5 Blasts From The Pasts this ‘70s guy misses seeing…

I took this idea from my friend Darrin over at Dad’s Dish Retro

5 Things This Retro Dad Misses Seeing...(another GREAT blog). Here’s a list of great everyday things gone by…

Lemonade Stands:

These were every bunch of neighborhood kids’ idea of striking it rich in the summer, and we did it all by ourselves! All we had to do was get mom to get us the glasses, make up the lemonade for us, help us find a table and some chairs, bring everything out and set it up at the curb for us, and we were set! Spend an entire afternoon selling cups of lemonade at 5 to 10 cents each and we might make $2 to $3! Split that 4 or 5 ways and were “rich”.

Record Parties

Did you ever do this? A bunch of us would get together and all bring all of our latest records (often just 45’s) and spend a whole evening listening to them together. We’d usually sing at the top of our lungs, and sometimes have a big pizza party, too. Great times of make-believing that we were rock bands, and dreaming of the day when we were really gonna be a band!

Variety Shows

These are now only known by this generation if they happen to linger on a late night ½-hour pitch by Guthy-Renker. Watching Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Carol Burnett, Sonny and Cher, Flip Wilson, etc – so many more than can be listed here. These were awesome and we were treated to a plethora of the big star actors, actresses and performers of the time. There’s no way to even compare these shows to anything today. And what was so amazing about the stars back then is that they could all dance, sing and act and were all good at it!

Kids Dressed up for Things

When was the last time that you saw a family out for dinner at anything but a high-end restaurant and the kids were dressed up for the occasion? Not pressed shirts and ties, but at least clean, well-fitting and nice looking clothes. We used to do this to go out to Denny’s or even a buffet-type meal. Other things we’d dress up for: Dinner at the Grandparents’, shopping downtown, going to a movie, family birthday parties – or a friend’s birthday party – and other gatherings, visiting family friends. It was never an option to NOT dress nicely… it’d sure be nice to see this on some level in society again.

Good Cartoons

Every Saturday morning! They were the good old fashioned ones – deemed too violent for kids today because a certain coyote would get squished into an accordion, or fall to a canyon floor only to emit a little poof of smoke upon impact. They were simple, funny, entertaining and carried no hidden messages. If Mel Blanc were to see what passes for cartoons these days, he’d surely roll over in his grave a FEW times!

A Different Kind of Drug Problem

I often lament about the difference between kids today and who/what we were as kids growing up.

A friend sent this to me. It says more in a short paragraph than I could say in a month of blogging. If you click on it, it will open up much larger to read with our aging eyes.

And, please don't think I hate all kids today (I have a couple of my own, you know) - or that I throw all kids into this cauldron of "spoiled lazy brats" soup. I do think that in a lot of ways, this generation of parents as a whole, has certainly done our kids a disservice by not drugging them in some of the ways mentioned here.

I'll be the first to admit that raising kids is hard work, takes concentrated effort and challenges our own abilities and level of commitment - even to the things we strongly believe in. But I also know that it's worth the headaches and heartaches. I pray that God helps us all to bethe types of parents that raise kids that will be upstanding and contributing parts of society, kind and caring to others, and giving rather than selfish.

Dishing up the FUN!

I wanna give a big shout out to my man, Darrin, over at Dad’s Dish Retro Blog! This guy is just plain funny! His little sub-title on his blog says it all: “Stuck in the past and living my life… no matter how much it embarrasses the kids”. He and I are a kindred spirit when it comes to all of this fun ‘70s stuff.

One of my favorite posts of his a bit ago was when he ran down with a list of some of his favorite catch phrases that were solidified in pop culture. Reading through the list he wrote, along with all those added by others, really sends you down memory lane. TV shows, movies, commercials, etc. – they all gave us some of the greatest one-liners.

He was also kind enough to just write a review of my book – he even recommended it! You gotta check out his blog, it’s a great time! Click the link on the right of my page under My Blog List.

And the ‘70s thought I have to throw out for you all to ponder today: what’s your favorite TV sitcom from the ‘70s? No dramas, variety shows or afternoon shows allowed (we’ll save those for another day). My vote – try to keep it just one or two – would have to be Mork and Mindy. The brilliance of the young Robin Williams, his goofiness really revealed for the first time, and cute Pam Dawber all made for a great show!

And – catch phrase + sitcom = Nanoo-Nanoo!

Christmas Memories - The Food!

Where would a discussion of Christmas be without bringing up the food?

There’s so. much. food. When I was young, we had a bunch of family… including Grandmothers, aunts, uncles cousins, etc… there was about 20 of us that gathered every year. We celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve so my mom drew the line at dinner, and we would actually go out for dinner. Before you think that we were rich, I need to let you know that we would go to the Royal Fork – which was a family buffet restaurant. Everyone could eat whatever they wanted for the same low price. This was especially helpful when we started having a fair amount of teens in the mix.

So – we’d go out and pig out and then come home to a huge layout of Christmas treats. Tons of sweets, different salads, sausages, little dogs in bbq sauce, candy, rolls, pies, cookies, etc, etc, etc.

There are a few dishes that were always the standouts. My mom’s fudge is still – to date – the best fudge I’ve ever tasted, homemade or store bought. Smooth as silk, never grainy and so chocolatey! And – my mom’s shortbread was also the best I’ve ever tasted. There were so many incredible things there – and many of them we only got once a year – so we HAD to eat at least some of everything.

We’d spend the next few hours just snacking and snacking and snacking. As always, we started opening Christmas presents at midnight – that’s right – midnight. And each person opened their present’s one at a time. We wouldn’t finish until like 3am. We’ve changed this in the last few years so now we finish up by midnight.

But – we’d spend the next few days eating all the great leftovers What great Christmas food/treat tradition memories do you have?

Christmas Memories - The Tree

The simple joys of childhood at Christmas. This time of year typically causes us all to reflect on our family life growing up. I was very blessed, as I’ve mentioned before, to have been part of a great, caring and loving family. Sure, we had our problems and quirks just like any other family, but we had a foundation of love – mentioned or not – and that was one of the ties that bound us together.

Some of my memories at this time of year are special ones. I remember after having decorated the house for Christmas, I would often just cuddle up on the couch and gaze at the wonder of the decorations.

The tree was very special. We always had a real one, but never anything fancy. It wasn’t ever a Charlie Brown tree, but it was also never a Noble Fir. Usually just an average pine bought at the local department store lot.

Decorating the tree was always a family affair. There were too many cool things to miss out on if you didn’t help. We had tons of great ornaments. Mom would buy one set of new ornaments each Christmas and would diligently write the year on each box so we would all know when they were bought. Some were tacky, some were cool, some were kind of lame, but they all played a part in the memories of each Christmas as we put them up.

We would put the lights on first. These were smaller version of the outdoor lights that got hot and caused more than a few burn spots on our rug over the years. Mom usually had to put these up while we waited impatiently to start doing everything else.

There were the ornaments each of us kids had made at one time in a grade school class that were so important to have in plain sight. Mine was a little cutout of my singing head glued on a wooden sherbet spoon wrapped with a construction paper angel robe and stovepipe harms holding a hymnal… I was a little angel!

There was the collection of handmade Santa Clauses. There were some from all four of us kids: the ones with rotating arms and legs using paper fasteners; the ones just cutout, the ones with cotton glued on for the beard, coat sleeves and waist and the top of the boots. All of them meticulously colored (quality dependent on our age at the time of creation) and all with our names and the date written on the back. There were even a couple from when my mom was a kid… still carefully preserved and hung with pride every year.

There were the construction paper links garland that my brother and I made as a gift for the family one year; and the handmade needlecraft ornaments from my Nana; and the special top that we put on every year.

We all loved hanging tinsel – we called them icicles – and we had the old boxes of the ones that had *gasp* LEAD in them. They weren’t the cheap mylar ones you get today so they hung straight and were beautiful – oh, and none of us, or our cats who liked to eat them – ever had an illnesses due to lead poisoning.

The tree was the center of our decorations and a focal point of the house during the Christmas season. What memories do you have of your family Christmas tree?

A Christmas Story

What is Christmas, really?

I want to spend some time and write about my memories, and I will, but I have to share this first. A friend of mine posted this and I recommend that you read it – it’ll warm your heart.


This short story is the author’s memories of spending Christmas at his Aunt Ida’s house. It’s full of the things that Christmas should be about. It tells of what it was like when the living rooms at Christmas were filled with the sounds of families talking or kids laughing, not the football game on a 52" plasma; with families making memories and having appropriate conversations, not pieces of fractured families avoiding each other or talking about the latest celebrity gossip; of kids playing in a pile of coats, not holed up in a back bedroom playing the latest bloody combat video game and seeing images of life way beyond their years.

Kind of made me stop in my tracks and remember what it means to have a family Christmas - not a "happy holidays" party; to be able to appreciate a personal, thought-out, given-with-love gift instead of another "picked-it-up-while-I-was-in-line-at-the-grocery-store" $50 gift card; to revel and take in with all my being the beautiful sounds, sights and magical wonder of Christmas instead of complaining about having to fight the crowds and traffic to "get my shopping done".

Christmas at Aunt Ida's

Enjoy!

Putting up the Lights!

It’s that time of year. Typically I try to do it in Thanksgiving week but I’ll be out doing it tomorrow. Yes – it’s the time of year to put up the Christmas lights… the outside Christmas lights. These days I have a nice set of lights that I have stored perfectly and that clip right into place… nice and neat. And although it’s going to be cold (mid-20’s) it’s all organized, ready to go and will be a fairly easy job.

Growing up, not so much.
Growing up, putting up the lights was a chore. It was usually my Dad and me, and sometimes my younger brother. There were a few reasons that putting up our lights back then was so much work.

To begin with – we used to put up a lot of them – all around our big deck and the entire perimeter of the house. Not a big house, but a lot of second story work. We also never seemed to do the exact design twice. I think that it was due more to the fact that every year another string would stop working or go missing.

We used the big lights back then – the type where you screwed each bulb in – and it sometimes took forever to get them all working, and they got really hot and burned your hand if you grabbed them for too long. Probably the biggest thing was that we had to nail every string up, and we used old style brads and hammers. Nothing like holding trying to hold the lights taut, hold the tiny brads in place and trying to swing the hammer in the snow or cold weather.

I have vivid memories of being very cold and wet when putting up lights… but they’re still good memories because they make me recall the great Christmases that I had growing up. It seemed like back then all of the neighbors in good ol’ suburbia put up lots of Christmas lights. Then - in the early ‘70s, we had the energy crisis and everyone became very energy conscious. It was rare to see lights up on any house for awhile and it was pretty depressing. It seemed that many of the people never started putting lights up again after that… kind of used it as an excuse.

Anyway – this would be a great weekend for you all to get your light up! Let’s get those neighborhoods a-glowing!

Bangs, Backpacks & Britches

Bangs. Did you have “bangs” when you were a kid? I know they were a big thing for girls, but remember how cool it was as a guy to have bangs? It was awful when it was haircut time – if you were like me, then mom did all the haircutting when you were young. She cycled through the styles… buzzcuts in the warmer months, and a decent covering throughout the rest of the year. How's that for an awesome school picture? circa 1968.

I think my favorite was having bangs, ‘cause I loved it when they got long. It felt so cool to have them over your eyebrows and getting in your eyes. Of course we were emulating the Beatles and the more we could look like the Liverpool Lads, the cooler we felt. And we also used to let the hair grow and hang down in front of our ears so we had “sideburns”. Then we kind of looked like Mr. Spock, and that was really cool, too.

As we got into High School, the bangs grew into “long all over” hair, with us constantly trying to whip our heads to keep it out of our face. And this eventually gave way to styled hair at “hair studios”. Oh, what a interesting hair tale we traveled.

Backpacks.
We never had them in school. We carried our stuff in our hands. We had books, Pee-Chees and notebooks, and we carried them. If the weather was bad, we put them inside our coats. We kept the supplies we used at school in our homeroom class and/or in our lockers. The fun thing about Pee-Chees was how we altered the drawings on them. More on that some other time.

These days kids seem to have everything and are prepared for a weekend camp-out every day that they go to school. Often the backpacks are bigger than the little kids hauling it. A change of clothes; a local bus, regional train and international airplane schedule; seeds and starter plants to plant their own garden… who knows what’s all really in there. I just know that we seemed to get by just fine with a lot less.

Britches. At some point in my life, I grew up enough to be wearing “pants” or “jeans”, or maybe even slacks. This did not, however, change the fact that my grandmothers would still comment on what a nice pair of britches I had on. It’s just one of those funny words that has, for the most part, gone the way of other words like trousers, stockings (guys socks – my dad still says this) and canvas high-tops.

What things do you remember having when you grew up that have been "replaced" or "improved" today?

The Snow of '68

We have our first prediction of snow in the next couple of days. I do enjoy the snow, and that’s largely because I grew up in Seattle where we didn’t have much of it. There were a couple of good snow storms when I grew up, but they were the exception, not the rule.

I do remember that we had a big storm in ’68. This happened to coincide with when my folks decided to do an addition to our home. We had the dining room addition foundation poured, walls and roof framed, and the contractor had just opened up the wall between our kitchen and the new dining room when the storm hit. And it was a big one – dumped 3 feet of snow in a short amount of time. You guessed it – we ended up with snow in our kitchen. My mom wasn’t too happy, but we did get a good story out of the experience, though.

It did make for good sledding, though, which was a rarity in our area. Living above the Puget Sound we had some good hills. So – with the big snow – we all got some great nights of sledding fun. We rode a route that started right by our house and, if you did it right, could take you all the way to the beach. The normal stopping place was about half the way down. The funnest thing I remember was that one of our neighbors had a big black lab named Tucker. They’d keep him at the midpoint until a bunch of us piled there, and we’d all rope our sleds together and he’d haul them all up the hill for us. It was one of the coolest things to us as kids.

We get a lot of snow here in Pullman where I live now, but my funnest memories are of the few times we had big snow where I grew up.

Color TV

It's easy to work on the computer and watch TV – especially professional sports.
Being a Washingtonian and former Seattleite, I follow the Seahawks and the Mariners. The Seahawks are performing less than dismal this year, and the Mariners came nowhere near making the playoffs.

So – I’ve ended up following the MLB playoffs and am right now watching the Phillies and Yankees go at it in game 5. It’s said that you either love or hate the Yankees, and as for me, well, go Phillies!

They just showed a montage of the 1950 World Series where these same two teams had met. Watching the footage it was apparent just how far television coverage has advanced over the years. We are so spoiled! Without a doubt, you see the game better when you watch it on TV, although you don’t get that “being there” experience, and going to a game these days is an experience in itself.

The reason I share all this is because I heard or read a comment recently that was extremely poignant. It was made by a guy who was a kid in the ‘60s. He said “I’ll never forget the first baseball game that I went to because it was the first time I’d ever seen one in color!” That concept blew me away. And – if you’ve ever heard the broadcasts from back then, I believe they also went to great lengths to describe everything about the players, the stadium and the whole feeling of the day because it was so poorly captured on camera. This helped me understand even more why a little kid’s first trip to the ballpark would have truly been such a magical experience and would make such a lasting impression on him.

I grew up with black and white TV, and I certainly remember when color first came out and how awesome it was! We take it all for granted now, but there was a time when the only mental image we had of anything we’d never seen in person was a black and white image. Try to get your kids to wrap their minds around that!