I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

What strange evolution took place among cars during our time. I remember growing up with two kinds of cars running around our streets: the old ones built like boxes, and the newer sleeker ones. But they all had one thing in common: they were BIG! Volkswagens were plentiful, but you didn't see too many other cars that were small.

Then, in 1973, those blasted Arabs punished the US for its support of Israel. The oil embargo caused prices to triple. Suddenly, bigger was no longer viewed as better.

A forward-thinking auto company called AMC saw a market for a compact car that got good gas mileage. Not wanting to spring too much on its intended American customers, they chose to shorten the wheelbase while maintaining a standard width.

It all started with a fellow by the name of George Wagner. Wagner was a short-statured high school wrestling champion who tried to make it as a professional wrestler. The sport was not exactly a raging success. Opponents would frequently lock each other up in clinches that kept them virtually motionless for minutes at a time.

Wagner decided to take a walk on the wild side. He grew his hair long, dyed it platinum blond, started using a valet to assist him in his lengthy strolls to the ring, accompanied by the playing of Pomp and Circumstance. His valet would spray his corner (and sometimes his opponent) with disinfectant and perfume. Eventually, the match would ensue. Gorgeous George, as he was now known, would blatantly cheat and gain victory.

Half of the crowd hated his guts. The other half loved him. They all ponied up bucks for tickets. Television, a new medium in the 1940's, started showing his antics. Professional wrestling, as we know it, was born.

Know how to make a six year-old kid light up in 1966? Ask him if he would like to go to the Dime Store!

Dime Stores sprang up across the country in the early twentieth century. By Baby Boomer time, every town with at least a thousand inhabitants had at least one. We had a Woolworth's in my home town. Other brands included Kress, Ben Franklin, and TG&Y.

They frequently featured lunch counters. Our store in Miami, Oklahoma did. In fact, a major kickoff of the Civil Rights movement took place at a Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960 at Greensboro, North Carolina. A piece of that counter is in the Smithsonian.

I have fond memories of cherry shakes at that store I grew up with. But the best part was the TOYS!

John Lennon made an infamous remark that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. They weren't that big, but this rumor which spread across the world like wildfire in the late 60's showed that they were pretty darned big anyway.

The originator of the Paul Is Dead rumor (big enough that it deserves capitalization) is unknown. It really caught fire in 1969 when a caller identifying himself as Tom spoke to a deejay in Detroit outlining the evidence.

The mysterious caller said that Paul had died of a car crash in 1966, replaced by a similarly talented left-handed bassist who just happened to be a dead ringer (sorry about that) for the original Paul.

Now, we should have taken a massive reality check right there. But hey, urban legends were in their infancy. We still believed that Jerry Mathers was killed in Vietnam, for Pete's sake.

"Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit outa my hat!"

It takes genius to create a cartoon show with humor on two completely separate levels. As a five-year-old kid, I was a huge fan of "moose and squirrel." Then, when my own kids were about the same age, I watched a video of the old shows. I couldn't believe the humor that was way over a kid's head!

Just think for a minute how preposterous this show's premise was: you have a flying squirrel and a dim-witted moose who are pursued by a couple of Pottslyvanians (who sounded like they were from Moscow). I never really learned what Boris and Natasha had against them. But Mr. Big and Fearless Leader insisted that they be eliminated. In between the show-long adventure, you would get snippets of wisdom from Aesop, Fractured Fairy Tales, Dudley-Do-Right, Mr. Know-It-All, and my favorites, Sherman and Mr. Peabody.

Ah, bell bottoms, those monstrously impractical yet completely irresistible flared pants. This fashion statement came straight from the good old U.S. Navy. Supposedly, the reasoning behind them was that the flared opening made the trousers easier to jettison in case you fell overboard. Then, they could be filled with air to make a life preserver.

Whatever. In the 60's, this look was declared to be cool, and cool it was. I got my first pair when I was nine years old. They were green striped, and instantly transformed me into the coolest thing in school.

The striped pants were a fixture in TV, the movies, and advertisements. But they pretty much disappeared early in the 70's. But flare-legged jeans rolled on.

The photo to the right is Kate Jackson, world-famous "smart" Charlie's Angel. Obviously, bell-bottoms were still cool to wear by the later 70's.

Today, I'm known as the bald guy. In fact, when I incorporated my website design business, it became known as The Bald Guy Enterprises, Inc.

But go back to circa 1968, and when I got spiffied up, my luxuriant blonde hair was coated in a generous slathering of Lucky Tiger Rose hair tonic.

It was called "tonic," because the oils and other secret ingredients were advertised to be good for the scalp. In fact (though I don't think the company ever claimed it), it was rumored to prevent baldness!

Trust me. That was not true.

But still, it was a great feeling, slicking your hair back and enjoying that tantalizing, manly scent.

Popperknockers. We loved 'em, we just didn't know what to call them. They were officially known as "Klackers," but most of us who carried the noisy, infernal, dangerous things around made up our own names, some a bit on the racy side. I preferred popperknockers.

According to Wikipedia, other names included Klick-Klacks, Whackers, Ker-Knockers, Whack'os, Bangers, Poppers, Knockers, Bonkers, Clackers, Clack Clacks, Crackers, K-Nokkers, Knockers, Mini Poppers, Popper Knockers, Rockers, Super Clackers, Quick Klacks, Quick Clacks, Quick Wacks, Wackers, Whak Kos, Bonkers Balls on a String, and Zonkers. Yeesh!

Their premise was the height of simplicity. Two acrylic spheres on a piece of string with a plastic handle located in the middle. They hung straight down, and upward and downward motions of your hand made them pop into each other, making one of the most familiar sound heard in the 60's and 70's.

Unfortunately, I can't remember which day it was. But one day each week, we received a delightful little four-page read in school: My Weekly Reader.

Thanks to this fascinating little periodical, I knew the names of every astronaut who went into space between 1969 and 1972. In fourth grade, our teacher made us memorize them, and I kept doing so for years afterwards. My Weekly Reader would prominently trumpet their triumphs, even with the later moon missions that the public lost interest in.

Then again, there was Peanut and Jocko. The monkey and elephant would crack wise and further inspire class clowns like myself.

The idea behind MWR was that you would study them on your own, then discuss them in class. It was more like fun than work.

Sunday night was a major TV night at my house in the 60's. Sullivan was on, so was Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. But it all kicked off with Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom at 6:00.

Long before Steve Irwin, that snake guy, or Animal Planet, Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler (later Stan Brock) served up a delicious half hour of wildlife footage. They went to Africa, Antarctica, the Arctic, South America, North America, and Asia. They waded through swamps, trekked across plains, rode across savannas, and went undersea. Their adventures were interrupted periodically with commercials from you know who.

It was great stuff for a kid to watch. I don't think I missed an episode from 1963 through the early 70's.

Perkins was Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo director who started a local TV show in TV's infancy: 1945. By 1949, he had a new show called Zoo Parade, which NBC took on the next year. Zoo Parade lasted eight years, and featured Perkins highlighting various inhabitant's of Lincoln Park.

Well, this war was won a long time ago.

It used to be that when you were in the mood for an all-day sucker, you had a choice to make. Sugar Daddy? Black Cow? Slo Poke?

Decisions, decisions . . .

As I recall, Slo Poke was the direct equal of the Sugar Daddy, the Black Cow being, basically, a Slo-Poke dipped in chocolate. I don't mind telling you, it wasn't much of a competition for me. I must have eaten at least a thousand Black Cows in the 60's.

Holloway was the maker of Slo Pokes and Black Cows. I seem to remember a Pink Cow, too, but couldn't tell you what it was. Maybe someone out there can?

It amazes me how many of our toys involved endless repetitive motion. Take the Whee-Lo, for instance.

The Whee-Lo was a wire loop which held a rotating wheel that was magnetically attached at its axle. It would traverse its metallic circuit endlessly, powered by gentle motions of a child's wrist. That yellow plastic hoogus could be slid up and down the handle to vary the speed of the wheel.

The toy was introduced way back in 1953 when a company called Maggi Magnetics began selling them. This was a surprise for me in doing my research, because I remember the toys appearing in stores in Miami, Oklahoma in 1968. Soon, every kid in town was sending the spinning wheel around its course as they walked to school in the mornings.

Wishniks were all the rage in the 60's. They were available in all sorts of sizes, from plastic dolls nearly a foot tall to mini-wishniks that fit inside a plastic container that was dispensed by vending machines that took quarters. They were utterly worthless and totally irresistible.

Supposedly, they brought good luck. Whatever. I just know that I used to have a few of them sitting on various shelves in my bedroom. I don't recall my fortunes as being particularly provident.

The troll doll was first produced by a danish woodcutter named Thomas Dam the same year I was born, 1959. Genuine Dam trolls from the period are quite valuable.

It wasn't long before cheap knockoffs appeared, the most prolific of which was the Wishnik.

Even wishniks found themselves cloned, by toymaker Mattel.

That sign to the right used to be a regular sight when I was a kid. It signified that the building that sported it was certified as a safe place to be in the event of nuclear fallout.

I don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I know that there were quite a few people that I knew who were convinced that, even though we dodged that particular bullet, that nuclear war was inevitable sooner or later.

It was easy to believe. NATO and the eastern blocs were cranking out ridiculous numbers of atomic weapons. Test detonations were being performed several times a year. The news would report atomic clouds drifting over the western parts of the country after a Russian test.

It was scary for a kid.

MAD magazine is too big a Baby Boomer phenomenon to write about in one sitting. In fact, I just created its own top-level category, the ultimate Movable Type honor. That's why I'm going to be individually recalling its contributors. Perhaps the greatest of the lot was the immortal Don Martin.

Don Martin was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1931. He began his career with MAD in 1956. He soon became its centerpiece artist, with each issue containing two or three cartoons featuring the timeless look of Don's characters. This included huge chins, bulbous noses, long, skinny legs, and, of course, the familiar hinged feet.

Going along with the look were the familiar sound effects. I remember a football player who was being interviewed by a sports reporter emitting sounds like "oont" and "groot."

In fact, Don's sound effects were of such literary magnitude that they have been collected here, in alphabetical order.

Every year, this movie was shown on network television. It was a tradition in my home to watch it, one I look back on with a variety of emotions.

The primary feeling was TERROR! This movie scared the living daylights out of me. From the tornado scene (I lived in a town that was regularly nailed by twisters, I was scared to death of them) to the creepy trees with faces to the cackling witch to the ultimate terror: FLYING MONKEYS!

I don't know what it was about those airborne apes that was so terrifying, but I had numerous nightmares about them. The depicted scene, where they are flying across that ominously darkening sky, was the one that frequently sent me running from the room to hide under my covers.

If you were a kid in the 60's, and wanted frequent visits from your buddies, all it took was for you to own one of these babies.

Rockem Sockem Robots were advertised on commercials that thoroughly entranced their intended young audience. The robots would mercilessly hammer each other until one of them popped the spring-loaded head of the other and it would fly straight up about an inch.

You knocked his block off!

Many toys were a bit of a letdown after their spectacular commercials. Not this one. It was a real rip to play with. You could spend an hour sparring with your pal. That was an eternity in kid-attention-time.

I Remember JFK's advertising policy and terms:

I remember a reader writing a letter to the editor of MAD sometime in the 1970's. He said, and I quote from distant memory, "I watch a movie because I like it. And then, I read the MAD satire to let me understand it."

That sums up exactly why the MAD satires were some of the most brilliant examples of journalism during the 60's and 70's. They were well thought out, biting satire that nailed the weak points of films and TV shows that needed nailing.

A few of the satires that I fondly recall, along with translations of the more subtle ones, include Star Blecch, Crymore Vs. Crymore, A Crock of (blip) Now, What's the Connection? (The French Connection), Balmy and Clod, The Zing (The Sting), and, most telling, Up With the Academy.

Up With the Academy was a very brief admission by MAD that it had made a mistake in lending its name to a typical 80's R-rated trashfest comedy called Up the Academy. MAD admitted publicly that the movie sucked. The "satire" was a single page long, a telling statement in itself.

AMC was by far the most innovative car manufacturer out there after the death of most smaller car manufacturers in the 1950's. They weren't afraid to put out designs that looked radically different from what the big boys were offering. And they also sold a boatload of cars! It's a shame they're not still around. They were swallowed up by Chrysler in 1987.

The Gremlin's basic design was penned on the back of a Northwest Orient air sickness bag about 18 months before the car was introduced. Its designer was Richard Teague, who designed many other AMC models including the Hornet, the Javelin, and, of course, the immortal Pacer. The Gremlin first appeared in 1970, beating rivals Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega by a year. It was produced until 1978.

Tom McCahill, Mechanix Illustrated's car columnist, tested a Gremlin that year and declared it to be the best American buy of the year. The public listened, and started buying.

This was, by far, IMHO, the most beautiful comic book design in history.

I was a comic book nut growing up. I loved them all (except those yucky romance ones, of course). But the books that leapt off of the rack into my seven-year-old hands were these gorgeous DC comics with that distinctive checkerboard pattern at the top.

If you walk into my house, you'll see that same checkerboard pattern in my floor. It's timeless, classic, and beautiful.

I actually owned the pictured issue. That's another sad story.

I didn't buy many issues in the 60's. They cost twelve cents, and that would mean that I would have to go an entire day without candy. My allowance was two nickels a day. Do the math. It was easier to read them in the store, the tolerant owner of Moonwink Grocery allowing it.

A collection of plastic gears and colored pens caught the attention of a generation of youngsters in the 60's and 70's. If you were patient, you could create some amazing drawings that would look great festooning your bedroom walls. But it did require patience, something that not all of us came by naturally.

A British electronic engineer named Denys Fisher invented Spirograph in 1962. In the tradition of Super Glue, Velcro, and Teflon, it was created for a strictly-business use which ended up making its mark as a lighter-weight product.

Fisher's family noticed that one of his geared creations aimed at manufacturing industrial products made some cool patterns in you traced their motions. They convinced him that he had one cool toy on his hands, and he listened.

Eventually, Kenner Toys grabbed the design and started marketing it in 1966. It sold untold millions, including two sets bought by my wife and myself when we were tots.

Mets fans are still seething that my beloved St. Louis Cardinals, tripping and stumbling down the stretch, managed to get their act together in time to knock a very strong team out of the World Series. But happier memories exist for fans of the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York, as they are formerly known.

New York fans were shafted by the greedy owners of the Dodgers and Giants in 1957. It was shocking that in one year, New York went from having two NL teams to having none.

In 1962, the Mets began playing. Rather than going for young talent, their GM went for older, more well known players (many of them former players for the three NY teams) who were past their prime. His ineptitude seemed to filter down to the players and coaches. Casey Stengel led them to an inaugural 40-120 record.

The year was 1965. I was six years old. The James Bond Attache Case was considered the holy grail of toys. It was heavily advertised, and millions of kids all over the US were relentlessly nagging their parents to pony up ten bucks for this utterly magnificent collection of spy stuff.

My nagging paid off. I received one that year. I was the king of the block.

The attache case came loaded with gear that transformed you into a spy to rival Mr. Bond himself. There was a Luger pistol with a silencer. It shot real rubber bullets, as I recall. There was also a knife that transformed into a gun. Other items included a wallet with cash, a passport, business cards, a decoder, a holster for the gun, and the case, which was amazing in itself.

Like the Energizer bunny, this song keeps going and going.

When I envisioned this entry, I intended to write about a doo-wop song that has made frequent comebacks. However, I was amazed to find out that this song dates back to the 1930's, and there is some real controversy about who holds the copyright.

The song originated with an artist named Solomon Linda, who recorded his creation (entitled "Mbube," Zulu for lion) with his group The Evening Birds in 1939. Linda, one of a gajillion artists who got screwed over by record companies, was paid a modest flat fee for the song with no royalties.

His version eventually sold 100,000 copies, mainly in South Africa.

In the '50's, the South African recording company sent it to Decca Records. They passed on it, but folk historian and musicologist Alan Lomax was intrigued by it, and sent a copy to his friend Pete Seeger. Seeger also loved it, and recorded it with The Weavers. He sent Linda an unspecified amount of money for use of the song, and recorded it as "Wimoweh."

Most of the memories here are from my childhood. In 1983, when our generation was all grown up, this movie was shown on ABC TV. This was one of the last coups for network television, cable not quite having taken over yet. It was watched by 100 million people, the most-watched TV movie ever.

My brand new wife and I watched this on our TV in our first home in Amarillo, Texas. It changed the way we looked at the world, as it did for everyone else who watched it.

The movie starred Jason Robards as a doctor in Kansas City. Other familiar 80's faces included John Cullum, John Lithgow, Stephen Furst, JoBeth Williams, Steve Gutenberg, and Amy Madigan.

The movie opens with familiar news broadcasts from the Cold War era, troop buildups, rattling of sabers, etc. People pay little attention as they go on about their lives.

Eventually, the Soviets blockade West Berlin. This is construed as an act of war.

Things accelerate rapidly at that point, with the general public at last taking notice when they see missiles launching all around them.

Thanks, superballs.com, for the image ;-).

Wham-O Toys were a big deal in the 60's. One of their products came out in 1965, a big year for toys. It was a ball made of highly compressed rubber. That gave it amazing bouncing ability. In fact, as the ad said, you could bounce it over a house!

And I did, too. Once I convinced my parents to shell out the 98 cents necessary for its purchase, the first thing I did was bounce it over the house. What a rush!

The SuperBall traces its origin to a California chemist named Norman Stingley. He compressed rubber under 3500 lbs. of pressure to create a sphere that bounced like no ball had ever bounced before. Realizing its potential as a craze, he offered it to his employer, the Bettis Rubber Company of Whittier. The rubber was not quite ready for prime time (it would fall apart within minutes of play), and they declined any interest in it.

Enter Wham-O.

It was the ultimate in cool. James Bond even wore one. It was the light-up LED watch.

Introduced in 1970, it was a very expensive toy for the wealthy. But by 1972, they had gotten affordable and were starting to be popular. I got mine a couple of years later.

Dad used to get Coordinated Universal Time on his shortwave radio to set his watch (at the tone, it will be . . .). I had a wind-up Timex, and it used to lose or gain a couple of minutes a day. Hey, if you had a watch, you had to keep adjusting it. That's how it was.

But LED watches got us used to knowing EXACTLY what time it was.

One of my favorite tricks was to count down the bell in class. "5, 4, 3, 2, 1!" followed by the bell ringing on cue. Great stuff for a class clown.

This one is one that I personally don't remember at its inception, but have recollections of its fallout. My older brothers no doubt recall when the Twist swept the nation. One reason I'm writing about it is the fact that Chubby Checker's song "The Twist" set a mark that has never been equalled before or since. More on that in a bit.

I learned some remarkable facts about the dance craze that swept the nation in 1960. In 1958, a group called Hank Ballard and the Midnighters performed a dance routine that they dreamed up at a show they were giving in an Atlanta club. The audience got a kick out of it. Hank wrote a ditty to go along with it and on November 11 of that year, released it as a backside to a single called "Teardrops on Your Letter," which made the R&B Top Ten the next spring.

The flip side finally got some attention from deejays, and none other than Dick Clark heard it and knew it was a hit.

He invited Hank Ballard and the Midnighters to perform on Bandstand, and for some strange reason, they no-showed. BIG mistake.

We had some great radio in the late 60's-early 70's. If you lived near the middle of the US, you got WLS at night, the greatest rock and roll station in history, IMHO. But daytime was another matter.

The FCC directed WLS to throttle its power way back in the daytime. In my small town, FM was in the future. AM was country music. An honorable genre loved by its fans, it was hated by me.

That left one alternative: the portable eight-track player.

In this day and age of hundreds of hours of music that fits in a player small enough to clip to your belt, eight-track tapes seem prehistoric. But they were cool to own circa 1971. Sure, they faded in and out between switching tracks (creating some unique memories of songs that now don't quite sound right without it!) and were prone to breaking after many playings, but we still loved them.

It's Tuesday night. Mom had a bad day teaching school. She came home and went to bed. Dad's just walked in hungry and realizes that the kitchen is idle. What happens next?

We wake mom up, load everyone into the Plymouth, and head for the A&W drive-in!

In the mid 1960's it seemed that every town with at least 5000 residents had an A&W drive-in. The chain was an intriguing anomaly: the only thing they all had in common was the fact that they sold the most delicious root beer on the planet. Their food menus were strictly up to each franchise!

I guess that wasn't so strange. Franchise restaurants weren't the commonplace sight back then that they are now. The business was still busy reinventing itself.

It's hard to imagine, but McDonald's was a rare sight in small town America back then. So were all of the other chains we see in nearly every town today.

But you were always close to an A&W. And while the food might vary in quality, you knew you had something heavenly to wash it down with.

The routine was set in stone. I would get out of school at 3:30. By the time I got home, I was in front of the TV in plenty of time to watch Sea Hunt. And watch it I did, rerun after rerun.

There was something compelling about a show that was largely filmed underwater. Even now, I can't resist series like Blue Planet. But in 1966, before Jacques Cousteau's specials were around, we got our underwater fix by watching Mike Nelson getting into and out of various fixes.

The show, syndicated from the start, was filmed from 1958 to 1961. It continued to be syndicated throughout the mid-to-late 60's.

Lloyd Bridges was an environmentalist who made a plea to protect the world's oceans at the end of every episode. In fact, he left the show because the producers intended to make plots more about getting bad guys and less about environmental issues.