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The 60s

You are currently browsing the archive for the The 60s category.

Fix-A-Drink

March 25, 2009 in Life, The 60s | 16 comments

Does this ever happen to you?  Here’s the scenario. A simple question gets asked. No one knows the answer. It becomes like a trivia question and everyone wracks their brains trying to think of the answer. Ding! Ding! Ding! when someone shouts out the correct answer. And, it is fun. And, everyone now has the answer! And sometimes, it becomes truly a game, with more related trivia questions and answers!

But, what happens when no one has the answer? Does it bother you? Does someone look it up? If it’s not that important, can you let it go?

I ask, because when this happens to me, I can’t let it go. And, I ‘m not just talking about a fun question, where there are a bunch of people trying to come up with an answer. I’m talking about the day to day questions that happen everyday. You see, I have a thing about unanswered questions.

For instance, if someone wonders what time it is in Paris right now, I have to look it up. If someone asks who wrote a certain book, I look it up. If someone asks me how to spell a word, I’ll look it up to confirm I’m right.

Here’s a recent example. Brian asked me the other day, “Is Robert Palmer dead?”

I said, “I dunno. Let me look it up.” And, so I did.

Is this normal behavior or a little over the edge?  I mean it really isn’t that important to my daily living to know this answer, is it? But, for me, once he asked the question I had to know the answer.

Brian even said, “Not necessary, Cindy. It’s not that important.” 

And, I said, “Well, no it’s not, but it will only take me a sec to look it up.”

The bottom line is that I do not like unanswered questions. Which takes me to the subject of this blog : Fix-A-Drink.

I was thinking about a drink we had growing up in the 60s. It was a syrup concentrate that had to be mixed with water.  My mind was telling me that my favorite flavor was grape, although it also came in a couple of other flavors. My mind was telling me it was called, Fix-A-Drink.

Now there are a lot of unanswered questions with this thinking, like what other flavors did it come in, where was it made, how long was the company that made it in business, did it make anything else, yada, yada.

Tons of unanswered questions, so, I went to the internet looking for answers. I googled Fix-A-Drink and got nothing! I googled grape, syrup, concentrates, 1960s, western Pennsylvania, you name it and got nothing! Oh, my goodness! I searched for several hours looking for the answers to these totally unimportant questions.

Silly, I know. But, I was driven to find out. While searching I stumbled upon several websites and blogs that talked about old-timey drinks, like Moxie, a favorite in Massachusettes, and NeHi grape and orange sodas. I learned more on the web about Coca-Cola than I did at its corporate headquarters in Atlanta and more about Dr. Pepper than I ever cared to know and Tang and root beer and cream sodas. I learned about the maple syrup diet, where you apparently drink several tablespoons of maple syrup several times a day to give yourself a sugar rush and suppress your appetite! Gee, I had never heard of this one, and I’ve tried a lot of them!

But, not one lousy little reference out there on the whole world wide freakin’ web about Fix-A-Drink, dammit!

So, I called my sister, Bonnie. Before I could get the whole description about the syrup concentrate out of my mouth, she said, “Fix-A-Drink.” So, then I asked hubby, Brian,  if his mom ever bought this syrupy concentrate thing, and before I could say its name, he said “Fix-A-Drink.”

So, I know it existed. But, I’m so frustrated because of these remaining unanswered trivial, meaningless, anal questions. So, please if anyone out there can supply a few answers, help me escape this misery!

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The 60s, Part 2

March 12, 2009 in Family, Life, The 60s | 2 comments

Since my last post – Make Love, Not War – I’ve been thinking about the 60s quite a bit.  And so, yesterday, while driving home from work, I remembered two events from that time period that I found to be both very revealing about the times and also about me.

Both involve my mother. And, in order to share it with you, I need to provide a little background information about my mother and me.

Mom was a Registered Nurse and during my early years she worked in the maternity ward at the hospital in town.  There were three shifts at the hospital: 7 a.m. – 3 p.m., 3 p.m. – 11 p.m. and 11 p.m. – 7 a.m. As I remember it, Mom usually worked one week on the first shift, followed by 2 days off, and then would work a week on the second shift followed by 2 days off, and then would work a week on the third shift and the two days off. Additionally, her days off were rotated with the other nurses. So, say, for instance,  she had Tuesday and Wednesday off this week, she might work seven straight days on the next shift  before her next days off of  Thursday and Friday the following week. 

Now, this is important to know because when I was a very little girl back in the 1960s, I loved when my mother was home and not at the hospital working. I spent every waking hour following her around the house, watching her do all of the house chores. I watched her wash clothes in the wringer washer. I followed her outside and watched her hang them on the line to dry. I watched her cook dinner and do the ironing, etc. And, while she did all of these things, I talked. Oh, yeah, I talked. I talked and talked and talked.

This is no lie, I used to  follow her into the bathroom and sit on the toilet seat to talk to her while she took a bath, then follow her to her bedroom to talk some more while she put on her white stockings and nurses uniform and fixed her hair at her dresser to get ready for work.  I didn’t shut up until she was in the car and on her way. I suddenly see that I never gave her any peace!  Honestly, she was probably relieved to go to work just to get away from me (although, she would have never let on that that was so).

So, back to the present, I’m in my automobile driving home, and I’m remembering all this because of the specific incident I’m going to tell you about next.

By 1963 I was in kindergarten. For part of the year, I attended school in the mornings and the other part of the year I attended in the afternoon. Well on this one specific day, I do not remember whether I was in morning kindergarten or afternoon kindergarten. But, what I do remember is sitting on my mother’s bed watching her reflection in her dresser mirror while she was getting ready to work the 3 p.m. – 11 p.m. shift at the hospital.

The date was November 22. And, John F. Kennedy had been shot. This was the first time I ever saw her cry. She wasn’t out and out sobbing. That would have never been her style.  But I saw her glistening eyes in her mirrored reflection and I was sad for her. And, she answered my never-ending questions about it, before going to work to deliver new babies into the world.

The second time I saw my mother cry during the 1960s was when I was in third grade. This was 1967, or maybe, 1968.  I went to the big city airport (Pittsburgh) with my parents to see my big brother Dennis get on an airplane that would ultimately take him to two tours in Vietnam.

On the outside, Dennis wasn’t acting a bit nervous or anxious about his future.  But, I think mom saw right through him and knew his cool demeanor was only an act.  Her eyes filled with tears as he boarded and again a little later when we watched the plane take to the sky.

So, back to present day. Yesterday. Driving home from work and thinking about these two incidents. Both say a lot about the times – the assassination of a president and a son going off to war.

And, my mother always listened to me.

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Make love, not war

March 9, 2009 in Aging sucks, Life, The 60s | 9 comments

Back in the summer of 1969, I was 10 years old. That was the summer of Woodstock and although I knew I wouldn’t be able to get there, I asked my mom if I could go. I envisioned standing at the end of my driveway wearing a tie-dyed tee shirt with a big peace sign on it, and getting picked up by a group of strangers making their way to upstate New York for the great festival weekend. These strangers would immediately love me and include me as one of their own because they were hippies. I would spend the weekend with them, sleeping in the back of their beat up, psychedelic painted Volkwagon Van (or it might have been an old yellow school bus with tie-dyed curtains on the windows – my vision wasn’t perfectly clear on that point).

And I wanted to burn my bra, too (even though I wasn’t wearing one yet).   

You know, I’ve never told anyone this memory before. Not that it is any great secret, really, it’s just that I had forgotten about it.

Until recently.  You see, our grown daughter thinks Brian and I were are hippies. I never knew she thought that of us, but she has made that reference several times recently, so it got me thinking.

As an adult, when I look back at the 60s, I remember the unrest and social upheavel. There were riots, deaths on college campuses and National Guardsmen on the news each night.  It was the establishment pitted against the youth. It was the decade that we lost John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was also the decade of my youth. I might not have been mature enough to have a clear understanding of all that was going on (after all, I was just a kid), but, I was at an age where those events would impress me and shape who I would become.

I was of the age that I should have been what hippies referred to as a “teeny bopper.”  This is the term for people too young to be hippies and who would eventually like music like The Monkees and The Partridge Family. But, I wasn’t there so much. I was more in to Jefferson Airplane and Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie.

I wore granny glasses and had a pair of Beatle boots. And, I knew of Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary (“turn on, tune in, drop out”), even though I didn’t have a clue about what they were talking about.  

My perception of the 60s was colored with the depth of knowledge any two to 12 year old might have had. “Make love, not war” was a beautiful sentiment to me. I didn’t know what making love actually was then, but I knew it was better than war. Guess, I’m still not wrong about that!

Yes, they were a turbulent, violent time, those days, but I believed in the true philosophy of the hippy. At their core, hippies believe in peace as the way to resolve differences among people, ideologies and religion. They believe that the way to peace is through love and tolerance. They believe in accepting others as they are, giving them freedom to express themselves and not judging them based on appearances.

So, years later, my daughter grows up in a household that subscribes to Mother Earth News, and the house has tie-dyed curtains in all the rooms, and her mom wears ‘earth shoes” and walks to work on Earth Day, and marches on Washington in support of women’s rights and makes macrame crafts. She grows up listening to her mom’s music like The Beatles, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Arlo Guthrie.

Is that why she thinks I’m a hippy?

(By the way, remember the song Mellow Yellow, by Donovan? It wasn’t about loving saffron, it was about getting high by smoking a banana. I swear, I didn’t know!)

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Love my Good & Plenty!

March 6, 2009 in Aging sucks, Life, The 60s | 3 comments

So, it started off innocently enough. I had asked one of the guys I work with about a delivery and he said, “Ask Charlie.” So, after I did, I went back to this other guy and here’s the rest of our conversation.

I began, “Charlie said.” And then, I was suddenly struck with a candy commercial memory. So, I sang, “Charlie said, love my Good & Plenty. Charlie said, really rings my bell. Charlie said, love my Good & Plenty. Don’t know any other candy that I love so well.”

Him: “What?”

Me: “Good & Plenties.” And then he gives me that I dunno what yer talking about look.

Me: “You don’t remember Good & Plenty?”

Him: “No”

Me: “The little pink and white licorice candies sorta oblong shaped, came in a little purplish rectangle box?”

Him: “No.”

Me: “And in the commercial, the little animated guy – Choo Choo Charlie –  wore a train engineer’s cap, rode up and down the hills in his little train and sang the Good & Plenty theme song.”

Him: “Nope. Well, maybe I remember the candies, used to get them at the theater, I think, but no, I don’t remember nuthin’ about your Choo Choo Charlie fellow.”

Strange, I thought, that someone ten years older than me doesn’t remember this commercial. So, since I love the internet, I looked it up.

And, to my delight, I discovered a few semi-interesting facts. Did you know that Good & Plenty was first produced in 1893 by Quaker City Confectionary Company in Philadelphia and is considered the oldest branded candy in the US? And, did you know that, although it had several owners during the 1900s, Good & Plenty was bought by Hershey Foods in 2008!  (Hey, you never know, it could be a Jeopardy question one day.)

I love Good & Plenty! Wanna see the commercial? I found it on You Tube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExSlyoVTX3I

Anyway, it got me to thinking about other old time candies I use to love as a kid.

Does anyone remember those candy cigarettes that if you blew on them, some white powder would come out that was suppose to look like smoke?

How about Boyer Mallo Cups and Boyer Smoothies. “Boy, oh Boy oh, Boyer Smoothie.” Yeah, I vaguely remember a song associated with that one, too!   Did you know that the Boyer Company in Altoona, PA was the first to create a candy in a cup shape like that? Yep, it predates Reeses Peanut Butter Cups! Do you remember the cardboard play money included that you could collect and redeem from their prize catalog?

How about Black Jack, Beemans and Clove gum?

Do you remember Ice Cubes? God, I loved those, too. A chunk of chocolate that melted like an ice cube in your mouth!

Necco wafers!

Some of these items are no longer available everywhere. I had a Mallo Cup about a year and half ago when I was visiting sister peep, Bonnie.  She had one on her kitchen counter to greet me when I arrived! And, it was probably the first one I had in over 20 years. You just can’t find them in the south.

You can find lots of this “candy we grew up on” on the internet.  You can place an order from the comfort of your desk  and  get it shipped right to your door.

Somehow, though, it’s a lot more fun, stumbling upon a candy memory by accident, when you least expect it.  A candy surprise!

You know, I think I’m going to try to stumble upon a Boyer Smoothie on my next trip to Pennsylvania!

Please tell me I’m not the only one that remembers the Choo Choo Charlie song.

And, what other candies did we love when we were little kids?

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The Party Line

February 4, 2009 in Aging sucks, Family, Life, The 60s | 5 comments

Back in the ’60s when we were young kids,  most families shared a phone line with another household.  In our case,  it was with an old widowed woman who lived down the road.

There were seven people in our household and we had one non-mobile phone located in the livingroom.  It was difficult enough to get a turn to use the phone at my house with that many people living there, but what made it worse was sharing our line with the widowed woman.  You see, if she was using her telephone, we couldn’t use ours.  

Don’t ask me how this modern marvel of technology worked – both households had separate phone numbers, but both her phone number and our phone number shared a line. Get it?

If old lady battle-axe was using her telephone, and someone from my family, say me,  picked up the receiver to make a call while she was using her phone, I did not get a dialtone, but rather could hear her long boring conversation about whatever ailment was ailing her at the time and about all the ailments of whoever she was talking to, too. It was way too much personal information for a public telephone line, in my opinion, not that I was listening.

And, of course, we would have to wait until she finished before we could use the phone.  Sometimes, while one of us was having a conversation with one of our friends, we could hear her pick up her phone and after a minute or two or three, put it back in its cradle, occasionally rather loudly.  Usually after one or two pickups, she would interrupt our call to say, “Get off the phone, I have an important call to make.”  Well, she did that all the time, and as typical children, we ignored her.

Our shared party line existence got ugly. That old woman would wait until we got home home from school, when we would naturally want to use the phone to call the friends we had just been with all day, to use it herself and tie up the line. Sometimes, we would pick up the receiver and hear her in her kitchen preparing her dinner or in her living room watching her television, talking to no one on the phone, but keeping it off the hook so we couldn’t use it, keeping it available for her own use. 

Looking back now, I think she  must have hated sharing a phone line with us. From her perspective, I bet she thought we were rude little hellions. She’d have been right, I suppose.  

You know what else I’m thinking? That this was my life just a mere 40 years ago.  Ancient, depending on your perspective.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

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