Our basement is chock-full of crap that my parents stashed away during the decades they lived here. One day I was rummaging around and discovered a cache of old children’s books from the late 40s to early 50s. Winnie the Pooh, Babar, The Poky Little Puppy and my all-time favorite, The Tall Book of Make Believe. God, I loved that book, especially the illustrations by Garth Williams. I see the book, long out of print, is quite valuable today, though I’d never sell it. My husband is now reading it to the cat.
Reading the reviews, it’s apparent this book was an important part of many people’s childhoods.
Sometimes discount/dollar stores will have candy I haven’t seen in forever. We used to get Mallo Cups, but what we REALLY loved was something made by the same (Boyer) company: Smoothies. They were peanut butter cups with a butterscotch shell instead of chocolate.
One interesting thing about Mallo Cups and Smoothies: they came with a piece of cardboard—square for individual ones, rectangular for the two pack. They printed “coins” on them in the US denominations. Collect $5.00 worth and you could cut them out, tape them together, and mail them in for a free box. We were always careful to stipulate that we wanted Smoothies.
Any time I see a Hardy Boys book, it takes me right back to my 10-year-old self. That’s when I first read one of those. Then, in about the eighth grade, a friend and I started reading them again just to make fun of the characters and talk about the relative hotness of Callie and Iola.
It was my favorite when I was a little kid. Like 5-8 or so. I even got my own copy at some point and it was the first musical thing I had that was my own, that I had chosen and requested.
Looking back, OF COURSE I loved Godspell. My family was religious, so the themes and some of the lyrics were familiar to me (and also, being religious, I also always wanted to be “good,” to get the approval of both adults and God. So this was like the six-year-old version of being a hipster who never shuts up about the indie bands he genuinely likes but also thinks make him look cool). And Broadway is just in my soul. Apparently, I was born that way. So Godspell was perfect- a little bit of church, but with PIZZAZZ.
Eventually, of course, my relationship with religion changed and I discovered other musicals and other musical genres and Godspell was filed away in my mind as “kids’ music.” It would pop up on Pandora every once in a while and it made me smile, but I still sort of considered it kids’ music even if it was good. Like something from The Little Mermaid.
Well… I’m not sure what inspired me to pull it up on Spotify one day a few months ago in the car. Maybe I got one of the songs in my head or maybe one popped up on a mix and I thought I’d listen to the whole album for nostalgia’s sake. But honestly? It’s great. It’s been on heavy rotation since.
I used to have a subscription to BANANAS magazine, the teen-oriented version of DYNAMITE. You may not have heard of BANANAS, but I’ll bet you’ve heard of its editor, “Banana Bob” Stine, who would go on to gain fame as writer R.L.Stein. He became famous for a variety of scary book series like Mostly Ghostly and Goosebumps.
Music will do it to me every time, and often in oddly specific ways. When I hear the Blue Swede version of “Hooked on a Feeling”, I go right back to the end of a (6 hour) car trip from visiting my grandparents, taking the exit off of the freeway that leads back to our house. I hear that song, and I’m right back to that ~50 yard stretch of road that went off of the access road.
Same thing with “Help Me” by Joni Mitchell - I associate that with a block long stretch of road in the neighborhood I lived in in middle/high school, memory of Dad driving us somewhere .but I don’t remember what our goal was, just being on that stretch of city street with the song playing on the radio.
I have several more songs tied to oddly specific locations like that
That’s tied with Butch & Sundance for “Movie I’ve seen most consecutive evenings in a theater”. And who has the time and money any more to hang out at the movies for ten nights straight?
Opposite of Dorothy, it resonated because I hadn’t been raised Strict Christian, so a lot of the themes were new to me (concepts like “joy”… it was fuckin’ joyful. If I get to heaven and it isn’t full of dancing hippies, I’m going to raise Hell). And it did start a love of musicals, and led to me even being in a few…
For me it’s Riders On The Storm by The Doors. We took our one big family cross country road trip when I was almost 16, drove from Indiana to Los Angeles the summer I turned 16. After weeks of preparation we finally left on a Friday night and that song was playing as we left our driveway.
They should have amended the title to “VERY LATE Baby Boomers.” All the writer’s memories are from the 60s. Some Boomers were born in the late 40s and had our childhoods in the 50s.
I disagree. The peak of the Baby Boom was circa 1955 (the year I was born. Also my wife):
MOST Boomers therefore have memories that begin in the late 1950s, but the bulk of their childhoods in the 1960s, so “memories of the 60s” really is appropriate for the majority of Boomers.
It annoys me that, since the Boomer wave started in the late 1940s, the media has always treated it as if all the Boomers dated from then, and had childhoods filled with Davy Crockett coonskin caps, watching Uncle Miltie and Howdy Doody on TV, and then experienced the Summer of Love and Woodstock when they were in college (or college age).
But all that 50s crap happened before I was award of things, an I was way too young for Woodstock.
Here’s one that came up today. While reading the latest postings in the “Banning of Shodan” thread, I remembered that I think that the first time I was exposed to the concept of a “harpy” was through a comic, possibly Disney. Some googling proved it to Uncle Scrooge issue 12, Dec-Feb 1956, The Golden Fleecing (though I would have encountered it a quarter century after that) which I–um–“aquired” just now. (It was also the basis of an episode from season 1 of Ducktales in 1987, which I may or may not have seen.)
(Interestingly, even in 1956 “harpy” had such negative connotations that the writers were required to call them “larkies.”)
The first time I used a microwave was in 1971 at college. I’d gotten a roast beef sub at a nearby sub shop, the “Little King” (yes, the same character as in the comic strips and a few cartoons). I took it to the student union and decided to try heating it in the microwave (which had been recently installed). The creaminess of the warmed mayo and tomato juices was a new taste experience, and I loved it.
Since then, I’ve had a taste for sandwiches prepared just that way, and I make them occasionally.
Recently I was making a sandwich like that for myself. Almost 50 years after my first such sandwich, a memory came to me. My mother made BLTs, and the hot bacon warmed the mayo and tomato, and that was the true first time I’d experienced that.
I’d forgotten that because I’d never made BLTs on my own (and part of the reason for that is that the nitrites in bacon started giving me headaches, so I avoid it).
When Jane Werner Watson and her husband retired (He from CalTech) they moved to Santa Barbara. My grandfather was a contractor and built their house. He had retired as well by the time I was ten but would still do handyman work. One afternoon when we were visiting he took me to the Watson’s home while he fixed something.
It took much longer than anticipated and I was bored out of my mind. Seeing this, she asked if I liked to read and, with my enthusiastic “Yes!” fetched one from her bookshelf, The World of Science. It certainly filled the rest of the afternoon and when we were ready to depart, on seeing how smitten I was with it, she gave it to me.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I read and reread it over the next four or five years. I never actually became a scientist like so many others exposed to the book have been but it planted the seed for a lifelong love of science and technology. It disappeared during one of the half-dozen moves my folks did but while looking for a better pic of the cover, I found Abe Books has pretty good copies for ten bucks. Think I’ll get one.
