Memories of the Fifties

In many parts of Europe, it's the silver barber's dish - used as a guild sign since medieval ages.
Still today, the dish is out when open, even if the the barber is now called "coiffeur"



Interestingly, even the Danish wikipedia mentions the barberens lavsskilt.

Hey, You guys weren't the only cow people. (The big guy is my grandpa.)



Double dutch required two ropes--not always available. When we had them, I gave it a shot.

Of course it was fun to celebrate Lucia December 13. and go to the teachers and hopefully catch them still in bed. Only went to the nice ones. It was early in the
morning - afterall school started at 8.

Hiking.
My oldest brother got permission to take me and Sam hiking, which we did thereafter for a long time. In Calwa, we went along the railroad tracks a ways and sometimes played with a hand car before rounding a long bend that took us to a great industrial tank, with a moat of black liquid around it. We never touched that stuff on purpose, but we did mess with it. Then past a garden on a large plot of ground. Last on the hike would be the Pima railroad camp. Only Roger was welcome there, so we generally made our way back after that. I often missed school from contracting poison oak.

When we moved to Campbell, we hiked to the woods around Los Gatos. I don't recall specific events, but it was a wonderful place to be in.

I fondly recall free movies in the park. There was a little park in the middle of the little town in which I lived, and on summer Friday evenings, a traveler would set up a large screen and show old movies. I didn't think about it at the time, of course, but i suspect the local shopkeepers kicked in a few dollars each to the man for the extra revenue he raised for them.

Absolut forbidden
was to play or climb around in the old quarry

A famous Swedish painter had painted a few paintings from the quarry and area.
When I moved to N.Y I got a poster with one of his paintings to take along.
In N.Y I went into a store with posters, cards etc. Almost the first poster I
take a look at - is the same one as I had brought along.

Cool, Saab . . . we used to go to the pits of abandoned strip mines, which would fill with water and create lakes. That's definitely a fifties thing, because after the EPA was created, they had to restore land torn up by strip mines.

Interesting re the posters, saab.

I suppose we didn't live in New York at the same time... I was only there for one year (sob, I hated leaving, but on the other hand, I liked the next place we landed). I think (a2k) Roberta and I lived there at the same time, both in the Bronx, but she was little and I was "older". That was late 1949 to late 50.

I got to see New York again 50+ years later, and met some grand a2kers there, and saw a lot I'd been craving to see, by myself or with the a2k people.

In between those times, there was 1969 when I took my mother back to her Boston home town after my father's death, and we stopped for a day and night in New York. She didn't want to do anything, including see her old best friend in Boston. Hard trip for both of us. It turned out she was zooming into Alzheimers (classic symptoms not long after, not all that clear back then). My father had warned me that she was acting funny, but I didn't see it.. we all let a pot boil over once in a blue moon.

This was thread tangential, but one thing reminds me of another.

There was only one thing I was absolutely, positively forbidden to do: Cross the street by myself. The kids who lived across the street were as alien to me as people from Brooklyn.

This was one of the few parental dicta that I obeyed. If we were playing ball and the ball rolled across the street, we asked total strangers to cross us. We never got a no. This, of course, challenged the rule of not talking to strangers. Clearly, retrieving a ball took priority over talking to strangers.

An oddity here. Of the seven boys in my family, not a one was particularly good at ball games and other sports.

Under the terass of our summercabin is a basement - a very scary basement.
The floor is cobblestones, there is the leftovers of an open fireplace and in one
corner there used to be dynamite. Some light comes from thick glass in the terass, (put in later). It used to be the place hundreds years ago the place the men from the quarry used to eat.
We only used it for keeping the bottles cool. I refused to go down and get the bottles if not a grown up stood on the top of the stairs. Someone always did.
We kids believed in ghosts in that basement.
I still refuse to go down....

I lived in N.Y one year on 225 East 54th Street.

I lived in NYC a month or so, then stayed in Brooklyn for a spell. 1968.

I remember we lived in the foothills, near Milpitas, CA, the year I went in 6th grade. Airpoint School was a one room school, with one man serving as Principal and teacher, over the first eight school grades. High schoolers rode the bus to the little town nearby. There was a kid that Roger sometimes called Barrel, because of his shape. One day I observed him picking at Sam, actually physically abusing him. I told him to back off. We were squared off to fight, when the teacher came out and told us to come into the gym. He put boxing gloves on us. I pot-shotted him pretty much at will, but he used his superior weight to knock me back a few times.

The place where we lived had some good hills for sledding. We took corrugated iron sheets, folded one end for makeshift sleds, and rode them down the tall grass, good as any snow. Then Roger made a cart and we rode it down the road to collect the daily mail. We did not mind that we had to tote it back up to the house.

We roved the landlord's pasture. He didn't like that, but kids gotta do something. We never did any damage that I recall.

I hope you got rid of the dynamite. It does not age well.

The dynamite was long gone before my parents got the property.
Just imagen to sit at rest with a fireplace on one side and dynamite on the other. Those old workers new how to handle things.

Fishing was my big passion. Me and my friend Joel used to pack rods and go down to the Lehigh Creek several times a month during the summer. It was usually an all day campaign in which we packed survival foods, snacks and ICY KOOL AID in our big stainless steel Stanley thermoses that were the first real tool of manhood
Hunting up fishing worms at night(always after a summer rain )was almost as much fun as fishing. We used to call the large "Lumbricus terrestris" NIGHTHAWKS. These worms could be snuck up on with a flashlight and carefully pulled from their holes in thr ground by exerting firm and constanttugging. If you pulled em too hard, they would break and the really big part would go back underground and regenerate another head (or ass, it really doesnt matter with a wom)

Wed go out and get a big load and put them in a large wooden box with soil and coffee grounds. And wed wet em and cover em with a screen and a cloth till the next day when the fishing campaign was underway.

Wed do fairly well and , I keep thinking today, how we were reaally "free range" kids and parents never really gave a thought that danger from evil molesters would stalk their children .
I used to take a bus into Reading with friends from the time I was about 9 years old and I recall going to a movie in downtown Reading Pa on a very day that John F Kennedy came to town for his 1960 campaign. I never saw him but we could her him. We were more interested in getting to Lowes theater to see a latest edition of One of the Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad or JAson and the Argonauts.

Popcorn was not only a movie food, it was also a means of communication with friends sitting below you (when you were in the balcony of the theater).

Balconies and Loges were really cool places from which we could watch a saturday movie and 100 cartoons. ALL FOR 50 CENT

We had more than a dozen quarries in my native town (seven cement and on chalk mill in those days) - entry was forbidden, but they were for us not just a great playing field but we could find a lot of archaeological "stones" (ammonoids and such), all kinds of newts ... plus, it was a nice swimming pool.

Some of these (former) quarries today form a park, "Mythos Stein" (Mythical Stone), allowing visitors to experience a unique symbiosis between men, nature, industry, and culture.

Besides sculpture, nature and geology, the still active cement works also want visitors to discover the company and cement plants. So various descriptive panels have been installed in the park illustrating the characteristics of cement and concrete and the cement works.

Lunch has been traditionally the main meal in Germany. The workers in those cement works got their lunch "fresh" and homemade, in a "Henkelmann" (locally called "Düppe"), a tiffin carrier, round or in an oval shape similar to military campaign dishes, containing perhaps not only the 'midday-meal' but soup, main course and dessert.

These düppen were collected by cement mill employees at various places in town - around 11 am, all were at the market place (50 yards away from our house), from vans (larger company) to bicyclettes/mopeds with a trailer.

The presedential memorial in Washington, Peace Palace in the Haag and the Swedish Church in Paris are just some of the buildings buildt with the very beautiful stones from my childhood quarry.
Many stones have been used for sidewalks and street not only in Sweden.