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.

Fun '70s Commercials

Commercials were a lot different when I grew up. Here are a few I found that I remember watching in the day:

Who can forget the pampered bird on Western Airlines?

I remember when cigarette ads were banned. The weeks leading up to those last ones were FILLED with them:

...and I loved the Benson & Hedges theme - I could only find this one in French:

and here was the bane of every '70s American housewife:

and fast food ads were a bit more, how do I sayw it, cheesy...


So - I could post a ton of them, but I won't. Go look up some of your favorites, it'll take you back to those old days...

Hot Wheels

What ‘70s blog would be complete without at least mentioning Hot Wheels? My brother and I were very fortunate in that we got a big incredible set as a base for our collection and then we got a second one. We also had the loop-de-loop set and a ton of cars.

There wasn’t a rainy day that could get us down. We’d set up huge track layouts – we had 2 superchargers, tons of curves and lots of awesome cars. We even had the little plastic clamps that connected onto the edge of a table or bookshelf. We had the really cool cases for our cars, and we even

had the little pins that went along with the cars.

Mom loved it – we’d be out of her hair for hours

on end, and the most it would cost her was a few

D size batteries. I wrote more about playing with Hot Wheels in my book, but I had to mention them here and throw in a few pictures to help us all remember.

Next time you’re at your folks house, you should grab a niece, nephew (or brother), pull whatever you have left of your Hot Wheels collection, and spend an afternoon reliving your race car memories.

Cereal Wars

I came across some great pictures of some products from the '70s.

Still one of my all-time favorites. I hardly ever have them anymore. I remember that one of the fun things we did at school was to take the foil and form it into a cube - we shaped it by making the basic shape and them rubbing them on the lunchroom tabletops to make perfect cubes. I have no idea whatever possessed us to do this, but we all did it - and even kept little collections of them.

One of the fun things about having a brother is that you always have a built-in rival. It's handy that many things are marketed using Rivals. The cereal world had it's share of rivals - the Lucky Charms Leprechaun and kids, The Trix Rabbit and... kids, Cap'n Crunch and Pirate LaFoote, etc. Qusip and Quake were not only rivals, but they both had their OWN cereal! I was a Quake loyalist and my brother sided with Quisp. We played the bother rivalry in all things - just like good brothers should!

Did you have a brother or sister that you sparred with regularly? Whether it be in cereal, sports or being mom's best kid?