Let’s take a break from the current insanity and reminisce. I’ll start.
This happened in '63 or '64, I think - I was 9 or 10. My friend, Agnes, had to go get something from the bakery for her mom (a real, stand-alone bakery, not a corner in a grocery store) and I walked there with her. Along the way, we decided we didn’t like our names, so we chose new ones and addressed each other thus. I chose Ruth - I really liked that name.
As we were finishing up in the bakery, she said something to me, calling me Ruth. The woman behind the counter then said “Oh is that your name? That’s my name, too!”
I was absolutely mortified and quickly left. And I never used an assumed name again.
I may have told this story here on the SDMB before:
One hot summer evening my Mom and I got on the bus and went downtown. We ate at a Chinese restaurant, my first Chinese food. We went to a movie at the Orpheum Theater. After the movie we got on the bus back to our neighborhood. It was a bit of a walk from the bus stop and we stopped for an ice cream cone for the walk home. I remember this night like it was last week. It was 1962. The movie we saw was “The Music Man” I was 9 years old, the same age as Ron Howard as he played Winthrop in the movie.
I’m not sure the date, but it was the first commercial movie I ever saw. Mom thought most Hollywood-produced movies were the work of the devil, so she chose carefully. She took me to see Heidi, a classic story. It was in black & white, in a small neighborhood theater. The double feature was White Mane, but Mom wouldn’t let us stay for that because she said the horse died in the end.
Flash forward 25 years. I was directing musicals in a small local theater, and I realized it was the same theater (without the screen) as the one I saw Heidi in.
Just remembered another. Summer of 1965. I used to go with friends to the local pool, when I saved enough allowance for admission, of course. But I remember that summer vividly - it’s when the Rolling Stones released Satisfaction, which seemed to play on an endless loop at the pool. Whenever I hear that song, I’m 11 and going off the diving board!
Among my first memories: In the late 60s, with my friends in a 7-Eleven (Google Maps shows it’s still there over 50 years later) buying candy and trying to sneak a look at the naked ladies in the magazines. I suddenly became aware of some weird music on the radio. It was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of Suzie Q, and it gripped me.
went on summer vacation to Lake George in NY around 1965. My cousin fell over but seemed to be OK. Got back home and he had a broken arm. The small motel we stayed at for 3 or 4 summers is still there. My mother was about to use the diving board when the person right in front of her broke it in half.
Lying in my crib in my first home (my current home is built on the same site), staring at the light on the ceiling, then crying to make my mom’s face appear over me. Dad’s face appeared, which just pissed me off and made me cry harder, because I wanted MOM.
I was 3. My sister was 5. We were in the closet of our bedroom. We were supposed to be napping. We decided we shouldn’t we be doing this. But we couldn’t get the door opened for some reason.
Scared the bejeebus out of us.
I was 3 or possibly 4. My family and our cousins were together someplace in Michigan on a lake. A seaplane was coming in for a landing. The six (or so) of us crowded out on a pier to watch it.
In squirming I got knocked off. I have no clear memory of that. What I do remember was being underwater and looking up at the light. I remember breaking the surface and my second oldest cousin grabbing my hand. My oldest cousin said, “No both arms.” He pulled me out, and carried me back towards the cabin. I remember my mother running out to grab me.
I think it was the summer before I started Kindergarten. Dad was driving the whole family up to Central Beach, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and we had stopped at some convenience store for picnic supplies. I remember standing in the store’s deli section, looking at their sandwiches and deciding which one I wanted.
I remember kindergarten and 2 teachers talking about me. They got my sweater and lunch box out of the wrap room. They walked me to the first grade hall and I was being introduced to a class as a new student. I was crying. My Mother came and got me. For some reason I thought I was in trouble.
When my Daddy got home he explained it to me.
When I was about six, some relatives came out from Michigan to visit and we took them to see the Washington coast. On a beach, we kids were playing Keep Away with the waves when one caught up with me and knocked me down. Before I knew it, it was pulling me away from the shore.
I still remember the feel of sand running between my fingers as I tried to clutch at the ground and then the ground dipping out of my reach. The water was rushing all around me and I’m not sure if I was able to keep my head up long enough to catch a breath.
Fortunately, Pops came to my rescue, diving in and snatching away me from a watery doom. Back on dry land, I remember my brother, who was two years older, saying that I went halfway to China. Though very frightened and bawling my eyes out, some logical part of my brain thought, “That couldn’t be possible.”
I think that incident left more of a mark on Pops than me. Many, many years later, the two of us took a couple of trips out to the coast. Whenever we were on a beach with small kids playing in the waves, he always kept a close eye on them, just in case.
I was in first grade in San Bernardino, California. In the classroom there was a big bin of stubby, fat crayons that we kids used for coloring and drawing. They were just bare crayons with no paper labels on them. Some were short, broken pieces, but some were whole. My teacher, Miss Schubert, told me that if I put together a set of whole crayons, I could take them home. (I was something of a Teacher’s Pet, which will likely surprise nobody here. :rolleyes: ) I stayed in from recess, went through the bin and assembled a complete set of eight colors (probably red, yellow, blue, orange, violet, green, black and brown), put them in a little box, and left it in my desk. After lunch (we ate in a courtyard outside at picnic tables) I looked in my desk and someone had taken the my box of crayons. That was 1953, and I’m still pissed.
We moved house around my fourth birthday, so I can place a small set of memories with certainty at age less than four.
I remember having to sit on the knee of a very old lady. She had very hard hands. I believe this was the only grandparent who was still alive when I was born.
I have a memory of playing in the street with my friends the day the drain cleaning lorry turned up, and the workman explaining to us what he was doing. In those days, in the middle of town, it was safe to play in the street because there were no cars.
I remember having a pink pressed tin bath, and having baths in the front room in front of a coal fire. I don’t remember whether the house had an indoor bathroom. I’m sure there was an indoor toilet, but there was also still an outdoor one in the back yard.
Growing up in West Texas, once or twice a year we would journey to Arkansas to visit my maternal grandmother. This entailed driving the length of Oklahoma on I-40. Now, as much as I hate Texas, I would slit my wrist if I had to live in Oklahoma. But cruising along the interstate was fun as a kid. I particularly liked it when my father stopped at Stuckey’s, several of which we passed on the interstate.
We didn’t always go up to Amarillo and then over. Occasionally, we’d go through Wichita Falls, turning north there and picking up I-40 in OK City after taking the HE Bailey Turnpike. But usually it was via Amarillo.
I had been watching a lot of Three Stooges shows. So I decided to call my uncle an “imbecile” (which, it turns out, he really was). I didn’t know what the word meant. He gave me a good smack.
I was talking with a friend about this yesterday. Back in the day during long car trips (we drove from San Bernardino to Cape Cod when I was 9 – dad transferred), a kid sat in the back seat and stared out the window. Watching the telephone poles and cornfields go by. Maybe noting the license plates of the other cars. I never could read in the car, because it made me queasy. The idea of having a device to watch any movie I wanted?? Hell, you couldn’t even watch any movie you wanted on the TV in your house. As kids, we spent a fair amount of time being bored. Which I think is good for kids. [/soapbox]
Of course my memory is about music: My 12th birthday was in March 1980, and I wanted to have and really got AC/DC’s album “Highway To Hell” from my parents. They got it from the local electronics department store of our little town, the album was so big at the time that even THEY had it in their small LP rack. So excitedly, I put the record on my cheap turntable, and…, the record skips after a few minutes. Every time at the same spot. So I forced my mother to go immediately to the shop to complain and get a substitute. The elderly (for me, age-old) owner of the store of course first puts the record on the store player to check the error and plays it carelessly over the store’s speakers, and “Highway To Hell” blasts through the store! I had a blast too, but he bewilderedly said “Well, that’s some HEAVY music!”. But most importantly, the record skipped at the exact spot in the store, and I got a new, error free copy of the LP.
I just read the whole thread and saw that many of the posts are about their earliest memories. So here is mine:
When I was four years old, I got a little drum for Christmas. it was definitely not the only thing I got, but the only thing that mattered for me and that I remember. It had an atrociously racist design, little cute negro kids hitting their drums on the side, but those were the times. As it was a custom in my family on Christmas afternoons, my father and his brothers and brothers-in-law drank a few beers and got into a funny mode. Song and music has always been a favorite thing for them in that state, so they began to sing some songs, and somebody took my little drum, and it went from hand to hand. And they broke it :eek:! I was absolutely heart-broken and inconsolable for the rest of the day, and I still feel the pain when now I think about it :D.
I remember my mother giving my brother and me a bath in the kitchen sink. My brother was 3 years older than me, so I must have been VERY young for both of us to have fit in the kitchen sink. My brother had an erection, and my mother smacked his penis and yelled, “No!” I’m sure this had some kind of lasting effect on us both.
That was 1953, and I’m still pissed.