Remember when

I was in the Pizza Hut Book It program in elementary school. Looks like they still do it.

 

We cashed in a lot those Pizza Hut coupons back in the day.

 

I refused I just sat at my desk. Really why bother !

Back in those days being close to NYC ,Phila, Baltimore Washington DC.

Then Back in those days Bethlehem Steel Mack Trucks Western Electric .

The Allentown area would just be a pile of glowing rubble

 

The short tenure of John Kennedy. They really loved to put him on television.

Several times the phone rang in the middle of the night and woke us all up. My dad got up and put on his uniform and went to the block house to sit behind a radar screen. there was a huge illuminated plexiglass map of the world up on the wall.

Rows of radar screens surrounded the area. If you remember the movie Dr. Strangelove, it looked almost exactly like that. What they don’t show you is that the command floor is only a tiny space inside this huge building filled with a vacuum tube IBM 360 computer. And a back up computer just like it.

When you walked out of the command floor area you were in the computer, and it looked like the stacks in the library covered with panels of electronic hardware. Everything had “the works in a drawer” like a Motorola Quazar TV on a giant scale, and huge drawers pulled out so you could change the tubes and boards.

I was a little kid during the Cuba missile crisis, living on a Strategic Air Command base in Moses Lake, WA.

For three days & 2 nights the wives and children on base lived in the basement of the bowling alley (which was our bomb shelter.)

We had folding army cots and all the wives had blankets with rope & clothes pins for privacy. You were not allowed to smoke inside the bomb shelter and everybody had to check in and out, so the women took turns to go outside smoking. It drove them all nuts, probably worse than the thought of Castro having nuclear missiles.

 

Here’s my pre-CONELRAD AM radio from a Plymouth P-15 circa 1947.

It was designed before we dropped the bomb, but it was built after we dropped the bomb.

By the time the next model came out, it had Little red triangles on the dial to indicate the emergency stations.

 

crude adjustable skates

 

We had the new fangled, uppity Super Skates,lol
No keys or straps needed.
If you got kicked in the shin , you felt it.

 

I got some serious road rash learning to roller skate. That was in between beating the crap out of each other playing no pad or helmet football down at the old school yard.

 

That football was great!! And nobody really ever got hurt, just maybe got their bell rung once in awhile.

 

I wonder how many of my aches and pains come from those years.

i do not recall anyone ever getting hurt just dinged up.

We must have been tougher back then .

 

I know a lot of my aches and pains are from the dumb things I did as a kid. I played ice hockey, and tried to be Geordie Howe, ouch!

 

All the A.M. radio talk reminded me as a young whip in the late 60's, my mom had a '66 Mustang. I have no idea how we figured this out but with no keys, if you turned the radio on, stepped on the brake pedal, and opened the glove box to flip the large hazard lights toggle, the radio would come on so a bunch of us kids would sit in the car and listen to a.m. radio. Someone always had to have a foot on the brake pedal or the radio would go on and off to the beat of the flashers flashing. They would stop flashing if you stepped on the brake.

Definitely a weird combination.

 

LOL
Truth is always stranger than fiction.

 

I learned to drive on a 1984 Audi Coupe GT. One day I figured out that if you were in the car and didn't have the keys, you could hold the light switch just beyond having the parking lights on but not far enough to engage the headlights and at that point you'd be able to operate the power windows. Like you, I have no idea how or why we discovered that, but it worked. Actually came in handy a few times, too.

 

Don't forget about DYNAMITE magazine.

 

Sorry, but no clue about Dynamite.

I used to read my dad’s old Hot Rod, Car Craft, and Four Wheeler magazines. He used to buy Popular Science and sometimes Popular Mechanics.

There were no comic books however. My parents did not believe in kids reading comic books for some reason.

On the other hand, the Sunday funnies were no problem.

 

Same here. I wasn't prevented but it wasn't encouraged, either. I don't think I ever had one nor did I really care to. None of my closer friends had them that I recall. Sunday funnies were always taken in usually when enjoying a bowl of Quisp Cereal....or maybe Count Chocula or Cap N Crunch.

 

I would read everything I loved Comic books maybe they were better in the sixties!

I would buy and read all the Car and Off Road magazines here is the young poor kid looking at these expensive projects with unlimited budgets .

Popular Mechanics was really great .

Even Outdoor Life was so much better back in the day!

 

All this. And --- I am so feckin' grateful that there weren't any cell-phone cameras, you-tube, instagram, etc., etc. to catch (& record!) all of my dumb-ass stunts back in the day.