Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2021 i Reminisce

“Singing is my beautiful, delicious obsession.” She sang gospel music as a child Ross grew up in a musical family. One of her grandfathers was a minister. Ross’ friend Smokey Robinson got the girls in the door at Motown Producer Berry Gordy Jr. liked their sound, but wanted them to finish high school before signing them. The Supremes’ appeal soared in 1964 “Where Did Our Love Go?” shot to No. 1. Eleven more hits followed before Ross left the group five years later. Success came quickly post-Supremes “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” from Ross’ debut solo album hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970. Her first film role scored an Academy Award nomination Critic Roger Ebert called Ross’ portrayal of troubled singer Billie Holiday in Lady Sings…

Halfway through my two years in the Army, my job was operating the closed-circuit radio station at Fort Gordon, which is a few minutes southwest of Augusta, Georgia. At that time, Sydney Ann Shields was a high school senior in that city, although I didn’t know her yet. I was a stage-struck boy from south Georgia, and I went to see a Post Playhouse musical production called Masquerade. There I saw Syd and her dazzling dance skills for the first time. The next day, I pulled out the Augusta phone book and called each Shields listed until I found her. Nervously, I explained to her that I was looking for a dance partner to learn some numbers for possible area bookings. Her response: “My mom and I would be happy…

MY FRIEND, IRENE, and I had known each other since we were in eighth grade. Twenty-something secretaries, both working in downtown Los Angeles in 1961, we’d taken vacations together, but we’d never traveled by plane. The May Co. department store downtown had an international travel bureau on the second floor, and one day as I quickly passed the travel office, a Standard Airways brochure caught my eye. Showing a stewardess in a pink uniform, it advertised the airline’s Pink Cloud service to Hawaii. Irene and I signed up for one of its tours, which was $188 round trip from Burbank to Honolulu. The package included a stay at the Reef Hotel on Waikiki Beach. At that time, with tourism to Hawaii starting to grow, the area didn’t have as many…

A lot of influential television came out of the 1970s, and no small portion was comedy: All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, The Bob Newhart Show. None holds up as well as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ruled the CBS prime-time lineup for seven seasons beginning in 1970. By any measure, it was revolutionary. It was the first hit network show centered on a career-focused single woman, Mary Richards, who was a) not a nurse, b) not a model and c) not preoccupied with finding a husband. The show put women center stage in ways large and small. Consider the depth and nuance of the friendship between Mary (Mary Tyler Moore) and Rhoda (Valerie Harper) or just the sheer number and variety of zingers Sue Ann Nivens…

John Gavin was Hollywood’s next big thing in 1960. After seeing him in Imitation of Life the year before, my high-school-age sister, Susan, had written him a fan letter. Universal Studios sent her several 8-by-10-inch glossy photos and apparently kept her letter on file. Gavin was in theaters as Janet Leigh’s fiance in Psycho when he came to Indianapolis to promote three movies coming out in 1961, including Tammy Tell Me True with Sandra Dee. An agent invited Susan to a lunch with Gavin at the Lincoln Hotel. Susan managed to include our sister Nancy and me in the invitation. A handful of people were at the luncheon, including a photographer. The 6-foot-4-inch Gavin looked like an Olympic god—anyone would know he was a movie star. He pulled out the…

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■ Elvis’ assistant Jerry Schilling told Peter Carlson at Smithsonian that the trouble started in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvis’ wife, Priscilla, and his father, Vernon, complained that the rock star had spent too much on Christmas gifts—more than $100,000 on 32 handguns and 10 Mercedes-Benzes. ■ An aggrieved Elvis needed to get away from the complaining. Eventually, he arrived in D.C. with the aim, Schilling suspected, of obtaining a federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge—something he always wanted. ■ On the flight, Elvis wrote to the president: “I would love to meet you … I will be here for as long as it takes to get the credentials of a federal agent.” He checked into the Washington Hotel with the name Jon Burrows. ■ Nixon aide Egil “Bud”…

My grandparents’ house in Rusk, Texas, stood at the end of a red dirt road on the edge of town. Behind the house was a hill—we called it a mountain—covered with tall East Texas pines. Inside was a huge red brick fireplace with a broad hearth. The old house was covered in weathered gray clapboard and had a wide porch that ran across the front and around one side. During several memorable months we spent with my grandparents in 1951, my older brother, Eddie, and I passed hours there, playing in the cool, dry dirt under the porch. Afterward, we’d take a bath in a big black tub in the front yard and wait for Dad to come home, driving the truck that was used for hauling pulpwood. Sometimes he…

Like many returning soldiers, my father, Carl Anderson, spoke very little about his experience during World War II. He died when I was very young, but I had a vague memory of him telling a story about being at sea when a ship he was sailing near was torpedoed. The uncertainty was put to rest when Jessica Lueddecke, who lives in my childhood home in Dorchester, Wisconsin, contacted me through Facebook. During renovations, Jessica found a letter Dad wrote to my mother, Agnes, while aboard a transport ship taking units of the 66th Infantry to Europe. The letter’s December 1944 date was the key to learning of Dad’s connection to a disaster at sea. On Christmas Eve, assigned to provide reinforcements for the Battle of the Bulge, the troops transferred…

HAROLD, MY FATHER, had three older brothers who emigrated from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Baltimore, Maryland, where they worked at the Sparrows Point steel plant. Our family had visited them once, in 1954, when I was 12. The bus ride from Sydney was a grueling three-day journey that nearly did us all in. When my mom, Maretta, and Dad started talking about visiting Baltimore again in 1968, we all agreed—no buses! For various reasons, traveling by car and train were also out of consideration, so Mom looked into the cost of going by plane. She found that flying fit the budget and, best of all, we could get there in one day. Dad flatly refused to fly, and a battle of wills was on! After a week of him digging…

THE FIRST TIME I flew was to visit my recently married sister in Oklahoma in 1956. I was 16, and I drove with my parents, Levio and Josephine Del Carlo, from our home in Sanger, California, to Los Angeles, where we boarded a huge airplane—at least I thought it was huge. Mom and Dad sat across the aisle from me. The seat next to mine was empty, but there was a “reserved” sign on it. As I wondered whether my seatmate would be friendly, down the aisle came a tall, scruffy man who took the reserved spot. He was handsome, with longish hair, and was casually dressed in jeans. I was not sure that my rugged partner was going to be the nice, friendly conversation partner I’d hoped for on…

BABE RUTH probably did inspire the name of this popular candy bar, which came out in 1921—the same year the slugger wowed the country by hitting 59 home runs. But Otto Schnering of the Curtiss Candy Co. in Chicago would never admit it. Instead, Schnering claimed that he named the candy after President Grover Cleveland’s daughter Ruth, above, who died of diphtheria in 1904. When Babe Ruth, below, later endorsed a different bar named after him, Schnering sued to keep the new candy out of stores—and a patent judge upheld the claim. In a twist-of-the-knife marketing ploy, Schnering later erected a billboard for Baby Ruths outside Chicago’s Wrigley Field, where the Great Bambino is said to have called his shot before slamming a homer to center field during the 1932…

1962 GUILT-PROOF OF PURCHASE Though sales of Swanson TV dinners soared as convenience food starting in 1954, few would equate them with home-cooked meals. Here, Swanson provides a handy excuse for anyone feeling guilty about serving a frozen turkey dinner at Thanksgiving: Get a classy writing set when you buy two. 1964 STAR POWER AT HOJO’S This ad plays on singer Rudy Vallee’s star turn as corporate boss J.B. Biggley in the popular musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which ran on Broadway from 1961-’65. Vallee reprised his role for the 1967 movie. 1964 FAST AND CHEAP Frozen dinners came of age in an era when women were entering the workforce at a steady clip. Here, Banquet wisely markets to the busy working mom pulled in a…

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Airport (1970) tapped into the thrill of seeing the familiar world devolve into chaos from the safety of a comfortable theater seat. Hollywood’s first big-budget film of the genre, it inspired a string of copycats. Can you name the movie that matches the cataclysm? 1 Scientists race to contain an alien organism that wiped out most of a town in New Mexico. 2 Faulty wiring ignites an undetected fire in a San Francisco skyscraper during its grand opening, above. 3 A powerful tsunami in the Mediterranean turns lives—and a cruise ship—upside down. 4 Landing a plane during a Chicago blizzard is hard enough without a mad bomber threatening to take down a 707. 5 Violent tremors strike Los Angeles, shearing buildings, collapsing bridges and weakening a dam that finally gives…

As family historians, we yearn to hear the stories that veterans such as Kenneth’s father have to tell. We have a few ways to learn more about family members who served in the military. Understand that they may find it easier to talk about war experiences with other veterans than with family. ■ Talk to your loved one now. For WWII veterans, ask how they felt when they learned about Pearl Harbor or when the war ended.■ If your family member is deceased, military buddies may be able to fill in the blanks. Military records such as draft cards and enlistment records may be found at: ■ Ancestry.com (Search U.S. Military Collection)■ National Archives Record Administration (NARA). This site has information on how to obtain personnel records. To honor and…

23 DAYS The first transatlantic flight in 1919 took awhile. And it wasn’t nonstop, either. A U.S. Navy team left from Queens, New York, in the Curtiss NC-4 flying boat, and made six stops—some that required the team to wait for parts—until finally landing in Lisbon, Portugal, 23 days later. 10,000 FEET Early turbine planes had a relatively low cruising altitude, which made them unable to fly over bad weather, making for excessively choppy flights. Today, jets travel at far higher altitudes—up to 38,000 feet—where the thinner atmosphere makes flying much faster and safer. 1952 The jet age dawned when a de Havilland Comet carrying 36 passengers and six crew members flew from London, England, to Johannesburg, South Africa. The high-profile Comets were removed from service a few years later…

FOR OUR FIRST FLIGHT, from Miami, Florida, to Memphis, Tennessee, my identical twin brother, Ron, and I wore matching Sunday dress clothes—even our bow ties were the same. It was the summer of 1965 and we were 8. The flight attendants made a fuss about us being identical twins, but my interest was someplace else—the cockpit! The captain saw me straining my neck to get a peek at all those knobs and switches as we stepped into the DC?8, and he invited us inside the compartment. At that time, it took three pilots to fly a DC?8: a captain, a first officer and an engineer. I was fascinated with what I saw, and from that moment all I wanted was to learn how to fly an airplane. We eventually had…

AFTER SEEING BRITISH SOLDIERS with tins of King George Chocolates during the Great War, the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps had to rethink its rations. It turned to chocolate as both energy source and morale perk, and solicited donations of 20-pound blocks from confectioners back home. The large blocks were cut to size, hand-wrapped and doled out to the troops. Those doughboys came home with an insatiable appetite for the sweet stuff. The timing coincided with the passage of Prohibition (1920–’33), and chocolate became a substitute for alcohol’s mood-boosting properties. At the onset of WWII, combat rations for soldiers already had been part of an ongoing experiment started in 1937 between Hershey and the Army quartermaster general. The final formula for the Field Ration D bar was a 4-ounce, 600-calorie chocolate…

A gap of 12 years and three sisters are between my brother, David, and me. He was always at a different place in life. When I was in kindergarten he was graduating high school and heading off to the Navy. For a little boy, this made for an unusual life experience growing up. Anything that belonged to my big brother was something I wanted to keep. The collection has included a phonograph, vinyl albums, a 35 mm camera, an electric road-race set, and several objects from David’s time in the Navy. When I was in elementary school, I never wanted to say goodbye when it was time for him to go. I would disappear into a closet or some other secluded spot until he had gone. In my mind this…

Hattie has lost a hatpin in this issue! If you find it, tell us at reminisce.com/hatpin. We’ll randomly select winners to receive a year’s subscription to Reminisce. In the August/September issue, we hid the hatpin on the side of the building on page 37. There’s no purchase necessary to enter to win. Purchase will not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes is open to legal residents age 18 years or older of the U.S., its territories and possessions, or of Canada (excluding the Province of Quebec). Sweepstakes begins on 9/21/21 and ends on 11/11/21. Visit reminisce.com/hatties-hatpin-rules-rem for official rules. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Sweepstakes sponsored by RDA Enthusiast Brands, LLC.…