Arthur Unknoan and other geezer memories

[Cornflake]

My wife and son and I were just eating dinner. Diane works in an elementary school library. She was discussing books the children like.

I was reminded of my favorite childhood author: Arthur Unknoan. The children's books available to me as a child were few. Most were English, for reasons that elude me. Treasure Island. Robinson Crusoe. One was a collection of poems for children. At the end of each the author would be named. I kept seeing Author Unknown. I read the word "Author" as "Arthur," as in my uncle Art. I mentally pronounced the last name as UNK-noan. Most of my favorites in the book were by this Arthur Unknoan guy. I decided he must have been one of the best writers ever.

Diane and I discussed how little information was available then. Houston had three TV stations, marginally viewable with rabbit ears. Daytime programming consisted of soap operas of no interest whatsoever to a child. What there was to do was read. My parents got the Reader's Digest and Reader's Digest Condensed Books. That was the bulk of the reading material available in the house, so I read it. There weren't a lot of choices. We also had a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. My father had bought it used, thinking it would be good for my brother and me, but whenever I tried to read anything in it I found it impenetrable and boring.

Cousin Billy had a shortwave radio. On it, you could actually here people in Cuba talking in rapid-fire Spanish. It was the first time I ever heard a human voice from someone outside of the US. I thought it was amazing. What's more, those people were Communists, whom I knew were evil and wanted to enslave or kill us. It was really something to listen to voices of evil people.

The dinner conversation meandered through air-raid sirens, Classics Illustrated and other things from that era. I'm not the only one here who's eligible for AARP. Anyone else have any such memories?

[Russell Letson]

Hell, some of us are eligible for friggin' Medicare.

What was the question again?

[SteveO]

Hey I have both them cards in my wallet

[RickW]

The biggest difference for me was the amount of time I spent outside, just playing. Running around like a madman, with all the other kids in the neighbourhood, having fun. And when it was time to go in, my dad would go out on the back deck, and call, and I could hear and know that voice clear across the block.

My kids have spent some time outside, but not like that, not wandering as far as we did, not playing the games with so many other kids like we did. It was better.

However, middledottir is 13, and in grade 8. That was when I started to party, drinking cheap wine, beer, and screwdrivers. It quickly came to the point where it wasn't a party without doing that.

First part, I wish they had. Second, not quite so much. So far, so good.

[Russell Letson]

Mar 2, 2010 0:54:29 GMT -5 RickW said:

my dad would go out on the back deck

"Back deck." That's a generation marker right there.


For my old man, a deck was for playing pinochle or part of a story about his Navy service.

[dickt]

Yep, playing with the neighborhood kids outside was the #1 pastime. And you knew all the different calls of the mothers around the neighborhood when it was time to come in for dinner. So the game of 500 or hide and seek or army or whatever usually got interrupted around dusk.

When we were a little older and the neighborhood range larger, a semi-organized game of touch football or baseball might be arranged by telephone and then everyone would bike over to the diamond to play. Didn't need little league with parents and coaches and uniforms. Nowadays I don't think kids ever play a team sport outside of leagues, etc. Maybe a pickup basketball game or a soccer kick-around, but playing impromptu sports was commonplace when I was growing up.

I used to spend hours reading our copy of the World Book. Maybe it was less dry than the EB.

And we'd fight every month over who got the Mad Magazine first. Usually that privilege was reserved for which of us went grocery shopping with Mom.

[Village Idiot]

While I am not a museum relic like the rest of you guys, we had a black and white television that picked up three stations as well. Save for Saturday mornings in the winter watching the cartoons (Warner Brothers, Pink Panther, etc.) or Sunday night stuff we didn't watch a lot of television. We were outside all the time. We were on the edge of town near the river, and us neighborhood kids would vanish all day long, until we heard my mom out back ringing the dinner bell. We'd come back, eat, and run out again, playing "old gray wolf" or other games in the dark with the other kids using the street light as base.

Treasure Island was a favorite of mine, and I read it several times. My folks immersed us in literature, and Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur stories, The Wind in the Willows and the like were all reading fare. As a result I am still an avid reader, and make it a point to read one classic a year. I'm thinking of A Tale of Two Cities for this year, somehow I've never read that.

[millring]

This is how we were called in every evening. I inherited the bell and it's now right outside my front gate.

[dradtke]

I mostly dug holes and built clubhouses.

[Cornflake]

My parents whistled a distinctive four-note call when we were summoned home from playing.

[theevan]

We need a spittin' bench for the geezers in here.

[aquaduct]

Mar 2, 2010 9:36:24 GMT -5 theevan said:

We need a spittin' bench for the geezers in here.

That's gonna be one big-ass plank.

[Marshall]

Interesting.

Every generation has their quirkie memories; the present day world filtered through the eyes of a child's experience (or lack thereof).

It'll be interesting (and hard for me to imagine) what my grandchildren will find memorable and quaint about the "modern" world they are experienceing.

[millring]

I remember back when my parents would text me for dinner.

[TKennedy]

Great memories folks. I remember:

No TV till 8th grade and then 1 channel that was more snow than picture and my dad constantly fiddling with the rotor on the antenna.

Classics Illustrated, Uncle Scrooge comics, looking at naked women in National Geographic

The intolerable wait at the mailbox for cereal box premiums and trying to get all 50 states with the Wheaties license plates.

Making Crystal Set radios and fiddling for hours with the "cat whisker" to get better reception.

Building countless model airplanes and then blowing them up with firecrackers.

Listening to "The Haunting Hour" on the radio

Being outdoors all day long with our moms having no idea where we were but they all had a yell that could be heard for 6 blocks.

Carrying knives in our pockets to school and playing "Stick Em" on the playground.



Now I've this too

[Cornflake]

"Classics Illustrated, Uncle Scrooge comics, looking at naked women in National Geographic." Check.

"Making Crystal Set radios and fiddling for hours with the 'cat whisker' to get better reception." Check.

"Building countless model airplanes..." Check. "...and then blowing them up with firecrackers." Nah, we blew up other things. We also would take pill bugs, that rolled themselves into little balls when threatened, and fire them out of BB guns. Kind of regret that.

"Being outdoors all day long with our moms having no idea where we were but they all had a yell that could be heard for 6 blocks." Check, but more often that whistle.

"Carrying knives in our pockets to school and playing 'Stick Em' on the playground." Check, but a different knife game.

[TKennedy]

[patrick]

Man, you guys must have grown up during colonial times!

Did you ever meet Washington or Lincoln or those guys?

I'm not quite that ancient, though I am an Eisenhower baby. I grew up in the vast metropolis of Los Angeles in the '60s, actually in the San Fernando Valley. We had a TV early on, stations were 2 (CBS), 4(NBC), 5, 7(ABC), 9, 11, 13. 5, 9, 11 and 13 were local to various degrees, 13 was hardly one step up from what you see on "community access" cable nowadays. I remember the commercials for local businesses were basically a slide show with a voice over. The shows on 13 included Felix the Cat and the Happy Wanderer.

Early on we were public library users. Both my parents have college degrees, so the house had not only books, but NatGeo, Time, Aviation Week, a variety of nursing magazines.

We used to bike everywhere. I could easily do 15-20 miles a day, without thinking about it. The roads were safer then, drivers more considerate. I think you'd be killed trying to do today what we did.

After the Cuban missile crisis, a neighbor installed a bomb shelter in his front yard. It was still there years later. There was a Nike missile base in the hills east of the valley, with a long meandering road that led up to it. On a Saturday, we would push our bikes all the way up the hill to the base, it would take a couple of hours, stopping to rest under the oaks and near a stream that ran nearby. When we got to the top, we would get on our bikes and coast all the way down, hoping our brakes wouldn't give out, because that would be a certain, very painful crash off the twisting road into the scrub.

North of the valley there was a facility run by Rocketdyne where they tested engines for the Saturn V program. Occasionally they would fire one up and the entire valley would shake. You knew it wasn't an earthquake because you could hear a steady roar all across the valley.

Probably half the kids I knew had swimming pools in the back yard, we spent a lot of time doing that. And we would occasionally hitch-hike through Topanga Canyon to get to the beach, also a near suicidal act today.

[Supertramp78]

My childhood was a blur of Houston time killing activities. In my neighborhood that included the following.


Black Cat firecrackers. Nothing speleld 'fun' more than blowing stuf up with firecrackers. Often that meant our fingers but most of the time it was tin cans, dirt, ant hills (NOT a good idea), or frogs (an even worse idea).



Aurora slot cars. Every kid on our street had them. We woudl take different colored chalk and rub it on th eraised logo on the back of each piece of track so we could know which piece belonged to which kid. Then we would build these massive tracks.

The rest of the time was spent in a local gully catching crawdads and tadpoles and playing in the mud.

[RickW]

We used to bike everywhere, too. I remember that sense of freedom.

Maybe that's why we were all in such a hurry to move out, and kids today, not so much. They don't spend enough time away, just hanging out with friends.

The library - used to ride down to it at least once a week, and get a new stack of books. Oh yeah. That old library is gone now.