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

We younger Boomers remember the assassinations of the 60's, but we were really too young to be touched by them. I remember my parent's agonized reactions to JFK, Bobby, and MLK, but my reaction was more of amazement than sorrow.

The 70's were blissfully free from the types of high-profile assassinations that plagued the 60's, but it wasn't without trying. President Ford survived two attempts, but nobody died.

That all came crashing to a halt the evening of December 8, 1980.

A lot of the nation was watching Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell broke into the broadcast to announce that John Lennon had been killed. I was watching MASH, so I learned through a news bulletin.

Now I knew how my parents felt in the 60's.

My mom used to get aggravated at me when I would pick out a breakfast cereal based on what prize might be contained inside. But you know what? She bought laundry detergent based on the fact that there were drinking glasses inside the box! I believe the brand was Oxydol, if I remember right.

In many ways, the internet has taken us back to the days when freebies were abundant, e.g. gas station gifts. You can outfit your system with a free operating system, office suite, protection against viruses and spyware, and even have the weather presented up-to-the-minute, all for free.

But step back to the 60's, and you could see detergent makers tempting consumers with gifts buried within the powder.

These gifts were usually glasses. The style would vary from brand to brand, and brands would also vary what they offered. They all put at least three sizes in, that would prove motivating for multiple purchases.

One day hundreds of years ago, a Native American had a close look at the raccoon he had just killed. It may have been a wintry day, and his head may have been cold. As he skinned the creature in preparation for cooking, he may have noticed the the furry pelt was just the right size to cover his head. He didn't know it then, but he had just created a fad of the 1950's.

I missed out on coonskin cap mania, though I recall seeing a few of them in the 60's. It all began in 1954, when Walt Disney put on a series of episodes about Davy Crockett.

Fess Parker did two things. First, he captured the imagination of a generation of youngsters with his portrayal of Crockett, and secondly, he wore an article of clothing that said generation HAD to have for themselves. That, of course, would be the familiar coonskin cap.

By the time my first child was born in 1986, we had already purchased a baby seat for the car. It had become law here in Arkansas a couple of years earlier that children under the age of two would be strapped in.

But go back about twenty years (from 1986, that is), and the only protection small children had going down the highway was the sheer mass of the vehicles in which they were traveling.

Many of us Boomers fondly recall gas for less than thirty cents a gallon, and consequently drive economical cars today. My ride of choice to get to work (25 miles away) is a 1992 Toyota Tercel which has a new engine and gets 35-40 MPG. Four men at each corner could probably lift it off the ground.

But go back to JFK's era, and cars were HUGE!

If you looked in the kitchen cupboard of any middle-class home that had children living there circa 1965, you would probably have spotted former jelly jars now serving as glasses festooned with images of the Flintstones.

Welch's began the tradition of packaging jelly in commemorative jars that were designed to be used as drinking glasses in 1953. Its first subject was Howdy Doody. It was such a success that new series were released every couple of years. Others who were honored included Davy Crockett, the aforementioned Flintstones (three different series released in the early 60's), the Archies, Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers characters, football teams, Tom and Jerry, Dr. Seuss, and many others.

Once upon a time, Americans were entertained by vaudeville. Every town had at least one theater that might show silent movies and double up as a stage for live performances. Performers would travel from town to town doing their thing for small, eager audiences. Their specialties might be circus acts, music, dancing, comedy, stunts, acts of mental prowess, acrobatics, and in one unique case, a man who would swallow water followed by kerosene and regurgitate it onto a miniature building. The kerosene would come up first, setting the building on fire, followed by the water putting it out.

Small town America ate this stuff up. And even though vaudeville was killed by talkies in the 1930's, an entertainment columnist by the name of Ed Sullivan knew that there was still a market for it in the fledgling television market.

So on June 20, 1948, CBS gave him a chance to prove his point. He did, for twenty three years.

There was a tiny little world that I remember entering as a child. To get there, you had to use an object that required you to point it to a bright light source. Once you did so, you peered through the eyepieces and observed a miracle: gorgeous color images of national parks, cartoon characters, or perhaps animals in incredible three-dimensional realism!

A Viewmaster was found in practically every house with kids in the 1960's. Perhaps one reason for its popularity was that it wasn't just fascinating to the young! Parents got a kick out of them too.

The Viewmaster actually predates the Baby Boomer generation. It was debuted at the New York World's Fair in 1939. It was invented by organ maker and photographer William Gruber, who wanted to create a stereoscopic way to view recently invented Kodachrome slides.

For a mere season and a half, a truly great show appeared on ABC. The years it ran were 1967 and 68, when I was in the second and third grades. But the short time this show ran didn't detract from the fact that it was the unanimous favorite science fiction show on TV among my friends and classmates, beating out the more famous Lost in Space and even Star Trek!

The Invaders was based on the premise that aliens were among us in the form of humans. They weren't REALLY humans, though. For one thing, they didn't have a pulse. For another, they didn't bleed (that would require blood, also missing). And many of them had a deformed little finger.

So in other words, they would do a perfect job of mimicking the human body, but they just couldn't manage to get that pinky right.

It reminds me of something my high school art teacher once said: the mark of a great artist is the ability to effectively draw human hands.

Air conditioning has become a ubiquitous part of our lives. We work in it, drive in it, and live in it in our homes. Even the cheapest built tract homes have central heat and air installed. And most older homes have had air conditioning added, whether central or with multiple window units.

But go back to our childhoods, and odds are there were a lot of windows open and fans running in the summertime.

We thought nothing of speeding down the highway with all four windows down in July. Sure, mom's hair would get messed up. But she would much rather deal with that than burn up in the heat.

And school in September! There we were, miserable after that much-too-short summer vacation, and to top off the agony of being back in class, it was at least 90 degrees in the room!

Television was definitely the way to reach a kid circa 1966. Pre-adolescents of the 60's weren't so much into radio yet, most of us didn't read newspapers (except for the comics, of course), and our magazines were comic books. While novelty companies certainly took advantage of the latter to turn us onto things like X-Ray Specs, the bottom line was simple: if you want to sell to millions of kids, advertise on TV and have the item available for sale in the kid's home town.

That's why Sixfinger was such a hit. It was advertised profusely on TV, and it was available at places like Woolworth's, TG&Y, Kress, and many other dime stores and discount houses.

Frank Lloyd Wright was possibly the greatest architect the world has ever seen. But he did children another great service: he became father to a son named John.

In 1916, John Lloyd Wright, obviously exposed from a young age to the concepts of designing and building structures, invented a construction toy that might inspire other future architects. He called them Lincoln Logs, one of the most instantly recognizable brand names in history.

Legend has it that he noticed the interlocking beams that his father used in designing the basement of the Imperial Hotel in earthquake-prone Tokyo, and a light bulb went off in his head. True or not, we do have John Wright to thank for one of the most timeless toys ever made.

How did kids in school see the world in the 1960's? Frequently by means of film strips.

Film strips were strips of 35 mm film that had positive images on them, much like movie film. However, it wasn't designed to be quickly run through the projector like a movie. No, each slide was a scene in itself.

Many film strips were silent. Words at the bottom of the image described whatever was portrayed. But it was also common to see film strips that were synchronized to records. The teacher would play the record, and a beep would indicate it was time to move on to the next slide.

Of course, it was easy to get lost. When that happened, the class would loudly offer the teacher their assistance in locating the correct slide for the dialog.

We loved film strips. It meant a break from the tedium of regular classwork.

We Boomers in school were used to having our health enhanced, as well as our minds. For instance, in elementary school every year, a dental technician would show up with posters, free toothbrushes for all, and something ominous known as plaque detection tablets.

The posters were scary, too. They would show what happened to little kids who DIDN'T brush their teeth regularly. Yikes, talk about some ugly rotted images.

But the scariest thing was popping those red tablets in your mouth for the first time. It was the first grade for me, and I remember some kids crying because they were frightened by the scarlet pills. But the teacher tried to reassure them, while still pointing out that resistance was futile. You WILL have your plaque exposed.

It's possible that no other generation will be as enamored of the space program as were youthful Baby Boomers. Perhaps a manned mission to Mars might capture the imagination of the young as we were swept up by the race to the moon in the 1960's. But then again it might not.

In our youth, the idea of man traveling to space and back was so new, so outrageous, and so compelling that it simply obsessed us.

In such a fertile environment, advertisers began selling us the same foods that astronauts consumed in space.

Now, the truth be known, no doubt the fellows with The Right Stuff would have preferred fresh-squeezed orange juice, fresh country ham and eggs, and similar fare. But instead, they had to make do with very artificial alternatives, that blasted lack of gravity the culprit.

If ever a sports personality was perfect for selling stuff on TV commercials, it was Broadway Joe. Men loved him because he was a pretty darned great athlete, one who put the AFL on even ground with the NFL by beating the Colts in Super Bowl III. And the ladies loved him because he was a good-looking bad boy.

Joe's commercials included some sexy spots with unknown model Farrah Fawcett selling Noxzema shaving cream. Obviously, Joe's sports hero appeal to guys was greatly overshadowed by that provided by the lovely future Mrs. Majors.

But if he was hawking Right Guard deodorant, it was Joe the quarterback who was selling to America's guys.

A nickel was a fortune in 1967. You could choose from dozens of confections that virtually assured that you would also have mercury-laden fillings in your teeth by the time you were a teenager.

Oh well. We may have ugly gray dental work, but we also have priceless memories.

Let's browse through Moonwink Grocery's candy shelf and see what we can find.

The gum was always near the top. In fact, it still is, in the convenience stores we have today. Hmm. Well, I see Beemans (famous for having pepsin, I guess it helped you digest your food), Black Jack (in case you wanted your gum to taste like licorice), Clove (I always loved that stuff), Fruit Stripe (we loved striped stuff. Remember Stripe toothpaste?), Teaberry (kind of clovish tasting, as I recall), Cinnamint, Chiclets (both standard size, and those irresistible tiny ones), and finally Trident, for those who weren't keen to the idea of getting cavities.

Nobody I hung out with chewed Trident. It was a dime instead of a nickel, and those who preferred the expensive stuff were not to be trusted.

Keith Mcelmurry, if you're still out there, this one's for you.

"Any place can be a soda fountain now, with Great Shakes, yeah Great Shakes!"

Not only was this a great commercial jingle, it was sung by some serious rock and roll stars of the 60's. At least three movers and shakers were persuaded by Great Shakes, manufacured by General Foods, to perform their jingle in the style that would define the signature of each artist: Dusty Springfield, The Who, and The Yardbirds.

Over the years, mega-corporations like Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, and Coca-Cola have managed to pony up enough bucks to get popular music stars to hawk their wares.

My budget-conscious father was very particular about where his money went, particularly when it came to monthly subscriptions. But he enjoyed his magazines. That's why we had all three big weekly magazines coming in the mail for a period of time in the 60's.

The big three were Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post (I just remember it as the shorter-named Post).

While the big three are certainly treasured Boomer memories, you have to go back a lot farther than that to see where they started. And they were one of the few things that youngsters of the Now generation enjoyed along with their much more conservative parents.

One of the inescapable sad facts about human society is that the actions of an infinitesimally small group of dysfunctional individuals will invariably impact the 99.99% of those of us who behave ourselves.

Flying has become an integral part of our lives. Our parents grew up with the concept of getting on a train to get somewhere far away. It was natural for the Boomer generation to adopt the airplane as its no-brainer method of getting somewhere, especially in light of competitive airfares that seem to steadily get more affordable.

That means regularly subjecting ourselves to walking through metal detectors. It means having our carried items subjected to X-radiation. It means having perfect strangers rifle through our most personal items. It means surrendering our Leathermans and pocket knives that we may have inadvertently forgotten to pack in our checked luggage, never to see them again. It means getting viewed as potential hijackers by stern airport security personnel until we successfully pass shoelessly through the devices that proclaim us to be otherwise.

We don't like it, but we accept it as the price we have to pay, thanks to the actions of a few idiots. But if you remember JFK, you also remember when you went to the airport, purchased your ticket, and walked onto the plane.

The earlier Daylight Savings Time we experienced this year may have brought back memories of the year you went to school in the dark. A Mideast war had a domino effect that caused that particular memory for us one year. Here's how it went down:

On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria crossed cease-fire lines and attacked Israeli-held land in the Golan Heights which it had obtained during the 1967 Six-Day War. This most recent conflict became known as the Yom Kippur War. When you have that many wars, you have to keep them straight.

Anyhow, Israel fought back and reclaimed its lands, and it was all over by October 26. Only it wasn't over. For the United States and any other pro-Israel nations, it was just beginning.

Those lovable lugs who form the coalition known as OPEC decided we all needed a spanking. So on October 17, while the little Yom Kippur thing was still going on, they announced that any nation that supported Israel would thereby be cut off from receiving any more of their oil.

Decisions, decisions. Obviously, white milk was yucky. So how did you go about flavoring it, making it fit for consumption by a seven-year-old?

In the 60's, there were a number of choices. Some are still around, others have passed along the wayside.

In my home, it was either Nestle's Quik, or PDQ.

I'm not sure which I preferred. Nestle's had a very good taste, but PDQ was processed in the form of those cool coarse granules. Plus, the jar had an ultra-modern shape to it.

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more
The Bloody Red Baron rolled up the score
Eighty men died trying to end that streak
Of the Bloody Red Baron of Germany

That irresistible chorus punctuated a novelty song that captivated the nation in 1967. The group that performed it, the Royal Guardsmen, while not one-hit-wonders in the strictest sense of the word, were equally blessed and cursed by the success of the tune.

The Royal Guardsmen were formed in Ocala, Florida in 1966. They played local gigs in the area, along with dozens of other garage bands.

At the same time, Peanuts was the most popular comic strip on the planet. It was buoyed by wildly successful TV specials, as well as images of Snoopy and the gang covering everything from lunch boxes to tee shirts.

Somewhere in Ocala, Florida, a light bulb went off over record producer Phil Gernhard's head.

It's impossible to overstate the influence the Beatles had on us Baby Boomers. Well, I guess it IS possible, if you mention a certain Son of God ;-). But much more than their mere music affected us.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and within weeks of their arrival in New York, the hair of young men was allowed to grow longer than it had ever been before. And it wouldn't be cut short again for a very long time, stints in the military excluded.

Prior to this, guys were still greasing up and making ducktails. Even if hair was allowed to grow a bit long, it was slicked back to stay above the ears.

Then, out of the distant east, four British lads stepped off a plane and the slick look vanished, seemingly overnight.

I'd like to take a minute and reflect on what has happened since I woke up in the middle of the night last November with the thought "I Remember JFK! Now THAT would be a cool name for a Boomer nostalgia site!" To my delight and surprise, the domain name was available.

I just received my Google ranking, and it's a pretty good one. That was my initial goal when I put this site together. I'm now getting good, steady traffic from the king of search engines.

What I never envisioned was the response I've received from Boomers. I've always had a slightly better-than-average memory. The cumulative effect over the years is that my wrinkled bald head is filled with all sorts of trivial recollections that have proven to have an emotional impact on many who had long since forgotten similar events from their own childhoods.

And the fact that I have been the extremely fortunate recipient of traffic blasts from Pirillo's Picks, CBS News, KSDK TV in St. Louis (GO CARDS! Tony! Can't you afford a cab??), and the lovely Kim Komando. That last one alone was worth a cool 18,000 visits on March 20. Glad I switched to a dedicated server last year!

Film animation has certainly had its ups and downs over the years. My all time favorite animated scene is when the clocks all strike the hour at once in Walt Disney's Pinocchio. Man, those little wooden people moving around on their little tracks on the clocks, it was some amazing, hand-drawn stuff.

At the other end of the scale is my subject of today's column: Scott McCloud, Space Angel.

Scott McCloud, and another popular kid's cartoon called Clutch Cargo, used a technology called Syncro-Vox. It allowed a still image to show moving, REAL human lips. It was kind of strange, but compelling. And it still is when you see it used today.

It also allowed for some mega-cheap animations. After all, if those perfect human lips were moving so naturally, you could REALLY cut back on the number of frames you needed to hand-draw.

We Boomers bought a lot of Coke when we were kids. We still do, for that matter. So did our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. In fact, so have our kids and even grandkids. I didn't research any figures, but I'm guessing that Coca-Cola is the largest selling product in the history of the US, possibly the world.

I bought a slew of Cokes from the old machine at my father's truck garage in Miami, Oklahoma. It looked just like the one to the right. You dropped a dime in, and pushed that big lever to move an endless belt of cokes inside one step along. Then, you opened that little door and grabbed six ounces of frosty refreshment. You ended the ritual by popping the lid off in that opener, hearing a reassuring clink as it fell among its brothers in the bin.

That bin full of lids would prove to be very lucrative to me about 1966. Coke had a Things Go Better contest, where you scraped the cork off of the inside of those lids to reveal letters that would eventually spell "Things" and "Better." Then it was a matter of finding the Holy Grail: the word "Go" surrounded by stars.

We just passed the 33rd anniversary of one of the most stunning moments in network TV. If you saw the episode that night, or even in a rerun, no doubt you are re-experiencing the shock you felt when Radar walked unmasked into the O.R. at the end of episode 72 and announced that Henry's plane had been shot down over the China Sea with no survivors.

MASH had debuted three years earlier and was an instant hit. It was one of those rare mixes of great actors, great characters, great writers, and a great time slot. CBS soon owned Monday nights thanks to this perennial performer.

By 1975, McClean Stevenson felt it was time to move on. So he informed producers Gene Reynolds and Larry Gelbart of his imminent departure. A decision was made to create an episode giving Henry Blake a celebratory sendoff.

When we were kids, kindergarten was an option, not a requirement. And if our parents opted for it, it cost them cash.

At least that's the way it was in Oklahoma. That's how I ended up going to Mrs. Abels' big yellow rock house every day.

My mom, a schoolteacher, was familiar with Mrs. Abels and her teaching program. She was using something relatively new at the time: phonics. Mom saw the value of learning how to spell, read, and pronounce phonetically. The public schools had not yet committed to the teaching method. But mom had.

I don't remember too much about kindergarten except for a few things. One was that Mrs. Abels was a fan of cooked cabbage. It wasn't unusual for the fetid stench of cooked cabbage to foul the air of that big yellow house in the afternoons.

Another thing I remember was naptime.

One of the things I loved about summer vacation in the 60's (that's a mighty long list!) was the fact that I could get up in the morning and start watching a slew of great TV shows beginning at 9:00 Central Time.

The shows included great kids' fare like Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street late in the decade, and the local cartoon shows. But another summer treat was watching all of the game shows that were on in that era.

It's taxing my brain cells to the limit to even remember the NAMES of these shows, much less the network and time slot. But when I can recall such tidbits, I'll toss them in.

My very favorite show was the Match Game. It was an afternoon offering. I don't know why it was so appealing to me, but it was the one that I never missed.

Now I'm not talking about the tasteless 70's version. The 60's show didn't feature the provocative clues like Gene Rayburn would feed Charles Nelson Reilly circa 1974. It was much lower key, and darned entertaining to a seven-year-old. Maybe that's why CBS spiced it up so much ;-).

To continue where we left off yesterday, we watched a lot of game shows in the 60's. The game show craze originated on radio, and carried over naturally to television.

Concentration was a show that I always enjoyed. Host Hugh Downs made a big impression on me, so much so that I think of him as the guy from this show, not Good Morning America or 20/20.

The premise of Concentration should be known to any human in the western world, so I won't go into it. Instead, I'll dwell on my personal memories. One frequent feature of the show was the awarding of "the envelope," a mystery prize. Any time a contestant revealed "the envelope," someone offstage would ring a little bell. It was a blast trying to figure out that rebus, too. I remember more than one occasion when the board was cleared, and the contestants STILL couldn't figure it out!

The special effects were pretty imaginative circa 1965. One show had the contestants themselves provide the special effects. Of course, I refer to Let's Make a Deal.

I hereby surmise that 1959 was the perfect year in which to be born. In addition to missing out on Vietnam, being too young, and having the computer age and the internet appearing at the right time for me to gain good employment in the fascinating fields, I was also very fortunate to have been eight years old when Hot Wheels were introduced. And an eight-year-old kid is the perfect demographic for Hot Wheels cars.

Kids have always loved miniatures. Our great-grandparents played with miniature horses and the like. When automobiles appeared, toymakers quickly followed suit with smaller versions for the kids.

By the 1960's, Matchbox was the undisputed king of little cars. They had pushed past competitors like Corgi, Cigarbox (a little obvious there, brand name developers), and Tootsietoy to be the major supplier of toy autos to eager kids.

That all changed in 1968.

We have always needed help in adding up numbers. Even if a businessman was a mathematical savant, his customers would still want to see proof that the prices they were being charged were absolutely correct. Thus, businesses like my father's truck garage had an adding machine that would print up a paper record of calculated figures.

But as electronics got more sophisticated and less bulky, pulling a handle on a noisy machine to calculate a value gave way to simply punching buttons on a wonderful new device known as a calculator. And if you remember JFK, you likely also have vivid memories of seeing one of them for the first time.