irememberjfk_l6fq3c – Page 15 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

Growing Up in Tornado Alley

Miami, Oklahoma was located just beyond the eastern end of Tornado Alley, as defined here. The little burgh had a history of tornado touchdowns, even though they were more rare there than any typical Kansas community.

But the possibility of a tornado destroying our house was terrifying to me. And while I miss many, many things about the 60’s, one thing I don’t miss is the state of tornado forecasting that we had back then.

Miami had tornado sirens that would put me into panic mode when they filled the air with their mournful wails. In the first grade, I would even get tearful during well-publicized noontime tests. And I wasn’t the only kid in class to do so, either.

It wasn’t until the ripe old age of 45 that I actually experienced my first tornado, an F-3 that thankfully passed just over my house, yet still causing $3,000 in damages. I’m happy to say that my irrational fear is long gone, replaced by a fascination with the phenomenon. My wife had to call me in from the front yard to get in the closet a minute or so before the funnel cloud passed over.

One of the big reasons that the fear passed, besides growing older, of course, is the vastly improved state of radar tracking of tornadoes. When I hear a warning siren go off, I simply meander over to a radio and turn on the local AM affiliate that has appointed itself Watcher of the Weather and find out exactly where the tornado is and where it’s heading. Most of the time, we simply listen as it safely passes miles away.

But in the 60’s, a tornado warning siren meant, to me, impending doom. It meant that a massive funnel big enough to swallow the entire town was likely bearing down on me, and no amount of consoling by my parents could change that.

The local TV stations would show grainy radar images that further scared the daylights out of me. The radar showed black and white blotches that were meant to represent storm systems and likely funnel cloud locations, but they were pretty limited in actual information provided.

It was about this time that the word began spreading that turning your TV to channel two would warn you of a tornado in the immediate area. The idea was that you tuned to channel 13 (the highest setting on VHF) and darken your screen to nearly black. Then, tune to channel 2 (the lowest setting) and see if the screen turns white. If it does, head for cover!

Did it work? Here’s what the NOAA experts had to say about it:

The idea was that tornadic thunderstorms were very active lightning producers. However, the method had (has) several shortcomings. Not all tornadic storms produce large amounts of lightning. TV’s are not all equally sensitive, and in fact some are made to filter out lightning signals. If you are connected to cable, it won’t work. The bottom line is that the method provide completely unreliable in actual field tests. Did it work sometimes? Yes, but most of the time it did not — it either indicated a tornadic storm when none occurred, or it did not indicate the presence of such a storm when in fact one was nearby. In meteorological terms, its success score was too low and its false alarm rate too high to be of use.

But with the state of 1960’s weather forecasting, it was about as effective as Earl Ludlum (our local weatherman).

Doppler radar made some quantum leaps in the late 70’s, and severe weather forecasting became much more accurate. That eased the stress levels of many Tornado Alley dwellers, especially scared little kids. That, plus the fact that storm cells could be seen in colors that varied according to intensity (since we all had color TV’s by then), gave us all a much clearer picture of where tornadic activity was in relation to our location.

But we kids of the 60’s who grew up in tornado-prone areas can recall a time when sirens would fill us with fear and loathing, much as news of the latest gasoline price hikes do today. 😉

Fallout Shelters

That sign to the left used to be a regular sight when I was a kid. It signified that the building that sported it was certified as a safe place to be in the event of nuclear fallout.

I don’t remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I know that there were quite a few people that I knew who were convinced that, even though we dodged that particular bullet, that nuclear was inevitable sooner or later.

It was easy to believe. NATO and the eastern blocs were cranking out ridiculous numbers of atomic weapons. Test detonations were being performed several times a year. The news would report atomic clouds drifting over the western parts of the country after a Russian test.

It was scary for a kid.

I don’t remember any of our neighbors in Miami, Oklahoma with bomb shelters. On the other hand, this little town, located in tornado alley, DID have numerous basements that the owners no doubt also thought about as refuges against air-borne fallout.

I used to cringe when the Emergency Broadcast System would perform their frequent tests over the television. That sound it made was the same one you heard in fictional movies and TV shows when it would be announced that nukes had been launched, run for your shelters!

The Day After was the ultimate look at life after a nuclear war. It wasn’t shown until 1983, when the Iron Curtain was getting close to collapsing. But it did show the futility of hiding in a shelter and coming out to a destroyed society. The survivors were the unlucky ones.

Today, fallout shelter signs are rarely seen, and the few that survive frequently date back to the 60’s. I don’t miss them.

Expo 67

About 1998 or so, we took a trip to Orlando. I figure every kid ought to see Disney World at least once in their lives, even if it nearly bankrupts the parents. Anyhoo, we went to the Epcot Center one sunny day, and I had a distinct deja vu feeling about the place. Eventually, as we strolled from “country” to “country,” it dawned on me: the feelings I was experiencing were very much like those I had lived through many years earlier as I went through Expo 67 in Montreal.

World’s Fairs used to be a big deal, they certainly still were while we Boomer kids were growing up. In 1967, Montreal hosted a spectacular that was the talk of the planet, officially known as the 1967 International and Universal Exposition. I’m not sure which parent was the most gung-ho to go, I would suspect it was my schoolteacher mom, but dad was all for it, too, perhaps because the conservative ex-Minnesotan would have the opportunity to visit friends and family on the way up to Canada.

So one June day, we piled into the car, my two parents, my reluctant seventeen-year-old brother, and my own eager seven-year-old self.

When we eventually made it to Montreal, I was captivated by the foreignness of the place. Let’s face it, going to the capital of the French province is almost like taking a trip to Europe. The signs everywhere were in French, and the city was the most crowded, busiest, craziest place I’d ever seen.

I remember being in a massive traffic jam, the first I’d ever experienced. There was a road sign stating that the speed limit was 50 MPH (I’m pretty sure it was still MPH in those days). The whole family thought that was hilarious as we crawled along.

Inside the American pavilion, an Apollo space capsule. The capsule hadn’t yet gone into space, but the tragedy of Apollo 1 had just happened the previous January

I also remember that we stayed in some sort of boarding house in lieu of a hotel. It was either a bargain, or simply no hotels were available in the tourist-packed town, as it was the only time we ever did so. The bathroom was in the hall, shared by a number of individuals. That added even more strangeness to being in a very foreign city.

We spent two, maybe three days at the actual Expo, I can’t remember for sure. My parents shot lots of pics with a Kodak Instamatic, but very sadly, they have disappeared. One I particularly recall was depicting a marquee proclaiming that Simon and Garfunkel would be appearing live onstage, along with Tim Rose. The sign, of course, had both “and” and “et.” My older brother finally had something to get excited about, but the concert cost extra, and my thrifty father refused to let him go, putting him back into a funk that lasted the rest of the trip.

We visited many pavilions, and saw many wondrous sights. But my normally acute memory doesn’t recall that many of them, except the huge geodesic dome that housed the American presentation.

I remember gazing up in wonder as we walked into the structure, seeing the sun entering through thousands of little windows which formed a monstrous sphere. The dome style was the design of world famous architect R. Buckminster Fuller, and they were seen in all sorts of places during the 60’s. It’s still popular, and every time I see one, I think of that American pavilion.

I recall that everything was quite futuristic. Two particular predictions were echoed there, just like they were at nearly every other forward-looking presentation: flying cars, and picture phones.

“Where’s my flying car?” is a common gag today, when those visions of the future are re-examined, but the whole picture phone concept has gotten turned upside down.

The futurists never saw the internet coming. True, they correctly predicted that computers would be a huge part of 21st-century life, but the downfall of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) was never seen. Between cheap or free Voice Over IP and unlimited cell phone plans, the wired telephone is fast going the way of the wing vent window.

Of course, if you like, you can do video chatting, but most of us prefer good old conversation sans video imagery.

The rest of the world put up some amazing displays at Expo 67 too, of course. The Canadian pavilion was very prominent, as it should have been, and while I don’t remember if we visited all of them, I know for sure we hit that one.

I remember going to the pavilion dedicated to Canadian Indians as well. The presentations there were controversial for the depiction of the white man as a persecutor of the aboriginals, but I’d been hearing that for a long time. I guess the WWII generation found something distasteful about that, their children, however, were fully aware via history lessons in school that there was nothing honorable about the exploitation of North America by European explorers and their followers. That was already being taught by second grade in the 60’s.

Eventually, mom and dad decided that we’d seen enough. We spent some time at the Lachine Canal, which I remember vividly. I’d never seen a canal before, the filling and emptying of the locks was fascinating for a kid to watch.

We went home through the eastern states, where I was treated to seeing Niagara Falls and the Great Smokey Mountains. When we finally arrived in Miami, Oklahoma, my brain was full of wonderful memories of strange places, none stranger than the city of Montreal itself.

OK, Boomers, your turn. How many of you were at Expo 67 with me, walking around with your parents and marveling at the sights of a World’s Fair, back when the title still carried meaning?

The Ups and Downs of Downtowns

My own depiction of downtown Miami, Oklahoma, 1955

The communities that we live in have been evolving since time immemorial. No facet of American culture has undergone more transformations than the downtown business district.

Every town with more than a couple hundred residents has one. And the odds are that it has seen its share of ups and downs over the years. And I’m not just talking Boomer years, either.

In the area where I grew up, there was a boom in the formation and growth of communities about the turn of the 20th century. In Oklahoma, many of these were given the names of Indian tribes that had been forcefully relocated there during the Trail of Tears era. In Arkansas, where I currently reside, communities are often named after railroad executives, who were often responsible for their formation at key points along the routes.

Stroll along the downtown sidewalks of these communities, and you will likely see durable old buildings dating from this era, from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s.

Those buildings have probably seen much in the way of both glory and ignominy.

When we grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, downtowns were on the rebound. They started off strong, but when the Great Depression hit, many of the businesses that had originally inhabited the buildings dropped out of sight. Many downtown structures were unoccupied while the country ‘s economy convulsed.

However, the economy eventually woke up and began roaring during WWII, and once again downtown buildings became inhabited by thriving businesses. After the war, prosperity was in the air, and every downtown was filled with shoppes run by returned vets who were doing a brisk business.

Many a downtown of this era sported a business or two selling the Next Great Invention, television. A big store window might feature several powered-up models, and it was a popular place for the less fortunate who could not yet afford one to enjoy the hypnotic effects of the one-eyed monster.

Then there were the dime stores. We all fondly remember the downtowns of our youth containing at least one Woolworths, or TG&Y, or Kress, or Ben Franklin.

There would also be banks, a hardware store, a shoe store, and a single-screen movie theater.

Downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, renovated and rejuvenated

Thus ended the sweet 60’s. The next two decades would lead us to believe that the downtown business district was dead.

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows, and vacant stores
Seems like nobody ever wants to go down there no more

In 1984’s My Hometown, Bruce Springsteen summed up downtown’s plight in that era. The 70’s were brutal on the economy. Things were turning around in the 80’s, but the effect had not yet reached downtown, and many of us remember the thriving Main Streets of our youth had become depressing places, indeed. Family-owned dime stores, hardware stores, and shoe stores were being attacked on all fronts by suburban shopping malls, massive retail chains, and tight dollars.

But our venerable downtowns showed that they still had life left in them.

Today, many communities proudly tout their “historical districts.” The downtown buildings that we knew and loved have new tenants. Upscale coffee shops, restaurants, and clothiers are often found in formerly run-down buildings that have been the beneficiaries of downtown renewal projects.

Of course, not every community has been able to afford to resurrect their downtowns. But enough have that we Boomer kids can smile with satisfaction that not every up-and-down story has to end down.

Dime Stores

Ad from my own Miami, Oklahoma Woolworth’s

Know how to make a six year-old kid light up in 1966? Ask him if he would like to go to the Dime Store!

Dime Stores sprang up across the country in the early twentieth century. By Baby Boomer time, every town with at least a thousand inhabitants had at least one. We had a Woolworth’s in my home town. Other brands included Kress, Ben Franklin, and TG&Y.

They frequently featured lunch counters. Our store in Miami, Oklahoma did. In fact, a major kickoff of the Civil Rights movement took place at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960 at Greensboro, North Carolina. A piece of that counter is in the Smithsonian.

I have fond memories of cherry shakes at that store I grew up with. But the best part was the TOYS!

There were long divided compartments filled with plastic Japanese-made delights that would make a kid’s head spin. Toy soldiers, miniature cars, play guns, balls, tops, whistles, airplanes, boats, and more were stocked in those magical shelves. They were just the right height for a kid to browse through them too.

Mom would often let me pick one out. It usually cost a dime. My collection of plastic treasures would thus grow incrementally. And being plastic, they are probably still in pristine condition buried in various landfills, awaiting future archaeologists to discover and speculate over.

The store even had a unique aroma, a mixture of cooking food, mothballs, old wood (it was in an ancient downtown building), and tennis shoe soles. I remember getting my first genuine pair of P.F. Flyers at that store.

Around 1951, a man opened a Ben Franklin up in Bentonville, Arkansas. His name was Sam Walton.

He went on to bigger things, and took most of the Dime Store chains with him.

Digging in the Dirt

If it was a warm, sunny day, a 60’s kid would be expunged from the house by a mother who was tired of her child watching television. After all, she grew up without TV, and knew the value of playing in the great outdoors. She knew, way before it became fashionable, that kids needed to get away from the one-eyed monster. Had the personal computer invaded the home space back then, she likewise would have shooed me away from the keyboard and out into the yard to plant some indelible memories of playing in the dirt.

We had a big old tree in the front yard. I believe it was an elm. It must have been of the slippery variety, since Dutch Elm Disease would have wiped it out long ago had it been of the American species. A 1995 trip to Miami revealed the warm news that the old tree was still alive, albeit MUCH bigger than it used to be.

The tree’s roots were exposed on the surface. That was a critical part of the equation for perfect dirt play. That allowed the digging of tunnels under the topmost radicels. it also allowed roads and bridges to be constructed on the larger, flatter-on-top versions.

Miami, Oklahoma had some natural prairie within its city limits. That meant that over the course of thousands of years, buffalo and other large plain-dwelling herbivores had managed to keep tree growth at bay by constant grazing. As each winter would cause grass to die back, the decaying vegetative matter would add to the ever-deepening soil. The end result for me, circa 1967, was that I had some seriously great rock-free dirt in which to dig in my front yard.

I took advantage of my rich windfall by spending untold hours on my knees, patches applied to my jeans where I had worn holes, creating massive construction projects.

Dad was way too busy making a living to mess with something as trivial as keeping the lawn perfectly landscaped. That meant that the ever-shady area under the tree was largely free of grass growth, another element in the perfect dirt-digging location.

So a typical summer morning would ensue with me digging my Tonkas, Tootsietoys, green army men, and possibly G.I. Joe out of my toybox and heading out to the jobsite. That’s assuming that I had put them up from the previous session, a more likely scenario is that they had been left out there from yesterday.

With that, it was time to get to work. The bulldozer, road grader, and dumptruck were employed to make the most essential components, the roads. Their activity was accompanied by engine noises, shouted directions, and other sound effects provided by yours truly.

Once the roads were in place, then the jeeps, pickups, and perhaps even the semis could begin motoring their way around. The Tootsietoys were too small, but a kid’s short attention span might well be redirected to creating smaller pathways that would traverse root systems and such, perfectly sized for the little vehicles.

Keep in mind that there were no Hot Wheels in this picture, they had not yet been released to the ravenous Boomer youth.

By now, I had probably been joined by other neighborhood friends. Together, we accomplished some amazing engineering feats.

If the dirt had just enough moisture in it, it was possible to build huge tunnels, large enough to put Tonka vehicles into. Generally, we kids, who were heavily into shows like Rat Patrol and Garrison’s Guerrillas, would immediately assign a military use to the structure.

Of course, you know what that meant. The green army men would surreptitiously attack despite G.I Joe’s valiant efforts to keep them at bay, causing catastrophic cave-ins.

But it was okay. Digging for survivors was fun, too.

Despite the fact that I have a couple of massive sweetgum trees with lots of exposed roots in the front yard where my kids grew up, they never got into the dirt-digging thing like their old man did. I think the reason was that their grandparents provided them with enough toys and such that didn’t lend themselves to dirtwork that they never got hooked.

Too bad for me. I would have been more than happy to lend a hand constructing tunnels.

China Opens Up to the West

We Boomer kids grew up in a pretty consistent political situation: Better Dead than Red.

The communists, ANY communists, were our sworn enemies, that is if you lived in the United States, or most other democratic nations. Russia, Cuba, East Germany, North Vietnam, Red China, they were all the same. The bad guys. The other side. The force from which the world must be protected from further expansion.

That all began to take a turn another direction entirely in 1971.

Table tennis, or ping-pong, was occasionally featured on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. While it had its followers, it was far from being one of the more popular competitive contests in the US. But it was a different matter in the Orient. Ping-pong was a passion!

Despite its lack of serious fan base, the US had a pretty good ping-pong team in 1971. They were playing in a tournament in Japan that year when a chance incident of a player jumping on the wrong bus, coupled with a courageous act of generosity by one of his competitors, led to relations normalizing between China (notice we dropped the Red?) and the United States.

US star player Glenn Cowan was late practicing one evening, and missed his bus back to the hotel. He spotted another bus and jumped on. It was occupied by the Chinese National Table Tennis Team.

Cowan was an outgoing fellow, and stood at the front of the bus as it left for the hotel and said a few informal words to the team. A translator passed them on in Chinese. The result were icy stares from the players who had been well-schooled in the decadence of the West, and the need to avoid contact with them at all costs.

Then, a player named Zhuang Zedong stood up in the rear of the bus, walked forward, and presented Cowan with a silk-screen portrait of the Huangshan Mountains.

Cowan was flabbergasted (in a good way) by the act of generosity. The rest of Zedong’s team were equally flabbergasted, but in a distinctly different direction.

When the bus arrived, there were photographers present who recorded the bizarre sight of an American competitor getting off of a bus full of communist Chinese rivals.

The incident received lots of airplay, and it eventually got back to Chairman Mao. With the Cultural Revolution (and the rumors of its horrible human rights abuses) winding down, he decided that it was time to make a friendly gesture towards the largest of the western nations. The end result: the US team was invited to visit China to play in a tournament just a few days after the Japanese competition was over.

The tournament was a success, even though the Chinese team seemed to be taking some dives in the name of diplomacy. A little less than a year later, Richard Nixon made his historic trip to visit Mao and Chou-En-lai (as he was known then). He also toured many parts of the country, and the TV shots of him standing on the Great Wall are burned indelibly into my memory.

Soon, we were doing business with China, and suddenly seemingly forgot that there existed a small island off of the nation’s east coast that we had once also called (nationalist) China. Such was the price paid for new political allies.

I was a serious juvenile philatelist in those days, and was delighted to learn that I could now obtain stamps from Communist China. I ended up with quite a few for a quarter or so from the Littleton Stamp and Coin Company.

Today, for better or worse, there are few items in the discount stores that are manufactured anywhere but China. Chinese-made merchandise has suffered a poor reputation for quality that is slowly being overcome. My son recently presented me with a very nice Kershaw pocket knife that was made over there.

But once upon a time, Red China filled a kid’s heart with uneasiness, imagining a vast communist army that was bent on destroying the American Way. After all, ALL communists were evil!

A Sleepy Ozark Fishing Village

Postcard from the Anchor Inn, Branson, Missouri, late 50’s

I wasn’t shortchanged for vacations when I was a kid. I lived in a dual-income household long before it was necessary for economic survival. So when my mom, the schoolteacher, got three months off during summer, we were assured of traveling SOMEWHERE.

A sleepy little fishing village in southern Missouri was a couple hours’ drive from my Miami, Oklahoma hometown. It was a fun, homey, funky place to get away for a couple of days. And the trout fishing was good on Lake Taneycomo, a dammed-up portion of the White River that was more of a swollen watercourse than a lake. But the ice-cold water teemed with rainbow trout.

As a result, I have fond memories of many trips to Branson. And the majority of them involve staying at the same place: the Anchor Inn, right next to the old bridge that crosses Taneycomo.

The Anchor Inn was a cottage rental outfit. The individual cottages sat among the oak trees on the top of the cliff that overlooked Taneycomo below. It had a pool that I remember as being as big as the municipal pool that still exists in Miami, but which was no doubt quite a bit smaller.

It was quite reasonable, or dad would not have been a return customer. We must have stayed at the Anchor Inn at least ten times during my childhood.

Once, though, we stayed in a different spot that had a cabin right on the lake. The rental included a boat, which I went out on with my father and older brothers many times. I was too young to fish, so my job was to keep pulling the stringer out of the water and admire the catch.

The point of this reminiscence is that Branson, Missouri was once known as a quiet little Ozark getaway, not a place where musical performers go to end their careers. 😉

In the 60’s, the musical acts consisted of the Presley Family and the Baldknobbbers. It was down home, yee-haw stuff, complete with matching buffoons in straw hats and overalls. Dad would never consider spending his hard-earned money on such nonsense. It was better destined for salmon eggs and fishing gear.

But the musical acts caught on, and today, that sleepy fishing village has turned into one of the top vacation spots in the US. Perhaps you have visited there yourself. But you probably weren’t there when you were a kid, unless you grew up in the south-central United States.

But odds are a Boomer kid has fond recollections of a similar situation where a quiet spot turned into a massive tourist attraction. If so, take today’s account of sleepy Branson, Missouri, and change the names as needed.

A Little Town Called Mayberry

Some of our memories as Boomers are so universal that we take them for granted. Practically all of us had TV’s in our households, or if not, we still had regular access to them. And the odds are overwhelming that 99.99% of us are familiar with a little town in North Carolina called Mayberry.

The Andy Griffith Show was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show. On February 15, 1960, an episode aired where Danny was detained by a small-town sheriff for running a stop sign. Outraged at the size of the fine, Thomas elected to sit in jail rather than pay. While in the hoosegow, he observed Sheriff Taylor’s kindly ways in dealing with Opie, his son, Otis, the town drunk (played by Frank Cady, who would go on to star as Mr. Drucker in multiple TV series), and Henrietta Perkins, played by Francis Bavier. Yes, the character names and actors were familiar, but their roles were not yet established as we know them.

The episode was a hit, and plans were made to launch a series that fall based on Mayberry’s day-to-day small-town activities. Andy Griffith was a hit from the word go, and never fell below #7 on the Nielsen ratings for its entire eight-year run.

An actor named Don Knotts watched the Danny Thomas episode and called his friend Andy Griffith when he got word that a new series was in the works. He suggested that Sheriff Taylor would need a deputy, and Griffith agreed.

Good call.

Thus, the opening episode featured Deputy Barney Fife, cousin to Andy. The family relationship was mentioned again in the second episode, then never brought up again.

The show featured a host of unforgettable characters, each with their own idiosyncrasies. Francis Bavier ended up cast as Aunt Bee, of course. There was Gomer Pyle, the simple-minded but lovable gas station attendant. Floyd the barber had many a good story, but would frequently get mixed up in the midst of telling them. Otis the town drunk knew where the keys to his cell were hanging, so he could let himself in and out as needed. Ernest T. Bass was an antisocial who delighted in throwing rocks. The Darling clan was always in trouble for moonshine, but they played some soulful bluegrass during their periods of detainment.

The public fell in love with the show at first site, but the critics? Not so much. It was ridiculed as “corn-pone humor,” an initial source of discouragement to Griffith. The reviews were soon forgotten as the show streaked towards the top in popularity, finishing its first season at #4.

The writers focused on milking the eccentricities of the characters, and the result was brilliant episode after brilliant episode. Barney became well identified as being gung-ho, courageous to a fault, and too quick on the trigger, both figuratively and literally. His idea of stopping crime?Nip it in the bud! It was great stuff when he would emerge from romantic encounters with Thelma Lou with his hair pointing every which way. Indeed, there was enough potential with Deputy Fife that he might have spawned his own spinoff.

Fortunately, that never happened. The chemistry between Taylor and Fife was simply perfect, and many have sought to duplicate it in subsequent sitcoms with little success.

Season six saw some dramatic changes. First off, the show went from black and white to color. Second, Don Knotts left the series, replaced by comedian Jack Burns as Warren Ferguson. Third, many of the initial writers left, and were replaced by a crew who took the show in a different direction.

While the ratings remained sky-high, in retrospect, most agree that it all amounted to an overall downhill turn for the series.

While slapstick was the rule in the B&W days, now, the jokes became fewer and farther between. As I recall, most episodes involved someone getting their feelings hurt. Sheriff Taylor became more of an urbane, sophisticated individual who would wisely direct who should apologize to whom. It wasn’t as much fun.

Thus, the majority agreed at jumptheshark.com that going from black and white to color was the moment that The Andy Griffith Show ceased to matter.

On a sad side note, isn’t it a shame that the great site that was Jump the Shark so horribly jumped its own shark when bought out by TV Guide?

However, Andy Griffith aired its final 1968 episode while sitting alone atop the Nielsen heap.

Many cast members went on to appear in Mayberry RFD, a regrettable follow-up which nonetheless survived until CBS’s 1971 Great Rural Purge.

It’s interesting to me that sitcoms continue to push the envelope of what’s allowed for broadcast television, daring more and more with suggestiveness, language, and controversy in an effort to capture the attention of audiences. Perhaps creative minds should look at the timeless success of the first five seasons of The Andy Griffith Show, now more popular than ever. The newest generations relate just as well to the little town of Mayberry as we Boomers do.

Food for thought?

Who Can Turn the World on With Her Smile?

There probably aren’t very many Boomer males who haven’t been in love with the beautiful Mary Tyler Moore. My older brothers fell for her as Laura Petrie. I was just a kid then, so I fell for Mary Richards when I was a teenager. And even today, she has aged gracefully, maintaining a timeless beauty that refuses to go away.

Mary herself is not a Boomer. She was born in 1936. But her beautiful smile and the popularity of her TV shows makes her a Boomer memory for sure.

There are many things I love about this talented actress. First of all, when she was born, she was named Mary Tyler Moore. I have always appreciated artists, especially actors and actresses, who felt comfortable keeping their own name. However, I DO understand why John Wayne decided not to go with Marion Morrison. 😉

Mary’s first moment on TV, which has been preserved, can be seen here. It was a Hotpoint appliance commercial for the Ozzie and Harriet Show. It caught the public’s attention, and Mary was soon a regular guest star on shows like 77 Sunset Strip, Wanted: Dead or Alive, and Hawaiian Eye. She auditioned for the part of Danny Thomas’s daughter on make Room for Daddy, but Danny himself vetoed her, saying her little pixie nose could never let her pass for his daughter.

In 1961, Carl Reiner envisioned a show about his misadventures writing for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, and cast Dick Van Dyke as himself and Mary as Rob’s understanding bride, Laura.

Dick was a good looking comedic genius who brought in the female viewers. Mary would have brought in the male demographic by being as funny as Adlai Stevenson, but it turned out she was a comedic genius herself. Double bonus.

Carl Reiner envisioned a series that would run for five years, then the plug would be pulled. And that’s exactly what happened. The show was an incredible hit, and ended of its own accord after 158 wildly successful episodes. Its legacy is historically cemented in place by the fact that it was listed as “never jumped” at jumptheshark.com (before they opened the floodgates and let a bunch of mediocrities in).

What would be next for the lovely Ms. Moore? It would be 1970, with the debut of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

The show was perfect for the era. Women’s Lib was in full force, and a show about a gal who breaks off a bad relationship and moves to Minneapolis to start over was certain to be a hit with good writing and good acting. Once again, it scored big in both areas. Besides Mary, the show included a mixture of talents like Ed Asner, Valerie Harper, Betty White, Cloris Leachman, Gavin McCleod, and John Amos.

While Gloria Steinem was in full activist mode, Mary Richards chose to establish her independence with baby steps. The result was one of the most popular and successful sitcoms in history, even in the opinion of this writer, overshadowing the Dick Van Dyke show itself.

One of the single most hilarious moment on the show was when Chuckles the Clown met his demise. The funeral scene has to be seen to be believed. And thanks to YouTube, you can see it here.

Mary knows how to take her leave, and she took the show out on top in 1977, shortly before I graduated from high school. She proceeded into movies, playing a mother with issues in Robert Redford’s directorial debut Ordinary People in 1980. She was nominated for an Academy Award, but fell short of winning it. The dark, cold character she played so brilliantly was certainly not Mary Richards or Laura Petrie. Its shock value may well have hurt her chances.

As I mentioned before, Mary has slid very gracefully into her golden years. She is an outspoken advocate of causes she supports, and still picks up an occasional acting gig (HER choice). She is also an essential part of Boomer memories, particularly for the guys who sought her qualities in the ladies they pursued.