ANY REALLY "YOUNG" FOLKS THAT REMEMBER THE SIXTIES AND FIFTIES?

[The Yakima Kid]

Does anyone remember the weekly reader? I remember reading about Sputnik in it. I remember the teacher saying they would never be able to put a man into space because it would require too much power to lift a man and the vehicle he was in. I was amazed by the Dick Tracy wrist radio and now smart phones are light years beyond that.

Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, and Prince Valiant. Remember Moon Maid?

My main memory of My Weekly Reader is that the teacher had us sing the version of "Get Along Little Dogies" that was printed in it one year - and the magazine stated that the way to pronounce dogey was like doggy. I can remember singing and getting in trouble because there was no way I was going to sing about herding Dachshunds or something. When I explained the problem I received a good lesson in urban confusion - city people always know best, and if a bunch in New York who couldn't tell a Great Dane from a whiteface calf declare it' a "doggie", then so be it. It was good training for understanding what goes on in DC.

We lived in the Pacific Northwest, so we always had real Christmas trees, with glass ornaments, fabric ornaments, sometimes popcorn strings, the aluminum foil "tinsel", and those very hot lights. We had a very sweet Angel on top, and some candle holders that spelled out "NOEL." and cute little ceramic figurines and a little manger scene. All of this was amazing considering my Dad wasn't religious at all and my mother was a Unitarian-Universalist. The popcorn went out to be hung up for the birds, along with a suet cake or even a seeded suet cake.

Our first TV had this seriously rounded screen with a gold colored frame around it; I think we bought it used. I remember how horrible the early color sets were when we'd go to see them in the electronics department of the old Payless Drug chain or in the local appliance store or Montgomery Ward. We had a rooftop antenna, and when we lived in the Willamette Valley, the only snow we tended to get on Christmas was on the TV screen.

We had neighbors who got the aluminum and other early synthetic trees; I thought they were sort of neat and tidy - like a hospital room - and with all of the warmth of one.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

I remember our little Philco tv in the early 50's. We used to watch Lassie & Rin Tin Tin, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and Smiley Burnett used to play John Sheldon - joined by Rext he Wonder Horse. Also drank lots of Ovaltine to get a secret decoder ring from Ovaltine. My parents also said I could have a dog if I won the contest to name Lassies puppies - kinda weird since Lassie on tv was a boy. Of course never won.

We also watched Amos N' Andy on TV, Garfield Goose, Ding Dong School, Two Ton Baker, Uncle Johnny Coons , Super Circus, Flash Gordon, Sky King, etc.. Broadcasting went off early at night and the screen would just show a test pattern. We also listened to the radio for the Xmas series The Cinnamon Bear, Most of the shows I guess were just local telecasts so I don't imagine anyone else has heard of them.

I remember race horses, Nashua & Swaps.

I vaguely remember something called Ding Dong School and I remember Gene Autry, Sky King, and Roy Rogers. I remember Lassie and Timmy, and then Lassie and ranger Cory. Mr. Ed. Most of our stations were still on when I had to go to bed, and it wasn't until I was in high school that I figured out they pretty much all disappeared around 1 AM except for KPTV, the independent out of Portland that was really hard to get with the antenna. We got cable when I was in sixth grade or so.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

Anyone else remember car coats and lap robes and piling into the car for the holiday trip to the relatives, and the dim six volt headlights and the windy two lane highways and the sound of the old vacuum advance windshield wipers, and how they would slow *waaaaaaaaayyyyyyy* down at a stop sign or stop light, so whoever was driving would have to wind up the engine a few RPMs before moving into the intersection so he could see what was out there? Remember those Ford station wagons with the vinyl seats with the cattle and horse brand patterns? The panel truck type station wagons which were great fun for kids because there was enough room for everyone? Like the International Travel-All?

Those old cars had rubber floors, no air conditioning, and could be really cold in winter. We didn't even have a radio in the first cars I remember.

 

[drumstick diva]

OMG did I love the "Weekly Reader," I loved to read and each one was a treasure to me. Back to Lassie, when I started watching it - Tommy Rettig was the boy Jeff with Lassie. His mom lived with Gramps who had a dilapidated pick up truck. Later Tommy outgrew the part and Timmy took his place.

The Mickey Mouse club on TV had a segment "Spin and Marty," featuring one rich kid and one not, on a dude ranch. My sister and I always had to be home to watch that. My brother was the baby of the family, so I don't know what he was up to then.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

OMG did I love the "Weekly Reader," I loved to read and each one was a treasure to me. Back to Lassie, when I started watching it - Tommy Rettig was the boy Jeff with Lassie. His mom lived with Gramps who had a dilapidated pick up truck. Later Tommy outgrew the part and Timmy took his place.

The Mickey Mouse club on TV had a segment "Spin and Marty," featuring one rich kid and one not, on a dude ranch. My sister and I always had to be home to watch that. My brother was the baby of the family, so I don't know what he was up to then.

I remember Spin and Marty, and especially how Annette Funicello seemed to be the only one who said a full sentence on MMC.

 

[Sjisty]

I remember sitting in my dad's lap watching Combat when my mother went bowling with her league. I remember our station wagon had a seat in the rear that faced the back window - that was MY seat - I loved it! I remember putting Hershey bars on the radiators in the school lunchroom in the winter.

Phones with dials and cords, party lines, penny loafers, record players, cassette recorders.

My Mother the Car - anybody remember that show?

 

[hemet dennis]

I remember sitting in my dad's lap watching Combat when my mother went bowling with her league. I remember our station wagon had a seat in the rear that faced the back window - that was MY seat - I loved it! I remember putting Hershey bars on the radiators in the school lunchroom in the winter.

Phones with dials and cords, party lines, penny loafers, record players, cassette recorders.

My Mother the Car - anybody remember that show?

I remember that Combat was one of my favorite shows. And we had a station wagon with the same seat. We had the first color T.V. in the neighborhood, a guy had to come out and set it up, he took a big magnetic ring (the size of a steering wheel) and demagnetize it or something. It took him about an hour as we all sat and watched. I remember the first time I saw the NBC peacock in color. We would watch shows we didn't even like because it was in color, but most shows were still in black and white. Does anyone remember the Hobo Kelly Show ? I don't know if it was a local show or not. And Romper Room, how about American Bandstand when all the guys had to wear suits and ties to be on it.
My In laws still had a dial phone on the wall about ten years ago and still used it.

 

[memphis]

Romper Room!! Wow that takes me back!!

 

[sourland]

American Bandstand - never saw folks carry on like that.

 

[ivan3]

Close ups of Groucho's expression when his contestants would hit the inevitable idiot bump. Ernie Kovacs and troupe serving up more polished absurdities all black and white and streaming into a nearly empty bucket of self evolving into an infatuation with his widow, Edie Adams, hawking Muriel Cigars to the music of Cy Coleman and my playing the 45 of Peggy Lee's cover of `Hey Big Spender' on the RCA turntable until my ma hid the record, though I kept worrying that Fidel would kidnap Miss Adams. So, yeah, cut me in half, count the rings, don't bother x'ing out the knots - degrade the warped board footage into bags of chips and spread `em in the coop. Rig up an old Zenith in the rafters and entertain the girls with a Ray Harryhausen festival so's all the snarling rubbery clay beasts and baddies scare off the predators and, Art, I'll take infinity for $100

Maybe just a gram of Aspirin and a little phenylbutazone (they dope horses don't they?) to mediate all this calcification and allow me to open up in the back stretch leading the field into the `good old days' when gas was twenty-five cents a gallon and a fill up earned the pumper eight leaded glass tumblers and my brothers and I could ride our bikes a couple blocks past all the pastel stucco and oleanders to the Monkey's Hideout bar on Highland Ave. in San Berdoo on the last Friday of the month where we'd make sure our neighbor, Charlie, a locomotive engineer long retired from the Union Pacific, wouldn't lose his way going home while weaving slurred visions of his past for us `yeah, boys' the `rounder' who, on a `leg' over the Sierra Nevada, in the dead of winter, froze solid still gripping a handle in one of the cars `imagine, boys' hack sawed at the wrists and laid out atop a crate of bearings where he clattered along, unhanded and sightless, with the wheels, while awaiting the thaw in thicker air

His wife always gave us a dime out of gratitude, as Charlie would follow us and not wander off to a more florid establishment with denizens greedy for the remains of his pension check. And, Leefa, his wife, disgusted with Charlie's indiscriminate imbibing, consulted a psychic who, she excitedly confided in my mother, read entrails, crystal ball, or maybe her navel, and confidently predicted Charlie would die in the spring. My mother, a very practical woman whose only chiffon was sewn on her Singer, asked Leefa if the psychic had included a year as well as a season

The last time I saw Charlie he was being carried, screaming, dentures in the grass, from his house by the boys in blue. Apparently he had sobered sufficiently to become aggravated by his Gallo loot being doled out by she who wished to switch him onto the very last abandoned siding, and had punched her out, menacing the arriving officers with a hacksaw

He left the station and disappeared into the marshalling yard of lost souls at Patton State Hospital. Leefa died, of an infection, from the bite of one of the Black Widows that grew fat and glabrous on tiny fry under the ledge of Charlie's goldfish pond. The lily padded death trap was adjacent to the ramshackle little greenhouse in the backyard where Charlie had been exiled and we had, as his guests, sat listening to fevered reports,, on the shortwave, from a pirate station in Mexico, detailing the nefarious activities of several divisions of The People's Army that, having debarked from a fleet of ChiCom subs, had formed up and were racing across the Baja to sack and pillage the Greater Southwest.

But I would never listen to Chuck's old glowing-tube Hallicrafter for long as I believed I'd hear the screams of Miss Adams being transmitted as beeps from some Sputnik or other as I just knew Fidel would kidnap her and force her to hawk his Havana Stogies, all the while conspiring with his Maoist buddies to force me onto a diet of cane sugar and rice

When our folks would haul us out into the desert proper, along the Colorado river, where my ma would hand feed the Chuckwallas shreds of lettuce from her sandwich before they'd scurry into the water, ballooning up their bodies with air, floating south with the current, I just KNEW the mess kits of the `Yellow Horde' would be brimming with lizard that very day

Thank goodness, for Soupy Sales and the Stooges (they always made sense!) and that Castro never succeeded in rubbing his commie beard over Miss Adams' furs