Early Artwork

I was going through stuff in my closet and found the large envelope of artwork I'd done that my mother had saved. I thought I'd share some of them here.

This was done when I was 8 (1961)

This was made a year later. I don't recall where, but somewhere where they had those big drum thingies that you poured paint into and spun. They were a lot of fun to play with.

Another from when I was 8 or 9. My proportions are a bit off. Look at the short arms on that woman! I think I was copying from a photo.

Cross-posted from I Miss My Childhood.

Feeling: blah

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: artwork

Memory Lane

I was reminded about an old toy and an old game today when I read about a store in NYC called Alphaville. I took a peek at their online offerings and found a couple of things that really took me back. I'd forgotten all about Lie Detector from Mattel. I loved the artwork on the suspect/witness cards. I did figure out how things worked, but that didn't detract from the fun.

The second item was a toy I remembered but haven't been able to remember the name of: Block City. I didn't know from Legos (I'm not even sure when those came out). I built houses with Block City. Not very versatile, but it kept me busy. This link will probably vanish once they sell the item.

More toy memories as I remember them! What about you? What do you remember playing with?

Feeling: nostalgic

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: toys

Sweet Smell of the Past

I feel marginally better, but work was uh, busy, and I felt pooped when I got home, so, other than looking at blogs and photos on flickr, and a bit of writing, I didn't do much and have nothing for you guys, so I'm cribbing from the post I put up earlier on I Miss My Childhood, because I'm not opposed to cheating if I admit it.



My uncle gave them to me when I was 8 or 9, or thereabouts. I really don't remember, except that I was fairly young. Before he got married and had his own kids, he gave me the best presents. He also gave me a locket, which one of these days, I might remember to take a pic of. But these French perfumes were amazing. Very grown-up. And I never opened them. I could smell them anyway, and decided they would be nice to keep in my underwear drawer. The effect of the scents has faded over the years, but if I hold the bottles to my nose, I can still smell the sweet scents. It is interesting though, that while none of the bottles have ever been opened, the contents have been evaporating at different rates, with some bottles almost empty while the others have a fair amount of perfume remaining.

Feeling:

~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: perfume

Public School

Over on I Miss My Childhood, I blogged about an upcoming reunion with one of my two friends from public school, the other Shelly. I don't have photos other than the class photos, but I thought I'd dig out some other things I do have. For one, my autograph book. And it's a hoot to look at. Here's what I put for my favs (I left some of them blank) back in June 1965, with some commentary:

• Author.... Ian Fleming
• Book.... James Bond, Man from UNCLE books (a tie!)
• Sport.... Swimming (except I really, mostly just floated), ice skating (when I wasn't falling down, I loved it)
• Profession.... Teaching or art (well, didn't quite do either, though I do craftwork now, and librarian is educational)

And while I'm at it, from my Junior High autograph book, June 1967:

• Author.... Agatha Christie
• Book.... Patch of Blue, 1984, Animal Farm (even back then, I had a hard time picking one fav)
• Song.... Any song by the Monkees, preferably one Mickey sings
• Sport.... TV watching, record listening (as you can see, I was developing my warped sense of humor right on schedule), boy hunting (yeah, right), swimming (even if I still really couldn't), ping pong (we had a ping pong table in the basement)
• Hero.... Mickey Dolenz (of the Monkees, of course)

Feeling:
~~~o0o~~~
Technorati Tags: childhood

Chanukah Traditions

T'is the season and all that, or close enough, so this reposting is almost timely.

I've been thinking about the Shelly Family Chanukah traditions.

Our traditions are effectively dead now. My father and I agreed to no longer exchange gifts for birthdays and Chanukah and my sister agreed to the same (hubby and I will still give her children presents). After all, gift-giving when you're in your 50s, as I am, kind of loses meaning, especially when it becomes more chore than fun. I love shopping for my closest friends. I love finding things I know they'll love. But my family? We'd slowly gotten to the point where we were exchanging gift cards and that just seemed silly.

The traditions started to lose steam after my mother died and my father remarried. His new wife and her three daughters had their own traditions. So we'd gather for the family Chanukah party with all the gifts piled up and someone would then hand them out, usually one of the 9 kids (not mine, because hubby and I don't have any) once they were old enough for the responsibility. A gift orgy ensued with wrapping paper flying around the den.

I always held the gifts I was giving to my father, sister, stepmother, nice, and nephew aside and after the feeding frenzy at the gift trough, I gave my father and stepmother their gifts, then found time alone with my sister and her kids (our hubbies usually made themselves scarce) and we exchanged gifts.

That's how we used to do it. Me, my sister (3 years younger than I am), our mother and father, gathered in the den, each with our bags of brightly wrapped presents to give out, one at a time. It wasn't as much about the gifts as it was about the giving, me to you, you to me. My mother would carefully remove the paper from the boxes and fold it neatly for future reuse, to be stored in a bag on a shelf in the garage.

My mother was a sneaky sort, too. Pre-giving traditions included my sister checking out the house to find where all the gifts were hidden, then showing me what she'd find. She was also and still is a whiz when it comes to picking up a box and guessing what's inside. She's hard to fool. Not that my mother didn't try.

Sometimes, my mother got sneaky with the giving. One year, when I must've been 7 or 8, she snuck our gifts into our bedrooms, not aware I was awake and pretending to be asleep (I confided this to her years later). And so, after she was done and in bed, herself, I got up and played with the Tiny Tears Doll with Playpen and fingered the keys of my Eminee Organ, then pretended to be surprised by them magically having appeared in my room when I woke up.

The best, though, was the money she would hide in the gifts. I can still picture the night, when my sister was in her mid-teens, and we were opening gifts in the kitchen. She was trying on her new bathrobe and a twenty dollar bill went flying out of a sleeve. There was another in a pocket. And I had to admire Mom's skill in steam opening a box of Mallomars (our favorite cookie), slipping a couple of twenties inside, then resealing the box so there was no hint it had been opened already. To say I was surprised when I opened it would be an understatement.

She died 23 years ago. The holidays just haven't been the same after that.

Feeling:

Chanukah

Summers and Summer Camp

Somehow, we got to discussing summer camp on an AOL writers message board. It started with camp songs and morphed into talking about camp. So I thought I'd talk about my summer camp experiences here.

The first camp I went to, when I was 9 or 10 was in the Rockaways. Spartan Day Camp was run by a family that was rather strict. My group of kids (all girls) loved our counselor who was fired after a couple of weeks for, we found out, being too friendly with some of the girls. Fear of lesbianism, or rumors of lesbianism reared its ugly head. The old hag who took over with our group after that kind of sucked the fun out of things.

The following summer, my parents sent me to camp run through a YM&YWHA. It was another day camp and we got driven out to Wyandanch, Long Island where the Y had property on a big, long hill. We did campouts and crafting and there was a pool. I got to suck at lots of new things: Archery, swimming, hiking... I spent a lot of time ducking yellow jackets. Once each month, we had a sleepover and learned ghost stories.

After two years of this, I went to a specialized day camp at the same place, but with emphasis on arts and crafts. There were 3 counselors for about 20 of us and we worked with papier mache, sculpting (my artist figure blew up in the kilm along with many other pieces when someone else forgot to leave a big enough air hole (I know mine was fine). I concentrated on crafts, while other kids concentrated on the sciences and the rest focused on drama and singing, putting on plays and such. I still recall sneaking in reading comic books in my sleeping bag by flashlight (and handing out comics to the other kids) until I found a daddy long legs sharing the sleeping bag with me and my subsequent scream woke the counselors and ended the reading session.

The following year, I went to a camp the Y ran called Teen Trips. We got to go somewhere different each day, and on Fridays, we stayed in the Y and did indoor activities. We went to parks and the beach. We went to see "Carmen" and to a couple of Broadway plays: "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman" (starring Jack Cassidy, Linda Lavin, and someone named Bob Holliday or some such as Superman) and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (long after the original cast left). We drove into NJ to go to Palisades Amusement Park, then sat in the bus in the parking lot for over an hour while phone calls were made to allow us in. It seems we needed an interstate commerce permit. We had a sleepover in the Y's sleepover camp grounds in the Catskills where I learned how to row. We sang songs. We had fun. And our counselor, Natalie, was only a few years older and other than keeping an eye on us, was almost a friend. She really was one of us.

Someone on the message board said he couldn't understand why kids would want to go to camp with kids they didn't know when staying home and doing whatever they want was so much better. What follows is part of my answer.

For me, it was a way to start fresh, with kids who didn't know they were supposed to tease me unmercifully the way the kids in school did — who had been mostly the same kids in my class from 2nd grade thru 6 and half of those were in my junior high classes. I was one of only a couple of kids wearing glasses in kindergarten and the "four eyes" name, among others, stuck. The camp kids were nice enough to call me Shelly.

And since my father could only get a week or two off each summer for family trips (long car trips that I'll always remember and will blog about them here later), and my mother didn't drive, camp was my one way out of a rather boring neighborhood in the middle of nowhere aka south Queens. We couldn't even swim in the bay cuz it was so polluted. Raw sewage as I recall. It's protected and cleaned up now. Or so they say. They closed our movie theater — something about it being owned by the mob, I believe — and it was a 10 min bus ride to the next nearest theater.

The highlight of a lazy summer day was to go to Heller's Drug Store to see if they got any new comic books in. Or maybe over to the pizza place to watch the pizza maker toss pie dough. It became a rather famous pizza place, unfortunately, for a very wrong reason. If other kids were around, we played stoop ball or punch ball. Winter was better. We could go sledding in the ditch on the corner, until they filled it in and put four houses up in its place. I think that was the year they put in sewers, which meant no punch ball for about 5 or 6 months while a trench ran the length of the street. Or for thrills, I could play with the girl across the street who was 2 years younger than me and was an accomplished thief by age 7 and tried to intoduce me to the joys of sniffing glue.

Geez, that neighborhood was boring. Camp was mostly a positive experience and I had fun, once I got past my natural shyness and the fact that I had to get up way too early to be picked up by the camp bus. I lived one block from school, so I wasn't used to catching a bus. But looking back, I'm glad for the experience.

Feeling:

summer camp

Hot Chocolate and English Muffins

Another reposting. I'm almost through with these. Hope folks aren't getting bored.

I'm sitting here drinking a yummy hot chocolate and munching on a toasted English muffin with butter and grape jelly and thinking of what I should reminisce about and the memories of sitting in coffeeshops eating the same snack come to mind. On days in my teens and twenties when I was out shopping with friends or my mother, when we'd stop to eat, I would either have a burger, fries, and chocolate malted, or, if I wasn't that hungry, I'd snack on the aforementioned English muffin and either a malted or hot chocolate, depending on the time of year. Comfort food.

I love to shop, but the actual purchasing of things is not required. Shopping was a social event, like going to the movies, only we could talk the entire time. We'd try on clothes and comment on how each other looked. When I went shopping with friends, we'd make a pact that we each had to buy somethin, anything, before we went home. Which is why I ended up with a fairly extensive collection of costume jewelry, though I often was able to find a record or book I really wanted, too. There was a lot of kidding around and then making a lot of noise with girlish laugher as the three or four or five of us descended on a coffeeshop, usually a Chock Full of Nuts, and made the older folks there nervous at seeing so many teens invading their space.

When I was shopping with my mother, however, it meant quality time. We talked and caught up with things (I'd already moved out on my own by then). If I bought clothes, I knew they looked good on me. My mother was my best critic and would tell me honestly if something looked good on me or not. And then we'd stop for something to eat and continue to talk about the important and not so important things in our lives.

Nowadays, I shop with my best friend when we get the chance to visit or by myself. And when I'm by myself, I take the ghosts of the past with me. My mother is usually there, looking over my shoulder as I try on skirts or sweater tops or jeans, giving me her assessment, and as she was when she was alive, she's always right.

Feeling:

memories

Sugar Cookies and My Grandmother

My father's father was a baker (I had a butcher and a baker for grandfathers!), but my mother's mother was pretty good in the kitchen with both cooking and baking and one of her specialties was sugar cookies. My father has been cleaning out his garage and came upon the rolling pin in the above photo and gave it to me. This was the very rolling pin my grandmother used and the one I used when I helped her make cookies.

They weren't drop cookies which are what my chocolate chip cookies are (Joy of Cooking recipe). We'd roll out the dough, then use cookie cutters for the shapes. For the sugar cookies, that meant round. The topping was a mix of sugar, cinnamon, and chopped nuts, but because I don't like nuts and never have, my grandmother made a small mixing bowl's worth of nutless topping, so there were always at least a half dozen cookies just for me.

My grandmother, a follower of the "pinch of this, pinch of that" school of baking, never wrote down her recipes, which I assume came from her mother back in the "old country" (Ukraine). For a while after my grandmother died, my mother, sister, and I were on a hunt for a recipe that would match those cookies. One of my mother's friends had one that came close, but something about the dough tasted different. Maybe the missing ingredient was my grandmother.

Feeling:

memories

Where I Grew Up

I'd posted this before, but not with the text. I think you can get maps like this on Google now, too.

This is an aerial map of where I grew up in south Queens, NY. The x is the house I lived in from age 5 to 16 and the z is my elementary school.
This map is from a few years ago, so things are a bit different than they were back in the '60s (well, from 1958 - 1969) when we lived in this neighborhood. Half my block was a big ditch until the mid-60s, when they filled it in and put up 4 houses. That was when they put the sewers in. Before that, we had to make do with the septic tanks under the front lawns.

Before they filled in the ditch, we kids used it for sledding in the winter. It was just the right steepness for us when we were still fairly young (and short). Sometimes, water pooled at the bottom and if we got lucky, it froze, giving us a decent size "pond" to skate on if we took turns. And if we didn't mind sticks and branches poking through. The body of water to the left of my house is a canal (called a basin) that empties into the Gateway National Park, which wasn't a park back then, just plain old, polluted Jamaica Bay. It leads out into the Atlantic. To the right, out of the picture, was the old town neighborhood, with houses on stilts over another section of the bay, hardly the image people have when they think of New York City. I haven't been there in years, though the last time, I saw chain stores down the main drag instead of the little restaurants and shops, many of which catered to fisherman and were little more than shacks. I think the bowling alley is still there, also out of the photo, but to the left.

Back then, my neighborhood was mostly a five block radius; I never got this sort of perspective on it. Pretty cool to now be able to put it in its full context.

Feeling:

memories

Laundry and Checkerboard Cakes

I know those things don't sound like they have anything in common, but they're the two things I can remember my sister and me doing in a mostly cooperative manner. She might be nearly 3 years younger than I am, but she's long acted as if she were the older sister. And we fought all the time. Our mother once told me that if one of us said "day," the other would say "night." Yet on two occasions, we set aside (most of) the bickering, during our teens, to do something constructive together.

Laundry. Our mother was a stay-at-home mom before the SAHM acronym was even a germ of a concept. Almost everyone's mother was home in those days. Rare was the mother who worked outside the home during the day. And while our mother did try to teach us some domestic skills, I for one resisted the teachings. I hated cleaning my room and I loathed dusting. The only time I willingly dusted was when my sister wrote her name in the dust on my dresser. But there we were one afternoon, home alone, in our mid-teens, thinking we'd surprise our parents by doing the laundry.

Maybe we just didn't follow the directions carefully or maybe there wasn't clear instructions on how to measure the detergent, and I don't recall anything telling us what to do if we used too much, but there we were, in a panic, bailing out the overflowing suds coming out from the toploading washing machine's lid. Good thing our parents found the incident amusing when they got home.

Baking. My paternal grandfather was a baker. He worked for a big kosher baking outfit in Brooklyn that supplied small bakeries in NYC. His specialty was breads, but every week or two, he'd bring us cakes and cookies along with breads and bagels and bialys. And one of my favorite items in those care packages was the checkerboard cakes. The little yellow and chocolate squares fascinated me and one evening, again when we were home alone, my sister and I decided to make one.

We'd baked before, from mixes, making yummy Duncan Hines chocolate cakes topped with creamy Duncan Hines or Pillsbury icing. We'd even managed to make brownies and cupcakes from mixes. So how hard could it be to adapt a mix for chocolate cake and one for yellow cake and make a checkerboard concoction. Damned impossible if you don't have the right equipment, which we not only didn't have, but didn't know we needed. Layering posed enough of a challenge, let alone the jam between the squares. What we ended up with was the messiest marble cake ever created. Tasted pretty good, though. And again, our parents, especially our father, found the whole thing amusing when they got home and saw what we'd been up to. We did have to clean the mess in the kitchen ourselves, however.

My sister has gone on to become rather adept in the kitchen, especially with baking, and her husband is into the culinary arts, too, though neither is an expert. Me? I do make one thing from scratch: chocolate chip cookies. Yum. But for all other baked goods, there's got to be a mix involved somewhere.

Feeling:

memories

Nostalgia Tour

Another one from last June.

My best friend in junior and senior high and I lost touch after college and a couple of years ago, 25 years since we'd last talked, she emailed me. Ah, the wonders of the internet, and Google. We had a reunion, in a diner not far from where I'm living now and spent hours catching up. We've been in touch via email since. Today, she drove down from CT and we took a nostalgia tour, to the elementary schools we each attended, to our junior and senior high schools, and to our former homes. And it's got me in a nostalgic mood.

Howard Beach is in south Queens, NY, on Jamaica Bay, not too far west of JFK International Airport. It was Idelwild Airport back then, when were growing up. I just finished looking around the official HB site's message boards and have been reminded of a lot of things. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize any of the names of folks posting. But the photos in the history section, showing the swamp and beach land where now there are houses and businesses, gives a good feel for how much this neighborhood has changed. I guess I lived there in its transition period. Built up but no big chains, except for the White Castle that's still over by the high school.

My old neighborhood looks so different now. New Park Pizza is still there, but the Cross Bay Lanes bowling alley is gone. Waldbaum's supermarket moved across the boulevard and everything's been built up so much on Cross Bay Blvd that I don't recognize it, anymore, and I can't tell where anything used to be.

There was the Big BowWow food place where we went with our mothers after each school year to celebrate a good report card. There was the small kiddie amusement park, Ditillio's, owned by my first grade teacher and her husband. There was Heller's Drugstore where I bought my Spalding balls and other necessities of childhood. There was the ditch at the corner where we used to go sledding until they filled it in in the mid-'60s and put up 4 houses. I remember when they put in the sewers (it was septic tanks til then) in '64 or '65. I remember a house we were all convinced was haunted and the little terror of a Chihuahua that lived next to the grade school and terrorized me for years whenever I walked past. There was the old HB movie theater that showed serials, travelogues, and short subjects before they got to the movies and they had raffles, too. I saw "Psycho" and "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" there, and many other wonderufl movies. There was the old Howard Beach Jewish Center in an old house with a veranda and more memories than I can name.

The photos, from the top: Entrances to my elementary school. Third photo is the rear of the school where the playground was and where we entered.

Next is the house I grew up in. I lived there from 1958-1969 (age 5-16). There was no deck. There were 3 short trees (more like large bushes) under the window, instead. The windows have been changed and the doors are different now, too. The brick walk used to be plain old concrete. We played stoopball against those brick steps. That white fence is new. We had a chain link fence and gate along the side.

The junior high we went to is next. It was a fairly new school back then. And below that is the high school. I don't recall the lawn looking that nice

Feeling:

hometowns

The Toys that Define Us

This reposting of Retro-Spective's entries (I'm working backward) is actually inspiring me to add to some of them, especially this one. Only the first paragraph was originally posted. And while I said I'd do the reposting slowly, and while I tend to be fairly patient, I do have this need to get things done streak in me, so I hope to get everything over here by tonight or tomorrow so I can cross it off my To Do list.

I finally wised up and realized I could Google for the toy that's been driving me crazy for years. When I was a little girl, I had a diver who floated up from the bottom of a tub of water via baking soda power. I've hunted antique stores high and low for one of these divers and the best I got was "Yeah, I remember those. No, we don't have any." But here are a bunch, and I don't recall which one I had, though I do recall my diver had a single tank on his back. The site looks like a lot of fun for my fellow baby boomers looking for a bit of playful nostalgia.

So of course, that has me thinking about favorite toys. I loved my Slinky, metal, of course. It made the greatest noise going down the brick steps of the stoop in the front of our house and on the tiled stairs leading down to the basement. I had a plastic (reds and blacks, as I recall) Jacob's Ladder, though I didn't know what it was called back then. There was Silly Putty and Jacks and Pick-Up Stix, too, but I also found household items fun to play with, especially my parents' collection of glass swizzle sticks. I hope my father still has them; they're probably collectors' items now.

I had a pink Spalding ball of course, to play stoop ball and punch ball with (punch ball was a challenge because we used manhole covers and car bumpers for bases and it wasn't unusual for third base to drive off in the middle of a game). See Streetplay for info.

I had dolls, too, Tiny Tears and Chatty Cathy, and of course, Barbies. I had the black haired, ponytail Barbie with the black and white swimsuit and blond Ken with actual fuzzy hair in a crewcut. They were the old type, the type that should never have gone swimming in chlorinated water. But I took them into the pool with me and their fingers eventually eroded enough to fall off. I had blonde Midge and redheaded Alan (he of the plastic hair), and Barbie's sister, Skipper, too, and Midge and Alan still adorn my shelves. Skipper apparently skipped during our move back in '69.

And I had a little homemaker set, with a stove that had a crank. And when you turned the crank, sparks would shoot out of the "burners." I'm thinking that this toy would never pass muster by today's standards, but back when I was 5, this was pretty uh, hot stuff.

Feeling:

memories
toys

Clothing Memories

Another Retro-Spective Reposting, with comments.

When I was a kid, I had a poodle skirt. It was hard to find one online in the same colors as the one I remember, but this looks pretty close. Mine was gray felt with a pink poodle.

I also had saddle shoes. I loved saddle shoes and still do. I've found variations over the years, but they're gone now either because they fell apart from heavy use or no longer fit. The best were the ones with the saddle part being a blue and greenish plaid.

A fun site is Fads, Fashions, Slang on the Fifties Web.

Now, I was born in 1953 and was fairly young when I wore my poodle skirt, and I really didn't have much fashion sense back then. But by the mid-to-late-'60s, mini-skirts, fishnet stockings, and white Go-Go boots were practically required. I had to have the boots because my mother's cousin, who's only 18 years older than I am, had them, and she was the closest I had to a real life role model, though I didn't get to spend as much time with her as I would've liked. M was a single woman with a cool job with a big-name record company, and besides, I had a serious crush on her boyfriend. So, when I saw M's boots, I simply had to have a pair. Which I got and wore to shreds because I wore them in the snow and they were decidedly not waterproof. My boots were short, coming to mid-calf, and flat heeled, and I can only find photos of thigh-high boots. Oh well.



Another fashion necessity for me, one that won't past muster with any fashion critic, was my denim blue Keds sneakers with orange shoelaces. Coincidentally, those are the Mets colors, but I wasn't a baseball fan back then. White sneakers were fine, too, once we got our friends to step on them to scuff them up.

Comments:

drizzlenightsky said...
Mymom was born in 1952 and she has a closet full of uber cool mini dresses and platform shoes which were hot in the 60s...my sisters and I wore them briefly when we were in high school even when they were decidedly an odd fit in the clunky fashion of the early to mid-90s...but yep, I had fun wearing authentic vintage stuff I just wish she had designer ones, too but she was so particular with the right fit that she had her own seamstress who made most of her clothes...:)

Shelly said...
That sounds like a lot of fun. I tried wearing platform shoes in high school, but kept forgetting to lift my feet high enough when I was walking up stairs. :)

carrie said...
cool stuff

Shelly said...
Thanks. :)

4HisChurch said...
Saddle shoes were part of my high school uniform. At the time we said we hated them, but they were VERY comfortable! The soles of the shoes were smooth and we used to write and draw on them--a little bit of individuality in a uniformed world!

mary said...
I wore saddle shoes all through high school. And bass weeguns. Go-go boots, I would have died for a pair but my Mom would not allow it.

mary said...
dang, I meant bass weejuns

Shelly said...
Heh, I knew what you meant, Mary. I didn't have Bass Weejuns. They didn't fit right. :)

Mama Mouse said...
I had a turquoise poodle skirt ... think the poodle was probably pink, but can't remember for sure. I also wore saddle shoes and LOVED them. I had been made to wear corrective shoes till then and they were ugly. For once in my young life I could wear shoes that were fashionable!
I'm a little older than you ... 7 years ... ahhh ... the good old days! Remember the crinolines we had to wear UNDER the poodle skirts to keep them looking right! I never had as many as I wanted ... but I think I had at least two and maybe three.

Shelly said...
Oh gosh, I do remember crinolines for a while, but then they were blissfully gone. They were hard to sit in.
I wore corrective shoes for a while. Well, actually, shoes with metal inserts because my feet turned in. I walk nice and straight now, so I guess it was worth it. Even my early saddle shoes probably had the inserts for the arches, but I don't recall for sure.

Mama Mouse said...
My saddle shoes had 'build ups' on the inside. My feet turned out and one day, not long after I started walking, I took off my shoes and refused to anymore. From then until I was a teenager I wore the 'build ups'.
My left foot walks straight now ... my right turns out. HeeHeee!! It looks weird!


Feeling:

vintage clothing

Music Memories

Reposting from Retro-Spective.

The first music I remember, not counting nursery rhymes of the "A Tisket, A Tasket" variety (if you don't know that, don't ask) and the more usual children's fare, were the three small records, probably .45s) that my mother had let me play over and over when I was 4 or 5. We had a small record player and I was obsessed with these three songs.

One was "Love and Marriage," and I have no idea who sang it. But I can hear the singsong lyrics to this day, because, after all, "Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage."

Then there was "Side by Side," my favorite of the three. From my memory (I'm afraid to Google the song and discover I'm remembering wrong):

"Though we ain't got a barrel of money,
Maybe we're ragged and funny,
But we travel along,
singing our song,
side by side.

Through all kinds of weather,
what if the sky should fall?
As long as we're together,
it really doesn't matter at all."

And one more verse which is escaping me now. And again, I have no idea who sang it.

The third song, however, freaked me out. It got into my brain and scared me. Maybe it was the mournful voice, the dirgeful tune, but my skin would crawl when I heard it, yet I would play it out of some morbid fascination. The song, possibly Peggy Lee singing it, was "Cry Me a River," a song I appreciate much more now that my music tastes are more sophisticated.

I got a transistor radio when I was 9 or 10 and it became a near-constant companion, keeping me company in the summer while I waited for the camp bus. My record player came in 1964 for my 11th birthday. I don't recall my first .45s, but my first LPs (Long Playing Records for the kids out there) were both by the Beatles: Something New and Beatles '65. A Dave Clark 5 album, Glad All Over, from 1964. I wish I could remember when I got my first CD, but I do recall when I first heard one. I was visiting a cousin in California in the early '80s. Her hubby worked on the CD project as part of the consortium of music industry people (studios and manufactureres) and so, a few months before they officially hit the US market, he played a couple for me. One something classical and the other a Broadway musical score. I don't recall which one.

Backin the '60s, when music first started to really matter for me, I loved the British Invasion bands, which hit the US around the time I was really old enough to really get into music. The Beatles, Dave Clark 5, Herman's Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Chad & Jeremy, Peter & Gordon, Manfred Mann, and The Hollies were my favs. But there were American groups I adored, too: The Turtles, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, The Everly Brothers, The Righteous Brothers, Jay and the Americans, The Young Rascals, The Four Seasons, and finally, The Mamas and the Pappas, The Monkees, and the many groups that moved into the '70s and beyond, mainly, America, The BeeGees, The Buckinghams, The Grass Roots, Three Dog Knight, Air Supply, and so many others. Scores of individual singers, too, like Dell Shannon, Jimmie Rodgers, Petula Clark, Neil Sedaka, Bobby Darin, Carole King, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, and too many others to name.

There were the Girl Bands and Motown and soul. The Shirelles, Ronnie and the Ronettes, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke, Chubby Checker, the Supremes, etc. As I got older and oldies started, my tastes ran backward as well as forward and I embraced the music of Elvis, Gene Pitney, Buddy Holly, and pretty much any rocker who came around. I even learned to love the Rolling Stones.

I got a bit locked into the oldies format for a lot of radio listening years (30 plus years), but I still managed to enjoy folk and folk rock, people like Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, Don MacLean, Christine Lavin, Harry Chapin (one of the few people I saw in concert more than once who was not on an oldies tour). Nowadays, I'm enjoying classic rock on the radio and can listen to pretty much anything in moderation.

But I'll always have a special fondness for those old LPs and those three songs that filled my childhood with music, even if it was a bit repititious.

Feeling:

music