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

When I was a kid, I noticed something about TV very early in the game: my mom's "stories," as she called the soap operas she watched on weekday afternoons, had a different look to them than other shows like Leave It to Beaver or Bonanza.

The look is hard to describe. But there are unmistakable differences.

Later in life, I learned that the soaps were filmed on videotape. The other TV shows were captured on cameras that utilized conventional film.

Go back to the early 50's, and all shows were caught on film. However, most were captured as kinescopes. The cameras capturing the action were piping their feeds straight to broadcast. The only way to record what they were filming was to point a film camera at a monitor screen. Thus, the quality of the captured show was only as good as the sharpness of the monitor and the focus of the camera. In other words, lousy most of the time.

During that decade, AMPEX, makers of sound tape recorders, was experimenting with putting video on tape. By 1957, they had perfected the process enough that a TV episode was shot for the first time entirely by videotape cameras. This was The Edsel Show, a Bing Crosby-hosted special that was considerably better than its namesake. Rumor has it that a door handle fell off of a car shortly after it was featured on the show.

I am so stuck in the past, music-wise.

It's a tradition with me. While my high school buddies were getting into formulaic crap like Styx, Foreigner, and REO Speedwagon, I was jamming to the Beatles and Stones of the 60's. I am just now discovering that there was some pretty darned good stuff recorded in the 90's. My daughter was pleasantly shocked to hear that I got a kick out of Radiohead's OK Computer.

So prepare to be amazed, Boomer friends. I'm about to heartily endorse an album populated by lots of twenty-somethings!

There's a Boomer connection, of course: the songs all belong to the Grandfather of Grunge, Mr. Neil Young. I've been a passionate NY fan since I first listened to Comes a Time, way back when I used to style my hair.

Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young is a two-CD collection of songs by independent artists who all have two things in common: they hold the Canadian genius in high regard, and they all sound amazing.

1972 was a banner year for inventiveness, consumer-product-wise. That year, Mr. Coffee was born. The coffeemaker, which forever changed the way the morning brew was prepared, will no doubt rate its own future mention here.

The other big release that year was the Polaroid SX-70.

Polaroid had long ago made its name with instant photography. They released their first peel-and-see camera in 1948, just in time for our fathers, getting more prosperous by the day, to preserve images of their lovely kids (that would be US!). By 1965, they released the affordable Swinger, which many Boomers made their first camera purchase.

But let's face it: peeling off the top layer after exactly the right number of seconds was, well, a pain. While still preferable to waiting days for pictures to get developed, we tired of having to carry waste disposal means with us wherever we went. And that emulsion was seriously nasty, sticky stuff if you happened to touch it.

Thus, the world was overjoyed when the SX-70 was released, a camera that spit out a picture that would magically develop right before your very eyes! And no nasty paper to throw away!

I sure did, back in November of 2007, when I first envisioned I Remember JFK.

Fourteen hours of work recently begs to disagree.

Issue number one: Upon moving from one dedicated server to a more powerful one at half the price two years ago, a large number of graphics were lost. I went into the articles in question, beginning in May 2007, and deleted the references to the now missing graphical files.

The result was over a hundred articles from may to August of that year which became text-only, no pretty pictures.

That has long bothered me. So last week, I decided to take a couple of hours, go find new graphics, and re-illustrate the articles.

After six hours last Wednesday, I had not succeeded in fixing half of them.

So, yesterday, I woke up bright and early and put in another eight hours. There are still a couple of articles left, which I will get to today.

Issue number two: Youtube, and it's yank-first-ask-questions-later policy.

I had posted a dozen or so links to Youtube-posted commercials of the past, and most of them were removed due to copyright concerns.

Now, the way this works is that if you feel you hold copyright on anything that Youtube hosts, let them know. They will instantly take it down, and the person who posted it has to now prove that there was no copyright violation.

Of course, if someone has simply posted an old commercial, they blow off Youtube's request for confirmation.

Who wins? Some slimy outfit that has collected old commercials on DVD, wanting you to buy them. They hold NO copyright claim, but Youtube follows its paranoid policy. So getting them out of the public view, and forcing you to pay to see them, is a no-brainer for DVD manufacturers.

Who loses? We do.

Ergo, I have re-located many lost commercials, or else found replacements, and reposted Youtube panels.

However, I have ALSO downloaded my own copies and posted and linked to them here, on my server.

If I have anything that anyone feels is a copyright violation, let me know and I'll investigate.

But what I WON'T do is take anything down for trivial reasons.

All that being said, I'll be back next Sunday with a new Boomer reminiscence. In the meantime, why not revisit the May-August 2007 archives, and see the results of all my hard work?

My subjects for columns are frequently decided upon by pure gut feeling. If it feels right, write about it!

I'm a subscriber to Charles Phoenix's Slide of the Week, and I recommend you do so too. Last week, I received a slide that featured a TV that I'd known about, but didn't know too much about. It's called the Philco Predicta, and it had the picture tube on a yoke in a wonderful expression of modern design. Charles had located a slide that featured a Predicta "in real life," as he excitedly put it.

The next thing you know, I'm watching Revenge of the Nerds on TNT, and lo and behold: a Predicta! It was being used to play 80's Atari games.

OK, two Predicta sightings in one week. Time to write a column!

Philco began in in 1892 as the Helios Electric Company. They manufactured batteries at first, but as electricity caught on, they diversified. In 1927, they began manufacturing radios, and soon became one of the Big Three in the business, along with RCA and Zenith. When televisions began appearing after WWII, Philco jumped on board.