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

1974 dawned with no hint of its significance. In January, it was just another year. By December, people running around naked in public had become commonplace enough to become, well, boring.

Streaking had been going on at college campuses before that. Princeton was streaked as early as 1970. Notre Dame had a "streaker's Olympics" in 1972. But the fad hit the big time in the spring of 1974, when students at colleges in southern California and Florida were shedding all of their clothes (except for sneakers, of course) and running across their campuses.

Soon, naked people were seen on newscasts, sporting events, parades, and in at least one state legislative session. The "Streaker of the House" interrupted a meeting of the Hawaiian body of lawmakers.

All right, get your mind out of the gutter. I'm not talking about THAT kind of playing doctor!

A while back, I wrote about how actually visiting a doctor was a mixed bag for a kid.On the one hand, there was the ever-present fear of getting a shot. On the other, there were all of those mega-cool instruments to look at. You would only look, though. You wouldn't dare touch.

But toymakers remembered how fascinated they were with doctor tools when they were kids. So since time immemorial, they have made miniature versions of doctors tools for kids to play with, whether out of stone, bronze, or modern-day plastic.

And I'll bet most of you Boomers out there can remember playing with a doctor kit that looked just like the one in the illustration (and thanks, Vintage-Toys.com, for the image).

Westerns (both radio and television) were largely kiddy fare in the early 1950's. Kids loved shows like The Lone Ranger, but most of their parents found the stories a bit simple and, well, suited for children.

In 1952, CBS began airing a western that was aimed at adults. The result was a smash hit that eventually dominated both television AND radio. In fact, for an amazing six years, from 1955 to 1961, the radio and television versions of Gunsmoke existed side-by-side, with two different sets of cast members!

The radio cast consisted of William Conrad as Matt Dillon, Howard McNear (better known as Floyd the barber) as Doc, Georgia Ellis as Kitty, and Parley Baer as Chester.

The radio version was one of the last, if not the VERY last network radio drama. I was astounded to find that it was still on when I was born.

There have been some truly memorable sports calls over the years. I have sweet memories of Harry Caray hollering "It could be, it could be, it is! A home run!" during Cardinal games of the 1960's. Russ Hodges, who might have otherwise been remembered as a competent but forgettable broadcaster of the New York Giants, cemented his place in history with his breathless 1951 call repeating "THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!" over and over again.

But Sports Illustrated, which has long been the standard by which sports journalism's excellence is judged, ranked Al Michaels' "Do you believe in miracles?" call of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team's victory over Russia as the greatest individual call of the 20th century.

The call was a perfect description of a perfect game, when an entire nation was ecstatic at the same time over a most unlikely victory.

How cynical we Baby Boomers are. And for good reason, too. After all, we devoured comic books like they were cotton candy. And the comics' ten or twelve cent price was subsidized by advertising. But it wasn't just advertising. It was huge, colorful, lavishly illustrated ads for things that, if we could persuade our parents to part with their hard-earned dollars so that we could obtain them, turned out to look nothing like the ads promised.

Take, for example, the six-foot Polaris submarines and rocket ships. My beloved Archie and Superman comics were profusely populated by half-page blurbs showing unbelievably real looking submarines and rocket ships available for a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars their real-life counterparts would cost.

What a bargain! What kid should be denied their very own submarine for a paltry $6.98? Just think how much fun it will be when we take that bad boy down to the lake and surface in the middle of startled swimmers!

My mom. What a trip.

She didn't like watching Johnny Carson or Dean Martin because of the suggestive jokes that they told. Yet, she never missed an episode of The Newlywed Game!

The Newlywed Game, whose questions relied heavily on the word "whoopee," was one of my mom's favorite shows. Go figure.

It was one of mine, too. I had a pretty good idea of what "whoopee" was at the age of eight or so, when mom began watching it on a regular basis.

As I pen this, word has just been released that Suzanne Pleshette has just succumbed to lung cancer.

Ms. Pleshette was just a few days short of her 71st birthday. And she will always be a treasured memory of Boomers who enjoyed her in TV and movies (and Broadway, for a few of us).

Suzanne came by life on the stage naturally. Her mother was a dancer and her father managed the Paramount Theater in New York. She was enrolled at the city's famous High School of Performing Arts and spent time in and out of college after graduating while looking for acting gigs.

She was soon on stage while attending the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, and ended up getting some minor Broadway roles.

There are memories that transcend generations. Today's I Remember JFK reminiscence is one such. Odds our our parents enjoyed the game of Monopoly before we Boomer kids ever came along. But we certainly enjoyed it ourselves, as have our children and grandchildren.

There are probably few households in America that don't have a Monopoly set stashed in a closet somewhere. According to Hasbro, the current owner of the game, more that 750 million people have played Monopoly since it was patented in 1935. That makes it the most popular commercially sold board game in history.

Certainly, there are few Boomers out there who didn't have a well-worn game, probably handed down, that would be set up for play while you and your friends would debate about who would be the banker, who would handle the real estate deeds, and, most importantly, who got to use the race car.

Today's column will probably wake up a few long-dormant memory cells. In my case, it was my grandmother who had a wringer washer. But for many of you, it might have been dear old mom herself.

Keeping one's clothes clean has been a challenge since clothing itself began being worn. The wealthy would have servants do their laundry, or perhaps would take it to a laundry business to be picked up later. The rest of society used rocks at the creek, or perhaps a tub and a washboard.

But in 1907, Maytag began marketing the Pastime. It was a hand-cranked washer, equipped with a flywheel to aid in the agitation of the clothes, which featured a wringer at the top so that the wash water could be extracted before the clothes were fed into a rinsing tub.

The wringer washer was high-tech stuff. No more endless had-wringing of clothes! How much easier could life get?

When the recess bell would ring in 1967, thus would begin a mad dash by students weary of classwork out of the classroom and towards the most desirable piece of playground equipment: the swing set.

There are still many school swing sets like that which continues to exist at Nichols School in Miami, Oklahoma that many, many generations of school kids have enjoyed. When the one that I played on was erected in the 50's, it was made of strong tubular steel set deeply into the ground in concrete. It has withstood tornadoes, floods, and steady use by thousands of children over more than fifty years.

However, what might bring it down one day is no force of nature, but rather the fear of liability.

In today's litigious, politically correct, it-takes-a-village society, playground equipment that has the slightest chance of causing injury to a poor, innocent child is an abhorrent thing. Yellow-Pages-advertising lawyers are hungry to get their slimy hands on any case involving a kid who splits a lip falling off of a jungle gym. What a sad situation compared to when we Boomers were kids.

People build lots and lots of houses. And sometimes, a few of those houses may become abandoned. Once that happens, it doesn't take long for them to quickly deteriorate into an eyesore. Or perhaps a better term may be a really cool place for kids to play.

Miami, Oklahoma, population about 12,000 circa 1967, had a few abandoned houses here and there. One of them was just up the road a block from my house. It sat all by itself, thickly overgrown by bushes and such.

It drew the neighborhood kids like Mecca draws the faithful.

Of course, I don't have pictures of "the old house," as we neighborhood kids referred to it. And when I revisited Miami just a couple of years after we had moved away, it was already gone. But my memories of the secretive place are keen even today.