Tag: my childhood

Memory Lane: Miller Dinosaurs

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Remember these? They’re some of the glorious wax dinosaurs produced in the 1950s by the Miller Company.

These have always been among my all-time favorite toys. Dinosaurs and long-lost giant mammals have always fascinated me, and I think these Miller toys from my childhood had a lot to do with that.

Amazingly, I still have a couple of them–a large Stegosaurs (left, in the picture) and a small one. It’s amazing because these toys were incredibly fragile. The sabertooth tiger’s tail, the Triceratops’ horns, the mammoth’s tusks–these would break off if you just looked at them too hard. The Brontosaur’s head had a penchant for snapping off, but you could always tape it back on with black electrical tape–and in any position you wanted, too.

Miller also produced wonderful Space Aliens, which I’ll visit some other time: I liked those, too.

Dinosaurs and mammoths and the like are not here anymore. All I know is that the God who created them pronounced them good and has the whole universe at His disposal.

Maybe someday He’ll show us where He’s put them. These are among the most radically cool examples of all God’s stuff, and I’d just love to see them.

Memory Lane: One Summer Night

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Grandma Moses’ barn dance–not quite what we had, but close enough

I wouldn’t want to let this summer pass away without one last visit to a summer long ago, a weekday summer night. Come on–let’s go to my house.

It’s hot up here in the bedrooms. Not many houses had air conditioning, back then. So my brother and sister and I climb onto the spare bed because it’s right under a window. Besides, there’s something interesting going on outside.

This window overlooks the neighborhood school and playground. It’s all expanded and paved over now: no more space. No more children playing here.

But this is a summer night, the sun is down, and adults and teens have gathered on the school blacktop for a dance. They do this once a week, or every two weeks, throughout the summer. You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, you do the Hokey-Pokey and you shake it all about: that’s what it’s all about… I remember them dancing to that. I remember people laughing. There’s enough light left so you can see them dancing, round and round, hand in hand. They’re still at it when the three of us get tired, and fall asleep with the faint music of the dance acting as a lullaby. They’ll all be gone home by 10 o’clock, but we’re just little kids and we can’t stay awake that long.

That’s the dance. Elsewhere, it’s fireflies and katydids, and maybe the people next door sitting on their porch with a cold drink or two, softly chatting.

There is nothing like this anymore: not around here, there isn’t. Maybe I dreamed it. No blacktop, no playground, no dancing, and no space for dancing anymore. No Hokey-Pokey. I have the feeling that if you suggested everybody get together for a dance at night, middle of the week, in a public space if you could find one… they’d think you had a screw loose somewhere.

But I’m here to tell you it was real.

Memory Lane: Crazy Ikes

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Wow! Remember this toy from the 1950s–Crazy Ikes? Snap the pieces together, and build just about anything you can imagine, including people and animals.

I have a fond memory of sitting outside on a summer day with my friend, David. He had Crazy Ikes, too, so we could pool our sets and build bigger and more complicated things. I was five years old, at most.

Keep your video games, and give me back my Crazy Ikes!

Sanity Break: Pet Chinchilla

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Did you ever see a cuter animal than this? It’s a pet chinchilla.

When I was a boy there was a fad for raising chinchillas at home, with the idea of getting rich by selling their pelts. I knew people who did this, but none of them got rich; and I’m glad that fad has petered out. People cheated themselves out of knowing and loving, and being loved by, some mighty appealing little critters.

100% Guaranteed X-ray Glasses!

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Image result for x-ray glasses

Remember these? “See through skin, see through clothes…!” They were one of many truly schlocky items advertised in the back pages of comic books.

Did you ever send away for any of those? My brother and I got these glasses once, and were greatly incensed when they turned out to be just these cardboard things that didn’t do anything at all, let alone see through anybody’s clothes.

I marvel that most of our government’s activities aren’t advertised in the back pages of 1950s comic books.

Memory Lane: ‘Tombstone Territory’

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Couldn’t resist this!

Every Saturday morning I used to run across the street to my friend Ellen’s house, and we’d watch this show: Tombstone Territory. I never forgot the theme music. (Psst! See if you can spot Leonard Nimoy before he grew his Vulcan ears.)

Well, that was the Bronze Age for you, tons and tons of Westerns on TV. I don’t even want to think about what the kids are watching now. Probably in today’s TV the marshal is the bad guy and the bank robbers and murderers are the good guys.

But what am I saying? Who’s even allowed to run over to a friend’s house anymore?

Come, Lord Jesus, come!

 

Memory Lane: ‘The Cool Ghoul’

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A lot of you are gonna say “Huh? What’s he talking about?” And some might even get a little cheesed off. But it isn’t everyone whose career extends over six decades; and Zacherley, “the Cool Ghoul”–horror movie host, disc jockey, presidential candidate–had the hottest show on TV when I was ten years old. And here he is at 94, still working. How I love to hear that trademark wacky laugh of his!

Come on down a little-traveled stretch of Memory Lane. No one ever came close to matching Zacherley, when it came to spoofing Grade-D horror movies: often imitated, never duplicated. Great singing voice, too. I still find myself, at odd and unexpected intervals, singing one of his ditties. “When a mummy meets a mummy, floating down the Nile/ Should a mummy greet a mummy with a nasty smile?”

It was all in fun, just a lot of innocent horsing around on TV, and my friends and I all loved it.

I wonder if it’s too late to get a copy of Zacherley’s short story anthology, Zacherley’s Vulture Stew.

A Bit of My Childhood Restored

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Image result for images of swan lake painting by muller kurzwelly

Many months ago I posted a little essay about this picture–Swan Lake, by Muller-Kurzwelly–that used to hang in our living room when I was a boy, and how I loved to look at it and imagine myself going to that place.

A very nice reader and her mother stumbled over my blog piece and realized they had that very picture in storage, and decided they wished me to have it.

The picture arrived this morning and now hangs on our living room wall.

Thank you, Chrissy, thank you, Dot, for giving me something that I never thought I’d see again.

To My Ma, on Mother’s Day

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You’re not here with us anymore, having moved to your mansion in our Father’s House; but there’s one thing I want to say to you that I never got around to saying while you were still present to hear it.

When I was a little boy, I was so proud of you for doing things that none of the other kids’ mothers, in our neighborhood, ever did–although they were as young as you were.

You rode a bike, helped teach me how to hit a softball, played chess and monopoly with kids and teenagers, played with us when we played volleyball on the street with Mrs. Thomas’ hedge for a net, and sometimes taught bunches of us kids how to play the games you played as a girl (“You may take three baby steps”–remember that one?). I could’ve burst my buttons, I thought it was so cool when you did all those things. I wish I’d thought to tell you so! But I’m afraid that was one of those things that children take for granted.

Nor do I forget how you watched U.N. meetings when they used to be on public TV, with me sitting with you on the sofa, and taught me all about the assorted world leaders and their countries, who they were and what they were trying to accomplish.

I think we both realized, after very many years, that if ever anybody was a chip off the old block, I was a chip off yours.

I would not be me if you had not been you.

P.S.–My wife wishes me to add that she and my mother were the best of friends: “And how many wives can say that about their mother-in-law?” It’s quite true, though. Nor will I ever forget my mother advising me, after she’d met Patty a few times, “Don’t you dare let that one get away!”