The Home – Page 3 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

Playing All Day Long

My daughter and son were born in 1986 and 1988. We lived in a small northwest Arkansas town with a population of about 12,000 back then. Yet, times had changed such from the 60’s of my youth that they were supervised when they were outside. They either played in the fenced back yard or on the concrete driveway in the front. Leaving our property was not allowed.

What a contrast to the simpler days of our childhoods.

It was not uncommon for me to get out of bed in the morning, get dressed, and head out the door, not to return until dinnertime. And mom didn’t have a problem with it, as long as I stayed out of trouble. The thought of keeping me home out of fear of being abducted or the like was unthinkable. After all, that sort of thing only took place in big cities, not little towns like Miami, Oklahoma.

The movie Stand By Me portrayed such a day in the life of the Boomer child. A group of kids traveled unsupervised several miles to see the body of a kid who had been hit by a train. While I never saw any dead bodies while growing up, I was free to go anywhere I wanted, as long as I was back before dark. In the summer, this might mean not returning until 8:30 at night.

There was plenty to do to keep a kid occupied. For instance, just a block away was an abandoned house. What a great place for kids to gather! We would use it as an army fort, rob it like a bank, or fight an imaginary fire as it burned to the ground. Writing on its walls was great guilty fun, as well.

Next to it was a big drainage ditch that had a small culvert that ran under the street to the other side. It was just big enough for a kid to walk through. Again, it was perfect for playing army, the game of choice for kids who watched lots of Rat Patrol.

Small town Boomer kids out wandering in the middle of nowhere, no problem!

A mile or so from the house was a small wooded area. I spent many summer hours there, getting bitten and stung by loads of little blood sucking parasites and not caring a whit. It was a blast playing in real trees like were available out in the country. Many an adventure involving Daniel Boone, the Cartwrights, and Indians was had there.

Another favorite gathering spot for us kids was the wading pool. The city had a small circular pool about two feet deep that was free and open to the public. I was free to go there any time I wanted. The city even paid a lifeguard to keep an eye on things, running on the sidewalk being the commonest violation to be pointed out with a sharp whistle.

I recall a beautiful blonde teenaged girl who worked lifeguard one summer. I think she might have been the first one I ever fell in love with, at the age of six. Her name was Cassie Gaines, and she was destined for tragic immortality. She became a vocalist with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and on October 20, 1977, was killed in the infamous plane crash.

The various moms of the neighborhood took it upon themselves to feed whatever kids happened to be at their home at lunchtime. We bounced around enough from home to home that it all evened out for them. Today, might require eight bologna sandwiches, tomorrow everyone would be eating at three houses down the street.

And our parents were never worried. They all knew the neighbors, and everyone trusted everyone else. Occasionally, I would be told to not go to a certain home. Later, I would find that would mean the mother or father was an alcoholic or the like. And I would never question the restriction. I had a lot of freedom, and kept it by behaving myself.

Alas, changing times removed that blissful freedom to go anywhere from my own kids. Nowadays, I imagine parents watch their children like hawks. But think back to your own childhood and you can likely remember a time when it was common to take off and play all day in various locations all over your town.

One Moves Out, One Moves Up

Our tract home, and my oldest brother in the background

Today’s reminiscence is one that is shared by all generations, but I’m going to wax poetic on my own particular experience.

Our little tract home in Miami, Oklahoma seems cramped by today’s standards. It was three bedrooms and one bath. My eldest brother had his own room, while the middle and myself shared another.

It was a cozy, wonderful place to spend the first eight years of my life.

But one day, about 1965, a remarkable transformation took place overnight. My oldest brother headed off to college, and my other brother took over his room.

I had a room all to myself!

Indeed, it was a very liberating experience for all three siblings. One on his own for the first time, and two others with their own private hideaways.

One memory I vividly recall was Terry asking me if I wanted a huge, ugly No Trespassing sign that someone had liberated from a government facility somewhere. It was attached to his bedroom door, and apparently mom was eager to see it go, because she hauled it to the trash before I could answer “Heck yes!”

My room became sort of a bedroom/den, as the television was hauled in there. A swamp cooler was also installed, So needless to say, “my” room was a very popular place on hot summer days and nights.

I remember sitting in that room watching that television when Martin Luther King’s assassination hit the news. I had heard of him, but wasn’t sure why anybody would want to kill a man who kept saying we should have peace and stop fighting among ourselves.

I guess I still don’t get it.

I loved having the TV in there because my mom might stay up until 10:00 watching it, and I would fall asleep listening to it. That was WAY past my bedtime, BTW.

Later, my brother Bill joined the Navy, and I had the whole house to myself. Headsome times, indeed.

Today, my beautiful bride of nearly twenty-five years and I have a 1500 square foot home to ourselves. I gained an office when my daughter left two years ago, and now we have an unused bedroom that was formerly inhabited by her younger brother, now on his own out in California.

This is the stuff that fills a middle-aged Boomer’s head with all sort of conflicting emotions.

I guess I’d better get used to it.

When You Got Your First VCR

As I sit back and watch my episodes of The Sopranos that my DVR automatically records every Wednesday night from A&E, I sometimes think about days long ago when you either watched a show on TV, or you missed it. If you were watching Bonanza, and the telephone rang, or company came over, you didn’t see the ending. Your only hope was catching the rerun.

If you can recall TV from the early 50’s, even THAT was not an option. It was live, and the only recordings were kinescopes, which were films shot by pointing a camera at a television monitor.

The first kinescopes were useful for preserving performances for posterity, but they weren’t suitable for broadcasts, although they would be later used to air shows three hours later for west coast audiences.

This all changed in 1975. That was the year Sony introduced the Betamax. This machine was instrumental in turning the world into commercial-skippers, thanks to that handy remote control. It also meant that you could watch TV programs ANY TIME YOU WANTED TO. That was pretty profound stuff the first time we realized it.

Of course, that convenience would cost you. The Betamax recorder, which came with a 19″ Trinitron TV, cost $2495 in 1975. Yikes.

But VCR’s were the devices that taught us that when something cool and expensive comes out, just be patient. It will soon get INexpensive, and still be cool!

By the next year, you could get a rival VHS recorder for less than a thousand dollars. By 1985, when I finally sprang for one, it was down to $299. And it played back in stereo, too, so I could watch movies like Days of Thunder and listen to the stock cars roar by from the left side of my living room to the right!

It also came with a digital clock, which, if you’ll recall, usually flashed all zeros.

That leads to another new concept which arrived shortly after the VCR’s themselves: renting movies.

We rented movies because they were too stinking expensive to buy. A movie on tape circa 1978 could cost over a hundred dollars. As a result, we signed up at video rental outfits, and didn’t mind shelling out as much as fifty bucks to sign on! That seems outrageous today, but I recall my older brother, who obtained a VCR about 1980, ponying up that cash to join a store that required a 15 mile drive to get to.

Oh, and the movies we watched. Years before the world wide web, VCR’s allowed you to watch ANYTHING you wanted to. The result was that many video rental places had a special “back room” that was opened to you by request only. You can guess what sorts of films were available in there. And, they generally were quite regularly rented.

In the meantime, Hollywood, in a rare moment of conscious thought, realized that the pricing structure for taped movies would have to be changed. Movie prices dropped dramatically, with many rental places being put out of business since you could buy a film for twenty bucks, the price of renting it four times. Paid memberships were also gone by the mid 80’s.

The buyers of the original Betamax machines, which had visibly better picture quality, were dismayed to see the VHS format win out. By 1998, you had to go to Japan to find a new one. But Sony kept cranking out a few each year until production finally ceased in 2002.

Today, the same situation exists in the high-definition DVD field with Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. If you invest in a player for either format, which are incompatible with each other, you run the risk of putting lots of bucks into a dead technology.

That’s okay. My standard DVD looks pretty darned good on my modest 30″ high-def TV. I’ll be happy to wait a few years while the two technologies slug it out. When I finally sprang for a VCR in 1985, it was clear who the winner would be.

When You First Tried a Home Computer

Okay, this is a no-brainer. If you can read this, it means you have mastered a few things. One, you know how to use a computer. Two, you have figured out how to connect to the internet. And three, you have figured out how to go to a certain website, or at least read your email.

Congratulations. Had the you of twenty years ago seen you now, he or she would be quite proud.

Computers have been quite a leap in technology for Baby Boomers who grew up with black and white televisions. Indeed, some of us (myself included) have lived in areas that didn’t have telephone service. And just look at us now! Interacting instantly with people on all sides of the globe.

But with each of us, it all started with nervously typing on a keyboard for the first time somewhere.

In my case, it was 1982. I was working in a Montgomery Ward’s in Amarillo, Texas in general maintenance. My crew would get to the store at 6:00 in the morning and get the place ready for the daily rush of customers (yes, Montgomery Ward’s used to do lots of business). While sweeping the floor, I stopped at a display that featured a Commodore Vic-20. You could type up a little BASIC routine that would flash a message on the screen. There was an instruction sheet that stepped you through it. My boss, call him Jim, was an evil little troll to work for. When I walked away from the computer, it was dutifully flashing “Jim sucks! Jim sucks!”

The experience taught me that I could master a computer.

Many of us got our first computers thanks to the lure of games. Indeed, games were the driving force behind the sales of Ataris, Commodores, and TRS-80’s. Prices were all over the map, depending on how much of a computer you were willing to buy. You could obtain a Timex Sinclair with a single K of RAM that required a television for use as a monitor for less than a hundred dollars. Or, you could spring $999 for a TRS-80 Model 3 with dual floppies, 16K of RAM, and built-in monitor.

As much of a geek as I turned out to be, it was sort of surprising that I waited until late 1993 to spring for my own smart box. I could just never justify the expense, and I wasn’t too much into games. But it was the writing urge that finally made me cough up 1500 bucks for an IBM slc2-66 (basically, a 386 that had been tricked into thinking it was a 486). A couple of months later, I sprang for a 2400 baud modem and connected to my first BBS. Life would never again be the same.

I loved using a word processor that caught things like spelling and grammatical errors, and joining AOL gave me access to people looking for writers.

I long had a paid gig producing a daily column for FamilyFirst.com. I decided long ago that while being a full-time writer was feasible, I enjoyed my job as a geek too much to pursue it. So it was a nice little diversion on the side, thanks in large part to a Commodore Vic-20 I encountered 25 years ago.

When We Learned to Dial Direct

Long distance phone calls are made without a second thought nowadays. I have a very reasonably priced cell phone plan that allows me to converse with my brothers, who live a long ways from me, for no added charge. You can buy cards in convenience stores that give you long distance for pennies a minute. In fact, international calls have gotten cheap. And many take advantage of Skype and similar services to talk to friends and relatives all around the world for next to nothing.

But go back to the 60’s, and many of us were having to speak to an operator to make a call outside our immediate area. And those calls didn’t come cheaply, either.

The first direct-dial long distance phone call was made in 1951 when the mayor of Englewood, NJ called the mayor of Alameda, CA. Before that, most long-distance calls required an operator at both the calling AND receiving end.

But AT&T launched the direct dial system, which necessitated the adoption of area codes, and the long distance operator began a slow but sure path to extinction.

Once upon a time, you will recall, you began your long distance call by dialing 0. When the operator answered, you told her (most of the time, although male operators have existed since the early days) what number you wished to dial, in what city, and what method you preferred. Your choices were person-to-person (expensive, but if your party was unavailable, free) or station-to-station (cheaper, but a voice, ANY voice, on the other end meant the meter began ticking).

Of course, the person-to-person method allowed imaginative individuals to communicate free of charge. Placing a call to “Joe S. Aboy” would announce the gender and name of a newborn free of charge to a relative in Minnesota circa 1965.

By the 1970’s, most of the country was capable of dialing directly, although many chose to do it the old fashioned way. I recall AT&T running many commercials about the reduced cost of 1+ long distance in the early years of that decade.

My thrifty father picked up on the new technology early in the game, insisting that in the unlikely event that a long distance call WAS necessary, it must be made by dialing directly. We were on a party line in Centerton, Arkansas when it finally made it to our home, and the operator would ask you what number you were dialing from, and that was the end of the dialog. After that, you had your own direct long distance connection, “untouched by human hands” (as a local potato chip maker liked to advertise about their wares).

So if you remember JFK, there’s a good chance you also recall when a long distance call meant dialing 0, instead of 1.

When We Dialed Telephone Numbers

Try this experiment: tell your grandchild to dial a telephone number. Do you get a puzzled stare back?

Indeed, many of our grandchildren are oblivious to such telephone antiquities as cords, dial tones, answer machines (which are still newfangled things to many Boomers) and, of course, dials.

For many of us, a quantum leap in modern technology was the colored phone. Our parents grew up with (if they had phones at all) a black chunk of bakelite that weighed five pounds or more. It was leased from the phone company, and likely was manufactured by Western Electric, thanks to a sweetheart deal with Bell System. Actually, it wasn’t so much a sweetheart deal as a monopoly, since Bell and Western Electric were actually under the same corporate umbrella.

Indeed, for many years, it was a breach of Bell contract terms for a homeowner to plug any device into the phone line except for the leased brick phone that Ma Bell provided. Inspectors would check the lines for any devices that varied from the peculiar voltage requirements of WE’s phones, and any customer with the chutzpah to do such a thing would be threatened with disconnection.

My best friend’s sister had one of those pink Princess phones in the mid 1960’s. It was a nice act of generosity on the part of her parents, because it too was leased, and cost extra since it was (1) an extra phone, and (2) a fancy phone. Remember, back in those days, it was one basic phone per house, unless you wanted to shell out more bucks.

But this column is creeping a bit. It’s not about leasing phones, it’s about when dialing a phone number meant DIALING a phone number.

Push-button phones appeared as early as 1963 in urban areas, but since I (and many of you) grew up in small-town America, they really weren’t an option. No, that familiar clicking sound would count off each number dialed through the earpiece as the spring-loaded dial reliably did its job, with just the right amount of resistance to the finger as we patiently entered in five or seven numbers.

Some of the older phones, like the one my grandparents in Texas had, would have a strange silent spring-like resistance, and wouldn’t make the familiar dialing sound until your finger was released. I never could get used to that.

Bell continued to have a leased-phone-only policy throughout the 70’s. But prices must have dropped precipitously on colored phones, because I remember my thrifty parents sprang for a harvest gold model in the middle of that decade. It had a dial, of course. While touch-tone phones were available in northwest Arkansas in the mid 70’s, they cost extra, hence not in OUR house!

In 1983, the reorganized and split-up AT&T allowed consumers to connect their own phones to their network. That meant that suddenly K-Mart and the like began marketing extremely cheaply-made phones, in contrast to the massively rugged Western Electric models that we paid for many times over through leasing. And it was cheaper to make push-button phones than dial-up types, so the venerable dial began disappearing at that point.

No touch-tone service? no problem. The phones all had switches on them that would cause the pressed keys to make clicking sounds just like dialer phones, so you didn’t have to pay the extra five bucks or whatever a month to make them work.

Unlike many of the wonderful long-lost things we grew up with, dial-up phones can still be used with most phone companies. They have maintained backward compatibility so that you can dig out your mother’s avacado green bedside phone, affix the proper plug, and use it to dial out on the same wires that might be providing you with high-speed DSL service.

It’s nice when an occasional thing doesn’t change.

TV Trays

Rumors of only one nostalgic journey this week are greatly exaggerated. My internet connection is doing much better, thank you.

The living room of the 1960’s was a warm, friendly place. True, times had changed since our parents might have first purchased our modest homes fifteen of twenty years prior. Most living rooms in the US had a new center of attention: the television set. That one-eyed monster changed the purpose of the home’s central location from a place of casual conversation, or possibly listening to the radio, to the spot where our parents unwound after a long day at work, accompanied by a cocktail, Walter Cronkite, a cigarette, and a TV dinner.

That piping hot little aluminum dish required special accommodation. It was certainly too hot to sit on one’s lap.

Enter the aluminum folding TV tray.

Evidence exists that the TV tray actually preceded the TV dinner by a year. I traced the much-maligned meal back to possibly 1953. But In her book As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s, author Karal Ann Marling states that national advertising for TV tray tables first appeared in 1952.

By 1967, there was scarcely a home in the suburbs that didn’t have a stash of neatly folded TV trays placed inobtrusively away in a corner somewhere, ready for instant deployment at around 5:30 in the evening.

The earliest examples of TV trays have legs that are constructed lengthwise in the shape of an X that prevented you from placing your human legs comfortably under the tiny table surface. Manufacturers soon reworked the design so that the tubular legs folded along the shorter axes, with the tray top itself dropping down to create a tiny little piece of furniture that fit perfectly out of sight into a space of just a few inches.

Sheer engineering genius!

Thus did millions of the diminutive home accessories change hands at various stores and find themselves in our childhood homes.

The flimsy trays were just sturdy enough to support a TV dinner and a drink. and possibly an ash tray. Add anything else to the load, and you did so at your own risk.

Thus did I learn a valuable life lesson at the age of thirteen: Don’t attempt to assemble a model sailing ship on a TV tray that might possibly collapse, taking paint, glue, rigging string, and various plastic parts with it to the floor.

TV trays sold moderately well in the early 50’s, but as TV dinners themselves began to be marketed, and more and more US homes began sporting shiny new television sets, their sales went through the roof.

And the best thing about them is their sheer indestructible nature.

Thus, fifty-year-old trays may well be in service, having been passed down from parents and grandparents, and now holding a nouveau chic status in this world gone retro-crazy.

The legs might become bent, plastic clips may break, but the metal itself is impervious to rust. Thus, even badly scratched up examples that saw action when Bonanza was on Sunday nights are likely still serving, possibly holding small pots populated by African violets on a screened-in porch somewhere.

And someday, hundreds or thousands of years hence, perfectly functional examples will likely be recovered from landfills by future archaeologists.

Overall, a pretty cool legacy for a cheap, yet brilliant invention.

The Most Stunning TV Ever Made: the Philco Predicta

My subjects for columns are frequently decided upon by pure gut feeling. If it feels right, write about it!

I’m a subscriber to Charles Phoenix’s Slide of the Week, and I recommend you do so too. Last week, I received a slide that featured a TV that I’d known about, but didn’t know too much about. It’s called the Philco Predicta, and it had the picture tube on a yoke in a wonderful expression of modern design. Charles had located a slide that featured a Predicta “in real life,” as he excitedly put it.

The next thing you know, I’m watching Revenge of the Nerds on TNT, and lo and behold: a Predicta! It was being used to play 80’s Atari games.

OK, two Predicta sightings in one week. Time to write a column!

Philco began in in 1892 as the Helios Electric Company. They manufactured batteries at first, but as electricity caught on, they diversified. In 1927, they began manufacturing radios, and soon became one of the Big Three in the business, along with RCA and Zenith. When televisions began appearing after WWII, Philco jumped on board.

By 1957, Philco’s sales were flat. That year, the Russians electrified the world by launching Sputnik. Suddenly, the modern look was red-hot.

Philco looked at redesigning the traditional cabinet-mounted picture tube in TV’s to something radically different and uber-modern. The first Predicta, with a yoke-mounted shortened picture tube, thus appeared in 1958.

One of Philco’ biggest customers for the futuristic TV was none other than Holiday Inn. They bought thousands of the sadly unreliable television sets, probably to their regret.

You see, the Predicta was more gorgeous than gorgeous. But Philco never created a color Predicta, and there was a growing demand for color by the dawn of the 60’s. More significantly, it wasn’t well-engineered. The shortened picture tube ran very hot, bad for electronics. The circuit board for the tube was also extremely difficult to access, and the combination of the two made certain that Predictas were in the shop on a sadly regular basis, perhaps three or four times a year.

I think we Boomers remember how depressing it was to have the TV off at the shop in the 60’s.

Thus, ultimately, the Predicta was a failure. Many sat unsold in TV dealerships. Customers preferred reliability over drop-dead coolness. And Philco went under in 1961. It survived as a purchased product of the Ford Motor Company until the 70’s. Nowadays, what remains of it is in South America.

But you have to admit that it was absolutely the coolest TV ever built. And guess what! You Boomers with a little money to burn can get Predictas from the Telstar Company, which now owns the name and produces new models faithful to the original design!

Remote Controls for our TV Sets

We Boomers are buried in gadgets, as are all other generations running around in the early 21st century. In ten years, I’ve gone from reluctantly carrying a (heavy brick) cell phone to proudly sporting an Android phone that is more of a computer/multimedia center than anything else. We’ve seen TV’s go from huge boxes with tiny black and white picture tubes that cost a month’s worth of wages to inexpensive lightweight flat-panel screens with enough resolution to allow us to count every nose hair on our favorite actors’ visages. Our fathers would rejoice if they could cajole 100,000 miles out of a car without major engine and/or transmission work, my wife’s Camry is about to cross that hurdle and my only concern is whether it springs any microscopic oil leaks over the next few years.

Last night, while switching channels on my nice new 32″ high-def I have in my bedroom, it occurred to me what a sweet little device the TV remote has become, and how important it now is for our day-to-day activities.

The inventor of the device that would ultimately allow us to switch from USA to ESPN was, as you might have guessed (not!), the great Nikola Tesla.

The much-maligned inventor, who was always getting upstaged by more ruthless rivals, in 1898 demonstrated a device which would remotely control a powered model boat.

The remote that Tesla demonstrated used radio waves, and its principle would go on to power other models, particularly airplanes and cars.

In 1950, Zenith began selling TV’s that came with “Lazy Bones” controllers, which allowed fathers to switch channels with lots of clicks and gear noises, as the big dial on the TV would rotate its way to the requested spot. The remote itself quickly became known as the “clicker” due to its own loud action.

The Lazy Bones was connected to the TV via a wire. it wasn’t until 1955 that wireless remotes became available. The “Flashmatic” used simple light to trigger a photocell on the idiot box, which unfortunately could be triggered by any other visible light that was shined directly at it.

In 1956, the “Zenith Space Command” was invented, using high-frequency sound to do the job. One downside was that all sorts of ultrahigh frequency sounds were present in the world, and they could switch your channels without your input. Another was that the remote would drive your dogs crazy!

Remote-controlled TV’s were a very pricey item. It took the addition of six vacuum tubes to allow the fancy wireless remotes to do their thing. It wasn’t until 1960 that TV remotes became much more affordable. That was because transistors became popular in replacing the expensive, short-lived tubes. But amazingly, the ultrasonic remote control would continue to dominate until the early 80’s.

In 1980, a Canadian company was formed called Viewstar, Inc. They began marketing a cable TV box that came with a revolutionary remote control which operated on infrared light rather than super-high sound frequencies.

It was an instant hit, and there must be a special shrine in doggy heaven for engineer Paul Hrivnak, the mastermind behind the new device, which would allow TV channels to be changed without filling the ether with noise pollution.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to picture a world where the TV, the cable box, the DVD player, etc. would have to be manually operated. Many of us use a single remote which performs a variety of functions and which controls a plethora of devices.

In our childhoods, however, it was a rare and amazing sight to see an individual, a “Lazy Bones” if you will, operate a television with a clicker.

The Dripping-Oil-Venus Lamp

Ah, the avocado-green-era we all knew and loved, aka the 70’s. The turbulent 60’s were still fresh in our collective memories. But in 1975, the Vietnam War was officially over. Protests were a thing of the past. Nobody had been assassinated in a long time. It was a time of peace and love like we had wished for in the Woodstock era.

So what did we do? We grew our polyester carpets long, We quit turning on, and instead, the country’s youth turned to much more mild-tempered grass as the illegal drug of choice. And the keyword of the laid-back years following the breakup of the Beatles was MELLOW.

So what did we buy with our extra bucks during the mid-to-late-70’s?

Oil-dripping rain lamps.

These bronze-tinted plastic liquid-pumping sources of illumination were sold by the droves in the era that immediately preceded disco music. When you think of a fondue party, you think of a Venus rain lamp providing subtle illumination on the goings-on.

Besides, the illicit effects of inhaling smoke produced by the dried leaves of plants of the cannibas family were significantly enhanced by visual stimuli like drops of oil slowly spiraling down plastic tendrils, or so I am told.

Anyhow, the dripping rain lamps experienced a rather short lifespan, especially when compared to the ever-popular Lava Lamp. The Seven-Up flicker light would be more of an apt comparison, as their reign was only about a year or so.

But they had a quirky appeal all their own. Even though the pump that sent the oily rain to the virtual heavens of the lamp’s lid was prone to breaking down and needing replacement, the lamps’ owners loved them.

Here’s to a short-lived period of time when gas prices were falling, when war was not a regular subject of the nightly news, and when we had some free time and bucks to spend on watching little droplets of oil surrounding a plastic statue.