Tag Archives: The 60s

Make love, not war

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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!

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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

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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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