Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Thirteen blasts from the past
The future is now, folks. Anyone who has had to explain the concept of a “carriage return” to his 11-year-old kid knows what I’m talking about.
Follow me below the fold for rabbit ears, and more . . .
1. Rabbit ears. Who among you doesn’t remember fiddling with rabbit ears to get better reception? (Well, Shaina, for one — but she’s chronologically challenged.)
2. Duck and Cover. My memory says: in our neighborhood, growing up, they tested the Civil Defense sirens on Thursdays at 10 AM sharp. Sis, how about it? I know you hated those things with a passion.
Do they still do duck and cover drills in the schools? I just asked Jake, and he remembers doing these two or three times. The Red Scare is alive and well, apparently.
In case of nuclear explosion, crouch under your desk, protect your head with your hands, and kiss your ass goodbye.
3. I’m not proud of it, but I know all the words to this theme song.
4. Carbon copies. One evening not long ago, I went to great pains to explain carbon copies to Jake. A picture’s worth a thousand words, right? So I broke away from my description, grabbed a #2 pencil and two sheets of paper, and proceeded to “black out” a section on one sheet. After a few minutes of diligent coloring, I flipped the one page on top of the other, wrote on the back of the colored area, and showed Jake the carbon copy imprint.
“You know, I believed you the first time,” he said, and went back to World of Warcraft.
5. Candy cigarettes. Is there anything cuter than five-year-olds practicing their smoking skills?
6. Eight track tapes. I dig this woman’s WTF? expression, don’t you? She has attitude.
When I saw her picture, a fantasy burst forth in my neocortex, fully realized. (That’s neocortex, not limbic system, so calm down.) We’re back in my childhood home again, the one under the shadow of Mt. Wilson. I imagine this gal living next door to us. My mother screams every time Miss Pink struts by her own kitchen window in her tighty-tight halter.
She’s a divorcée, Miss Pink, an unabashed rocker who likes to crank her favorite 8-track, Cream’s Greatest Hits. Her three boys tear their way through the neighborhood on their Schwinn bikes, terrorizing toddlers and giving hapless lizards firecracker enemas. When she serves them dinner — Hamburger Helper, tuna casserole, or Tuna Helper, that’s her repertoire — the boys bitch loudly and we can hear her yelling next door for them to Shut the fuck up already and eat your damn food or go to hell and starve for all I care. In our house, we try out Shut the fuck up already, not really sure what “fuck” means but it sounds cool when Miss Pink shouts it, and our innovation is met with a bar of soap to the mouth.
Every workday morning, she somehow fits her long form into a teal Karmann Ghia, then drives downtown. My mother stares out the kitchen window with hypervigilant eyes, watching her go. Miss Pink says she’s a clerk at the welfare office, but my mom thinks she’s turning tricks at the bars on Mission, whatever that means. Miss Pink doesn’t look like a magician, although when I mention this to one of the neighborhood’s older kids, he points out her levitating breasts.
Mom thinks Miss Pink is having an affair with my father, hence the wary watchfulness, hence the spontaneous, hate-filled shrieks. She drives Mom absolutely nuts, Miss Pink does, and I love her for it.
7. Psychedelic art. The real deal (this Jimi Hendrix poster, for example) was a little before my time. No, I’m of the Roger Dean generation — remember all those nifty Yes album covers? In high school, I ran for a minor position in student government, activities commissioner or some such, and for all my posters, I did up my name Roger Dean-fashion. I thought it looked cool. Very few voters agreed with me 🙂
8. Incredibly phony laugh tracks. (That link is a two-fer, folks.) I dunno, maybe they still use these on network TV sitcoms. My son has never, ever watched a network TV sitcom, and I don’t think Karen and I have watched any since college.
9. S&H Green Stamps. Here’s how it worked: you bought some merchandise, and the retailer gave you stamps. If you spent more money, you received more stamps. Take stamps home. Lick ’em, say “Bleeeaggggh,” then stick ’em in a Green Stamps book. Fill up several books, take the to the S&H Green Stamps store, and turn them in for more merchandise. Yippee!
From The Straight Dope:
S&H made their money by selling the stamps to retailers. The trade-off to the retailers was in customer loyalty. Customers flocked to stores that gave stamps. It was an extremely successful program. According to a publicist for Sperry and Hutchinson, when the program reached its zenith in the mid 60’s, they were printing three times as many stamps as the US Postal Service and its catalog was possibly the largest single publication in the country. It was estimated that 80 percent of US households collected stamps of one sort or another, creating an annual market for S&H alone of about $825 million.
Popularity of Green Stamps receded in the 70s, but they’re alive and well on the Internet. And you don’t even have to lick ’em anymore.
10. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Klackers, and Army Men. In the 60s and 70s, childhood was all about aggression. You could kick each other’s avatar asses with Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, host your very own Tet Offensive with Army Men, or take a more direct approach and clobber your enemies with Klackers. Properly aimed and operated, Klackers could fracture the thickest skulls. One thing’s for sure, if a kid was a Klacker Master, you didn’t fuck with him.
11. View-Masters, on the other hand, were the ideal toy for uncoordinated, unaggressive wimps like me. Sit on yer ass with one of these in yer face, and when Miss Pink’s second-oldest kid Charlie Ray socked you in the jaw, you never saw it coming.
Life was less stressful that way.
And yeah, I know you can still buy View-Masters, but when was the last time you ever saw a kid with a View-Master? I showed a picture to Jake, and eventually he said, “Ooooh, yeah, I remember one of those.” QED.
12. Wonderama with Bob McAllister. Watch thirty seconds of that clip and you’ll have some understanding of the cultural wasteland that was 60s and 70s children’s television programming. Wikipedia has the full run-down.
Sadly, I couldn’t find a You Tube video for Wonderama A-Go-Go, the show’s funniest feature. Nothing like watching dozens of toddlers rocking out on the dance floor.
Bob McAllister died in 1998, and as far as I can tell from the Wiki on him, he was a stand-up guy to the very end.
13. Junket. I wonder if Junket manufacturers have an inferiority complex whenever Jello comes up in conversation?
Junket is a dry ingredient packet (like Jello) containing flavoring and rennet. Mix with milk, and you have a Jello-like dessert which becomes watery and ooky the moment you break the surface with a spoon. Oh, how I despised the stuff. Oh, how my father loved it.
14. Baby red-eared sliders. They cost a buck, a little more if you bought them a plastic swimming pool with a raised “island,” complete with plastic palm tree. Kids bought them by the thousands and killed them by the thousands. Typical red-eared slider death scenario:
Dopey Kid: Here, Yertle, let’s play on the lawn.
Dopey Kid’s Friend: Hey, DK, Charlie Ray Pink caught him some lizards, an’ he’s got firecrackers, too. Let’s go blow up some lizards!
Dopey Kid comes back a few hours later and Yertle is nowhere to be seen. Deprived of his tropical paradise swimming pool, Yertle soon becomes a pretty, green, diminutive hockey puck.
But as most of y’all know, that’s not why baby red-eared sliders were taken off the market. Baby red-eared sliders were taken off the market because Charlie Ray liked to hand his little brother Mickey Ray a slider and say, “Here, kid, suck on this.” The little buggers (the turtles, not the Pinks) carry Salmonella. Nowadays, we have the four-inch rule. Unless you’re an educator, you can’t buy a slider that’s under four inches in diameter.
Here’s a tip from someone who knows: you don’t want to own a slider that’s four inches in diameter or larger. Mother-effers are mother-effing carnivores. And if you are the nearest source of meat, God help you.
***
Ball’s in your court now, folks. Have I neglected any blasts from the past? Let me have it! Or just yammer at me and I’ll still give you the linky lurve.
Shaina has a potential love interest. Go give her some encouragement.
Another Friday, another great snippet from Tam.
Dammit, I want a slutty cousin Jenny, too.
Mauigirl’s pit bull needs some exercise. Will dogs climb a StairMaster?
Lyvvie’s Lengthy Links List of Male Cameltoes
protected static’s ring cycle
Pat finds teh kool flickr photo
Da Nator braves the elements in New York
D.
um, i SO know about rabbit ears. we STILL HAVE THEM. yes, that’s right, my dad is stuck in the 80s. we dont have cable. at all. nor direcTV or anything else. we have rabbit ears. so THERE.
What a trip down memory lane. I don’t remember Junket – evidently it wasn’t big in Iowa (we are the Jello eating capital of the world, after all) – and we didn’t have Wonderama. We had Floppy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Floppy_Show Which was really cool ’cause all the kids on the hsshowow got treat bags, complete with an icy cold bottle of Mt. Dew (bottled locally and a big supporter of the Floppy Show, of course). Mostly, the Floppy Show showed cartoons (Bugs/Tweety/Daffy, Popeye, and Tom & Jerry) but the fun part was being on the show and telling Floppy a joke. And, ya know, no matter how many times you asked Floppy “What do you get when you put a car in the oven?” he never knew. I was actually on the Floppy Show two or three times, which was pretty dang cool.
Floppy rocked. I took my daughter to the Historical Building to see him once, and she was so not impressed.
Shaina, you who are so world-wise for your meager years, I stand corrected.
Tam: what do you get when you put a car in the oven?
You have the 10 a.m. right, but I thought it was the last Friday of the month for the civil defense siren. I don’t know if you recall, but it went off on a Saturday night one time. It turned out to be a short, but it scared the crap out of me.
S and H Green Stamps…wow, haven’t thought of those in years.
Ditto for Junket…this immediately conjured up the taste/texture. We used to have strawberry Junket. It was a mess of nasty stuff before you ever got to finish half of it.I went to the link and was surprised how good they made it look.
I have one for you: mimeograph machines (my students loved to sniff the copies if they were freshly run off).
Now I’m really showing my age: Woolworth’s where you could find ANYTHING and then sit at the soda counter and eat a hamburger and drink a malt or a vanilla coke.
Plastic pop beads in gum ball machines; you could get several for a penny, connect them and voila, a necklace!
Items of Dougs’ that were NOT in my past
2. Duck and Cover. Nobody was going to bother bombing Australia – anyway, it would be somewhere to come when the northern hemisphere was just radioactive shopping malls.
3. Land of the Lost. But I do know the Gilligans Island intro!
6. Miss Pink. (The 8 track tapes, we had). The closest to Miss Pink was my 3rd form French teacher whose name escapes me. Mature, pneumatic and a habit of sitting just so on the desk in front of the class.
9. S&H Green Stamps. No equivalent here.
11. View-Masters. I led a mostly toy-reprived childhood. Two cans and some string. Old cans and old string. Sometimes I only had one can and no string. but that was OK, I had no-one to play with anyhow. (may contain traces of lies)
12. Wonderama with Bob McAllister. We had Nancy Cato and Joey the Clown. And if you went to Melbourne you could watch the Happy Hammond Show. (see linky lurve, and you’ll understand)
14. Baby red-eared sliders. We used to catch yabbies in the irrigation ditch. They died under juvenile care just as well.
Waiting for the lurve: and Doug, I think you’re a perfect fit for the US division.
Sis, now that you mention it, I remember that accidental alarm. I wonder if it gave anyone a heart attack? Besides you, naturally 🙂
I have no memory of mimeograph machines, oddly enough. Junket, however, is one of those unforgettable horrors.
Woolworth’s only recently went out of business — in the 80s, I think (too lazy to Wiki it right now). That Woolworth’s in Alhambra was open forever. If I remember correctly, Thrifty had the better and cheaper ice cream.
microsoar, of course you didn’t have duck and cover. All of our relevant fiction assumed that when the nukes fell, we would be able to flee to Australia (see: On The Beach). What, pray tell, are yabbies? and the US division???
Doug: Yabbies are small freshwater crayfish. The ditches were muddy, so calling it fresh water is stretching it a bit.
The US Division of Rent-a-Stan, of course. I’ve seen your picture. 😉
I LOVED Woolworths! My mom always called it ‘the dime store’ but you could buy just about anything you needed at Woolworths, and stop by the cafe area for a cheeseburger and malt.
And Doug, when you put a car in the oven you get a Hot Rod.
There are a TON of jokes like that, and kids still use them on trick or treat night.
microsoar: hey, I used to keep yabbies! We called ’em crawdads. We kept them in our science teacher’s sink.
I’d be honored to be Rent-a-Stan, provided the US military doesn’t invade me. They have a problem with Stans.
Tam, I think my mom used to call it “the five and dime.” All this talk of Woolworth’s demands a picture:
As for the joke . . . it’s clean. That’s why I didn’t know it 🙂
Loved your list, brought back some great memories. I had those Click-Clack things when I was in high school and everyone was walking around the hallways click-clacking constantly. My arms were all bruised from those things.
I hate to admit it, but I liked Junket. My mother used to give it to me (the vanilla flavor) after I’d had one of those awful stomach viruses you get when you’re a kid and it was the first thing she’d let me eat when I started to feel better. Naturally since I was starving after not eating for a day or two, it tasted great to me!
As my sis noted, we only had strawberry-flavored junket. Vanilla and chocolate? A revelation.
I owned some clackers, too. No bruises, so I must not have been half bad at it.
While we’re on the topic of Blasts from the Past, check this out: you can play the original Lemmings on the internet.
Why won’t the sound work for me?
Woolworth (woolies!) prospers in Scotland. Also known as BigW. thanks for the LOTL link as I used to watch that all the time as a kid! It looks so cheap now, but as a kid, It so REAL! Those sleestacks freaked me right out! Get the stones the right way around!! I have no idea what the show was actually about as I was just in single digits but I know it had :Aliens, Dinosaurs, and a girl with really long braids. My first musical love was an 8Track by Peter, Paul and Mary. I also has a Lou Rawls one where I’d play “You’ll Never Find” until I was told to stop pushing the buttons on the player or I was gonna get a spanking.
The girl with really long braids was Holly! As in, “Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition . . .” la la la etc. I ought to try doing a “whatever happened to” on that girl.
Here we go: Kathy Coleman’s bio.
Not just ‘carriage return’ – I almost despaired at having to explain ‘like a broken record’ and ‘dialing’ the phone. There’ve been a couple of other ones, but those were the biggest OMGWTF? moments.
I never did get to watch Land of the Lost – I’m not sure if it was off the air or not since my folks kept pretty strict control over the TV. My best friend had a LotL lunch box (inherited from his older brother, who would be about your age) though, and I always thought it looked pretty cool… IIRC, it was replaced with a Star Wars lunch box as soon as Kenner got them on the shelves.
Oh, and plastic army men have made a pretty substantial comeback. Not ‘Cliffs of Navarronne’ big, but you can easily find bags and bags of them in the drugstore these days.
Oh, you didn’t miss much with LotL. I’m sure the kids with Star Wars lunch boxes were probably beating up the kids with LotL lunch boxes.
I think we need to worry, if Army Men are making a comeback.
Green Stamps sound like Canadian Tire “money” (which is essentially scrip that you get when you buy stuff at Canadian Tire).
Wonderama! I thought I hallucinated that show!
Woolworth’s… sigh. I shopped in the last one in NYC before it closed. Sadly, I missed on finding the automat before it shut down.
BTW, there is no four-inch rule on sliders in Chinatown. Trust me.
Want a couple very large turtles?
I’ve been lax at linky lurving. Or lurvy linking. I’ll fix it this afternoon/evening.
DN, which Chinatown?
I haven’t checked at the Queens one, but the Chinatowns in Manhattan and Brooklyn all have an infamous baby turtle trade. I suspect they are raised to be eaten, but the hatchlings are sold out of dirty water buckets to tourists for a few bucks each. We ended up with our first turtles when Mrs. Nator’s niece bought some to “rescue” them while visiting and couldn’t take them home on the plane.
I would imagine that other cities’ Chinatowns have similar issues, but maybe they are better policed…