irememberjfk_l6fq3c – Page 10 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

Trading Stamps

Once upon a time, your mom made the decision about which grocery store to shop at based on a simple factor: what brand of trading stamps did they offer?

Mom was a Top Value fan, hence my using them for the illustration rather than the much more popular S&H Green Stamp. The IGA in my hometown gave away Top Value, hence the reason mom never, ever shopped at the Safeway right across the street. She also did her dry cleaning, bought her gas, and did other shopping with dealers who gave out Top Value stamps.

I grew up licking those stamps and pasting them in books. I loved it. That was big stuff to a six-year-old. And our modest house would periodically be enhanced by the purchase of a lamp, toaster, or the like gained in exchange for those books full of pasted legal tender. We had a Top Value store in town, no waiting for a package in the mail!

The whole idea behind trading stamps was simple and effective: stores would purchase the stamps in quantity. They had a cash value that the trading stamp company would recognize. You could even trade in your books for cash, but you would make out better getting merchandise. Other businesses, such as bowling alleys and service stations, also got in on it.

The store’s or business’s payoff? Customers like my mom, who would never dream of patronizing any grocery store but Farrier’s IGA.

Every town with a population of, say, 7500 or more had a redemption center for at least one brand of stamps. In fact, my memories of the trading stamp program coincide with the peak of the industry. In the mid 1960’s, S&H alone was printing three times as many stamps as the US Postal Service! An estimated 80% of US households were saving at least one brand of stamp.

The Recession of the 70’s is what ended trading stamps. Redemption centers started closing as the economy floundered. By 1981, there was just a fraction of the original S&H stores left. S&H sold out to another company at that time, and they still survive as a get-paid-while-you-surf-and-shop outfit at http://www.greenpoints.com/. In fact, if you have any old books of stamps laying around, you can give them a holler at 1-800-435-5674 and get $1.20 for each of them!

The Back Yard, Circa 1965

Kids spend a lot of time in their back yards. I sure spent lots of hours in my Oklahoma back yard in the 1960’s. I became so familiar with its features that I can close my eyes and imagine it in its entirety. I will now recreate that wonderful place, complete with its features unique to that era.

We had a concrete birdbath in the middle of the yard which was accompanied by a miniature flock of three plastic pink flamingos. They weathered well, I remember they lasted at least three years. That birdbath was a monster that mom picked out from one of those businesses that sold all sorts of yard stuff made of concrete. We never had one of those bright blue balls on a pillar, but my next-door neighbor did.

Like every other family on the block, we also had a clothesline that frequently was festooned with our laundry.

Dad brought home a new washer and dryer about 1966. Before that, hanging clothes outside was mom’s only option. If we were in an extended rainy period, she had an indoor version that only held a few items. So the weather determined how much clothes were washed.

That clothesline got a lot of use after the purchase of the dryer, as well, because my Depression-era parents didn’t like to spend money on gas when the sun would dry our clothes for free.

We had big trees with white on the leaves. They were either silver maples or some sort of poplar. But they were plagued by what mom called “borers.” These were huge, garish black and white beetles with long legs and antennae. They were absolutely grotesque to look at. And the solution to keep the trees safe from them was to paint the trunks from the ground up to about six feet with white paint. The only image I could find of a painted tree trunk is the small one to the left.

I don’t know if the paint kept the trees safe. I know that, at least in Miami, Oklahoma, white tree trunks were a very common sight in the 60’s. I haven’t seen one in a long time, though.

We had an osage orange tree on the edge of our yard. The species is also known as bois d’arc (pronounced bodark) apple. The French name pays homage to its wood being the native Americans’ choice for making bows. It would produce grapefruit-sized green fruit that would litter our yard in the late summer. It was great fun rolling them across the ground at my dog. He wasn’t crazy about it, though.

We had a corner lot with an alley along the back line, so we only had a neighbor to one side. They had a fence that looks similar to the one at the right. That fence was decrepit looking, probably having been installed fifteen or more years earlier. The neighbors were a little strange. They didn’t let their kid leave the yard, and allowed very few visitors. So we played lots of games through that fence. In fact, that looped-wire barrier is one of my strongest memories.

I also had a little swing that was suspended from one of the T-shaped clothes line poles. It’s amazing how much time a kid would spend in this simplest of contrivances, consisting of a short board and two lengths of rope. I swung in that swing until we moved away in 1968.

Today, my back yard is still a favorite place for me to be. Some day, perhaps my own children will write of playing tetherball, swimming in our above-ground pool, having fun with their dogs, and, of course, swinging in their homemade swing.

Summertime Serenades

It is late May as I write today’s column. The late afternoon air is filled with a variety of sounds. These include singing birds, barking dogs, and neighbors, whose conversations are noticed because of the combination of good weather and low background sound.

But around mid-July (in my Northwest Arkansas area), the afternoon air is filled with a sound that actually has the ability to live on 365 days a year in your subconscious.

I present today’s subject as a Baby Boomer memory only because it is one I associate with my childhood, as are the vast majority of other articles I write. But untold numbers of generations have grown up with the sound of (as I put it) “yuree, yuree” echoing throughout whatever summer afternoon memories their minds can assemble.

Cicadas, or locusts, as they were known in Miami, Oklahoma, are some pretty amazing creatures. A male will mate with a female (who was impressed by his incessant “yuree, yuree” sound, complete with a natural fadeout) and die shortly afterward. Man, there must be a bunch of them because they literally sing all summer long.

Then, the female will lay eggs in tree branches, and the hatchlings will find themselves in the ground in short order. And they will spend 15 or more years there before instinctively crawling out of the dirt, climbing up a nearby tree trunk, and stopping to split open its exoskeleton to emerge as a completely dissimilar life form. For instance, its pincer front legs, so prominent in the empty hull, are gone in the adult, replaced with a massive set of wings that are arguably capable of completely blocking ultraviolet light.

Such a critter deserves to be able to plant itself into the summertime afternoon memories of humanity.

Indeed, their call is so pervasive that I often hear it subconsciously as I drift off to sleep with temperatures outside approaching 0 Fahrenheit, my window being cracked open a couple of inches because I like to sleep in the cold.

Shag Carpets

Ah, the late 60’s and 70’s. A time of experimentation, whether with recreational drugs, or with extreme decorating ideas. Such a bold stab at style (its creators might have tried some of those drugs, too) was the shag carpet.

Shag carpets came in a variety of colors, some of which were as extreme as the two-inch-long polyester monstrosity itself. Bright reds, blues, greens, and jet blacks were not unheard of. But earth tones were also big, to match those avocado green and harvest gold kitchen appliances.

My parents never went for shag carpet. They were in their forties and fifties when it came out, and it was more of a hit with the younger demographic. But I knew plenty of friends whose more youthful parents installed vast yards of the dirt-absorbing carpet.

Shag carpets came in different depths. You could go for a modest half-inch, or go all the way to the three inch thick Austin Powers variety. However, if you bought the deeper shags, you also had to purchase (and regularly use) the device to the left: a carpet rake.

Then, there was the embedded dirt. Had shag carpets maintained the 1970’s popularity for a few more years, who knows what new life forms might have been discovered among those nylon depths where no vacuum cleaner could reach? The combination of organic and inorganic material buried at floor level among the polyester tendrils was sufficient that it was its own enclosed environment within your living room walls.

An episode I recall with particular cringing on my part was when my parents and I were invited over to a couple’s home who also had a child my age. They had vast expanses of bright white shag carpet, much like the illustration to the right. They also served a salad for dinner that required VERY red Russian dressing to taste perfect. As I served myself some salad, I reached for the dressing bottle, which required shaking to mix. It also had a very loose cap.

I run into that couple once in a while, and they regularly assure me that they STILL remember the amazing amount of square footage that one bottle of Russian dressing could cover thirty-five years ago.

But let’s face it, if you’re crazy enough to buy a white carpet, you must also resign yourself to the fact that it’s never again going to look as clean as it does that first day, Russian dressing notwithstanding.

Shags have made a bit of a comeback in our day. It’s not unusual to see a new home with a shorter shag carpet installed. The pile is composed of a much more durable material these days than the 1970’s era polyester. Remember how horrible a worn shag carpet looked?

But we who can recall even the vaguest glimmer of JFK can remember when every newer subdivision home had two features: a shag carpet, and a carpet rake.

Wooden Screen Doors

Well, I Remember JFK has uncovered yet another conspiracy theory. Recall that we revealed that wing vent windows were surreptitiously phased out by auto air conditioning manufacturers. Well, faithful readers, we have blown the cover off of yet another cabal by those who sell equipment designed for artificial environmental cooling: the demise of the screen door.

The above paragraph is written tongue-in-cheekingly. Please, no nutcases need respond 😉

When we were kids, wooden screen doors were everywhere. Moonwink Grocery in Miami, Oklahoma had one. It may have had a Rainbo Bread advertisement, advising all who would enter that it was GOOD bread. Or perhaps it was Bunny bread, a locally-baked rival.

But it was definitely there, providing a reassuring “thunk!” every time a customer walked in or out. It was a sound that I must have heard hundreds of times, and I would dearly love to return in time to hear it again.

But that’s what our imaginations are for. So please, read on as I magically transport you to an era when we passed through screen doors many times a day in our travels.

The utility of screen doors was undeniable. Have one at the north and south ends of a house, and you had yourself a wonderful breeze providing fresh air, cooler temperatures, and a dearth of flies. Metallic screening used in screen doors and windows was patented on April 22, 1884 by John Golding of Chicago, Illinois. Prior to that, people bought lots more flyswatters.

By the time I was in the process of being a kid in the 1960’s, old-style screen doors were already being supplanted one at a time in private homes with aluminum storm doors. My childhood home had one of the newfangled models which, if I recall correctly, was installed by my father as an add-on.

But my grandparents, who lived in the Mason, Texas house that they bought as newlweds early in the 20th century, had screen doors on all sides. They were equipped with holder gadgets that would grab the door when it shut. I was fascinated by the mechanisms, as I had never seen them anywhere else in my youthful experience. In researching this article, however, I see that they are still out there, looking much like the models that my grandparents probably purchased when Babe Ruth was a pitcher for the Red Sox.

Air conditioning was still a luxury for many homes and businesses in the 60’s. Moonwink Grocery, which was probably built prior to WWII, had none. So on a hot summer day, the screen door provided some cooling relief, along with fans placed everywhere. It wasn’t much, but it felt like it was back then.

In dryer environments, evaporative coolers worked hand-in-hand with screen doors to provide fresh cooled air that was exhausted through strategically placed openings in the house that allowed the sweet relief to pass through every section.

But as the 60’s turned into the 70’s, air conditioning became cheaper. Businesses in old unrefrigerated buildings either remodeled or relocated. Moonwink, sadly, was razed and fourplexes were put up on its corner lot. More sadly, the wonderful corner grocery didn’t bother to relocate.

And with homes no longer needing to let the slightly-cooler-than-a-hot-summer-day breeze blow through, screen doors became obsolete.

That leads us to today, Wooden screen doors on the fronts of houses are as scarce as quality reality television. Some exist on the back sides of homes, primarily proving ingress and egress to screened-in porches. But by and large, we now walk into our homes and businesses through glass doors.

So the next time you daydream about being a kid in a much simpler time, don’t forget to shut the screen door tight behind you. We don’t want those flies to get in.

Growing Up in a Little Tract Home

Our tract home, and my oldest brother in the background

When our fathers got back from WWII, they were in the mood to get out of living in barracks and tents. They wanted new homes! So many of them purchased brand new tract homes, which were being built by the hundreds of thousands all over the US.

My father purchased our tract home in the early 50’s. It was probably built right after the war was over. It sat on a nice-sized corner lot, had a one-car garage, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and was probably about 1100 square feet in size. It was heated by a floor furnace, and cooled with a swamp cooler.

A new home would not be built with those dimensions today. In my area, even the most modest new home has two bathrooms. And the days of the big lot are gone. Lots are postage-stamp-sized in lower-priced subdivisions.

But our fathers felt like they were in tall cotton, buying new homes for perhaps $10,000. After all, they grew up having to visit the “house behind the house” for bathroom duties. The sleek homes they were able to purchase had real INDOOR plumbing!

So, we families grew up in small houses with a single bath. we grew accustomed to waiting for our turn in the “little room,” and nobody thought they were being deprived.

Additionally, our heating and cooling systems were far from reliable in many cases. Our floor furnace’s pilot light was constantly blowing out, and morning temperatures of near-freezing were the result.

But the biggest downside of floor furnaces was the fact that natural gas is heavier than air. So a malfunctioning unit might possibly have a mass of extremely flammable gas built up inside it, and you lit a pilot light by sending flame to the bottom with a match!

Fortunately, we suffered no explosions in our home, although it was known to happen in our town.

The evaporative cooler had a mind of its own. It liked to shut its water pump down for no apparent reason on August days where the temperature was around 100 degrees. It didn’t take long for an 1100 square foot house to turn into a kiln under such circumstances.

But, I remember that house with nothing but fondness. I revisited my home town about ten years ago, and was pleased to see my house still standing. It has additions built on (another bathroom, I’m sure), but I was still able to recognize many familiar landmarks, at least on the outside.

My current home is also modest, a 1500 square foot 1972 tract home. But it’s been extensively remodeled, and my lot is at least as big as the one I grew up on.

I think I feel the same pride in it that my dad must have felt about that 1940’s tract home in Miami, Oklahoma.

Freebies in the Detergent Box

My mom used to get aggravated at me when I would pick out a breakfast cereal based on what prize might be contained inside. But you know what? She bought laundry detergent based on the fact that there were drinking glasses inside the box! I believe the brand was Oxydol, if I remember right.

In many ways, the internet has taken us back to the days when freebies were abundant, e.g. gas station gifts. You can outfit your system with a free operating system, office suite, protection against viruses and spyware, and even have the weather presented up-to-the-minute, all for free.

But step back to the 60’s, and you could see detergent makers tempting consumers with gifts buried within the powder.

These gifts were usually glasses. The style would vary from brand to brand, and brands would also vary what they offered. They all put at least three sizes in, that would prove motivating for multiple purchases.

I know many of our drinking glasses were retrieved from detergent boxes. Mom also bought Crystal Wedding oats (each container also had a glass within) and bought Welch’s jelly (those Flintstone-laden jelly glasses will rate their own column).

Breeze detergent took a different approach: free towels. I can still remember an early 70’s commercial featuring Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton that aired in my area. Dolly was very excited because the towels had pictures of flowers on them. I’ll never forget how she gushed about the “zeenyas!”

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen detergent packed with goodies. Like so many of the little niceties we enjoyed as children of the Baby Boom, they have taken their leave. But you know what? Being able to download a free office suite from openoffice.org is pretty cool too. And you don’t have to rinse the detergent off before you use it.

Formica Counter Tops

The pattern to the right was a familiar one to you if you were a visitor of malt shops and hamburger joints in the 1960’s. It’s known as VirrVarr, if you were wondering (probably not). It was one of Formica’s biggest sellers of the 50’s and 60’s, and was installed on the tabletops and countertops of eateries all over the world.

Formica was patented in 1913. The story, according to formica.com, is thus:

A young engineer had an idea that was pretty straightforward: take fabric, coat it with resin while it winds on a spindle into the shape of a tube, slit the tube lengthwise, unroll it, press it flat and then cure it. The result was a laminated plastic material that was tough, light and an excellent electrical insulator. It was easy to see the commercial potential of this new material.

The initial “commercial potential” was to replace the natural mineral mica as an electrical insulator. Ergo, “for mica.”

Formica eventually became the state-of-the-art inexpensive countertop material for diners and such. When you walked into a diner, your eyes were enthralled to see a wide variety of contrasts, from the black and white floor tiles (which cover many of the floors of our retro-themed home) to the chrome on the barstools, chairs, and counter trim, to the shiny Formica finish on the eating surfaces.

We had yellow Formica on our countertops at home. I’m guessing that it was installed when the house was built in the early 50’s, because dad did quite a bit of work on the house, replacing carpeting, nailing up paneling, installed a swamp cooler, and the like, but I don’t recall the kitchen ever getting any work.

It would be pretty ugly to look at today, but it was as comfortable as a well-broken-in shoe when I was a kid.

Formica was durable, but there were two things it wouldn’t stand up to. One was sharp knives. If you ever cut anything on your kitchen countertop, it would leave a dark, ugly gash. That would incite the wrath of mom, of course. The other element Formica was very pervious to (that’s the opposite of impervious, right?) was a burning cigarette, a very common heat source in those days. It was not at all unusual to see ugly cigarette burns branded into otherwise scar-free earth toned Formica.

The Formica corporation has listened to the public, which has clamored for a return of the classic styles we remember from our youth. So you can build yourself a retro table or bar topped with the ever-stylish VirrVarr. All you need is Elvis on the jukebox and a mug full of A&W root beer, and you can be a kid again.

Electric Wall Clocks

Among the subtle sounds that made up the ambiance of the home where I spent my early childhood was a gentle whirring noise. It was coming from the electric clock hanging up in our kitchen.

The electric wall clock was a staple in most homes during the 60’s. Ideally, you wanted it to be hung in the middle of a wall. However, esthetics required that the cord hang straight down. Therefore, the clock resided directly above an electrical outlet.

While that cord stuck out like a sore thumb, it didn’t take long for it to vanish. In fact, if the clock was replaced with a battery-driven model, it just didn’t look right without a cord hanging down.

The clock made a whirring sound because it was driven by a rapidly-rotating motor. Seven-year-old me discovered this one day by taking the clock down and seeing for myself. And as the clock aged and bearing surfaces wore down, the whirring would turn into a more abrasive noise, which would eventually get so bad that it could no longer be ignored. The clock might even seize up.

But electric clocks were still preferable to battery-driven models. Most of the took a huge d-cell that just didn’t last very long. It was a pain to change the battery every six months.

Today, like most of the objects we grew up with, genuine vintage electric clocks sell for big bucks. Atomic models like the one pictured that might have sold for twenty bucks in 1964 go for hundreds of dollars on the auction sites.

If you’re into these motor-driven beauties, check out http://www.oaktreeent.com/vintage_clocks.htm

Here’s to that gentle whirring sound that helped make our house a home.

Burning the Leaves in the Fall

“Leaf burning leads to air pollution and is a health and fire hazard. The smoke from burning leaves contains a number of toxic and/or irritating particles and gases. The tiny particles contained in smoke from burning leaves can accumulate in the lungs and stay there for years. These particles can increase the risk of respiratory infection, as well as reduce the amount of air reaching the lungs.”

Thus spake B. Rosie Lerner, Purdue Extension Consumer Horticulture Specialist in a 1997 article entitled “Please Don’t Burn Your Leaves.”

Whatever.

The first arrival of a slightly cool snap this past week put me in mind of the sweetly perfumed skies of Miami, Oklahoma forty years ago, when neighbors would rake their leaves into neat piles and set fire to them, spreading a heavenly, autumn aroma all over the town.

Nobody complained about the smell or the smoke back then. In searching for appropriate images to accompany this article, I was quite surprised to see numerous passionate diatribes out there citing the smoke from burning leaves as the Next Great Threat. Indeed, it seems to cross that most sacred of lines: political correctness!

For instance, check out this comment from a garden club chat board, reproduced verbatim:

“im really sick of people burning leaves in their yards. is there any law against this in pennsylvania? the smell is sickening even with my windows closed tight i can still smell it. theres a cloud of smoke above my neighborhood is this legal?”

Thus complained a user who probably keeps their windows closed tight, their garage door down, and their front door bolted shut to escape possible interaction with neighbors.

That was the whole point of leaf burning. Neighbors would gather in loose groups on K Street and have conversations as their leaf piles slowly smoldered. Some neighbors were outdoors more often than others at different times of the year, but in October, everyone was outside burning leaves. Thus, you could have a conversation with Mrs. Koff, who would rarely be seen otherwise.

And I seriously doubt that any of us died from the effects of smelling leaf smoke.

And that aroma. They say that smell is the single most powerful provoker of deeply hidden memories. When I smell burning leaves, I am instantly transformed back to a slightly nippy night in October, 1967.

Leaf burning has been outlawed in my town, as it has in most cities all over the country. However, I take advantage of a loophole for backyard fire pits to enjoy a single burn of a modest amount of leaves. The procedure follows this routine, if you would like to duplicate it:

Rake up a bushel basket of leaves, then set the mulching mower to have the front wheels higher up than the rear. Mow the entire yard, chopping the leaves into nothingness. Then, place the unchopped leaves into the pit and wait for sundown.

As it gets dark, pour yourself some good bourbon over ice and set fire to your precious little stash. As it burns, savor the subtle aroma, close your eyes, and enjoy a few minutes of being a kid again, at least in your mind. Sip your bourbon, go back inside, and sleep like a baby.

For a non-paranoid look at burning leaves, check out this site.