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

Boomers in the northeast US had lots of cool things growing up that those of us in the heartland didn't have access to. For example, they got to visit Palisades Park, while the rest of us had to settle for dreaming about it. And they also got to listen to Jean Shepherd on WOR out of New York. While the station's airwaves carried hundreds of miles, they didn't reach northeast Oklahoma.

That's a shame. I missed out on one of the greatest storytellers in history.

Jean was born in 1921 and heard the calling of the radio business. He obtained an amateur radio license when he was sixteen, and served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in WWII. After the war, he landed his first radio gig for WSAI in Cincinnati.

It recently occurred to me that I came by my geekish (and I use the term with great honor and reverance) nature naturally. My father was a B-29 mechanic in WWII. Not only did that keep him from getting killed on some south Pacific island, he was also involved in state-of-the-art technology of the time. The B-29 was a monstrously huge, powerful, beautiful airplane that required highly skilled personnel to keep flying. I'm very proud of my father for qualifying for such exalted, technically challenging, honest duty.

Dad showed his geeky side in another way as well. He was passionate about fancy radios.

The word "hippy" used to conjure up some very strong emotions. WWII veterans would snort with disgust at the idea of a bunch of smelly, pot-smoking longhaired kids who dared to defy Uncle Sam by burning their draft cards. Why, such yellow cowards would have been tarred and feathered back in the day!

Youngsters had different point of view. Many admired people who would dare to live an unconventional lifestyle. And the idea of protesting a war that made less and less sense every day was easily related to. And long hair was decidedly cool. And you didn't HAVE to smoke pot. Beer was easily obtainable in those days for Saturday night fun.

About fifteen years ago, I was stunned by the sight of a bald eagle that flew across the road while I was driving. I had never seen the gorgeous creatures outside of zoos. Now, they are a common wintertime sight in northwest Arkansas, and we even have year-round residents that nest at nearby lakes.

We have Rachel Carson to think for the resurgence of bald eagles, golden eagles, peregrine falcons, and countless other bird species whose numbers were rapidly dwindling during the 60's. In 1962, she shocked the world with Silent Spring, a book that turned an entire generation into environmentally conscious individuals.

I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick
And steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take
A good look around
This is your hometown . . .

The first time I heard the great Bruce Springsteen's My Hometown I picked right up on that line. I used to steer the car all over town myself, sitting on dad's lap and very conscientiously keeping the big Plymouth safely centered in the lane.

Today, of course, such irresponsible behavior by a parent would likely land them in court facing charges of child neglect.

This is a memory that every kid shares, regardless of generation. The last day of school was a rush for all involved.

Kids loved it because it meant three months of freedom. Teachers loved it for the same reason. But kids had the additional bonus of going up a grade the next year. Of course the lucky teachers gained another year of tenure, where applicable. But the rest got a year closer to retirement. And even the staff that had to keep working, like maintenance, finally got to tackle jobs that required shutting down parts of the buildings.

So the last day of school was without a doubt a good deal for all involved individuals.

Parents have long been baffled by the strange phenomenon of giving their kids nice gifts, only to see them playing with the box the prize came in rather than the toy itself.

Well, I still have enough kid in me that I can remember what was so cool about playing with big cardboard boxes. You could make absolutely anything out of them! Your imagination was the limit. And they didn't require assembly! Perhaps a bit of cutting here and there was needed to create just the right structures.

I have many, many regular readers of I Remember JFK, and I appreciate all of you. Right now, we're getting around 10,000 visits a month. That's a nice figure, to be sure, but I feel like our potential audience is at least ten times higher than that.

So, regular readers, please click on the Recommend I Remember JFK to a Friend or Tell a Friend links and spread the word to a few Boomer-aged friends and acquaintances. I'm leasing a dedicated server with enough horsepower to handle the 17,000 visitors I received the day I was the Kim Komando pick (although I didn't have my referral form running yet! Grr ... ), so please, TELL SOME FRIENDS ABOUT US! ;-)

Perhaps you might be able to relate to today's memory, perhaps not. Anyhow, here goes.

When I grew up in the 60's and 70's, I was quite fascinated by collecting insects. It was not unusual to find somewhere in my bedroom a collection of unfortunate victims impaled through their thoraxes with straight pins and attached to a board of styrofoam with little labels containing childish scrawl as to what their species was.

Of course, I had my Field Guide to the Insects to assist me in noting the subtle differences between, say, the Chinese and praying mantids.

I had all of the childhood ailments common to Boomer kids. Fortunately, by the time I was born in 1959, serious diseases like whooping cough, polio, and smallpox had been largely eradicated by vaccinations. But there were less dangerous but unpleasant illnesses like chicken pox, the mumps, and the flu that would require those dreaded trips to the doctor.

It seemed like I caught everything that came through town. So I was a regular customer of Dr. Wendleton.

So, if I had to go to the doctor, I would try to concentrate on the positives.

It would be difficult for me to imagine life without a microwave oven. I probably use one twice a day minimum. Yet, I grew up without one of the expensive, newfangled, radiation-emitting appliances. We didn't get a microwave oven until the mid 70's.

But many of us Boomer kids recall having them as far back as 1967, when Amana introduced the Radarange home model.

The heating power of microwaves was discovered by accident by Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer with the Raytheon Corporation. In 1945 or 1946 (accounts vary), he was testing a magnetron, a vacuum tube that emitted microwaves, when he noticed the candy bar in his pants pocket had inexplicably melted.

Kids have great imaginations. And some of us lucky ones keep it throughout our whole lives. I know I couldn't crank out six new memories a week without lots of imagination!

But the cost of toys has dropped, and their quantity has grown in the average home compared to the 60's. And I fear that kids today no longer feel motivated to devise their own toys out of mundane objects.

I remember being entertained for hours by throwing my hand-made parachute up in the air and watching it float back to earth. All it took was a handkerchief out of dad's drawer, a rock, and some string. Oh, and also some imagination.

The Boomers who can recall the coonskin cap and Howdy Doody years also remember ads in magazines designed to separate kids from their nickels and dimes. One of these scams, excuse me, opportunities, was tempting kids to get monkeys or dogs that are small enough to fit in a teacup for No Cost! Well, there WAS a tiny "at almost" in front of that statement. So they weren't TECHNICALLY lying.

But seeing how the ads intended audience was prepubescent youth, it was pretty underhanded nonetheless.

The year was 1959. A machinist/inventor/tinkerer named Ernie Fraze couldn't sleep. A few weeks previously, he had gone on a picnic and realized that nobody brought a can opener to open the sodas, a common situation of the time. So, to tire himself out, he thought he would ponder for a while on how a self-opening drink can could be devised.

Ernie envisioned a pull tab anchored securely to a strengthened rivet at the center of the can, which, when lifted, would perforate the can's top and allow the tab to be removed along scored lines.

With that bout of insomnia, the canned drink industry was revolutionized overnight.

The Beatles were at a critical point in the summer of 1966. An offhand quip by John to a reporter friend about how the Beatles were more popular than Jesus had drawn the ire of conservative self-titled Christians all over the world, but particularly in the US Bible Belt. Their protests often included public burnings of Beatle albums. Let's face it, when angry people burn ANYTHING, it ain't pretty. Plus, the rigors of the road had all of them thoroughly burned out on touring. So in August of the year, they all agreed live performances were no longer in their plans, and they sat down and got to work on their next album.

With Beatlemania's flames no longer fanned by concerts, and with John's remark carrying a bad taste in many people's mouths, the group's continued success depended heavily on their next album's reception.

Life in Anneville, Kentucky, located in the backwoods of the backwoods, was not easy in 1915, the year David Akeman was born. His family were farmers who barely scraped by. Entertainment had to be provided by the local folks themselves. Thus arose bluegrass music, which was prolific in the rural areas of Tennessee and Kentucky.

David took a shine to music. He came by it naturally. His parents were musicians as well. When he was seven, he took an old shoebox and some thread his mom gave him and created his first instrument. Five years later, he traded two of his prize bantam chickens to a friend for his first real banjo.

I suspect today's recollection may touch many Boomers, because I remember nearly all of my 1960's friends had spring horses similar to mine.

The fascination that 20th and 21st century kids have with toy cars is probably directly related to archaeological discoveries of small terra-cotta horses in Greek ruins. The horse was the transportation of the day (at least for the well-heeled), and kids love playing with miniaturized versions of things that get you around.

Sometime during the medieval period, stick horses appeared. And by the 17th century, the first rocking horses appeared. The rocking horse King Charles I played with as a child still exists today.

In the 1940's Mary Carter lived in Cincinnati, making a lucrative living holding fake seances.

Mary was also inventive. She created a slate that would appear to be sealed inside a box, inside which she was able to write messages "from the spirit world." When she opened the box, her customers were amazed to see messages scrawled on the slate.

Her son Alfred admired the invention, but he realized that it took real skill and dexterity, which his mother possessed in droves, to operate the magic slate. So he set about inventing a device that would "tell the future" in a manner that required no input from the user.

One thing about the good old human race. They're not afraid to cripple themselves in the name of fashion. Victorian ladies would deform their bodies with corsets that would tighten their waistlines down to an extreme degree. African ladies of culture still shove their shoulders down several inches with brass rings in order to achieve their epitome of beauty: a long looking neck. And, circa 1975, hip youths of both genders in the US and Europe strapped guaranteed ankle-breakers onto their ever-boogieing feet: platform shoes.

Platform shoes have actually been with mankind since at least the Roman Empire. Actors would wear platform-soled-shoes an inch thick or so while performing plays. In the late 1400's, fashionable women of Venice were spotted wearing chopines, raised overshoes that slipped over more dainty shoes, protecting them from mud in the ever-sinking city.

Miami, Oklahoma was definitive Small Town America. Population about 10,000, the only traffic lights were on main Street, everybody in town knew who you were.

Yet we were treated to circuses that would pass through town every year, as far as I can recall. They were HUGE, at least in a child's memory, because they had three rings, just like Barnum and Bailey!

Circuses have always been aimed at one demographic in particular: kids. That's why the posters are so big, bright, and colorful. Once you capture the kids' attention, you can rely on them to beg, cajole, and eventually prevail in the mission of persuading their parents to take them to the show.

A friend of mine gave me a real treasure: a November 1970 copy of House Beautiful magazine. The articles themselves are a treat to read, but the advertisements in the back are wonderful in themselves. You may see quite a few future columns based on the contents of that magazine.

There were no less than THREE ads for the subject of today's column: wrist watch clip-on calendars.

Let's face it. Nowadays, we're spoiled, wristwatch-wise. For less than fifty bucks, you can get yourself a name-brand quartz timepiece that will be accurate to within a few seconds a month. It will have the day, date, and possibly the moon phase emblazoned on its face.

But go back to 1970, and your options on an affordable watch were much more limited.

Ah, those sweet, laid-back decades of the 1960's and 1970's. We were worried about things like Russian missiles, inflation, getting our butts kicked by the Commies in the Olympics, and what smoking might be doing to our health.

So the key thing to do was to mellow out. And what was a better way to relax than with a fondue pot full of aromatic cheese, and a bevy of friends with whom to dip one's bread into the pot?

The lessons we learned when we were children! We gained wisdom that would serve us well as adults. For instance, we learned that the safety and security of training wheels was comfortable, yet it had to be left behind sooner or later for the much more unsure, daring world of riding around on two wheels.

Every kid starts out with training wheels, regardless of the generation. We Boomer youngsters may have had them attached to traditional Schwinn hand-me-downs, or perhaps on brand new Sting-Rays. And the bolt-on wheels would make for a nice smooth ride. But eventually, peer pressure and the desire to spread young wings would make you ask your dad to remove them. Thus, your first step towards growing up.