2013 Blog Entries

These are the 2013 pages of Jeff's "Baby Boomer" Blog,  its first year.  Access Part #2 and subsequent years by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page. Topic specific sections have their own tabs and sub-tabs. 

The website is intended to be an endless ramble about all things historical and nostalgic.    I find our tendency to wax nostalgic an interesting one and am starting to get a handle on why it is so appealing, at least in my case.  For me much of the attraction is that childhood was a time when the world seemed limitless and exciting.

So free for the moment

Lost somewhere between the earth and the sky

So free for the moment

Lost because I wanna be lost

Don't try to find me

"The old man's eyes boggled ... overcome by art."

A high school friend recently said my tales remind him of the writing of Jean Shepard, the guy who wrote A Christmas Story:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Shepherd.

Shepard's bio mentions that his pen name was "Frederick R. Ewing"

rac·on·teur  /ˌrakˌänˈtər/

One who tells stories and anecdotes with skill and wit.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Philo - Egyptian Philosopher - 20 BC

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.

28 November 2013:  

Shoplifting anyone? ......

This is the cover of the May 1965 issue of Playboy, the issue featured in a segment of the "Flight of the Phoenix" film.   The magazine is memorable to me for being the first time that I was seriously tempted to steal something.   It was on display in the magazine section of Nardini's,  a confectionary and news store in downtown Ashland which I regularly frequented during junior high school.  It was close enough to the school that I had enough time after school (before the school bus arrived) to run down there and get a Coke or a bag of "Red Hot Dollars" (a gummy bear-like candy in the shape of a coin).

In 1965 Nardini's only had the storefront on the right of this photo.  I don't recall what was in the middle storefront,  but a guy named Thomas ran a coin collecting shop in the left storefront.  There was a huge coin collecting craze in the early 1960's and you could still find relatively valuable coins by simply going through your pocket change.  Thomas had people in the local banks who tipped him off when they had received a shipment of uncirculated coins and he would gobble them up.  He also spent much of his time shuttling back and forth between the banks and his shop,  carrying large quantities of used coins, which he would cull through for anything of value and then exchange for coin rolls that he had not yet examined.  I recall him as being more like Uriah Heep than Scrooge McDuck.

During the height of the coin collecting craze I set up my own coin shop in our neighborhood.  It was the first time anyone but my brother stole anything from me.   I should have learned from the experience and never rented spots in those Antique Malls.   Technically it was less stealing than defaulting on a loan,  as I had been silly enough to sell some coins to Steve Denbow on credit.  If you are reading this Steve the principle and interest on that 95 cents is now over $2000.

Although I missed out on that 1965 Playboy,  my prayers were answered less than three years later when this issue of Life Magazine (March 1968) was delivered to our home.  I could not believe my good fortune.  It was quite simply the most erotic image I had ever seen.

The inside of the old section of Nardini's,  a relatively recent picture but the 1960's layout was very similar.  I used to caddy for John Edwards,  who basically ran the place for his father-in-law (the owner and founder).  According to my father it had a checkered past and most likely someone underage could have purchased a Playboy type magazine back in those days.  He said they used to sell single cigarettes to minors for a penny and also did quite a trade in punch board sales,  which was an early gambling scheme.  

After a patron bought a chance at the punchboard, he would puncture one of the hole's paper or foil covers with a nail and retrieve a ticket. If the gamepiece contained a winning number, the patron won the prize.

17 November 2013  

Electric Trains

Like many baby boomers,  I owned an electric train set.   Probably got it for Christmas in 1961,  set up the track on a sheet of plywood in the basement and built a large Plaster of Paris (Gypsum plaster) tunnel on one end.  Also periodically purchased bags of something called "lichen", this was an actual composite organism consisting of a fungus and its photosynthetic partner growing together in a symbiotic relationship. It looked like stringy rubber.   It was used for bushes on the train table as it never wilted and it kept its original color.

Fishsticks are not fish and they are not sticks,  like lichen they are a fungus.

Technically this was my second train set as years earlier I had a Marx wind-up train in a larger scale.  By 1960 the sales of HO gauge train sets was booming,  it had suddenly become the way to go;  and for a few years it caused a mini-boom in people taking up the hobby.  You could still find old-time collectors of the larger gauge train sets in Ashland, but almost all those new to the hobby were going with the HO stuff,  and the hobby shops were getting most of their business from this segment.  There was an obvious advantage to setting up small trains, and those producing the HO stuff were not sacrificing detail in the downsizing.

This is an advertisement for my only electric train set,  although instead of the open car with the crates I had a flat car hauling long cylinders of compressed gas of some type, and a satellite (not a helicopter) launching car.  $39.95 was a lot of cash back in 1961 so it would have been my big gift that year.  It got a lot of use and was eventually given away although I don't recall just when.  The exploding target boxcar really worked, but you had to uncouple the missile-launching car to hit the side of it - which triggered the explosion.   The satellite would actually fly a short distance - spinning through the air;  you could launch it automatically by reversing the train and running over a triggering device attached to a section of track. 

25 September 2013

French Lessons

The discussion earlier this week about John Prentice's drawing style reminded me of another daily newspaper comic strip.  Also from 1964 (January) was an illustrated telling of "Carmen". An educational comic strip which did not appear on the Plain Dealer's comic pages, it was in their travel section.  Even more minimalist than Prentice, Mary Kincaid does an amazing job with a few strokes of the pen transforming an innocent (but tempting) looking waif into the traditional sultry Gypsy seductress.  An early lesson in the erotic power of contrast.

I learned more French from Mary Kincaid than from an entire year of French lessons the Ashland School System had given our 6th grade class.  As I recall they had a floating teacher who went from school to school that year giving French lessons.  I think we were the first year it was done and I'm not sure if the experiment was repeated.  It was a bit ill-conceived and would probably have been more successful if started in 2nd or 3rd grade. 

Then again,  my brain apparently is not properly wired for the hearing and processing of sounds.  I had difficulty with the pronunciation of a few sounds even as late as a 1st grader and no ability to distinguish points on music scales.  None of it came naturally. 

The translations were placed upside down below each strip.  In these two Carmen tells us that she is combing her hair in preparation for doing a song and dance. 

1 September 2013

  Go West Young Man of 27

 The Rutles

A touchstone is a metaphor referring to any physical or intellectual measure by which the validity or merit of a concept can be tested. It is similar in use to an acid or litmus test in politics, or, from a negative perspective, a shibboleth where the criterion is considered by some to be out-of-date.  I've used it in a more expanded literal way to refer to an especially vivid memory from which when recalled (or touched) radiates a host of lesser but related recollections. In this sense "The Rutles" are my touchstone for 1978,  the year of the longest overland journey of my life and something that in retrospect seems quite surreal. 

On March 22, 1978, NBC aired a 90-minute "docudrama" entitled, "The Rutles: All You Need is Cash." The focus of this satirical film is the fictitious 1960's musical group, "The Rutles." As the title of the film already suggests, the Rutles are modeled on the Beatles, and the densely packed references to the "Fab Four" which occur throughout "All You Need is Cash" will be immediately detected by any viewer familiar with the Beatles' careers.

On Monday March 20, 1978 (fresh from six months on a fracking crew in the Permian Basin oilfields) I left Jeromesville Ohio in my red 1976 4WD Chevrolet Blazer, bound for San Francisco.  I had very little money, no immediate job prospects, and only the invitation of Jean and John Casey,  a couple I had known in Austin Texas while working for Ross Perot (EDS) in early 1977.  As I recall they had written:  "we are renting a large apartment in North Beach,  come out and we will go to the Long Beach Grand Prix.  You can stay with us until you find a job".   John was still working for EDS and Jean was working for United Airlines.

What I didn't know was that 1978,  which had started out so poorly,   was about to become one of  the best years of my life.

I had removed the Blazer's rear seat and left it behind in my parent's attic.  And I had replaced it with a large piece of foam rubber I liberated the year before from my fraternity house room at Cornell (yes I recognized lots of Jack Kerouac and Richard Farina parallels at the time). With all the other gear I was taking this gave me a narrow space to sleep and I could avoid paying for a motel.   I got all the way to Lawrence Kansas the first day and spent the night in a parking lot outside the University of Kansas Student Union.  The next morning I walked into the Student Union with my shaving kit to clean up and to brush my teeth.

My Lawrence Kansas destination was deliberate,  I had just been accepted into their Law School for September 1978 and this was my first actual look at the campus.  That summer I would defer admission for a year and ultimately abandon the whole idea,  a waste of LSAT scores that had been the envy of my labor law study group at Cornell.  Yes,  even back then I was exhibiting Jeff Lebowski characteristics.

"And even if he's a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. But sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Aw. I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced him enough".

About all I recall of the Kansas Union was that they were promoting an upcoming Debby Boone concert with this photo.  Debby was pretty but not enough for me to stay in town for her concert.

That day was a seemingly endless drive across Kansas on I-70.  Noteworthy only for the inventive ways farmers posted huge Bob Dole signs on hay wagons to make them visible to passing cars. Once up in the Colorado mountains west of Denver I decided to actually pay for a motel room.  It was dark and it was snowing,  I was tired of driving and it was really too cold to spend the night in the Blazer.   I do recall thinking that the previous December I had spent a similar night in the sleeping berth of my well servicing truck cab, parked on an Indian reservation near Farmington, New Mexico - about 150 miles due south of my present location.  I was pulling a frac pump on loan from our Hobbs yard in SE New Mexico to a well-site in the NW corner of the state, little dreaming that just three months later I would be off on an entirely unrelated adventure to the north. 

Once inside the motel I switched on the television and found myself midway into a documentary about a rock band called "The Rutles".  It took me quite a while to figure out this was a parody of The Beatles.  I like to think that this was due to my being exhausted and essentially brain dead from the drive, and that had I not missed the first 15 minutes that I would have been quicker on the uptake.  By the end I was laughing out loud and wishing that I could view the whole thing again.  It was the defining moment of the entire trip.

The next day I drove the remaining way across Colorado, all the way across Utah, and into eastern Nevada, spending the night in Ely.  This was the day I kept flashing on the movie "Vanishing Point", which had been filmed along roughly this same route. 

Kowalski works for a car delivery service. He takes delivery of a 1970 Dodge Challenger to take from Colorado to San Francisco, betting that he can get the car there in less than 15 hours.

I had bypassed Salt Lake City to the south, little knowing that just six years later I would find myself sitting in the Salt Palace with the mayor of Paramus New Jersey, watching Elaine Zayak (his hometown star) compete in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

The Ely to San Francisco drive on March 24, 1978 was not especially notable other than passing through the Ghost Town of Austin, Nevada and then through Reno.   Northern Nevada would become my NLRB territory in November of that year (until June 1985), and most of my cases were in Reno.  That possibility did not even cross my mind as I cruised through the city.

Like the day before,  I had cinema company.  This time in the form of Guy Madison, who  traveled a similar route in "5 Against the House" on his way to rob Harold's Club casino in Reno,  a place I would regularly check out when I was in town on NLRB business.  Madison was a reassuring childhood television friend, having appeared in countless episodes of "Wild Bill Hickok" with Andy Devine as his sidekick "Jingles". 

My instructions from Jean and John were to call her at work when I got to San Francisco, leave a message, and she would call back and direct me to an easy to find location from where they could direct me to their apartment.  This was back in the days of long distance phone charges so our visit up to this point had been coordinated by letter.   Jean was working in the United Airlines reservation center, one of dozens of reservation agents.  I stopped at a Chevron station, called the number, and she picked up; which seemed quite normal to me but she was shocked.   I had called the main reservation number and by coincidence she happened to be the one who answered,  about a one in hundred chance. 

The stretch from Ely to Reno was certainly lonely, I've lived in west Texas and in New Mexico, but I've never been in an area with a lower population density than along this road in central Nevada.

Manhattan Nevada is south of Highway 50, you turn south just before crossing the mountain to Austin.   I did not go through it on my 1978 trip but this is an especially cool photo which is representative of the area I saw.

7 August 2013:  

They Say It's Your Birthday:

Say hello to Violet Rutherford (Veronica Cartwright), perhaps a pivotal figure in my development.  I was just reminded of her yesterday while watching this "Leave It to Beaver" episode.  It was originally broadcast in the spring of 1960 and is my favorite episode of the series.  One reason I like it is because it addresses the boy-girl thing in 4th grade better than anything I have seen before or since.  Since I was in 4th grade when I first saw it I feel qualified to make that judgment.  Cartwright was the best young actress of our generation (check out "The Children's Hour" sometime) who gently teases this role and makes the episode special.  The one-on-one revelation sequence between Jerry Mathers and Cartwright at the end of the episode transcends pretty much anything from the golden age of television.

The other reason I like it is because in 1960 she was the cutest girl I had ever seen and in retrospect seems to have caused a huge attitude shift.  This plays into my imprinting theory,  basically the idea that we subconsciously make certain pre-adolescent connections which program our facial preferences.  This relatively random imprinting might explain why each of us has our own unique concept of beauty.  In this we are probably less unique now than before the advent of movies and television.  

About this same time I recall my father watching a Jane Russell - Marilyn Monroe movie on television and commenting several times on how much more attractive he found Russell than Monroe, which seemed odd to me because at the time Monroe was regarded as the number one sex symbol in the world.   Yet for him the contest between them was not even close.  There must have been something that predisposed him to have such a strong preference, my guess is that it was something that was imprinted on him at a relatively early age, and through which he filtered every woman he subsequently encountered. 

Most likely one's preferred "type" does not significantly change after a certain impressionable age.   In any case it is fun to try to determine your lifelong preferences and try to identify their origins.

3 August 2013 

The Generic Word for....

What generic word do you use to describe carbonated soft drinks?

Having lived throughout the country, I have been reminded that there are huge speech differences, although perhaps nothing quite as extreme as for this word.  We called all varieties "Pop" (represented on the map as blue),  but often called Coca-Cola "Coke" and would sometimes use "Coke" generically.  The generic "Coke" (represented on the map as red) might be used if you were a guest in someone's home and they asked you if you wanted something to drink - it was generally understood in that situation you meant any carbonated soft drink - back then households were unlikely to stock more than one type of soft drink and you were expressing a preference for that over coffee, tea, milk, or water.  I never heard anyone use the term "soda" (represented on the map as yellow) until I went east for college,  although I think "soda pop" was occasionally used by older people in the more rural areas of our county.  I still think "soda" sounds incredibly dorky, in those areas my concession is to say "soft drink". 

http://www.popvssoda.com/

A brief history of “pop”:

The word soda comes from soda-water (sodium bicarbonate with acid to create fizz). Its original meaning was sodium carbonate, Na2CO3, but has evolved into one of the generic terms for a soft drink.

Pop was introduced later in 1812 by Robert Southey,

A new manufactory of a nectar, between soda-water and ginger-beer, and called pop, because ‘pop goes the cork’ when it is drawn.

Trailing soda and pop in popularity is coke, which has influence in the south likely due to the location of the Coca-Cola plant in Georgia. “I’ll have a coke,” “What kind of coke?”, “Root beer please”.

I think “soft drink” is probably the best term for this stuff, at least the most descriptive of the words.  But “pop” is the official slang term because the standard English of the United States is found in the Midwest.  There’s a southern accent, there’s a northeastern accent, there are border accents, there’s even a Chicago accent, but people on national news broadcasts and most people in movies are considered accent-less.  Their pronunciations are no different from the Midwesterner pronunciations.

So we drink pop.

2 August 2013

 Nehi Pop

• Nehi Blue Raspberry

• Nehi Root Beer

• Nehi Lemonade

• Nehi Wild Berry

• Nehi Grape

• Nehi Peach

• Nehi Strawberry

• Nehi Orange

• Nehi Berry

• Nehi Ginger

• Nehi Fruit Punch

• Nehi Blueberry

• Nehi Lemon-Lime

• Nehi Cherry

• Nehi Blue Cream

An exotic list of soft drinks, it seems to me they also offered a cream soda flavor which I did not like.  This was back in the day of the returnable bottles and the gimmick with Nehi was that their grocery store six-packs were sold as an assortment of flavors, each a different color.  You may have been able to buy straight six-packs of a single flavor in some stores but I don't think these were available in our area.  But you could mix and match if you were enterprising and the store did not object.   The assortment typically included the most mainstream ones on this list; orange, grape, and lemon-lime.  In retailer terms it was a bottom shelf product which you had to look around for among the more display worthy mainstream soft drinks. 

My favorite Nehi flavor was the Lemon-Lime, not for its taste but because it was actually green.  It was the opposite of 7-Up; instead of being clear in a green bottle it was light green in a clear bottle.   There were no Nehi vending machines in Ashland but occasionally I would find one at a motel on our vacations.  Mostly you found them rounding out the selections in other bottler's vending machines.   Typically those machines where you could see the bottle caps behind a vertical glass door,  you would opening the door and pull out the bottom by its neck. 

Nehi had the best "kid-friendly" bottle, with the little glass spikes providing texture - tactile perception being of considerably more importance at that age.  It also was less likely to slip from small hands.

Pepsi originally had a pretty good tactile perception bottle, but in the 1960's they switched to a whirly futuristic design which was way too slippery for its purpose.

28 July 2013

Greenfield Village

In addition to summer vacation expeditions our family went on the occasional lesser trip during the school year.  The most notable was a trip to visit friends in Birmingham Michigan in October 1959.   I can date this not just from the family movies but also from association with my all-time favorite television series.  

"The Troubleshooters" staring Keenan Wynn and Bob Mathias (the Olympic decathlon champion) ran for  one season (26 episodes) on NBC, Robert Altman directed some of the episodes.  They worked as troubleshooters for an international construction company and were sent to handle emergencies like fires, accidents, strikes, and earthquakes.   I am dead certain that I watched an episode of the show in our friend's family room during that visit. 

One of the favorites of my many childhood comics, released about the time the show was canceled.  I was more disappointed at its cancellation than that of any show before or since.

The house in Birmingham is memorable as the site of one of the panic moments of my childhood.  I was given my friend Bill's room and just before going to bed the first night I got out an elaborate toy printing press he had stored away.  While examining it on the bed some black ink leaked out of a bottle and stained the bedsheets.  I frantically tried to wipe up the mess but could not get the stuff out - I think I did manage to keep it from seeping through to the mattress.   Had I exhibited this sort of carelessness at home and damaged property, it would have drawn an extreme punishment from my parents - and this was many times worse because we were guests in this home.    I  remember standing there in my pajamas slowly gathering up the courage to go downstairs and alert Bill's mother to the damage.   With all the other kids asleep,  I went into the room where the four adults were talking and sheepishly confessed.   To my "vast" relief nothing much was made of the situation.   Many years later I bought the same press at a garage sale - just to remind me of the night in Michigan when I dodged a bullet. 

While in the Detroit area our family went to nearby Dearborn to see Greenfield Village and to tour the Henry Ford Museum.   This combo was riveting to me and I recommend it to everyone. 

Perhaps this trip was so memorable because it was right in the middle of what I think are the best two years of life, ages nine and ten (or the 4th grade sandwich).  In "Stand By Me" Stephen King puts this at age 12, although we both set our stories in 1959 - maybe there was just something great about that year.   

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?

25 July 2013:

 Family Summer Vacation Trips 1950's:

A hugely boring topic but I will inflict it on the blog in the service of getting all of it better organized in my mind.  My father took 8mm silent home movies of us from 1955 through 1977, not obsessively but  to document vacations, Christmas, and the occasional human interest event.   As movie making was a huge hassle and very intrusive to the activity being filmed, the camera rarely came out except for these occasions.   So for all the bother created by this activity the end product for the first seven years of family film-making totals less that 40 minutes of running time, and a fair amount of that is simple scenery.  But the film record does help me to sort out the clutter in my mind and put some chronology to these now hazy years.

The danger of home movies is that they contaminate memories.   Having seen these films many times over the years, my actual memories of the events on them have mixed with the film images,  so that I no longer have a pure memory of them.  Contrast this to my pre-1955 and post 1977 memories, or my memories of events that were never captured on film. 

I have very few clear memories of the first five years of my life,  and many clear ones of the next ten years.  The difference is in part due to the intense mental processing one does during their earliest years,  your experiences are processed not for retrieval but for integration with a developing mental framework.  They are your most important experiences but the hardest to consciously recall. 

I've always assumed that we took a vacation trip every summer,  but we did miss a few.  Summer vacations were always car trips and since my parents had little patience for the inevitable "are we there yet?" refrains from the back seat, the range of each trip was limited.  They were never for more than a week,  I would say that five days was typical.   

The first one I went on was to Traverse City Michigan in August 1955.  We stayed in a nice cabin on Traverse Bay (Cherry Cove Beach) with another family.  Jack Nash had over 300 feet of beach and had built cinder block cabins on it just after WWII.  

http://www.cherrycovebeach.com/

My only vivid memory is having the generator on our 1953 Chevy replaced at a truck stop garage.  This was the trip where my parents aggressively talked up getting an ice cream soda at a soda fountain in downtown Traverse City.  Spending considerable time regaling me with the delights of this treat.   One afternoon we drove into town for this purpose and the three of us took seats on those little metal chairs around one of those little metal tables.  The waitress came up and asked me what I wanted.  Instead of an ice cream soda I said that I wanted a hamburger.   So much for parental mind control.

We went to Oglebay Park in Wheeling in 1957 and 1958.  They have a huge swimming pool there and when I stopped back in 2002 I noticed that they are still employing the same wire basket system for swimmers checking their street clothes before going in the pool.  They still give you a large chromed safety pin with a number when you check in your basket, you pin this to your swim trucks and use it to claim your street clothes when you leave.   Holy nostalgia Batman!

The massive swimming pool and stone clubhouse at Oglebay Park

During the 1958 visit we went into Wheeling one evening for dinner, the town has a race track and was pretty much a wide open place.  The nightclub style restaurant we visited had slot machines lining the walls of the hallways.  I had never seen anything like them and coming back from the rest room I ended up rooted to the spot watching the action.  There was a 50 cent machine and you could see  hundreds of half dollars inside through the glass.  50 cents was a fortune to me.  One lady gambler adopted me,  gave me ten dimes, and showed me how to work the machine.  I stood up on a stool and played until all the dimes were gone.  Dad came along toward the end and watched with amusement as I played the slots.  I thanked the lady and we left.  I could not stop talking about the experience but we did not return to the nightclub. 

In the summer of 1959 we went to Storybook Forest in Ligonier Pennsylvania (just east of Pittsburgh),  most likely the result of a tourist brochure we stumbled across on one of those Wheeling visits.  This trip was unique in that it was the first and last vacation to a children's attraction.  Past and future vacations would be to educational oriented destinations.    We also visited Fort Ligonier, a full-scale, on-site reconstruction of the 1758-1766 original fort.  I bought a tiny canon in the gift shop and a pennant, which I still have.

"Story Book Forest was built in 1956, an era when many children's parks based on storybooks were sprouting up around the country. The Pennsylvania attraction was created by Idlewild's then-owner C.C. Macdonald and Arthur Jennings, who was a performance clown at the park. Jennings had always said he wanted to create a theme park "based on emotion rather than motion."

The result was a winding path through a wooded area dotted with scenes from the most beloved nursery rhymes. The Good Ship Lollipop sits floating in a lagoon, Mary Mary Quite Contrary sits in front of her watering-can shaped house, and Snow White gives apple stickers to children who visit the cottage of the seven dwarfs."

The story my parents liked to tell was of them buying me tickets for some rides in another section of the park.  Everyone began walking toward that area but stopped at some point so my brother could look at another Storybook attraction.   While they were occupied with him I continued walking down the path unnoticed.  Finally discovering my absence they began a frantic and lengthy search for their eight-year old, methodically moving out in all directions from where I had last been seen.  Finally I was spotted in a little car at the top of the Ferris Wheel, just about to complete my second ride.  They were furious with me at the time but years later amused by my initiative and surprised that I had gone on the ride by myself.   As I calmly exited the Ferris Wheel my father had to admit handing me the tickets, that I had simply proceeded forward when they stopped,  and had done exactly what they had intended me to do.  They should have known their pragmatic child and the Ferris Wheel should have been the first place they looked for me.

28 June 2013  

Round Top Refrigerators

Funny thing is that I was trying to think what this type of fridge might be called and I came up with "round top" which strangely enough is what they are called today. 

The predecessor of the round tops was the "Monitor" style (below), so named because the compressor was housed in a round container on the top, like the gun turret on the "Monitor" ironclads of the American Civil War.  While the round tops were not named after certain terrain features at Gettysburg it is curious that both these models share a Civil War reference.

I did not know anyone with a Monitor type still in service when I was growing up. 

Most boomers recall round tops although they were generally phased out of kitchens by the late 1950's.  Many of these ended up in basements and garages where they hummed along for years as a family's auxiliary refrigerator.  The most notable feature was the tiny freezer compartment which was housed inside the main compartment instead of having its own external door.  It typically had a spring loaded thin aluminum door (missing from the above image).   You could put two aluminum ice cube trays on the upper rack and several cans of frozen orange juice concentrate in the bottom compartment with maybe a TV dinner or two.   Lack of freezer space was the main drawback, made worse because these things tended to frost up in a matter of days, left untended your freezer space would shrink to nothing,  with the contents eventually imprisoned in a solid block of ice.  And defrosting was messy because the water dripped all over the place.

Technically it was an interesting design because only the freezer was cooled, the main compartment was a passive area that benefited from its proximity to the freezer compartment. 

My grandmother kept her round top in service until the early 1960's (we replaced ours when we moved into our new house in 1956) because she purchased an early horizontal home freezer like this Crosley (a Cincinnati company).  Having this made the freezer compartment on the round top irrelevant, it was just used for ice cubes and something called Ice Milk (an early version of low fat ice cream which even kids found disgusting). 

She bought her freezer the summer we were living with her.  It came in a huge cardboard box (the biggest I had ever seen) which I appropriated when they were about to take it to the dump.  I built my only playhouse out of this box which had plenty of room inside for a five year-old.  This led to one of my most vivid memories.   I used a rounded tip paring knife to cut out a door and windows in the cardboard.   This was thought by my grandmother to be as harmless as a table knife,  but in fact it had a deceptively sharp edge.  During my labors in the backyard cutting openings in the giant box,  the knife slipped off the cardboard and sliced open the palm of my left hand.  Not a deep cut but it was across the entire palm and initially very bloody.  It scared me as much as I have ever been scared,  and probably scared my mother more when I ran up to her and opened my hand.  But the bleeding quickly stopped when she applied pressure with a cold towel.   I had to complete the project with a table knife and I was extra careful even with that. 

15 June 2013

 Science Fairs and a Quincunx

Science fairs first became popular in the early 1950s under an organization known as the National Science Fair. Interest in the sciences was at a new high as the world witnessed discoveries that brought science fiction to reality; this attracted increasing numbers of students to fairs.  In Ashland science fair eligibility was from 7th - 9th grade, at least those were the years I participated.

It was an oddly competitive activity,  with blue ribbons for superior projects, red ribbons for excellent projects, and green ribbons for good projects.  Superior projects got to move on to a regional competition and there were probably even bigger competitions later for the really great projects.  As you would expect this often turned what could have been a fun learning experience into a disillusioning negative. 

Back when Osborn was eight grades they held the science fair in the gym and all the younger classes would parade through to see what the older students were up to.  Years of observing had me eagerly anticipating the opportunity to participate once I was old enough.  By then the science fair was citywide and held in the gym of the junior high school.

My first year was quite basic, the science of flight.  For which I exhibited a see-through model of a P-51 Mustang fighter, drew a few illustrations of airflow over wing surfaces, and copied some basic material out of an encyclopedia.  I would have done the model anyway and had fun just setting the stuff up and answering questions.  I got a red ribbon.

Neat idea but not an easy model to put together.  I was pretty skilled at assembling this kind of stuff but Monogram was notorious for poorly fitting pieces.  Most of their kits included battery operated electric motors but the pieces rarely had enough play to do what they were supposed to do.  In this case the propeller spun but the landing gear were good for about one retraction before jamming. 

My second science fair project was also not especially ambitious or original.  I had this Lionel-Porter Mineralogy Set (basically a Geology oriented Chemistry Set) and I just displayed some rocks,  made some diagrams of the various ways in which they were formed, and used the Lionel-Porter kit to illustrate hardness tests and other ways to disclose the identity of a sample.  This too netted a red ribbon.

After two red ribbons I decided in the 9th grade to make a serious effort for the superior award.  It would be my last year of eligibility.  Several times a year I received the Edmond Scientific catalog in the mail (the J.C. Whitney of science geekdom) and they had a section devoted to science fair projects.   The project that caught my eye was focused on the laws of probability, the Edmund kit included several cheap gambling devices (a roulette wheel, a chuck-a-luck, and a tiny slot machine), along with big paper dice and a book on random variables and the application of statistics to the experimental method.  It's main appeal to me was that I had never seen anyone take on the topic at a previous science fair.

Needing a visual focus I decided to build a very large Quincunx or "Galton Board" , named after Sir Francis Galton and not to be confused with "Harry Potter's"  "Horcrux". There was a picture of one in the Edmund book, it is a triangular array of pegs on a board.  Balls are dropped onto the top peg and then bounce their way down to the bottom where they are collected in little bins. Each time a ball hits one of the pegs, it bounces either left or right.

https://aeon.co/essays/our-behaviour-in-bulk-is-more-predictable-than-we-like-to-imagine?utm_source=pocket-newtab

If there is an equal chance of bouncing left or right, then the balls collecting in the bins form the classic "bell-shaped" curve of the normal distribution.  If the probabilities are not even, you get a  "skewed"  distribution.

No one in Junior High (students, teachers, or me) had ever heard of a Quincunx but in our basement was a sheet of pegboard and a sheet of clear plexiglass with three one-inch deep sides.   After positioning a triangle of pegs on the board and setting up some dividers for collection bins, I attached the plexiglass to the bottom with the open side facing up.  The board was about four feet high and I set it up on an angle so that a marble dropped at the top would roll down through the pegs and drop into the bins, which were visible through the clear plexiglass.   The Quincunx link (above) takes you an animated illustration of this process.

A ball would end up in the bin k places from the right if it has taken k left turns.

In the general case, if the quincunx has n rows then a possible path for the ball would be k bounces to the left and (n-k) bounces to the right.

And if the probability of bouncing to the left is p then we can calculate the probability of a certain path like this:

So, the probability of following such a path is pk(1-p)(n-k)

As I recall about 80% of the projects got a red ribbon,  about 15% got the superior blue ribbon, and the remaining 5% got the lowly green ribbon.  Only a small fraction of the students entered a project and every entry was a serious one.  Differences resulted mostly from a disparity of financial resources (insert "parental backing" here) and student sophistication,  actual slackers stayed away as did the alienated so no satirical efforts made it into the competition.  Except in 8th grade when Paul Nichols, a largely unappreciated but creatively inspired slacker who I hung out with on occasion, entered a project illustrating the ripening of a banana.  It was a parody of my efforts as the whole science fair thing would otherwise have not even appeared on his radar.

It was somewhat entertaining to roam around searching for the occasional green ribbon project,  as these typically reflected a staggering degree of cluelessness and a huge need for an early reality check.  You could laugh at these but mostly I worried for these kids, much like I had worried as a preschooler for the penguin living all alone in my snow globe. 

Each year judging was done just after the initial set-up, the night before public viewing; ribbons were placed on each project after the students went home and you did not find out the results until the gym was opened the next day to the public.

I was uncharacteristically eager to speak with interested and knowledgeable adults about my "Probability" project,  convinced that it was cutting edge cool - especially for a 9th grader; and certain they would be blown away.  They had about a dozen teams of judges,  some of whom I recognized and some who were strangers.  Finally two guys I had never seen before approached my table and introduced themselves.  Then I began my presentation about sample size and standard deviations,  moved on to each exhibit and the charts where I had calculated the odds of getting each result randomly.  I confidently finished by explaining the purpose of the Quincunx and giving them a demonstration of it in operation.  Unlike the first two years I was brimming with confidence and intimately knew my material; having done all the construction and performed all the calculations myself (not an easy task in the days before computers and affordable pocket calculators). 

When I finished they asked a couple of rather basic questions and I began to wonder where the school had dug up these two characters (judging was a volunteer job). They did not seem to grasp the concept and had said nothing encouraging up to this point, nor had they appeared even remotely impressed.  I could see my dream of the district science fair going up in smoke.  There was a short pause and then they both expressed skepticism about the appropriateness of a project on statistics and probability in a science fair, maintaining that it had nothing whatsoever to do with science.  I was literally flabbergasted, Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party,  and rendered speechless for a brief time.  Then - completely out of character - mega shy Jeff went off, telling them that they had no business being judges at a science fair and that it was a travesty for students who worked hard on projects to be judged by someone so utterly unqualified (or words to that effect).  It sucked to be me in 9th grade.

“why is a raven like a writing desk?”

The day after the judging the fair opened to the public, open for a couple hours during school so that entire classes could tour it and then again that night for the parents.  You were expected to be with your project for most of this time, available to answer questions.  When I reported to the Junior High gym the afternoon after the judging I was not surprised to find a green ribbon with my project,  making it in the eyes of the judges one of the three worst projects in the entire science fair.  Of course I had prepared myself overnight for this,  although I had not entirely given up hope that common sense would prevail and someone in authority with at least half a brain would intervene on my behalf.  Such was not the case and I quickly steeled myself for the ordeal of watching students and parents parade past my project shaking their heads at its lameness.   At the same time I somehow knew that this would not crush me,  that I could not really feel shame because I was still dealing with a full-on incredulity. 

Initially it crossed my mind to simply pocket the green ribbon and leave people with the impression that for some reason it had not been judged. But I was rather proud of myself for having stood up to the judges the day before. As I slowly processed everything I began to realize that I was actually glad it was not the mediocrity of another red ribbon (or even the once hoped for blue ribbon), seeing in "this" green ribbon a unique badge of distinction.  

And far from being a source of derision,  the touring students, teachers,  and parents took far more interest in my gambling devices and in the Quincunx (spelled out in big letters along its top edge) than they had in my first two projects.

The funny thing in retrospect is that this was more than a coming of age moment.  It would prove to be the first significant moment in the rebuilding of a new identity, a process that I had been struggling with since my old identity had been shattered two years before.  Sometimes life can be quite amazing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/05/parenting-islands-of-competence-kids-motivation/682739/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

.

5 June 2013: 

 Millie The Model:

Not a comic to which I paid much attention at the time (it was recently referenced on an episode of "The Big Bang Theory" because Stan Lee originated it), but I did read it on occasion.  What always struck me was how much hotter Chili (Millie's rival) was than Millie.   Given they were done by the same artist and in the same style this seems a bit inexplicable,  although impossible to dispute.

Even making allowances for my lifelong preference for redheads.

I'm inclined to put it down to what I call the "Bad Girl Effect", which basically says that bad girls are simply innately hotter.   

Think about it.

24 May 2013:  

Perfect Day

Yesterday's entry directed the reader to a homemade video documenting a 5th grader's perfect day, which signs off with the statement that they will never top this one.  This got me thinking about how many of us have had a perfect day or if not exactly perfect, how many of us boomers can identify the best day(s) of their lives.  I count myself lucky that I can do this,  they were the days of the annual Osborn Elementary School PTA Festival, and there were 3-4 of them (probably 3rd through 6th grade) that were absolutely special.  Although these days may not have been perfect,  they are the days that I would most like to relive.  

The festival was a PTA fundraising event held once a year on a Saturday night, I think in the Spring.  From 6-9 PM the gym was turned into a carnival with traditional carney games like a basketball toss,  breaking balloons with darts, knocking over milk bottles with a softball,  fishing with a magnet, etc.  Unlike those at the county fair,  these games were not rigged and it was easy to win a cheap prize.  I still have a large tin policeman's badge I won, the back of it revealing that the metal came from a Japanese orange juice tin, with Japanese writing and colorful graphics.  Those were the days went Japanese goods were considered cheap junk.

The basement and first floor classrooms were turned into various festival attractions.  There was a bake sale room,  a clothes and household item rummage sale room, a toy room with rummage sale items for children,  and a craft room where students exhibited their personal hobby stuff for judging.  At that time the school was a regular hotbed of matchbook collectors (not guilty), and I recall poster boards of matchbooks on every wall.  One year I hauled much of my plastic model collection down there and received an award.   The cafeteria served food.   Nothing was sold for cash.  Instead you purchased books of tickets for $2 and then used them for whatever you wanted to buy, play, or eat.

Each year my parents (and another couple) ran the coat check room, a converted classroom just inside the main entrance.  They would push all the desks up against the back wall and move in enough metal coat racks to fill up the room.  There were several teacher's desks by the classroom door and people would pass their coats to my parents and receive a numbered claim check.  Then their coat would be hung up on one of the coat racks,  with their matching claim check slipped over the hook portion of the hanger.   The room would eventually become a sea of coats with row after row of coat racks.  Most likely my parents stumbled on this job and found it to be by far the most dignified of anything they could volunteer for, so that latched onto it like grim death and did it every year. 

For me the toy room was the main attraction.  Each year it had several tables stacked high with donated used comic books.  Three books for a ten cent ticket, which was an especially good value if you found a few 25 cent giant size comics.  Each year I would help set up the coat check  room,  then park myself in the hallway outside the toy sale classroom and wait for them to open up.  At which time I would beeline to the tables of comics and carefully sort out 60 of them; the number that I could buy for one $2 book of tickets;  my parents always bought me one book when we first arrived.  I would take my stack of comics downstairs to the coat check room and squirrel them away in a student desk in the back corner behind the last coat rack. 

I always brought some of my own money for another book of tickets which I would use to play the games in the gym and to buy some food.  One year I talked my parents into buying me a large metal globe in the toy room.  Later that night I dropped it on the gym floor which left a small dent, this carelessness pissed off my parents but did not harm any functional part of the globe.  I had it for years but have no idea what ultimately happened to it.

Once my money and energy had run out I would return to the coat check room and huddle in the corner eating whatever food I had left and reading my newly acquired comics until all the coats had been distributed and we could head home.  That last hour was absolute heaven.

At some point I acquired a taste for Little Lulu comics, although I would not pay full price for one I did purchase a bunch of them over the years at the festivals.

One fall we visited family friends in Birmingham Michigan and the visit happened to coincide with their neighborhood school's festival.  It was very similar to Osborn's in concept but second-rate in execution.  Of course my judgment mostly reflected the limited number of comics that were available.  It did help me to better appreciate my school.   I also recall attending something like this at Grant Street school, where both my cousins were students. 

Afraid the blog has been neglected for high school softball (we won the state championship "again" this year) and a kidney stone, which took over 15 days for me to pass.  But I should have more time and more ability to concentrate as we head into late May.

Meanwhile check out this great Taylor Swift story.  Be sure to read the story and then watch the video (at least the last half) as it nicely illustrates the ability of a decently edited homemade video to let the viewer share in the excitement of an activity.  However, I recommend watching the entire video as it will give you a look into a world we are unlikely to ever see ourselves.

At the end of the article the little girl says:  "It didn't surprise me that she was nice. I knew she'd be nice".  This reminded me of Harry Houdini's advice on illusions: "Never try to fool children. They expect nothing and therefore see everything".   I think a ten-year-old who no doubt has watched countless televised interviews with Taylor would be able to sense the genuine person behind the persona.   And of course Taylor is kind of purdy. 

http://www.cleveland.com/tipoff/index.ssf/2013/05/taylor_swift_makes_10-year-old.html#incart_m-rpt-2

http://perezhilton.com/perezitos/2013-04-29-taylor-swift-fan-hug-club-red-concert-video#.UYPFW4UYBJM

We're happy free confused and lonely in the best way

It's miserable and magical oh yeah

8 April 2013:  

Annette Funicello 

 (who Mad Magazine called Annette Funnyjello)

Just got the word on Annette.  Donnie in June, Bonnie in November, and now Annette.  A hard year for us MMC fans. 

Meredith MacRae and Annette on the beach.  Meredith passed away thirteen years ago.  She played Tim Considine's girlfriend on "My Three Sons" and then was the third actress to play Billie Jo on "Petticoat Junction".   The show changed Billie Jo's the same month I changed high schools.  I regularly inflicted that show on myself just to look at Meredith.  I still hate that stupid dog.

Here is a review I wrote several years ago about the "Annette" serial at the time of its DVD release:

Another Collector's Tin release by Disney; this time a limited series of 39,500 were issued. Each contains an individually numbered certificate of authenticity, a 7" x 4.5" black and white publicity still of the title character, a booklet about the serial, and two disks.

The disks contain all 20 episodes of the serial and two entire episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club. These are from early 1958 so they are only 30 minutes long as the show's running time had been cut in half for its 3rd and final season.

There are also some bonus items on the disks: introductions by Leonard Maltin and some interviews with and tributes to "Annette".

Baby boomers don't need any introduction to the title character but others may be puzzled by the popularity of this actress who was not much of an actress and this singer who was not much of a singer. I was never particularly dazzled by Annette but I always liked her; she had an effortless charm that just won you over. Even if you crushed on Cheryl (guilty) and Doreen you still liked Annette. And very few girls ever felt any jealousy toward her. Much the same could be said in reverse about Tim Considine so featuring them together (here and in "Spin and Marty") pretty much guaranteed you would appeal to the widest teen and pre-teen demographic.

The series was a somewhat toned down adaptation of Janette (The Pokey Little Puppy) Lowrey's 1950 book "Margaret" and was originally to be titled "Annette and Darlene". But poor Darlene Gillespie fell into disfavor and was replaced as the Jet Maypen character by Judy Nugent. Nugent was not a Disney property so there was no need for the studio to promote her career, otherwise it would have been called "Annette and Judy".

The plot features the traditional conflict between city and country. Annette and Jet are up against rich girl queen bee Laura Rogan (Roberta Shore successfully playing against type and obviously having a lot of fun with the role). You've seen this same dynamic recently in "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen". Disney's move from Annette to Lindsey Lohen might signal the decline of Western Civilization.

David Stollery and Tim Considine team up again as the main male characters. Stollery sings a duet with Annette and one featurette explains how they doubled her voice (probably his as well) by having her sing the song twice.

There are sizeable parts for Doreen Tracey, Shelley Fabares, Sharon Baird, and Rudy Lee. And a bit part for Cheryl Holdridge; even third season newcomer Bonnie Fields (the prettiest Mouseketeer who was sadly underutilized by the show itself) gets some screen time. Richard Deacon and Mary Wickes play off each other for comedy relief; basically reprising their trademark character roles.

The song that launched Annette's recording career, "How Will I Know My Love?" is featured twice and Shore sings a couple much better numbers, "Readin', Writin' and Rhythm" and "Don't Jump to Conclusions". Shore's stuff has an early Judy Garland quality.

The teen dancing sequences were painfully corny even to a small town 1950's 2nd grader. On the other hand Bonnie does dance a little and this prompted me to seek out a video of her original 1957 MMC guest appearance (as a tap dancing act) which someone has uploaded to U-Tube (scroll to the very bottom of this page to check it out).

I still have the Dell comic book so I had not forgotten the general story, but I found the series itself better than I remembered it. They do a nice job of laying some romantic misdirection so that the resolution offers a mild surprise. Then you can look back and see that clues were provided all along but most viewers missed them.

Despite having some awful dialogue to deal with; Stollery, Nugent, and Shore are talented enough to sell their characters. Annette and Tim just play their likable selves and as always that works just fine

"I remember being really small; too small to see over the edge of a table. There was a snow globe, and I remember the penguin who lived inside the globe. He was all alone in there, and I worried for him."

12 March 2013

  Monsters & Bullies

Yesterday's entry makes a good segue into this discussion.   Unfortunately I have so many detailed examples that it is best handled with its own page, one which I can gradually supplement as it strikes my fancy.  So click on https://sites.google.com/view/2013babyboomerblog/monsters-bullies if the topic is of interest. 

11 March 2013:  

Queen Bees

Our elementary school class (there were about 50 of us and each year we were divided between two teachers) was remarkably well-adjusted, but there was some bullying.  The bullies were girls (oh my!), the teachers had learned to split them up and put them  in separate classrooms, so their combined reign of terror was confined to the playground, joint classes, and walking home. 

Girls suffered much worse than the boys,  the boys saw little to be gained from close association with the Queen Bees, but a girl's status in the class was dependent on the degree to which she was accepted by them.

One of them lived nearby and had showed some interest in my activities in the neighborhood, pushed for an association, and tried to assert control.  She lived in a prefabricated (modular) home that had been trucked into the neighborhood in four sections and assembled on a crawl space;  I had watched the concrete trucks pour the footings several weeks earlier.   I would not have enjoyed watching the assembly process as much if I had known who would be moving into our neighborhood. 

Modular Connie narrowly avoided electrocution one day when a bolt of lightning hit a large tree in a neighboring backyard and set the tree on fire.  A fire engine soon appeared and extinguished the blaze but the charge had traveled through their clothesline and briefly electrified their house.  One can only hope it made her sterile.  The insulation on the electric cable they used as a clothesline was split apart from the transmission; an awesome display for this impressionable boy - I kept a small section of it. 

After a few of years Modular Connie's family moved to another town and our section of the neighborhood breathed a collective sigh of relief.   At the last class reunion I was the only one who remembered Modular Connie but her house is still there.

The favorite target of "The Connie's" was the fattest girl in the class and they relentlessly directed a campaign of rejection and torment in her direction.  To be fair she would be fat even by today's standards, and fat kids were rare back then.  The girls ridiculed and excluded her.  The boys teased her.  Unfortunately she reacted violently to any teasing;  screaming,  crying, and chasing any boy who baited her.  Since she was guaranteed to go for the bait and too slow to catch you,  it was great sport for a while.  Most of us (boys) eventually began to feel sorry for her and left her alone, but actual acceptance never came

One strange coincidence is that author Dandi Mackall lives in Ashland County and wrote a children's book on this same dynamic.

"Theresa laughed. She's kind of chubby, and I got the feeling she wasn't entirely against the idea of having someone in class who made her look skinny. I got to admit that I laughed too. But it wasn't a real laugh, and I guess that makes it worse".

This assessment (or confession) says all that needs to by said about Laney's and Teresa's positions in the classroom dynamic, occupying that large middle ground between the bullies and the main victim; feeling a sort of guilty relief that someone else is drawing the majority of the cruelty and abuse.

9 March 2013: 

 Levittown

Many Boomers shared in the Levittown experience, whether you were on Long Island or somewhere else in North America.   The four-member Ewing family began their Levittown experience in August 1956; moving into a large brand new development on the southeast fringe of Ashland Ohio.

Our unnamed subdivision was the former Duff farm, which ran from Main Street to roughly the Boy Scout Woods and the Country Club on the south edge of town.   As I recall,  it was the brainchild of local builder Ray Keen who named one of the streets "Luray";  after himself and his wife.   Two of the streets, Hillcrest and Bank,  were extensions of existing streets.  Two others,  Hoover and Jackson, were probably named after Presidents although that is just guesswork on my part.  Two others, Duff and Sloan were named after the parcels of land on which they were built.  The last one, Steele, is of unknown origin.

It wasn't Keen's first development in town but it was a bit upscale from his early post-war homes on Steele, Sloan, Phillips, Buena Vista and Keen (yes he named another street after himself).  The Keen spec homes were of two basic styles,  a three bedroom ranch with a double garage and a three bedroom two-story with a a choice of a single or a double garage.   There were also several homes built in the style of his more modest earlier homes.  Options like fireplaces were available on the two basic styles and he built a few custom homes on his lots.  He also allowed homeowners to buy a lot and use another builder.  The end result was a neighborhood with considerably more variety than most Levittowns but with a standardized core of homes. 

Keen had enough land to incorporate the North-South tree-line of the Duff farm into his plans.  This was a twenty yard wide swathe of trees which had divided the fields of the farm and provided a windbreak.  He preserved the trees (which saved himself the expense of cutting them down) by designing parallel streets laid out with the trees at the very back of the lots.   This provided a long line of mature trees which saved the early neighborhood from the slash and burn emptiness of many large subdivisions.

27 Feb. 2013:  

Tonsils 

As noted earlier, one of my childhood experiences was a tonsillectomy,  my adenoids came out as well.  It was done much more frequently then (only about 2% of children have the operation these days). I had just turned five and I went under general anesthesia for the procedure.  Back then you spent three nights in the hospital, one before and two after the operation.  I was generally clueless about what I was letting myself in for, and my parents said that it would not hurt.  Later they liked to tell people that when they came into my hospital room "after" the operation I just glared at them.  I don't think I ever entirely trusted them after that experience.   Those days in the hospital are arguably my earliest detailed memories. 

And it was not without its rewards.  The nurses kept me well supplied with ice cream and my grandmother Ewing brought me a Robin Hood picture book.  I recall watching  Robin Hood (staring Richard Greene) on television with my new book on my lap.

I was reminded of all this by a recent 30 second commercial on television.  I liked the commercial so well that I wanted to upload it but I found it is already on Vimeo; amazingly I found it by just plugging "Emily Blue Cross" into Google. 

A few years ago I made a short montage (of movie clips) for a video production class I was teaching,  the point I was trying to illustrate was that images of little girls are more powerful than any other generic images (at least in our culture).  This commercial nicely confirms that point. 

 Watch it first with the volume off and notice how perfectly the images connect with a viewer;  the cultural clues allow us to read the images and pretty much follow the story without the voiceover narration.  In 30 seconds it communicates an incredible amount of information and happy emotion.  Whoever story-boarded it did an amazing job.

http://vimeo.com/Emily

And along the same lines is the classic McDonald's "Little Sister" commercial from the 1980's. 

ClickHereToWatchMcDonald'sLittleSister

After countless viewings this  McDonald's  commercial still make me intensely wistful.  

It is simply incredible.  For me,  coming from a somewhat dysfunctional family and a truly horrible sibling relationship, it is the most powerful one minute of sensory input out there.

And for something completely different dating back to my film school days here is a short horror film I helped to make:

PRODUCTION DATE: July 23-25, 2004 

LENGTH: 6:34 

RATING: R (graphic violence and disturbing images ) 

AWARDS: Best Action Film, Character, and Production Design

COMPETITION: Nashville 48 Hour Film Project 

GENRE: Horror/Action 

CHARACTER: Sgt. Stoddard, Park Ranger

 PROP: Garden Shears 

DIALOG: Now You've Done It 

LOCATION: Shed

18 Feb. 2013

Records and Popular Songs

Just sold my old "Beggars Banquet" LP today, which I purchased shortly after it was released, when I was  a freshman at Gettysburg College.  To this day I can't listen to "Street Fighting Man" without laughing,  because it inspired the members of the fraternity I pledged to nickname the roughest looking member "Street";  even though he was probably the most even-tempered and well-adjusted guy in the whole organization.

In any case this sale puts me in the mood to discuss boomer music.

For the past couple of decades most estate sales I have visited reflected the music choices of middle class Americans during the boomer years.  Every family seemed to have some show tune albums like "South Pacific" and "My Fair Lady".  There were often soundtrack things like "Victory at Sea" and "Peter Gunn".   Some big band stuff; "Woody Herman" and "Erskine Hawkins" if you were lucky, but more likely the more mainstream stuff.  And you often found Peggy Lee, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme; then a bit later Barbara Streisand and Robert Goulet, at least in houses where you didn't have just religious records. 

Of course we kids had our Golden Records ("Doggie in the Window" stuff) and occasionally amused ourselves with the stack of old scratched 78's in the basement.  And there was Andy Griffith's football story, which I have always called "The Big Orange" record.  If your family was into history you probably got exposed to Johnny Horton's "Battle of New Orleans".

These paper & plastic Voco picture records were still around in the early 1950's.

The LP's typically came from membership in the Columbia Record Club, where they would sell you 12 albums for 25 cents up front, in exchange for promising to buy another 12 over the next year for full price plus an outrageous shipping charge.  Unless you declined it by mail (each month) they would send you their featured album that month.  Almost every family got burned with one of these unsolicited albums and then had to decide if it was worth the time and expense of retuning it unopened before a specified deadline.  A choice which meant acknowledging to yourself that you had been clueless and careless.  If you have any magazines from the late 1950's check out these record club deals, not for their rip-off qualities but as an education in how little recorded music was being marketed to the public.   It seems like the same 100 albums were all that was for sale over at least a five year period.

 Staying with the music theme,  we finally got a real HiFi in about 1960 and joined one of those Record Clubs.  Our HiFi was a small tabletop model that played at all three speeds (33, 45, & 78).  It also had a longer playing speed (16-2/3RPM) although we had nothing recorded at that speed, which was used for spoken-word recordings.   My father got an LP of civil war songs and some John Philip Sousa marches.  And my mother got the obligatory Broadway musical LP's.

I was allowed to select one LP,  and "Johnny Horton's Greatest Hits" was my choice of the offerings in our introductory record club package.  Making it my first adult record.  A few months later I got the Soundtrack to "The Longest Day" at a discount store. 

My tastes in Junior High ran toward the comedy stuff.  "Ahab the Arab" by Ray Stevens was my first 45.  "I've Been Everywhere" by Hank Snow was my second 45.  My mother absolutely hated both songs, almost as much as she hated "The Three Stooges".  I would acquire several Smothers Brothers, Bill Cosby, and Tom Lehrer albums during this time but little in the way of music.

In 1962 I got the single "409" by The Beach Boys, with "Surfin' Safari" on the flip side. Technically, "409" was the "B" Side song but as sometimes happened my tastes and those of the industry were not in lock-step.  Eventually I got the album.  This was one group where I was ahead of the curve.

There was also the James Bond "007" thing happening in Junior High and I had the "Goldfinger" and "Dr. No" albums; in mono - stereo cost a dollar more and our HiFi only had one speaker. 

In 1966 I actually spent money on "The Blue Max" movie soundtrack album, with an extremely ordinary score by Jerry Goldsmith.  But it had the best cover art of any album up to that time.

I absolutely loved Rolf Harris' "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" which came out in 1963.  Although I never bought the single I played it on the jukebox everytime I went bowling at King Lanes.

When the British Invasion hit I purchased several Herman's Hermits singles;  including "Leaning On the Lamp Post" and "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter". 

I was never much of a fan of Dick Clark's American Bandstand, but I did watch "Shindig", "The Hullabaloo Show" and then Dick's "Where the Action Is".   I mostly recall Paul Revere and the Raiders from "Where the Action Is" .   But Hullabaloo had those dancers and was occasionally hosted by Annette and Frankie.  The most memorable time being when they danced with Freddie Garrity as "Freddie and the Dreamers" performed "I'm Telling You Now".  They did "The Freddie" (duh):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lIup-Dma1

"Eve of Destruction" made a huge impact on me in the second half of 1965.  Then and now it's a litmus of your values, deriding apathy and wishful thinking.  Dividing society into two camps based on their differing value systems.  Like biblical protagonists vs biblical antagonists - many of whom believe themselves to be protagonists.

 I still associate the song with a visit to lifelong family friends in Grosse Point Woods, Michigan that fall.  My friend Bill took me to my first shopping mall where he bought the single.  Note the top 10 chart list on the jacket for the week of 18 September 1965;  that might be pop music's the best week ever.

Lehrer did a song called "The Vatican Rag", which I would occasionally use to torture my Catholic friends.

"Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton became my first non-comedy 45 in 1962.  For some reason I never purchased "Goodbye Cruel World" by James Darren, although it was my favorite song for years after Darren sang a special version of it to Shelley Fabares on "The Donna Reed Show" in 1961.  I have since learned that the calliope music riff in the song was a synthesized recording of a woman's voice rather than a musical instrument.

I must confess to being a bit late in my appreciation of Shelley;  being preoccupied with other things,  such as the Harvey Kuenn for Rocky Colavito trade.   But in retrospect she is my girl of the 60's decade.

And that pretty much sums up my popular music interests through age 15 and going into our August 1966 move.

14 Feb. 2013

 Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day seems like a good day to recall what a big deal this was in elementary school.  It involved days of preparation as each student would decorate a box for display on the window sills of the classroom.  Mostly these were old shoe boxes covered in paper (often pink with glitter), in which a slot was cut so that your classmates could deposit "Be My Valentine" cards.  At some designated point in the day we all got up from our desks and rather chaotically deposited a Valentine's day greeting in each box.   You signed each card and addressed each envelope. 

The greeting card industry had this thing down pretty well as they sold packages of inexpensive cards especially for this purpose.  Most packages included a couple of larger and more elaborate cards which were meant for anyone you were crushing on at that moment.   You could also show this more specific interest by throwing a few candy hearts into the envelop.  Each heart had a sappy message printed on the front,  somewhat like a Chinese fortune cookie.  Typically all the guys were crushing on the same 2-3 girls and vice versa; so after a couple of years those students wised up and began using larger shoe boxes to avoid ending up with a bunch of crushed cards.  I made my slot wider in the hopes that one day some girl would throw a candy bar in there, but it never happened

Those old candy hearts looked like these but the messages were different.

10 Feb. 2013  

Paul Wertz - The Mystery Runner

More review of the 1962 Guide solves a mystery.   A fixture in our neighborhood in those days was a cross country runner who would pass our house several times each evening on his training circuit.  I doubt that he lived in the subdivision and I never knew his name.  But he is pictured several times in the 1962 Guide, it was his senior year and he was undefeated in dual meets and one of the top runners in the state.  His name was Paul Wertz.  

Over the years as I mulled over my life as a frustrated jock I have thought back to the regular sight of Paul toiling away along the road as a sign from God, a sign that I managed to repeatedly ignore.  I was too thin, weak, and slow to meet with anything but frustration during my sports participation.  And for a time diligently practiced punting the football in an effort to find a place for myself on the team.  Yet all along the answer was in front of me,  even closer when I think of a night when I jokingly ran after Paul for  a couple blocks.   I had a lean runners body and several decades later took up distance running, discovering that what had been liabilities in other sports was an advantage in cross country running.

The key event was several weeks into running when I discovered a point where I could run indefinitely, a kind of tipping point where the painful out-of-breath reaction stopped and my body settled into an equilibrium.  If anyone had told me this was possible or if it had simply occurred to me to ask,  I would have dedicated myself to the sport.   But what Paul was doing did not look like fun or even particularly satisfying to young Jeff; and I would have had to tap into the "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" thing and give up my dream of performing before an admiring crowd.  So it never happened

The name of the mystery runner of my old neighborhood is finally revealed.  By 1967 he was married and working at Union Malleable.  He would become a letter carrier (walking the streets of Ashland) and for several decades represent the 4th Ward on the city council.

Of course my running decision occurred years before the movie with the catchy song.  But even at an early age I was brutally honest and unwilling to accept substitutes that I considered inferior.  So it is unlikely that distance running - no matter how well packaged - would have been able to replace the dream of being a football star no matter how absurd I had come to view that dream.

9 Feb. 2013

A Bitter Rejection

Just found a copy of the 1962 Ashland High School yearbook "The Guide".  That would have been the year I finished 6th grade so I am not pictured.  But it is historical because it was the last year they were in the old high school building and the last year it was a four year high school.  Beginning that fall grades 10-12 were in the new building and the old building became a Junior High School with grades 7-9. I should point out, however, that the old arrangement had lasted for only about a decade.   Prior to the early 1950's the town had the first six grades in assorted neighborhood schools and the last six grades in the old high school building.  Years later they would build a technical high school, which freed up enough space to shift the ninth graders out of the old building and convert back to the four-year high school configuration.

Our lucky (?) class was the first one to experience 7th grade in the old building.  The class of 1966 was the one to be envied as they skated by with the full K-8 elementary thing, then only 9th grade in the old building, and their last three years in the new building.  

Of some note was the absence in the yearbook of my old neighbor Glen Schwartz, who lived across from us on the Duff - Jackson intersection.   Glen was 4 years older and actually interacted with the younger kids in the neighborhood, as opposed to most everybody else who treated us with varying degrees of contempt. 

Apparently Glen's family moved away before he entered 9th grade,  although I cannot recall when or where (Kathy Mitchell has since said that it was to State College Pennsylvania).  We would move away in four years, on the tenth anniversary of our move into the neighborhood.   At the time of our move I was convinced that I was the only kid unfortunate enough to be displaced in this fashion, but it had happened to Glen and to several of my early childhood buddies; Peter Hamilton, Greg Longstreath, and Steve Overly.   Although our small town seemed demographically frozen, I of all people should have been aware that such was not the case.   Peter had been my best friend in kindergarten and first grade, then suddenly he was gone.  Greg and Steve had replaced him for a time until they both moved away to other towns.

Craig Martin (above) was my best friend in the neighborhood for six years and then his family moved to another neighborhood.  I have no idea what he is looking at.

. 

In third grade Steve and I hung out together at Glen's house quite a bit as our houses bracketed his, he was often engaged in some interesting project, and he tolerated our presence.   This would lead to an especially heartbreaking event for me.   After the running of the soapbox derby Glen gave the car to Steve, announcing his decision as we stood there with him in his garage.  There had been no hint that he was not keeping the car and neither Steve nor I had even entertained the thought that we would get the car,  that was in no sense why we were helping Glen.

We had both helped him with the project and neither was more deserving than the other on that basis. And at the time there was nothing in the world that I wanted more than that car and little question that I would have gotten far more enjoyment out of it than Steve, who predictably rarely used it.  Perhaps more importantly this indicated to me that Glen liked Steve more than he liked me.   I was absolutely crushed and although I ended up with Glen's baseball card collection it was an inadequate substitute.  

I'm not sure how much thought Glen gave to this decision but I know that I took it as an especially bitter rejection and the most disappointing thing that had ever happened to me.   In retrospect I believe it was a huge life-changing event, from that point forward my capacity for hero worship became almost nil and my desire to please became subordinated to other considerations.   Life would have been much easier had this not occurred but conversely I would not be all that I am.  The irony being that I still have Glen's 1955 Bowman baseball cards and they have been far easier to drag along with me during the past 55+ years than his soapbox derby car.

There also is a lesson in unintended consequences.  Glen was just being a nice guy and he couldn't cut the car in half in the interest of equity.   Yet his generosity had created more disappointment than pleasure.   Then again, I suppose everyone tends to view their coming-of-age moments in this way, otherwise they wouldn't be a coming-of-age moments.

Apparently my trauma was apparent to my parents,  as Santa gave me a knockoff soapbox derby kit in December.  I had fun with it until it wore out,  and by that time a kid up the street had a motorized go-cart which made my little coaster seem kind of silly.  But each time I think about how my parents tried to ease my pain causes my love for them to grow.

Steve soon moved away and Glenn recruited me as his paper route summer substitute (see below),  as he was going to the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.   I figured Steve would have been his first choice but I was not about to turn down the opportunity.

Just found this on the internet when I input Steve Overly and Castalia.  November 1961 would have been the fall of sixth grade,  he was in Castalia by then so my memory of the timing appears to be accurate.

Sandusky Register November 3, 1961:  "Troop 23 held a court of honor this week, with parents and guests present.  Second Class pins were received by David Cattano, Robert Braswell, ....  Glennis Moore and Steve Overly."

5 Feb. 2013

More About Bicycles

I don't recall much about my 20" bicycle, it got some serious use and soon passed down to my brother.  Its replacement was the "astronaut" bike, so named retrospectively because it was a hand-me-down from Astronaut Bob Springer.  Bob lived directly across the street from us.  He was eight years older than I (look Mom - used the correct pronoun)  and when he went off to the Naval Academy in 1960 his parents sold his bicycle to make more room in their garage.  I'm guessing my father paid $15 for it.  It was a Schwinn "Tiger" with a gear shift on the handlebars, hand brakes, and one of those spring tension book holders mounted above the front fender.  I would supplement this with a set of those metal saddlebags mounted above the rear fender.  They were quite heavy (as was the bike itself) but I needed them when I took over as a summer substitute for Glen Schwartz's Cleveland Plain Dealer paper route (the summer between 5th and 6th grade); I think it was the summer he spent at Philmont Boy Scout Ranch in New Mexico.

A-tisket a-tasket

This was a very heavy basket....

The interesting thing about Schwinn was their similarity to GM, Ford, and Chrysler in marketing philosophy prior to the invasion of foreign competition.  Instead of offering efficient vehicles that competed functionally,  they differentiated their products and models by adding more chrome and more useless accessories.  A look at Schwinn catalogs during the 50's and 60's illustrates how completely clueless they were as to how their bicycles performed.  Marketing campaigns were geared (pun intentional) toward convincing children that bigger and heavier were better.   My Traveler was considered a lightweight touring bicycle even though it had 1 3/8" tires and weighed 50% more than a European bicycle of the same era.

https://www.ashlandsource.com/news/hometown-astronaut-col-robert-springer-talks-space-confronted-by-conspiracy-theorist/article_17e0335a-a0eb-11ec-9b85-a75711df7829.html

Bob's "Tiger" was a 26" 3-speed with hand brakes.  It was green and had one of those next to useless generator lights (which instantly stop shining when you stop moving).  One thing it was not is "lightning-fast".   Schwinn called this a middleweight because it had 1.75" wide tires.  Believe it or not they had a heavyweight category with 2" balloon tires - target market paperboys and delivery boys.

Definitely my pride and joy, and the second of two "new" bicycles I owned as a child.  This is the 1960 model which graced the back covers of many comic books that year,  mine was the 3 speed with this same red frame and chrome fenders (it looked exactly like this one!).   Note the medium width tires, a joy for me (especially when trying to peddle uphill) after the balloon tires on my old green Schwinn of the same 26" size.  It came with the generator operated light and the tiny white bag behind the seat.  I rode this to elementary school on warm days, and even to junior high (much further and on busier streets) on occasion.

3 Feb 2013  

My First Bicycle

I owned my very first bicycle for only 16 hours.   Shortly after we moved into our new house in a brand new subdivision with minimal car traffic I learned to ride a bicycle.  One of the girls two houses away had a 16 inch bicycle which she showed me how to ride.  It didn't take long to figure out how to balance and I would ride it up and down a flat portion of the street beside our house. Brakes were unnecessary as was turning,  because when I wanted to stop I just stopped pedaling and put my feet down as the bike slowed down.  Then I would turn it around and resume pedaling.   I immediately informed my father of my new skill and reminded him of the promised bicycle.  A few days later he brought home a huge 24" well used bicycle.  It had large balloon tires and was painted the same rust color as the semi that chases Dennis Weaver in the movie "Duel".  My feet barely reached the pedals even with the seat in its lowest position,  bike and kid probably weighed about the same.  But Dad had gotten it for a good price, and Walter Good's Bicycle Shop did not have any small "used" bikes.  In retrospect,  it was all about his growing up during the depression,   by his financial logic the purchase made more sense than buying me something smaller that I would outgrow in a couple years.

The new streets in the subdivision all had high curbs and it was just possible for me to stand on the curb and mount or dismount from this monster.   So we walked the bike to the top of the long hill in front of our house (we lived on a corner at the bottom of the hill).   And he held it steady while I swung onto the seat from the curb.  Then he started it downhill,  jogging beside me and holding the seat steady and keeping the speed low.  Once he was convinced that I could keep it upright he let go and I began flying down the hill.  Quite a thrill until I looked back and saw  him standing about 30 feet behind yelling for me to slow down.  It had a coaster brake but I had no clue how to use it.  But I was able to keep my balance as I flew past my mother at the bottom of the hill and then zoomed through the stop sign and the intersection (fortunately no traffic was coming).   I wasn't all that clear about the concept of turning but I had managed to keep the thing pointed ahead.  I made for the  high curb on the far corner of the intersection (or maybe the bike just drifted that way by itself),  however it happened going there seemed reasonable as I needed a curb or adult nearby when I stopped or I would just fall over.  But I was going too fast and just slammed into the curb and went flying off the bicycle.  Both bike and boy were pretty banged up.  I didn't tend to cry much even at that early age,  but I cried some on this occasion;  partly from pain and terror, but mostly from fury at what my father had done.  Once he was convinced that his son had not broken anything he began castigating me for damaging the bike and for claiming that I knew how to ride.  In retrospect a very sad story.  I had ruined his big moment, as unlike his father he was well-enough off to afford a bicycle for his son, this should have been  a momentous event.

Apparently he and my mother had it out that night because the next morning the bike was gone.  That night he came home with a new 20" model with training wheels.  Of course the training wheels were overkill in the other direction and they came off the next day, but it would be a few weeks before I tried riding down that long hill.  I occasionally caught him looking on with pride but at the time I didn't understand precisely why.

1 Feb 2013: 

Cycle Bikes

Expect a few days of discussion about bicycles.  But I will start at the beginning and note that I first had two peddle cars and a tricycle.  The pedal cars were a fire engine ( a hook 'n ladder truck with little wooden ladder sections on the sides) and a tractor with a little trailer that could be hitched to it. They were both made by Murray-Ohio in Cleveland.

 My mother's side of the family was only a generation distant from farming and my great-grandmother still lived on her farm, so riding the tractor and playing with small metal farm equipment toys are some of my earliest memories

Note both a Rex Jet wagon and the Murray tractor on the top shelf.

1 January 2013  

A New Year and the Beginning of a Blog

December included obits in the Ashland Time Gazette for adults that were vaguely a part of my grade school years in Ohio.  Amazing how the town (which we left in 1966) still contains people I once knew.

The first was Harold Wylie, who was born in 1934 and moved to Ashland in 1961 to work on the local newspaper with my Uncle Bob.  The obit says he also worked as manager of the Cussins & Fearn store.  I remember the store name but could not visualize it (amazing how selective my memory can be), what it sold, or where it was located in Ashland.  A search on the internet disclosed that it was located on Center Street next to Woolworths and was an early Ohio department store chain.  

The only time I recall meeting Harold was a few months after he moved to town.  My father and my uncle took me to a Cleveland Indians game (the second one of my life – my parents had taken me up a couple years earlier when I started collecting baseball cards) and he came along.   I was in 5th grade and this must have been a Friday night game because I recall that staying up late meant a struggle the next morning to get up in time for a tournament at the newly opened Putt-Putt golf course.  We drove up on Route 42, the interstate was probably being built but I don’t think it would be operational until 1963.   One takes I-71 totally for granted but for many years 42 was the main road to Cleveland.

On the way up we stopped in Medina at a dime store and Wylie bought several bags of candy.  Which he shared with all of us, but he and I ate most of it.  And at the ballpark anytime a vendor passed by he asked me if I wanted a hot dog, coke, or whatever; and then he bought it for me (with the vague disapproval of my father).  I ate ball park concessions that night like I arrived on the verge of starvation even though we had stopped for chicken dinners at Kenny Kings in Middleburg Heights before the game.  Now the typical thing would be for me to have gotten sick from all that junk but I managed to keep it all down.  My parents limited our ration of candy and pop so severely that having an adult buy me all this stuff was a very memorable experience.  As was just getting to do a road trip with the guys. 

 One thing that this reminds me of is how the cokes sold by the vendors came in large paper cups with saran wrap sealing the tops.  But it was not a good seal plus they had been filled long before they were ever sold; so the ice had almost completely melted and the carbonation was just a memory.   I can still taste these watery flat cokes, which sold for about what you would pay for a six-bottle cartoon in a grocery store.

Another obit was for Gaylord Strine,  who worked with my father and lived beside us on Duff Drive during the same time frame as the above stories.  His oldest daughter Mary and Craig Martin were my best friends during the late 50's.  The obit reminded me of a morning in 7th grade where I overslept and missed the bus to school.  By that point we were one of the relatively rare two-car families in the neighborhood, as my mother was teaching.   But Dad had left for work and she was on the way out.  So I had to hoof it a couple miles to school and it looked like a rainstorm was coming.   Worried about the rain I got about halfway when a car drove by with its wiper on and water on its windshield.  This was before the widespread availability of  windshield washer-fluid squirters, our cars had never had them and I was unfamiliar with the concept.   Being roughly halfway to school I turned back, probably because if I got wet I could at least change clothes at home.   Needless to say it did not rain all the way home and now I was going to be even later getting to school, plus it "still" looked like rain.  Gaylord was working the late shift that week and was washing his car in their driveway when I got home.  So I explained what had happened and asked if he would drive me to school.   On the way he explained about the windshield washers in a way that did not make be feel completely stupid.

Mary was literally my "girl-next-door" and another temporary best friend - her family moved away shortly after this photo was taken.

Also passing recently was a staple on my youth, Harry Carey Jr.   He played camp counselor Bill Burnett on “Spin & Marty,” which was my favorite part of “The Mickey Mouse Club”.   And Bill was the ultimate of television’s wise understanding adults.

But closest to me of all was the passing of Bonnie Fields last November.  Bonnie had replaced Cheryl as my favorite of the Mouseketeers when she joined the show for its third season, and in recent years her photo (right) from the show has been the wallpaper on my computer screen.  Kind of weird but since putting it up there I have not found anything that I liked better to replace it,  I don’t think Walt himself realized the degree that the Mickey Mouse Club would cement a connection with its youngest viewers,  the first show with kids entertaining kids.

The funny thing is that I was thinking of Bonnie in early November when we drove though Richmond, Indiana; her hometown and where she died just five days after we were there.  I waited too long to look her up and tell her of my lifelong fondness. Next time I’m up there I’ll talk my cousins into driving over to Webster Cemetery and finding her grave.   We did something similar a few years ago for Agnes Moorehead. 

This video of Bonnie's duet as a teenager brings out a lot of emotions in me.  I think it was the most poibnant moment of the entire series;  it is well suited as a farewell tribute to all things past and as the first link I've placed on this website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCaVJ_sor6Q

I was probably predisposed to like Bonnie when she joined the show, as she had dazzled me as a guest dancer (tap) during one of the first season's Talent Roundup Day shows, which someone has been good enough to place on U-Tube::

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Lc7pLls-

The third obit was for a woman I will not name,  who died in Ashland last month at age 92.  She had lived several houses down from us in the late 50’s - early 60’s.   She was the most brittle woman I have ever known and had the misfortune of living beside the Martinelli’s; without question the noisiest family in the neighborhood.  Compounding her misfortune was the fact that the Martinelli backyard was the place of choice for assorted neighborhood athletic contests. 

 Mrs. X was a severe obsessive-compulsive control freak and would pounce on any toy or ball that was thrown or hit over her backyard fence, and then take them inside her house for disposal in some unknown but evil manner (pure speculation but the neighborhood legend).  She had a timid son (Jimmy) about our age over whom she exercised absolute control.  Poor Jimmy was not allowed to participate in our rough activities and his mannerisms fit the classic “only-child of a dominant mother”.  Mr. X never seemed to be home although according the obituary he did exist until 1992. 

I think of her whenever I hear Paul Newman's exchange with the female owner of the Chief's hockey team in "Slapshot":

I was probably the closest thing Jimmy had to a neighborhood friend but his mother would not allow me in their house.  If I came to their door she would make me stand just inside waiting for Jimmy, then we would go outside.  I may have once or twice seen his room but not any other part of their house except that visible from their front door.  What I saw was photo op clean and uncluttered.   Instead of playing outside his house we would go down to his grandmother’s house several blocks away, to get out of range of his mother.  I recall watching the 1960 democratic convention on his grandmother’s television.  She was perfectly normal (a Stevenson Democrat like us) and probably the main reason Jimmy did not become a psycho.  

Apparently Mrs. X got her wish and escaped from the torture of living next to the Martinelli’s sometime in the very early 60’s, as their house was on my paper route but by then was the home of young doctor and his wife (who was fortunately available when I hurt my arm playing backyard tackle football the night before we were to take a family sedan vacation to New England).  And apparently the X’s stayed in the Ashland area although I don’t recall ever seeing Jimmy after they moved from our neighborhood.  The obituary places Jimmy out-of state.  I would imagine that he fled his mother at the first opportunity.

Comments

jr ewing

Jan 1, 2014

•

Growing up in L.A Jeff., I became accustomed to places of my childhood simply disappearing - "I used to play miniature golf where that industrial park is now" - and it gave a strange feeling to know that once-tangible pieces of your life could just be wiped away.

jr ewing

Jul 20, 2013

Actually, Jeff, I wasn’t too interested at first-- not my usual thing --

but thought I’d give it a quick scan to be polite. Got drawn in. Will go

through it more slowly when I have time, but here are a few random

reactions (all good!) –

I wonder if I’m a few years older than you. We DID do duck ‘n cover

drills, in Lynbrook Elementary School, Bethesda, MD in the 50’s.

Familiar with Wendy, but rarely indulged.

Enjoyed Empire Records. Have the soundtrack CD.

My favorite scene in Back to the Future was the Johnny B. Goode performance.

I grew up in a small, shotgun apartment. I still remember the round top frig, as well as a

wringer washer and clothes lines out back.

I think my favorite show in the 50s (my elementary school years) was The

Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, although Walt Disney (particularly Davy

Crockett (Fess Parker), George Russell (Buddy Ebsen), Mike Fink (don’t

recall) and Elfego Baca (don’t recall him either)) fought for first place

hard enough.

Dr. No was an epiphany for me. Same impact as (in the 70s?) Star Wars.

Is that you, perchance, in the photo pointing to the milk delivery box?

Anyway, good blog!

P.S., Never realized Shelly Fabares was so…well, babelicious (if you’ll

permit a retro, sophomoric word).

15 July 2013