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

Oh, lord. I'm opening myself up to cease-and-desist orders and libel lawsuits here.

Well, I have freedom of speech. So here goes...

According to the Georgetown Journal of Legal ethics, Summer 2005 issue, in an article by Emily Olsen, this summed up the stance of the American Bar Association once upon a time:

In 1908, the American Bar Association ("ABA") established and promulgated its first ethics code, known as the Canons of Professional Ethics, which condemned all advertisement and solicitation by lawyers. Academics at the turn of the century generally viewed advertising as not appropriate for the legal profession. They believed that only tricksters used legal advertising in order to improve their reputation and an honest lawyer worked to earn his good name. "In the case of the lawyer, advertising of one's own willingness to be trusted as a man of unselfish devotion frosts the rose before it has a chance to bloom."

Wow, shades of the NRA (and I am NOT anti-gun, before anyone's hackles get raised) coming out against machine guns and sawed-off shotguns in the hands of the general populace in the 1930's. Once upon a time, common sense was much more common.

Well, the times they-have-a-changed.

My wife and I love walking our pair of miniature schnauzers on warm evenings. Lately, we've been walking by yards well-populated with clover, complete with honeybees. That caused a memory to jump into the forefront: catching bugs and putting them in jars with holes punched in the lid.

I'm happy to see the honeybees, because they are in trouble. Their numbers have dramatically dwindled, a combination of mite infestation accompanied by irresponsible pesticide use.

My yard in Miami, Oklahoma was covered with clover flowers. It was an adventure stepping through them bare-footed, and stepping on the occasional bee was inevitable, the insect manifesting her displeasure by leaving her stinger embedded in a seven-year-old foot.

But the bees also provided hours of entertainment, when they were caught in the preferred method of dropping a wide-mouthed jar over the clover flower that was being visited, then lifting the jar and placing the perforated jar lid in place as the bee buzzed angrily inside.

Time was, usually located on Main Street within walking distance of the Dime Store, there was an establishment that carried generic automotive supplies like oil, gas treatment, tires, freon, anti-freeze, windshield wiper blades, and wheel covers. Additionally, they offered diverse non-automotive items like lawn mowers, gardening equipment, higher-end toys (e.g. Radio Flyer wagons), major appliances, and even firearms!

Every town big enough for at least one traffic light had one, and quite a few burgs that lacked an automated traffic control system still managed to support a Western Auto store, or in the central United Sates, an Otasco.

There were probably other local versions of the ubiquitous retail establishments in other parts of the country, as well, If so, please share your memories of them, readers.

They were located everywhere because they offered what people wanted and needed. After all, our fathers all had cars, and you certainly couldn't buy anti-freeze at the IGA. And not every town had a Sears or Montgomery-Wards either, so lawnmowers and clothes dryers had to be obtained elsewhere. Thus thrived the automotive store.

Roone Arledge was a man to whom any stockholder of ABC should raise a glass on a regular basis. He was single-handedly responsible for taking the perennially third-rated latecomer network and turning it into the sports powerhouse that it was during the time that we Boomer kids were growing up in the 60's and 70's.

Besides Monday Night Football, which is still riding high, Arledge was also responsible for a show which debuted in 1961 whose weekly 90-minute Saturday afternoon run is burned permanently into my memory banks, and probably in yours as well.

"Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!"

With those words, I would be parked in front of the television set for the next hour and a half, watching competitions between a bewildering variety of athletes, including figure skaters, drag racers, boxers, gymnasts, and jumping frogs.

I have vague memories of nursery-rhyme-type records played on our portable player. When the Beatles arrived in February, 1964, I was primed and ready to get into their music. It was lightweight, fun, and easily remembered for later singing in the side yard. My favorite early Beatles songs were "She Loves You" and the bluesier "I Saw Her Standing There." That latter song was rock and roll every bit as hard as anything the Stones were putting out at the time.

I never missed a Sullivan performance, and faithfully tuned in for every episode of the cartoon. I was one six-year-old Beatlemaniac, to be sure.

But then, that year of 1966, the Beatles began growing up. And they dragged me along, kicking and screaming, forcing me to one day grow up as well, although I held off for as long as possible.

We Boomer kids grew up in a pretty consistent political situation: Better Dead than Red.

The communists, ANY communists, were our sworn enemies, that is if you lived in the United States, or most other democratic nations. Russia, Cuba, East Germany, North Vietnam, Red China, they were all the same. The bad guys. The other side. The force from which the world must be protected from further expansion.

That all began to take a turn another direction entirely in 1971.

Table tennis, or ping-pong, was occasionally featured on ABC's Wide World of Sports. While it had its followers, it was far from being one of the more popular competitive contests in the US. But it was a different matter in the Orient. Ping-pong was a passion!

Despite its lack of serious fan base, the US had a pretty good ping-pong team in 1971. They were playing in a tournament in Japan that year when a chance incident of a player jumping on the wrong bus, coupled with a courageous act of generosity by one of his competitors, led to relations normalizing between China (notice we dropped the Red?) and the United States.

Try this experiment: tell your grandchild to dial a telephone number. Do you get a puzzled stare back?

Indeed, many of our grandchildren are oblivious to such telephone antiquities as cords, dial tones, answer machines (which are still newfangled things to many Boomers) and, of course, dials.

For many of us, a quantum leap in modern technology was the colored phone. Our parents grew up with (if they had phones at all) a black chunk of bakelite that weighed five pounds or more. It was leased from the phone company, and likely was manufactured by Western Electric, thanks to a sweetheart deal with Bell System. Actually, it wasn't so much a sweetheart deal as a monopoly, since Bell and Western Electric were actually under the same corporate umbrella.

Indeed, for many years, it was a breach of Bell contract terms for a homeowner to plug any device into the phone line except for the leased brick phone that Ma Bell provided. Inspectors would check the lines for any devices that varied from the peculiar voltage requirements of WE's phones, and any customer with the chutzpah to do such a thing would be threatened with disconnection.

"Stop throwing that ball around in the house! You're going to break something!"

How many of us heard that sound repeatedly by our impatient mothers? it was enough to make mom go for another cigarette, the stress of worrying about her good lamps!

On July 3, 1929, Dunlop Latex Development Laboratories created the first foam rubber. Why it took another 41 years for someone to figure out that it would make for a great indoor ball is beyond me.

The Nerf ball's history is short and sweet enough. According to the Parker Brothers website:

In 1969, a games inventor came to the company with a volleyball game that was safe for indoor play. After studying the game carefully, PARKER BROTHERS executives decided to eliminate everything but the foam ball. In 1970 the NERF Ball was introduced as the "world's first official indoor ball." It didn't harm furniture, windows or people.

One of the crazes that came after my childhood that never caught my attention was the video game in its various incarnations.

Pong showed up when I was fifteen, followed closely by Space Invaders when I was eighteen. If I was going to get hooked, those were the primo ages to do it.

It never happened. I always preferred pastimes that required physical involvement of real objects, rather than those electronically produced.

I guess that's why I'm so baffled by the generations of kids who followed mine who would gladly curl up with a Colecovision, Nintendo, Wii, or Atari (lots of years just covered there!) on a perfectly beautiful day rather than go outside and enjoy the real world.

I know that if such a thing as the gaming console would have existed circa 1967, and if it had managed to grab my attention, its use would have been STRICTLY for rainy days in the Enderland house. My mom would have insisted on it.