Unfortunately, I can’t remember which day it was. But one day each week, we received a delightful little four-page read in school: My Weekly Reader.
Thanks to this fascinating little periodical, I knew the names of every astronaut who went into space between 1969 and 1972. In fourth grade, our teacher made us memorize them, and I kept doing so for years afterwards. My Weekly Reader would prominently trumpet their triumphs, even with the later moon missions that the public lost interest in.
Then again, there was Peanut and Jocko. The monkey and elephant would crack wise and further inspire class clowns like myself.
The idea behind MWR was that you would study them on your own, then discuss them in class. It was more like fun than work.
n researching this piece, I learned that the familiar flyer was first produced way back in 1928 by Eleanor M. Johnson, who died in 1987. So it’s far more than a Boomer tradition. In fact, it’s still going strong today! Even Peanut and Jocko are continuing to inspire the next generations of class clowns.
Here’s to Eleanor, who found a way to inject a little fun into an otherwise humdrum school day, and made you learn something in the process.
There may well be many of you Boomers (and others) out there who can’t relate to today’s memory. The Floridians and Los Angelenos will shake their heads quizzically, as will Minnesotans, but for different reasons. Bear with me.
Miami, Oklahoma (and my later homes in SW Missouri and NW Arkansas) had a temperate climate which allowed for hot summers and cold winters. The winters were quite mild compared to International Falls, Minnesota, but we got our share of frozen precipitation.
So a little bit of high pleasure I recall waking up to was discovering that the yard was white, so were the streets, and SCHOOL WAS CANCELED!
Mid-south towns like Miami were ill-equipped to deal with slippery streets. Since many winters would only manage a couple of two-inch snowfalls, city officials simply couldn’t justify purchasing expensive street-clearing equipment. So a modest three-inch-depth might virtually paralyze traffic for the early part of a day.
School buses made their runs first thing in the morning, so it didn’t take much snow for the school superintendent to call KGLC, the local radio station, as well as the Pittsburg, Kansas and Joplin, Missouri TV stations and give the word that would bring sheer ecstasy to kids all over town (and perhaps a slightly different emotion to their mothers).
While waking up to snow and getting the good news was intoxicating enough, it was even better if a heavy snow caused a cancellation the night before! I remember we got an unusual 12″ snowfall about 1966 or so. I got to stay up late that night and sleep in on a Wednesday, in the middle of January! Life couldn’t possibly get any better. That snow gave us the rest of the week off.
Okay, my memory is not so perfect that I recall the very days I missed. But it makes for a nice story flow, don’t you think? 😉
The neighborhood kids would converge some time in the morning, and the constructions and snowball fights would commence.
It’s amazing what a group of kids with time and packable snow can accomplish. I remember my buddies and myself constructing some pretty bonzer forts. The snowball fights that would follow were legendary.
It was unusual to miss more than one day of school in Miami. Wear from traffic as well as the few trucks they had with plows would generally make school quite feasible the next day. And besides, you didn’t want to miss TOO many days, or you might have to make them up at the end of the year. I remember going to school until early June one year, probably the one when we got the really bad storm.
Of course, you Minnesotans, Wisconsans, and fellow kids from the other northern states might well have missed fewer days than I did way down in Oklahoma, thanks to your much-more-fully-equipped snow clearing crews. A three inch snow canceling school? I wish!
Hey, things even out. I was scared witless of tornadoes as a kid, due to being located just a little ways from the heart of Tornado Alley. I DESERVED my occasional snow days. 😉
When you think about it, going to grade school during the 50’s and 60’s was downright hazardous! I mean back in those days, asbestos was a wonder substance for insulation that was used in our floor and ceiling tiles and insulation ubiquitously. Our schools were full of it!
Not only that, but there we were, innocent little kids, and they were sticking needles into us right and left! Needles full of nasty things!
You can quickly spot a Baby Boomer by the presence of a scar on a shoulder (mine is the left) from a smallpox vaccination.
But another procedure that I (and no doubt many of you) recall being performed upon me at least twice was the tuberculosis test.
Tuberculosis has had an up and down history. It was one of society’s biggest killers in history, up until about WWII. A vaccine was developed during the 1930’s which slowed down the disease in general. Unfortunately, it also CAUSED the disease in some cases. And it wasn’t a lifetime vaccine. It would lose its effectiveness after a few years, and the recipient would again become vulnerable to the tuberculosis bacillus.
What largely caused TB to disappear in our childhoods was effective quarantining. TB can be “arrested,” i.e. it can remain in one’s system, but not be infectious. And mandatory quarantines caused TB to become a rare, but still worrisome, disease by the 1960’s.
That worrisome factor was what led to us Boomer kids being pricked with the Tine TB test during our grade school years.
The multiple needles didn’t hurt a bit. Of course, neither did the gentle pricking which initiated that huge smallpox lesion. So many of us were a bit skeptical when that nurse produced the small plastic hoogus that implanted actual tuberculosis bacteria into our skin.
It was probably good instincts that made us feel that way The Tine test has since been largely discredited as being inaccurate, and in fact CAUSING TB in some cases.
But hey, we were kids. We hadn’t yet learned to not trust anyone over thirty. So we submitted to the procedure.
I never knew anyone who tested positive. I assume that they would have been quarantined themselves. Quarantine is very effective in containing infection in many cases, but it’s politically incorrect in itself.
And sadly, in today’s society, political correctness has decreed what is moral and immoral. Taboo and acceptable. Good and bad.
With TB’s return via immigration and the compromised immune systems of AIDS sufferers, perhaps the school TB test is back. I know my kids never took it in the 80’s and 90’s.
But we Baby Boomers remember the little pricking of the TB test as one of our many rites of passage so long ago.
The term “ubiquitous” is defined as “existing or being everywhere, esp. at the same time; omnipresent.” Ubiquitous perfectly describes the humble writing implement known as the Crayola Crayon.
The depicted postage stamp was released in 1998, graced with an illustration of an early-20th-century Crayola box. This shows that kids have been playing with Crayolas for over a century, making the pigmented wax writing implements ubiquitous in the truest sense of the word.
Binney and Smith, a company that specialized in industrial pigments, released the first box of eight Crayola crayons containing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, and black sticks in 1903. It sold for a nickel.
The brains behind Crayolas (the name was dreamed up by Alice Binney, wife of one of the company’s founders) realized that kids would delight in drawing and coloring with them. They would also likely ingest them in the process. Therefore, Crayolas were made of non-toxic materials.
Thus did they arrive in my hands sometime in the early 1960’s. I don’t remember my first box of Crayolas, but, like most kids, coloring was one of my first artistic activities. I was probably three or so, just old enough to be somewhat trusted not to eat the delicious-smelling creations.
Seriously, is there any more intoxicating aroma than opening up a shiny new pack of Crayola Crayons?
But, of course, it wasn’t all joy for Boomer kids when it came to Crayolas.
The first thing that would happen is that the more popular colors would wear down. That would lead to using, say, raw umber to color a tree trunk instead of brown, which was showing wear and tear (as in tearing the paper sleeve back a bit).
The more fortunate among us had the 64-color box that had that sharpener in the back. Thus, a reasonable facsimile of the pristine pointed tip that adorned a brand-new Crayola could be produced. The rest of us had to make do with using a dull crayon’s sharpest edge for fine details.
But sooner or later, time would catch up with every new box of crayons, and they would be reduced to shortened, war-wounded shadows of their former selves.
So many of our boxes of Crayolas looked like the image to the right: Once immaculate and beautiful, but now showing signs of struggles against coloring books that required vast amounts of yellow, dark blue, and black to create landscapes and such that would adorn refrigerators and schoolroom walls for an amount of time suitable for masterpieces of their caliber.
Eventually, popular Crayolas would become too short to go into the box. Then they would be relegated to a cigar box full of their brethren which would have all of their paper peeled off, to be used by laying the entire crayon down on the paper and creating a one-inch wide swath of, say, blueness for a vast sky.
Like us, Crayolas saw their share of having to change with the times for politically correct reasons. In 1958, in response to requests from schoolteachers, “Prussian blue” was renamed “midnight blue.” I’m not exactly sure what that was all about, unless there was a sense of anti-Teutonic prejudice in the air. In 1962, the color “flesh” was renamed “peach.” I guess that’s better than “Caucasian.” And in 1999, “Indian red” became “chestnut.”
The last color change is particularly PC. You see, “Indian red” is a pigment produced in India and used in oil paints. However, since it could give the “wrong impression,” it was renamed.
Thus have Crayolas mirrored the Boomer generation. We are showing wear and tear, some of us more than others. We have had to make changes as society has demanded them. But we have also endured in pretty much the same easily-recognizable form that we have always had.
Could a postage stamp commemoration be far behind?
Mr. Zip window painting at the Miami, Oklahoma post office which has survived for at least 50 years
We Boomer kids look back in wonder at what the world was like when we were children and compare it to the technologies we commonly use today.
But think about what our parents went through! Typically born early in the 20th century, they grew up with horse-drawn wagons delivering ice to keep their food cold. They would pick up a phone and tell the operator who they wanted to talk to. And they would address a letter with a person’s name and a town. That was all of the information that the postal service needed to see to it that it arrived.
This worked with small towns, but deliveries to bigger cities did require a bit more information, e.g. a street.
But by 1943, the situation had gotten complicated enough that the USPS instituted zone codes for larger cities.
Thus, sending a letter to a friend in, say, Los Angeles suddenly got more complicated for our parents. But they eventually learned to add the two-digit code to the address, being rewarded for doing so by speeding up the delivery by a day or two in many cases.
Mr. Zip informs the public about the new zip codes with this card, delivered to each address
Twenty years later, mailing a letter got VERY much more complicated. That was the year that the now-familiar zip code was introduced. Imagine the pain our parents went through having to add a five-digit number to each letter!
But the brains behind the postal service knew what they were doing. In introducing zip codes, they did so by means of a cartoon character that we Boomer kids saw every time we went to the post office, and also on innumerable commercials: Mr. Zip.
Mr. Zip’s familiar personage reminded us that we needed to put a zip code on our letters to make sure they got to where they were intended.
And we dutifully passed the reminders on to our parents.
Zip codes were voluntary when first introduced in 1963. By 1967, they were made mandatory for second and third class bulk mail. But while strongly encouraged for general first class usage, they remain voluntary to this day.
However, leaving a zip code off will typically add days to delivery time.
That, plus the fact that we’ve been using them since the year that JFK was killed, means that nowadays over 95% of letters mailed include a zip code. If you want, you can go the extra mile and add the optional four digits that were introduced in 1983.
However, Mr. Zip is long gone. But he retired (in 1980) with honor, having helped get a nation to voluntarily use a coding format which has greatly enhanced our mail delivery.
Oh, one last piece of zip code trivia: In 1964, Smokey Bear was getting so much fan mail that he was assigned his own zip code: 20252.
One of the inescapable sad facts about human society is that the actions of an infinitesimally small group of dysfunctional individuals will invariably impact the 99.99% of those of us who behave ourselves.
Flying has become an integral part of our lives. Our parents grew up with the concept of getting on a train to get somewhere far away. It was natural for the Boomer generation to adopt the airplane as its no-brainer method of getting somewhere, especially in light of competitive airfares that seem to steadily get more affordable.
That means regularly subjecting ourselves to walking through metal detectors. It means having our carried items subjected to X-radiation. It means having perfect strangers rifle through our most personal items. It means surrendering our Leathermans and pocket knives that we may have inadvertently forgotten to pack in our checked luggage, never to see them again. It means getting viewed as potential hijackers by stern airport security personnel until we successfully pass shoelessly through the devices that proclaim us to be otherwise.
We don’t like it, but we accept it as the price we have to pay, thanks to the actions of a few idiots. But if you remember JFK, you also remember when you went to the airport, purchased your ticket, and walked onto the plane.
On July 16, 1948, an attempt to hijack a seaplane flying out of the nation of Macau ended with the plane crashing into the sea. Thus took place the first hijacking of a commercial plane.
Security check in 1973
Hijacking planes remained a sporadic phenomenon until 1968. That year, a shocking 27 attempts were made to hijack airliners to Cuba. Why did people commandeer airliners to fly to the communist nation? That’s a question that has puzzled me for years. In the case of one man, Black Panther William Lee Brent, it was done to avoid a murder trial.
Hijackings continued to increase in 1969. Palestinians saw them as a way to further their cause and force Israel to release prisoners whom they viewed as unjustly confined. And unlike typical Cuban hijackings, the Palestinian versions would frequently end in tragedy.
Hijackings became more and more popular as the 1970’s progressed. In 1971, D.B. Cooper threatened the lives of the passengers on a 727 and managed to get $200,000 in cash. He then parachuted out of the plane over Oregon and was never seen again.
The crimes of piracy showed no sign of decreasing, and finally, in 1972, the first metal detectors were installed in airports. The tunneled structures were very confusing to passengers who were not used to being searched for weapons. Lawsuits were filed questioning the legality of the procedure, claiming it violated the Fourth Amendment against illegal searches and seizures. But the courts upheld it, and preflight security checks became a part of our culture.
Every time some madman decides to make a statement by hijacking or destroying an airliner, the rules get tougher. Despicable monsters take over planes with box cutters, now we can’t carry pocketknives. A dipwad turns his shoe into a bomb, now we have to walk through security in our socks.
It’s sad, but it’s the price we pay. A tiny minority of sociopaths can have a huge influence on the way the rest of us well-behaved ones are treated. But those of us old enough to remember JFK can recall a simpler time when you could walk straight from the ticket counter to the airplane, with no searches in between.
People build lots and lots of houses. And sometimes, a few of those houses may become abandoned. Once that happens, it doesn’t take long for them to quickly deteriorate into an eyesore. Or perhaps a better term may be a really cool place for kids to play.
Miami, Oklahoma, population about 12,000 circa 1967, had a few abandoned houses here and there. One of them was just up the road a block from my house. It sat all by itself, thickly overgrown by bushes and such.
It drew the neighborhood kids like Mecca draws the faithful.
Of course, I don’t have pictures of “the old house,” as we neighborhood kids referred to it. And when I revisited Miami just a couple of years after we had moved away, it was already gone. But my memories of the secretive place are keen even today.
Of course, the primary function of an old house was to server as Command Central for games of Army. Perhaps it was just a local thing, but the neighborhood kids and myself didn’t play much cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians. No, we were soldiers. Perhaps it was the G.I.Joe influence of the times.
Anyhow, that abandoned house was where all battles against the enemy were launched. Warfare would take place within the house’s confines, as well, as we would squeeze up against the wall and sneak our way up to the doorways, and suddenly let out a yell and start shooting.
Another cool thing about old houses was that you could break windows, write on the walls, or do pretty much anything else you chose (short of lighting fires) and nobody would care. It was a nice break, as opposed to the rigid rules we had to observe in our own homes.
Plus, sometimes there were cool things to be found. It wasn’t unusual to find an old Mercury dime or buffalo nickel in the dirt outside or perhaps in a crack in the floor.
And you could also let your imagination go wild. Sitting on the overgrown back stoop, you might picture just who was living there and what they were doing ten or twenty years ago. Maybe there was a kid your age then, who had to careful to pick up his room, now littered with pieces of plaster that had fallen from the rain-soaked ceiling.
Of course, some abandoned houses were simply dangerous, and scary to boot. Two-story houses frequently suffered from wood rot that made venturing up the stairs an experience that might well involve plunging through to whatever lay below, perhaps breaking an ankle in the process.
Despite the potential for danger, abandoned houses were a big draw to adventuresome little boys. They still are, I reckon. However, before I close on the subject of abandoned houses, I must comment on one that is very close to me.
You see, a childhood home of mine now sits abandoned with a “KEEP OUT” sign in front of it. I stepped in anyway, figuring that if a sheriff or the like showed up, I could explain that this used to be MY house.
Anyhow, as I walked through the rotting structure, the memories came flooding back. That’s where I sat in the living room floor as my beloved Kansas City Chiefs fell to those blasted Dolphins in the marathon playoff game of 1971. There is my wood-paneled bedroom, where my posters of Johnny Bench and Roberto Clemente once hung. And there was broken plaster on the floor that I used to have to be careful to keep clean.
Abandoned houses could be fun as a kid. But to an adult, they might provide something much more introspective.
The only photo of Moonwink grocery I’ve ever seen. Only the back of the store, unfortunately. Oh, yeah, that’s your webmaster.
The year was 1966. Dad would give me 55 cents to run across the alley to Moonwink Grocery. Mark, the store owner, would sell me a pack of Phillip Morris Filters in a box with a plastic top, knowing I was heading straight back home to give them to my father. I would also spend a nickel, my allowance delivered twice daily, on a candy bar. If dad wasn’t in a hurry, I might browse the comic books before I left.
Every neighborhood had a corner grocery within walking distance in the 1960’s. These were real mom-and-pop businesses, sometimes being run out of a building on the same property the owner had his house on.
Moonwink had other things going for it, too. It resided in a building with two other smaller store spaces. The local barber rented one, the other was frequently sitting empty.
Ink drawing of Moonwink Grocery by the webmaster, assembled after conferring with several individuals who remember it from their own childhoods.
Those were idyllic days. In my little Northeast Oklahoma town of Miami, there were no security cameras, bars on the windows, or height scales on the doors. Nobody would dare rob a neighborhood market in the daylight, and they closed up at 5:00.
The store owner would let you have things on credit, too, frequently not even writing anything down. He knew his customers were good for it.
In 1967, a new store opened in Miami. It was a Quik-Trip. It was also the harbinger of what would be a major factor in the death of neighborhood markets.
Corporate-driven chains, along with supermarkets, would quickly drive mom-and-pops out of business. While Moonwink survived the Safeway and IGA markets in town, since it was more convenient to walk to the store rather than drive uptown, customers began drifting away to the convenience stores that were open late at night. When I was in my hometown last, Moonwink’s lot held an apartment building.
The last mom-and-pop I remember being open was in my high school town of Pea Ridge, Arkansas in the late 70’s. One day at 5:00 sharp, they closed their doors (missing height scales) for good.
In 2003, the largest blackout in US history took place. Affected areas included New York City, as well as surrounding states and Canada all the way up to Hudson Bay. The world was stunned. But Baby Boomers, particularly residents of the affected areas, said “here we go again!”
On 5:27 p.m., November 9, 1965 (that would be the middle of rush hour), much of the same area was affected by what was then the greatest blackout in history. The event would go on to inspire a movie (and a new phrase for the English language), Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?
Traffic lights went dark, subway trains stopped in their tracks, and the world learned just how dependent we had grown on electricity’s being there when we needed it.
The power grid, long touted as a system with multiple failsafes that simply couldn’t and wouldn’t collapse, was revealed to be a long string of dominoes on edge. When a relay failed to operate at the Sir Adam Beck Station no. 2 in Ontario, Canada, a bizarre series of overloads began a chain reaction. The overload shot down the main trunk lines of the power grid, separating power generation sources from load centers and weakening the grid’s structure with each subsequent separation. As the outage progressed through the northeast, power plants in the New York City area automatically shut themselves off to prevent the surges from overloading their generating capability. Within a quarter of an hour the outage had wreaked its havoc, and the entire Northeast was dark and quiet. Well, except for about ten million car horns, that is.
In a scene that was replayed on September 11, 2001, New Yorkers pitched in and helped each other. Volunteers directed traffic, assisted firefighters and rescue teams, and generally refrained from looting.
So what did we learn from the great 1965 blackout? Not much, I’m afraid. The 2003 outage (greatly feared to be terroristic in nature) was attributed to untrimmed branches in Ohio.
Oh, and much more looting took place than in 1965.
But on the other hand, urban dwellers during both blackouts saw something they possibly had never seen before: a sky full of stars.
My own beloved Miami, Oklahoma city pool, as seen on a 1940 postcard
Sweet summertime was at its sweetest for a kid in the 60’s. No school! Staying up late! Sleeping in! And, best of all, SWIMMING ALL DAY LONG!
Miami, Oklahoma had a huge public pool that was (and still is, I’m happy to say, even though it has inexplicably shrunk) gorgeous. I searched online in vain for photos of the actual facility. But on a hot summer day, it looked very much like the photo to the left.
Half of the pool was the kid’s area. A rope separated it from the deeper end. I spent a couple of summers confined to the shallow depths. But if you could swim all the way across the pool, you were allowed access to the Most Holy: the DIVING BOARDS!
The Miami Municipal Pool had a simple but effective policy: A child under the age of ten had to stay on the shallow side of the rope unless he or she could swim across the width of the pool ,without having to stop.
In the summer of 1967, I began attempting to swim from one side of the pool to the other, a distance of probably 75 feet. At first, I would tire out and have to stand up halfway across, but my endurance increased. Finally, I made it the entire way! I went up to a lifeguard and requested an audition.
To my surprise, I didn’t have to swim the width of the pool, only out to the island in the middle of the deep end and back. Piece of cake! Probably sixty feet total.
I completed the test perfectly, and was granted the revered access to the deep end. I was so excited I almost bawled.
I made a beeline to the Most Holy. Miami’s pool had three boards of varying heights above the water. It wasn’t long before I was climbing the ten foot ladder that led to the high dive’s altitude.
My love of swimming, in addition to my seven-year-old fearlessness, caused me to be quite the spectacle. Older kids would goad me into trying multiple flips, and once I learned to tuck, I was doing one-and-a-halfs from the three foot board. I had lots of belly busters during the learning experience, but they don’t hurt so badly when you weigh fifty pounds.
Mom would drop me off at the pool when it opened, around 11:00, if I recall. I would swim until late afternoon. Then, on the ride home, I would suddenly be aware of how FAMISHED I was!
Swimming burns lots of calories. And when you start the day weighing fifty pounds, you probably lose a significant percentage of your mass to treading water and climbing ladders. Ergo, swimming starvation.
I would go home and gorge myself on snacks before dinner. Mom would allow it, probably because she remembered experiencing the same phenomenon during the 1930’s. I still had plenty of appetite when suppertime finally arrived.
Today, of course, the times they have a-changed. Diving boards have gone the way of 29 cent gas, Nehru jackets, and ten-cent Cokes. Society has become a place where people expect to be protected from their own stupidity, or else they will grab the Yellow Pages and phone up a shyster with an ad spanning two full pages. Law schools graduate tens of thousands more each year, God help us. Municipalities can’t afford the liability insurance it takes to have high dives, or even any diving boards at all. So our grandkids slide into the water through long enclosed tubes that protect them from any harm whatsoever as they slowly descend to the four-foot depths.
What a shame. There’s nothing like the rush a seven-year-old kid would feel when he realized that he had gained access to the very same diving boards that his seventeen-year-old sibling was using.
