Note also that traumatic events are often erased from a memory- as a young child my face and hands were burned. I dont remember it at all, altho I do remember calling the stuff they put on “cheeks medicine”.
I once had a dream so vivid of flying an airplane (solo) that for a long time I had to remind myself that if it was true, I would also have memories of things like flight training
I remember watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller video on Halloween, during class at middle school.
The video came out in December of my second of 2 years in middle school. So it wasn’t middle school. Or it wasn’t Halloween. But I think we were dressed up for Halloween.
I had a Citroen 2CV which, although it had an electric starter, could also be started with a hand crank if required (I guess if the battery was flat or something); the crank handle was also the crank for the supplied screw jack for changing a tyre; on the other end of the crank was the socket for the wheel lugs - and the construction of the car used bolts with oversize heads in a lot of places - designed to fit the same socket, so with the wheelnut wrench-jack-handle-crank, plus a screwdriver and I think one other size of spanner, you could practically take the whole car apart.
My Renault Dauphine had the same jack handle crank, which I used when the starter quit. Then I lost the crank, but the engine was so weak that I would turn the key on, put it in second, and rock it until rolled enough to turn over and start, at which point I would run around and jump in. Seems crazy/dumb in retrospect.
This is pretty mundane, and is about the timeline for Monty Python being shown in the US.
I could’ve sworn that my first exposure to Monty Python appeared on a summer replacement for Dean Martin, called Dean Martin’s Comedy World, which featured clips from Monty Pythion’s Flying Circus. The regular Flying Circus show wouldn’t be shown in the us until 1974, when it ran on PBS.
The first time I heard their name and really took notice of the British comedy troupe came when they showed their feature film And Now for Something Completely Different during my freshman year at college, 1973-1974. They blew everyone away. People who missed the film asked those of us who’d seen it if “Monty Python” was the British comedian with the eyes that went in two different directions. Clearly people didn’t know Marty Feldman’s name, either. Even if they knew what he looked like. Shortly after this PBS began running the series, and we discovered the large-format Monty Python books and record albums.
What upsets this timeline is that Dean Martin’s Comedy World, according to Wikipedia, ran in the summer of 1974, after I’d seen And Now for Something Completely Different. So I couldn’t have seen the Python routine with gangs of grannies before I saw the film, even though that’s what my memory tells me.
“And Now for Something Completely Different” was released in the US in 1972, according to Wikipedia. But I don’t recall ever hearing about it before 1973-4.
After we discovered the albums, the “Argument Clinic” routine got incorporated into one of our Party Tapes (long-running music tapes we’d put on and forget while we had a party or beer blast), so I’ve heard it a gazillion times. If you break it down, it’;s one of the cleverest pieces of comedy interchange ever made. It’s in a class with Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?”
I have memories of seeing the St. Louis MO arch when I was 5, back in late 1962. But construction of the arch was not begun until 1963. and 1962 was the only time I was in St. Louis. But I was 5 at the time, an age not known for creating razor sharp memories.
Maybe you went to McDonald’s? 
That’s a very real possibility. One of the first Micky D’s in my home state (WI) opened in 1958 just about 15 miles from my house. We passed it every time we went to visit my aunt and uncle.
When I visited St. Louis back in the paleolithic era there really was a McDonald’s practically under the arch. I was amazed to se that they didn’t try to exploit the resemblance, by having the arches colored like aluminum, or only having one arch.
From here: Ask a Hemmings Editor: What was the last vehicle that could be cranked by hand? | The Online Automotive Marketplace | Hemmings
" So while we’re not apt to find this feature on a car beyond – I’m guessing – the MGA or some Citroens in the Sixties, trucks and SUVs carried that option far longer. Some light googling revealed a number of candidates for the four-wheel-drive vehicle that last featured hand-crankability. The dawn of the Eighties seemed the cutoff for a few of them, with the Nissan Patrol and the Land Rover Series III supposedly featuring crankholes until 1980. Toyota reportedly made its Land Cruisers able to accept armstrong starting through 1988, which we’ve yet to confirm."
And if Russian cars are allowed
“Indeed, the archaic Lada Niva, a.k.a. VAZ-2121, according to some sources, had a crank hole through its front bumper all the way until 1998.”
For years I recalled watching CBS Sunday Morning when we lived in Manhattan, Kansas. Once I had a computer I looked it up. The show began in 1979,… WE left Kansas in 1977. An VERY clear but FALSE memory. hock.!
I remember watching the ABC “You’re Still The One” promos about the new fall season when I was a teenager back in the early '70s. Turns out those promos didn’t start until 1977, when I was in the U.S.A.F.
I can, to this day, describe walking up to an old abandoned house as a kid. Up the rotting porch stairs verrry carefully, then pushing the door open…
…and of course there IS no house like that on the street I remember, or in the entire neighborhood. Later, I realized that it was a scene in an audiobook I’d listened to years ago.
I have an interesting mis-memory.
I can tell you exactly where I was when we heard the principal, over the PA system, that President Kennedy had been shot: Sitting in grade school, staring at the speaker above the door.
Except that he was shot when I was in third grade, and the memory of the room is my sixth grade classroom (right down to the tile and the classmates and the teacher, all of which only occured three years later).
And it took me years of feeling unsettled to finally realize what happened:
Sitting in sixth grade, in 1966, looking at the speaker over the door, I was remembering the news that came over a similar speaker three years before. The reminiscence was so strong that THAT became my “Where were you?” memory.
I realized that’s what happened after having other "memories of what I was doing when I THOUGHT about an earlier event. I’m still surprised how strong those “memories of a memory” can be. At least for me.
One odd thing about the Triumph TR3 I mentioned was that the crank required a hole through the radiator to accommodate it due to the tall radiator. I don’t know if other cars did this. So it reduces the area available for cooling by quite a bit. And triumphs needed all the help they could get towards cooling.
I will add a telling story about memory. It was in my social studies class in high school, back in 1970. It was a large class in a large room. As we were settling into our seats, 2 students jumped up and started shoving and yelling at each other. The only time such a thing happened in any of my classes-it was a reasonably well-behaved school. After a few seconds the teacher sternly ordered the students out of the classroom. After they left, one of the bright students in the class called fake. And the teacher admitted it was a staged fight. Our assignment was to immediately write down everything that had happened. We passed our essays around and I am proud to say that after winnowing down the different essays, mine was judged by the students as the most accurate. I was proud of myself. The two students were in the room by the time the essay was read to the class. I had gotten every detail of the fight down correctly-except that I had carefully described what those students had each worn the previous day. They stood up and were dressed noticeably differently from how I had described them. Surprising to say the least. What was even more surprising is that none of the other students had picked up on my mistake when they had read the description. I learned a valuable lesson that day-don’t ever ever rely on eye-witness testimony. People’s memory is notoriously bad.