Tag: my childhood

Memory Lane: My Erector Set

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Vintage Erector Set Gilbert No. 6 1/2 Metal Case Many Pieces Working Motor 1950s

One of the joys of staying home from school sick–well, not really all that sick–on a cold, rainy winter’s day was my very own Gilbert Erector Set, complete with electric motor. That’s the blue thing with the black band around it, directly over the little metal pump-house. At least I always thought of it as a pump-house, without exactly knowing what a pump-house was.

Ah! Take this into bed, open the metal box, and get busy building things! All kinds of things: whatever you could imagine. But this was an old-fashioned set, so you had a lot of screws and nuts and had to use a screwdriver and a wrench. And the pieces, instead of being shaped for you, were metal plates and girders in assorted sizes–plus wheels and gears, as needed. The motor was for making things turn, which it did quite handily. The pump-house had no obvious purpose, but no way would I have ever parted with it.

And it was amazing how the time went by, as you put together towers and improbable flying machines, enclosures for your plastic dinosaurs, and more. Before you knew it, it was suppertime.

Of course, you had to have an imagination, to do this. True, the set came with an instruction book for making this or that; but it was more fun to invent things that weren’t in the book. The best part was this: until you actually finished putting something together, it never looked like anything. Just a bunch of girders, big and little wheels, and screws and nuts. It all came out of your imagination, by way of your hands.

Erector sets still exist, for those who want them. You can still get old sets like mine on eBay, if you want them. I comfort myself with the thought that they wouldn’t be selling them unless someone were buying them.

Memory Lane: Sky King

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Remember this TV classic? Sky King, starring Kirby Grant, was one of the earliest TV Western hits, running from 1951-1954. They brought it back in syndication in 1959, which was when I saw it.

Sky King was billed as “America’s favorite flying cowboy.” Was there a lot of competition for that title? Anyhow, it was great fun, watching him chase down the bad guys in his airplane.

Ignore the earnest young woman trying to pass herself off as Peter Pan. Hey, a job is a job, right?

Memory Lane: Sandy Becker

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Growing up in the New York media market in the 1950s and 60s, you just can’t imagine it without Sandy Becker on TV. Which he was, from 1955 through 1968, mostly on WNEW.

This guy was a volcano of talent: nobody like him, anymore, to entertain little kids and young teens. Original puppets? Sandy not only performed them; he made them. Far-out characters? Sandy played them: Norton Nork, Hambone, the Big Professor, and the inscrutable Dr. Gesundheit. He also did cartoons.

Much of his show was live, and, alas, little of it was recorded. Much of it was ad-libbed. And you also heard a lot of Bert Kaempfert music: the theme for his daytime show, heard in this video, was That Happy Feeling. When he was on at night, it was Afrikaan Beat.

Kids’ TV in this era was overrun with talent. Along with Sandy, we had the immortal Soupy Sales and the incredible Chuck McCann, who gained national recognition by winning an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter… and his “Hi, guy! One shot and I’m good for the whole day!” deodorant commercials. Remember those? The protagonist was an ordinary gtuy who had to share a medicine cabinet with McCann’s weird character. But I digress.

Well, I can’t hear any of Bert Kaempfert’s music without thinking of Sandy Becker–gone, but lovingly remembered by probably millions of people who were kids then.

Let me see if I can get you just a tiny Hambone clip or something…

Memory Lane: ‘We Belong to a Mutual Admiration Society’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Going back, way back, all the way to 1956–remember this? Teresa Brewer had a big hit with We Belong to a Mutual Admiration Society. I was only a little shaver at the time–in fact, I didn’t shave at all–but I never quite forgot this song.

Dopes like to speak of the 1950s as a cultural dead zone: but check out this song. Actual music provided by actual musicians. Clever, witty lyrics. An absence of rancor.

I’m posting stuff like this for those of us who remember what it was like, and for those who are too young to have experienced it: to deliver the message that once upon a time, and not so long ago, things used to be a great deal better than they are now–and that it is, after all, possible to have a relatively clean popular culture that’s still a lot of fun.

Memory Lane: ‘A Swingin’ Safari’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Do you ever get a tune in your head from way, way down at the bottom of your memory jar, and then it drives you nuts because you can’t remember what it’s called or where you heard it?

I’ve had this one going round and round. I kept thinking it was from a TV game show, The Match Game, and it turned out I was right–it was the theme song for the first edition of The Match Game, 1962-69. And I used to hear this at my friend’s house after school, because his mother never missed the show.

Nothing like an old TV theme to take you back! Hey, where were you in ’62? I think Paul Lucas asked that once. Of course, he had us all behaving like teenage sitcom characters, which wouldn’t be even close to describing my pals and me. I have a vision of two or three of us just sitting down to play Mille Bornes when we heard this music coming from the living room.

Bert Kaempfert, Billy Vaughn, you made great music! Don’t let anybody say you didn’t.

Memory Lane: How Not to Build a Raft

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Image result for homemade raft

Hey, it’s cold outside today! Which for some obscure reason has raised up a summer memory.

Once upon a blistering hot summer day, my friends and I decided to build a raft, a la Huckleberry Finn. This we did at one of those places that’s since been paved out of existence: a sluggish little stream that flowed through woods and meadows that some of the people living nearby used as a dumping ground for junk.

But for us, the discovery of an old wooden pallet, and some discarded tires, this was a treasure trove. I had recently seen, in Popular Mechanics, a plan for building a nice raft buoyed up by a tire under each corner. Actually, the raft floated on inner tubes; but some dumb kid–me–could only remember “tires. Yeah, tires!”

So we toiled in the heat, using scrap lumber to strengthen the pallet, and laboriously attaching an old tire to each corner under the raft. This was going to be great! Like, who knew where this stream would take us, once we were afloat? And of course anyone who chanced to see us would be torn between applause and envy.  We were going to have adventures!

At great cost in labor and sweat, we wrestled our glorious new raft into the water.

And it sank. Immediately. The old tires instantly filled with water and dragged our raft straight to the bottom before any of us could even set foot on it.

We were mystified! Tires are supposed to float. These just made a horrible glug-glug-glug noise and went straight to Davy Jones’ Locker.

And that’s how I learned the difference between a tire and an inner tube.

It was fun, though–enormous fun while we were building the wretched thing, our minds on fire with imagination. And we did get it built, albeit on a false premise of design. Dreams that don’t come true are still dreams.

 

Memory Lane: Soldiers Path

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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: The Widow Next Door

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I grew up on a dead-end street–a dirt road at first, then coarse gravel, then fine gravel, and finally paved–adjacent to the neighborhood school and playground, the high school football field, and a wonderful big woods.

Let me focus in on our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Thomas, an elderly widow. I say “elderly” because I was just a little kid and she looked elderly to me. Probably she was younger than I am now.

Mrs. Thomas had a dog, Old Brownie, who had the run of the neighborhood because he could be trusted never to abuse his freedom, and who was always available to listen to your troubles with a sympathetic ear. She had a large, tree-less back yard, ideal for our football games, and a hedge out front that served us for a volleyball net

You’d think she’d be unnerved by all these kids playing on her property, but no–she liked it. If you got cold or wet and didn’t feel like going home just yet, she had you in to warm up with some cookies. And there were always a couple of us available to run an errand for her: we had a little grocery store just around the block, and Mrs. Thomas didn’t have a car. We kids shoveled her walk when it snowed, and one or another of our fathers mowed her lawn. I think it’s safe to say that everybody loved her.

It was a long time ago, and it was a good time: I’m here to tell you it was better than the times we live in now. Old Brownie would surely agree.

P.S.–Thanks to Marlene, whose eloquent comment yesterday inspired this.

(If this called up happy memories for you, and if readers are interested, I can expand this into a series of sketches. There’s just no way I can summon up the whole neighborhood in just one blog post.)