Category: memory lane

Memory Lane: Nabisco Dinosaurs

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Ah, there they are! The whole gang. Free Inside! For a little golden while in the 1950s, these gloriously crude little dinosaurs came free inside boxes of Nabisco cereal–Wheat Honeys and Rice Honeys, to wit. You can only imagine with what eagerness I opened each fresh box of cereal and rooted around until I found my prize.

Actually these figures were a little smaller than pictured above, which made it terribly easy to lose them in the sandbox. I still have a few of them, and I wouldn’t part with them for all the tea in China.

Looking back, I’m amazed at what little it took to make kids happy, back then. Well, these toys made me happy, at any rate. So did a 5-cent pack of baseball cards, which costs $5 now and probably makes no one happy.

All right, maybe you’re not into dinosaurs. But there were all kinds of nifty prizes in cereal, those days. Little plastic figures of characters in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (remember that?); bronze or silver-colored plastic doodads representing famous breeds of dogs; little spacemen, The Spoonmen, that you could attach to your cereal spoon… little cars, little speedboats. All of them simple, tiny, cheap–and lovable.

I don’t even what to know what they’re offering 9-year-olds today. I’m sure it would depress me.

A Song from My Childhood

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Sorry! I didn’t mean to imply that this song was contemporaneous with my childhood (and I’d like to see Joe Collidge try to spell that!)–The Glendy Burk by Stephen Foster, vintage 1851. I wasn’t around for The Ballad of Ramses II, either.

No–this was just an old steamboat song that we were taught in first grade, back when it was still unobjectionable to call boys and girls boys and girls. We didn’t go in for steamboats much, here in New Jersey, but we still knew they were part of our heritage. Kind of a romantic part, at that.

Will anybody look back on this present age as a romantic part of any heritage?

Heaven forbid.

Sanity Break: Your Pet Mouse Loves You

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It’s a grey, dreary, drizzly day today; and as I enjoyed my cigar outside, I thought of a pet I had many years ago. A mouse.

Her name was Sleepy, and she was about the lovingest little creature you ever saw. Her babies took advantage of her, mobbing her for nursing well after they were too big to need it anymore. She used to climb up onto the water bottle and chatter at them.

I used to take her downstairs, lie down on the floor, and let her run around the living room. She would run a little ways and then run back to me, a little farther each time, until she finally made it to the wall–but always back to Daddy. I took it as a lesson in prayer: make a lot of little prayers during the course of the day, just to maintain my connection to my Father in Heaven.

Mice make wonderful pets, they’re incredibly intelligent; but I don’t keep them anymore because we have two cats. Besides which, a mouse will only live for two years or so, and it breaks your heart to lose one.

True, wild mice invading your granary, that’s not good. But God has also created them with loving hearts–and that’s another thing we never would have thought of, in His place.

Memory Lane: Howard Johnson’s

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Image result for images of howard johnson's restaurant

Something good was lost when the Howard Johnson’s restaurants faded from the landscape.

When my father took us to see Grammy, he often stopped at HoJo’s on the way home and bought us kids ice cream cones. Howard Johnson’s raspberry sherbet–wow! The only thing that could compare with it was Howard Johnson’s black raspberry sherbet.

And HoJo’s fried clams–aah, delightful! At the HoJo’s in East Lansing, Michigan, they used to have “All You Can Eat Night” every Tuesday–and I’d go there and chow down on fried clams.

Everywhere was the trademark orange-and-aqua color scheme. And it didn’t matter where you were: HoJo’s was always HoJo’s, coast to coast. They made their own ice cream, by the way, and were justly proud of it. What I wouldn’t give for a pint of Howard Johnson’s black raspberry in my freezer.

But the whole enterprise has just sort of dwindled away, leaving naught but happy memories.

The Orchestra Song

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Remember this weird little exercise from music class, circa second grade? Everybody sang something different, and yet when it was all put together, you had a harmony. In theory. When our class sang it, it sounded like a barnyard invaded by a wolf.

“The clarinet, the clarinet goes doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-det…” We never got it right. But this video is what it was supposed to sound like.

Memory Lane: Travels With My Aunts

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Image result for images of world map 1960

My mother’s unmarried sisters, Gertie, Millie, and Joan, lived in the same house all their lives, with their mother and father, and worked at the same jobs all their lives. You might think that was boring, but you’d be wrong: it freed them up to do what they really, really wanted to do.

What they did was travel. Not like travel is now, with everybody doing it, jet planes, computers, etc. We’re talking the 1950s and 60s, with propeller-driven airliners and luxury ocean liners. It was glamorous, back then. And very few people did it. But my aunts did it practically every year, usually in the summer, and there wasn’t much of the globe they didn’t cover.

They started out seeing America, places like Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon, then Canada and Alaska, back when Alaska was an exotic destination. Before it was a state. By the time they were done, they’d been to Central America, Egypt (where Millie had a bout of claustrophobia inside the Great Pyramid–imagine that!), Norway, Iceland, England, Spain, Italy, East Africa (lunch at The Black Cat Cafe in Uganda: not for the faint-hearted), South America, and Australia (where Gertie declined to hold the koala). They always brought back slides, boxes and boxes full of slides, and souvenirs. And they were much in demand as speakers at their churches. I think the only places that they didn’t go to were places that you weren’t allowed to go to, back then, like Russia or China.

I can’t stress this enough: back then, nobody was traveling like that–nobody but professional travel writers. And these three little maiden ladies from a small town in New Jersey. They could’ve easily hosted a TV show. But they liked their lives the way they were–stable, peaceful, and Christian… and seasoned with a hearty tablespoon of worldwide travel. A lot of us would have called that “adventure.” But for my aunts, it was just the way they liked to live.

Sanity Break: Jimmy Durante

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Just to show that the human race is capable of better things than the state of our colleges and our politics might indicate, here’s Jimmy Durante on Steve Allen’s TV show, vintage 1960. Don’t ask me to sum up what the two of them are doing, besides treating us to a wholesome breath of sanity.

For those of you who are too young to have caught Durante’s act (to say nothing of Steve Allen’s: he was pretty sharp, too)–well, here it is, and better late than never.

Inka-Dinka-Doo, by the way, was one of Jimmy’s signature songs, and a great hit in its time. Nuff said.

Let Me Share a Treasure With You

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Image result for images of roy chapman andrews mongolia expedition

Andrews confers with a Mongol camel-rider

I think it’s safe to say I couldn’t begin to write the kind of fantasies I write if I’d never read Roy Chapman Andrews’ non-fiction accounts of his scientific expeditions to the Gobi Desert. He led the great Central Asiatic Expedition for the American Museum of Natural History, into a country passed over by many of the currents of history–a country so wild, so exotic, that it might as well have been a fantasy world, like Middle-Earth or Narnia.

To see what I’m getting at, visit the Roy Chapman Andrews Society website ( https://roychapmanandrewssociety.org/ ), scroll down quite a ways, and then watch some videos of original film footage from the expedition. The video in the middle of the page is especially haunting, with a gorgeous piece of music attached–The Gael by Trevor Jones, part of the soundtrack of The Last of the Mohicans. Maybe I’m some kind of nut, but this video brings me close to tears.

Because it’s a lost world, sights that no one will ever see again, a world unto itself, with no Starbuck’s, no MacDonald’s, no transgender bathrooms, none of the dismal plock we have to hack our way through every day.

It makes me homesick for the world of my own fantasy novels: somehow these videos get me to thinking I can go there–to Lintum Forest, to Roshay Bault’s house in Ninneburky, to the Abnak camps among the foothills. All fantasy, of course.

But God has given us imagination for a reason; and I think the reason is to keep us sane.

One of the Greatest Gags Ever

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This gag is so simple, only a genius could have invented it–a genius like Jimmy Durante. He first performed it on a Vaudeville stage and later, as you can see, in the movies.

The enduring legacy of this inspired comedy bit is the entrance into everyday language of that saying about ignoring the elephant in the living room.

[Note: You may have noticed I’m taking a break from writing about Democrats today. One can only take so much.]

 

Whoo-Hoo, It’s Snowing!

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Image result for images of snowstorm

So yesterday it was almost 60 degrees, and today it’s in the 20s and snowing like mad: welcome to February. And oh, that wind!

I’ve just finished clearing our cars so we can use them tomorrow. It’s funny–no matter how old I get, I’ll never forget the unexpected joy of waking up on a snowy morning to learn that there’ll be no school today! How can I not love snow? Sledding, snowball fights, snowmen and snow-forts–who in his right mind would rather be sitting in a classroom?

And now, I think, it’s time for a cigar…