DOWN MEMORY LANE--RECOLLECTIONS FOR MY 50TH HIGHSCHOOL REUNION

    DOWN MEMORY LANE 

I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you to accompany me down memory lane.   I’ve been a writer all of my life, but an especially serious one for the last 12 years.  That is, I feel guilty if I don’t write something every day.  Therefore, I’m well acquainted with a writer’s problems. More likely than not, it’s not what to write, but how to keep it brief and to make every word count.

I’m going to make a list of experiences common to our generation. I could tell you a story about every one, but I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to let your memory make your own stories. 

So, here  goes.

Do you remember?

Clotheslines, bluing, wash tubs with wringers, ice cards in the window, or if your family was rich, metal ice cube trays with metal levers.  Dishwashing machines consisted of two teenagers. One to wash and rinse, one to dry and put away the dishes. Sometimes this great tool for interpersonal relationships deteriorated into sibling spats. For this reason Mother served as referee.

Hot, breathless Oklahoma summers with fans, sleeping in the yard, visiting with neighbors on the front porch while enjoying fresh squeezed lemonade and asking, “Did anybody feel that breeze?”

Chasing fireflies in the twilight.  Dizziness from whirling in circles to make you giggle. Playing Batman or Superman with a dishtowel as your only prop. Hide and seek, king of the mountain, tire swings, reenactment of Tarzan movies.  Cork pop guns, roller skate keys, Tinker toys, Lincoln logs, erector sets, making balsa wood airplane models, beanie flips, inner tube rubber guns; the beauty, feel and smell of a brand new, white, virgin baseball in the spring and how by the end of summer the red threads would no longer hold the cover together, requiring black friction tape to keep the ball intact.

P.F. Flyers.  This was a cheap canvas and rubber “tennis” shoe, but it was light.  It seldom outlasted the insult and wear of one summer, but it could make a boy run faster and jump higher than any of his barefooted peers. (We saved our good leather shoes for going to church.) Saddle oxfords. Bobby socks.

Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Captain Midnight, The Torch, and no Cliff notes—only Classic Comics for emergency book reports.

Fishing with a cane pole and a cork bobber.  Making your own kite from strips of an orange crate, newspaper and home made paste. Thanks to the lead & zinc mines, blasting powder boxes which made great chairs and tables for tree houses. Wooden cheese boxes.

Door to door salesmen, home delivery of milk in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.  Cream that oozed out of the bottle in the winter time.

The pre-television age of radio left our eyes and hands free for building model airplanes, doodling, or doing homework while we listened to Bob Hope, Jack Bennie, Inner Sanctum, Green Hornet, Jack Armstrong the all-American boy, fireside chats from FDR, and soap operas with Stella Dallas.  Johnny Lee Wills and all his boys. Town Talk bread.

Telephone numbers with prefixes such as Kimball 5027. Party lines.  Mimeograph paper with very faded blue ink.

Penny candy, nickel candy bars, candy cigarettes, five cent soda pop in glass bottles.  Twelve ounce

Pepsi Cola--twice as much for a nickle.

The Saturday Evening Post with its great short stories and Hazel cartoons; Colliers, Life Magazine.

Gas stations with attendants who’d check your oil, tire pressures, and clean your windshields while filling your tank with 20 cent/gal. Ethyl gasoline. Free air and water at every pump.

Studebakers, Nashes, Hudsons, and Kaisers.  That first driving lesson by your father in cars with starter buttons and headlight dimmer switches on the floor boards, clutches, standard shift (only four gears if you could find them), rubber bladed fans on dash for defrost. Radios not standard. Roll down windows. Developing good upper body strength while trying to parallel park without power steering.

Greyhound, and Trailways buses that could deliver you to any small town in the U.S.

Sooner Drive-in movies, Doc’s Barbeque where a half dollar could buy you a delicious BBQ sandwich, a Miller’s Highlife bottle of beer, and leave you a nickel left over for a tip.  I know, I know. You’re going to say—a nickel tip? What a cheapskate!  Not really. The going rate for mowing a lawn was 50 cents—no power mowers, strictly push and pull. So five nickels was the half the price of admission to a movie at the Glory B or the Ottawa theaters. Twenty nickels would buy you five gallons of gas.

Ray’s root beer in frosted mugs.  Tucker’s hamburgers and chili.  Tableside jukeboxes in cafes.

Coleman theatre—twelve cents for kids, 25 cents for adults. Theatre manager, the bald

headed Mr. Griffin taking tickets and often challenging ages of pre-adolescents with

growth spurts. Aside from the bank, the only air-condition building in town. Newsreels

before the movie and cartoons afterward.  Glory B theatre with B grade movies.

Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry Lash Larue, and Roy Rodgers.  None of the boys liked

Roy because he sang too much and kissed Dale Evans.  You’d never catch Lash kissing

any dumb old girl. Of course, his having to stand on Alan Ladd’s box may have had

something to do with it. Ottawa theatre for the Three Stooges, really bad movies, and

drawings for a set of dishes. All movies were rated G. The closest we came to a PG was

at the final scene of “Gone With The Wind” when Rhett Butler told Scarlet he didn’t

give a (Oh, God! A four letter word!) damn.  Hollywood writers tried their best, but Clark

Gable refused to say “hoot”. It wasn’t dignified. Only Gabby Hayes said hoot.

Winart pottery factory near the high school. 

High school. C.C. Feree’s PA announcements, “Now hear this. This is your principal

speaking.”  Feree had been a Navy Lieutenant during World War II.

 Generational school teachers who taught fathers, mothers, and their children..  No school buses, no cafeteria.  No free textbooks. All bought, mostly second hand. Those whose parents could afford new textbooks were really cool. The reason everyone was slender was we either skipped lunch or walked briskly to home and back for lunch.

Football: concrete stands, pall of blue tobacco smoke against floodlights, the smell of dry

Bermuda grass. War Dogs with leather helmets. No face masks.

Band- story of third trombones.  Jerry Bressie, Jim Campbell and myself. We played a lot of whole notes and half notes, leaving the rhythm, fourth and eighth notes to the smart aleck 1^st and 2^nd trombones who could actually read music. We were so bad, Doc Killion told us to forget about playing, just march. We sounded like braying llamas who really needed to spit.

School assemblies with Eddie McGinnis and Gary Truman skits.

Tobacco was the only habit forming drug. No metal detectors, no dope sniffing dogs, no

locker inspections.

Only race problems were arguments over who could run the fastest.

Dress code unspoken. Boys: just weren't cool unless one wore denims and white shirts.  Girls: No shorts.

Girls wore below the knee skirts, white blouses, or two-piece sweaters.  Lipstick grudgingly allowed, but I can’t remember pierced ears or painted nails. I do remember the current saying that “only Mexicans and Gypsies wear dangling earrings and paint.” Saddle oxfords. Blue jeans allowed on Fridays.

Bicycle racks. No parking problem because no students owned cars.  One car families. People walked to town, to the movies, to school, to the store.

Neighborhood grocery stores.  Farrier’s on main street was closest thing to a supermarket.

Highway 66 was Miami’s Main Street.

Parades consisted of nothing more than a float or two, HS band, and Mutt Farrier’s Roundup club bringing up the rear, yet people lined the sidewalks to watch. Miamians just loved parades no matter what the reason. 

VE Day. VJ Day.  The atomic bomb. The flood of July ’51.  Returning home from Korea three years latter to discover that that was the last rain. Grand Lake was down to its river bed.

Bud Wilkinson-OU football.  Harry Carey-Cardinal Baseball.  Only two sports in Oklahoma: Football and spring football.  Sandlot baseball, track, and basketball existed only to keep in shape for football.

Barbershops with male barbers and Field & Stream magazines. Served as a forum on local and

national politics. Fifty cent haircuts.

Boy Scouts of America never heard of the word homosexual.  The ACLU didn’t exist.

These were simpler times and harder times, but they were OUR times.