You might want to watch this before youtube pulls it off this blog.
Loony Tunes, 1942: Babbit and Catstello takes off on Abbot and Costello, who were smokin’ hot at the time. They were only two of the many movie stars who wound up with avatars in cartoons, including Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, and Peter Lorre, just to name three. Some of these renditions were uncanny!
Here was another rainy day favorite of my childhood–the game of Risk. Can you raise mighty armies, and conquer the world? This was your chance to try.
What strategy will you use? Will you try to nail down Australia, and spread out from there? It’ll be hard for the other players to attack you there, but you might get bottled up. Or will you set up in some central location, like Mongolia (my favorite!), and attack the weakest targets until all Asia grovels at your feet, and supplies you with the numbers needed to go after Europe?
It was also a fun way to learn geography. Where is the Risk player who doesn’t know where Kamchatka is? Which is not the same as knowing how to pronounce it! And gee, look at that: the Middle East gives you entry into Africa, Europe, or Asia, or even all three at once.
I know Risk is still around, but I don’t know who’s playing it. Patty and I have a game in our toy chest. Of course, to play it, you have to be able to concentrate for two hours at a stretch, and you have to be imaginative, with the ability to adapt your strategy to changing circumstances. I’m afraid that might be asking a bit too much of the Zombie Bloodbath video game crowd.
We need a sanity break, we need a laugh–and here’s one, courtesy of Allen Funt and Candid Camera, from somewhere in the 1960s. Watch how these bowlers react when the pins start behaving oddly. Who didn’t love this show!
It sure has been a long time since I saw one of these. Empires rise and fall in less time.
Do you know what this is? Do you remember? Here’s a hint to give the game away: carbon paper.
Yes, it’s a typewriter eraser. Then along came Wite-Out… and those strips of whatever that you stuck in between the ribbon and the paper and typed over your error.
I kind of miss the soothing clackety-clack of a manual typewriter.
But I don’t miss carbon paper!
On dreary, rainy days, like the ones we’ve been having here, the past two weeks, my brother, my sister and I used to go bowling–in the cellar.
We had the ball and the pins, which you weighted by filling them with water. If you didn’t fill the ball just right, the water sloshed around inside of it and made it do strange things when you released it.
We had a ready-made lane in our cellar, between the wall on one hand and the furnace and hot water heater on the other. So as the ball wandered down the alley, bumping into one or the other barriers would return it to its intended course. And there was a plastic sheet to guide us in setting up the pins–if we were able to knock them down.
We never did learn how to keep a proper bowling score, but at least we could count the pins that we knocked over. And the ball made a pleasant sloshing sound as it meandered down the cement floor. The pins made a dull thud when you hit them: not at all like the satisfying “ka-pocka!” they made when you hit them in a real bowling alley. But this one was our own personal bowling alley, and we were mighty glad to have it.
Years later my father bought a wooden pool table, which soon warped just enough to make a straight shot impossible. Really, water-filled bowling was a lot cheaper and much more fun. Even if my sister had to use both hands to roll the ball: the price she paid for being the youngest.
I think we’d all be very pleased if we could somehow play it again, Sam.
Ah, 1950s kids’ TV! I just couldn’t get enough of that stock footage of African wildlife, no matter how many TV shows it got recycled through–principally Ramar of the Jungle, with Jon Hall, and Jungle Jim, with Johnny Weismuller.
But let us not forget Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, which ran 1955-56, starring the statuesque Irish McCalla. I was too young to develop crushes on TV or movie stars, but I knew way cool when I saw it, and Sheena was way cool. What I wouldn’t have given to trade places with her! But then she’d be stuck behind a desk in my rotten second-grade class at Edgar School, while I’d be off in Kenya, easy prey for the first hungry animal to come along. She had a cool horn, too. I wished I had one like that.
This was one of those things that just pop into my head for no reason: the old Ballantine Beer jingle, vintage 1960–from an ad on the Jean Shepherd show, no less.
I was too young to stay up and listen to Jean Shepherd. For us kids, “Hey, getcha cold beer!” meant New York Yankees baseball broadcasts. The Giants and Dodgers had deserted us, and there were no Mets yet, so it was Yankees all summer long. Brought to you by Gillette Razor Blades (“You’ll look sharp, and you’ll feel sharp, too!”) and Ballantine, brewed right here in New Jersey. Mel Allen in the broadcast booth, saying “How about that!” And it was mostly day games, back them.
And also in the daytime, the crack of the bat from the athletic field next door, where some of the guys on the high school baseball team would get together for a pick-up game. On rare occasions, they would allow some of us 11-year-olds to play with them. Oh, paradise! I hit a home run once, in one of those games: I’ll never forget it.
I wasn’t old enough to drink beer, but for some reason I really dug those Ballantine commercials. No school, play all day long, clip baseball cards to our bikes so they’d rub against the spokes and sound like a motor–yeah: it was good.
This old Irish folk song, Green Grow the Lilacs, here in its Civil War version sung by Ed McCurdy, was in my head this evening. I looked for it on youtube and there it was. I thought some of you might enjoy it, so here it is.
On many a Sunday in the summer, my father liked to hold a family cookout in the back yard. So early in the morning, I’d run over to the playground and fetch some fine sand for the coals to rest on.
If Uncle Ferdie came, as he usually did, we’d break out the horseshoes and have a few games, him, my father, my brother, and me. There’s nothing like the clang of horseshoes on a summer day. If Uncle Bernie came, he’d do some simple magic tricks that always wowed me. I never could figure out how he pulled off one of his fingers and stuck it back on, good as new. When he finally taught me how to do it, I had a lot of fun blowing the minds of the younger kids in the neighborhood.
When my aunts came, they usually brought slides of their latest visit to some exotic clime–places like Yucatan, Uganda, Iceland, or Australia. My Dutch step-grandfather, John, played old Dutch tunes on his harmonica. Grandpa reminisced about the misdeeds of Woodrow Wilson.
And then came the hot dogs and the hamburgers, which always tasted so much better, off the grill. I enjoyed watching the charcoal briquets catch fire briefly, then settle down to glowing redly and sputtering when fat dripped on them. A simple feast, but highly satisfying.
If only we could do it all again…
This is the theme song for Mitch Miller’s hit TV show, Sing Along With Mitch, vintage 1961.
I think everybody I knew had a Mitch Miller record album or two. Back then, he was just about the only guy who had a beard but wasn’t a beatnik. Good grief, remember them? Some of us heard a rumor that a certain person in the neighborhood had actually become a beatnik, and grown a beard, and a bunch of us kids stood outside his house one night for I don’t know how long, hoping to get a glimpse of such a curiosity.
Anyhow, Mitch provided millions of people with songs they could sing in front of their kiddies without embarrassment, and entertainment galore.
If he tried his act today, he’d either make a fortune like he never dreamed of, or be arrested for hate speech and uninclusiveness.