Still remember our first telephone number: 931W
Also, when I was really young I knew my birthday was coming up but was unsure of the date and asked my mother, “Is my birthday July 15th or July 50th?”
The look on her face was sort of like she figured I would be lucky to land a job flipping burgers for the rest of my life.
GARFIELD 1-2323 was an ad on TV for an aluminum siding company. It will never be erased from my brain.
I remember when I was about three a lady asking me if I liked my new daddy and nodding my head yes.
I remember when my brother threw my stuffed panda bear into a hanging light fixture from the stair case. My dad fished it out and it had a burn mark on the back from the hot bulb.
I remember the day they took my training wheels off my bike and I proceeded to run right into a telephone poll.
Sometime in the early '50s, we had linoleum maybe five feet high around the walls of our kitchen (It was stylish then.), avocado green tile pattern with a row of black along the top. It was curved at the corners, leaving a little gap. I remember standing on my chair and dropping crumbs down the corner to feed the family of frogs that lived there. I had a strange imagination.
I also recall riding my tricycle very fast down the sidewalk and yelling “Beep! Beep!” at some neighbour to get out of the way. That might have been earlier than feeding the frogs.
I remember Cal Worthington too, but that was much later. I think he had a tiger and a chimpanzee as well, one time or another.
(ETA: VIctor 2-xxxx, when they decide to require more than the four digits.)
Thanks for the earworm. Bastard.
It’s not inexplicable, but I vividly remember the time I almost died when I was 7. I was playing on the monkey bars, and, being a show-off even at that early age, I balanced myself carefully and stood up, yelling at my cousins.
Apparently I wasn’t careful enough, because the next thing I know I’m hanging from the side of the monkey bars, my chin hooked under one of the bars and my hands pulling up on the one above, holding on for dear life in a chin-up sort of position. If I hadn’t caught myself I likely would have snapped my neck. My face was all jacked up and I was screaming like a little girl for my dad to come and get me. So what does he do? He gets me down, checks me out, and after everything is copacetic he starts laughing at me for being such a dumbass, just like he did when he saved me from drowning in my great aunt’s pool when I was 5 (another great story that I remember vividly- I’m lucky I didn’t die in childhood given the crazy things I did, but what can I say, I was fearless. So is Aaron…God help me).
Yeah, that sort of thing sticks with you for a long time (the rest of your life, in my case).
For some reason a public service ad produced by some long-forgotten singer ran in perpetuity for considerably longer than “this summer” for a couple years circa 1969 or thereabouts in Valdosta GA on one of the 3-4 TV stations we got:
“Kids, kids kids want work this summer,
Employer it’s up to you,
Let them do the unwanted,
Let them do the unneeded,
A job, a job, who wants a job,
Mister Employer, Mister Employer, it all depends on you!”
In a similar vein to the Rula Lenska posts, I remember that Anna-Marie Alberghetti was the good seasons lady. I knew that because when (on TV ads) she would crash family picnics of complete strangers to talk about salad dressing, everyone would exclaim “Anna-Marie Alberghetti!” in delighted surprise. And one person would be so delighted that he/she would exclaim ‘the good seasons lady!’
I remember my friend Todd 's Simon. I remember that Simon was the neatest, coolest thing EVER and everyone in school was jealoius of Todd for having one. He brought it into school one day, and everyone in class (including the teacher) flocked around his desk to see it. It was that amazing!
I remember an ad for Accent (the ‘flavor enhancer’ – it used to be pure MSG). I can’t remember all of it, just the end where a man was sitting at a table eating something & smiling up at a woman. The end of the jingle (to the tune of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”) went something like, “…a romance is brew-ing while he’s busy chew-ing. Accent is a girl’s best friend!” Ewww!
Love, Phil
Was Rula Lenska the one who advertised those indestructible pantyhose? They’d take a sharp nail file and run it down the leg to prove they didn’t run. At some point Rula (or another woman with a foreign, exotic accent) would say something about how much her husband or somebody loved her legs.
“He is … how you say? a leg man.”
I remember my dad randomly got QQ 8585 as a plate number one year. I also know that when I was about five years old, our family car’s license tag featured NM as its first two characters. The main reason I recall this is that I had a My Favorite Martian coloring book, and one of the pictures included a car with a blank space where the plate would normally be. My mother wrote the **NM{/b] number in the space so I could pretend that our family was visiting Tim and Uncle Martin.
I distinctly remember looking at stuff in our house, and (dis)liking it aesthetically. I remember thinking our earthenware fruitbowl was beautiful. And that I wished the tea pot would break, so it would be replaced by a more beautiful tea pot.
For instance, I remember getting a doll, finding it butt ugly, and feeling unhappy because I had no place to put it out of sight. I tried leaving it out in the rain in the garden, but that only meant an even more smelly, ugly doll sat on the foot of my bed.
I remember liking the color green of my little terrycloth panties, but only in the middle; the sides were a bit washed out and not so bright green anymore.
I must have been three or four or so.
Sunday mornings, my older brother and I could sneak out to the lounge and listen to the kid’s story time on the radio. For some reason, we thought our parents were unaware of this and would tell us off, so we tried to keep quiet (which worked for them, they could well have set it up deliberately - bastards!).
I also remember the delicious anticipation between turning the television set on and the picture fading in to clarity - ‘warming up’ could take up to a minute (an old set even in 1968) but it felt like ten.
Once, when I was 10, IT WASN’T A TEST. Mount Saint Helens blew up, turning day into night, dumping ash all over everything even 300 miles away… and about three hours after the ash started falling, we got a Not Test.
One of my earliest memories is being on vacation at a cabin on Cape Cod, going outside, and thinking that the air was exactly precisely the same temperature as my skin, not too hot or too cold in the slightest, and thinking that was weird and kind of magical. I think it must have been very still and windless. I was maybe three or four.
I also remember being given a piece of cinnamon Trident gum, unwrapping it while standing on my wooden back steps, and dropping the wrapper such that it fell in the gap between two boards. I couldn’t reach it to pick it up, or even see it. I was consumed with terrible guilt that I had littered. ::shudder::
I can remember what the sidewalks looked like in my neighborhood – not just the ones to the front and side of the house, but also all up and down the street. They were different in front of each house (one house had drawn abstract lines in the cement, for example). All were of different ages. The cracks were different. I don’t remember each and every inch, of course, but I can recall specific stretches.
We spent a lot of time playing on the sidewalks in my little town. The houses were built in the 40s and this would have been late '60s, early '70s.
I was at the age where I could understand speech but was unable to speak myself(probably about thirty five)I was sitting in a high chair in the dining room by a table next to the bookshelves that we grandly called the library.
My mum and older brothers were there and had started to eat,as I attempted to communicate my mum said oh look do you think that hes trying to tell us that hes hungry? in a coochy,coochy,coo sort of voice and I remember thinking YES I am so why dont you give me something to eat.
But the required response was not forthcoming.