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

There has always been a group of musicians who were just a bit off-center. When my mom was waiting for my dad to get back from the war, it was Spike Jones. Jones, a gifted musician and bandleader, used guns, whistles, pots, pans, cowbells, hammers, bird calls, klaxon horns, bricks, gargling, breaking glass, and God knows what else to make some truly wonderful and unforgettable music.

Jones was quite the celebrity in his day. But when the Big Band sound died, his music slipped into obscurity. Sure, Big Band stations can still be found, but what are the odds that a serious deejay would dare play the William Tell Overture that segued into a truly bizarre horse race (...and Beetlebaum...)?

Well, Mr. Jones, who died too young at the age of 53 in 1965, would have been quite pleased with the emergence of a 1970 jock at KPPC in Los Angeles. His name was Barry Hansen, but the persona he created that year was Dr. Demento.

It all started when Hansen got a deejay gig while still in high school. He was in charge of serving up sock hop music at local dances. The young jock had discovered, in his childhood, a store that sold 78's for a nickel apiece. The music was quite hit and miss, but some of the misses were hysterical.

The year 2000 was a big one. We used to dream about someday seeing the year 2000 when we were kids. Arthur C. Clarke figured that by that year, commercial spaceflight would be commonplace (in fact, there is a bit of commercial space flying, if you want to buy a spot on a Soyuz rocket for 20 million bucks). We sweated 1999, figuring that computer systems worldwide would lock up when the clock ticked 12:00 the last night of the year. And, in 2000, one of the most beloved companies in history was officially dissolved.

I aim I Remember JFK at an American audience, because, duh, that's where my memories come from. It's nothing personal, and I'm delighted when I get comments from other countries. I don't know how many Boomer kids all over the world grew up with Kenner toys. I know that they had a British presence. But the fact is that probably 99% of American Boomers had them. That's because of a very simple fact: Kenner knew what kids liked, and they provided it. Their best salesmen were us, hounding our parents into submission to get us the likes of Easy Bake ovens, Spirographs, SSP Racers, and Star Wars toys. Yep, Kenner had the foresight to lock up the Star Wars franchise in the 70's, and the result is that some of the most valuable toys cherished by collectors today bear the Kenner name.

The date was November 24, 1971. A man on a Boeing 727 flying from Portland, Oregon to Seattle passed a note to a stewardess. The note said "I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked."

Thus began the only unsolved airplane hijacking in US history. The man called himself Dan Cooper. He had done his homework, and had a plan to escape from the plane without getting caught. In fact, some speculate that he did just that, although the prevailing thought seems to be that he failed to survive his 10,000 foot parachute jump into a driving rainstorm.

The note demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. Once the actual existence of a bomb-looking device in a briefcase was established, the money and the parachutes were gotten together. The money, $200,000 in twenties, had all serial numbers recorded. Once the goods had been sent to the Seattle airport, Cooper gave the pilots permission to land.

Cooper had them dim the inside lights to deter a possible sniping. The plane taxied to a remote end of the runway and one person was instructed to deliver the ransom.

I Remember JFK has been honored to receive attention from the media in the past, and I'm quite pleased and excited to announce that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has invited Yours Truly to jump on a plane and fly to New York to be interviewed!

The interview will be filmed in a couple of weeks. This is exciting, as you can imagine. Stay tuned for more details. I don't want to give away too much and make someone in New York mad ;-).

Well, now I know why I never got into show business. I was told positively that the above would take place, but a last-minute budget cut caused them to rethink flying in an interviewee. They decided to stick with locals.

Too bad for them. I woulda knocked their socks off!

If you were to time-travel back to the mid 60's, you would find that photography was a pretty technically challenging affair. I mean, nowadays, we shoot auto-focused, auto-exposed, auto-flashed shots with our $100 digital cameras and see the results as soon as we plug the memory chip into our computers.

But our fathers went through a more arduous experience. Open the camera, wind in the film, then, if the pictures were indoors, insert a flash bulb and instruct the camera to take a flash exposure. Then, of course, the exposed film had to be removed and sent in for processing.

It's the flash bulbs that we'll be concentrating on today.

Perhaps our fathers felt like they had it easy. They might have been old enough to remember when using flash involved igniting a pile of magnesium powder on a tray! But sometime in the thirties, the magnesium powder was changed to thin pieces of foil, and was contained within a glass bulb that was ignited electrically. It was truly a quantum leap in photography.

By the time we Boomers came along, the bulbs had been coated with blue plastic which provided the perfect color balance for use with outdoor color film. Thus, the same color pictures looked right whether shot inside or out. That plastic coating also kept the bulb from shattering from the sudden influx of heat, a common occurrence with earlier models. The foil had also been replaced with very thin wire strands.