Memories of the Fifties

I still don't think a Ouiji board has any connection to evil spirits or good spirits or spirits. I did have one at one point but wound up getting rid of it because so many friends freaked out when they saw it in the hall closet with the monopoly and trivial pursuit games. I got rid of it only because it was actually boring and it was pointless trying to assure others I wasn't into some sort of demon worship. It was more of a distraction, and since it was only a trifling gee-haw I didn't miss it.

I was distressed however to learn that so many folks believed a cheap cardboard game was evil incarnate coiled to strick.

Clearly she wasn't a Methodist. I re call the Ouija board in the fellowship hall of Trinity Methodist years back. It always seemed odd; but, I figured if it was there it had to be Conference approved, same as the shuffleboard patterns on the floor...although none of us ever played shuffleboard.

It was under Ike that SAC was built up, and kept the Soviets from thinking we were weak, and no stomach for dealing with them. His playing golf after he was out of office was a diversion, since he was then analyzing the photos from high altitude planes. You apparently might not understand the mind of an ex-general that used diversion in WWII, so we could today be speaking English, in my opinion.

Something I remember not so fondly was summer nights in Maryland before air conditioning. Hot, humid and constant pillow flipping to get to the 'cool' side. None of our schools had air conditioning, now they shut down school when the temp gets to a certain level. Most schools have air now, but since there are still a few that don't, they send all students home. I'm not sure if the rest of the country understands how hot and humid it can get here. We have days with 100% humidity, the air is so thick it seems you can cut it with a knife. On days like that, you pray to the weather gods to turn it into rain. We can also have almost artic conditions at times. We've seen it snow in April and in Dec 2015 Mr. G'bag had to mow the lawn because of a warm spell.

I'm not complaining (much) but our weather is extremely unpredictable. We have mountains and are close to the Atlantic so it makes for interesting weather unpatterns.

You apparently might not understand that just because someone can recount a fifty year old kid's joke and recall the popular sentiments of the time doesn't necessarily mean that he agrees with the assessment or thinks the joke is clever.

They built the buildings differently before A/C. They were designed for air flow. I don't recall living with A/C before the 1970s.

So do I. I wear it once in a while, have it on a chain in my hallway.

We had two good (to us kids) local shops: one a few blocks away across a moderately fast street (I'll remember the name in a minute) that had a glassed in candy counter, laid out with penny candies.. that took some rollerscating smarts to get to. We were good at it though.

Another was a corner store, closer to us, where we bought endless popsicles.
One day the owner barked at me for not having enough coins, and said he knew we were rich. Huh? Turned out there was another family with our last name in the church donor list. Let's say that was around the time my dad lost his job, the start of a life downhill -- so as years went by I learned how resentment happens, early lessons in the different ways. That was a warmup for real life.

The loss of the Red Cars in Los Angeles. I don't remember the exact timing, but I well knew the repercussions over time.

Alternately, I started getting really interested in food, went to a restaurant called Pizza something with an after school work pal, and got to eat my first dish of what was called salad. Not quite my first restaurant ever, but close.

We had Good Humor and Bungalow Bar. We girls had something we jumped rope to while reciting: Bungalow Bar makes me sick. With a wiggle and a waggle and a kick, kick, kick. How do I remember that?

We had two candy stores on the block. The one on the south corner didn't have a soda fountain, but all the kids went to it. The one on the north corner had a soda fountain. We didn't go there because it was a bookie joint, and the guy running the place wasn't thrilled when kids showed up.

I'm remembering Saturday afternoons at the movies. For an entire quarter you got a newsreel, a short subject (documentary), one or two cartoons, and a double feature.

Yeah, I remember newsreels and and documentaries, and movies too.

I used to have trouble getting my shoes to stay tied. I would pull at them as hard as I could to make a tight knot. I had just done this one day when my step father came by. "You tie them tight," he said. Having just done that and having a too literal mind, I thought he meant to lace them tight. So I untied them and laced them as tightly as I possibly could and then tied the knot as tightly as possible. I wore my shoes too tight for the longest time.

I never lived with air conditioning - New York, Wash DC, Chicago, LA, until I've lived here, Albuquerque, with what is called a swamp cooler, a mildly helpful apparatus.

Asbury was the name of the avenue.
Oh, well, that took a bit of time to remember, but hey, that is also the street where were we used to ice skate, even with a warming hut, in winter... corner of South Boulevard + Asbury.

Cigarettes and ashtrays were ubiquitous. In grammar school art class, we sculpted clay ash trays for our parents. One our many variations of the game tag was known as "cigarette tag". If you got tagged you had to shout out the name of a cigarette brand, without repeating a previously used one. There must've been at least 30 or 40 brands that we kids could recite. One time I got tagged and yelled out, "Spud!" No one recognized the name, it was disallowed, and I was it.

I recall my parents buying cartons of cigs from a machine. A dollar bill got a carton, with the change taped to it. Not sure when filter tips were introduced.

That's a new to one me. If my father smoked I wouldn't be surprised, but since I have anosmia (not entirely, but mostly, and so did he), I didn't know. He was a good, moral man, and all these years later, I think of him as brow beaten by a moral woman. I now think he obeyed at home.

I didn't smoke until something like '62.

My parents didn't get air conditioning until I was pregnant with their first grandchild. The plan was for me to recover for a week at their home. Prior to that we experienced humid nights in full glory and I can remember the window fans built by Westinghouse would hum and the downside was my bedroom had the window used to draw air thru the bedrooms. Mom said it was the best use of the fans, I just kept flipping that pillow trying to find the cool side.

I lived in one place, in West Columbia Texas, that had an attic fan, instead of A/C. Once I got used to the constant flow of air, it was wonderful.

The same way I remember: Bungalow Bar tastes like tar, the more you eat the sicker you are! or Inka Dink a bottle of ink, the cork fell out and you stink, not because you're dirty; not because you're clean, just because you kissed the girl behind the magazine or even Eeny Meeny Miny Moe catch a tigger by the toe.

I recall a time when we kids actually used the "n" word in the rhyme, but I also recall that I had no idea of what the "n" word was supposed to mean. I didn't learn what it meant until after our parents demanded we change it to "tigger" or "ticker"

We lived in a lower middle class neighborhood where some young fathers were on the rise in careers that would enable them to move their families to newer middle class neighborhoods, and others had already climbed as high as they were going to reach and whose families were destined to remain in the old neighborhood as it inevitably decayed. Still, there wasn't a single black family in the entire neighborhood.

We had one "colored" friend, Gary who was a nice but quiet boy, and no one had a clue as to where he came from; where he lived. He just showed up one day when we were all between the ages of 5 and 8 and stood watching us playing baseball until eventually, someone asked if he wanted to join in the game. Gary was part of the gang for a couple of years and then disappeared without a trace. He had never told us he was moving or wasn't allowed to come play with us, but one day he didn't show up and that was that.

Despite what many people might believe of the time, I don't recall the experience of Gary being one of our friends as all that remarkable in terms of conflict or strangeness. There was one family with three boys: One, Johnny, who was my age, one, Timmy, who was my older brother's age and the oldest of the brothers, Jimmy, who was too much older than us to care to hang out with little kids. They were, overall, a nasty bunch who sooner or latter everyone had a fistfight with and the mother, Doris was the nastiest of all. The boys would sometimes give Gary a hard time and I remember one of them calling him the "n" word. By then I knew what it mean't and I knew it was nasty. The rest of the gang didn't leap to Gary's defense with righteous condemnation, but we all made it clear that we liked him and weren't going to follow the brothers' lead in harassing him. Eventually they were forbidden to play with Gary and that solved the problem. When he showed up, they went home. A win-win.



That's great!



That setup, with anything more than the feature films, save a cartoon, was before my time, but I do remember us forming the "Movie Club" (we had a ton of clubs of one sort or the other) which just meant we all agreed to each come up with the $0.35 for price of admission (allowance, birthday money or just begging parents) and then "hike" the two miles into town together. For a nickel you got a full size candy bar or box of such delights as Milk Duds or Jujy Fruits and for a dime you got a big sleeve of popcorn. A couple of large Cokes were shared by all.

I distinctly remember the Club going to see Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in "The Road to Hong Kong" (with the alluring Joan Collins replacing the alluring Dorothy Lamour ), "Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein" and "Abott & Costello Go To Mars" (both of which were made before I was born so it must have been a kid's specialty double feature), "King Kong vs Godzilla" (I was so excited I couldn't sleep the night before) and numerous Hammer films like "Horror of Dracula" and "Brides of Dracula" with the actor who, for me, has always been the iconic vampiric count, Christopher Lee. At some point, I don't remember when, I found that most of these films contained a virtue previously unrecognized: the ample bosoms of Victorian maidens with stirring cleavage!