Forty years ago, the Democratic Party could not have been in worse disarray. They had succumbed to the new Republican “Southern Strategy” and were left with a small, ultra-liberal core. But George McGovern bravely galloped into battle against Richard Nixon and was soundly thumped. People may not have liked McGovern’s politics at the time, but he was a bomber pilot in WWII, and his Senate report on hunger in America remains the benchmark study of its kind.

Perhaps what strikes us most in the photos is the candidate’s friendliness, his naturalness, and how close everyday people could come to a presidential contender. He might have been running for the local town council.

The top songs of 1972 were Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face; Alone Again, Naturally; American Pie; Nilsson’s Without You, and Sammy Davis Jr.’s Candy Man. On the album-oriented side there were Superstition; School’s Out Forever; Love Train; Heart Of Gold, and Take A Walk On The Wild Side.

All In The Family; The Flip Wilson Show; Marcus Welby, MD; Gunsmoke and Sanford & Son were the top 5 TV shows.

Movies? Memorable among that year: The Godfather; Cabaret; Deliverance; Cries And Whispers; Superfly; The Heartbreak Kid, and John Waters’s Pink Flamingo.

Click Here For The McGovern Photos Interview (Click PLAY to start once you’ve reached Cherbit)

“Ma,” I’d say coolly, Don’t flip your wig, ok? In my mother’s case, this was particularly apt since she actually did wear wigs, changing them like hats for different occasions. 

There was a musical explosion, a movie explosion, explosions in style and dress and attitude that all began in the 1960s and keep on truckin’ today. I don’t want to review the entire history of the slang of the time - that’s not my bag – but rather I want to recall buzz words and catch phrases that meant an awful lot to teenagers and young adults from about 1968, when I turned 13, to 1977, when I finished college.

Much of the vibrant, often pointed, language sprang from the anti-war movement. Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? If you think 2012 is filled with political rancor, the tenor of the late 60s would seem to you like real blood sport. It was part of the Generation Gap, which sprang, I’m guessing, out of the expression the Missile Gap with the U.S.S.R. that John F. Kennedy exploited to help him beat “Tricky Dick” (aka The Nicker) in 1960.

JFK was spared the wrath of youth because of his untimely death, but LBJ and Nixon took turns hearing Hell no, we won’t go, wrestling with the likes of Hanoi Jane (Fonda), a real women’s libber, who drove the Silent Majority, the Hard Hats and Middle America insane.

Those folks would scream at the peaceniks until their heads were ready to explode: America. Love it or leave it. Then, when some of the boys made their choice to leave for Canada or Sweden to avoid the war, the same people howled that they were traitors and draft dodgers. We might say back to them, Keep the faith, a bit sarcastically. And just to rile them even more, we’d spell Amerika like this, with a k. But, even though I wasn’t a flower child, I would probably fall back on some flower power to gently explain why the guys were making a rational decision not to be killed in a rice paddy on the other side of the world.

It wasn’t just about being a militant or not. Mohammed Ali entertained us with his silly, tongue-in-cheek poetry and quips about boxing. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Superman didn’t need no seatbelt. In a more serious vein, he would repeat over and over, I’m black and I’m beautiful!. Ali himself was a draft resister, earning bow-coo bucks and the revilement of many rednecks along his singular path.

When a person was suitably stoned and someone else delivered a sweet, soft observation on life, living, or the universe in general, a companion might reply, that’s really beautiful, man.

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win. I wasn’t one of the radicals who could chant that at a peace rally often held in conjunction with a larger event, a moratorium on the war. It still felt too anti-American to me to sing You say you want a Rev-o-looo-shun. I didn’t feel oppressed enough to shout “up against the wall mother-fuckers.” But I did certainly believe “if you’re old enough to die for your country, you’re old enough to vote.” In a nutshell I might blurt out, All we are saying is give peace a chance.

We said it in lots of different ways: Make love not war and War is not healthy for children and other living things. And the ever popular question, Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? 

So many different thoughts flood my mind. The unabashed idealism. The battles we’re still fighting that grew from the seeds planted in those times. (Give a hoot. Don’t pollute! Equal pay for equal work!) I have to laugh when I think of Save water, shower with a friend. Beam me up Scotty – there’s no intelligent life here. Butterflies are free. Let it all hang out. Try it – you’ll like it. What’s your sign? Keep on keepin’ on. Be-Ins, Love-Ins, Bed-Ins, Happenings… all come and gone in their silliness and sincerity.

I will never get over President Nixon going on “Laugh-In” during the election of 1968 to utter as woodenly as can be, Sock it to me, then five years later having to go on national TV and proclaim, I am not a crook, his jowls jiggling. There’s a trajectory for you.

I didn’t end up living in one of those little boxes, little boxes, made of ticky-tacky. I learned young to question authority. I lived in Los Angeles for 40 years, then moved to Colorado. I’ve come a long way, baby. So long. But, I wonder where all that fresh-faced, clear-eyed hopefulness went. Part of growing up and old? I admit that, given my position in the family, all my eye-wear now qualifies as granny glasses. Why did young girls then want to look like their grandmothers? Something had been lost, I suppose, and little metal-frame glasses helped remind us.

Oh for just one day of wearing a micro-mini and love beads, drinking a martini shaken, not stirred without affectation or irony, adventure in the air. A little bit of free love. That would be wonderful. Not for the sex, which was pretty bad, but for the great possibilities that lay ahead.

When that little hint of maudlin thinking creeps in, I say to myself, Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Far out.

Melinda Yapaleter., b. 1955, was born in L.A., lives in Denver, and practices on a pro bono basis on behalf of children who are short changed in the public education system. She keeps chickens in her backyard for the eggs.

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 was head over heels for. I had met her at a concert in Central Park in New York the previous July and was hell-bent on seeing her as much as possible.

My Guinevere was was about 140 miles away, but for me, like many college kids at the time, neither in nor out of the privileged class, travel was expensive and difficult. Without a car, getting to Providence was something like Admiral Byrd’s expedition without all the ice. The direct route took forever and was cheap. The faster route, through Boston, was more expensive but took only 3 hours to complete.

Coincidentally, “Remy” (short for Remington, tangential heir to the arms manufacturing fortune), a prep school friend of mine from Connecticut days was also at Williams. He was adventuresome and romantically inclined just as I was. Together we hatched a plot to hop a freight train to Providence.

We set out on a warm September Friday around 5 AM. The first obstacle was getting to North Adams and the Hoosac Tunnel, which we figured would take us through to Springfield, Mass. The obstacle proved daunting. We walked the 5 plus miles to the mouth of the tunnel, panting under the weight of our rucksacks. But we were Cassady and Kerouac, on the road, on the rails, on the march like strapping young men of any time. We were both dressed in the youth uniform of faded blue jeans and denim work shirts. Our hair was long enough to make a quiet statement about the crazy Vietnam War though not enough to make us look like real freaks.

The Hoosac is one of the 7 man-made wonders of the Northeastern United States, still the longest continuous travel tunnel this side of the Rockies. As “Providence” would have it, a 4-car train, faded old red caboose tagging along behind it, crept slowly into view. Remy and I hopped on an open flat car. Not 30 seconds later, the train screeched to a halt at the mouth of the tunnel. We waited and waited – 45 minutes so we estimated. When at last the donkey engine revved up, the little train-that-possibly-could lurched and clanked; off we went, the diesel exhaust filling our lungs.

The Berkshires were huge rolling quilts of autumn colors. We chain-smoked Vantage cigarettes. We didn’t know better. We drank from our canteens in those days before store-bought bottled water. The train was clipping along at 30, 35 miles per hour. It was sunny but the chill of the rushing wind made us glad we had brought bulky, high-necked Irish sweaters.

Around what we judged to be Chicopee, the engineer slammed the brakes on and we tumbled face down onto our bellies. Some sort of signal changed and we slowly worked our way into the Springfield yards. End of the line for this leg, we decided. After some dithering about how to get on to Worcester, we finally decided to act like nice suburban boys instead of hobos. I hailed a workman and gave him a line of bullshit about doing a college paper on traveling by freight.

At first you could see he was leery of getting in trouble. But after a severe rubbing of his chin, he pointed us to a string of boxcars, some with open doors, but without an engine. Remy raised his eyebrow at him. “Buncha cats cat it lahst week clean to Wuhstah,” he said. What else could we do but take the advice and leave him with innocent thank you’s?

We picked a tastefully suitable boxcar, a brightly painted Bangor & Aroostook State of Maine in red-white-and-blue stripes. We smoked some more cigarettes and a bit of hashish from a little chrome pipe camouflaged as a thick industrial bolt. Dozing in the slanting sun that shone through the open door, we were awakened by a jolt. “Locomotive,” I said. Remy nodded and closed his eyes.

We weren’t prepared for this part of the ride. The train started slowly enough to clear the yard and then picked up speed till we estimated we were rumbling along close to 50. Let me tell you, those tracks needed plenty of work. Bouncing, swaying, careening, using every trick not to fall out of the wide open door, we finally descended to the flatland between the hills of Worcester into an incredibly massive set of rail yards. Once I heard somewhere, they were the biggest in the country.

The big problem was that the Worcester yards were crawling with people. Gnarled railroad workers, men in uniform, but for some reason a lot of women, which, at the time, didn’t gibe with hiring practices. Warily we “de-trained.”

It was then that I noticed how dirty and grimy Remy looked. “Asshole,” he said. “You think you’re like some Snow White?”

We found ourselves in the midst of a movie shoot. As we shambled up, we came face-to-face with two actors dressed as railroad bums from the 1930s. One even had his belongings tied up in a bandana on a long pole. “Who are you two?” some exasperated young chick with a clipboard said, an assistant type.

“We’re the guys going to Providence on the freight train,” Remy shot back, jerking his head in an arbitrarily chosen direction.

Sort of thinking out loud, she said, “Next freight to Providence?”

A nebbishy man with another clipboard came hustling over, running a pencil down a long, complicated-looking list. Before you could say “Casey Jones,” we were sliding along the Blackstone River on an open flatcar again. (The abandoned Triad Bridge we crossed in fall of ’71 is pictured at left.)

It was September and 82 degrees. Two hours later we pulled into Providence and for 2 bucks paid out completely in small change wrangled a ride from a cabbie to the school where my lady love was.

At the dorm we made inquiries. Sophie Millstein? She went home to her parents’ house for the weekend at the last minute.

“Some guy from Williams was supposed to come down here on a freight train or some shit,” the dorm-mate said, “But Sophie thought that was just a line.”

“That’s me.”

Dorm-mate laughed. She had a nice smile and a multicolored scarf wrapped around her head like Joanie Mitchell on an album cover. She was kind of sexy in a pale New England way.

“You really got here by freight train?”

“We need a place to crash,” I said shaking her hand a little too long.

Remy raised his eyebrow. Those were the times.

© Boomersrememberwhen.com, Boomers Remember When, Inc.

I was listening to the radio not too long ago on a long drive from my hometown of Knoxville to Washington, DC. While there were plenty of great songs on the “Classic” radio stations along Interstate 81, the fare was pretty standard – the newer Oldies.

Eventually I lost interest and began thinking about the strange, diverse Top 40 stations of my cavalier youth. (I can hear the overly bright station ID jingles now in my memory.)

Could Frank Sinatra exist comfortably side-by-side with Beatles psychedelia today? Something Stupid jostling against I Am The Walrus? How about The Carpenters’ Close To You arm-in-arm on the airwaves with Whole Lotta Love? Who would listen to a station like that in today’s tribalized America?

There were those maudlin tragedy songs. Kids dying, drowning, bleeding on pavements, gasping at teen angels who were breathing their last with a degree of dignity, if not honor. Live fast, die young, have a song written about you.

This Chex-Mix of songs seems breathtakingly bizarre nowadays. From roughly 1955 through the very early 1970s, the melange was pro forma in broadcasting.

A Singing Nun; a Japanese language hit; a Sheik of the burning sands, and a song about a Sunday comics caveman all poked up like strange weeds in the midst of the mega-hit makers’ orderly fields – Beatles, Four Season, Byrds, Motown, old holdovers like Connie Francis, and instrumentals from Herb Alpert, among others.

Here’s some of my favorites, singles that today might find a niche audience but couldn’t make the Hot 100 if they had a battalion of PR flacks, legal payola and a whole lotta luck. (In no particular order.)

The Shangra-Las

Leader of The Pack and Remember (Walking In The Sand)

Is she really going out with him?
Well, there she is. Let’s ask her.
Betty, is that Jimmy’s ring you’re wearing?
Mm-hmm
Gee, it must be great riding with him
Is he picking you up after school today?
Uh-uh
By the way, where’d you meet him?
I met him at the candy store
He turned around and smiled at me
You get the picture? (yes, we see)
That’s when I fell for (the leader of the pack)

There’s a man in the funny papers we all know
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He lived ‘way back a long time ago
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He don’t eat nothin’ but a bear cat stew
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
Well, this cat’s name is-a Alley Oop
(Alley Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
(Alley Oop) He’s the toughest man there is alive
(Alley Oop) Wearin’ clothes from a wildcat’s hide
(Alley Oop) He’s the king of the jungle jive
(Look at that cave man go!!) (SCREAM)

“And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining…”

Allan Sherman was a very funny guy who died much too young, at 49.

Set to Ponchiello’s The Dance Of The Hours, (also used for the hippo dance in Disney’s Fantasia), Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh is something well beyond a novelty song, having entered icon-hood decades ago. Perhaps because it’s so specific in time and place, ingratiating and grating at the same time.

The Ballad Of Davy Crockett hit the Top 10 three different times in 1955, recorded by three different artists: Fess Parker, pictured at left; Bill Hayes; and Tennessee Ernie Ford. What makes the song’s popularity so unusual – aside from the fact that another #1 hit that year was Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock – is that the move to the suburbs was in full swing.

Kids were longing for something other than white picket fences and two car garages. “Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.”

The Bee Gees – Holiday

“Ooh you’re a holiday, ev’ry day, such a holiday
Now it’s my turn to say, and I say you’re a holiday…”

Creepy, eerie, a nihilistic, despairing love song that almost makes sense, although, in the spirit of the times, 1967, it really didn’t have to even try. Holiday hit #16 on the U.S. singles charts. It’s not every day the singer of a mainstream pop song asks to be murdered.

“Ooh it’s a funny game
Don’t believe that it’s all the same
Can’t think what I’ve just said
Put the soft pillow on my head.”

I have to admit that when it first was released in 1967 I didn’t know Pictures of Lily was about masturbation. Alright, a venerable teenage pastime. Nice ditty, great drums.

What launches the song to deepest bizarroworld, however, is that the kid’s FATHER suggests Lily’s pictures so sonny-boy can get his rocks off and go on to a good night’s sleep.

How far of a leap is it to Tommy’s pedophile Uncle Ernie?

And really, then, how much farther of a leap is it for Pete Townshend to be arrested for possession of kiddie porn?

Pictures of Lily made my life so wonderful
Pictures of Lily helped me sleep at night
Pictures of Lily solved my childhood problems
Pictures of Lily helped me feel alright…”

Gene Chandler’s The Duke Of Earl has a sort of intellectually perverse appeal. WHO is the Duke of Earl? WHAT is the Duke of Earl? For some mystical Manhattan reason, the song is often played on Madison Square Garden’s organ after the opposing team scores a goal against the New York Rangers hockey club. Randy Newman’s song, Mikey’s, which closes the album Trouble In Paradise, ends with “Whatever happened to the old songs, Mikey?/ Like ‘The Duke of Earl’/ Mikey, whatever happened to the fucking Duke of Earl?”

Nothing happened to him. The Duke’s own words can attest to that: “Nothing can stop me now/Cause I’m the Duke of Earl… well yay yay yeah..”

Flat out, a song like Ahab the Arab (A-rab rhymes with Ahab) could not be made today. Its lyrics are so oddball, racist, ethnically charged and full of weirdness, it’s hard to imagine it could be issued even in Paleolithic 1962. These lyrics says it all:

“There she was friends lying there in all her radiant beauty. Eating on a raisin, grape, apricot, pomegranate,
bowl of chitterlings, two bananas, three Hershey bars,
sipping on a “R C” Co-Cola listening to her transistor,
watching the Grand Ole Opry on the tube reading the
Mad magazine while she sung,
‘Does your chewing gum lose it’s flavor?’ and Ahab
walked up to her and he said, (imitate Arabian speech)
which is Arabic for, “Let’s twist again like we did last summer, baby.”

Strangely enough, 1963 witnessed two #1 songs that were in foreign languages. Dominique (in French) and Sukiyaki (in Japanese).

Soeur Sourire was the Belgian “Singing Nun,” whose  folk song was dedicated to St. Domenic, (Santo Domingo), founder of her order in the year 1215. Its perkiness, good folk strum rhythm and novel language propelled it to the top of the pops in the United States.

The song occupied the #1 slot until January of ’64 when it was supplanted by Bobby Vinton’s There, I’ve Said It Again, and then came the Beatles’ onslaught.

If Dominique is a mystery, the song that knocked Lesley Gore’s pain anthem, It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry If I Want To), off its perch on top seems even more incongruous. Sukiyaki is one of the top-selling singles of all time across the world. Was its success some sort of unconscious absolution of Japan’s actions in World War II? Its Japanese title, Ue o Muite Aruko, is loosely translated as I Shall Hold My Head Up High. Might be some sort of public confessional work, but I think it simply has a haunting, lovelorn melody and singer Kyu Sakamoto has a Japanese-inflected westernized voice. Ridiculously enough, “sukiyaki” means “hot pot in Japanese. It was chosen because it seemed familiar-sounding and was easy to pronounce. A Newsweek columnist observed that the re-titling was like issuing Moon River under the words “Beef Stew” in Japanese.

No need to discuss how Nancy Sinatra got her recording contract.

But These Boots Were Made For Walking is an early coming out of dominatrix culture into popular consciousness. Of course, since the mild-mannered days of the mid-1960s, the song has been covered and the naughty side teased out much more overtly than in Little Miss Sinatra’s version.

A couple of highlights of the song: a bit of meowing (Puss-In-Boots?) and the line to close it down and bring it home that is now recognized as high camp.

“Are you ready, boots? Start walkin’.”

1967 may well have been the high water mark of the contrast between the ridiculous, sublime and idiosyncratic. Although in all it was a very solid year for big hits (by everyone from The Monkees to The Turtles, The Doors to The Strawberry Alarm Clock), there was ample room for one of the most compelling songs of all time, Bobbie Gentry’s Ode To Billie Joe.

Gothic in tone, southern Gothic, we are still left to wonder what on God’s green earth were the narrator and Billy Joe MacAllister throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge? Aborted baby? Compromising letters? Wedding ring? And what would make Billie Joe jump to his suicide? Was he to be arrested or hanged?

Most disturbing about the song is the dinnertime indifference – pass the black-eyed peas, have another piece of apple pie, the mundane recollections of a county fair. Possibly the worst part is the fragmenting of the family, almost as if a curse had been called down. Daddy dies, brother moves away. Mother and daughter are left with their sorrows and mysteries. An odd mess of greens for a number one smash hit.

© Boomersrememberwhen.com, Boomers Remember When, Inc.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep – surprise at 60, eh? – I lull my brain by thinking back to a guy who was on late nights on St. Louis radio station KXOK: Johnny Rabbit. When I say this guy was funny as all shit, I can’t begin to tell you. This was from about 1964 through ’68.

At left: Teens sharing their love of Johnny Rabbit

He had this sort of sidekick Bruno J. Grunyon, an early model slacker mixed in with beatnik (not hippie!) rebelliousness. He couldn’t keep an after school job, his parents couldn’t stand him, and girls wouldn’t give him the time of day.

I think in the few years I was into the show he must have had something like 150 jobs and they seemed to all be about sweeping. Bruno also had a scheme to fix anything, a popular pick up from many, many classic shows like The Honeymooners. Bruno was like a teenage Ralph Cramden, always on the brink of something big, but always getting in trouble over it. He was like we were!

The kicker is that the host of the show, whose real name was Don Pietromonaco, did both voices. Sometimes he prerecorded them, sometimes he just switched back and forth live. It was completely convincing either way.

There were always stories going around about some group of drunk teen fans waiting outside the studio to try to “kidnap” Bruno. Insane. He didn’t exist and Johnny Rabbit would always give the losers the razz the next night or next show.

The best part is that Johnny Rabbit was always understanding in spite of Bruno J. Grunyon’s idiocy. He never got mad at Bruno, or judged him.Johnny was sort of the perfect parent, if you could design one yourself.

This spilled over into Johhny’s dedications and the love letters he would read that listeners sent in or phoned in. That’s where “Blab it to the Rabbit” comes from. He was always totally 100% sincere. Maybe it was a more sincere era.

Now I laugh myself to sleep, chuckling, remembering how innocent and silly everything was. Everyone is too serious these days.

© boomersrememberwhen.com, Inc.

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© Boomersrememberwhen.com, Boomers Remember When, Inc.

You can listen to an air check here:

KXOK – Johnny Rabbit 2

Jim Comey has written the coming of age e-novel,

From my earliest memories to my mid twenties, I was granted entry to a fantastical world, a  place of unexpected smells and sounds and tastes. It was a city of majesty and poverty that never slept.

People from all over the world, speaking dozens of tongues, flocked to its streets and hotels. It ran along the Atlantic Ocean on a sandbar island with three piers that jutted out into frothy, green waters. A boardwalk ran along its white beach for seven miles, where stores sold salt water taffy in little, silver boxes shaped like suitcases and mile long hot dogs from Coney Island.

Men, down on their luck, pushed the wealthy in tall, wicker, rolling chairs along two smooth sections of the boardwalk, singing out, ”Watch d’ chair! Watch d’ chair!” Under-shirted men toting heavy white cases with worn, leather, shoulder straps tramped along the beach during the day, shouting, “I’ve got yer Eskimo Pies. I’ve got yer Fudgie Wudgies. Ice cream. Come and get yer ice cream!” Boys with blue change-aprons and newspapers under their arms, called out, “Read all about Frank Sinatra. Read all about Frank Sinatra,” regardless of the day’s news. Burly life guards sat in tall white, wooden chairs or stood by long white row boats trimmed in red and black, scanning the thousands of bathers who jammed the surf.

I was not a tourist. That was an important distinction to me.

My grandfather, Pop Comey, emigrated to Atlantic City from West Philadelphia before I was born. He lived on St. James Place, between New York and S. Tennessee Avenues, in a cooperative apartment house. It was just a stone’s throw from the ramp to the boardwalk. He and my grandmother owned their narrow, first floor apartment, with a porch that was only four steps up from the never-ending stream of people who passed from Pacific Avenue to the Boardwalk.

Just down on the right was Feeley’s, an Irish bar that enjoyed melancholy singing in the wee hours of the morning that my two brothers and I could hear when its door opened and closed. Down the other end of the street, and just up Pacific Avenue, was St. Nicholas Tolentine Church, where my grandfather was an usher. The church was built in 1855. The island had become Atlantic City in 1854. There was history deeply imbedded in the sand in Atlantic City, and I considered myself part of it.

Every night, throughout the summers, my two brothers and I explored every foot of the boardwalk. We knew the cheapest place to get a soda (the last store heading to Captain Starn’s at the inlet – five cents and 40 varieties). We stalked the demonstration vendors where pitchmen hawked spring loaded choppers that every woman needed for her kitchen. They always had food items left over and gave them away. (Ed McMahon of Johnny Carson fame was the regular at the corner of St. James boardwalk.)

We knew when the peanuts had just been roasted at Planters Peanuts, just across from Steel Pier, and when the Belgian Waffles were on sale at Woolworth’s, at the corner of New York Avenue. We knew the best water games to play on Million Dollar Pier and who were the honest carnies. (Charles Burchinsky – later known as Charles Bronson – worked these same games in the 1950s.) And we haunted the Italian Village in the rear of Million Dollar Pier.

It was always a carnival in the Italian Village, a roof covered section at the rear of the pier that stood thirty feet above the ocean. Glass-bowers spun liquid glass into fragile, tiny animals. Men with thick arms and hairy chests pounded their fists on white dough to make pizza pie. Huge sausages and cheeses with strong smells hung near posters of Rome and Milano. Small cafes served hoagies, pepper and egg sandwiches, Neapolitan ice cream, and shaved water ices with real chunks of lemon and orange. Espresso simmered in tall chrome percolators. Mario Lanza’s voice echoed nonstop in Italian and English.

We couldn’t afford to buy anything in the Italian Village. We often started the night with 25 cents each. My older brother would blow his money in the first half hour in the arcade on Garden Pier. He enjoyed pinball and was especially good in shooting a bear that would roar when you hit it with a shot of light and then change direction. My younger brother would eat his way quickly through his money. Me? I had two passions. Comic books (especially Classic Comic books) and the incredible parade of people every night. Conventions were popular and changed every week. One week it was men wearing fezzes decorated with black tassels and silver, crescent swords. The next week it was the Knights of Columbus with sashes and plumes. Masons and Elks and Kiwanis clubs from every state in the union proudly strutted their finery among the mass of adults and children.

We usually walked up to Convention Hall where Miss America was crowned each September, and then all the way back to the cheapest soda place, and then, on weary legs, back to St. James Place. When I returned home, I usually had a new comic, a dime left over, and a tapestry of voices and faces in my head from the strangers I had been following for blocks, before they turned off into a store or a street. Often I could not understand a word they had been saying as I strolled only a foot or so behind them. I speculated about what part of Canada or Europe or Asia they were from, but I could never know. I guessed their occupations and socioeconomic ranges but I could never be sure. But I was always pretty certain if they were happy or not. If they were interested in the people that were by their side. If they loved their children and their partner. Years later, I would study Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that taught me how humans mirror behavior and establish rapport and adjust their voice and tone with those they enjoy. It made me remember three little guys who were blessed to have a boardwalk and a street named St. James Place where they could discover a fantastical world each and every night.

© Boomersrememberwhen.com, Boomers Remember When, Inc.

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 Dipper. My two brothers, two cousins and I loved to ride it, even though it wasn’t really very big, or high or fast. Daddy could afford maybe two or three 20-cent tickets for the roller coaster for the whole vacation for each of us and then we were on our own. “Enjoy the fresh air and water,” was the usual refrain when we started pushing and whining for more rides on the Dipper and other attractions.

We resorted to collecting deposit bottles. Quart-sized bottles brought 4 cents, regular-sized ones brought 2. We would fan out with little burlap sacks, or cardboard cartons and gather, gather, gather.

The crazy thing was that we wouldn’t collect enough for three or four rides, even though there were more than enough bottles strewn around to do so. We’d collect enough bottles then cash them in for just enough for one ride on The Dipper. The thrill over, we’d ride our bikes back outside the park to the cottage lanes and in back of stores and start all over.

Our family would arrive on Monday morning and stay for two weeks. On the Saturday before the Sunday when we were to return to Medina, my dad and uncle, seeing how hard we had been working to earn our daily rides, would spring for a few extra tickets for us.

Thinking back, the deposits were a lot of money in relation to what 2 or 4 cents could buy. I think the actual sodas were 10, then maybe 15 cents.

I went back to Chippewa Lake when I was in Medina for my 40th high school reunion. The cottages seem nicer, much improved. The amusement park was in ruins. Eerie, haunted by old happy times that only live on in memories now. We sure did love all that running around. Free as birds and happier than we knew.

© Boomersrememberwhen.com, Boomers Remember When, Inc.

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 bewildered look on her face. Her radar had picked up the vibe.

“Boys,” she said, raising her usually soft, mellow voice to a panicky pitch. “Go to the restroom and wash your faces. With COLD water.” Off the boys went in a noisy, disordered jumbley-junk way. We girls waited, almost as sweaty and fidgety as “those boys,” (which was how Miss Giffords always termed them). We read a story in our geography books about a girl our age in South America who was collecting fruit in a rain forest.

When the boys came back, it was our turn. Running in the hall was a cardinal sin, but we sure walked as fast as could be, dying for the cold splash. We had spent at least half an hour jumping rope while chanting ditties. “Pomp-pomp-pompadour, Sally, calling Bonnie to the door, to the door. Betsy’s the one to have all the fun, so we don’t need Sally anymore.” Enter Bonnie, exit Sally.

Once the whole class was back together, Miss Giffords lectured us that there were  two months of school and pretty soon we would all be playing to our hearts content. “Keep your nose in your books,” she emphatically concluded.

On the left side of the classroom was a window wall that overlooked a half dozen fruit trees whose blooms were just fading. For the first time in that year, their shade looked welcoming, like a cold lemonade in July. Lulling enough.

We were talking about South America from the Amazon to the pampas, from the Caribbean to the Straits of Magellan, when suddenly Miss Giffords dropped her chalk and sat down in the chair behind her desk. We all thought it was “her time.”

Miss Giffords, looking as exasperated as possible, stood up and pointed to the back of the room. “Jonny Fredericks! You put your shirt back on this minute!”

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His voice crackled with enthusiasm, confidence, youth, and charm as he acknowledged just winning the California Democratic Presidential Primary.

I was right there, five feet away from Robert F. Kennedy, edging in as close to the podium as I could. Barely 18 years old, a very green freshman at UCLA, I was reporting for KLA, the university’s radio station. I wasn’t on cloud nine – I was on cloud ten thousand and nine. I could practically touch the next President of the United State.

“Right there” was the Embassy Room, inside L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, RFK’s California Primary Campaign Headquarters. It was the very early morning after the election, a little past midnight, June 5, 1968.

Everybody in the room was ecstatic. His smile was a beacon. And I was in front of the podium, just to the right of RFK, as he gave that jubilant, electric, beaming victory speech.

Even now, nearly 45 years later, I vividly remember the body heat of the crowd and the smell of the room.

It was the moment of a lifetime: within a step or two was our next President; the President of the United States.

We knew. Our generation knew… the brilliant younger brother of John Kennedy, the keeper of the Kennedy flame, rising from his brother’s ashes.

Gone would be the tumult and turmoil of Lyndon Johnson. Bobby was to complete the Kennedy dream by leading the American people to all the good places that JFK had charted. And he would listen to us, America’s youth. We knew he valued us, believed in us – just as we celebrated and believed in him.

We had waited and grown up in those five years since Jack Kennedy was murdered on a sunny day in Dallas. Many of us – including me – would be voting for the first time in a presidential election that November. Redemption and rebirth were in the air.

The crowd was vibrant. Pick an emotion: joy, optimism, excitement and confidence. You could feel the energy and see it in every face.

The future seemed so rosy, the moment felt so perfect, one of those sweet spots in time that I knew I would never forget it.

I was right, of course, but for the wrong reasons.

Within moments after Bobby finished his speech he moved to the right rear of the podium of the Embassy Room, exiting by a kitchen door behind us, not fifteen feet from where I stood.

I heard three or four campaign balloons pop. No big thing. A few more balloons popped.

Within seconds everyone – nearly a thousand people – became very still. It was an unsettling silence from which then flowed the strangest sound. A collective moan and only later what I came to understand was a “wave” of pain and disbelief as I and the RFK partisans crammed into the Embassy Room realized that someone had just shot Bobby Kennedy in the hotel kitchen a few feet from us. It all happened in seconds, but the seconds were surreal, stretched out by the slow motion unique to accidents and death.

Hadn’t Bobby, not two months before, given an impromptu eulogy in Indianapolis for Martin Luther King?

And there we all stood, thinking the unthinkable. Was Bobby really shot? If so, where? Would he live or would he die? Had history repeated itself within these five stormy years?

© Boomersrememberwhen.com, Boomers Remember When, Inc.

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 that he was probably suffering from PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

We got stoned on marijuana and music — the music of Van Morrison — and made love in the afternoons in my tiny matchbox three-room apartment, drinking herbal tea, and then walking down by the river in the nearby park. I am reminded of these days when I hear Van Morrison’s “Into The Mystic.”

Dimming are my memories now, and my heart swells with a mixture of sadness and sweetness when I hearken to the captivating rhythm of Van’s enduring melodies.

At Left: Van Morrison in the late 1960s

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