Childhood Memories

Life is funny … I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but can recall in exquisite detail what happened well over 70 years ago. Here are a malanga of things that have stuck with me through the years:

-  Wringer washing machines and wood-frame curtain stretchers 

- A skateboard made with metal wheels (taken off of an old pair of skates) nailed to a 2x4 scooter.

- Bing Crosby singing “The Ole Lamplighter” on a 78-rpm record (with “Bye Bye Blackbird” on the flip side) 

- Drinking yeasty home-made root beer out of old ketchup bottles 

- “Helping” the circus roustabouts raise their tents (for a free ducat) 

- That toy that dropped darts on a corkboard containing silhouettes of enemy ships (from a cardboard box with a mirrored bombsight and “bombs away” levers)

- Live chickens in Grandpap’s coal bin

- Lowell Thomas reading the nightly news on the old Philco radio  Other newscasters – John Cameron Swayze, Gabriel Heatter, Fulton Lewis Jr. 

- My mother knitting a kaki sweater for the “boys overseas” 

- The “Toonerville Trolley” comic strip in the Sunday papers Other comic strips – “Katzenjammer Kids”, “Notary Sojak”, “Maggie and Jiggs”, “Prince Valiant”

- “Just Plain Bill (Barber of Hartville)” on afternoon soap-opera radio (while I was staying home sick) Other soaps – “One Man’s Family”, “Stella Dallas” (and her daughter, Lolly Baby), “Portia Faces Life”, “Lorenzo Jones” 

- Hand-woven plastic lanyards and elastic cotton potholders 

- My sister wearing a crinoline skirt and brown & white saddle shoes 

- Eating Cracker Jacks … looking for the prizes and avoiding those bitter paper-jacketed peanuts 

- My father (a die-hard Republican) crying when FDR died 

- “Curious George” and the “Little House” book (about how it became a city derelict until was moved back to the country and fixed up) 

- Front-page newspaper maps of the ever-changing battle lines on the Korean peninsula 

- Fried “city chicken” drumsticks made with ground-up veal formed around lollypop sticks 

- Winter hay rides with real horses and sledges 

- Viewing a hoochy koochy girl in the Mutoscope (peep show) movie machine at the penny arcade 

- Building a toy frontier fort with Lincoln Logs 

- Fletcher’s Castoria and paregoric (for childhood’s range of stomach distresses)

- A tin model of the “Spirit of St. Louis” in my father’s bottom dresser drawer 

- My grandparent’s telephone number (1903W … a party line) 

- Mom’s baked ham and home-baked beans (w/ a mixed green salad) 

- “Pick-up Straws” and jacks 

- Watching the McCarthy hearings on TV (I even remember “At last, Senator McCarthy have you no shame?”) “

- Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer

- Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club on weekday radio (“Good morning breakfast clubbers, so nice to meet you …”) 

- The National Farm and Home hour (on very early Saturday morning radio out of Chicago) 

- The Saturday Night Fights w/ Bill Stern (sponsored on radio by Gillette, “To look sharp and be on the ball … ”) 

- Seeing an old civil war veteran (Grand Army of the Republic) in my town’s July 4th parade (in the 1940’s) 

- Sunday Swiss steak and mashed potatoes “supper” at Grandma’s after church (around 1 PM) 

- Having the (bleep) scared out of me by the movie, "Spellbound" 

- Coloring the oleo (wartime butter substitute) by squeezing and massaging a yellow pill inside its plastic bag

STAND UP FOR MEMORIES