You have my personal guarantee that your personal information, what little is necessary to gather for registration purposes, will NOT be used for anything other than signing you up for the forum. You can then opt in or out for as much or as little notification of new postings as you like.

By default, you receive NO notifications. So your emailbox won't notice the difference.

For the present, any new members have to be hand-approved by me. That keeps the spammers out. But I generally approve "real humans" within hours, a day at most.

So head over to the forum and join the fun!

But in late 1968, Elvis, backed by TV producer Steve Binder, dug in his heels against Parker and starred in a December NBC special that reminded the world of what all of the excitement was about ten years earlier.

Parker wanted Elvis singing Christmas tunes. Binder, who had previously stood up to Chrysler over Petula Clark touching Harry Belafonte's arm during a duet on her own 1968 special (Chrysler didn't feel the world was ready for a white woman to touch a black man on broadcast TV), was not intimidated by Elvis's doltish manager. The result was one of television's greatest moments, and a revitalization of the King's career.

Tom Brokaw did an amazing piece on the Summer of Love a couple of years ago, this should be a dandy show as well.

Who knows, perhaps he might even mention your favorite Boomer nostalgia website! Hey, it could happen...

They came in little clear plastic packages with cardboard at the top. The hole in the cardboard allowed them to be hung on a rack, frequently at the top of the candy display, as I recall. The plain ones cost a dime, the fancier rubber-band driven models were 29 cents, as best I can remember.

Since I usually was given two nickels a day, buying a glider meant making a tough decision. I had to forego my morning candy fix and come back later in the afternoon in order to have ten cents to purchase my flying machine.

But as much as I loved the elegant little airplanes, I made the tough call many times, and walked home proudly carrying my plastic-wrapped wooden prize.

Rest in peace, old friend.

Ten years old, I had recently started paying attention to fast cars, thanks to getting into the brand-new phenomenon known as Mattel Hot Wheels. Thus, I was able to spot and differentiate the subtle differences between a Camaro and a Firebird, or the more obvious ones between a Barracuda and a Cougar.

But that day, so long ago, my ten-year-old jaw dropped. There, cruising up highway 71 in front of a big empty field that would one day hold a Wal-Mart Supercenter, was an unearthly-looking wonderful lime-green Plymouth Superbird.

There were a plethora of fast cars produced during Detroit's muscle car era. Many of them concealed their horsepower under the ruse of a standard-looking vehicle, the better to avoid frequent stops by the law. But then there was the Superbird: a hedonistic thumb to the nose at conventionality. What an amazing machine for a ten-year-old kid to see tooling through the streets of a small town.

These are shaped salty snack foods I'm talking about. And I know Daisys is misspelled, but notice that it is in the pictured ad, too.

According to the scant information I could find, Daisys, Bugles, and Whistles first appeared on the general market in 1966. They were produced by General Mills. And Bugles still survives today, but not the others.

It appears that Daisys and Bugles were similarly flavored. The plain-Jane Bugles you can buy today were the original flavor of 1966, salty corn. Daisys were shaped like, well, flowers, duh!, and seemed to be strategically aimed at dippers. Whistles were cheese-flavored. They were just the right size to fit on the ends of a kid's fingers.

Click here for the website.

I've already written about Kenner. Today, we cover three more beloved toy makers who have regrettably slipped below the waves of history and live on only in the memory banks of Boomer children.

The first is Marx. "By Marx!" used to sign off all of their commercials, eagerly absorbed by many a 1960's-era kid on a Saturday morning, the prime time for TV to show such ads in order to reach their maximum demographic. This Big Rail Work Train ad is one I remember well. It seemed that Marx's specialty was BIG toys. That meant that it would take a special occasion to talk mom and dad into springing for one.

Marx was founded in 1919 in New York City by Louis Marx and his brother David. The brothers looked for innovative toy designs produced by others, bought the rights, and improved upon them. The strategy worked well. By 1922, both had become millionaires. Their business actually thrived during the Depression, and by 1955 Time magazine had declared Louis Marx the Toy King.

In 1972, the now 76-year-old Marx sold the company to Quaker Oats. In 1975, they in turn sold it to Dunbee-Combex-Marx, a British company. In 1978, that company went under, and so did the Marx name.

Indeed, some of the sweetest remembrances of the decade come from us kids, as can be evidenced by the wonderful popularity of I Remember JFK.

Today, we feature a review of a novel by a kid of the 60's, one Jim Potter. The name of the book is East Bench: a Novel. If you're familiar with Salt Lake City (I wasn't), the name should be very familiar. If not, read on. It soon will.

The book is called a novel, but it reads like a true-to-life remembrance by the author. The tale is that of a Catholic kid growing up in Mormon territory in a lower middle-class family. The Beatles have just appeared on Sullivan, and garage bands are springing up all over town. These impromptu groups frequently featured preteens playing with homemade instruments. It was a great time to be alive.

Click here to visit ihatethehometeam.com

My buddy John Sorrells walked in, threw an object on my desk, and said "okay, nostalgia expert, what's this?"

Without hesitation I said "Why, that's a curb feeler." John was impressed, but hey, I AM the nostalgia expert.

Curb feelers made their debut sometime in the early 50's as an accessory added to luxury cars by Detroit. However, they were inexpensive add-ons for anyone who wanted to protect their tires from the unforgiving concrete that made up street curbs. This was particularly the case if one had big whitewalls on their sweet ride.

Whitewall tires weren't really invented in as much as they were simply the original tires. In the automobile's heyday of the Model T, tires were made of light-colored rubber. The rubber didn't wear so well, so eventually, more carbon black was added to the tread area. This made for tires which were black around the circumference, but white on the sidewalls. As the entire tire began to be manufactured out of higher carbon-black rubber, consumers clamored for the look of their father's tires. Thus, sidewalls were pigmented with a wide white stripe.

Herb Alpert was born on March 31, 1935. That makes him a bit too senior to be a Boomer, but he was a strong source of memories for the Boomer generation.

His father was a tailor who emigrated from Russia. His family loved music, and he grew up listening to his father play mandolin, his California-born mother play violin, his sister the piano, and his brother the drums. When Herb was eight, he decided that he wanted to learn the trumpet.

A prodigy he was not. It took Herb years to make the trumpet sound the way he wanted. But he patiently stuck with it, and by the time he was sixteen, he had formed a small band that played weddings, bar mitzvahs, and the like in his L.A. neighborhood.

Not yet convinced that music was his future, he enrolled at USC after high school and joined the gymnastics team. However, he also played with the Trojans' marching band. In 1955, he was drafted into the army. He was able to grab local musical gigs during evenings to help support his new wife and family.

Herbert obtained a ukulele and learned to play it. He would spend hours singing the old refrains in his natural mid-baritone voice. By the mid 1950's, he was playing in small clubs throughout New York. Sometimes the crowds would laugh at him. Sometimes they would laugh WITH him. And sometimes, he would simply bowl them over with his unconventional appearance and his ukulele.

In 1968, a rather strange film was released called You Are What You Eat. The movie was a celebration of the Flower Power generation and their music, and featured performances by the likes of David Crosby, Frank Zappa, Barry McGuire, and a narrator/performer who had, in 1962, begun calling himself Tiny Tim. One particularly memorable performance involved Tiny Tim and a female singer performing "I Got You Babe," with Tim singing Cher's lines in falsetto, Eleanor Barooshian singing Sonny's lines in baritone.

The film was spotted by the producers of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, who booked Tiny Tim for an appearance.

Art Clokey, creator of Gumby, just passed at age 89. Enjoy this presentation of Gumby on the Moon, courtesy of a brilliantly imaginative mind that will be missed by Boomers and others alike.