We Boomers were eyewitnesses to a bewildering amount of history in the making during the 50's and 60's in which we grew up. The death of an idealistic young President was the first memory that many of us can recall clearly. Man's first steps on the moon are recorded indelibly in our minds. And we also recall the Civil Rights Movement, whether we were actual eyewitnesses to its painful birth, or we viewed its struggles in black and white on the TV set.

Many narratives exist. For example, there is the controversial movie Mississippi Burning, which paints the FBI in a heroic light for its supposed courageous stand in safeguarding equal rights for all races in the most segregated state that existed in 1963. Alas, the movie, while entertaining, takes extreme liberties with the sad truth: the FBI really didn't want to be involved, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing its job of busting individuals and groups who violently sought to keep the blacks "in their place."

Hollywood, for better or worse, will forever be Hollywood. Written books are more and more available in the age of the internet, and can be produced with a much smaller investment. Therefore, with the demands of a return on a large investment removed, greater honesty in storytelling is very much a possibility.

In the case of the book being reviewed here, the honesty is brutal indeed. The summer of 1964 saw a large number of white college students descend upon the most backwards state in the Union. Honesty is revealed in the humanity of many of the students, in many cases, their motives were less than 100% noble.

Continue reading "Boomer Reviews: Freedom Summer, by Bruce Watson" »

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Life has taken over all of my time lately. A water leak in the kitchen has turned me into a full-time floor installer for the last month (800 square feet, including the kitchen, dining area, living room, entry, and hallway). I'm putting down pub-grade solid hickory strips, they require some "convincing" in order to go in perfectly. Additionally, I've been downsized after 24 years with the same employer, I'm about to start a full-time job seeking another job. First, though, we will be slipping off to Florida for a week. When we return, I hope to be back on track writing here by early September. In the meantime, I am posting daily album reviews over at Gotta-Have Albums, if you haven't signed up for email notifications or subscribed to the rss feed, I encourage you to do so. I've discovered some truly great music lately in my search for albums you just gotta have. Thanks for the kind words of concern from all who've wondered just where the heck I've been!

Got a cell phone in your pocket or purse? How about a GPS in your car? I'm sure you have a computer, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this right now.

Then you know, within a teeny fraction of a second, exactly what time it is. We take such a situation very much for granted. Some of us even wear watches that communicate with an atomic time server several times a day, making microscopically small adjustments to ensure that the time displayed is exactly right.

But it wasn't always that way, was it, Boomers? When we were younger, the exact time was largely unknown. The local bank might have had a big clock outside for all to see, and presumably, it was accurate. It had better be, the whole town might have been setting their watches to it.

In my hometown of Miami, Oklahoma, at precisely noon each day, the B.F. Goodrich plant would let loose with a blast on a steam whistle which would alert plant workers (and everyone within a couple miles) that it was lunchtime. Many a wearer of a wristwatch would stop what they were doing and adjust their timepiece to 12:00 noon.

We had other ways to set our timepieces back then, of course. Today's article will remind you of what they were.

Continue reading "When You Weren't Sure Exactly What Time It was" »

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I Remember JFK did an article on Dragnet back in 2007, but it really didn't pay enough homage to the man behind the show, Jack Webb. With that, today's offering will attempt to give credit where credit is due, to the creative genius that accompanied one of the most familiar faces that we Boomers grew up with.

Jack Webb had an oft-imitated style of his own on the screen, one that made for great fodder for comedians, school playground thespians, and B-movie method actors. But perhaps his greatest talent lie in giving us some unforgettable television moments from shows that he created and/or produced.

Webb's first shot at creating a show without appearing onscreen was a home run to deep center. Adam-12 debuted in 1968, and enjoyed a seven-year run. The pilot revealed that officer Pete Malloy (Martin Milner, who had previously toured the country in a Vette in Route 66) was about to quit the force three weeks after losing his partner to a crook with a gun. Young, naive rookie Jim Reed was assigned to the depressed Malloy for a one-night deal, and by morning, the veteran decides to stick around and show the plebe how to survive. Thus began a show which would be a part of Boomer kids' lives. It started out on a Saturday night, finished up on a Wednesday. But for the life of me, I can't remember what night I watched it on growing up. Saturday, I believe. Any help from you readers?

Malloy was no-nonsense, by the book (except when he needed to not be by the book), and constantly reminded the greenhorn that it was life or death out there. In other words, he was Jack Webb. Jack Webb would thus "appear" in practically all of the shows that he would produce afterwards, you just had to look for him in a more sublime game of "Spot Hitch" (played every time a Hitchcock movie was on the screen).

Continue reading "Jack Webb's TV Creations" »

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I am so pleased when I write about a toy from our Boomer childhoods, and don't have to include it under the "Things that Disappeared When You Weren't Looking" category! Such is the happy case with the subject of today's piece, the Etch-a-Sketch, still proudly produced by Ohio Art! I was deeply hoping that they were being made in Ohio, but sadly, that's not been the case since 2003.

However, let us celebrate the fact that they are still around, exactly like they were during the Decade of Change, when many of us were enjoying wonderful childhoods as Baby Boomers.

It all started in France in the late 1950's. A gentleman named André Cassagnes (another source credits Arthur Granjean) crafted a drawing device in his basement. He filled a plastic container with aluminum dust. The container had a clear screen, also a stylus mounted to two bars which was moved by small cables attached to knobs. Thus, an adroit artist could make subtle movements to create a single line which could create infinite shapes.

In reality, he created a very cool toy which 98% of us could use to make basic shapes, and cause us to envy true artistes with the talent to create masterpieces.

He took his invention to the International Toy Fair in Nuremburg, Germany, where a US-based company called Ohio Art showed little interest. However, upon seeing "The Magic Screen" a second time, they decided to roll the dice and take a chance on it.

Continue reading "The Etch-a-Sketch" »

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Man has been eating lunch since time immemorial. And you might think that the portable lunchbox like you carried to school in the 50's, 60's, or 70's would have been just as ancient. But you would be wrong.

In 1950, Nashville, TN-based Alladin came up with a concept that they felt just might have potential, especially in light of the fact that the largest generation of six-year-olds in history were about to enter school for the first time: a metal box/vacuum bottle combination just the right size for a kid to carry his/her lunch to school in. And seeing how metal lasted forever, and a steady supply of new customers was needed in order to do future business, what if they put a TV character's image on the box and bottle? That way, new TV shows would create demand for new lunch boxes!

I couldn't find any names connected with that idea, but rest assured, even Don Draper has never possessed that kind of genius.

Those original Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes were an immediate smash success, and a tradition was born for not just Boomers, but all kids of the 20th century: a perfect-sized case that a kid would proudly lug to school and back, festooned with colorful pictures.

The metal lunch box for kids was actually born in 1935, a company called Geuder, Paeschke and Frey creating a lithographed box with Mickey mouse's image on it. But it took postwar prosperity, TV, and the addition of a Thermos bottle for the concept to become a craze.

Continue reading "Lunchboxes" »

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These mailmen today have it made. Why, back in my day, they used to haul a hundred pounds of catalogs five or six times a year!

One of the most pervasive memories we Boomers have locked away is a big catalog or two sitting on the coffee table right next to the ashtray. They would come in the mail annually from companies like Montgomery-Ward, Sears, J.C. Penney, and Spiegel. All it would take to receive them was to buy something at the store. If they got your name and address, the monstrous consumers of wood pulp would begin showing up automatically, generally laid on your welcome mat by those poor abused postmen of the 1960's.

And there was something for everyone in those massive tomes. It seemed that women's clothing took up the most real estate, for good reason. I'm sure it was female shoppers who comprised the bulk of the mail-order catalog business of the era. The customer is always right, load those books up with pretty pictures of dresses.

But kids got their share of cool stuff to look at too, particularly with the Christmas wish books. More on that in just a bit.

Back in the days before the internet, when discount stores carried stuff that was, well, discount (aka junk), consumers knew that they needed to deal with department stores for the good, high-quality stuff that would last years. Thus, the previously mentioned retail establishments would invest money in the big catalogs that would end up in our living rooms. It was good business.

Continue reading "When Big Catalogs Came in the Mail" »

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For Baby Boomers, one of the most pervasive memories we all have is the Vietnam war. During the 60's, not a night went by without the nightly news telling us the latest figures on deaths on both sides of the conflict, as well as showing us images of Huey helicopters flying across jungles firing away (and getting fired upon in return).

For a time after it all came to a halt in 1975, we just wanted to forget about it. Soon, however, books started appearing on the shelves, closely followed by movies that presented the war to us in the form of incidents recalled by its participants.

The quality of these offerings has been overall very high, if not extremely graphic.

Let's face it: the war was one of the most harrowing things ever experienced by participants on either side, and it was common for a soldier's daily life to involve bodies blown apart, the deaths of civilians, horrifying flashbacks, and escape through drugs.

Thus, these are the things which are commonly highlighted in works like The Deer Hunter, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now.

But what if you could receive a clear picture of the war's horrors, as well as necessary covert missions afterwards, that skips most of the graphical descriptions? In fact, to use a simile that should hit home with most of us, what if there was a book out there that our own dear mothers would enjoy?

Well, if your mom was like mine, no prude, but no fan of gratuitous profanity, sex, or gore either, then the subject of today's Boomer review would be one that both of you could enjoy.

The book is called George's Candy. It's a first-person account of a marine who found employment with the CIA after his hitch was up. And it's a great read, I recommend you have a look.

Continue reading "Boomer Reviews - George's Candy by George Ratz" »

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Some things blissfully took place before I had a chance to be terrified by them.

As a kid, I was plagued by worry. I've gotten over it since then, perhaps to an excessive degree, but back then, it didn't take much to fill me with fear. And if I'd been a bit more aware when I was two years old, I'd have been up all night, just like much of the rest of the world was in 1962.

It all started on January 1, 1959. President Manuel Batista fled Cuba, leaving it in the hands of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary forces. Despite the fact that Batista was about as crooked a character as was around at the time, the US took it as a personal insult that communism had taken hold just 90 miles from its borders. The fact that lands and corporations held by US entities were nationalized by the Cuban government certainly didn't help the mood, either.

Premier Nikita Kruschev was delighted, though. The outspoken, emotional head of the Soviet Union was another burr under the US's saddle. The USSR had been flexing their muscles throughout the post WWII years, and Ike was sick and tired of it. By the time JFK was elected in 1960, the US had made it clear that Soviet expansion would not continue without resistance from them.

The Russians were nervous. The US had enough ICBM's to bomb their entire nation, but the Red Bear couldn't strike back. They could pepper Europe, but most of the US mainland was out of their reach. Solution: put missiles within the borders of new ally Cuba.

That went over with Kennedy like the proverbial fart in the elevator. Thus began one of the scariest chapters in world history.

Continue reading "The Cuban Missile Crisis" »

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This will be a fun write, almost 100% from memory, no research needed! My favorite type of I Remember JFK article.

Okay, transport yourself back to, say, 1967. You are entering an imposing building: your own local public library. One of the earliest concepts that you learned as a child was that books were freely available to you to borrow for a couple of weeks, at the end of which you either returned them, rechecked them, or (horrors) paid a fine, which may have burdened you with some of your first feelings of guilt.

Walking through those tall doors (everything was tall when your height was less than four feet), you were greeted with a wonderful smell: the aroma of hundreds, maybe thousands of books, many of which were dozens of years old. You also saw row after row of neatly organized bookshelves, with each book in its proper place. All in all, it was a wonder of order.

Behind the desk sat the librarian, with a stern expression on her face, just the thing to remind a rambunctious kid that he was in a temple of silence, and it had better stay that way, or the wrath of that hair bun-wearing matron would be quickly and painfully expressed.

Continue reading "The Libraries of Our Childhoods" »

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It's a bit sad that death is so much a part of our Boomer memories. We learned at a very early age that famous people die. We also learned, through the Vietnam war, that loved ones die. And as we kids grew up listening to and loving rock and roll music, we likewise learned that the makers of that music die.

Airplane crashes have taken many musical stars from us. The first one to shake up the world of the newly-invented genre of rock and roll was the one that took Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper in 1959. Nine years later, Otis Redding took off in his own plane (his manager was the pilot) and ended up losing his life in an icy lake near Madison, Wisconsin. Thus was the world robbed of a rising star who had redefined soul music, and had in fact taken on the title of the King of Soul.

Otis was a clean-living family man who was raised in Georgia, and who never left his roots. However, the deaths that would soon follow would show the world that rock and roll music had transformed from innocence to worldliness as its participants found themselves at risk from deaths from decidedly hedonistic causes.

The victims were young people who found themselves thrust into the bright spotlight and simply had problems handling all of the success. While they struggled, they produced some of the most beautiful and prized art that the world has ever seen, art in the form of music.

Continue reading "Rock Star Deaths" »

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About 1998 or so, we took a trip to Orlando. I figure every kid ought to see Disney World at least once in their lives, even if it nearly bankrupts the parents. Anyhoo, we went to the Epcot Center one sunny day, and I had a distinct deja vu feeling about the place. Eventually, as we strolled from "country" to "country," it dawned on me: the feelings I was experiencing were very much like those I had lived through many years earlier as I went through Expo 67 in Montreal.

World's Fairs used to be a big deal, they certainly still were while we Boomer kids were growing up. In 1967, Montreal hosted a spectacular that was the talk of the planet, officially known as the 1967 International and Universal Exposition. I'm not sure which parent was the most gung-ho to go, I would suspect it was my schoolteacher mom, but dad was all for it, too, perhaps because the conservative ex-Minnesotan would have the opportunity to visit friends and family on the way up to Canada.

So one June day, we piled into the car, my two parents, my reluctant seventeen-year-old brother, and my own eager seven-year-old self.

When we eventually made it to Montreal, I was captivated by the foreignness of the place. Let's face it, going to the capital of the French province is almost like taking a trip to Europe. The signs everywhere were in French, and the city was the most crowded, busiest, craziest place I'd ever seen.

Continue reading "Expo 67" »

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We Boomers have a wealth of pleasant memories from growing up in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. Those are memories that we wouldn't trade for a million dollars. But, like all generations, we have our share of bad memories as well.

One of the most pervasive unpleasant memories that touched each and every one of us was the war in Vietnam. In this blog's early days, I wrote a column about that subject. War seemed normal to Boomer kids, sadly, there is a whole new generation to whom it feels that way as well.

What made the Vietnam war so hard to deal with was that all of the deaths, the maimings, the psychological scarrings that happened to our nation's youth were, it appears, all for nothing.

By 1972, the country was sick of Vietnam. The protesters had found many allies in the "establishment," it seemed that there wasn't a soul who wanted to spend any more lives to try to make a nation located on the far side of the world a place safe for democracy. The 1972 Presidential election featured a lot of talk by all candidates concerned about ending the mess once and for all.

Nixon really didn't face much competition, though, and after his re-election, he set about getting America out of SE Asia.

Continue reading "Saigon Falls" »

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Everybody loves to laugh. And growing up a Boomer, one of my most consistent sources of laughter was Mel Brooks.

Melvin Kaminsky was born in 1928 Brooklyn to a father descended from German Jews and a mother whose lineage was Russian Jews. He was a sickly child who soon discovered that he loved to entertain and make people laugh. His first public performances came as a tummler at various Catskill resorts. As master of ceremonies, he took advantage of opportunities to poke fun at acts, audience members and just cut up in general. Soon, he moved on to full-time standup. However, he eventually specialized in writing gags behind the scenes.

After serving as a corporal in the army in WWII, he landed a gig writing for Your Show of Shows in 1950. He worked alongside Carl Reiner, who would eventually base Morey Amsterdam's role of Buddy Sorell in The Dick Van Dyke Show on his pal Mel.

In 1960, Mel and Carl landed a writing/performing role on Steve Allen's variety show. They created the routine of The 2000 Year Old Man, which went on to live a life of its own, spawning five albums and a 1975 TV special.

Brooks expanded his career into films. In 1963, he produced and voiced an animated short called The Critic. It won an Oscar, boding well for Mel Brooks, filmmaker. He continued to stay busy on TV projects. He soon got a job working with Buck Henry writing for Get Smart.

Continue reading "Mel Brooks" »

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Thanks to Awkward Family Photos for reminding me of this one. Remember walking into the houses of friends and seeing these stretched pop bottles? They definitely had a youthful appeal, so it may have been in the bedroom of a teenager where they might be most readily spotted.

I couldn't find any history on who first heated up a 7Up bottle and stretched the neck (it was usually 7Up, as I recall). But I know that you couldn't attend a county fair or carnival in the early 70's without seeing them offered as prizes at game booths.

They might be twisted into spirals, or they might simply be elongated. The straight ones were perfect as vases for long-stemmed flowers made of paper or plastic.

Many had lids, and what was apparently the original contents inside. No doubt they were uncapped, emptied, altered, and refilled and carefully recapped.

Continue reading "Stretched Pop Bottles" »

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Richard Nixon was in tall cotton in 1972. His overall approval rating with the public was respectable. His opponent, George McGovern, was so far to the left that he had alienated many Democrats. It should have been an easy ride into his second term as President.

Only it wasn't. Sure, he won the election with a monstrous landslide, but it turns out that there was something brewing in the background that would eventually explode into the biggest political scandal of the 20th century, quite an accomplishment, considering that it would make us forget all about Warren Harding's infamous Ohio Gang. In fact, the scandal would come to dominate the news for two years, and cost the next President an election thanks to a pardon of, in the opinion of many, the head instigator of the whole mess.

The Watergate scandal began with an unremarkable burglary which took place on June 17, 1972. A security guard at the Watergate Complex noticed that someone had taped the latches on a few doors. He removed the tape, only to find that it had been replaced again afterwards. The guard called police, and five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's office located at the complex.

On January 30, 1973, the five men were tried and convicted. It turns out that they all had ties to the Committee to Reelect the President (officially known as CRP, but many in the news and late-night talk shows had fun calling it CREEP). In March, 1973, one of the five, James McCord, wrote a letter to the judge who had convicted him, John Sirica, claiming that he was pressured into pleading guilty, and that forces over his head were actually responsible for the break-in. Sirica read the letter in court, with many reporters present, and the race was on to find out more.

Continue reading "The Watergate Scandal" »

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One of the coolest things about being a Boomer is that we can recall the very roots of the game which brings the USA to a stop every February, as the entire country takes time off (whether formally or informally) to observe two teams play for the championship of the NFL. In fact, some of our sweetest memories are of a time when the game was a game, not a religious observation marked by many hours of pre-game crapola and those silly pretentious Roman numerals.

Indeed, go back far enough and the very term "Super Bowl" was a mere nickname for the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. And the game itself was of interest to football fans, but not so much anyone else.

Commercials were a time to get up and go to the can. The pre-game show lasted a half hour or so. The halftime show was a time to go heat up more Ro-Tel dip. And the game itself was a sleepy demonstration of the vast superiority of the well-established NFL over the young upstarts known as the AFL.

Hmm, come to think of it, maybe it wasn't so rosy back then after all?

The Super Bowl came into existence when the NFL could no longer ignore the lone competitor that ever arose which successfully challenged their stranglehold on the sport: the American Football League. The senior league struck a deal with the new kids which would end up in a merger three years after the first end-of-season championship game would be played. The leagues would be changed to conferences. But the Big Game would live on.

Continue reading "The Super Bowl" »

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Once in a great while, a scientific mind comes along that changes everything. These brilliant individuals include Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and a Boomer whose name fits right alongside the greatest of all: Professor Stephen Hawking.

Hawking was born in Oxford on January 8, 1942, to Dr. Frank Hawking, a research biologist, and his wife Isobel. Though German bombs were falling all around them, his parents had moved from North London while Stephen was in his mother's womb in order to escape the brunt of the attacks. Kudos to them, it would have been a tragedy for the human race to lose that mind in childhood.

Eventually, they moved to St. Albans, where young Stephen attended St. Albans High School for Girls. That's right, the school welcomed male students up to the age of ten. When he outgrew that institution, he switched to St. Albans public school, which proudly traced its history back to the year 1100. He was a diligent but unexceptional student who enjoyed science.

Under the encouragement of a favorite teacher, he boned up hard on mathematics, but steered his scholastics towards physics when he realized he had a better shot at getting into Oxford, his father's alma mater, under that discipline. He got in, but again was unexceptional as a student. He didn't like reading that much, or writing things down.

You can get away with that when you have one of the most brilliant brains in human history.

Continue reading "The Einstein of the Boomer Generation: Stephen Hawking" »

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Recently, the generous permissions that Movable Type requires in order to allow instant publishing of comments and entries have caused me to be attacked by phishers. These thieving scum have actually written files to my site and advertised them as places for gullible customers to go to change their bank passwords and such.

Thus, I have had to change the way the site operates. I have to log in and open up permissions just long enough to publish new entries and comments, then lock things down again. This affects you, the reader, by delaying seeing your comment go up.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I've forwarded the files to the victimized banking institutions, I sincerely hope they can catch them.

Oh Lord? Won't you buy me a color TV?
Dialing for Dollars is trying to find me!

Janis immortalized a local TV phenomenon with her very last recording, "Mercedes Benz." Indeed, this writer may have completely forgotten about the home-grown giveaway program if not for that lyric, memorized many years ago.

Dialing for Dollars was a part of Boomer memories, as well as those of subsequent generations. Incarnations of the show ran on local affiliates until the 80's, and may indeed still exist.

It all started in 1939. WCBM radio in Baltimore began running a money giveaway show hosted by Homer Todd. Dialing for Dollars was a local hit, and as television began coming into the picture throughout the late 40's, it moved to that medium.

The show was franchised, meaning that a fee was paid to use prebuilt props and the like, as well as the familiar format and the ever-more-popular name. Thus, local stations all over the US had their own versions of Dialing for Dollars.

And Boomers, no matter where they grew up, likely can remember such shows.

Continue reading "Dialing for Dollars" »

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We Boomers are proud of the fact that we came into existence within a few years of the end of WWII. And as the nation put all of the creative efforts that were once channeled into making the world safe for democracy into business ventures, many familiar household names sprung up during this time as well.

One of the most familiar monikers is that of one Earl Tupper. It was he who devised plastic containers for food storage that featured a delightful operation known as "burping."

Tupper started out in the landscaping/nursery business. He did well for a while, until the Great Depression came along. Like millions of other Americans, he was forced into unemployment by the harsh economic times, and was fortunate to find a job with the DuPont Corporation.

He was given an assignment: find a use for worthless chunks of plastic slag that were left over from other the production of other products. He purified the slag and was then able to use it to form lightweight, durable implements for servicemen including bowls, glasses, plates, and even gas masks. Later, he developed sealable tops for containers by studying the lids of paint cans.

Tupper bailed from DuPont in 1938 and started his own company. He did okay while the war raged, but in 1946, the future of home food storage crossed paths with Tupper plasticware.

Continue reading "Tupperware" »

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Growing up Boomers, there were familiar faces on TV that kept showing up time after time that were as comfortable as a well-worn pair of slippers. They would move from series to series, and we sort of took it for granted that we would always have them.

Sadly, that's not the case. One performer who left us in 2000 is dearly missed by me, and after the memory bump that this site provides, I suspect by you as well.

Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen was born in 1921 in NYC to a pair of vaudeville performers. Yes, show business was in his blood. His father died when Steve was a toddler, and his mother largely left it up to her family to raise him in the gritty south side of Chicago.

Steve sought a career in radio, and early in the 1940's, he landed his first gig at station KOY in Phoenix. When WWII started, he enlisted and trained as an infantryman. He never was shipped overseas, though, and returned to radio when the war was over. he became an announcer for LA's KAFC, then in 1946 began hosting a five-nights-per-week comedy show.

This led into a one-hour late night series that became a smash hit. Audiences were SRO, and one night, guest Doris Day failed to show. Allen tried something risky, moving into the audience with a microphone to do some ad-libbing. He was a natural at it, and it became a regular part of his performances.

The successful local show went national in 1950, and Allen began a 50-year-run of being a very recognizable and well-loved celebrity.

Continue reading "Steve Allen" »

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One memory that we Boomers have indelibly burned into our collective psyches is a theme song about a talking horse. We also have the sound of a baritone voice saying "Willlburrrr!"

The horse is, of course, the famous Mr. Ed. And it was very few black and white TV's of the 60's that didn't have the beautiful palomino gelding on their screens during the Decade of Change.

Mr. Ed first appeared as a syndicated series in January of 1961. CBS spotted a potential hit, and soon grabbed it up. Originally set to be titled "The Alan Young Show," the human star balked, in case the wacky premise of a talking horse's day-to-day life should prove to be a bomb. He needn't have worried.

Mr. Ed was conceived of by children's book author Walter R. Brooks. He delighted kids with tales about talking animals on the Bean farm in upstate New York. Despite the eventual popularity of Mr. Ed, it was Freddy the Pig who was the star of the literary series. Such are the foibles of fame...

Mr. Ed also owes his origin to the Francis the Talking Mule series of comedic movies that was released in the 50's. Francis would only talk to a single human, acting like a normal equine to everyone else, to the eternal consternation of the human. This was, of course, the same premise of Mr. Ed, the TV show.

Continue reading "The Famous Mr. Ed" »

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Many of us Boomers grew up with chess sets in the house. Many of these were cheap plastic jobs imported from Japan. Some of us had prestigious cast or carved versions. But odds are that all of us, when sitting down to take on one of our youthful opponents, fancied ourselves to be the great Bobby Fischer, the world's household name among competitive chess players of the 60's and 70's.

The first competitive chess tournament whose winner would be declared Europe's best player took place at London's Great Exhibition of 1851. Of course, you were aware that it was Adolf Anderssen who won, with accusations of unfairness by a defeated player, Howard Staunton.

I know, you never heard of them, but it's interesting that the very first competition would be marred by the same controversies that would dog the sport throughout the 20th century.

For many years, it was Germany who spawned chess champions. In 1921, Cuban José Raúl Capablanca began a reign which lasted for eight years. He was eventually deposed by Alexander Alekhine, a French-Russian who would be a harbinger of the future of chess and its domination by those blasted Commies.

On October 17, 1956, a thirteen-year-old named Bobby Fischer took on master player Donald Byrne and defeated him in what a chess publication called "The Game of the Century." Perhaps it was, but few outside of the chess community were aware of it.

That was about to change.

Continue reading "Bobby Fischer and the Match of the Century" »

Recommend I Remember JFK to your friends

We Boomers are buried in gadgets, as are all other generations running around in the early 21st century. In ten years, I've gone from reluctantly carrying a (heavy brick) cell phone to proudly sporting an Android phone that is more of a computer/multimedia center than anything else. We've seen TV's go from huge boxes with tiny black and white picture tubes that cost a month's worth of wages to inexpensive lightweight flat-panel screens with enough resolution to allow us to count every nose hair on our favorite actors' visages. Our fathers would rejoice if they could cajole 100,000 miles out of a car without major engine and/or transmission work, my wife's Camry is about to cross that hurdle and my only concern is whether it springs any microscopic oil leaks over the next few years.

Last night, while switching channels on my nice new 32" high-def I have in my bedroom, it occurred to me what a sweet little device the TV remote has become, and how important it now is for our day-to-day activities.

The inventor of the device that would ultimately allow us to switch from USA to ESPN was, as you might have guessed (not!), the great Nikola Tesla.

The much-maligned inventor, who was always getting upstaged by more ruthless rivals, in 1898 demonstrated a device which would remotely control a powered model boat.

Continue reading "Remote Controls for our TV Sets" »

Recommend I Remember JFK to your friends

The forum was fun for a while, but it has fallen out of use and has become a target of spambots. I'm moving it off of the site for now. Perhaps some day we'll give it another shot. Thanks to all of you real humans who visited and left/read comments.