Nostalgia Food, Music or Memories

Remember baloney, sardines, potted meat? For hispanic households, homemade tortillas, chile, pinto beans.

Tang was our orange juice.

Head cheese with Lea and Perrins Worcester sauce , sardines , Old English cheese in a jar and Fizzies . Minute Maid Concentrated frozen orange juice in a can .

Fresh out of the oven, homemade bread.

Walt Disney and Ed Sullivan on Sunday Night.

Stopping up the downstream culvert on the neighborhood street during a summer thunderstorm, so the ditch would fill with water. We could swim and ski on a board while holding on to a rope tied to a bike on the pavement.
Also jump on the bike ramp and crash into the water.

Picking Catalpa worms off the Catalpa trees and selling them to make money( great fishing bait), or freezing them to bait our own trot lines.

Slopping in the mud, hooking up winch cable to trees in the woods, trying to get to the camp, while the men stayed in the jeep and drank beer.

Rabbit hunting with beagles.

My first kiss! Not a Hershey kiss.

Fireflies( aka lightning bugs)

Trying to knock the bats down with a broom after dark, under the street lights.
Don't think I ever succeeded. Lol.

Many hurricanes.

Shaking hands with George Jones.

The Smokey Mountains.

Water skiing with a built, super attractive, young nun(sja) , who always wore a 2-piece bathing suit. She liked the water, the Sun, and a beer or two.

Lord( pun intended), the bad thoughts I had every time.
I told her, she should get a habit from one of the older nuns and wear it when she was slalom skiing.

It would be like The Flying Nun on skis!

It's the Equinox.

In a week, the Harvest Moon.

I measure time that way.  The Harvest moon, one 1985 night, was when I put my motorcycle (first one I owned) away for the winter.  After a young woman who worked in my office, begged a ride.

I wrote a long essay about it, years ago.

The Harvest Moon, in 1990, was when she drop-kicked me out.  After I'd become a drunk, and she had begun advancing at work...because, women, you know...

The Harvest Moon, 2002, was a night I had a fast through freight from Cleveland to Buffalo...with a narcoleptic older conductor.  I didn't care.  He got his naps; I got to be left alone with my thoughts.  The night started out fine, locomotives running beautifully, a beautiful view of the rising moon...and ended in a minor nightmare, mishandled by a new dispatcher who had no idea what was involved in starting and stopping a train.  Train broke in three pieces, while I was already feeling sorry for myself.

And after returning home, waiting for official investigations to be wrapped up, I wrote the story of the above events.  It was long ago, even the writing of it...

Memories, in my world, are hard things.

Listening to the new rock bands of the time.

Led Zeppelin
Black Sabbath
Jethro Tull
Skynyrd
Deep Purple

And listening to the first Cheech & Chong album, laughing.

We had a local fair, in our city park...which just-so-happened to be across the street from our home. It was an annual event, started in 1945, to honor all the returning WWII vets. It had gotten a bit more elaborate in the 1960s, with amusement-park rides set up, booths of all kind...even some games of chance where the winner got food or store coupons. French fries, fried in butter...it was off a portable trailer and was there every year from 1964 to 1976. And DAMN, were they good. Greasy, crispy and hot...and the perfect way to have them was soaked in vinegar. There were bake stands, foot-long hotdogs (when that was still a novelty) and other vulgarian edibles. Remember, McDonalds only hit our town (like many others) in 1965; so we had little concept of "fast food." Milkshakes, came from Dairy Queen - which had a window you walked up to on the sidewalk. Hamburgers came from Big Boy, or out of a greasy-spoon diner.

And here all this stuff was there, along with a beer tent run by the VFW for anyone old enough to buy some. And probably some customers not old enough - the fair went on from Friday night to Sunday at 5pm, so there were two Date Nights there.

Any church or charitable organization could open a booth - KofC, or JayCees, or YMCA. A friend's father was active in the Touchdown Club, a booster club for the high-school team. They ran the French Fry truck and had another tent doing something or other, it varied from year to year.

Since it was set up right across the street from us...it was a busy time for us kids. They'd start a week earlier, marking the midway and booth spaces with lime. Then the post-hole augers, and the poles for midway lights would be set up. Meantime the reprobates who work for traveling fair rides, would bring their equipment, camp in the park, start setting up...while the Community Council (not the City Council, this was a voluntary service group) who controlled the event, would try to tell the ride company foreman where to put everything.

Imagine, a churchy middle-age guy with a gut, a banker or grocer...arguing with an illiterate with a vocabulary of 100 words, half of them unprintable. That was always fun to watch. Raising the ferris wheel and rides was more fun, because always something would break, and there'd be a lot of grownup tantrums.

The booths would go up, under tents lent for the purpose; and Thursday night the midway power would be turned on. LIGHTS, in what was a soccer field and ball diamond, dark after sundown. Everything would be tested, refrigerators turned on, packed up...the ride guys would click the twinkling lights on, as advertisement to whoever was driving by on the main highway.

It was the official end of our summer. School usually started the following Monday - we'd start a week before Labor Day, which was, back then, September 1, no matter the day.

But it was also a time for some reflection. The sun would set about eight - not 9, as it would in high summer, just a couple weeks after school got out. And it would get cold after sunset...the first inclination that fall was right around the corner.

Sunday night was another great time to be there. LOT of giveaways - unsold food would be sold reduced or even given free, after 3 or so. No lines on the rides, if they had any good ones. If you'd gotten to know one of the reprobates (and didn't get molested) you might get on free.

At six the cops tried to enforce a cessation, but there were always people pushing the limit. Some years the ride companies kept them running later. Some booths stayed open. The VFW beer tent was always gone - no Sunday liquor license. But the fry truck and the footlongs, there until the steamer or fryers were emptied.

Then, as the sun went down, frantic work by all the civic groups, loading up trucks, policing their spaces (they were very good at this) and bugging out. A few vendors left refrigerators or heavy stuff until the next day. The ride guys would start tearing down as soon as closing time came in, or when the authorities told them to stop taking tickets. Amazing how they'd get it done so much faster than going up went - often they'd have their trucks loaded by midnight and they'd be pulling out on Monday morning - while we're waiting for that school bus.

Trying to knock the bats down with a broom after dark, under the street lights.
Don't think I ever succeeded. Lol.

Bats.

They never bothered me. Maybe they should have - they're known rabies carriers.

Now, as a kid I lived in a suburban home, with several large maple trees (and some smaller others) in the yard. Looking back, it would have been a nice place for bats to feast - plenty of mosquitoes and flies. But I don't remember seeing any.

Then I moved to Chautauqua County. I lived several summers in a frumpy cabin just off the lakefront - had about a hundred feet to the water. Again, a fair amount of maples, as well as cedar and fir trees. Some beech...lots of leaf cover. On the front grass, the only time it got sun was late in the day when the sun was going down over the lake.

At dusk the bats would get busy, and work at things for about five hours. No idea where they'd go to after that.

But a few times I had friends over - once a friend from Ohio, and he was puzzled why birds would be flying long after sundown.

"Those are bats," I said, matter-of-factly.

I got a creepy look. I wonder if he considered just jumping in his old VW and driving back home, away from all this strange stuff...

HawkTheSlayer wrote:Fireflies( aka lightning bugs)

Trying to knock the bats down with a broom after dark, under the street lights.
Don't think I ever succeeded. Lol.

Many hurricanes.

Shaking hands with George Jones.

The Smokey Mountains.

Water skiing with a built, super attractive, young nun(sja) , who always wore a 2-piece bathing suit. She liked the water, the Sun, and a beer or two.

Lord( pun intended), the bad thoughts I had every time.
I told her, she should get a habit from one of the older nuns and wear it when she was slalom skiing.

It would be like The Flying Nun on skis!  

Nuns ! Sister Clair Marie my 8th grade Social Studies teacher and could run circles around me on the basketball court - my first love .