Tag: my childhood

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.

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.

Memory Lane: Lincoln Logs

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First you imagine it, and then you build it with your own hands–how cool is that?

Remember these? Good old Lincoln Logs. Many a fort and log cabin I built with these, most of which wound up being inhabited by toy dinosaurs. And the surprising thing is, they’re still around. You can still get them–a toy that encourages a child to use the ol’ imagination.

I’d encourage you to get your child a set of Lincoln Logs for Christmas, but I don’t want to be blamed when the kid refuses to play with them and just sits around doodling with some stupid video game.

Instead, get a set for yourself and then enjoy hours of relaxing fun, building things on your table or your floor. Maybe the kiddies will see it, and catch on. Sort of like the kids watching Tom Sawyer whitewash the fence (to dredge up another goody from the ancient past).

Hey, it’s worth a try–and if it doesn’t work, well, you’ll still have your own set of Lincoln Logs. Maybe you can build one of those little houses that someone will want to steal.

Memory Lane: DIY T.V. Repair

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Image result for images of old tv with vacuum tubes

One of the pleasures of my childhood was when the TV set would stop working and my father and my uncle would fix it, right there in our living room. Which meant they had to take it apart first.

I didn’t know this at the time, but my uncle was an inventor with lots of patents to his name. He worked for RCA, on the cutting edge of electronics. As for my father, there was no appliance in his home that he couldn’t take apart and put back together so it worked; and he could explain how everything worked, too. By contrast, I live among all kinds of hi-tech stuff without a clue as to how any of it works. It might as well be magic.

So my father and my uncle would take the TV apart, and its innards–mostly vacuum tubes, which I found endlessly fascinating, and it looked like there were hundreds of them–they would carefully spread out on the floor. Somehow they isolated the tubes that were probably at fault, and took them to the local hardware store to be tested on a tube-tester like the one pictured above. I loved that! It was even cooler than the machine that used to shake cans of paint. My daddy liked to take his kids along wherever he went, and I was always up for a trip to the hardware store.

Having learned which tubes needed to be replaced, they would buy them, come back home, and put the TV back together–and voila! Good as new.

I would give an awful lot to be able to watch them do that again.

Memory Lane: Cheap Junk You Could Order through Comic Books

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Ah! The treasures to be found in comic books! At least they looked like treasures, if you were ten years old in 1959.

This video shows you what some of those things turned out to be when you finally got them. So if you ever wondered if that “Learn to throw your voice!” trick really worked, here’s your chance to find out.

It reminds me of the “Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin!” that I badgered my folks into sending away for. You can to collect labels from a certain brain of maple syrup–which entailed buying a lot of syrup, because my brother had to have an Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin too.

Imagine our emotional devestation when the Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin turned out to be a crummy little cardboard box that looked like a crummy little cardboard box. Even a cardboard Davy Crockett wouldn’t be caught dead in there.

Oh, well, we’ve all grown up, we’re more sophisticated now. So now instead of an Authentic Davy Crockett Log Cabin made out of genuine cardboard, they pitch us Climate Change instead.

Memory Lane: Ramar of the Jungle

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If we might return, however briefly, to a more wholesome time, before they set up Satanist clubs in grammar schools, here’s one of those antique TV shows that set my imagination on fire when I was a kid.

Ramar of the Jungle, produced in 1953-54 and then in syndication for years, starred Jon Hall as medical missionary Dr. Tom Reyolds, and told of his adventures in the heart of Africa. Lots and lots of wildlife footage, which I could have sat and watched all day! Between that and Mark Trail comics, it’s no wonder I grew up to be Mr. Nature. Oh, and Ramar went to India, too, and had equally astonishing adventures there.

Do any of you out there remember this? Quite a few full episodes have been preserved on youtube, if you’ve got half an hour to spend on nostalgia.

And I hardly need add that my friends and I played “Ramar” a lot, making up our own adventures. Kids were still allowed to use their imaginations, back then.

I regret we haven’t used them more wisely when we got older.