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.

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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.

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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.