Book "Em Danno

Those of you under 50 probably can't relate to the title of this post. Allow me to explain. There was a TV cop show called "Hawaii Five-O" that ran from the late Sixties to around 1980, and the star, Jack Lord, would end many episodes by saying to his younger sidekick, Detective Danny Williams, as they were about to arrest the bad guy: "Book 'em Danno". Attitudes toward cops have changed in the past twenty years, with headline media frenzies every time a cop goes bad. Back in the day, cops were respected, or at least feared. If a cop spoke to your father about something wrong you had done, woe to you. Today the parent would sue the cop for traumatizing their baby.

Anyhow, it was a healthy respect for law and order that led to my early career on the school safety patrol. From the fifth grade on at Our Lady of Lourdes, boys were eligible to join the school safety patrol. (Sorry ladies, this work was just too dangerous for girls.) The standards for acceptance were high. Applicants needed to have a good record scholastically and behaviorally before pinning on the silver badge. This was probably a mistake when you think about it. They should have put the less bright, more troublesome kids out there to dodge traffic, so that if one got taken out, the local gene pool wouldn't suffer too much. But I digress.

There was a pecking order in the ranks of the safety patrol. New members with no rank wore plain silver badges, while more experienced Sergeants wore badges with a green background. The next rank up was Lieutenant, whose badges bore a bright red background, signifying they were men of action. Finally, there was the Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler of the safety patrol, the Captain. There was only one Captain, and his badge background color was a regal blue. Badges were worn on a white canvass harness that draped diagonally across the chest from shoulder to waist and clipped behind the back. It's no secret that safety patrol members, especially those holding higher ranks, were chick magnets. Oh yeah.

The duties of the safety patrol consisted mainly of standing in the intersections near the school and helping young kids cross the street. These assignments were handed out at a morning meeting and referred to in military terminology as "posts". Less experienced troops were placed on quiet posts like DeSales Place where they could learn the ropes. Veteran eighth graders were assigned to busy streets like Broadway or Bushwick Avenue where they confidently took matters in hand under the admiring eyes of blossoming eighth grade girls. At the end of a shift, the Lieutenants would make their rounds, even stopping to assist a newbie as required. When the shift was over, every safety patrol member removed their canvass harness and rolled it up the way they taught us in boot camp, so that the badge came out on top.

Besides helping little kids, safety patrol members also walked old ladies across the street whether they asked for help or not. We were also instructed to help teachers cross, a service I'm sure they really appreciated, as if they were too frail to make it on their own. This act of kindness was callously forgotten later in the day when that same teacher got her revenge by repeatedly whacking that brave safety partoller on his outstretched hand if he forgot why God made him. ("God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and the next."). Catholic schools used a simple method to teach...stark terror. I can still recite my Baltimore Catechism even though I occasionally forget my wedding anniversary.

I'm proud to say that through hard work and dumb luck, I rose to the rank of Captain. It was an unforgettable day indeed when Brother Jude, who ran the safety patrol, spoke those memorable words to me: "McAvoy graduated, you're Captain". The mantle rested heavily on my shoulders. How could these fifth graders be expected to handle a "219" ...kid crossing against the light! A lot of them just want to cut and run, but it's my job to get them to stop that green Chevy so little Tommy can make it safely to the sidewalk. I must confess, as I made my rounds and saw those young, plain silver badge-wearing kids dragging little old ladies across the intersection, that I got a lump in my throat. By God, they were going to be all right. Book 'em Danno.

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What Do You Feel Like Doing, Marty?

I was never a big Ernest Borgnine fan, partly because of the way he smacked poor Frank Sinatra around in "From Here to Eternity", but he was perfect for the role of Marty in the movie of the same name. Marty was based on a TV play by Paddy Chayefsky that originally ran on "Philco-Goodyear Playhouse". Borgnine played a lonely butcher who lives with his mother in the Bronx. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Marty is sitting around a neighborhood cafe with his friends trying to come with something interesting to do apart from their very familiar daily routine. His buddy Angie says: What do you feel like doing tonight? Marty: I don't know, Ange. What do you feel like doing? This scenario was so familiar because my friends and I spent many evenings on the stoop repeating these same lines.


Money was usually short in the days before we all had steady jobs. If we were really desperate, we would pool our money to pay for enough gas for a joyride, assuming one of the older guys could con his father into lending him the car. One of our favorite destinations was Idlewild (now Kennedy) airport, where we would park and just walk around the terminal. This was in the days when the Department of Homeland Security was way off in the future, and you were free to go pretty much anywhere, including down to the departure and arrival gates. Airline terminals were primitive then compared to the marble and glass affairs they have become. To get on the propeller-driven airplanes, you actually walked down on to the tarmac, and up a flight of steps to board.


Summertime was ideal for low-cost evenings. We often drove to Cross Bay Boulevard on the road to Howard Beach, where they had a recreational complex. It included a hot dog and burger joint called The Big Bow Wow, a miniature golf course, and a row of batting cages. Miniature golf was for date nights, but if we were stag, we headed straight for the batting cages. For a quarter, you could step into the cage and, using a metal bat, hit yellow, rubber-covered baseballs thrown by a pitching machine into the night sky. You could set the speed of the pitching machines, and being macho men, we always chose the fastest setting. While one guy was in the cage, the rest of us would gather behind the fence making humiliating remarks if the batter whiffed.


Another cheap night was going to the "Confraternity" dances sponsored by St. Fortunata's Church on Linden Boulevard. Many Catholic parishes held these dances, but for some reason, St. Fortunata's became the Copa Cabana of church dances. They were well-attended affairs, with girls in hip-hugging, brightly colored dresses and beehive hairdos, and guys in pegged pants and hair slicked back with Wildroot Creme Oil. Moreover, they attracted name bands, especially Latino groups headed by big names like Tito Puente. Contrary to what was shown in Saturday Night Fever, most guys couldn't dance like John Travolta, we were just desperate to meet girls.


If we didn't even have gas money, it was the stoop for us. We always sat on Tommy Dowd's stoop because it was on the corner near Rockaway Avenue, and we could see the people getting off the bus or exiting the subway station. We would either ridicule them or, if they were pretty girls, we would holler out can't miss pick-up lines like "Hey, marry me baby". If one of these young ladies ever came over (none ever did) we would probably have blushed a deep red before going into our Ralph Kramden impression ... hamina, hamina, hamina. We were harmless, and after a night of this merriment, we'd go into Tommy's house where his lovely Mom Lillian would give us tea and raisin bread toast. Very civilized.


Ernest Borgnine as Marty resonated with us because our lives paralleled Marty's. There was no e-Harmony, Facebook, MySpace, or other "dot com" social networks. Many of us attended all boys or all girls high schools, and had little opportunity to meet or socialize with the opposite sex. We stumbled through social interactions much like Marty until, if we were lucky, we met Miss or Mister Right. Sometimes I look around and it seems like young people today are so much more socially aware than we were. Of course the bad news is that you can no longer just send your daughter off to a dance secure in the knowledge that she will make it safely home. All in all, and no surprise here, I'll take the old ways.

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"You Can Never Go Home"

Today someone sent me a wonderful clip from YouTube featuring movie director Martin Scorsese YouTube - Martin Scorsese's "The Neighborhood" visiting his old neighborhood in Little Italy. Marty went back to see how things were on his old block, and to show his young daughter where he came from. Some things hadn't changed like the butcher shop his family shopped in. Clearly some of the people he grew up with were still there and delighted in traveling with him down memory lane. He visited an Italian cheese store that has been there for 75 years and still operated by the same family. The current proprietor made an interesting comment; he said people ask him why he opened an Italian cheese store in the middle of Chinatown. And that's the point of this blog...sadly, neighborhoods change.

People my age remember what neighborhoods were like. In the days before the great exodus to the suburbs, people, many of whom were immigrants or children of immigrants, lived in tight communities a few city blocks square. Every borough of New York City had unique neighborhoods, many with a distinct ethnic or racial flavor, as people from other countries entered the United States and were drawn to areas where people looked like them and spoke their language. Brooklyn was no different. One in seven Americans can trace their roots to Brooklyn, a fact that I find fascinating. We lived in East New York, but were surrounded by Brooklyn neighborhoods like Brownsville, Bedford Stuyvesant, Downtown Brooklyn, Cypress Hills, Park Slope, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst and dozens of others.

Neighborhoods were very protective of their own. Eyes were everywhere, watching you from windows and reporting back to your parents if you stepped over the line. Strangers were eyed with suspicion, especially if they were "different". I got a kick out of Scorsese's comment that his parents' families were from different towns in Sicily. In Italy it was unlikely that anyone married outside their town since travel was very restricted, but as immigrants moved into different tenement buildings in Little Italy, inter-marriage between different Sicilian towns began, an event, as Scorsese describes it, that required a "major sitdown". You can imagine the consternation when my cousin married an Irishman. Her parents must have offered up countless prayers that this "infamnia" would be forgiven by the clan.

Every neighborhood had its schools, churches, stores and parks. If you lived in East New York, you attended the local school. This was in the days when the idiotic practice of busing kids twenty miles to school had yet to be implemented. The idea was to give NYC kids a chance to attend other than area schools for racial balance, After spending billions, the practice is recognized as a colossal failure. We also attended the local church of our faith. I used to love standing outside the storefront churches on Fulton Street attended mostly by blacks. The thumping gospel music and shouts of the congregation came blaring out the doorway. Their service sounded like a hell of a lot more fun than ours.

Your friends lived mostly within a two block radius from you. Cliques of five or six guys were common, but the numbers expanded when it came time to choose up sides for ball games. As we got older, and girls started to enter the picture, things got a bit complicated. Some guys got girlfriends, and a whole new social dynamic began. Girls were always around, but mainly to tease and throw snowballs at; nobody ever thought of them as people worthy of companionship. When guys in the clique started getting married, we were all in each other's wedding party. This was such a happy time with weddings coming at frequent intervals. I still keep in touch with two great friends from those days, and recently made contact with a new friend Joe who lived around the block from me. Sadly some are no longer with us, but I remember them with great affection.

A while ago I visited my old block in Brooklyn. My house on Somers Street and some of the familiar buildings were still there, but clearly the neighborhood had changed dramatically. Unlike Martin Scorsese, I found nobody I remembered, or who remembered me. There were no heads sticking out the windows, no kids playing stick ball in the street, no cop on the beat to help steer kids clear of trouble, and no little old man selling his hot knishes from a push cart. The school yard was quiet, no old men played Brisk on the stoop, no trucks lined up to deliver to Spinners Super Market, and no skinny guys in dungarees and tee shirts with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve, combing their duck-tailed haircuts in the reflection of Louie's Candy Store window.

My East New York is gone, but it lives in my memory. If you've never lived in a neighborhood, it's hard to understand what it was like. I try, along with my friend Joe, who also writes of his days in the hood, DelBloggolo to give you a little glimpse once in a while.

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The Price of Progress

Ever wonder how much easier we have it today compared to fifty years ago? Technology has truly revolutionized the way we live, not only from the standpoint of big changes like space travel and giant leaps in medicine, but in the everyday things that affect us all. Let's take a stroll around the house to see how much life has changed.


Making a cup of coffee used to require a percolator pot, ground coffee placed in a nest (we used to get our coffee ground fresh at the A&P) and water, all heated on a stove until the water flowed through the coffee in the nest enough times to give it some taste...probably a 15-20 minute process. We now have sitting on our kitchen counter a Keurig Coffee Maker that looks like a tiny juke box. You insert a coffee "pod" that comes in many varieties including decaffeinated, push the button, and a delicious cup of brewed coffee is ready to drink. For Christmas our kids gave us a slightly sleeker version of this wondrous machine for making espresso. I resisted buying this machine on the grounds (no pun intended) that it was an extravagant waste of money. You'd have to fight me now to get it back.

Not too many people remember the old record players (we called them "Victrolas") and the 78 RPM vinyl records they played, one at a time. Then came the bigger vinyl records that played at 33 1/3 RPM and could be stacked on a record changer to play several at once. Every living room had a stereo system or "hi-fi" the size of a Buick Roadmaster on which to play their records. Rapidly changing technology brought us 8-track tapes, then cassette tapes, then CDs. Now we listen to our downloaded music on an I-pod the size of a pack of cigarettes. I still have stacks of vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs that clutter up my house. Maybe I can donate them to the Amish.

While we're in the living room, take a look at that 52 inch plasma TV and appreciate the long journey television has made. In the fifties we had black and white TVs that got a few channels, and then only if you moved the antenna (or "aerial" as my father called it) until the picture appeared through the snowy static. You watched what was on when it was on. Then came color TV with remote controls, and in the seventies the VCR (celestial music here). Now you could tape a show and watch at your convenience. Finally came cable TV where there are now hundreds of channels with nothing worth watching instead of just a few. VCR/VHS tapes were replaced by DVDs and the ability to record from your cable box. This latter innovation is a great convenience; if we get nuked and can't leave the house for five years, I have enough old movies recorded to get me through.

Let's move on to the bathroom. This used to be a very functional place where maybe the only luxury was a copy of the Sears catalog to read while taking care of business. We never even had a tub, just a stall shower with such lousy water pressure that only gravity allowed it to work at all. Our bathroom was adjacent to a large, unheated pantry attached to the house, so nobody lingered in there for fear of hypothermia. Today, bathrooms are showplaces of marble tile and gleaming metal. Over sized tubs with Jacuzzis, mood lighting, electric tooth brushes and water pics, fluffy, pastel colored towels, and enough assorted bath soaps and lotions for a Sultan's harem. It's almost a shame to use the place for its intended purpose.

The bedroom has seen maybe the fewest changes, although most are now air-conditioned. You can also buy a "white noise" machine to simulate sounds to help you sleep. During the summer when it got hot, I used to turn my bed so that I could sleep with my head nearly out the window. If the phone rang, you ran down to the kitchen to answer it. Then came "Princess" extension phones in the color of your choice, followed by portable phones, answering machines, cell phones and now Apple makes an I-phone that I think can cook your breakfast if you have the patience to read the user manual. I don't.

The innovations go on and on. The microwave oven, laptop computer, video games, fast food, the snow-blower in the garage, the seat-warmer in your car....what will be next? I appreciate progress as much as the next guy, I'm just not sure it was all for the good. Too many kids are obese and socially awkward because of not enough active play time with other children. The pleasure of sitting down with a good book is known to fewer people, especially the young. The idea of neighborhoods where people knew and helped each other is disappearing. The most commonly prescribed drugs in the country are for depression. Maybe technology extracts a price that we shouldn't be so willing to pay.

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What's That Smell?

Sometimes I'll be going about my business when an aroma will hit my nostrils and immediately get my attention. (Yes you could make some "big nose" joke here, but you're better than that.) There are certain smells that have the ability to transport me back in time to the days when my back didn't ache, my eyes were like an eagle's, and I had a full head of wavy hair. (Again, resist the cheap jokes please.) The human mind links our five senses to things or events associated with past experiences, and when that sense is stimulated, these things or events rush into our consciousness. For me, I think smells are a powerful way of experiencing the world.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, I was close to adulthood before it dawned on me that not everyone awoke to the smell of frying meatballs on Sunday mornings. To this day that wonderful smell transports me back to my bed on Somers Street, to a time when I could sleep past 6am. Being Italian, our family ate macaroni (not pasta) on Sundays, complete with delicious meatballs, sausage and braccioles. This is simply something Italians did as if it were the eleventh commandment; we had no choice. My mother would start frying the meatballs probably around 9am, and their fragrance would permeate the house. After frying, they went into the simmering gravy (not sauce) and took on a new tomato-cloaked, mouth-watering aroma that promised good eating by around 3pm. It's one of my strongest memories.

In the days before antibiotics, when we got sick, my mother would give us cherry-flavored cough syrup, slather our chests with an ointment called Musterole and put us to bed. This stuff was better than Penicillin. It had a unique smell like a cross between camphor, mustard and menthol, and was supposed to help clear congestion in the chest. We had a "fifties" themed Christmas a few years ago, and my daughter Laura actually presented me with a couple of jars of this stuff, probably smuggled in from some Mexican clinic. I took a whiff of it as I wrote this column, and I expect my sinuses will be clear until the Fourth of July.

They don't use it as much as they used to at Catholic mass, but the smell of burning incense is another time travel ticket for me. I was (and still am) fascinated by the Catholic ritual of high mass. In the days when the church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Brooklyn was a thriving parish, high mass was something really special. An outsider couldn't imagine more pomp and circumstance at St. Peter's in Rome. The altar was crowded with elaborately robed priests and altar boys, each with his own special role in celebrating the mass. I loved when the priest burned incense in a gold colored vessel on a chain called a "censer", and walked around the perimeter of the big altar, rocking the censer in three pendulum swings toward each section of the congregation until the rich, exotic smell filled the church. Neat.

As we got off the Brighton Train at the Coney Island stop, and walked down the stairs to the street, the smell hit you...the beach. It's beyond my ability to adequately describe this heady aroma, but if you like going to the seashore, you probably know what I'm talking about. Part salt, part sand and part ocean, the smell is carried on soft summer breezes and lures you down to the sea like the Sirens' song in Greek mythology lured smitten sailors to their death on the rocks. There was a Seinfeld episode where Kramer had the idea to sell a fragrance called "The Beach" to Calvin Klein. If they could put it in a bottle, I'd buy it.

Smell associations are involuntary but inescapable; no matter what you're doing when the smell hits you, your brain takes control of your thought process and makes the connection that takes you swiftly back in time. The smells are not always pleasant, like the dentist's office, but the associations are just as strong. Sometimes the smell will never be experienced in modern times, for example, I'm thankful there aren't many chicken markets around today. So just let your nose take you back (you can't help it you know) and smile or cringe as the case may be. Mmmm, is that meatballs I smell??

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Auld Lang Syne

On New Year's Eve we had a quiet dinner with my sister-in-law and her husband. It was an enjoyable, low-key evening with family. We watched the ball drop in Times Square and the revelers standing in the rain to party in 2010. On a sad note, we again saw Dick Clark carry on his long-standing tradition of ushering in the New Year, despite the ravages of a serious stroke he suffered in 2004. One wants to applaud Dick for his courage in appearing even though he can barely speak, but one also questions his judgement in subjecting himself to the cruel jokes made at his expense. Maybe it's time to step aside. But I digress.

I got to thinking about how New Year's Eve has changed since the days when I was still a party animal. The crowd last night numbered in the millions, and the Times Square event has become a carefully orchestrated, world-renowned celebration. Back in the early Sixties I made a couple of pilgrimages to a very different Times Square. Groups of us went in on the subway carrying pints of the cheapest booze we could buy. My favorite was Old Mr. Boston Blackberry Brandy. Today alcohol is not allowed but back then it was our misguided way of dealing with the cold.

The crowds were minuscule then, maybe 10,000 people, mostly locals. There were no funny hats or goofy goggles sold at extravagant tourist prices. There were no armies of police concerned with terrorist attacks; the biggest problem the cops dealt with stemmed directly from over-consumption of Blackberry Brandy. We just kind of hung out, arriving around 10 pm. Today people show up 24 hours in advance to get anywhere near the spot where the ball drops. There was no lavish entertainment except gawking at the storefronts housing the porn palaces that made Times Square infamous before Disney and the big box stores moved in to clean up the neighborhood.

New Year's Eve parties were far more numerous and raucous in the Sixties before the big crackdown on drunk driving. People got dressed and went to restaurants and night clubs that typically featured a one-price package for dinner, drinks and dancing. And drink we did. Leaving those parties and driving home was a real adventure; the road was full of weaving cars and people behind the wheel who were in no condition to drive. The designated driver was the guy who could find his car keys. Pretty irresponsible...that's one aspect of New Year's Eve I don't miss. Parties today tend to be more sedate, family-oriented affairs and I like it much better that way.

The next day we would crawl out of bed and head somewhere for a big New Year's Day dinner. My mother-in-law was the hands-down champ of serving up multi-course, pants-open at-the-top meals that left you in a semi-comatose state. Dinner would start with an antipasto that in itself would pass for a holiday dinner in non-Italian families. Then came steaming bowls of chicken soup with tiny meatballs (an homage to our food-loving Jewish brethren), a fancy pasta like manicotti, lasagne or ravioli, "gravy meat" which consisted of meatballs, hot and sweet sausage, bracciole, pork meat, (no, we're not done), then came a roast or a turkey with accompanying side dishes like potato croquettes, crumbled up sausage with mushrooms, spinach or escarole pie, and sometimes a calamari pie. About now people were nodding off so the whistle blew for half-time.

After the break came salad (typically a last course in Italian households) roasted chestnuts, assorted mixed nuts, wedges of fennel cut up, and fruit. Then came dessert: Italian pastries, homemade pies, Ebingers cakes and coffee, both espresso and "American" coffee. Finally, for anyone who was still awake came the candy. My wife's Aunt Lu worked as a buyer in the A&S department store's candy shop, and we had enough candy to make a dentist weep. Boxes of assorted chocolates, marzipan, colored jelly slices and others that I always made room for, candy being a serious weakness of mine.

These traditions were ours and I loved them. We try to keep them alive for our children, and they are surprisingly willing, even excited about carrying them on. Let's pray that in 2010, people everywhere get to carry on their traditions in peace.

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The Brooklyn Bums

As a New York Yankee fan, I had little use for their arch rival, the Brooklyn Dodgers, but being a Brooklyn resident surrounded by Dodger fans, I had to blend in. Every once in a while a bunch of us would take the subway to Ebbets Field where the Dodgers played. Ebbets Field was on the block bound by Bedford Avenue. Sullivan Place, McKeever Place, and Montgomery Street. Club owner Charles Ebbets acquired the property over several years, starting in 1908, by buying parcels of land until he owned the entire block. This land included the site of a garbage dump called Pigtown because of the pigs that once ate their fill there. Despite its humble beginnings, Ebbets Field would be the scene of some of the greatest baseball drama in the history of the game.

At the time I was growing up, New York City was lucky enough to have three major league baseball teams, the powerhouse Yankees, the Giants who played in the Polo Grounds where Willie Mays patrolled center field, and Brooklyn's favorite, the Dodgers. It was very frustrating for Dodger fans back then because despite having great players like Robinson, Snyder, Hodges, Campanella and Furillo, and playing good baseball, they always lost in the World Series to the Yankees. In 1941, '47, '49, '52, '53, '55 and 1956 they played the Yankees in the World Series and lost every time except in 1955, the year Brooklyn had it's sweet revenge.

I tried my best not to gloat when the Yankees won title after title, not because I didn't want to, but most of my friends were Dodger fans and I valued my front teeth. Maybe the Dodger's most heartbreaking loss came, not at the hands of the New York Yankees, but by the New York Giants. In 1951 the two teams were in a three-game playoff for the National League Pennant after the Dodgers had squandered a 13-game lead they held in August. Each team having won a game, the pennant came down to game three. The Dodgers looked solid as they led 4-1 in the bottom of the ninth inning when their pitching ace, Don Newcombe, began to tire and gave up a run, making the score 4-2.

Newcombe tried to take himself out of the game, but was convinced to continue on the mound by second baseman Jackie Robinson, a fateful error in judgement. The Giants touched Newcombe for a couple of more hits, and Dodger manager Charlie Dressen pulled Newcombe and replaced him with Ralph Branca. With men on second and third, the Giants' Bobby Thompson came to the plate. On Branca's third pitch, he yanked a fastball down the left-field line and over the invitingly close outfield fence. The ball disappeared into the stands for a game-ending three-run homer, just above the 315 marker.

With one swing of Thomson's bat, the Giants had turned near-certain defeat into sudden victory and a pennant. Seeing the ball disappear over the fence, Thomson hopped crazily around the bases, then disappeared into the mob of jubilant teammates who had gathered at home plate. The stunned Dodger players trudged off the field. As has often been pointed out, waiting on deck to bat behind Thomson was a young man who would hit many home runs of his own: 20-year-old rookie Willie Mays. Every die-hard Dodger fan has nightmares about "the game" and cannot bear to re-live that electric moment captured so memorably by Giant broadcaster Russ Hodges: The Shot Heard 'Round The World

In 1955, the Yankees and Dodgers tangled in the World Series. The Yankees won the first two games, and every Dodger fan began rehearsing their "wait 'till next year" speech again. But Brooklyn won games 3 and 4 to even things up. The Dodgers took game 5 and the Yankees game 6. The series would be decided by game 7. Johnny Podres, who had already won game 3, took the mound for Brooklyn and pitched the Bums to a brilliant 2-0 win. I remember that my neighborhood went absolutely crazy the day the Dodgers finally beat the hated Yankees. People were on the streets banging pots and pans like they did on New Year's Eve! I lay low, feeling for the first time what Dodger fans felt their whole lives, the agony of defeat!

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Christmas Toys, Circa 1950s

If you look at the toys that were popular back in the 1950s, they bore little resemblance to kids' toys today. Nothing was computerized, most toys did not need to be plugged in, and I-Pods were still a dream of little Stevie Wozniak (who later founded Apple). Toys were not only simpler and less expensive, but required imagination and physical dexterity to play with. If we could time travel back to the nifty fifties, *here are the items that might pop up on a kid's Santa list:

Mr. Potato Head—Did you know that the Mr. Potato Head toy originally only came with the face pieces? Children were actually supposed to use a real potato! Even so, the toy enjoyed incredible success. Released in 1952, Mr. Potato Head was the first toy ever advertised on television, which lead to profits topping $4 million—that’s $30 billion by today’s standards!

The Hula Hoop—Though it’s one of the defining objects of the 1950’s, the exact origins of the Hula Hoop are unknown. They were used in various forms in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Australia, but were reinvented by the toy company Wham-o in 1957. The design was switched to plastic, and the company sold over 100 million within a year.

Frisbee—The very next year, Wham-O Toys hit it big again with the Frisbee, although this toy’s history is better documented. The Frisbee flying disc started in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the Frisbie Pie Company delivered pies to several college campuses nearby. The students started tossing the empty pie tins around, and the Frisbee was born!

Silly Putty—Like a lot of great toys, Silly Putty was invented entirely by accident. The fortuitous mistake happened during WWII, as scientists developed a bouncing substance that would go on to become Silly Putty. Some got into the hands of toy store owner Ruth Fallgater, who marketed it in plastic eggs. The inexpensive toy became enormously popular worldwide and remains a toy classic.

Barbie Dolls—Of course, at the end of the fifties, the Barbie Doll came out, revolutionizing girls’ play time forever. Barbies became the highest selling fashion dolls in history within a year, and the dolls now sell more than two per second across the world.

Scrabble—Board games were also quite popular in the fifties. The game’s big break happened when the president of Macy’s, Jack Strauss, played the game on vacation. When he returned and found that the game was not sold in his stores, he placed a large order, and Scrabble quickly received national attention.

View Master-- In this modern age of DVD players and the Internet, it is hard to believe that the View Master is still bedazzling youth. Small images on film circled a disc that was inserted into the binocular-like viewer, where they came to three-dimensional life.

Play-Doh—This squishy toy was actually invented as a wallpaper cleaner. The inventor’s sister, however, started letting her kindergarten students use it in crafts as an alternative to harder and messier clay. Play-Doh, now owned by Hasbro, has sold over 900 million pounds, and the exact formula remains a secret to this day.

Pick-Up sticks -- Even more low-tech than View Master, Pick-up sticks (or pick-a-stick) is a game of physical and mental skill in which sticks have to be removed from a pile without disturbing the remaining ones.

Slinky -- In 1943, a naval engineer named Richard James was trying to develop a meter designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships. He was working with tension springs when one of them fell to the ground. It kept moving after it hit the ground and the concept for Slinky toys was conceived.

Cap Gun -- Cap guns were originally made of cast iron, and used rolls of caps that contained tiny gunpowder charges that fired when the hammer struck the charge, automatically advancing the roll of caps to the next shot. The popularity of Western heroes like the Lone Ranger helped boost the popularity of cap guns.

Match Box Cars -- In 1954, Jack Odell created the first Matchbox car of a Road Roller and put in it a matchbox so his daughter could bring it to school. Today, 100 million Matchbox cars are sold each year.

The toys that stick out in my mind as the favorites of my childhood include my Schwinn bike, my A.C. Gilbert Erector Set, and maybe my favorite of all, my Marx electric trains. If I could add up all the hours spent playing with just these three things, and tack them on to the end of my life, I'd live to be 100!

*Most information taken from an article in "Toy Reviews and News, July 2008

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You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

Most of us will never see our life stories on the big screen, but any kid who grew up during the forties and fifties can strongly identify with Ralphie Parker, the nine-year old boy from the holiday film, "A Christmas Story", based on the novel by radio personality and author Jean Sheppard. There is no better characterization anywhere of what it was like to be a boy that age growing up in that time. Sheppard's story is loosely based on his own childhood growing up in the mid-western steel town of Hammond, Indiana, but it is so much more; for those of us from that time, Jean Sheppard could have been telling our story. Ralphie's dreams and fears were our own, as told by Sheppard in a voice that was unerringly honest and heartfelt

Ralphie's parents, played beautifully by the talented Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon were our parents. Hard working, loving and a little eccentric, they were the traditional family unit in those days. The scenes when the family went downtown to visit the department store Santa brought smiles to my face. It was a little like stepping out of my body and peeking through a window at my own life, as I recalled visiting downtown Brooklyn where great stores like A&S, Martins and Mays always put up beautiful decorations for Christmas (when it was still OK to call it Christmas) and before the notion of Black Friday and trampled shoppers became a reality.

We can all identify with the scene where Ralphie snaps and overcomes his fear of a neighborhood bully before giving him the profanity-laced beating he deserves. Ralphie's mother breaks up the fight and drags poor Ralphie home. Ralphie is worried about the swearing and fighting, and is sure he will be in big trouble when his father gets home from work. Instead, Ralphie's mother tells his father about the fight casually at the dinner table. She then changes the subject of the conversation to an upcoming football game, distracting his father and getting Ralphie off the hook in the process. This reminded me so much of how my mother managed my father and saved my bacon more than once.

Then there was the scene where Ralphie, having waited anxiously at the mail box for his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder pin to arrive in the mail, finally receives it and is now able to decode the daily "secret message" broadcast on the radio show. Ralphie learns a sad lesson in being ripped off when he finds out that the secret message turned out to be a commercial for the show's sponsor, chocolate-flavored Ovaltine. Most of the stuff I ever sent away for turned out to be junk too, so I completely empathized with Ralphie.

"I triple-dog dare you" is the challenge one of Ralphie's friends issues to another over whether a person's tongue will stick to a frozen metal flagpole. Not being able to refuse the challenge in accord with the nine-year old boy's book of street protocol, the kid takes up the dare and of course his tongue gets stuck to the pole, much to his terror. I can't tell you how many dumb stunts on my block were proceeded directly by the words "I dare you". We didn't even wait for the triple-dog dare, a simple "I dare you" was enough to get kids doing everything from stealing milk out of milk boxes to scaling roof tops for lost Spaldeens costing all of 15 cents. The dare was a tool of great power.

The scenes in the movie that I identified with most concerned Ralphie's obsession with getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. His mother's response every time the subject came was right out of the mother's handbook: "You'll shoot your eye out". On Christmas morning, Ralphie looks frantically under the tree for a box that would hold the BB gun, but to no avail. He and his brother have quite a few presents, but he is disappointed because he did not get the gun. His disappointment turns to joy as his father points out one last half-hidden present, ostensibly from Santa. As Ralphie unwraps the BB gun, his father explains the purchase to his none-too-thrilled wife, stating that he had one himself when he was 8 years old.

We didn't have video cameras when I was growing up, so I want to thank Jean Sheppard for this little gem of a movie. I was Ralphie and this was my life captured on film. If you're a child of the forties or fifties and your Christmas spirit is lagging, do yourself a favor and watch this movie. It's like looking under the tree and finding that toy you obsessed over as a nine-year old.

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