Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2021 i Reminisce

RAY CHARLES STRIKES GOLD Playing a dance hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in December 1958, Ray Charles and his seven-piece band ran through their entire repertoire and then realized they had some time to fill. Knowing the band had to finish the four-hour set to get paid, Charles dug deep and came up with a groovable beat and simple lyrics—mostly oohs and aahs—that lit up the crowd. “There was nothing left that I could think of,” Charles recalled in Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story. “So I finally said to the band and the Raelettes, ‘Listen, I’m going to fool around and y’all just follow me.’” A blues-based boogiewoogie riff on his electric keyboard set the stage. Then Charles began tossing out short lyric lines, which he encouraged the backup singers…

My mother, Bernice, was living in the mining town of Butte, Montana, with her two children. She’d survived the Great Depression and the turmoil of World War II but had been put in a new and difficult position when her husband, an alcoholic and a gambler, left for California. He supposedly went to build a new life for them, but a few months later, she received a goodbye note from him, along with a set of divorce papers. Her ex-sister-in-law helped her find a small apartment and even paid the first month’s rent. But unable to find employment, Bernice was facing eviction. With no idea from where the next meal would come, she considered one last possibility. Butte’s economy relied on the mining industry, and she reasoned that the miner’s…

At Christmas in 1962, when I was 11 and my sister Janet was 7, we got a Bob the Beetle toy. It was a simple game with two plastic beetles, two rods and a large plastic frog. Whoever bopped their beetle into the frog’s mouth won. We played it continuously that winter, and when the warm weather came, we played it outside with each other or neighborhood friends. Every so often our parents would clean out closets and the basement, but we wouldn’t let Bop the Beetle be donated. We’d play it again. This continued even into my college days and my sister’s high school years. In 1978 our parents moved from our childhood home and Bop the Beetle moved with them. We played it with my oldest niece a…

Gourmet gift boxes, with their shrink-wrapped sausage, colorfully wrapped cheese and flawless fruit, were practical, extravagant options for late-season shoppers. These mailorder brands were among the first to set the holiday standard. ALMOST LIKE VISITING THE ALPS In 1926, Raymond Kubly began to ship cheese from local dairy farms near his home in Green County, Wisconsin. The grandson of an immigrant from Switzerland, Kubly called his company The Swiss Colony. Kubly opened the first of many stores in 1949. Located in malls around the country, the kiosks and shops decorated with the outline of gently sloping chalet-style roofs hinted at cosmopolitan culture. YOU CAN’T SAY NO TO THEIR CHEESE Richard Ransom got his start selling hand-crafted products at trade shows and fairs in cheese-starved rural Ohio before founding Hickory Farms…

My friend Marvin Dunn, a new college graduate, reported for duty at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Atlanta, Georgia. The ATF formed in 1972 and worked with state revenue agents, or revenuers, busting stills. The ATF office in North Carolina was investigating a largecapacity still there. The local moonshiners knew all of the agents by sight, so the bureau hatched a plan to send young agent Dunn undercover to North Carolina to pose as a big buyer from Atlanta. Asking around in North Carolina, Marvin soon found a bootlegger who would sell him all the moonshine he could haul. Marvin agreed to buy at least 500 gallons if he could examine the still to make sure it was safe and leadfree. Rather than lose such…

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PHOTO TIPS Please identify the people, city, state and year the photo was taken. For photos sent by mail: • Be sure your photo or reprint is in focus. Do not send photocopies; we cannot print from them. For photos sent digitally: • Scan your photo as a JPEG file at 1200x1800 pixels, 300 dpi and 1MB. • No scanner? Walgreens, OfficeMax and FedEx Office offer this service. TIKI STYLE We’re researching a story on the rise of Hawaiian and tiki style in general during the 1960s. The look has been revived in recent years. Did you or someone you know fall in love with all things tiki? We’d like to hear about your experiences. What did you like about the look and why? Label your story and pictures “Tiki…

Two nights a week and on Saturday mornings I tended the switchboard at the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now the ArtCenter College of Design). It was the early 1960s, and I was studying photography. The switchboard job was easy duty, and I could use the extra money. One evening in July, Fred Lyon, a photographer in San Francisco and an Art Center alum, called the switchboard. He was looking for an assistant for a photo shoot, and wondered if the school could help. In fact, I did think the school could find him an assistant—me! I met him in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel the next Sunday morning. His assignment was to shoot Rosemary Clooney and Jose Ferrer and their five children for the Christmas spread…

Like so many families, my holiday memories revolve around special foods. My mother was baking weeks before the big day, making breads and cookies. But the tradition that sticks in my mind is Grandma’s plum pudding—the English version, which contains no plums, but is a heavy fruitcake that is steamed rather than baked. Grandmother had six sons, which resulted in her teaching six daughters-in-law how to make both the pudding and the exquisite, delicate hard sauce served with it. The pudding was made well ahead of Christmas. Then on Christmas Day, after we all had consumed a huge meal, the menfolk relaxed in the parlor while the womenfolk gathered in the kitchen for a refresher on making hard sauce. No ingredients were actually measured, and the art was in learning…

Christmas 1957, when I was 9 years old, was difficult for my family. That year, Dad had cancer surgery on Christmas Eve at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles, California. Because he wasn’t working and our mother was a stay-at-home mom, we had to watch expenses. Our Christmas tree had only angelhair decoration, and we four children each received just one gift. None of us complained; I got a 7-inch doll that had a bottle and diaper—I was so happy feeding and changing it. I remember visiting Dad at the hospital on Christmas Day and starting to cry. He comforted me. I’m very happy to say the story turned out well because Dad healed, went back to work at the telephone company, and lived a full life until he…

Shoppers were primed to look through the new plate glass fronts in department stores, but they needed something to look at. As stores grew in size and number, designers vied to create the most engaging seasonal spectacles. CATS AT MACY’S R.H. Macy’s store in New York employed one of America’s first female executives, superintendent Margaret Getchell, in the 1860s. Getchell understood the importance of eye-catching window displays, developing memorable ones such as dressing cats in doll clothes and placing them in baby cribs. It wasn’t until 1883 that Macy’s showed off its first Christmas-themed window. The exhibit was a mechanical marvel: Santa and his sleigh pulled by reindeer. SANTA WILL SEE YOU NOW F.A.O. Schwarz, also in New York, was the first store to get a visit from the jolly…

1947 LIGHTEN UP GE began selling Christmas lights in 1903, but at $12 a set, illuminating a whole tree was strictly a rich man’s game. America wasn’t fully electric until the 1940s. By then, GE’s holiday lamps were more affordable, as shown in this festive ad from Life. DIE-CAST FUN Hubley made a name in die-cast toys by having its designers attend automotive trade shows and pore through car ads to make sure their miniature versions were like the real thing. The charm in this ad is in the hint that Santa might be playing with that cute little airplane under the tree. 1954 1962 THE NAME OF THE GAME Of the array of board games in this fictional store window, only Stratego and The Game of Life have stood…

ACROSS 1 Reindeer 4 Reindeer 8 Opposite of nice, for Santa 10 Reindeer 11 Card game that matches colors or numbers 13 Santa’s helper 15 Reindeer 17 Sally Field movie Norma _____ 18 Paranormal ability 19 “All is calm, all is _____” 21 U.S. institution of higher learning, founded 1636 24 Help signal 25 Radio wave 26 Form of transport in winter 27 Make a cup of tea 28 Baseball Hall of Famer Cobb 29 “America the Beautiful” closer 30 Slippery fish 31 Affirmative, in Mexico 32 Baking chambers 33 Reindeer 35 Wheel track 36 Christmas miser 38 Goose egg 39 Santa’s big _____ suit 40 Cocktail cooler 41 Wise men’s guide 42 Had some turkey 43 Big ______ Country DOWN 1 Reindeer 2 Stocking _____ (pl.) 3 Clear blue…

President Dwight D. Eisenhower declines meeting Fidel Castro when the revolutionary visits the U.S. Alaska and Hawaii become states Nos. 49 and 50. NASA introduces its Mercury 7 astronauts. Music is big news: Miles Davis records Kind of Blue; Berry Gordy Jr. founds Motown Record Corp.; the first Grammy Awards event is held; and Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson die in an Iowa plane crash. Bonanza—in color—and The Twilight Zone debut. The first Little Caesars opens near Detroit. And Merriam-Webster finds these words in common use. CB: The FCC’s decision to open a special band of frequencies called the “citizens band” the year before leads to many new, amateur users—and a flood of “breaker, breaker” radio calls, center bottom. CRUISE MISSILE: The first—and only—delivery of…

Rod Serling started writing TV scripts in his 20s, winning Emmys in 1956, ’57 and ’58, but often battled program censors and sponsors who found his work too controversial. In 1959, Serling cannily turned to science fiction. In the creepy “fifth dimension” of The Twilight Zone, which debuted that October, social commentary breezed past censors while still delivering an emotional wallop. Serling would win three more Emmys, two for Twilight Zone scripts, and was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1985. He earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in WWII. He was injured while serving with the Army in the Philippines. Flashbacks and nightmares haunted him for years afterward. His now famous narration was actually Plan B. Serling framed each episode of The Twilight Zone…

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, over giant bowls of Lucky Charms, my sister Staci and I studied the Sears Christmas Wish Book. A 3-inch tome often used as a booster seat at the dinner table, the pages were stuffed with dreams for two curious farm girls in the mid-1960s. We took our Christmas lists seriously. Santa had to see us through to summer birthdays. After crafting my letter to the North Pole, I proofread my little sister’s. At the top of her list was Tonka Truck. “No! That’s a boy’s present,” I told her. Although we both had tomboy tendencies, favoring tree climbing over tea parties, I couldn’t allow her to waste her main gift on a boy’s present. Our grandfather Papa Creecy would buy us boy presents at the…

My sister Joanna, my friend Rachael and I belted out the lyrics from the backseat of the minivan. “FIVE GO-O-OLD RINGS!” In the front, Mom and Dad smiled at our spirited rendition of the Christmas song as we sped toward Minneapolis-St. Paul after school. We lived about an hour north, and going to “the cities,” as we called them, was always a big deal. One afternoon each Christmas season, we made the trip to enjoy the store window displays and the magical eighth-floor wonderland at Dayton’s downtown Minneapolis department store, where a different story was portrayed every year. Exiting the elevator, we were immersed in a sparkling world filled with music. We followed a path through the maze of animatronic characters set up to tell a well-known story, such as…

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