Name the artists:
For the answers, start here.
Just Muttering has the answer from NostalgiaLand:
Well, to begin with, fire engines have 8 wheels and 4 people riding in them.
8 plus 4 is 12.
12 inches is a foot.
A foot is a ruler.
A famous ruler was Queen Elizabeth.
The "Queen Elizabeth" was a ship that sailed the sea.
The sea has fish.
Fish have fins.
The Finns fought the Russians.
The Russians are red [sic] and fire engines are always rushin' . . .
. . . which is why fire engines are always red.
As always, the knife-wielding monkey is indeed a nice touch. (via Andrea Harris)
I Remember JFK is a great nostalgia site where you can relive memories from the 60's and 70's (and a few from the 50's). Check out the posts below, then go wander around their archives for lots more great posts. You'll find yourself saying over and over again I'd forgotten all about that!
From the Boomer nostalgia site I Remember JFK:
Milk Duds were a classic candy that closely resembled what you find in the bottom of a rabbit cage. Despite that rather unseemly resemblance, the confection has been a hit since the 1920's.
I'm not sure who discovered that the box would create a miniature woodwind instrument. All I know is that my earliest memories of Milk Duds involve eating them as fast as possible (and that's not very fast, with all that chewy caramel), pulling the waxed paper liner out of the box, ripping the flaps off one end, and blowing vigorously into the makeshift clarinet.
The sound would often annoy girls, yet another added bonus.
After a while, the cardboard would absorb enough of your saliva that you would toss your musical creation into the trash. But let's do a little math:
Cost of the candy: five cents.
Cost of the instrument: no additional charge.
Getting to annoy your cousin Cynthia: priceless.
From the Boomer nostalgia site I Remember JFK:
How did kids in school see the world in the 1960's? Frequently by means of film strips. Film strips were strips of 35 mm film that had positive images on them, much like movie film. However, it wasn't designed to be quickly run through the projector like a movie. No, each slide was a scene in itself. ...
We would be shown pictures from other countries, photomicrographs of cells and protozoa, health/hygiene stuff, and occasionally, fun stuff like cartoons.
I remember one teacher with a two-pack-a-day habit who would appoint a kid to be the film strip advancer and would slip off to the Teacher's Lounge for a smoke. Don't worry, Mrs. Finley, your secret is safe with me. ;-)
Today, of course, our grandkids in school are treated to live videos streamed over the internet, or perhaps DVD's viewed on plasma TV's. But if you're old enough to remember JFK, you can recall when multimedia in class meant the teacher wheeling in the 1950's model film strip projector, and playing a scratchy record. It was great stuff.
From the Boomer nostalgia site I Remember JFK:
Another downside to the removable pull tabs was nicely summed up by one Jimmy Buffett:
I blew out my flip-flop
Stepped on a pop-top
Cut my heel had to cruise on back homeAnd while booze in the blender assuaged his pain, the fact is that it was darned annoying to cut one's foot on a discarded pull-tab.
From the Boomer nostalgia site I Remember JFK:
We Boomers in school were used to having our health enhanced, as well as our minds. For instance, in elementary school every year, a dental technician would show up with posters, free toothbrushes for all, and something ominous known as plaque detection tablets.
The posters were scary, too. They would show what happened to little kids who DIDN'T brush their teeth regularly. Yikes, talk about some ugly rotted images.
But the scariest thing was popping those red tablets in your mouth for the first time. It was the first grade for me, and I remember some kids crying because they were frightened by the scarlet pills. But the teacher tried to reassure them, while still pointing out that resistance was futile. You WILL have your plaque exposed.
From the Boomer nostalgia site I Remember JFK:
You never had enough of them. The antithesis of coat hangers (which reproduce on their own), they would vaporize soon after purchase, and you didn't have enough to stack all of your 45's on your changer.
Also known as adapters, inserts, or spiders, they were essentials pieces of hardware to have long before we started packing literally days of music on our hips in packages smaller than a carton of cigarettes. Portable record players had to have them to work. ...
If you want to have fun, offer one of the classic Jasco yellow inserts pictured here to your teenager and ask them to identify it. Only the ones who are most savvy of vintage equipment will be able to do so. When we were teenagers, we knew what they were for, and that they disappeared as fast as we could buy them.
Here's a thought-provoking question: What ultimately killed more World War II American soldiers: German/Japanese bombs and bullets, or the cigarettes included with the K-Rations?
With one of these guys, it's personal:
Speaking of Mr. Wright, I can't let him get away for stiffing my great uncle, a small town grocer, for a couple of melons. "I'm on my way to Madison, put it on my tab," the great man supposedly said as he walked out of the Mickelson store in Deerfield, Wisconsin unpaid melons tucked under his arm. We're still looking for that tab.
An excerpt from an ongoing series at Isn't Life Terrible:
What's missing in the story of the Dionne Quintuplets... is a hero. Someone who rides to the rescue. Someone who says "This is wrong and it has to stop."
- It wasn't Dr. Dafoe, who commandeered the quints, was celebrated by the press as a savior, and made a lot of money.
- It wasn't Oliva Dionne, whose initial reaction to the birth was to "sell the Quints," in order to make a lot of money.
- It wasn't Father Daniel Routhier, from whom Oliva Dionne sought guidance and who suggested that, since the children were a miracle from God, 7% of the money should be given to the church.
- It wasn't Elzire Dionne, who had married at 16 and was the embarrassed mother of 10 at age 25.
- It wasn't Dr. W.E. Blatz, who headed the team from St. George's School for Child Study at the University of Toronto, who cataloged every move the Quints made but either did not see, or did not want to see, the big picture.
- It wasn't Mitchell Hepburn, the premier of Ontario, who arranged for the Quints to be taken from their parents legally, via a "guardianship" act that officially gave the government and Dafoe full charge.
Yvonne, Marie, Emilie, Annette and Cecile had to become their own heroes.
Today it seems bizarre on so many levels. Click on the link or the picture to see the YouTube video.
Both of these were released in 2007.
How would you go about explaining Evel Knievel to the youngsters to-day? Or the Billie Jean King - Bobby Riggs Battle of the Sexes? Or the idea that we could all help fight inflation by wearing a "Whip Inflation Now" button? Other stuff from the Seventies seems to be much easier to explain.
It seems like every decade has its events which are at their core incomprehensible to those born after. For example, I never understood why Lindbergh flying solo across the Atlantic was such a huge deal. And you, what earlier events don't you get?
The need for which is explained to you by the nice folks at Kitschy Kitschy Coo:
Don't let its resemblance to a CB radio fool you -- this is NOT an actual radio, nor is it a CB radio cozy (as the wifey first assumed). This is an imposter CB radio straight out of the 1970s, when knitters turned to the citizen-band world by storm, filling the airwaves with their purls of wisdom.
This plastic-canvas needlepoint project, probably intended towards kids and their interests, is actually a "handy catch-all" box. So, as Grandma browsed this month's copy of McCall's Needlework and Crafts, she'd run across this ad and have an epiphany: "Billy loves CB radio -- this kit is the perfect birthday gift!" Billy's eyes will widen upon tearing away the giftwrap, and all other toys -- the Stretch Armstrongs, the Creepy Crawlers -- will be tossed aside in preference of the fabric-and-plastic faux CB radio.
Rick Moran remembers:
There was a time when baseball was king and the players were gods and the country literally stopped when the Series was on. In election years, politicians didn’t bother campaigning much because no one was paying attention to them. Productivity plummeted as people would gather around radios at work, on the street, in bars and homes across the country. I can recall in 3rd grade Sister Nona giving us a geography lesson and occasionally interrupting to get the score from a student who brought a transistor radio to school.
World Series games back then were all played during the day. It was estimated that 70 million people would tune in to either the television or radio broadcast. Kids would race home after school to catch the last half of the game, joining their mothers and sometimes their fathers who were playing hooky from work in front of the TV or radio.
The Series transfixed the nation as no other event save war. Tell that to anyone under 30 today and they won’t believe it.
From rrstar.com:
More than 70 former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League players are set to reunite Wednesday in Rockford. That group will include Rockford Peaches returning to the Forest City for the first time since their playing days 50 years ago.
It’s the first time the AAGPBL reunion has come to Rockford, and it provides an opportunity for a pair of local Peaches historians to gather more material for their project and showcase what they’ve accomplished so far. ...
The Peaches were one of the original four teams when the league began in 1943 and one of the few teams that stayed in the league for its entire 12-year existence. The team was immortalized in the 1992 film “A League of Their Own,” starring Tom Hanks and Geena Davis.
From back in the day when it was OK for liberals to smoke. Close Cover Before Striking was the most-used phrase in the English language back then. And note the "Union Bug" right next to it, indicating that this matchbook was made by union workers -- very important essential for a Democratic candidate. Inside the matchbook (click the link) it has a picture of old George himself and the slogan McGovernment For The People. All in all, a great little artifact of election nostalgia.
A rare collectible. Flashbulbs were a great little bit of drama added to everyday life, like little incendiary bombs your could hold in the palm of your hand.
Yet another post for Baby Boomers. An excerpt from Kris Trexler:
Starting in 1957 until the beginning of the 1962-63 TV season, every NBC color broadcast began with the colorful animated NBC Peacock which reminded viewers that "The Following Program is Brought to You In Living Color on NBC!" Keep in mind that NBC was owned by television set manufacturer RCA. No doubt the Peacock, which looked pretty drab on old-fashioned black and white TV's, sold countless RCA color sets like the one shown here.
In 1962 NBC changed the intro to the version most of us remember, and kept using it until 1975. The link above will take you a page that has both versions, as well as the color presentation logos for ABC and CBS.
Sing along, Baby Boomers!!!:
Gold Doubloons and Pieces of Eight,
all belong to Applegate,
from buccaneers,
who fought for years,
for Gold Doubloons, and Pieces of Eight.
Handed down in a pirate's chest,
the gold they sailed for east and west,
the treasure bright,
that made men fight,
til none were left
to bury the chest.
So now the gold and Pieces of Eight,
all belong to Applegate,
the chest is here,
but, wait,
where are all the Gold Doubloons
and Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight?
This theme song was sung by Tony The Tiger himself, Thurl Ravenscroft ("You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch"). The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure was a serial that was shown on the Mickey Mouse Club back in 1956. It starred Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk.
Tim Considine was a fixture in that era of Disney TV. He later went on to appear in the first five season of My Three Sons. He also played the soldier whom George C. Scott slapped in the movie Patton. Tommy Kirk has an interesting story, too, to say the least.
From Doug Pappas' Roadsidephotos:
From the 1940s through the 1960s, every tourist trap had a rack of postcards. Every postcard rack displayed views of the local attractions and a selection of comic cards. Some of those comic cards seem to have come from another world.
In the world of comic postcards, all women start as man-crazy airheads, then become either stern, overweight battle-axe wives or desperate "old maids." Southerners are hillbillies with outhouses and moonshine stills; after their annual bath, they mate with their kinfolk. African-Americans are shuffling, bug-eyed, thick-lipped caricatures. Someone could write a dissertation, or at least a master's thesis, about the audience to which these cards were marketed.
But not me. I'll just present a sample of the way women, Southerners and blacks were depicted in comic postcards. (I know many of these images are offensive. That's why they're here.) I've also assembled a few military postcards from World War II, and some British comic postcards with a different sensibility. Enjoy!
Yeah, they're all there: the Chevette, the Vega, the AMC Matador, the AMC Pacer, the Ford Edsel, the Corvair, the AMC Gremlin, the Pontiac Aztec, the Ford Pinto, and the car shown above, the Yugo:
"You couldn't get scrap-metal money even if it was running."
"The Yugo was a car that fell apart while you drove."
"I used to work for a dealer and the last one on the lot was an '88 model that never got sold. It was there until 1991, when it was given away as a promotional gift on a radio show."
An excerpt from Wikipedia:
Its name (never mentioned in the commercials) is Sascha, after the wife of the founder of the company. Theodore Hamm's wife was named Louise. The Hamm's Beer bear was created by Patrick DesJarlait, an Ojibwa, in 1952 for an advertising campaign produced by the Campbell-Mithun advertising agency. For a period, a real bear named Sascha trained by Earl Hammond appeared in commercials as well. The Hamm's Beer bear was featured on endless array of signs, glassware, and tchotchkes such as clocks, ceramic miniatures, and ashtrays. It was so well-known and identified with Minnesota that the St. Paul Pioneer Press named the bear as a runner-up on its list of "150 Influential Minnesotans of the Past 150 Years" in 2000.
There's also the YouTube videos and the Onion Radio News: Hamm's Beer Bear Found Dead In Flop Zoo. I used to see the Hamm's bear all the time when I was a kid watching the Chicago Cubs on WGN-TV.
Back when he was on the air in St. Louis, my brother Tim used to mow his lawn. And while KXOK is long gone, Ray Otis is still very much around. Ray's granddaughter Michelle Oddis recently wrote about her Grandpa:
The young Ray Otis was only 24 when he started working in the St. Louis radio scene. The year was 1962. He was married with three children. It was Mothers Day weekend and my grandfather was traveling from Cleveland to St. Louis to visit his mom. The management at the current radio station he worked at expected him to be in a meeting on that specific Mothers day. After a small dispute consequently my grandfather left his disk jockeying job there. (For those of us who only know iPods, music came on disks -- records -- before tapes and then CCs. The guys who hosted radio shows were called “disk jockeys.”) That same weekend in St. Louis was the first time my grandfather heard KXOK radio.
In St. Louis “the God’s were good” he said, and he landed a job KXOK. He was host of the morning show for only a short time before it became the top morning show in the market. He was the first disk jockey ever to have a city mayor on the air regularly. St. Louis Mayor A.J. Cervantes would call in every morning and talk about what was happening in the city and what his day looked like. The governor called once a week.
My grandpa even received an audition tape from a young Rush Limbaugh and was considering the possibilities of putting him on the air on weekends, but that was erased when Doc Downey showed up in St. louis and was given the weekend job. Limbaugh later went on to replace Downey on a station in Sacramento.
I used to listen to Johnny Rabbitt all the time growing up. I love that guy over in the corner . . .
Sometimes I think Gallagher had it exactly right:
I'm still stuck
I'm still stuck
I'm still stuck
I'm still stuck in the sixties
The Mommas and the Papas still get to me
My hair is too long
The New Right is still wrong
And I still ain't got my degreeI still haven't bought a blue suit
I still haven't drunk enough beer
I still ain't married my wife
and I ain't even picked a careerWhat in the past is the matter with me?
Why didn't I evolve?
And why am I asking the likes of you?
You got the same problem to solve . . .
We used to do this all the time when we were kids. If you can say the same, then you're probably over 50 too. And really, it was all perfectly safe, just as long as you didn't accidentally pour the hot molten lead on your hand or foot, in which case all bets were off. If all went well, you ended up with something like this:
But that wasn't the final output, it was just a prerequisite for putting the finished toy soldier into the molten lead and making all manner of screaming noises and sound effects. Great fun!! Sooooo much better than the classic boyhood pasttime of setting objects on fire with a magnifying glass.
If you've grown up a little, you can even cast your own Nativity Set. While you could put the Wise Men into the molten lead, I wouldn't advise it. Do that to the Little Baby Jesus and brother, you're on your own.
What made me take this stroll down Memory Lane was Brian Kane's link to One Man's Blog's summary of Radar magazine's article The 10 Most Dangerous Toys of All Time. Those toys, dangerous? Maybe for girls.
From Dial B For Blog:
The story revolves around Superman encouraging the youth of America to join Kennedy’s “Presidential Fitness Program.” This program was a nationwide campaign to encourage physical fitness in America’s young people. It was prepared “in close cooperation” with President Kennedy, and originally scheduled for publication in Superman #168, cover-dated April 1964. However, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, and DC decided not to run the story.
(DC eventually did run the story later.)
Joe Sherlock remembers. An excerpt:
Whenever I hear pundits declaring who the next president will be, I tune out. It's simply too early to make predictions. Don't believe that? Just travel back 40 years.
I was alive and well and just beginning my business career in '67. Unlike the "historic" clips that are run on television these days, hippies were not everywhere. One rarely saw people on the street dressed like the Mommas & Pappas. Some of us grew sideburns though. (Oh, the horror!) People went about their daily lives just like today, working, shopping, drinking and watching television. Except the water cooler question was: "Did you see the finale of 'The Fugitive' last night?" Rather than: "Did you see the finale of 'The Sopranos' last night?"
I remember 1967 well - the politics and the events. Here's what it was like:
In the summer of 1967, the conventional wisdom was that President Johnson would stand for reelection. The Republicans were in disarray after the resounding '64 defeat of Barry Goldwater. Many pundits thought that the moderate liberal Nelson Rockefeller would be a good GOP counter to the policies of Goldwater and serious competition for Johnson. Richard Nixon was around the fringes but many did not take him seriously after his 'You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore' speech a few years earlier.
Then everything began to change. ...
From VinylCheese:
The title is not too elusive. Nope, Jayne recites Shakespeare over the subtle strains of Tchaikovsky playing in the background. Sounds just about as bad as it can get doesn't it? WRONG! There is the album cover. First, there is the wretched, straw-like helmet wig she is wearing. Paired with her ginourmous fake diamonds, her mink stole and jaundiced tan Jayne is certainly in the forefront of Cheese-i-ness.
I love this kind of stuff. From the wonderful Lewis Jaffe:
For those of you who do not remember telephones which were dialed by inserting your finger in a hole the object shown below may be of interest.It is a sterling silver telephone dialer sold by Tiffany &Co.
Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast At Tiffany's was looking for an unusual gift which would cost no more than $10.00. She almost purchased a sterling silver telephone dialer but opted to have a Cracker Jack Ring engraved.I suspect telephone dialers are like bagel cutters and cheese slicers. They were given as house warming gifts , used once, kept in their original boxes on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet and will eventually show up on Ebay.
An ad from the 1950's. (via Found In Mom's Basement)
Excerpts from a fascinating post at Kitschy Kitschy Coo:
Most people credit CDs with the destruction of the record album market -- they were both permanent storage, they both catered to audiophiles, but one won out. However, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the record industry was already feeling the impact of other recording media -- as evidenced by the dustjacket I found inside a copy of Johnny Cash at San Quentin. Columbia records devoted one entire 12"x12" side of the sleeve to touting why albums will always be king, compared ot those upstarts, 8-tracks and reel-to-reel.
They go on to list eight reasons why vinyl records are better than tape. Here's just one:
4. THEY'RE ATTRACTIVE, INFORMATIVE, AND EASY TO STORE. Record albums are never out of place. Because of the aesthetic appeal of the jacket design, they're beautifully at home in any living room or library. They've also got important information on the backs -- about the artists, about the performances or about the program. And because they're flat and not bulky, you can store hundreds in a minimum of space and still see every title.
All this sorta reminds me of affable sportscaster Chris Schenkel gushing "Beer: It's Better in the Bottle!" when glassmakers were trying to fend off the onslaught of aluminum cans. Whenever you see this sort of generic promotion going on, you can be sure you're looking at a dying industry.
The Boat Lullabies is the name of a blog with all sorts of old photos. Sort of like rummaging through the photo albums at an estate sale. Fascinating.
Excerpts from Leonard Maltin:
That’s why I’m so annoyed by Fox Movie Channel’s decision to cancel its Charlie Chan film festival this summer, after an Asian-American organization stirred up this ancient hornet’s nest. They don’t like the fact that Charlie Chan was played by Caucasians. Fair enough, but what do we accomplish by taking those movies out of circulation? Do we convince young Asian-Americans that such casting never existed? Moreover, does anyone gain anything by wiping this piece of movie (and social) history off the map? Why should we obliterate the good work of such Asian-American actors as Keye Luke and Victor Sen Yung, who played Charlie’s sons so well?
Instead of pretending these movies never existed, they should serve as a springboard for intelligent discussion about racial stereotyping and Hollywood casting. ... we should all attempt to learn from the past, in order to improve ourselves. As Cicero said, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to forever remain a child.”
As a movie buff, I feel especially sad. I’ve loved the Charlie Chan movies since I was a kid; they’re enormously entertaining. And unlike many other ethnic groups who have a valid complaint about their portrayal in films gone by, Asian Americans have in Chan a genuine hero—a warm, wise, witty crime-solver and behavioral psychologist who is invariably smarter than any white man in the movie. If this is racial slander, I must confess that I just don’t see it. But for now, he has been silenced. With him goes a chunk of Hollywood history, a prime piece of popular culture, and an opportunity to learn and grow.
It was a Fletcher's Castoria TV ad in the 1960's that first introduced American Moms to the problematic nature of prunes as a children's laxative. Fletcher's took the guesswork out. If you've ever heard the "Is three enough, is six too many?" line, now you know where it came from.
Some really fun stuff!
A short excerpt from a very fine article by David Yonke:
Adler scheduled a three-hour recording session in July, 1965, and at the very end, McGuire reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out wrinkled, stained sheet of notebook paper on which Sloan had written "Eve of Destruction."
"We did it in one take. There's a place where I sing, 'I feel like my blood's coagulatin' .... Ahhhhh, you can't twist the truth.' People say I sound frustrated. I was. I was in a corner and the light was dim and I could barely read the words because the paper was wrinkled and someone had gotten chicken stains or something on it."
McGuire planned to do a more polished recording, but a DJ got a copy of the raw version, played it at a party, and the crowd went wild.
"We recorded it on Thursday and by Monday it was on the radio," McGuire said.
On Sept. 25, 1965, the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
(via SmartChristian)
This happened back in 1973, and from what I remember, the only thing that saved him is that they held the pole in place which kept the blood loss to a minimum. Even with that, Clint was still pronounced dead at one point. But as they say, that pronouncement was greatly exaggerated and he's still with us to-day at age 79. If you're a Cheyenne fan or a Dirty Dozen fan you can click on the link and get yourself and autographed photo, direct from The Big Guy himself.
I thought about this due to the Steve Irwin stingray-barb-through-the-heart story. I've remembered this little bit of trivia for 33 years, just so that I could retrieve it now for your education and enlightenment.
When I was a kid I thought this was the stupidest advertising slogan ever. And as an advertising slogan, maybe it is. But it's also one of those too obvious truisms we always forget. Every day I check my site logs to see who's linking to me, and I've found a number of great sites that way. It makes sense: If somebody likes me, there's an 9 out of 10 chance I'll like them too. It's an easy way to find new blogs I like. Just like that old 7up slogan.
