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

Kids spend a lot of time in their back yards. I sure spent lots of hours in my Oklahoma back yard in the 1960's. I became so familiar with its features that I can close my eyes and imagine it in its entirety. I will now recreate that wonderful place, complete with its features unique to that era.

We had a concrete birdbath in the middle of the yard which was accompanied by a miniature flock of three plastic pink flamingos. They weathered well, I remember they lasted at least three years. That birdbath was a monster that mom picked out from one of those businesses that sold all sorts of yard stuff made of concrete. We never had one of those bright blue balls on a pillar, but my next-door neighbor did.

Like every other family on the block, we also had a clothesline that frequently was festooned with our laundry.

We kids spent lots of time in our backyards when we grew up in the 1960's. Today's Podcast consists of my memories of my Oklahoma back yard.

We Baby Boomers had to learn how to dial direct long distance calls. After all, we were used to getting hold of an operator to help us talk to Aunt Marge in Boise.

Long distance phone calls are made without a second thought nowadays. I have a very reasonably priced cell phone plan that allows me to converse with my brothers, who live a long ways from me, for no added charge. You can buy cards in convenience stores that give you long distance for pennies a minute. In fact, international calls have gotten cheap. And many take advantage of Skype and similar services to talk to friends and relatives all around the world for next to nothing.

But go back to the 60's, and many of us were having to speak to an operator to make a call outside our immediate area. And those calls didn't come cheaply, either.

The first direct-dial long distance phone call was made in 1951 when the mayor of Englewood, NJ called the mayor of Alameda, CA. Before that, most long-distance calls required an operator at both the calling AND receiving end.

We Baby Boomers grew up surrounded by Formica on countertops and tabletops. The ubiquitous substance was a familiar sight in our homes and the cafes and diners we visited. Here's today's Podcast with my memories of Formica.

The pattern to the right was a familiar one to you if you were a visitor of malt shops and hamburger joints in the 1960's. It's known as VirrVarr, if you were wondering (probably not). It was one of Formica's biggest sellers of the 50's and 60's, and was installed on the tabletops and countertops of eateries all over the world.

Formica was patented in 1913. The story, according to formica.com, is thus:

A young engineer had an idea that was pretty straightforward: take fabric, coat it with resin while it winds on a spindle into the shape of a tube, slit the tube lengthwise, unroll it, press it flat and then cure it. The result was a laminated plastic material that was tough, light and an excellent electrical insulator. It was easy to see the commercial potential of this new material.

The initial "commercial potential" was to replace the natural mineral mica as an electrical insulator. Ergo, "for mica."

We loved our yards in the 60's, but they required lots of mowing. Today's Podcast goes into memories of old lawn mowers and getting them started.

Ed. note! Sorry I goofed the URL. It will work now.

One of the things I remember about Leave It to Beaver was the fact that Wally (and later, the Beav) had to push one of those rotary mowers like the one to the left. That was a relic that I don't remember, myself. My older brothers no doubt had to drive the gear-driven workout machine through our grass, but later faced a different challenge: trying to get a beat-up old machine to start.

I remember that every mower we had throughout the 60's was old, and tough to get going. While I didn't start mowing the lawn until I was about eleven (the summer of 1971 was my first one to do the weekly chore), I remember my brother Bill struggling to get our mower running. It had a Briggs and Stratton motor with what the manufacturer called a coffee grinder starter.

Then Came Bronson was a wonderful TV show starring unassuming actor/singer Michael Parks. It only ran a year, but its fans never forgot it. In fact, you can still spot 1969 red Harley Sportsters with the distinctive white triangle on the gas tank, courtesy of fans who never forgot. Today's Podcast is all about my memories of the show.

(Sorry again. I keep adding an extra folder to the podcast url. Please be patient, I'm a 47-year-old trying to learn a new technology. PODCAST NOW WORKS!)

On June 26, 1969, a movie was released that was a gritty, druggy smash hit with both the critics and the public. Easy Rider was the talk of the nation. As Captain America and Billy captivated audiences, NBC execs noticed.

The rampant drug use, violence, and nudity of the original film would never fly on 1969 televisions (even though it is now shown practically uncut on AMC), but the idea of saying to heck with society and taking off on a motorcycle had already come to life as a TV movie that was aired on the network in March of that year. After Easy Rider's success, Then came Bronson was greenlighted as a series.

Singer/actor Michael Parks played Jim Bronson as a rebel, but a polite, friendly, quiet one.

They changed the way we watched TV. They let us blast through commercials, do other things while our shows were being recorded so we could watch them any time we wished, and let us watch movies, ANY movies, in the privacy of our home. It took a while before many of us could afford them, though. Today's Podcast is about your first VCR.

As I sit back and watch my episodes of The Sopranos that my DVR automatically records every Wednesday night from A&E, I sometimes think about days long ago when you either watched a show on TV, or you missed it. If you were watching Bonanza, and the telephone rang, or company came over, you didn't see the ending. Your only hope was catching the rerun.

If you can recall TV from the early 50's, even THAT was not an option. It was live, and the only recordings were kinescopes, which were films shot by pointing a camera at a television monitor.

The first kinescopes were useful for preserving performances for posterity, but they weren't suitable for broadcasts, although they would be later used to air shows three hours later for west coast audiences.

They were everywhere in the 60's: Giant dinosaurs, lumberjacks, arrows stuck in the ground, milk bottles, tepees, etc. And since they were made of durable materials, many of them are right where you saw them forty years ago. Today's Podcast is about the big, funky roadside attractions you remember as a child.

We Boomer kids spent a lot of time on the road. In our family, my grandparents lived 400 miles to the north and to the south, so we usually traveled every year to see them. Additionally, we managed to take some great vacations. In 1967, we drove up to Montreal for Expo 67, coming back home through upstate New York, where I saw Niagra Falls. And the next year, we drove down to Miami, Florida.

Dad would get on the interstate and drive 70 miles an hour to get to the grandparents' homes. But when we went on vacation, we would set out at a much more relaxed pace, stopping along the way to take pictures and check out big, funky roadside attractions. We never had reservations at hotels. Generally, towards the end of the day, we would pull in to a little motel with a vacancy sign turned on.

It was a great, relaxing way to travel.

Many homes of the 60's and 70's had inexpensive wood-toned plastic musical instruments known as chord organs, with Magnus being their primary manufacturer. Today's Podcast consists of my recollections of the ubiquitous air-driven machines, and my total inability to produce anything remotely resembling music on them.

The world was full of budding keyboardists in the 1960's. However, that didn't mean homes were full of pianos. Pianos were big, heavy, and expensive. Having one in your home meant that you were committed to playing it, otherwise it just took up space.

The same wasn't true for a musical instrument that was inexpensive, lightweight, and small enough to tuck away into a closet when not in use.

Chord organs were found in lots of homes during this time. The most common brand was Magnus. Magnus chord organs were made of various shades of plastic. They were made to sit on a tabletop, or there were also models that came on legs. They would necessitate benches with built-in compartments for the sheet music that was also a familiar sight.

TV didn't always run 24 hours a day, as those of us who remember JFK will recall. Once upon a a time, the National Anthem, along with the curious inclusion of a poem, would signal us that it was time to go to bed. Today's Podcast has all the details.

Are you wide awake at 3:00 AM? Are you staring at the ceiling? Is reading a book too much work? No problem, there is always something on the idiot box.

Nowadays, practically every TV station is a 24/7 affair. Even local stations run all night, selling the wee hours of the morning to infomercial producers. You can ease your insomnia by watching a long sales pitch for a George Foreman grill, a diet plan that is guaranteed to make you look like an anorexic, or a mattress that heats up, adjusts for different firmness, and lets your dogs out when they need to go.

But go back to our childhood years, and you can remember when the station would shut off the lights shortly after Johnny Carson (my Tonight Show host, perhaps you recall Jack Paar, or even Steve Allen) would say goodnight.

Late in the year 1969, I got a Gilbert erector set. I even know the model that it was, but not from memory. But Gilbert, who by then had been purchased by the Gabriel Co., only had a few different sets on the market.

I had a Senior Powerline set. It had a battery-powered motor so you could make amazing creations like rotating ferris wheels, a lift drawbridge, a crane, and many more acts of engineering.

The concept of the erector set sprang into the mind of A.C. Gilbert as he watched a skyscraper being built in 1911. He pictured a simple toy, a collection of miniature girders, beams, wheels, gears, and metal plates, all designed to be held together with small nuts and bolts.

Gilbert had the money to create and produce the toy, and also launched a national advertising campaign in 1913. Interestingly, that decade would also see the introduction of two other construction toys, Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys.

Erector sets were more than just great, durable toys. They taught a kid a lesson in making a commitment to a cause. Today's Podcast is all about what I learned from my 1969 Gilbert Senior Powerline set.

Kids have been pulling wagons called Radio Flyers down the sidewalk since 1930. Most of them are loaded with essential cargo like rocks, pop bottles, toys, puppies, or younger siblings. Not only were the metal wagons an important part of our childhoods, they continue to be such for our grandchildren. Today's Podcast is all about the venerable Radio Flyer wagon.

Some of our toys were unique to our own childhoods. The senior members of the Baby Boomer generation had Howdy Doody dolls. Boomers my age and a little younger had Schwinn Sting Rays.

But generations of kids stretching back to 1923 grew up with wagons produced by the company founded by Italian immigrant Antonio Pasin. And they still do. Even Calvin would take his friend Hobbes on some harrying trips down hillsides in a Radio Flyer.

The wooden wagons were known as Liberty Coasters when they came out that year. In 1930, Antonio's company was renamed Radio Steel and Manufacturing. His first metal wagon, which came out that year, was known as the Radio Flyer.

Remember those doctor and dentist waiting rooms you visited as a child, waiting for your name to be called so you could have lots of uncomfortable procedures performed upon your young self? Well, they all had one good thing going for them: Children's Highlights Magazine. Today's Podcast is all about the big, friendly read that made trips to the doctor just a bit more bearable.

I was a kid who was always sick. I was at the doctor's office for various childhood ailments ranging from chicken pox to pneumonia. I hated going to the doctor, because it would invariably mean getting a shot.

However, there was a pleasant memory of doctor's offices of the 1960's. That was Children's Highlights Magazine.

Dr. Wendleton, our family physician in Miami, Oklahoma, had the typical waiting room of the era: semi-comfortable chairs, ash trays, and magazines in a rack with thick clear plastic covers protecting their pages. There were all sorts of different magazines to be found, but I always went for the big, friendly copies of Children's Highlights.

To a soldier in World War II, the term "cootie" would bring unpleasant thoughts of bloodsucking parasites to his mind. However, for the children of that soldier, it would make us think of a fun game involving fortunate rolls of the dice and the construction of big plastic bugs. Today's Podcast is all about the game of Cootie.

A cootie, according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, is defined as a louse, especially one affecting humans, as the body louse or head louse. So if you were a soldier in either world war, cooties were extremely undesirable.

However, if you were a kid born after the conclusion of the second conflict, the term had a much more pleasant definition. It referred to a game involving big plastic bugs and lucky rolls of the dice.

Cootie originated with Herb Schaper, a letter carrier for the U.S. Post Office. He envisioned a game that would be fun, educational, and profitable.

MTV has been with us since 1981. And other music networks provide us with music 24/7. But producer Burt Sugarman saw a market for late night rock and roll way back in 1972, and had to finance the first show himself to get his point across. Today's Podcast is all about the Midnight Special.

"I want my MTV" was the catchphrase of the early 80's. But years earlier, producer Burt Sugarman saw a market for a rock and roll TV show that would take the medium just a bit farther than American Bandstand.

Late night TV was an untapped market in 1972. Once Carson was done, it was signoff time. So when Sugarman approached NBC execs with his idea of a Friday night show that would ride on Johnny's coattails, and that would draw in the teenage demographic that was still wide awake at that hour, he was surprised and disappointed that they turned him down. Unfazed, he produced the first episode, bought the airtime (with help from Chevrolet), and televised it. The result? Great ratings, and reconsideration by the NBC execs.

Imagine a movie about the wonderful, carefree days of 1996. Imagine the great music, our hot cars, and the innocence of the era. Yeah, right. But George Lucas recognized that 1962 Modesto, California was a special time and place, and in 1973 filmed American Graffiti to capture it. He also caught our imagination, and today's Podcast is all about the smash hit movie.

Let's see, if we were to make a movie about life eleven years ago, it would be all about the exciting year of 1996. Who can forget the great music, the cruising, and the carefree times?

Yeah, right.

While each generation defines its own "good old days," the fact is that some pretty profound changes took place in the years between the late 50's and the early 70's. These changes involved a tremendous loss of innocence, as things like Vietnam, the Nixon White House, and three tragic assassinations turned us all into cynics. Even Cuba was just a former Mafia playground turned insignificant communist nation early in 1962.

Of course, my first coherent memory was the first of the three killings. So I've always been a cynic.

I'm excited about the response to the I Remember JFK Podcasts. However, I'm in the middle of a conversion from Windows to Linux, and I'm going to have to take a different approach for how I record mp3's. So please be patient, and I'll be back soon with sound cuts. In the meantime, the articles will continue to roll.

Thanks, all, and keep tuning in to I Remember JFK!

Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, served from 1947 to his death in 1964. He was a good friend of Ghandi, saw his country through the first difficult years of independence from the British, and also tried hard to eliminate the Indian caste system, which assumes that if you are born into poverty, it must be because you're a horrible person who did horrible things in a previous life.

Obviously, he was a fine leader who did a lot for his country. However, he is more famous for lending his name to an article of clothing that is uniquely 60's in its appearance.

The Nehru jacket appeared in the mid 1960's. Its mod look went perfectly with Twiggy, paisley prints, and sitar music. Soon, it was seen on none other than the Beatles themselves, vaulting its popularity. Dr. No was seen wearing one in Sean Connery's first Bond movie. Other Bond films released in that decade with Nehrus, or close Mao lookalikes, were Diamonds Are Forever and You Only Live Twice. In fact, Bond villains have continued to sport them right up to recent releases.

Sea Monkeys. They're amazing. You can even "train" them (we kids didn't know what the apostrophes around the word "train" implied). You can get hundreds of pets for a measly buck and a quarter. And they look like innocuous creatures from the black lagoon, only in shades of innocent pink, and with those cute little crownlike horns on their heads (we also ignored the disclaimer that the illustrations did NOT represent artemia salina).

Sea monkeys were the brainchild of one Harold Nathan Braunhut, who early on saw the potential of selling mundane stuff to lots of youngsters with the aid of colorful, attractive comic book ads.

Pretty smart business, actually. Kids who were expecting pink mermaids and mermen got instead swimming creatures from nothing more than fine dust. We didn't care if they were nearly microscopic. We were still thrilled.

Today's I Remember JFK memory is one you're no doubt familiar with if you grew up in the 60's, even if, like me, you didn't have a clue who they were or what they did. That's because you heard their moniker, the Chicago Seven, every night on the news.

Indeed, I grew up with the name of the group on trial as familiar with me as terms like Vietnam, Gemini, Martin Luther King, and other subjects of newscasts. But the Chicago Seven were baffling to a kid, because it just wasn't clear why they were in trouble.

The space race was one of the most exciting things we Boomers remember from our youth. Charismatic President Kennedy said we were going to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's decade! And we thought we could do it!

We kids were as excited as our parents. We loved hearing the beeps whenever Mission Control would communicate with the astronauts. We loved spacewalks, liftoffs, splashdowns, all aspects of the space program.

Mattel took the hint, and in 1967, in time for Christmas, introduced Major Matt Mason.

Originally, the toy was intended to showcase actual vehicles that NASA was designing. Soon, though, more fanciful modes of transportation were offered.

The Great Depression was a very difficult time for our parents and grandparents to go through. Times were bleak, and there just wasn't very much to laugh about.

A designer at the California Clock Company thought that what the world needed was a clock that would bring a smile every time you looked at it. Thus was born the Kit-Cat clock.

The cat, in case you didn't know, is Felix, who was a popular comic strip character during that era. The original Kit-Cat clock is black and white, just like Felix himself.

In 1956, Noah McVicker and his nephew Joseph invented a substance for cleaning wallpaper. The substance did a fairly good job, but the two soon recognized its potential as a child's toy.

Play-Doh was originally off-white, and came in 1 1/2 lb. boxes. Soon, the McVicker's company, Rainbow Crafts, started selling blue, red, and yellow Play-Doh. These varieties came in gallon paint cans. These large containers were intended for sale to schools.

Department stores took an interest, so they soon started selling smaller containers. Sales were brisk, and a patent was applied for. It took nine years before it was granted, though, governmental red tape being what it is.

Must-see TV has changed from night to night over the years. During the 60's, it was Sunday, with Sullivan and Bonanza. NBC reigned over Thursday nights for many years with Cosby, Cheers, Seinfeld, and ER. But go back to the early 70's, and ABC made Wednesday night the night to stay home and watch Room 222 and the Courtship of Eddie's Father.

You probably remember the them song more than the episodes. Harry Nilsson sang "People let me tell you 'bout my best friend" and we were given a tune that sticks permanently in minds that might begin to forget less tenacious memories.

Ah, the rivalry between Ivy League schools. Who invented the ubiquitous flying disk known as the Frisbee? The consensus agrees that the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, made pies that were sold to many New England colleges. Students soon discovered that the empty pie tins could be tossed and caught, providing a fun way to work off the calories just consumed. But who did it first?

Yale claims that a student named Elihu Frisbie grabbed a collection plate from the chapel and flung it across the schoolyard in 1820.

Even very few Yalies believe that.

It is late May as I write today's column. The late afternoon air is filled with a variety of sounds. These include singing birds, barking dogs, and neighbors, whose conversations are noticed because of the combination of good weather and low background sound.

But around mid-July (in my Northwest Arkansas area), the afternoon air is filled with a sound that actually has the ability to live on 365 days a year in your subconscious.

I present today's subject as a Baby Boomer memory only because it is one I associate with my childhood, as are the vast majority of other articles I write. But untold numbers of generations have grown up with the sound of (as I put it) "yuree, yuree" echoing throughout whatever summer afternoon memories their minds can assemble.

This column is not about opinions. There are plenty of them to go around without adding mine. Rather, it's about the sadness that exists when children are raised in an environment where war is considered normal.

My first coherent memory, as my regular readers know, was the assassination of John Kennedy. At the time of his death, American soldiers were being deployed as "advisors" to the nation formerly known as French Indo-China, now split into North and South Vietnam. Within two years of the President's murder, the United States would be embroiled in a quagmire of a war that would strongly divide a nation, that would reek of bureaucratic mismanagement, and that would cause many mothers and fathers to weep tears of agony.

It was a curious situation in the days of our youth. Roads, as a rule, were narrower than today, particularly the state two-lane highways that connected small towns. Yet the cars that traveled them were HUGE compared to today's models.

Yet, our parents maneuvered those massive hulks around the tight curves without a second thought. And the interiors of those automobiles contained enough cubic feet of space to allow a kid tremendous freedom to move around inside on long trips.

Automobiles started out small. The Model T and Model A were basically compact cars. But as the years wore on, BIG became the trend. By the late 1930's, cars typically weighed over 3000 pounds. They were made of thick steel that took some serious force to dent, as well.

The southern California soil shook violently the morning of February 9, 1971. That's because a fault with the provocative name of the Santa Susana thrust exhibited a lot of movement that day, with the result being an earthquake measured at 6.6 at its epicenter. While not a big quake by Richter scale standards, it affected one of the most densely populated areas of the world, with widespread destruction being the result.

The 71 earthquake made the Huntley-Brinkley report that evening. That's how I learned about it.

Earthquakes were difficult to comprehend in northwest Arkansas, my home at the time. We dealt with nature's cranky side, to be sure, but in the forms of hail, tornados, lightning, and drought. Earthquakes were other-worldly phenomena.

The perfect accompaniment to the Seven-Up flicker light circa 1972 was a room full of black light posters, along with WLS on the radio. Now, according to That 70's Show, marijuana smoke would also be a part of the ambiance. But I grew up in small-town America, and while pot smoking was certainly something we had heard of, the fact is that junior high students in northwest Arkansas simply didn't commonly engage in the act.

But we did love turning the bright lights off in our rooms at night and laying back and enjoying some good music, with the black light making our posters glow beautifully, and perhaps a candle or incense completing the perfect sensory experience of relaxation.