Relax, Laugh and Remember with Reminisce Magazine. Each issue is a "time capsule" of life from the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's filled with reader-written stories, pictures from the past, embarrassing moments, ads from the Old Days and much more!
Share your stories and photos: REMINISCE.COM/SUBMIT-A-STORY As leaves disappear from trees and pumpkins appear on neighborhood doorsteps, we welcome the season of haunts and shadows with true family ghost stories. The tales in “Spirits of the Past,” page 34, are thrilling, lightly chilling accounts of the macabre. But they also are touching portraits of domestic life made richer by the addition of someone long gone but still acknowledged, or even someone still beloved and missed. One, “Don’t Look Now” by Douglas Clark, page 38, delightfully twists the traditional ghost tale into a loving memory of brotherly bonds and the power of a child’s imagination. Our other main feature is a special picture package from reader Thomas Lower, a talented photographer who as a young man in 1972 traveled to Munich,…
THRILL OF IT ALL Michael Jackson, below, releases Thriller, which goes on to sell 100 million copies worldwide. “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” are hits, but the music video for the title track, with an elaborate dance number, is a game changer. BIG SHOULDERS Women’s fashion goes big, above, with bold silhouettes and colors. Working women favor a menswear look, with large shoulder pads. Dressy outfits feature chunky jewelry, balloon sleeves and waistlines cinched with wide belts. And the finishing touch? Big hair! POISON CONTROL Seven people die after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol laced with potassium cyanide. Johnson & Johnson recalls 31 million bottles, but the only tainted containers are in the Chicago area. Although the killer is never found, Johnson & Johnson reissues the medicine in a tamper-proof bottle that…
■ It sets the stage for big-ticket productions on Broadway. Over its run, it uses about 2 million pounds of dry ice and some 3,000 pounds of yak hair. ■ “Memory” is the show’s hit song. Hundreds of artists record a version, including Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Liberace and Barry Manilow. ■ Over its 18-year run, Cats boosts New York City’s economy by about $3 billion and adds almost $200 million in tax revenue to state and local coffers. ■ With more than nine lives, the musical is translated into 15 languages and has been staged in more than 30 countries.…
Boy meets alien. Boy loses alien. Boy helps alien go home. That’s the plot of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and for more than a decade, it was the biggest movie in the world. Inspired by the divorce of Steven Spielberg’s parents when he was a kid, E.T. was a global phenomenon in 1982, boosting the popularity of Reese’s Pieces, which the alien (Matthew De Meritt and others) loved to eat, and earning a best picture Oscar nomination. E.T. hit theaters during a summer full of sci-fi films, including Blade Runner, The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Tron. But the little alien beat them all, earning more than $359 million. It has since earned more than $792 million. It was the highest-grossing film of all time until Spielberg’s…
Football’s John Madden recalled his first encounter with the Louisiana specialty: “I didn’t have any plates or silverware or anything, and I just started eating it with my hands.” Turducken is a portmanteau—a word that blends multiple word parts—that lets eaters know they’re in for a dish consisting of turkey, duck and chicken. Deboned fowls are packed, Russian nesting doll-style, inside progressively larger birds. But why stop at three? Traditional versions of the engastrated (literally, “placed in the abdomen”) specialty call for as many as 17 birds to be serially stuffed one inside another. Creole and Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme popularized the carnivorous cornucopia as a Thanksgiving option, explaining the turducken concept in Newsweek in November 1982, the year that Merriam-Webster added the word to the dictionary.…
In the earliest days of digital chatting—and misunderstood messages—a young computer scientist became the father of the emoticon. It happened in 1982 when Scott Fahlman proposed typing :-) after something meant as a joke. “Read it sideways,” he told colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. He also suggested using :-( for things that were not jokes. His idea of using bits of punctuation to convey meaning proved nothing to ¯\_(?))_/¯ at. Not the first? The emoticon concept may have had limited use in pre-digital times, but it was Fahlman’s version that caught on in university circles, spreading to the greater world. The search for meaning Devoid of body language or tone of voice, text can lead to misunderstandings. A smiley face may prevent that and even represent steps toward “a new…
