show next to Jeannine so that casting choice wasn't all bad.
Of course the kiss of death for both "Petticoat Junction" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" was their increasing drift toward cute animals, the annoying dog at the Shady Rest and the ever growing menagerie of critters Elly played with around their cement pond.
19 July 2016
Downtown - Ashland Ohio
To get in the mood I include this photo of a Mansfield hotel lobby because as a child I encountered this general look in many places in downtown Ashland. There were still a lot of those glass cigar counters, carpeted floors, and oak counters and trim. By the mid-60's most of this had disappeared, either the buildings were torn down or the interiors were up-dated. And the popularity of cigars had waned to almost nothing.
Any close association I had with downtown Ashland ended when we moved to Strongsville in August 1966, but one of my last memories of the town was a scary walk down these blocks after the Times Gazette bused us back from another paperboy day at Cedar Point. We had arrived back in Ashland at about 10PM, by about this point everyone else had gone off in a different direction and I walked the rest of the way home alone.
Remember "Old Fashion Days"?
Below is Main Street in 1963 looking west, Ohio Edison's Reddy Kilowatt draws the eye just as it did back then.
Ohio Edison's Reddy Kilowatt draws the eye just as it did back then.
On the left side starting with The Farmers Bank #19 and working toward the camera you can see W.T. Grant #7, The Home Company #1, Glasgo's Drugs #17, Greens & Things #19, David Lash's Sports Corner #25, Ohio Edison #29, and Isaly's #35. Some storefronts had multiple tenants over the years and I have only listed one of them.
Click Here for More About Downtown - Ashland
Unrelated to Ashland but one of the more original things I have found on U-Tube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z40UAsVJzRM&t=10s
28 October 2016
Leaving Ashland (again)
My pa was a man of the sea. He used to say the wind was like a wild horse. No way to tame her, that's just its nature. And that you can be sure in every voyage she'll buck and blow you off course. Just a matter of time, really. At some point, we all lose our bearing.
And when you do, ain't no need to be afraid. You just gotta believe you'll find your way again.
This is the last day of my 18-month Ashland experiment. Today I left town voluntarily almost 50 years after I was reluctantly yanked out when we moved to Strongsville. The reasons for leaving are complicated but relatively consistent. I returned in April 2015 to make good on my vow to one day return. The timing was influenced by the upcoming closure of Osborn Elementary School, it was now or never if I wanted to capture some long-lost memories. I expected the return to be permanent but hedged by leaving about half of my things back in Alabama. A year ago I would have said the odds of my staying were about 50%, the odds of returning to Alabama about 25%, and the odds of somewhere in southwestern Ohio about 25%. So how do I explain today's departure?
Free will vs destiny? In April 2016 I made an offer on this house the first day it went on the market. As the real estate market in Ashland was mega-hot it was almost a full price offer, but there was a competing offer slightly higher. The house was identical to our old house a block away on Duff and sitting in the identical spot on Bank Street. The main downside was that it was at the entrance to the new Reagan Elementary School where twice a day cars back up well past this house as parents come to drop off and pick up their children. The other downside is that it has been mega-extensively altered from its original state, although to anyone else these are clear improvements to me they also destroy most of the nostalgia value. This is the house that I should have purchased. Had it come on the market a couple months earlier I would have bid more aggressively and simply lived with the two negatives. Had there not been another buyer on day one my offer most likely would have been accepted or countered. I can't say this path would have been better than the one I am now on but I can't help being humbled by how close I came to being on it instead.
Above is a link to the Chantal Kreviazuk song that perfectly captures the emotions of my 2015 return to my birthplace and childhood home.
11 November 2016
R.I.P. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Robert Vaughn was a kind of Adam West figure to baby boomers. Neither were especially well suited to their television identities as Napoleon Solo and Batman/Bruce Wayne or particularly suited to the vocation of acting, but we were happy to simply suspend disbelief each week and appreciate their respective shows.
In 2007 I mentioned Vaughn in a review I wrote of "The Magnificent Seven". I noted that the film's score was further popularized in the late 1960's as the theme for Marlboro cigarettes. An odd bit of irony given that Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, and Jorge Martinez de Hoyos all died of lung cancer; Horst Buchholz and Charles Bronson of pneumonia, and Brad Dexter of emphysema.
In the film, only two (Brynner and McQueen) of the seven leave the village alive (Buchholz survives but stays behind). In real life these two actors were the first to die, preceding the others by about 20 years.
The other four deaths (only Robert Vaughn is still alive) occurred over just a nine-month period (James Coburn in Nov 02, Brad Dexter in Dec 02, Horst Buchholz in March 03, and Charles Bronson in Aug 03).
Vaughn died of acute leukemia on November 11, 2016 at the age of 83.
19 November 2016
Campfire Ghost Stories at Camp Mowana
A story today in the Times Gazette got me thinking about the favorite nightly past-time at 1960's Camp Mowana, a Lutheran church camp that has been in operation near Ashland for about 80 years. The Lutheran Church took it over from the Boy Scouts in the 1940's, changed the name, and have operated it ever since. The Camp Avery Hand name was transplanted to a larger piece of land outside Lexington. I camped at that location several times as a Boy Scout.
I was a week-long overnight camper at Mowana the summers of 1962, 1963, and 1965, many nights the counselors delighted in assembling us after dark around a large campfire. Stories were a big part of the camping experience with tales from camp lore (like Hoppy the hermit) told during day hikes and ghost stores of all varieties told around the campfire. The ghost stories were relatively tame in consideration of the ages of the campers and the fact that for many this was their first lengthy time away from parents. I was only eleven my first summer there. The camp staff could hardly afford to induce mass nightmares each night throughout the camp's many cabins.
29 November 2016
Time / Life - The British Invasion
One of my cable stations has been showing a half-hour infomercial program for Time-Life's CD release on this topic. It is often called simply the "beat" sound and refers to the "Ferry Cross the Mersey" (Gerry and the Pacemakers) type stuff that we listened to from the mid-60's to early 70's. I was surprised how some of these songs totally escaped my notice and at how many of these British groups I always assumed to be Americans. Of course we did not have the benefit of MTV or the internet in those days so the only visuals were on album covers and 45 picture sleeves.
For example, to the extent that I even thought about it I assumed that "The Spencer Davis Group" was a R&B band out of Detroit that was trying to cash in on the pop music craze; "I'm a Man" and "Gimme Some Lovin" sounding similar but even lamer than a "Sam & Dave" standard like "Hold On, I'm Comin'". What a pair of garbage songs.
ClickHereForFactoryOfSadnessAnalysis
(caution - this really gets ugly)
Debbie
She was so darn cute.
Debbie died about two weeks ago and I am still processing her passing. Debbie was not a baby boomer, she was born in 1932 and was the only woman from her generation that I have had a crush on my entire life. And I believe that she had a huge imprinting role on what became "my type", nicely illustrated by her "look" in the above photo. It wasn't a conscious choice on my part but I don't recall ever not having a "girl-next-door" preference for which she was obviously my model. Or maybe it was the simply the extreme rarity of finding a short girl (5'2") with an actual waist, also nicely illustrated in the above photo .
More objectively, Debbie's dream girl appeal to many in the young male portion of 1950's & 60's movie audiences illustrated the hypocrisy and hollowness of the sex-idolization process; worshiping the "girl-next-door" while banging prostitutes-etc. Male baby boomers were indoctrinated into this process from day one. For some (guilty) the indoctrination was so successful that the "girl-next-door" literally became a more powerful physical turn-on. For others it probably felt less sinful lusting after Debbie than lusting after Sophia Loren. In that narrow sense they were making a subconscious choice to feed the right wolf. A third group never bought into any of this and found our preferences puzzling.
Reflecting back now at the strange mix we were being fed by mainstream Hollywood before the days of the counter-culture may help us to better understand our development. Debbie reminded me of this as she appeared once in what I like to call:
"the strange phenomenon of 1960's Tony Curtis movies":
Monday 16 September 1974
This was the day I arrived at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. I can pin point it because I recall watching the Monday Night Football game in my room at the Jersey City Holiday Inn; Buffalo with O.J. Simpson vs Oakland with Kenny Stabler. I had caught a glimpse of the recently completed towers of the World Trade Center that afternoon. Who would have imagined that evening that O.J. Simpson and the World Trade Center would be perhaps the two most prominent news stories of the coming forty years.
All this is by way of introducing a section which details the most intense four years of my life, a period of such extreme adventure and variety that it seems impossible that I lived it, let alone survived it. I don't think these were the best years of my life, they were simply too scary; but they provided enough adventures and variety to last a lifetime.
31 January 2017
The Swiss Dairy Store
Sometime in 1964 the first chain convenience store entered the Ashland market, they constructed this building at 417 East Main Street. Of course there had been small grocery stores in town for decades. Swiss Dairy Stores were Isaly's attempt to duplicate Lawson's; focusing on diary and deli items but with roughly the same mix of other items you would find in a small grocery store. The location would take business away from nearby Paul Sponsler IGA at 207 East Liberty, which subsisted on neighborhood people who walked there to shop.
The Swiss Dairy Stores had an alpine chalet theme, most details of which have been removed from the building which is now an insurance office. Ashland's store was one of only three that were built, I recall the store doing a respectable if not booming amount of business at this location but obviously the idea did not produce the results for which they were hoping.
I think they blew it by not offering cones, shakes, milk & gas; blending the regular Isaly's features with a self-service grocery. The United Dairy Farmers (UDF) cooperative, an Isaly's competitor in some markets, was able to find a profitable niche with that combination and Isaly's was well-positioned to transition their stores to that format. UDF started in 1938 in the Cincinnati area so the model was already in place had Isaly's management simply opened their eyes. Even now UNF is slowly moving into markets that Isaly's abandoned 40+ years ago.
Of course this whole "Swiss Thing" was also part of the Isaly's branding.
The exterior of Ashland Store at 35 E. Main Street looked much like this traditional one. It was in operation from 1940 till 1970, the last Isaly's in Mansfield was also closed that year. I remember the Ashland store being very busy especially after its main competition, the Sanitary Dairy Bar on Center Street, closed. Isaly's was a social focal point of downtown which at that time was the focal point of the whole city.
Ashland's downtown retail business went into a serious decline in the late 60's that continued throughout the 70's, until it became a virtual ghost town. The decrease in downtown shoppers no doubt doomed the many Main Street Isaly's in Ohio and Pennsylvania as they did not draw people downtown but were a secondary destination for those who came downtown for shopping.
Founded in Mansfield, the most interesting thing about Isaly's is that it didn't survive, in Ashland or nationally. It's decline began with the growth of drive-in fast food outlets with their large parking lots and continued as supermarkets introduced deli departments. Although Isaly's downtown location focus put them at a competitive disadvantage, the company's historical innovation, decentralized management, and the minimal capitalization at its existing locations positioned them nicely to exploit the drive-in craze of the 50's and 60's. They were well positioned to go in that direction but refused to do so, even turning down partnership overtures from Frisch's and from Ray Kroc.
What they were especially poor at was succession planning, the most obvious weakness when expansion over-extends a family-owned business. Typically such families luck into being in the right place at the right time and convince themselves that their success means that they are golden; they stay closely held and unable to unbolt from their legacy until it is too late.
Isaly's would also have been a decent fit with Shopping Mall food courts which were exploding across the country in the 60's and 70's. In retrospect the best idea would have been franchising a blend of a "Subway" with their ice cream shop.
My favorite memory of the Swiss Dairy Store was that they introduced Frostie's Root Beer to Ashland, and many times when riding home from Garber's after school with my father we would stop and get cold bottles of Frostie's.
The bottles we purchased were like the ones on the left of the photo. They were molded at the bottom with a rough frost-like texture.
http://tomfloodeen.blogspot.com/2013/11/frostie-root-beer.html
14 April 2017
Buster Crabbe as Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion
Funny thing, I vaguely recalled this early children's action-adventure television program from the mid-1950's but until yesterday did not remember its name. I placed it from the time of Sgt. Preston, Circus Boy, the 77th Bengal Lancers, and Rin Tin Tin (which it most closely resembles). It ran for 55 episodes from 1955-57. I saw all five of these shows when they were originally broadcast and they are some of my earliest memories of television.
Like a lot of stuff from those days these ran in syndication for several years after the original broadcasts, television stations did not have a lot of live action material like this to fill their Saturday morning schedule. Unfortunately for us baby boomers these reruns tended to distort our memories of these series, 60 years later it is impossible to distinguish between the memories of the original viewing and memories from subsequent viewings much later in our childhoods.
The television series had a comic book of four issues. The first issue (above) is not worth much because it was a promotional issue published and and given out by Heinz, and unopened cases of these were found in a warehouse and have flooded the market. The back cover features a Captain Gallant Junior Legionnaires Membership Certificate.
Although a big fan of the television series, when Ghoulardi began running Crabb's old "Flash Gordon" serials several years later I don't recall anyone making the connection between Flash and Captain Gallant. Much the same thing happened with Guy Williams on "Lost In Space", it did not immediately occur to me that he had played "Zorro". I suspect that when you are very young you don't have much ability to systemize your memories, they get only a cursory processing and accessing them later can only be done in a very direct way.
Marx even released a playset for the series.
26 April 2017
Those Were The Days
The Russian origin of the melody was accentuated by an instrumentation that was unusual for a top-ten pop record, including balalaika, clarinet, hammered dulcimer, tenor banjo and children's chorus, giving a klezmer feel to the song. Mary Hopkin played acoustic guitar on the recording, and Paul McCartney also played acoustic guitar and possibly percussion. The hammered dulcimer was played by Gilbert Webster. It is unknown who played the banjo though McCartney is known to be a banjoist.
Mary Hopkin was a dreamy girl at age eighteen, or maybe that was just my eighteen year-old Welsh DNA signaling a likely match. Her big hit was a staple of my first semester in college.
Playlist - Click Each Title to Play
Despite my loyalty to baby boomer female vocalists the best live performance of a single song belongs to this non-boomer
By way of the truly bizarre are the 1950's advertising campaigns that Kraft used to promote Caramels & Fudgies
Kraft is still around and they still makes these but a least one recent review is not all that positive.
"I was so excited to see that Kraft fudgies were back. I couldn't wait to try one. So when I did and found that they don't compare at all to the ones that came wrapped in gold foil back in the 60-70's I was so disappointed. These new ones remind me of dark caramel there was no similarity at all to the originals. What a let down."
Personally I don't recall fudgies coming in gold foil or in their own package although they must have been around even back then. Instead in each bag of clear wrapped caramels that my mother brought home for baking you could find 3-4 clear wrapped fudgies, which were a real treat because they were so rare. It seemed like a few fudgies had somehow spilled over into the caramel bin and been clear wrapped with the caramels. After a few packages however it seemed more likely that it was a deliberate plant, an attempt to introduce fudgies into the food chain so that mothers would purchase a package of fudgies along with a package of caramels. Kraft caramels occupied a strange middle ground between candy and cooking ingredient, along with Nestle's toll house cookie chips and blocks of baker's chocolate. It wasn't candy if the grocery store had it on the baking supply shelf.
12 May 2017
The Bank Street Mystery
"high upon a hilltop see for miles around"
it seems to me that these were the old lyrics to the Ashland College fight song - since somewhat modified - with Bank Street the inspiration
I suppose that Bank Street could have been named for an early Ashland financial institution, at least that is what many believe as a local bank did own the land at the intersection of Center and College streets. But those of us who grew up around E. Bank always assumed that its name referred to the slope (bank) going down toward the Town Creek.
The original Bank Street had its name changed long ago to College Ave. The present Bank Street and E. Bank Street are the eastern extensions of the original, their link to the original section now disrupted by a jog created when Highland Blvd. and Ferrell Ave. were developed. The two extensions have their own disruption at Hale Ave. and a jog. East Bank jogs a half block to the south and starts again at Luray Dr., a puzzle why. It became a street instead of a path when the Duff Farm was developed in the 1950's. I suspect that early in Ashland's history the portion east of Center Street was more a dirt wagon path than a road, and that it ran through various farms until it linked up with E. Main St. The street or path follow a ridge line about 30-40 feet high that runs from Claremont to Jackson St., breaking the flatness of the terrain and providing sledding opportunities in the winter and (by the 1960's) skateboard opportunities the rest of the year. Bank Street moves from the top to the bottom of the ridge between Edgehill (guess where that name came from) and Hale.
My guess is that either the old wagon path veered a bit to the southeast just before reaching what is now Hale as a way to diminish the grade. Or it continued straight east down the hill and the jog south was the result of Ray Keen laying out the lots in Luray Heights to maximize the number of lots he could fit on his parcel of land. There are still vacant lots on the eastern side of Hale, one lines up with E. Bank and the other lines up with the back lot line of the homes on the north side of East Bank.
E. Bank was just a dirt road in 1956 when we moved to the Luray subdivision and at that time there were no other breaks in the three windbreak tree lines which parallel Hale, these two lots would have been the only places it could have cut through.
Oddly we had moved from the base of this ridge line in one neighborhood to the base of it in the new neighborhood. The ridge resembles a glacial moraine but I think its origin is geological and related to the erosion that created the flood plain of the ancient version of the town creek. It is dotted with natural gas vents and springs, which would support its being a zone of bent and fractured rock strata, not glacial deposits. The gas from at least two of the natural gas vents was once burned off with perpetual flames on Hale Ave. and on Charlotte Ave.
20 June 2017
Mattel V-RROOM!
ClickHereForMoreMattel/V-RROOM!Stuff
4 July 2017
Austin Healey 3000
“Onward Thru the Fog.”
Believe it or not I have owned two of these, beginning in June 1970 and ending in December 1971. I have detailed much of the experience here:
AdventuresWithMyAustinHealey-3000
My purpose is to document the life-altering and destiny changing force that less that two years of ownership of these mechanical nightmares was to my life. As I write this I am struck by how short a period of time this was and by how much life experience one packs into living at age nineteen and twenty.
The name “Oat Willie” is from an Austin-based comic character. The famous Oat Willie’s motto, on various of my bumper stickers since the 1970s is: “Onward Thru the Fog.”
I am resurfacing the subject because I finally solved a mystery dating back to 1971. It has not been a particularly pressing mystery but a mystery none-the-less. And I finally solved it.
Going Greek ... or
"Do what you do, just keep on laughing"
Just noticed in my alumni magazine that the ringleader of the group who tormented me during fraternity pledgeship died last November. Interesting how his death coincides with the mess at Penn State this year, I'm quite sure they too would have gleefully poured beer or pissed on me had I lingered near death after some pledge abuse. Our pledge class was slowly decimated that semester and ended up with only three of us being initiated; the freshman class president, a guy dating the cheerleader who had won the Miss Western beauty pageant, and "me" - go figure.
The Steadfast Tin Soldier
Note the star spangle on ballerina's sash in this illustration.
One of my favorite early comic books (this one is from 1955), and perhaps the greatest fairy tale of all time. Did you worry about the penguin all alone in your snow globe? Like many young children I tended to worry about the welfare of certain toys, it is this impulse that probably accounts for the appeal of The Steadfast Tin Soldier to multiple generations.
Sailing on, the boat is washed into a canal, where the tin soldier is swallowed by a fish. When this fish is caught and cut open, the tin soldier finds himself once again on the table top before the ballerina. Inexplicably, the boy throws the tin soldier into the fire, which is most likely a work of the goblin. A wind blows the paper ballerina into the fire with him; she is consumed by it. The maid cleans the fireplace in the morning and finds the soldier melted into a heart, along with the ballerina's spangle, which is now burned black as coal.
This is Hans Christian Andersen’s most romantic story, The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a one-legged tin soldier who suffers a terrible fate all for the love of a beautiful paper dancer. Cursed by a jealous goblin, the toy solider is sent flying out the window to the street below, where a perilous adventure carries him ever further from his love. But throughout his ordeal, the soldier remains sturdy and staunch on his one leg, ever true to his beloved little dancer.
"The story is unusual among Andersen's early tales, both in its emphasis on sensual desire and in its ambiguities. Blind fate, not intention, determines all events. The tin soldier's passive acceptance of whatever happens to him, while exemplifying pietistic ideals of self-denial, also contributes to his doom. The tale is often read autobiographically, with the soldier viewed as symbolizing Andersen's feelings of inadequacy with women, his passive acceptance of bourgeois class attitudes, or his sense of alienation as an artist and an outsider, from full participation in everyday life."
ClickForDaft+Punk+-+Instant+Crush
The story has even inspired this recent music video.
Another corny old favorite.
14 August 2017
Grit - America's Greatest Family Newspaper
During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, Grit was sold across the country by children and teenagers, many recruited by ads in comic books from the 1940s to the 1970s. A comical ad in Richie Rich comic books aimed to recruit more young salesmen, suggesting that Richie's father, Richard Rich, got his start as a businessman selling Grit.
In 1967, during what would today be called a sleepover, we doctored up the above Grit Recruitment Comic in a satirical tribute to its incredible lameness. I recently ran across this long-forgotten gem and have decided to share it with the world.
Click above for the rest of the story.
Hawkwind & The Bickershaw Festival
I sold my first Hawkwind album this week and with it a bit of my childhood. I discovered Hawkwind in 1972 at my first outdoor rock festival, a three-day affair held in a large field southeast of Liverpool which became known as Mudstock.
19 November 2017
Brenda Lee
Perhaps the most interesting thing I have experienced in the course of assembling these baby boomer related websites are the occasional gaps in my knowledge about the era in which I grew up. Brenda is the most astonishing one so far, somehow she flew completely under my radar. I certainly recognize some of her songs but do not associate her name with them and I don't think I ever grasped just how unique and remarkable her voice was, probably the best of any female vocalist of the era. Most likely I confused her with Peggy Lee, and it was not until the late sixties that I was reading teen fan magazines. So I was not exposed to the promotional teen hype being generated for her and Janet Lennon in the late 50's and early 60's.
Although Brenda had little direct impact at the time on 50's baby boomers she was a huge influence on la collégienne du twist. Sylvie Vartan, the twisting schoolgirl swept the continent at the same time The Beatles were sweeping America. Her music had a lot of Mersey Beat similarities and her trendy hairstyles swept through Europe and then swept through North America. During the last half of the 60's American girls unknowingly emulated Slyvie, a Brenda Lee influenced singing sensation of whom they probably had never heard.
It is worth listening to some of Silvie's songs as like Brenda she was the best female vocalist of her era.
And she had a second to none stage presence.
14 December 2017
Conrad Birdie's Motorcycles
If you have ever wondered what the motorcycles were that Conrad Birdie and his two pals rode into his rally in front of the Sweet Apple Ohio Court House I found this photo. They were supercharged Norton Dominators, probably the 650SS.
Ann-Margret
Another movie - Another British motorcycle.
4 May 2018
Brian Hyland
It is interesting in retrospect that this modestly successful singer has come to be the American baby boomer touchstone.
24 December 2018
Heather Menzies
An oddly truncated grieving process finds me on Christmas Eve 2018 thinking about someone who passed away exactly one year ago, on Christmas Eve 2017. I have come to connect Heather to Alice - the one woman to whom I ever felt attracted enough to propose, with the realization many years later that similarities between them likely predisposed me toward Alice when I met her.
Both celebrity video tributes which included Heather selected this scene from 1965's "The Sound of Music",
appropriately the "So Long, Farewell" song.
October 9, 2018
Ashland Ohio Country Club
I live on a golf course, I was a caddy at the Ashland Country Club when I was twelve years old, I played for a few years in a kid's league at Glenwood and at the Country Club (on Caddy Day), and was on the Strongsville High School golf team. I played a few times on assorted British Golf Courses while stationed in England. I last played regularly when I was a member of the Cornell University Golf Club in the mid-70's.
Click here for Ashland country club page
April 10, 2019
The Horror that was Latin Class
(or apparently I was right all along)
Also at Monday's board meeting, the board held its first required public hearing on the retire/rehire of Latin teacher Bonnie Graves and special education teacher Melanie Pheifer. District leaders plan to rehire both teachers on a part-time basis following their retirement. Marrah said the district will be phasing out the high school Latin program upon Graves' retirement. Students in Latin III this year can finish out Latin IV next year, and students in Latin II may move on to Latin III, but underclassmen will no longer have the option to take Latin I and Latin II.
Spotted this in the Ashland paper this morning. They are talking about Ashland High School. As a test of whether time heals all wounds I thought I would address a topic that is not near and dear to my heart.
First let it be said that I have a lifelong auditory learning disability when it comes to sounds, languages, and even music. I worked closely with morse code operators in the Air Force but to this day cannot distinguish the sound of a dot from a dash, they call it auditory processing disorder or audio dyslexia. When I was seven I had speech therapy lessons to correct an inability to recognize certain sounds. It did not fix the cause but it taught me to concentrate and focus on sounds so that the problem was no longer noticeable.
So while I can listen to and enjoy music, I cannot actually identify a specific note played in isolation. Which makes learning to play a musical instrument impossible beyond mechanically memorizing a series of hand positions. I can recognize the pattern of a tune but not whether a song in isolation is being sung in the correct key.
“I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed,” Keller remembered. “I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation.”
Unfortunately back in those days college prep required that you take two years of a language, finding this requirement absurd I refused to study the subject after the first year; hence two painful years of Latin. And then two painful years of college German.
22 July 2019
The World Doesn’t Care About You
The thought that is so frightening at first glance — “No one cares about me!?” — becomes so liberating when one actually processes its true meaning. As David Foster Wallace put it, “You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.”
You, me, and everything we do, will one day be forgotten. It will be as if we never existed, even though we did. Nobody will care. Just like right now, almost nobody cares what you actually say or do with your life.
And this is actually really good news: it means you can get away with a lot of stupid shit and people will forget and forgive you for it. It means that there’s absolutely no reason to not be the person that you want to be. The pain of un-inhibiting yourself will be fleeting and the reward will last a lifetime.
And in case I am getting too full of my own omnipotence:
“Nobody exists on purpose,” says Morty to his sister. “Nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”
or:
“When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours.”
Or: One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the uncomfortable truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing.
I believe that we may have a purpose. Perhaps Earth is the universe's ore reduction mill for life energy, in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut. The commodity produced by life energy is needed to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself. It is produced by humans during the course of their lives and while they live manifests itself as nobility of spirit. If, by the end of each life, a nobility of spirit in some degree has not manifested itself in someone, their life energy is simply cast aside as useless slag. If they have manifested and grown their nobility of spirit, it is harvested by the universe and their life energy recycled.
22 August 2019
Go The Distance
This was the last summer for Camp Mowana, my old Lutheran Church Camp. Lutheran Outdoor Ministries is downsizing from three to two camps in Ohio. I've known for some time that this would be their last summer of operation. Then on August 3rd the camp suddenly popped into my head and I searched for it on the internet. I discovered that volunteers were needed between August 7th and August 13th to get things ready for an auction on the 10th and to move things to the remaining two camps. Although too late to get up there at the start of this activity it might be feasible for me to come up on the 11th. I tried to talk rationally talk my way out impulsively driving 600 miles for this activity and told myself that I would try to make the arrangements to do so and if I encountered any significant obstacles I would back away from the idea. But that did not happened, instead all the pieces simply fell into place.
Nostalgia, but I just don't get it and never did - this show I mean.
Notice: The statements in this blog are to the best of my recollection, accurate enough as memories go but don't expect perfection. Please contact me at jeffrey.ewing1@gmail.com with any comments you wish to add to the comment section or with requests to remove (or properly credit) a borrowed image. Spelling corrections are also welcome.