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

It was a thick, clear plastic material that had raised triangular bumps all over it (I guess to provide traction for the slippery stuff). It was seen on automobile seats, couches, chairs, and nearly anything else that could possibly come into contact with the human derrière.

In the 1960's, it was everywhere.

I remember my parents taking one of their biannually-bought new Plymouths in to have this stuff put on the spacious bench seats. When mom and I went to pick up the car, we had to drive with the windows down due to the endless square yards of extremely redolent new plastic wrap.

In 1966, when you were on a two-nickel-a-day budget, you had to be careful what you spent your money on.

Your soft drink options were these: Coke, Pepsi, 7up, RC Cola, Dr. Pepper, Fanta, Nehi, Grapette, or Orange Crush. These were all available for a dime. In other words, your ENTIRE BANKROLL.

But there was another option: Shasta. And it only cost a nickel.

At Moonwink Grocery, the ten cent pops were ice cold. But the more budget-friendly Shastas were located on an upper shelf in the far left side of the store. In other words, there were sold at room temperature.

The tensions of the 60's erupted in various ways. The most unfortunate were the riots, notable ones occuring in Watts, California, Detroit, Newark, Chicago, and Washington D.C. More peaceful statements were made by sit-ins and marches.

But an amazing statement was made in the form of a three-day music festival on an upstate farm owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur.

Yasgur no doubt never knew what he was getting into. It was planned for up to 200,000 to attend the Woodstock Festival. By the time non-paying stragglers wandered in from all over the country, there were 500,000. Yasgur's farm was essentially destroyed. But he remained good-natured about it, and received a $50,000 check from the festival organizers to make things right.

Among the subtle sounds that made up the ambiance of the home where I spent my early childhood was a gentle whirring noise. It was coming from the electric clock hanging up in our kitchen.

The electric wall clock was a staple in most homes during the 60's. Ideally, you wanted it to be hung in the middle of a wall. However, esthetics required that the cord hang straight down. Therefore, the clock resided directly above an electrical outlet.

While that cord stuck out like a sore thumb, it didn't take long for it to vanish. In fact, if the clock was replaced with a battery-driven model, it just didn't look right without a cord hanging down.

I have the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals to thank for getting me into baseball. I grew up with dad listening to the games on KMOX every night during the summer, but I didn't start paying attention until that fateful series that the Cards lost in seven to Detroit (ah, revenge is sweet ;-).

The next year, I was eagerly grabbing up packs of baseball cards from the little store that sat next to my grade school, White Rock Elementary at little Jane, Missouri.

Each morning, after the school bus deposited me at the school's back door, I would hike across the schoolyard to the store.

A nickel bought a treasure trove: about ten cards (as I recall) and the world's hardest flat stick of bubble gum.

Sunday nights were the must-see-TV of the 60's. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Sullivan, Bonanza, and of course, Disney were its residents.

The Disney show started out as Disneyland on ABC in 1954. It was a hit, its biggest coup of that decade being the Davey Crockett series over three nights. Coonskin caps were the immediate rage in the wake of the hugely successful presentation.

In 1961, Disney hopped networks. It had nothing to do with ratings or cancellation. Instead, it jumped to NBC because the network was widely telecast in color. The show was rechristened Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color.

You never had enough of them. The antithesis of coat hangers (which reproduce on their own), they would vaporize soon after purchase, and you didn't have enough to stack all of your 45's on your changer.

Also known as adapters, inserts, or spiders, they were essentials pieces of hardware to have long before we started packing literally days of music on our hips in packages smaller than a carton of cigarettes. Portable record players had to have them to work.

Many home stereo systems had built-in adapters of various types. The one we had featured a disk that could be pulled up and rotated slightly to lock in place. that allowed for single play. You still needed inserts for multiple play. Other changers had a rectangular piece that fit over the spindle and allowed the 45's to be dropped one at a time, allowing multiple play. But for portables, you needed these devices, period.

In 1964, Playboy Magazine was the talk of the town. Not only did they achieve a measure of journalistic credibility with cutting-edge writers, they did it while showing those . . . PICTURES! The most outrageous of all was the centerfold.

Playboy managed to transform the primary definition of the very word from a feature of a magazine to the most beautiful woman in the world that particular month.

The brains behind MAD decided it was time to cash in. But not with a centerfold. Nah, that had been done.

What they conceived was the idea that the back cover would need to be folded INWARDLY to reveal a hidden gag.

Man, this is an obscure one. I couldn't find anything but a brief mention on a site or two. So I guess I will hereby become the official source of internet information on sound-alike eight-track tapes.

These things were hawked on TV commercials in the early 1970's. One in particular I recall was "Summer '71." Instead of paying royalties to the original artists of the songs featured in these collections of hits, the producers of these tapes would hire a band that would do their best to sound exactly like them.

It seems like a strange concept now, but it was big business in the 70's.

If you watched as much television in the summer as I did, you soon had the samples of the songs played in the commercials memorized. As I write this piece, I can hear those Summer '71 songs streaming through my mind . . . Brand New Key . . . American Pie . . . Drowning in a Sea of Love . . .

The pictured tape is an example. It's songs of Cher, but it's NOT Cher! Caveat emptor.

I vividly remember when I first saw the marvel of the 1970's that was called Pong. I walked into the Rogers, Arkansas bowling alley in 1974, shortly after I got my motorcycle license and was enjoying the freedom of getting around on my own for the first time. There, among the pinball machines and pool tables, sat a table with a clear glass top. Under the glass was a TV screen showing a dot of light being hit back and forth between two flat bars of light. It was obvious that it was an electronic clone of ping-pong.

This was pretty amazing stuff. Arcade games all had one thing in common: they were machines. They consisted of plastic and metal parts that worked via gears, belts, and the like. A car driving game consisted of a little car on a stick that moved back and forth as you "steered" it through obstacles that were attached to a moving belt. Baseball was a game where a ball came rolling at the home plate, and you swung by operating a plastic bat that sent the ball back onto the field.

Suddenly, before me sat a game that was completely electronic! The quarters were practically jumping out of my pocket.

It was the penultimate rivalry in boxing in the decade of the 60's. Motormouthed Olympic champion Cassius Clay vs. quiet Sonny Liston.

Clay had won gold in the 1960 Games at Rome. Liston had become the heavyweight champ by Knocking Floyd Patterson out in the first round in 1962. The next year, he did it again. In the first round.

Liston was sort of an "preincarnation" of Mike Tyson. He had been arrested some nineteen times, was illiterate, and distinctly antisocial. Raised in abject poverty in Forrest City, Arkansas (named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan), he ended up relocating as a teenager with his mother to St. Louis, where he had his first run-in with the law. Armed robbery.

Two different generations of Boomers remember this show two different ways: For the older set, it was a Saturday night offering. For us youngsters, it was on every day after school. But one thing was for sure: we all watched it.

Leave It to Beaver was a simply brilliant, understated sitcom. It used real-life situations and made us laugh at them. And it did so under the constraints of very strict censorship. After all, husbands and wives were given twin beds to sleep in. The thought of them being in the same sack was out of the question.

What do you do under these conditions? You create a great show that depends on excellent writing and acting. 90% of the sitcoms that followed could have learned something from this.

The 1968 Summer Olympics saw some unforgettable moments. There were some controversial ones, such as the Black Power salute on the winner's pedestal. But there were also some amazing accomplishments in sport. Perhaps the greatest of all was Bob Beamon completely shattering the long jump record.

Beamon was a good long jumper. When you look at his overall career average, that's about all you can say about him. But what he did was choose the perfect time to make the longest jump of his career, one that would change the history of the sport.

He nearly missed even getting into the event. He fouled on his first two qualifying jumps, and decided to start his last one well behind the line to be safe. He managed to get in easily at that point.

Don't look now, Baby Boomers, this one slipped away while you weren't looking!

The AM push-button radio, the same we used to yank out of our dashboards and throw away when we replaced it with a shiny new AM/FM/8-track player, is extinct.

Now I haven't confirmed this, but every new car I've seen, even the most basic economy models, have AM/FM electronic radios or better in them. But when we were kids, and even adults just a few years ago, the push-button AM radio was what you got when you bought a new car.

The push buttons were ingenious. When I was a kid, I wondered how on earth my dad's favorite stations would come up when he hit the buttons. I thought it was amazing that Plymouth (dad always bought Plymouths) knew ahead of time where KMOX was on the dial!

"Hello. I'm Johnny Cash."

Those words opened an amazing variety show that shined brightly for three short years, from 1969 to 1971. My parents were both fanatics of the show, even though neither particularly cared for country music. Every Saturday night, Cash would grumble his intro and launch into the opening riffs of Folsom Prison Blues.

Cash's show was appealing to all sorts of folks. The fact is that he was simply a master entertainer who could hold the attention of virtually any generation. I was a nine-year old kid who can still vividly remember his regular bits, including "Come Along and Ride This Train," his gospel sings, and his nightly duets with June. I also remember the night he proudly introduced John Carter Cash, just born.

If there was one thing we Boomers saw a lot of, it was musical revolution.

Perhaps it all started with our parents. After all they ushered in the Big Band Era, pretty revolutionary in itself.

But rock and roll outlasted it by far. And the British Invasion is still being felt after forty years.

The Invasion is generally thought to have originated the moment this photo was shot in 1964, and the Beatles deplaned in New York for the first time. But it actually started earlier, with a trickle rather than a flood.

Dusty Springfield had a hit in November 1963 with I Only Want to Be With You. She even appeared on Sullivan to sing it. Other songs snuck across the ocean by the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, and the Tornados. Interestingly, the Dave Clark Five was the first British rock and roll band to tour the US.

Those words opened each episode of the 1967 remake of Dragnet. It was a remarkably successful venture, in the light of poor performance of other attempts to revive older shows.

I must confess that I have never seen an episode of the original 1950's series. I have heard that the remake didn't do it justice. If that's the case, it must have been truly great, because Dragnet 1967 (and subsequent years) was pretty terrific itself.

Jack Webb was an actor whose style I would compare to the great Jack Nicholson. While Nicholson is truly one of the greatest actors Hollywood has seen, the fact is that his characters are all quite similar to one another. He plays Jack Nicholson.

Jack Webb did the same. His roles in films like Dark City and Sunset Boulevard were incarnations of Joe Friday.

The ritual was followed every August. You would reluctantly drag your still-in-a-summer-vacation-mood bones to the store with your mom and pick out the stuff you needed at the hated Back to School sale. The items would include soft lead pencils with enough heft to beat someone to death, a wooden ruler with a strip of steel embedded in one edge, a compass for drawing perfect circles, albeit with holes pierced through the paper at their centers, a plastic protractor, and a huge monstrosity made of processed wood pulp known as a Big Chief tablet.

Schools provided lists of required items to parents spelling out the necessary supplies, citing the Big Chief tablets by name. After all, second-graders were simply not ready for finer-lined spiral notebooks, what with using those tree-branch-sized soft-leads for writing implements (and building up our right forearms in the process).

I think I was in the second grade. That would have been 1967/68. A nurse came to school and announced that we were getting smallpox vaccinations. "Now don't worry!" she exhorted us. "I'm just going to prick your skin. It won't hurt at all!"

Turns out she spoke the truth. The little pinpricks she gave us were barely noticed.

Then, AFTER we all were vaccinated, she gave us the rest of the story. The pinpricks would turn into huge, ugly, itchy lesions that would leave a permanent scar. BUT, we were safe from smallpox. And she would show up pictures of unfortunate children who DIDN'T get their vaccinations, covered with horrible scars.

At that point, we accepted the fact that we had made a good decision in accepting the procedure.

Wax is made from petroleum distillates. In other words, crude oil. But someone once came up with the idea of impregnating flavor and food dye into the foul substance, and molding it into objects like gargantuan lips, containers of sweet liquids, and the ultimate: the Wowee Whistle. And you know what? We kids of the Boomer years just couldn't get enough of them.

I would have loved to have posted a picture of a Wowee Whistle. I must have bought at least a hundred of the familiar plastic-wrapped orange edible (well, let's say chewable) waxen musical instruments. But alas, I couldn't locate a photo anywhere.

UPDATE! I Remember JFK fan Brad Matusiak (matusiak_brad(at)charter.net) has sent me a couple of pics!

Wax candy is one of those things that never completely disappeared, but its popularity has greatly diminished since store candy shelves were packed with them circa 1967. A Canadian candy company called Concord Confections still produces the lips, and supposedly, even the Wowee Whistle.

If a TV show or movie about the 50's or 60's is REALLY authentic, it shows nearly everyone above the age of 21 having a smoke.

Our generation was perhaps the smokingest one in history, at least during those two decades. And no wonder! We were bombarded with ads on TV, radio, in newspapers, magazines, and billboards. And we had a pretty good idea that it was bad for us, but we weren't 100% sure.

In 1947, Merle Travis's Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette painted a dark picture of tobacco addiction and its ultimate effect: death. But it was not until 1966 that the US government finally required labeling on cigarette packs stating that "Smoking may be hazardous to your health."

In my house, the warning had an immediate effect. Mom was a Salem chain smoker, and as soon as I was old enough to read that warning, I began hounding her to stop. She finally did, a few years later.

In 2003, the largest blackout in US history took place. Affected areas included New York City, as well as surrounding states and Canada all the way up to Hudson Bay. The world was stunned. But Baby Boomers, particularly residents of the affected areas, said "here we go again!"

On 5:27 p.m., November 9, 1965 (that would be the middle of rush hour), much of the same area was affected by what was then the greatest blackout in history. The event would go on to inspire a movie (and a new phrase for the English language), Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?

Traffic lights went dark, subway trains stopped in their tracks, and the world learned just how dependent we had grown on electricity's being there when we needed it.

You might say I was born at the perfect time. Those born in 1959 avoided the most dreaded of fates: being drafted and sent to Vietnam. On June 30, 1973, the draft was officially ended. I was about to turn fourteen. On March 29, 1975, even registration stopped.

And being teenagers in the 70's, we were shielded from many scourges that appeared later, notably inexpensive recreational drugs. While my religious upbringing kept me out of trouble anyway, our generation as a whole never got hooked on things like crack, meth, or other cheap addictions, at least as teenagers.

But those of us who remember JFK were sadly cheated out of one delight: the Big Wheel trike.

As a borderline audiophile who used to spray his records with a preservative that would supposedly extend their lives, I am a real fan of digital music. I love the fact that my extensive mp3 collection is backed up four ways, unlike my old record albums, which either wore out or were warped by leaving them in my car on a hot day. Just dropping an album might result in a permanent skipping spot, as happened with my original Rickie Lee Jones debut album. Right at the end of Company, too, my favorite song!

But there is one area where analog record album technology has it all over digital. That's in the case of cardboard records. Yeah, let's see you digitize THAT!

You probably remember these on the backs of cereal boxes. That's where the depicted Archies album came from. Larry Staples, who, BTW, designed this site's logo, and who came up with this column idea, once owned the very record depicted here. He nearly wore it out, as a matter of fact.

George Carlin said that the problem today's kids have is that they have to wear a helmet to do anything. When we were kids in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, we engaged in activities that would shock today's society that is so obsessed with protecting us from ourselves.

For instance, we used to walk into the neighborhood grocery store and buy explosives.

The explosives were in the form of roll caps. The brand I saw everywhere as a child was Bang Caps. And thanks to http://www.nicholscapguns.com/ for the photo, by the way.

The summer afternoon air was frequently filled with reports and smoke as we dueled with our trusty cap pistols. But after a while, we would crave louder explosions. That meant finding a hammer.

I'm always hesitant to write about more obscure memories. After all, just three months after putting this site up for the first time, we already have a nice amount of traffic in the form of reminiscing Baby Boomers. I don't want to discuss things they don't remember, but on the other hand, maybe they've been looking for info about the same obscure factoid. So here goes.

I was unable to find ANYTHING on the web about Commander Whitehall's Explorer's Club. So I'm operating on memory alone. Fortunately, my memory is pretty good.

Mrs. Cox, my third grade teacher, introduced the class to the Explorer's Club. It cost about $5.00 a month, and a child would receive a box in the mail filled with genuine treasures from all over the world.

In 1954, Red Skelton had an unfortunate accident. During a rehearsal, he plunged headlong into a "breakaway" door which failed to give. The resulting concussion landed him in the hospital.

What to do? A live show was about to be broadcast in just thirty minutes!

A writer named Johnny Carson had another gig as host of a show called Earn Your Vacation. He was obviously used to being in front of the camera. So he was persuaded to host that night's episode.

He was brilliant. NBC execs watched, and remembered.

The movies reigned supreme over the entertainment business for a nice run of the 20th century. They knocked live Vaudeville performances out of the saddle, and never looked back. The movie industry didn't notice when Scotsman John Logie Baird sent a television signal over the wires from London to Glasgow in 1927.

The Golden Age of Hollywood lasted until the late 1950's. By then, televisions sat in a large percentage of American households' living rooms, and movie studios were starting to feel the pinch.

So about this time, movies began getting more, shall we say, risque. After all, you had to do SOMETHING to keep the public paying money to go to the cinema.

But that meant conflict with the Hays Code. This list of rules, adopted by the MPAA in 1930, spelled out what was and was not considered morally acceptable in the production of motion pictures for a public audience.

We Boomers had great imaginations. How great? Well, in the mid-to-late 70's, we would get extremely excited over little red LED's flashing on a tiny screen. These LED's, as they lit and darkened to the motions of our thumbs on buttons, would cause cheering, cursing, and occasionally even the tossing of the game that provided all of this "action" (hopefully against a shock-absorbing surface).

Electronic games began with Mattel's Auto Race in 1974. It was the first handheld game to contain no gears, relays, or any other moving parts. Everything ran with diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, and of course a tiny screen with "cars" represented by tiny red LED's. And believe you me, any kid whose parents shelled out the big bucks for it was popular, at least while he had fresh batteries.

Football seemed to be a natural fit for handhelds, and accounted for many of their incarnations. The pictured game (thanks, Handheld Museum) was Mattel Electronics Football, circa 1977.