When I envision a new article for I Remember JFK, I am often surprised by the amount of information that is out there for me to research. As regular readers know, I like to ferret out the history of whatever subject I cover. In the case of the bikini, that meant going all the way back to the 4th century! But with today's entry, the long-lost oil can, I was surprised to find very little on its past, and its subsequent replacement by plastic screw-top containers.

Fortunately, my memory banks are still in good shape. So off we go...

The oil can, as we know, excuse me, knew it, came about in the early twentieth century. It was then that a standard quantity of one quart was sold by most companies. The earliest cans had a solder seam. Collectors prize these oldest examples of oil cans.

By the early 40's, the soldered seal was gone, replaced with a crimped version. During WWII, when metal was in short supply, oil was sold in cardboard boxes, similar to the milk cartons we drank from in grade school.

Continue reading "Oil Cans" »

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It wasn't unusual for a Boomer kid of the 50's or 60's to have a Saturday or Sunday afternoon ritual: strolling through the living room to find dad glued to the screen while skaters went round and round a circular track whilst beating the crap out of each other.

Such was roller derby, a sport which captivated the nation over a time period of about forty years.

It all began during the Great Depression. Film publicist Leo "Bromo" Seltzer was struggling, along with the rest of the nation. He saw the success of dance marathons, and decided to cash in on the fad with a twist: he would sponsor similar marathons, only with everyone on roller skates. Sometimes, this would amount to a large number of skaters on a circular or oval track of limited size. It was inevitable that tired skaters, who might have been at it for days, would occasionally get into massive pileups.

Writer Damon Runyan saw potential for the sport cashing in on its potential violent side, and convinced Seltzer to sponsor an "all-out" contest, in which elbowing, punching, and whip-cracking were encouraged.

The public loved it, and roller derby was born. Male and female teams were organized, and the rules were the same for all, a unique situation in the world of spectator sports.

Continue reading "Roller Derby!" »

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Reader Scott Irv sent me an email asking what ever happened to all of the glass containers.

Well, Scott Irv, and any others who might be curious, they have largely disappeared. But today, I'm going to take you back forty years, back to a day when we took it for granted that the products we obtained at the store, or perhaps delivered to us, would be in glass, tin, or perhaps paper containers.

Walking into a grocery store circa 1966, you would be surrounded by thousands of items packed in glass containers. Notice the soft drink aisle. Row after row of bottles, in six ounce, twelve ounce, and sixteen ounce sizes. There are also a few Coke bottles in 24 ounce size. All of them are in six-pack containers, and buying them requires either paying a deposit on the bottles, or else trading in an equal amount of "dead soldiers." Sometime in the 70's, a larger size was introduced: the quart. I recall most major soft drinks being sold in quart returnable glass bottles with twist-off resealable caps.

Continue reading "Pre-Plastic Containers" »

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I hate it when someone just a tad older than me drops dead. This has been a bad week for that, but I'd like to say a word or two about the most recent as of presstime, Billy Mays. Billy was a Boomer, born just a bit before yours truly. I never paid him much mind until I stumbled upon Pitchmen, Discovery Channel's real life drama (as opposed to reality TV) about what Billy Mays and fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan go through before they begin hawking a new product. The show made me appreciate the genius and heart behind the loud-mouthed purveyor of products famous as well as obscure. It also made me realize that he has a family, and they are very much in pain now. My deepest sympathies to all of you, friends and family of Billy Mays. My sympathies also to those out there like me, who will miss his whiz-and-vinegar bombastic blasts on the tube.

I have been spending a lot of time lately rediscovering a love for fossil hunting that I had as a child. I have put together a website showing some of my finds called What Is this Fossil?

I'm hoping that eventually, I'll be visited by some serious paleontologists who can help me identify my finds down to the genus level. And if any of you are sharp in the field, please either leave a comment of shoot me an email and help me identify these creatures.

Feel free to subscribe to the rss feed, too. I've posted seven or eight articles in the last couple of weeks, and they will keep coming as long as I'm out there hunting!

River's End, thanks for suggesting this week's column.

The 50's and 60's were collectively known as the Jet Age. That moniker implied that life was being lived at an accelerated rate, compared to previous decades.

I suppose that means that the 21st century should be known as the Warp-Drive Age, because the pace we experienced forty or more years ago was quite laid back in comparison to today.

One thing about life back then that may have escaped your mind was how quiet Sundays were. I grew up in NE Oklahoma, definitely Bible Belt territory. Sunday meant

(a) That you were at church
(b) That after church, about the only thing you could go purchase was gasoline and food. Everything else was closed. Main Street was abandoned. The entire town was noticeably quieter.

Continue reading "When Sunday Was a Lazy Day" »

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Today's I Remember JFK is the result of an anonymous idea from one of our readers. Please keep them coming!

One of the familiar sights that we Boomer kids grew up was an image of a sad-eyed child. The child might be accompanied by an equally sad-eyed kitten or puppy.

The paintings had a haunting quality to them. They were simple, almost primitive, but great detail was given those huge, sad eyes.

The paintings were hated by some, loved by many more, and eventually became the largest selling artwork of the 1960's. That meant that we grew up with them all over the place. Art prints, of course, but also greeting cards, magazine covers, advertisements, and probably even lunch boxes, though I'm only speculating on that last one.

The artist, Margaret Keane, was born in 1927. She describes herself as a sickly, withdrawn child who took comfort in drawing. Eventually, she met and married another artist, Walter Keane, and they ended up in Paris after WWII was over to study the subject.

A sight they frequently encountered was that of homeless, destitute children, orphaned by the war.

Continue reading "Sad-Eyed Kid Paintings" »

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The things we Baby Boomers were destined to accomplish! We would be the generation that would usher in cheap, clean nuclear power! We would be driving flying cars by 2000! And we would take the lead in adopting the efficient, easy-to-use metric system!

OK, enough with the exclamation points already. Obviously, all three of these particular dreams were overblown.

However, it may surprise you to know just how close we are to being a metric nation. Read on.

It all started by those lovable masters of illogic, the French, who decided we needed a logical system of measurement. According to metric scholar Pat Naughin:

The metric system used all around the world has three parts. In France in the 1790s, it was named the "decimal metric system". The system part came from John Wilkins in England, the metric part came from Burattini in Italy, and the decimal part came from the USA. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were very active in getting the French "philosophes' to use decimal numbers for the "decimal metric system".

OK, raise your hand if you knew that our founding fathers were part of the team behind the metric system. THIS history buff didn't!

Continue reading "When We Converted to the Metric System - NOT!" »

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Boomer ladies, I'm sure that if I cross the chauvinistic line in today's piece, you'll be more than happy to let me know.

What would a beach party movie be without Annette Funicello in her bikini? Fortunately, the world of the 60's didn't have to find out. That's because the two-piece bathing suit, once considered so risqué that ladies who sported one risked arrest, was a commonplace sight on American beaches of the 1960's, much to the delight of all of us who possess a Y chromosome.

The bikini's history is a venerable one. 4th century CE artwork discovered in Sicily depicts Roman ladies exercising while wearing what today would be considered bikinis.

But the Dark Ages, the Victorian Era, and predominant social mores kept the two-piece outfit that was intended to be worn in public by members of the fairer sex pretty much out of circulation until 1946. It was in that year that Frenchmen Jacques Heim and Louis Reard designed and released what was called for the first time the bikini. The diminutive swimsuit was named after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the site of the much hailed (at the time) atomic bomb tests which began taking place that same year.

However, bikinis were still rarely spotted on US beaches for several years afterwards. It was Brigitte Bardot's performance in Roger Vadim's scandalous And God Created Woman in 1956 (but not released in the US until the next year) that opened the floodgates.

Continue reading "The Bikini" »

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There are a few basic staple foods that every single Boomer kid partook of, no matter the race, creed, or social status. For example, there was Campbell's Soup. There were various incarnations of TV dinners. And there was the grilled cheese sandwich.

Today's column isn't specifically about the grilled cheese sandwich. No, rather, it was about the technological innovations that led to the ability of our mothers to open the fridge, pop out a slice of American cheese, put it between two slices of bread, and quickly and easily create a bit of culinary heaven.

I could trace history back to Bedouin shepherds who lived thousands of years ago, but instead, I'm beginning with James L. Kraft.

Kraft had moved to Chicago from Canada in 1903. He opened a cheese production business with the $65 he had in his pocket.

Kraft was a sharp cookie, and he soon devised a method of transforming cheddar scraps, which would otherwise be disposed of, into a processed cheese. It was so innovative that he patented his idea in 1916. Kraft's cheese would also last much longer on the shelf than classic cheese, and consumers loved its taste!

Continue reading "American Cheese" »

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The year was 1973. My middle brother was home on leave from serving in the navy. While on tour in the far east, he stopped in Japan and picked up a Bridgestone ten-speed and had it shipped stateside. He had it with him when he arrived at our Pea Ridge, Arkansas rural home.

Thus, at the age of fourteen, bicycling became serious business for me.

It was that way with many of us Boomers. During the 70's, we gave up our Schwinn Sting-Rays and began riding sophisticated machines that would gear down so that we could climb hills with ease, or gear up so that we could approach forty miles per hour on downhill stretches.

The ten-speed had actually been around for a long time prior to that. The derailleur gear shifting system was "invented" in 1949 by the Campagnolo bicycle company of Italy. They actually reworked an existing system that had been around for many years previously, but their innovation was such that European bicycle manufacturers began cranking out ten-speed bikes in large numbers.

Continue reading "The Ten-Speed Bike, and How It Took Over the World" »

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Boomer kids grew up on two wheels. From the time the training wheels came off, we were spotted buzzing around town on our Sting-Rays, or on less expensive banana-seated clones.

However, many of us had more technologically sophisticated rides. Perhaps we inherited them from our parents or older siblings, or perhaps the non-conformists among us showed our rebellious traits at an early age by opting for them over the high-handlebarred models that everyone else preferred.

The result was the fairly common sight of three-speed bikes on the 1960's streets where we lived.

The three-speed bike has a venerable history. Before the invention of the automobile, bicycles were seen as an alternative method to getting around town for those without a horse. And let's face it: it was difficult for a city dweller to own a horse, so the bicycle may well have been an essential part of his or her life.

Thus, around the turn of the century, technological developments were taking place very rapidly on bicycles. In 1909, the British Raleigh bicycle, equipped with a Sturmey Archer 3-Speed hub, started production. Thus began the three-speed revolution.

Continue reading "The Three Speed Bike" »

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The world has reacted in various ways to the swine flu scare at presstime. Mexico has basically shut down, recent soccer games being played all over the country before empty stadiums. The fans aren't allowed in, but the games get played anyway. Strange.

Anyhow, the CDC is calling for clear heads and calm. And you know what? The Boomer generation is doing exactly that. You see, we've been here and done this before.

On February 5, 1976, an Army recruit at Fort Dix told his drill instructor that he felt lousy, but not sick enough to see the medics or to skip an upcoming training hike. Within 24 hours, the soldier, 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis, was dead. Doctors determined that he was killed by the same influenza which caused the pandemic (the world's first) of 1918-19, which took a half-million US lives, and killed 20 million worldwide. Two weeks later, health officials disclosed to America that the disease, known as swine flu, had killed Lewis and hospitalized four of his fellow soldiers at Fort Dix.

Continue reading "Swine Flu Scare, the 1976 Version" »

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Boomers, remember when you first started listening to FM radio over AM? Listen to today's podcast to hear recollections of when the new radio band began taking over the radio business.

Continue reading "Podcast: Easing into FM" »

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Think back, Boomers. Once upon a time, listening to the radio meant one thing: listening to AM radio.

Now perhaps you had a father like mine, who enjoyed tuning in shortwave broadcasts from all over the world. That could mean a possibility that selecting stations on the home radio might mean switching bands. But dad, proudly geeky in his own blue-collar way, was the exception. Most families under the charge of WWII vets had AM radios in the house. And obviously, the push-button car radio of the 50's and 60's only pulled in AM signals.

But somewhere along the line, we started listening to FM.

Perhaps the experience was an epiphany for you. Perhaps you tuned into an FM station for the first time and noticed that the sound was decidedly clearer, that it was practically unaffected by lightning static, and that you could hear music in true stereo.

Such wasn't the case with me. I don't recall my first experience listening to FM. My first car, a 1966 Ford Falcon, had AM. My bedroom radio could pull in monophonic FM, but what was the point when WLS was the greatest (AM) radio station on the planet?

Continue reading "Easing into FM" »

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Podcasts have been back for a couple of weeks, but if you tried to find them through iTunes, you couldn't. That's because I had configuration problems on my end. Well, I'm hoping that those bugs have been squished. So whether you listen to podcasts through iTunes or some other online service, the rss feed should now be coded to locate I Remember JFK on their end. And you can also add my rss url (http://www.irememberjfk.com/mt/atom.xml) manually to whatever desktop software you use to grab podcasts.

Happy listening!

Time was that there were three magazines on the racks that Boomer boys scarfed up by the bagfuls: Mad, Sick, and Cracked. In a time when TV humor was much too tame for us, we devoured the politically incorrect satire that was contained therein. Today's podcast looks at the Big Three humor mags we grew up with.

Continue reading "Podcast: Getting Mad, Sick, or Cracked" »

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Forty-seven years is a long time to be around, particularly if you are a rock and roll group long known for pushing things to excess. But the Rolling Stones have accomplished just that. And they have managed to attain the title of World's Greatest Rock and Roll band in the process. Today's podcast is all about the lads who first got together way back in 1962.

Continue reading "Podcast: The Rolling Stones" »

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We Boomers grew up with a soda fountain within easy walking distance of where we were. Sadly, they disappeared, to be replaced by the self-serve convenience store. However, with the retro movement, soda fountains are making a bit of a comeback. Today's podcast is all about the long-lost, lamented soda fountains we grew up with.

Continue reading "Podcast: Soda Fountains" »

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Pity America's youth prior to 1952.

They had to manufacture their own sick, irreverent, cutting-edge humor. Nowadays, the term for such is "politically incorrect."

But that year, a strange new comic book called MAD began to be published by EC Comics. EC would be infamous for pushing the envelope a bit too far for 1950's readership with their horror and science fiction lines, and causing the formation of the Comics Code Authority, which would ensure that kids would only have much blander fare to read for the foreseeable future.

MAD also horrified parents, of course. That was one of the biggest reasons that kids loved it. It specialized in lampooning, and would frequently offer sardonic "apologies" within story lines, begging people not to sue them.

It was great stuff from the get-go, and was also an instant success. Two years after its debut, MAD switched from comic book to magazine format. Those early MAD issues are among some of comicdom's most sought-after collectibles. But MAD, the magazine, would go on to be a huge influence on the Baby Boomer generation. It would also spawn its imitators.

Continue reading "Getting Mad, Sick, or Cracked" »

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The year was 1962. Rock and roll music had been in existence for eight years, according to a 2004 Rolling Stone article which declared (quite controversially) that Elvis's 1954 recording That's All Right Mama was the first rock and roll song. Kids were cruising the boulevard in Modesto, and George Lucas was eleven years away from immortalizing the moment in American Graffiti. The British Invasion was a year away. So was the death of President Kennedy.

That year, boyhood friends Mick Jagger and Keith Richards decided to form a little band. They also invited multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, pianist Ian Stewart, bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts.

They were looking for success, just like every garage band that has ever arisen from childhood friendships. And if forty-seven years of being what most consider to be the greatest rock and roll band in history is what you would term success, then I suppose they have done okay for themselves.

In order to try to put the Rolling Stones into perspective, let's look at a few entities that cause nods of admiration if they manage to last forty-seven years:

• A corporation.
• A professional sports franchise
• A tree
• An airline
• A building
• A newly-formed nation

So, what exactly are the odds that a rock and roll band could possibly approach five decades in longevity, particularly one that is known for putting the E in excess?

Continue reading "The Rolling Stones" »

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When you were a kid in the 50's, 60's, or early 70's, and you had a thirst, odds are a soda fountain was located somewhere close to your parched self.

Time was when soda fountains were part of the services offered at drug stores, dime stores, department stores, and other locations that might seem strange today.

In fact, it's nigh impossible to find soda fountains ANYWHERE nowadays.

Maybe your community is blessed enough to even have a classic soda fountain up and running somewhere, but the sight of a counter with revolving-topped-stools placed there for the customers' convenience was once a ubiquitous one, so much so that if you were in a strange town, and developed a thirst, you would look for a Rexall drug store.

The classic soda fountain had one or more tall soda water dispensers. The soda jerk received his proud moniker from his propensity for pulling back the handles of the dispensers, sometimes two or more at a time, in order to mix the soda water with the other delicious ingredients that would make up a perfect concoction that might cost a dime.

Continue reading "The Soda Fountain" »

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Once upon a time, circa 1965, teen idols arose and began dominating the daydreams of young ladies. The media industry picked up on this, and began covering the newsstands with brightly colored magazines with titles such as 16, Tiger Beat, and FaVE.

These periodicals were a source of great consternation to young males, who considered the adoring photographs and articles which paid homage to young male heartthrobs as the height of silliness. Magazines were more properly devoted to august subjects such as hot rods and Alfred E. Neuman.

The teen mags would feature pinups, which would adorn the rooms of the sisters of my buddies. These pinups were often the earliest cause of eye-rolling in the male populace, such reactions being provoked at the tender age of five of six, in many cases.

But they are a memory for all of us, whether we scarfed up the magazines themselves and snuck them into class, or whether we simply acknowledged their presence on the magazine racks, as we dug past them for the more socially significant CARtoons.

Continue reading "The Attack of the Killer Fan Mags" »

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