Last Minute Christmas Advice

 

There is no shortage of advice online at this time of year. There is gift advice, decorating advice and even advice on dealing with the annoying relatives at Christmas dinner. What we really need is a column where people can get last minute Christmas advice as they’re heading out the door on Christmas Eve.  It might look something like this: 

Dear LMS (Last Minute Santa) – I haven’t started my shopping yet and it’s Christmas Eve. What would you suggest I buy for my family?  Since time is short, I suggest you head to the nearest big box store and only buy items that come pre-wrapped in a holiday box. For dad, try the 18-hole desktop executive golf course. Consider the perfumed pencil set for mom and the Bluetooth slippers for your sister.

Dear LMS – We have a tradition of opening one gift on Christmas Eve after church. Last year my little brother got to open a cool gift while I opened a sweater?  Try this. Each family member can open one package or “steal” one that’s already been opened. This should lead to some quality family time.

Dear LMS – We want to bring a gift for our friends tonight but hesitate because we don’t want to embarrass them if they didn’t get a gift for us. What should we do?  Make the first move. Present the gifts to them at the door. This courteously gives the host time to wrap someone else’s gift or drive to a nearby drug store before they close.

Dear LMS – I will get home from college at about 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve. My old high school friends are having a really cool party tonight as well.  How long do I need to stay at my parent’s house before I can leave for the party?  There is a formula for calculating PQT (parent quality time).  Take the number of weeks it has been since you were last home and multiply times five to get the proper number of minutes. For example, if you saw them at Thanksgiving, you need to make small talk for at least 20 minutes. Showers don’t qualify as parent quality time.

Dear LMS – My kids want Santa to bring them a drone, an Ipad and a Playstation 5. Santa is magical they say so he should be able to bring anything they ask for. Unfortunately, my bank account is not magical. Any advice would be helpful. It’s about time you got some credit here.  Tell them that mommy and daddy send money to Santa on April 15 every year.  Based on how big that check is, Santa decides what he can bring. Show them the cancelled check from last year and explain that IRS stands for I (love) Rudolph & Santa.

Dear LMS – My older sister and her boyfriend are great people but they are lousy cooks. It’s our turn to go to their home for Christmas and we dread it. What would you do? Instead of the traditional hostess gift, bring a round roast with mashed potatoes and some mixed vegetables. Explain that you are both are on a strict diet.

Dear LMS – I will cook for hours tomorrow while my family watches football all day. They will then devour the meal in 15 minutes and return to the TV room. Is there anything I can do?   I would start with a 7-course meal that takes an hour to serve. Next cut the cable TV line in the yard and set all of the DVR’s in the house to record the Little House On The Prairie holiday marathon.

 

Merry Christmas to our readers.  Send column suggestions and comments to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.

Hanging Onto Halloween

 

 Halloween may be this nation’s second most popular holiday, but I won’t be trick or treating this year. My biggest concern this week is how much candy to buy.  In recent years, that question could also be “how much candy do I want to eat in early November?”

 Each year we get less and less trick or treaters and I eat more Kit-Kats.  Ironically, I wouldn’t buy a ten pound bag of chocolates any other time of the year but in mid-October I get this urge to splurge.  I always buy the candy that I like most because I know that’s what kids will like as well.  What would be the point I buying a giant bag of Smarties if I have to eat them for weeks after Halloween.

Parents apparently had few concerns about their children walking all over town asking total strangers for candy in the 1960’s. If it is our nation’s second most popular holiday, what happened to Halloween? 

Some things are better if we don’t try to understand them.  Twinkies would fall into that category and so would Halloween.  Halloween is this country’s second most popular holiday yet most people on the street have no idea what it’s all about. 

The full history of Halloween is a colorful one.  The holiday’s origins actually go back 2,000 years to Celtic harvest festivals and superstitions.  They celebrated Samhain (sow-in) on the night of October 31 when ghosts of the dead where believed to return to earth causing trouble and damaging the community’s food supply.  Romans added their own twist to the holiday and Christians established a holy day called All Saints Day or All-Hallows Day on November 1. All-Hallows Eve gradually became Halloween according to legend.

Somewhere along the timeline, candy corn was created and an American tradition was born. You don’t have to go back 2,000 years to see how the holiday has changed.  Just ask any 40+ adult and they will describe in detail how “the good old days” of Halloween are gone forever. 

My friends and I literally knocked on hundreds of doors and filled one or more paper grocery bags with candy bars – full size of course. We would return to stack our bounty by brand and swap candy bars as though we were trading wheat futures.

As we grew older and roamed on our own, the danger didn’t come from strangers - it came from the older neighborhood boys.  Tribute was often paid in candy bars to teenagers too old or lazy to trick or treat themselves.

 Halloween has always been a weird holiday for kids.  They get to beg from strangers, eat gross amounts of candy and stay out late on a school night.  Try that on March 31 and your kids will get picked up for creating a disturbance. Halloween also differs from other holidays because it often falls on a school day.  Is there a longer school day for kids or teachers than October 31^st?

Of course the big attraction of Halloween was always the costume. My earliest memories are of cowboy vests and chaps sewn from hokey 1950’s Simplicity patterns. Mom finally broke down and bought me the cheap silk Superman costume with the cheaper mask and painful elastic band.  As my friends and I grew older, originality was no longer a requirement.  We were either football players, hobos or guys in a black t-shirts with scary masks. For a short time, Halloween was just too much fun to miss but too cool to participate in. We halfheartedly put together “costumes” and basically hung out at the neighborhood park causing mischief and hoping girls might come by.  They didn’t. 

These days Halloween has lost some of its luster. More homes than ever turn their porch lights off, candy bars keep shrinking and legitimate safety concerns keep kids from roaming far and wide.     

Still, there’s plenty of fun to go around on Halloween and I hope your kids have as much fun as we did when the sun sets on Monday night.

A True Crayon Experience

 

I found some crayons at The Shops at Willowbend today.  I was heading to another store but was drawn into the Crayola store. More specifically, I was drawn in by the comforting smell of thousands (tens of thousands?) of fresh Crayola crayons.

A lot has changed since old folks like me were little kids. Wooden Lincoln Logs are now made of plastic, they put a talking chip in GI Joe action figures and even outlawed lawn darts. What they haven’t changed is the look and the smell of crayons. 

Crack a yellow and green box of 8 or better yet – 64 crayons and you will be transported back to that first week of school in the elementary grade of your choice.  

Crayons for children were first created in 1903 by the Binney and Smith Company.  The two cousins began producing slate pencils for schools around 1900. They next created dustless chalk and one year later perfected the non-toxic and colorful Crayola Crayons. Many have tried but no company has come close to competing with Crayola.  

The Crayola store at Willowbend is part of the Crayola Experience – an interactive crayon playland in the mall that looks like a fun way to kill a winter afternoon with the grandkids.  For now, I settled for browsing the attached store which had every imaginable variation of Crayola product.

The store showpiece is an entire wall of fresh crayons where customers can pick out their favorites and create their own box set. I’m sure it was the aroma of those open-air crayons that drew me in. Every imaginable color was displayed with the date the color was “born.”  Over the years, many new colors have been introduced while others have been retired but here they all were for the picking. 

I found three old “crayon friends” along the wall whose names brought back coloring book memories: Brick Red, Cornflower and Periwinkle.  I think it was the names more than the colors that I remember. Red, blue and purple just don’t have the same allure to a budding artist.

It’s not just the smell or the names that has made crayons so popular. Coloring is one of the first activities we learn to do on our own. A toddler or an eight-year-old can get satisfaction from putting a crayon to page. They choose the color, they pick the subject and create their own refrigerator masterpieces with a little stick of wax.  Coloring is much more than the busy work some parents and teachers think. It’s a license to create within or outside the lines. 

Another reason might be the billions of crayons Crayola drops on the world each year.  The company estimates that it produces 12 million crayons per day which rounds out to about 3 billion per year. That’s a lot of crayons!

I took my three old “crayon friends” home for a quarter each. They now live in my desk where I can open the drawer and catch a whiff of crayons instead of that stinky Elmer’s Glue. 

Send your crayon memories to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com

 

45 Labels Tell The Story

 

   Buried deep in my old stereo cabinet is a tattered red portfolio full of 45 rpm records. Each page is a sleeve that holds one record with a 3” hole to reveal  a colorful label.

   Thumbing through the book I can name almost every record without reading the labels because those labels are so familiar.  The odds are good that orange and yellow swirls on a Capitol Record label means Beatles or Beach Boys.  The solid red Columbia label belongs to my oldest record: The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. The record is completely unplayable but I can’t let it go.

   The light blue pattern signaled the Rolling Stones on London records and the solid blue label with the white whale was undeniably Happy Together by the Turtles.

  Something I never realized about record labels was how often they changed in the early days of rock and roll.  The most striking example was Elvis Presley who began his career on the colorful Sun label but hit his stride with the black label of RCA Victor Records. RCA was one of the five major labels in the 50’s along Decca, Columbia, Capitol and Mercury Records.

   Beyond the big ones were hundreds of small labels owned by companies that came and went and merged throughout the early 1960’s.  Anyone who owned a stack of 45’s will remember some of the more familiar ones like Bell (Box Tops, Delfonics), Roulette (Tommy James), Dot (Pat Boone), and Scepter (BJ Thomas).

   Teenage record buyers weren’t all that concerned about who owned what but many new labels in the 1960’s were derived from bigger companies.  Columbia Records owned Colpix (later Colgems) the familiar label for The Monkees.   Atlantic or Atco owned Stax Records and Kama Sutra Records (Lovin Spoonful) merged with Buddah (Melanie).

   The 1960’s ended with many of the same big companies dominating record sales although Motown, MCA and the Beatles’ Apple Records gave them all a run for the money.

   I didn’t start this column intending to lecture on record label history. I wanted to say that thumbing through the 45’s was like visiting with some old friends. These guys were played over and over and over again on a cheap phonograph that quickly gave them a scratchy background noise.

   I asked for the record “album” one Christmas so that I could haul my collection of singles around to friend’s houses. We would sit and play take turns playing the new ones or if mom allowed, we would stack them on the grownup’s phonograph.

   While the 45’s were gradually phased out by lps in the 1970’s we continued to have listening sessions in basements and attics and later dorm rooms. I can tell you where I was when I first heard many of the classic rock albums that now fill my IPOD.

   Simply listening to a new recording is something that has been lost with the advent of digital music and headphones.  Listening to a new song is more of a personal experience in earphones or the car although accessibility to music has never been greater.

   My meager 45 rpm collection included 24 records.  Today my IPOD has over 10,000 songs inside of it, including files for every 45 in that old collection. I’d love it if I could have some friends over and we could play them all. They just don’t seem to have the time.  I understand though. According to I-Tunes, my collection is 23.1 days long. 

Celebrity Cruising In The Hometown

 

While visiting my old friend Tom Casey this past week, the name of Connie Francis came up.  The question was ‘where in our hometown of Bloomfield, New Jersey did she live for several years.”  

 

Old time music fans already know that Connie Francis was among the most popular singers in the country about 60 years ago. Let’s call her the Katy Perry of 1960.  Francis actually grew up in an Italian section of nearby Newark and later moved to Belleville, where she graduated high school.  The family then moved “up” to Bloomfield.  To complete the story, her family later moved further “up” to the exclusive community of Essex Fells.  She got her big break in 1958 on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand show.  She was the first woman to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and went on to sell over 100 million records worldwide.

 

Our discussion focused on Bloomfield though. Was it Beverly Road or Huck Road that she lived on? Neither of us really cared but it was out there - kind of like searching for the Bat cave’s actual street address.  A thorough web search turned up no clues for her address but she definitely lived in the neighborhood. 

 

It was after posting this important question on the “I Grew Up In Bloomfield” Facebook page that I realized how much people enjoy connections to celebrities.

 

“She went to the prom with a family friend,” said one post.  Another reader remembered Connie coming to her grandmother’s apartment building to see her dressmaker, Mrs. Zuckerman.  “My friends and I walked by their house and saw the garage had racks and racks of clothing. They also built a bomb shelter while they were there.” Post after post spoke kindly of interactions with the girl who put Stupid Cupid and Who’s Sorry Now on the pop charts.  

 

I never saw her in person but pointed out her former house many times. Today I realized I was pointing out the wrong house all those years. The Facebook crew straightened us both out – she lived on Dalebrook Road, just around the corner. 

 

Connie was probably not there in 1960 but that didn’t stop people from walking or driving by.  There is something fascinating and a little embarrassing about driving up to a celebrity home when the famous people no longer live there - or never did in my case. 

 

They didn’t have to fear stalkers and would come out to greet fans. One post said that Connie’s family gave out memorabilia instead of candy on Halloween.  Those are the fun stories about hometown kids who made it big. Many smaller towns and neighborhood fans tell similar tales of celebrities who walked the same streets.

 

One final post caught me by surprise.  A grammar school classmate, Bob Fredette, and his family lived in the Francis house when they moved out in the 1960’s.  The 1950’s split level (now affectionately called Mid-Century Modern I guess), still had the bomb shelter and probably still had Connie Francis fans cruising by now and then. 

 

One of those celebrity seekers was me but the Fredette’s had no worries there.  I was incorrectly showing off a house a block away.  

How Did People Survive Before AC?

This heat is finally getting to me.  I watched a western the other night and could only think about how hot is must have been for them cowboys.  Then I flipped over to a History Channel piece on the Crusades. I imagined that a guy in a suit of armor fighting in 1147 would fry like a corn dog walking across the desert. So, I turned off the television and continued my own crusade to save plants that weren’t meant to survive weeks of 100+ temperatures.

Even the most optimistic Texans must admit that it is exceptionally hot this summer. We have survived about 38 days of 100+ days so far and will hopefully not break the record of 71 days set in 2011 or 69 scorching days in 1980.  Speaking of 1980, it was a doozie. The local record of 113 degrees was set that summer on June 26. There were also 42 consecutive days of 100+ degree days in 1980. For those who revel in the misery of others, the hottest temperature ever recorded in Texas was 120 degrees in Monahans in 1994.

All this talk about heat begs the question “how did people survive in Texas before air conditioning?”  Cultures have been surviving in hot climates for thousands of years and early Texans adopted many of the same strategies they used.

Homes were built with thick walls to keep the heat out and high ceilings to let the heat rise. They were also positioned so that breezes could pass through open windows and hallways.  Folks often slept outdoors or on porches during the heat of summer. One cowboy trick that some might question was soaking their sheets in cool water before bedtime.

Once electricity was added to the equation, fans helped millions survive those hot nights.  The whirring of fans was constant in homes and hotel rooms in the summer months. Fans also led to creative inventions that cooled the air. The most popular was the swamp cooler. The air conditioner was invented in 1902 but was considered too expensive for regular folks until the early 1960’s.  In the meantime, blowing a fan across water was a quick way to drop the temperature and recreate swamp humidity in your home.

When all else failed, there was always the movies – at least in the 20^th Century. The first air-conditioned theater was in Times Square (NYC) in 1925. The head of Paramount Pictures, Adolph Zukor, was in the audience and quickly realized the potential. People flocked to theaters for good and bad movies to enjoy a few hours of popcorn and cool breezes. The banner “cooled by refrigeration” became more important than the movie title.

Central air conditioning was built into most new homes starting in the 1960’s but those with older homes like ours settled for room units that blasted cold air and shook the walls. We had one wall unit that cooled our downstairs. Unfortunately, we slept upstairs. On the hottest days though, sleeping bags were rolled out and the Carroll family camped out for the heat wave in the dining room just like the cowboys – sort of.

Instead of complaining about the heat this week, take time to appreciate the struggles your parents and generations before them faced in the Texas heat. Then head to nearest movie theater for some popcorn and cool breezes.

Send your beat the heat stores to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.

Did I See Your Father At The Concert

 

Have you ever paused and tried to imagine what your parents were doing at the same age?  

Last Friday night I tried to imagine them at the Brian Wilson / Chicago concert we were sweating through at the Dos Equis Pavilion in Dallas. It was an enjoyable outdoor show held in intolerable heat. The audience was full of 50 and 60 somethings with a sprinkling of 70 somethings to see Brian Wilson – who turned 80 this week.

The whole affair reminded me of an old Mad Magazine cartoon that showed the 50^th Woodstock Festival reunion attendees with canes and walkers.  It was a joke to the teenage readers in 1970 but it hit home Friday night as fans sang along with Beach Boys tunes that were blaring out of their transistor radios in 1963. Maybe the concert should have been billed as the Medicare Advantage Tour. 

I can’t poke too much at the crowd since I am a card-carrying member of the Medicare generation myself.   I like all sorts of live music but especially enjoy classic rock shows. I checked off a big one last November with the Rolling Stones show in Las Vegas. There was a predictable number of grey-haired ponytails but the surprise to me was the large number of kids/teens in the audience. Many were accompanied by their parents – or grandparents, who were anxious to show them what a big rock show was all about. The Rolling Stones did not disappoint and put on a great performance. Did I mention Mick Jagger turns 79 next month?

So, getting back to my parents…I could not imagine them attending any concert, even Frank Sinatra, at this age.  Instead, I could imagine my father driving us to Roosevelt Stadium (NJ) for a concert and patiently waiting in the car to drive us home. “Come on inside dad, Pink Floyd is a really cool band – you should check them out!”  That wasn’t going to happen.

My parents weren’t prudes and accepted the fact that our music wasn’t their music. They also appreciated the comfort of a recliner and a television over big noise and big crowds. Concerts were not common in the 1930’s when my parent’s taste’s for music were being formed. It was the depression and large venues didn’t exist outside of the major cities. Big bands like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller dominated the radio but they usually performed in ballroom settings, not major concert halls.  The big guys like Frank and Elvis and the Beatles took it to a new level.  Tens of thousands of people wanted to see them perform and concert mania was born.

 I’ve taken my kids and kids in-law to classic rock concerts.  In turn they have invited me to their shows and still do.  Some are hits and some are misses.  I imagine the kids would say the same thing but at least we all have a better understanding of what’s going through those earbuds.  Rock on dad.

Send comments to Flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.

Who Or What Was Alvis Stalwart

 

  Who or what was Alvis Stalwart?  For the price of 50 cents, I was willing to find out. That was the price of a Matchbox car in 1966 when the Alvis Stalwart was first introduced to American kids.

   The name was fittingly strange for a vehicle that sported six wheels and looked like a prop from Lost In Space.  I never cared to research the name – it probably wasn’t in the library card catalog anyway.

   Fast forward 53 years and I came across a Facebook group dedicated to diecast metal cars.  I pulled out my childhood Matchbox car collection for a quick photo.  After all, here was a group - possibly the only group, that actually cared what was in the box. 

   Out popped weird named vehicles like the Mercedes Unimog, the Iso Griffo and of course the Alvis Stalwart.  It took me 53 years but finally I learned the origin of the Alvis Stalwart.

   Wikipedia describes the Stalwart as a highly mobile amphibious military truck built by Alvis that served the British Army from 1966 until 1992.  British servicemen apparently called it a Stolly. 

   My miniature Matchbox version was labeled BP Exploration to probably misdirect Russian spies who looked to steal the design.

   There is no single toy from my childhood that consumed more of my time and gave me greater pleasure than my collection of Matchbox cars that were stamped “Made in England by Lesney.”

   Lesney Products was an industrial die casting company founded by Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith in 1947. The pair began experimenting with die cast toys and created the first toy under the Matchbox name in 1953.  A Lesney co-owner named Jack Odell designed a miniature car for his daughter because her school only allowed children to bring toys that could fit inside a matchbox. The rest is history as they say.  

    Because each model had to fit in a matchbox, the idea was born to sell the models in replica matchboxes. For many years that followed, the name Matchbox was synonymous with die cast cars.

   Competition from Mattel’s Hot Wheels cars seriously cut into Lesney’s business in the late 1960’sand they were eventually bought out by their old rival Mattel in 1996.

   One thing that made Matchbox cars special was the price.  For fifty cents, a kid could buy a toy with his/her own money that lasted more than an afternoon. 

   I hauled my cars in their special Matchbox case for sleepovers and vacations frequently scanning the free catalogs for new models.  These days a mint condition catalog is worth more than the cars but I never saw them as an investment.

   Instead, they were just comfortable old “friends” that had personalities and helped me fill hours of my childhood and then hours of my son’s childhood.

   My photo on Facebook drew 130 likes from the die-cast group last week and prompted several others to pull their collections out of the closet.  I wonder if there was an Alvis Stalwart was among them.

Cigarette Jingles Taste Better & Last Longer

 

I got a tune stuck in my head the other day.  It was the Winston cigarette jingle: Winston tastes good like a (clap clap…).  If you’re over 60, you know how it ends. If you fit the demographic, you could also complete these followings phrases:  LSMFT mean…, come on over to the L&M … and Tarryton smokers would rather fight than…  How did you do?

Despite the obvious dangers of smoking, cigarette smoking and commercials were a part of our lives in the 1950’s and 60’s. Smoking has been around much longer but it became a popular trend for men after World War I and for women in the 1920’s.  Cigarette advertising in national magazines helped make smoking glamorous and sophisticated.  It also helped turn about 42% of the nation’s adults into smokers by the late 1940’s.

Some of the earliest TV shows were sponsored by tobacco companies and cigarette ads began to dominate the airwaves within ten years.  A popular 1950’s trend was using celebrities to pitch cigarettes as part of the show. Desi Arnaz, Jedd Clampett (Buddy Ebsen) and even Fred Flinstone pitched cigarettes during their shows.

Search YouTube and you will find hundreds of cigarette commercials. Among the most popular ones are the Marlboro Man commercials that used the Magnificent Seven theme song. Of course, it’s hard to stop humming the Kent tune: to a colonel - it’s a regiment, to a smoker - it’s a Kent. The only way to stop humming the Kent song is to whistle the opening lines of this one.   You can take Salem out of the country but… you can’t take the country out of Salem.  For a smoking commercial, it makes no sense but that doesn’t stop you from whistling along.

The jingles were catchy but the ad copy bordered on ridiculous. For example, did you know that “in a national survey of doctors in all medical fields, it was found that more doctors smoked Camels than any other cigarette.”   I learned that dentists recommended Viceroy cigarettes for a fresher breath and a medical report proved conclusively that Phillip Morris cigarettes helped eliminate throat irritation and scratchiness.

Chesterfields had “man sized satisfaction” while Virginia Slims reminded women “you’ve come a long way baby.”  Lucky Strike encouraged smokers to “reach for a Lucky when tempted to overindulge.”  A particularly offensive campaign used babies to push Marlboros. “Gee mom, you sure enjoy your Marlboro.”  Prior to his terms as president, Ronald Reagan pitched Pall Mall cigarettes by testifying that Pall Mall has a “he-man aroma that wows the ladies and makes a difference for any studly guy.”

A public report in 1952 first linked cigarette smoking to cancer but major anti-smoking campaigns didn’t show up for another 10+ years. Broadcasters were required to run one anti-smoking ad for every three cigarette in the late 1960’s. Richard Nixon, a heavy pipe smoker, reluctantly signed legislation to end  cigarette ads on TV in 1971. Ironically, the move freed tobacco companies to put more money in print advertising and anti-smoking ads disappeared from television.

Knowing what we do about the harms of smoking, it’s hard to look at smoking ads nostalgically but there is little harm in humming along with the Marlboro Man.

Share your jingle memories at flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.

Remembering Darkroom Days and Nights

 

   The term for today is disruptive technology. It means that new technology changes or disrupts what we know.  Take the typewriter, for example. No nostalgia can convince us to give up our computer keyboards and bring back the white-out correction fluid. The personal computer slowly killed the typewriter and not many people put up a fight.

   The same is true in photography. Digital cameras gradually improved year by year and before we realized it, our film cameras were obsolete. If you don’t believe me, try finding a roll of film.  In the days of Plus-X and Kodachrome, I carried a dozen rolls of film on vacation. I now have just one roll in the familiar plastic film container to remember “the good old days.”

   The good old days for me started in 1970 when I received a Kodak Instamatic Camera with flashcube for Christmas. Kodak introduced the auto loading camera in 1963 and sold 50 million of them by 1970.  The cost of film and processing slowed me down but I fell in love with photography.  My first official photography role was as the Boy Scout Troop 22 photographer – a title I claimed after earning the prestigious photography merit badge.

   A few years later I joined the high school yearbook staff and was introduced to “real” film cameras that our private school could afford. There was the Leica camera that may have come home with a GI from WWII and an ancient Yashica-Mat format camera that may have previously been used by Jimmy Olsen.

   The cameras were unimportant. The fun was working in the darkroom.  I logged hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours in darkrooms through high school, college and later work. Like a chain smoker, I carried the strong smell of chemicals like D-76, Dektol and acetic acid on my fingertips and clothes everyday.  Darkroom work was rewarding and fun but inefficient. 

   Franchises like Fotomat began offering low cost film processing and soon you could drop off your film at Target, shop and pick up your prints on the way out. The darkroom days were numbered but not dead until the digital camera appeared. Invented in 1975, digital camera sales boomed in the late 1990’s when the quality caught up with standard film cameras and costs came down.

   I was reminded of those good old darkroom days this past week when I came across “vintage darkroom equipment” listed on Ebay.  For only $50 you could get an enlarger, reels, trays, and a snappy red light.  That is a bargain if you are interested in taking up photo processing as a hobby. Vinyl records are making a comeback – maybe darkrooms are next.  The whole thing is a bit depressing when I see my old darkroom equipment listed as vintage.

   My darkroom days are over but I have boxes of old black and white prints to remind me of those many afternoons in the high school darkroom.  Today, no darkroom skills are needed to process smart phone pictures.  People can literally shoot, edit and send high quality photos with one finger and that finger won’t be stained with photo chemicals. Now that’s progress.

Prom Memories Don't Last But Prom Photos Do

 There are headline events we have all experienced that leave a mark on our lives. The high school prom is not one of them.

For more than 1000 Allen High School seniors, the senior prom at Southfork Ranch last month was hopefully a memorable evening and another check box on the road to graduation.

Senior proms are a big deal - for at least a month. A month later, graduation takes top billing and the prom dresses head to the back of the closet.

I can’t make light of proms because they were a big deal for me as well. Our boys only parochial high school rarely hosted mixed social events so I willingly volunteered for the Essex Catholic junior prom committee in 1973.

Under the watchful eye of Brother Lapa, crepe paper selections were made, centerpieces were planned and most importantly, a theme was chosen.  The Moody Blues hit “Nights In White Satin” would set the mood for this gala event, which was held in the high school ballroom (yes the ballroom).

I invited Eva Marie, a childhood friend. I bought some dress bell bottoms at the mall and secured transportation.  Unfortunately, I was a full six months short of New Jersey’s 17-year-old driving age so my father graciously drove us. We awkwardly sat in the back seat with plenty of space in between. That set the tone for the evening as we awkwardly danced under the crepe paper canopy. We are still friends but that magical night rarely comes up in conversation.

One month later, I attended the St Vincent’s Academy junior prom with a blind date. As a favor to a friend, I accompanied her friend Mary and sat in the backseat of my friend Bill’s car with plenty of space in between.  It wasn’t a romantic evening - it was just a fancy high school dance very closely supervised by nuns.

A steady girlfriend, Patrice, and a driver’s license made senior prom much more entertaining.  Unlike recent events, proms in “the old days” always included dinner, live music and dancing.  Other than a tux rental and a corsage, the price was fixed. I believe my 1974 prom was $40 per couple. A fancy dinner, limo, tux, prom ticket and after prom event might set a high schooler back $500+.

A group of us had a great time and then aimlessly drove my father’s car all night long. We finished off with a trip to one of New Jersey’s famous all-night diners in our prom attire.  Unfortunately, the joy of an all-night prom was spoiled by my father who was waiting to drive to work.  Remember the days of one car families and no cell phones? 

It was fun. We got dressed up, had a fancy dinner and stayed out all night just like adults. The only lasting memory from that long evening are the photos we had taken.

Four weeks later we were caught up in summer jobs, packing for college and looking ahead. Prom was already reduced to a few photos.  Now, 48 years later, Patrice and I are still friends but I admit the topic of our prom doesn’t come up often, except for the tuxes. What were we thinking?

 

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Fifty Year Old Music Still Rocks

 

What music were you listening to fifty years ago.  If you’re about my age, your stack of rock albums might have included Eat a Peach (Allman Brothers), Exile on Main Street (Rolling Stones) and Foxtrot  (Genesis).

If you preferred your music on the lighter side you probably owned Honky Chateau (Elton John), Catch Bull at Four (Cat Stevens) and Harvest (Neil Young).   The top country album in 1972 was Will the Circle Be Unbroken by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  Good Hearted Woman (Waylon Jennings) and Let Me Tell You A Song (Merle Haggard) followed on the top selling lp list.

Fifty years sounds like a long time ago but the music from 1972 is still in circulation and listeners of a certain age have their ITunes and Spotify playlists loaded with “oldies” from the seventies.

The term oldies is hard to define.  Top 40 radio station programmers in the 1970’s considered any music made between the early 1950’s and mid 60’s to be oldies.  Using that same standard, Adele’s Rolling in the Deep and Katy Perry’s Fireworks are now officially oldies.

The classic 1972 tune American Pie often pops up on playlists fifty years later.  Can you imagine listening to the radio in 1972 and hearing fifty-year-old music?  The top artists of 1922 included Al Jolson, Fanny Brice and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. The answer to the question is “no way would you hear Al Jolson on a popular radio station in 1972.”

The fact is that old music is more popular now than ever before.  A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine reported that old songs represent 70% of the U.S. music market and that number is increasing. The article went on to say that vinyl recordings are now outselling CD’s with a large piece of those vinyl sales in reissues of “old” artists and albums.

I would like to arrogantly declare that old music – my music – is better and that’s why it sells more. Of course, it’s not that simple.  New music still remains very popular with young people but it doesn’t have much of a shelf life.  Younger listeners want to hear new songs at dance clubs and on pop radio stations but they don’t stop by the record store or the App Store to buy that new music.  They are more content to accept the playlist that streams over their car speakers.

In contrast, I bought Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album in 1973. I then bought the 8-track in 1974 and the cassette in 1977. I had to have the pure compact disc version in 1982 and eventually downloaded it from ITunes in 2002.  Now I just yell “Hey Google play Dark Side of the Moon” and it happens. How cool is that?

I think much of the old music has survived because it is also good music. Old folks like me appreciate their quality and younger folks might discover their parents listened to some pretty cool music when they were in high school.

That doesn’t mean all 1972 music was good.  In the top five records of the year, we see Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling, Michael Jackson’s Ben and Melanie’s epic Brand New Key.  You just don’t hear those classics much anymore although I’m still waiting for release of the ten album Melanie retrospective. Maybe next year.

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Quarantine Like Its 1969

I found myself building a car model last weekend.  It was raining and I found a half-built ’69 Dodge Dart Revell model in my closet. It was started about 15 years ago on a rainy day by my daughter and me.  It stopped raining, she lost interest and we literally forgot about it.

So here I was on COVID day twenty-eight struggling to connect an exhaust system to a manifold. I came to the same conclusion I did when I was 12.  This pretend driver will never need an exhaust system.  I will just leave it out.  With that fast track approach, I finished the model in about two hours.  However, I pity the first person who tries to drive a car with no suspension or exhaust.

Like many people, the thought of staying at home for weeks at a time didn’t seem so bad with an Ipad and a laptop. What I hadn’t anticipated was spending many hours each day in Zoom calls on that laptop or answering emails on that Ipad.  I have become literally burned out on my own technology.

The year that real ’69 Dodge Dart first hit the streets I turned 13 years old. When my friends Gary and Bill were on vacation or otherwise occupied, I was trapped into entertaining myself at home – alone – with no technology.  Can you imagine?

TV wasn’t an option during the day and any suggestion that I had nothing to do might lead to some household chores. So, I disappeared to my attic or basement and kept busy.  I was too old for Matchbox cars so I might set up the HO scale slot cars for two hours.  Then I would play with them for maybe fifteen minutes and spend an hour taking them down.

I might build a tower of baseball cards at the bottom of the stairs and kill time flipping cards down the stairs to destroy it. I could update my stamp collection with the packets of stamps that kept arriving by mail.  I considered reading the latest issue of Mad Magazine and Sports Illustrated as an intellectual activity, but my favorite solo activity was building models.

An entire afternoon could be pleasantly consumed for only $2.99 and some paint.  I was never very good at building them, but the challenge was there. It was great.

Just like Buzz and Woody in Toy Story, my models eventually got boxed up and stashed in the basement.  Years later, after we got married, decisions had to be made about how much of my “stuff” was coming with us and how much would become junk.  

I didn’t put up a fight over the models.  They would not match our newlywed décor.  I stacked them up, shot some photographs and dropped the box in the trash.  It was not an emotional moment, but I do remember thinking about all those quiet, rainy afternoons they represented.

I was right back there last weekend with that ’69 Dart.  It was a nice place to be and for a while. Being quarantined like it’s 1969 wasn’t so bad.

Remembering Fish Friday For The Wrong Reason

 

I was never a big fan of fish.  As a kid in a Catholic home, I assumed eating fish during the Lenten season was a form of penance.  My mother would probably have agreed with that– but not about eating the fish. The penance for her was getting her kids to eat fish.

Catholics have abstained from eating meat on Fridays since the earliest times. The reasons may have changed over the centuries but the practice remains.  In the early days, forgoing meat was forgoing a luxury. This was especially true in the Middle East, where meat was scarce and fish was plentiful.  Ironically, fish is now the luxury and meat is more or less affordable. 

The tradition of abstaining from meat never required one to eat fish.  That memo never reached our home so every Friday during Lent we had fish.  Of course, the 1960’s were the peak of processed foods.  We never had fresh fish but the canned tuna and salmon harvest in our home was plentiful.

Tuna was the preferred choice for my brother and I. Thank goodness for Chicken of the Sea. It somehow tasted less like fish. Fortunately, I never made the connection between their logo – a mermaid - and the can of fish.  Even so, mom had to disguise the fish as tuna casserole with cream sauce and peas.  Apparently, this most popular family dish was created by Campbells Soup in the 1940s although fish parts in crème sauce was an old 1800’s dish called cod a la bechamel.

Salmon came straight from the can in patties much like SpongeBob’s crabby patties. The best part of salmon cakes was the potato pancakes mom served with them.  The “pancakes” were served with applesauce. For a kid who gagged on salmon, two full tablespoons of applesauce helped the salmon go down.

Fish sticks could also be consumed with a generous amount of catsup or mashed potatoes. General Foods introduced fish sticks in 1953 under their Birdseye brand. They were part of a rectangular food stick line that included chicken sticks, ham sticks, veal sticks and dried lima bean sticks – egad. Only fish sticks survived and became the preferred choice in many countries where the quality of fish was suspect. Fish sticks also solved a bigger problem. Fishing technology after WWII led companies to overfish. To keep from spoiling, the extra fish was processed into frozen sticks - Yum.

Abstaining from meat on Fridays for Catholics became optional in 1966 when U.S. Bishops allowed members to replace the abstinence with other forms of penance. There was little argument from our household.  Fish Fridays soon became Pizza Fridays and all was good with the world. I haven’t eaten a salmon cake since.

It was never about fish of course. It was about abstaining from something we desire to focus our thoughts on more important things. It’s a big month for that as Christians prepare for Easter, Jews celebrate Passover and Muslims prepare for Eid al-Fitr, a feast that follows one month of fasting and reflection. Happy celebrations to all our Allen neighbors.

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Rediscovering The Wonder and Torment of Plastic Models

 

   This time will be different.  I’m a grownup and I know how to follow directions.

   With that in mind, I have decided to tackle one of my childhood demons – the 1:25 scale plastic car model.  After all, how hard can it be to finish building a level 2 plastic car model?  The answer depends on how you would define the word finish.

   I built a fleet of car models in my life.  It was a boredom buster for my friends and I in the days before video games. We would ride bikes to the 5 and 10 (cent) store and pick out a cool model along with a few jars of Testors paint and a new tube of glue. With the hopefulness of a Cowboys fan in August, we’d race home, stack a few Beatles lps on the turntable and crack open the box of wonder. 

   Whether we were building a Model A Roadster or a hot rod Cadillac Hearse (seriously), the modeling process for 11-year-olds was the same.  Ignore the directions and start painting stuff.  The results were predictable but satisfactory for an 11-year-old who had lost interest about halfway through the project.

   Five and dime stores no longer exist. Neither do $3 plastic car models. Model prices now range from $25 - $40. Surprisingly, many of the actual models have not changed at all.  Model kit companies like AMT, Monogram and MPC have been bought and sold since the 1960’s but the actual molds and packaging have survived. The model I chose to rebuild my confidence; a 1960 Ford Starliner, was probably designed and molded sixty years ago.

   I say that I never finished a model because every time I assembled one, I was left with a pile of spare parts. There was a usually a water pump and a rocker arm, a few shock absorbers and a radiator hose left over.  That stuff was hidden anyway, right?

   The most dangerous but most satisfying part of the project was painting the car body.  Years of bad paint jobs have finally convinced me to follow paint instructions this time.  I watched a YouTube video and followed the advice of “professional modelers.”  Did you know you are supposed to wait for one coat to dry before applying the second coat?  

   Glue was the biggest hurdle for me. No matter how careful I was, there was always a smudge of glue somewhere on the “glass” windshield.  I recently watched an enlightening YouTube video on that as well. This time it will be different!

   Models weren’t much fun once they were completed but I never had the heart to throw them in the garbage. Years later when we were married, I wisely recognized that my childhood car models would not be part of the new home decorations.  I stacked them in a big pile and photographed them before sending them to the junkyard for good.  They all had one thing in common – a chubby fingerprint on the front or back windshield and a lousy paint job.

   This time I will build a model with all of the parts and no chubby fingerprints – probably. I will keep you posted.

   Send comments about your car model experiences to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.

 

I withheld comment recently when someone on Facebook posted photos of the “ice storm” that shut down schools and highways in Dallas last month. Others were not so kind.

In fairness, it was a thin but solid sheet of ice that covered everything. The photo didn’t really tell that story and several readers mocked the phrase ice storm.  It really was more of an ice dusting but one person’s storm is another person’s dusting I suppose.

There is a sense of pride or smugness when it comes to telling tales about surviving terrible winter weather.  Bragging about the weather is an unsanctioned sport in coffee shops and office lounges “up north.”.  Most tales start with “It was so cold that….”  They often end with someone else saying “that’s nothing. I remember when…”  Eventually the group nods in approval that the final tale depicts the coldest, longest, or snowiest storm ever.

The title of worst winter storm, according to numerous sources, belongs to the Great Blizzard of 1888.  The storm hit the northeastern states in March 1888. It caused more than $20 million in property damage (about $550 million today) and killed more than 400.  New York City was buried under 22” of snow. Further north, cities were hit with up to 50” of snow in two days.  Wind gusts up to 80 mph buried buildings, horses and people under massive snow drifts.  Now that’s a storm to remember or forget.

There’s a bonding that occurs when several people experience the same storm, even though it may have happened fifty years ago. The really bad storms are etched in people’s memory in much the same way hurricanes and tornadoes mark history for hundreds of years.

Everyone has a good winter storm story. Texans may have felt left out of that conversation until February 2021 when the temperature dropped way down and millions lost power.  Winter storm Uri, as it was named, has the dubious distinction of being the costliest winter storm on record with $196.5 billion in damages.  My memory was more localized as I fought the ice flow in my pool for a week with a large wooden pole.

My personal winter storm brag is surviving the Chicago blizzard of 1982.  A week of snow was followed by extreme low temperatures of -26 degrees on January 10 and high winds that pushed the wind chill to -80 below.  The weatherman didn’t mince words when he said “if you go outside you and your pets might die.” It was good advice.  It was so cold… that ice formed on the inside of some walls of our home.  I should mention that it was a rental.

A temperature of -26 sounds darn cold but residents of Fargo, North Dakota will brag that their grandparents survived -48 degrees in the late 1800’s.  Then again, workers on the Alaskan pipeline recorded a balmy -80 degrees in 1971. Let’s just hope the storm tales are over for this season and we can get onto bragging about the heat.  Did you now that it was so hot in Texas last summer that…

Send comments and your own storm brags to flipsidecolumn@gmail.com.