Does Anyone Remember...

March 3, 2013 | Doc Savage

[Doc Savage]

Waking up to the news these days can not only ruin your day, it can make you irritable, frustrated, and sad. That's when I like to spend a few moments remembering the things that made America such a great place to grow up when I was boy. Here are just a few golden memories:

1. How excited I was when I put on my new Cub Scout uniform for the very first time and my mom was so proud of me.

2. How my friends and I would spend the long hot summers fishing down at the North Side Park lagoon with bamboo poles, safety pins for hooks, and bread dough for bait. Caught some good sized Carp in those days!

3. The great feeling of putting on my Little League uniform, and fixing my socks just like the Big Leaguers, and getting ready to play the big game. The uniforms were wool and weighed about 100 pounds but I didn't care. I was walking two feet off the ground every time I took the field.

4. The excitement of opening my Christmas present and finding a Daisy BB gun. Wow! It was incredible.

5. The first time I was old enough to sit at my grandmother's Thanksgiving table with the grownups. I was so excited I could hardly eat!

6. My parents bought me an English Racer bike for Christmas and I put multi-colored streamers on the handle grips. Talk about flash!

7. First time my mother took me down to the Loop in Chicago on the streetcar and we went to see Santa Claus at Carson Pirie Scott. I want to tell you I was a little nervous and could only tell him what my younger brother wanted for Christmas. If you were never in a large department store at Christmas time you really missed something. It was beautiful!

8. Playing baseball every day in the summer at the Little League field. Everyone pretended they were a famous baseball player. I was always Ernie Banks. I used to dream about someday buying a Wilson A2000 glove. I used to rub neatsfoot oil into my old glove and go to bed each night pounding the pocket so I'd be able to make a great catch! I think I wore my knuckles out on that old glove.

9. I remember when they made me a crossing guard in 6th grade and I got leave class a few minutes early and get to my corner station wearing my white safety belt. Pretty neat.

10. I remember that late in August every year Dad would take us down to the Wheaton Sports Shop where all the gym teachers in town worked during the summer, and we'd get a new pair of gym shoes. I can't even describe how excited I was when Chuck Taylor introduced not only Low-Cuts, BUT WHITE!! I felt like a million dollars wearing them that first day in gym class.

Anyway, after spending a minutes down memory lane, I always feel better. Yet also a little sad. America has lost so much of it's wonderfulness. But I'm so glad I had a chance to experience it before it vanished.

Perhaps you'd like to reminisce with some of your favorite boyhood or girlhood memories. Have at it!

[sodpoodle]

Thank you for this thread;)

I had been inclined to write a similar theme. My family had asked me to write down my childhood memories for the grandchildren - but it was becoming so depressing to realize how much ‘wonder’ has been removed from today’s and future generations.

I came to the US from England - married Irish and raised my super hybrid kids....all great Americans.

Now - despairing of politics, daily crises I also limit TV, rightwing radio and even FR....too wrenching.

There isn’t any decent music to soothe the savage stress of daily living. Sinatra, Bennett, Elvis, Willie Nelson, et al - could at least provide a temporary escape.

God help us.

[mylife]

Remember when the local TV station signed on the air and signed off the air to the National Anthem?

[mylife]

Remember when the family used to watch TV together?
Ed Sullivan? Ted Mack? Jackie Gleason? Carol Burnett?

[aomagrat]

I remember when public parks had retired steam locomotives, army tanks, or artillery pieces for kids to play on. The neighborhood store sold firecrackers year round. Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry ruled the TV on Saturday morning. We only got three TV channels, but I was outside playing till dark. I played little league in the 1960’s. The park where I played is now an illicit drug market.

[Coldwater Creek]

Wow! I’m a widow with a terminal illness, so I spend a lot of my time reliving the memories from a long lifetime. I was really enjoying all the post, then I get to yours, it was like a ghost had just slapped me in the face. My late husband grew up in West Whittier, loved to ride his bicycle in the Whittier hills, spend Saturday afternoons at the Wardman theater, Pattie Melts at Nixon’s and when old enough the Sundown Drive in. Tears! These are things that I had forgotten that he loved so much as a kid. Thanks for reminding me.

[mylife]

Remember Isaley's Klondike bars? Isaley's BBQ Chip Chopped Ham sangwichs?

Remember Kresge's?

Remember how cool it was when you got to go downtown with Grandpa for business and he took you to lunch at the Woolworth's Lunch counter?

[real saxophonist]

Sadder than that, all the baseball fields around here are now used for soccer games.

[nascarnation]

As a kid who failed at baseball but would have loved running all over like crazy in soccer (at least that’s what my grandchildren do) I say hurray!

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

Music:

Every Friday and Saturday you may want to find the Freeper Canteen music threads. They play a wide range of music. Here is this week’s thread:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2992705/posts

[mylife]

Remember when YOU as an 11 yer old kid could get a job putting together the double Ferris wheel at the fair?!!

Remember trusting yourself enough to ride that double Ferris wheel???

LOL

[Terry Mross]

Thanks, Doc. These are fun to read.

There are so many good memories. In our little southern town of 300 people, 10 of us from age 18 down to 12, would ride bikes down a gravel road to Dale’s fish pond to go swimming. Some of the younger kids couldn’t swim but the parents didn’t worry about that because it was the older kids’ job to take care of the younger ones.

These same group of us guys went out into the woods one day to build a log cabin. We chopped down trees with AXES and HATCHETS and actually got the walls up to about 3 feet high. Later we used it as a fort when we played war with REAL BB guns. A year later in that same part of the woods I killed my first rabbit with a .410 shotgun.

We walked on the railroad track. Remember the scene in STAND BY ME? That happened to my cousin, my brother and me. It was a short bridge but the train snuck up on us. My grandparents, my parents and my brother are all buried in a cemetary about a quarter of a mile from that bridge.

I fell asleep many nights listening to WLS out of Chicago. I’d wake in the morning and the battery on my transistor radio would be dead. Eventually I’d sell enough “coke” bottles to buy a new battery.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane.

There are some things I don’t remember.

I don’t remember video games.

I don’t remember computers.

I don’t remember calculators.

And I don’t remember having hundreds of TV channels to watch. There were three channels and during the day all that was on were soap operas. No kid wanted to watch those so it made us get up out of bed every morning in the summer and go find fun things to do. If we couldn’t find something fun to do, we’d make it up. My cousin once said “Our exploits were only as limited as our imaginations”. Kids today don’t have imaginations.

[CodeToad]

I remember the excitement of a long distance phone call from someone because they cost so much.

I remember getting $10 at Christmas from my grandparents and thinking I could buy everything in the store and I always got something really neat.

I remember 1976 and the excitement and pride for our country during her bicentennial even with Nixon, Vietnam, and the gas problems in the background.

I remember student bus drivers and how much fun it was to get a driver’s license for it.

I remember when going to fast food was a treat and getting a huge ice cream cone was the weekend challenge to eat.

I remember to incredible excitement and stunning display of watching missiles launch from Vandenberg AFB while sitting all day on the hilltop waiting for them knowing we would be going to the moon soon.

I remember sitting in that back row of the Family Battlewagon facing rearward and getting other cars to honk their horns.

I remember taking flights on 747s and L1011s and getting to go into the cockpit. I always thought those guys were some kind of astronaut to be able to know what all those switches and dials did.

I remember our first touch tone phone and thinking someday we’ll all just touch what we want and get it, like ice cream cones and pizza.

I remember going to Straw Hat pizza on my birthday and getting to order whatever pizza I wanted, as though the place held some kind of magical ability to make anything.

I remember my first Huffy BMX bike. I thought it could jump anything…well, it could, I couldn’t.

[Sporke]

When I was 14, and in Army JROTC, we took a field trip to Fort Sill to shoot 45s, M16s, and M60 Machine Guns.

I can’t even imagine the hysteria there would be now over a trip like that. lol

[Chode]

also scrounging pop bottles to pay for the thousands of BB's we went through in BB-gun wars

playing football on the courthouse lawn

[2nd Bn, 11th Mar]

Great job, Doc. The phrase “English Racer” really hit home with me, as that’s what my Dad bought me too. He also came home with the beloved Wilson A2000 one time. Does anyone recall going to Marshall Fields downtown and being in awe up in their gun department?

[mylife]

Thanks so much for getting me to thinking about my childhood.
I was so lucky to grow up in what would become one of the worst places in the country.
At the time, IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST PLACES IN THE WORLD!!!

I was a very lucky fellow to have all those experiences.

[mylife]

Remember Western Auto?
God! It was like Heaven for a kid.
Save your money and you could buy anything.
Bicycles,BB guns, Fishing poles, pocket knives, shotguns, rifles.

No problem. Your money was good there.
I still remember the proprietor, good ol Tom White.

[logitech]

“Sadder than that, all the baseball fields around here are now used for soccer games.”

Ugg!

I’ll never forget my Ted Williams glove and suicides(drinks)free after the game.

[Joe 6-pack]

"Back in '82, I used to be able to throw a pigskin a quarter mile...How much you want to make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains? Yeah. If coach would've put me in fourth quarter... we'd have been state champions, no doubt. No doubt in my mind. You better believe things would have been different. I'd have gone pro...in a heartbeat. I'd be makin' millions of dollars and... livin' in a... big ol' mansion somewhere. You know, soakin' it up in a hot tub with my soul mate."

[SamAdams76]

Just posted similar reminisces on a different thread.

I grew up during the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when kids spent virtually all their time out-of-doors when they weren't at school or doing homework. For if you ventured into the house in those days, your mother would stick a broom in your hand and put you to work around the house - and none of us wanted any of that!

So we stayed outside constantly. Mothers would hand peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of Kool-Aid out the windows to us so we didn't have to track our dirt through their houses. On rainy days, we'd go to somebody's basement to watch wrestling or cartoons on TV but otherwise, we'd be out of doors.

We all had bicycles in those days and nobody wore helmets. If one of us had a dollar or two, we'd go to the corner store and get large bags of penny candy and we would gorge on licorice sticks, flying saucers, giant gumballs, Swedish fish, caramel creams and all kinds of other candies - almost pure sugar.

Kids had paper routes in those days and many of us (including myself) would spend an hour or so tossing papers up on front porches and go around the neighborhood once a week to collect the money to pay the newspaper man (keeping the rest for ourselves).

Mostly we'd sit around at picnic tables listening to Top 40 music on the portable "transistor" radio and play board games like Monopoly and Risk for hours on end. We would even break out a deck of playing cards now and then until somebody's mother came around to make us stop, lest we grow up and become "degenerate gamblers."

Stickball, touch football, basketball (with just a hoop and no net), and baseball when the bigger kids didn't kick us off the field. Boys and girls played together. So the girls would join us for stickball and dodgeball and occasionally us boys would play hopscotch and house with them with no fear of being called sissies because we were all in this childhood together.

When the streetlights started coming on, we would start hearing our fathers whistle for us (each father had a distinct whistle) and we'd gradually start heading home. Except in mid-summer on those hot humid nights when we had no school and we'd hang out on our doorsteps close to midnight (nobody had AC in those days) while we'd go looking for fireflies, listen to the crickets, light some firecrackers and bottlerockets, and our fathers would let us have a sip or two of their beers as we waited for it to cool off enough to go to our beds.