Category: memory lane

Memory Lane: Soldiers Path

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We lived next door to the playground, and beyond the playground lay the woods. All gone now, of course–playground, woods, and all. Everything paved over. But come along with me, I know a way back in.

Deep in the woods, a little ways past Hangman’s Tree, was Soldiers Path. Now of course any woods visited every day by children is bound to be full of paths leading all over; but this path was different.

For one thing, it didn’t really take you anywhere: it just sort of petered out. If you traced it back to its origin, you found the same thing. This was a path from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular.

But even more unusual, this path was made of  cinders. Someone, Heaven knows how long ago, meant for this path to last for many years. Certainly it outlasted whatever it was going to, and whatever it was coming from.

Kid legend invested Soldiers Path with all kinds of improbable stories. This was the official path by which criminals were taken to Hangman’s Tree and strung up. No, it was a path made by the Hessians so they could march quickly through the woods. I heard that story long before I had the foggiest idea what a Hessian was: I don’t know why, but I somehow got the idea that a Hessian was a kind of gigantic insect.

We also believed that if you went out there late at night, you could see condemned criminals or Hessians marching on Soldiers Path; but I never heard of anyone who was brave enough to make that experiment.

What I wouldn’t give to tread that path again! But if C.S. Lewis was right, when he speculated that all the places that we love on earth are only facsimiles of the real places in Christ’s Kingdom–well, I may. I may.

Memory Lane: How We Played Baseball–Without Adults

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Believe it or not, children used to play baseball–without Little League, without uniforms, without coaches, umpires, a scoreboard, sponsors, a crowd of parents in the stands, and perpetual supervision of our every move.

My first baseball glove was my father’s old Larry French model, vintage 1940. More often than not, our baseball was wrapped in tape because we’d long since knocked off the cover. Some of our favorite bats were kind of patched together, too.

We never had 18 kids to play full teams, and sometimes our bases were trees, stones, or squares drawn in the dirt. Because we were always so short-handed, we had a plethora of playground rules that allowed us to play baseball with as few as four kids to a team. Here are some of the rules we used.

Pitcher’s hand: So who needs a first baseman? If the ball got thrown back to the pitcher before you got to whatever base you were going to, you were out.

Invisible man on base: One thing about imaginary baserunners–they never got hurt.

Call your field: Sometimes we had to make do with only two outfielders, or even one. So before the pitch was thrown, the batter had to announce which field he intended to hit to, and the outfielders were positioned accordingly. If you hit to some other field, you were out.

Imaginary outfielders: If no one was available to play the outfield, we decided on whether a batted ball was a hit or an out, and what kind of a hit it was, based on whether a fielder, had one been out there, would have ordinarily been able to catch the ball. This could lead to a lot of debate, but that was sometimes half the fun.

Four foul balls, or two, and you’re out: Nobody wants to chase foul balls, one after another. This rule saved a lot of time.

There were other rules in addition to these, and we decided which ones to use and then started playing. Those discussions helped to teach us arts not generally associated with baseball, like compromise, negotiation, and sweet-talking.

Thanks to these innovations, we were able to play baseball every day, for as long as we liked.

And if that wasn’t more fun than Little League, I am very much mistaken.

A Day in the Fall, Long Ago

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Image result for people raking leaves

I have lived in the same small town all my life: and the biggest difference between the way it was then and the way it is now is… you don’t see many people outside.

Zooming back to 1958 or so, it’s Saturday, a sunny day in the fall, and there just might be a high school football game today. You can always tell, once you hear the band tuning up. So everybody on our street flocks over to the football field to watch our team try to get the square root of the other team’s score. Drums, tubas, people cheering, referees’ whistles: I know the tune by heart.

But if it’s just a sunny day without a football game, then you’ve got adults outside raking and gathering leaves, and the delicious autumn aroma of burning leaves. Men tinkering with their cars. Women playing with small children. And the rest of us kids with a pickup game of football, either on the playground or in someone’s back yard. Or riding around on our bikes.

Now they’ve got these great big houses on little tiny lots and you never see anybody. The only people outdoors are out there because they have to go somewhere. As for kids just playing in the neighborhood–free ranging, making our own fun: but in reality all those adults outside were discreetly watching over us without making like guards on a chain gang–oh, perish the thought!

Give me the smaller houses with the bigger yards, and neighbors yakking with each other as they raked their leaves–what kind of conversation can you have, with leaf blowers roaring in your ears?–and maybe your folks might have a few friends over for cards that night; and you’d be up in bed, pretending to be asleep, but listening to the muffled talk and the not-so-muffled laughter downstairs and wishing you were old enough to join in.

Yeah, give me that. I’ll take it.

Memory Lane: A Night at the Drive-In

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One of the amenities of American life that I really do miss–and I’m sure I’m not the only one–is the drive-in movie. Wasn’t that great! Especially that somewhat horrible intermission bumper, “Let’s all go to the Lobby!”

Once upon a summer night, on one of those extremely rare occasions when a babysitter just wasn’t available, my mother and father went to the drive-in to see Psycho. They must’ve really wanted to see it, because they took me along. I guess they expected me to fall asleep in the back seat. Fat chance of that!

Yup, when Vera Miles tapped ol’ Momma Bates’ shoulder, and Mrs. Bates turned around, and she was a mummy, this dreadful ghastly mummy–Yee-ow! It just about went through the roof of the car. You can imagine how I slept that night. I was ten years old, I wasn’t used to stuff like that!

Hooked me on horror movies for life, though.

Maybe someday the drive-ins will come back. And then we can all go out to the lobby and scuttle back with popcorn in time for the next feature.

Memory Lane: Play Sets

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The Marx Ben-Hur play set from 1959

What did you do if you were nine years old, and you’d already been to church or Sunday school today, and your father wasn’t going to take you to the movies–oh, and it’s 1959, or so?

Throughout the 1950s, America’s toy companies met that need with play sets. You got a big box, some kind of background you could set up, and a whole bunch of little plastic figures. If you had the Ben-Hur play set, pictured above, you could set up the arena and re-enact the chariot race from the movie.

There were all kinds of play sets. I had the dinosaur set, the farm, and a Cape Canaveral set with rockets and missiles you could send flying from spring-powered launchers, and a circus set with a tin big top.

The Cape Canaveral set (“You’ll put your eye out!”)

With all of these, you had to use your imagination. So we made up stories and acted them out with the little plastic figures–dinosaurs take over the space program, the farm animals decide to run the farm themselves, and so on. Every day was different.

Not like now, when well-meaning (we are being charitable) adults spoon-feed and control everything that a child might take into his head, completely unaware that such a thing is impossible to perform and letting a lot of really dark stuff get in that ought to be kept out.

We were better off with the play sets.

Memory Lane: Golden Stamp Books

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Vintage Golden Book

Hey, remember these? Golden Stamp Books, from the 1950s–one of my all-time favorite toys.

These books were a three-way delight. Each page had a short article or story for you to read, a line drawing for you to color–and, best of all, these brightly-colored stamps, pictured above, that you could paste on to the appropriate page. The one you see here, In Days of Old: The Story of the Middle Ages, was one of my favorites.

Golden Books published a whole series of these, and I had quite a few of them–stamp books on African animals, pirates, dinosaurs, and whatnot.

A kid could learn a lot from these books. They were “educational” without sacrificing any fun. Of course, you had to be able to sit quietly and contentedly for a little while, reading and coloring and pasting in stamps, and you had to be able to use your imagination: but I suppose that’s what made these so out-and-out wonderful. As you can see, I’ve never forgotten them, although it’s been going on 60 years since I’ve seen one.

I think there’s a lot to be said for being able to sit quietly and use your imagination. And it would be a better world if more people know how to do it.

Memory Lane: Gorilla Monsoon

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Just to show you that even pro wrestling is more tasteful than our politics, these days, here’s what happened in 1976 when Muhammad Ali, the world heavyweight boxing champion, took on the late Gorilla Monsoon (1937-1999).

Ah, Gorilla Monsoon! He was really Robert James “Gino” Marella from Rochester, New York, former NCAA wrestling star. But he hit it big when they billed him as the savage Gorilla Monsoon from the wilds of Manchuria. One of my high school friends attended a wrestling match at Temple Hall in Highland Park, NJ, and became sort of a kid celebrity when Gorilla Monsoon threw an autograph book right back in his face.

And then, with pro wrestling’s traditional penchant for the incredible, Gorilla Monsoon was transformed into a fan favorite, a gentle giant who had no difficulty at all, speaking English, and an all-around good guy.

The Muhammad Ali dust-up was hype for Ali’s coming bout with Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki. What a hoot that was. But Gorilla never admitted that his meeting with Ali was scripted in advance. So maybe he did wipe up the mat with the champ–ya think?

My wife and I went to a lot of pro wrestling matches, way back when, and saw all the greats of the era. We don’t go anymore: an awful lot of artless zing, with slob appeal raised to a height that had to be seen to be believed (and enjoyed), has gone out of wrestling since then.

But we do have some memories that still tickle us to this day.

Farewell, Zacherley

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I was thinking of using Zacherley’s 1958 hit, Dinner With Drac, as a Halloween nostalgia piece–when I discovered, just now, that John Zacherle, aka The Cool Ghoul, died yesterday.

He was 98 years old, he died at home, and he worked right up to the very end. He was just as wild and hilarious a week ago as he was in 1958. I’m sure he had a live appearance lined up somewhere for this year’s Halloween, because he always did.

He was the first to hit it big as a horror movie host on television, and no one ever did it better: he was the very best at what he did, with a legion of imitators.

How I loved his show when I was 10 years old! I wanted to be like Zacherley when I grew up. Don’t knock it: you could do worse than keep your marbles, love your work and never have to stop doing it, and be loved by countless people all over the country.

As they said of Julius Caesar, “Whence comes such another?”

Memory Lane: Miller’s Space Aliens

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Image result for miller space aliens

These were among the coolest toys I ever had–Miller Company space aliens. Like the Miller dinosaurs, they were made of wax and terribly easy to break. But they were worth the trouble. If these couldn’t turn your imagination loose, well, I don’t know what would.

There was the scary giant spider-beetle from Neptune, the cricket-man from Saturn, the creature from Uranus with gigantic legs and puny body, the nice little blue Moon men, and even Sheb Wooley’s Flying Purple People Eater. Oh, and not forgetting the yellow two-headed guy from “Nebula” (where was that?): my father equipped him with a home-made parachute.

Image result for miller company space aliens

Oh, the stories and adventures we kids made up for these things! The little yellow guy from “Orion” (in actuality, there’s no such place) usually wound up being the villain because he had such a fierce-looking face. Doing his bidding was a very scary dragon-thing from Pluto–apparently armed with some kind of high-tech corn cob?–and, naturally, the spider-beetle. And it was usually the little Moon men, and the cricket-guy from Saturn, who had to save the day.

Alas, every one of my many specimens is long gone. It was just so hard to keep them in one piece. The big ones used to cost a quarter, the little ones a dime. I don’t dare ask what you’d have to pay for a spider-beetle these days.

Memory Lane: A TV Show That Got Lots of Us in Trouble

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Remember the old Winky Dink TV show, in the 1950s? Remember how we bugged our parents to send away for the Winky Dink Magic Kit, so we could put the Magic Screen over the TV screen and, with our special Magic Crayons, trace the arcane shapes and scrawls presented to us, until they came together to form a secret message?

Regrettably, a lot of us couldn’t wait for the Magic Kit, so we took ordinary non-magic crayons and scrawled all over the TV screen itself, producing a mass of gibberish that somehow never pleased our folks. It worked just fine, as long as you put up the Magic Screen first. But without the Magic Screen… well, live and learn.