Harry S. has been a tugboat pilot, a stockbroker, and a restaurant owner in Barcelona, Spain. He was born in 1951 in Norwalk, Connecticut, and raised there until he was 15 when he and his family moved to Chicago. He is very slowly writing a book about the experiences of his salad days. I went to a small New England college, Williams, only a few miles from North Adams, Massachusetts. But, you see, mister, there was a girl going to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence who I...
Maryvonne H. grew up in Medina, Ohio, about 35 miles south of Cleveland. A high school English teacher, she now lives in Toronto. My father worked in the B.F. Goodrich tire factory in Akron as an inspector. My mom stayed home and took care of her three children. Summers, we would rent a cottage on Chippewa Lake, about 10 miles from Medina. It was the one “extravagance” we indulged in all year. There was an amusement park (closed in 1978 finally) that had a roller coaster called The Big...
Betsy B. was born in Muscatine, raised in Waterloo, and now lives in the Chicago suburbs where she teaches special needs children. It was early May, the Longfellow School, in Waterloo, Iowa, 1974. The 5th grade class I was a part of had just run in red-faced and panting from lunch recess. It was about 78 out, the first hot day building up like a head of steam in an old tractor. As we were being dismissed it would touch 85. Miss Giffords, who was very pregnant, had a...
Wendy C. lives in Toronto. I first heard Van Morrison when I was only 19 years old, ‘way back when this album first came out. I was with my (then) boyfriend, a guy named Buddy Landermann from New York, who had served in Viet Nam. He was a tall, poetic, rugged, long-haired hippie who had come to Canada to escape the memories of that horrible war. He wore frayed blue-jeans and a weathered brown leather jacket, and had a small goatee on his chin. Looking back, I now know...
Rick B. was a sportswriter around the country for many years and now works for IBM. As a point of reference, in the year of the Dent home run, Rick was making about $200 a week for his efforts. For Rick’s sports website and his top 10 sports moments, click here: SPORTSLIFER BLOG It was 1978. The Bucky Dent game, Yankees versus Red Sox. At the time I was a sportswriter with the Fitchburg Sentinel & Leominster Enterprise. Although I wasn’t a beat reporter, I had a pass to...
Jason W. is a reporter for a metropolitan newspaper in the Midwest. He and his wife also own a yarn shop. Their children are “progressive.” I grew up reading a lot, and indiscriminately. Lots of Reader’s Digest condensed books, comics, some classics I didn’t understand at the age I read them. Wuthering Heights springs to mind. Here is a list, somewhat random in order, I know, of books that affected me...
M. de Voltaire lives in Manhattan again now, after having been exiled to Chicago and New Jersey for activities best not discussed here. Born in 1946, he had the good fortune to come into adulthood just as New York’s food scene exploded as if in a Big Bang. Our family forays into fine dining in the 1950s and 60s were infrequent. If we were in Manhattan for a Broadway show or a basketball game, we hit the tourist traps – Mama Leone’s, Patricia Murphy’s Candlelight Lounge, Stouffer’s Top of...
© Boomersrememberwhen.com, Boomers Remember When, Inc. Clif S. grew up in various Texas towns and cities. He lived most of his adult life in New York City until he returned to the Lone Star State to help his aging father run his cattle ranch in Fredericksburg. Today things are getting to the point where it is about time to “run my freak flag up the mast” again. I vividly remember this photo and year. Walking back to my college apartment, there was a vacant square block of...