I was a child of the 60s, growing up in San Francisco.
I thought the prizes in Cracker Jacks were amazing.
I thought that it was strange that the “Hate” Ashbury was where everything was always going on. Why all the hate?
I thought it was very sad that some man blew his brains out in a bomb shelter that the adults were talking about. I thought it happened at a bomb shelter near my home. They were talking about how “you know who” died in 1945 in Berlin.
I thought my big brother was the most wonderful big brother in the world. Still do.
As a kid I misunderstood the purpose of the defroster in a car. I even dreamed once that I switched the defroster on, and opened the glove compartment to find an ice-cream sundae!
I didn’t know anything about surgery or anesthesia. I knew what the appendix was, and where it was, but I couldn’t imagine how a doctor takes it out. I decided he runs a special tool much like an oil distpick down the patient’s throat to cut the appendix off and pull it out. When an aged friend of my parents’ had hernia surgery, they told me he had been operated on, in such a way that a cut had been made across his abdomen. I tried to picture this, and was in anguish to think about it. I cried hard.
I read a message on a fire-alarm box: THINK–A FALSE ALARM MAY COST A HUMAN LIFE. I thought this meant that if someone turned in a false alarm he would be in lifelong custody of the Fire Department.
For years I thought that the number “3” was spelled “FREE” until recently, being unable to figure out how long before some of the Three Stooges’ shorts had been made.
A bubble-gum machine I saw in Pomona contained Ford branded bubble gumballs. There was a picture of a kid in a wheelchair on the machine and I thought that I would end up in a wheelchair myself if I chewed that gum!
I believed that getting your skin pierced by a piece of metal anywhere on your body was instantly fatal. And only doctors had the secret knowledge of where and how to stick you with a needle without killing you.
Also, I believed Mr. Rogers was sneaking into someone elses home and wearing their clothes, playing with their toys and feeding their fish, then putting everything back the way it was and leaving before he was caught. Why would he leave at the end of the show if that was his house?
I understood that reproduction involved a man’s penis and getting naked, and that something from the man makes the baby grow inside the woman. The best I could do with this was that the man and the woman went into the bathroom and took their clothes off, and then the woman would drink the man’s urine. Ewww! So glad I was wrong.
Also, somewhere in northern Wisconsin is a mysterious burg named “Business Dist.” Every little town we drove through on the way to Grandma’s house had signs pointing to it, but we never went through Business Dist itself.
