Here are some random things I remember from my childhood.
We had a late '50s Admiral b/w TV, which took awhile to warm up, and when you turned it off, the picture dissolved into a white dot in the middle of the screen before it faded away. It had an antenna on a tower in the back yard. Eventually my dad got a remote control rotator. It was an electric unit that sat on the table next to his easy chair. He knew all about electronics and tubes, and whenever the TV went wonky, he had the right tube to replace it. We got 7 channels, three from Buffalo, NY.
That was how I was able to see JFK assassinated on television. My mom was watching the afternoon soaps, when they were interrupted for coverage of the president in Dallas.
We had what must have been a late '40s Chrysler. It was huge and shiny black with lots of chrome. The control panel was futuristic, and the radio had tubes. It was fun to sit in it and pretend. I remember going to drive-in movies in it, where I could fall asleep lying in the back window.
I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
The original Bugs Bunny show, which became The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Hour. Rocky & Bullwinkle. Dudley Do-Right. Underdog. Beany & Cecil. The Andy Griffith Show. Search For Tomorrow. Bonanza. The Twilight Zone. Hollywood Palace. American Bandstand. Canadian Bandstand (!) Batman. The Monkees. Wayne & Shuster on the CBC. The Smothers Brothers. Laugh-In. The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.
The Indian head test pattern. ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
I remember when rockets going into space were such an important event that televising them was a 24-hour thing.
At school, they would get several classes together in one room to watch the Apollo missions taking off and landing.
Bubblegum was 3 for a penny, except for the good kind, which were a penny. Chocolate bars and bags of chips were a dime. You could get a Coke in a 7-ounce green bottle for 7 cents, or the regular sized one for 15 cents. If we found some pop bottles lying around, we would scoop them up and take them to the store, where there was a 2-cent return on each one. More gum!
When my mom would take me grocery shopping, Elmer the butcher would give me a wiener that he had made. To this day, I haven’t tasted one quite as good as the ones I remember at Brown’s Red & White.
I remember discovering popular music, when it seemed to me like every song on the radio was better than the last one. It probably wasn’t, but boy, what a period of transition I lived through. Amazing music was released at the time when I was soaking it up like a sponge.
