I recall... Asking my Dad, when I was 7... We had a '37 Ford flatback, 85 HP. later engine, Dad complained about not enough 'power'... Looking at the gas pedal from the passenger side, I could see the rod disappearing down the hole in the toe board. "Daddy? Can't you just get a longer rod to go down that hole?"
Southern Calif. Orange county, The three lane past the Paulo drive in, Bal week, the Freeze, the Pier, Black powder rifle hunting in the canyons with Serrano. talkin to Charlie at the Irvine store. the beach.
Running across the street with horseshoe cleats on my Engineer boots at night and sliding to create sparks in front of oncoming vehicles! It's a wonder I'm still here.
After ww2 in the 50's ,Grand openning of the car dealer ship,unvail of new cars,was a really big deal with free hot dogs all ! Each year was still a big deal tell the 70s it just got{So what !
City curfew was 930 if you were younger than 16. Fire siren blew and it blew a long time. It was a small town of 3500 at the time. I remember riding like hell on my Schwinn 2 speed to get to the driveway before the siren died down so I wouldnt be grounded for missing curfew
Yep-got sent home from school for horseshoe taps in the 8th grade. Curfew was 10 PM where I grew up-if you were pulled over after 10 they told you to get home and called your parents, siren at the Creamery went off at noon and 10PM
Playing ball with my Brothers in the street. The sewer cover in middle of the street was home plate, neighbors tree was first, old piece of cardboard was second and the light pole in front of our house was 3rd. no cars on the street most of the day when all the Dads went to work. When they came home we ended our games and just hung out.
Yep. New cars were exciting! I love the artwork from the old brochures! Used to pick them up free at dealers. New cars were a colsly guarded secret then, new stuff almost every year. No cookie cutter cars, a wonderful era.
I remember our dads working on somebody's car. Several neighbors pitching in to replace a water pump, generator or whatever. Long gone. The nice guy "John" at one of the neighborhood gas stations, in this case Standard. Helping kids with bikes and patching tires. Letting us watch as they repaired customer cars. I lived next to airport, I'll NEVER forget the gentle sounds of small planes coming in for landings. As kids we would rush outside when we heard a jet airliner, a novelty then! Military planes! C-119's, F-89's, then later F-102's, C-141's, F-101's. My Dad was in the Forest Service, took me to see the fire bombing planes, B-17's, C-47's PBY-5A's. Good memories. We'd always go see the USN when they were in Portland, the WW2 Navy, modernized in the 50's, but still cruisers, destroyers , escort carriers. Smell of paint, oil, etc. COOL STUFF!
My paper route.....enabled the extra time to look over the old cars in the neighborhood along with the hot new ones....and also got me some extra time with my girl's from school.....showing my fancy paper throwing ! My dad's list of thing's to do would have to wait another day......
In So Cal... Helms Bakery Trucks. Crumb donuts too die for. The day Freeway Motors Ford Delivered my Dad's 1956 mint green and white Ford Crown Victoria with power windows (I wasn't allowed to play with them).
Playland Park, Houston, 1955 Smell of cotton candy, popcorn, and castor oil Teenage Foyt stood out because his tee shirts and pants were clean and pressed. Sideways and caught up in a midget
Going to the barber for my first paid for haircut (mom used to do it) about 10 years old and asking for a "Butch" wanted a stick of "Butch wax" to keep the front standing up like the cool kids. But alas it was too expensive like 69 cents or there about. Saved my pennies from my TWO paper routes and finally got some.
Riding with my grandma in her powder blue '62 T-Bird to King Norman's Toy store, or the grocery store, or the movies. Loved the swing away steering, and the electric windows that tended to stay UP in the summer and DOWN in the winter. HAHAHA!! Riding with grandpa in his mostly green '59 El Camino - black interior and a black dashboard that went on for MILES, with blinding chrome bezels and binnacles for the gauges. AND all the little rust holes in the floorboards, so you ended up a little dizzy from all the exhaust fumes. FINALLY getting the '54 F-100 to run and being able to drive it to school. Installing a Kragen special KRACO radio in the glove box and sticking the speakers directly to the metal interior. The black velvet choker on that beautiful, curly-haired brunette that you met in the mall, but didn't have the guts to ask out.
"The chrome was thick, and the women were straight" Some say that smells can bring back powerful memories, that's probably true. My parents house had Redwood siding, and angled vertical slats, in the open carport. I remember the stain dad used every year or so had a distinctive odor, came in yellow gallon cans. Every now and then I'll get a whiff of that somehow and brings me way back. My brothers tore some of the boards of it up playing hockey. He was pissed. Dad looked into getting those boards replaced after that, asked "how much" and the guy said "I can get it, but you can't afford it", and he was right. Ozone, machine oil, and electric motors, cloth insulation, or something whatever, it is another smell that is hard to describe. Take a whiff of old, old Lionel train locomotives.. Another is cracking open vintage electronics and old radios... tube dust burning off. Those mysterious glowing glass objects that made music or the TV work..
My dad was in construction and owend several 50's pickups like Internationals & Chevys. When I was youg he used to play a trick on me where he would secretly press the high beam switch and make the red light come on when he slapped the dashboard, but he wouldn't hit the switch when I did it. It took years to figure out what he did.
Hey Mike, what a coincidence, my Dad had a ‘37 Flat bed with 85 horsepower. We moved from California to Oklahoma in 1957, when I was six. He too complained about no enough power, but we had it loaded and pulling a four wheel trailer loaded. Somewhere in Arizona on Route 66 there was a 17 mile pull that took us 2 hours to make. I remember it like it was yesterday, was quite an adventure for me. Still have that truck and trailer here on the ranch. Bones
Made me think back to the eighth grade. I was called into the principals' office for not removing the horseshoe cleats from my shoes as my teacher had warned. I finally got my first pair of wingtips and had horseshoe cleats put on them, and was trying to milk as much use out of the cleats as I could. Apparently I wasn't the first because the principal already had the tools in his office and removed them on the spot. I guess being friends with the prindipals' son paid off because that was the end of it.
You delinquent! I remember all kinds of shit schools were upset about. Short skirts, girls wearing pantsinstead of dresses (tramps), hair, cinnamon toothpicks, gum............. Little did they know!
DDD, here in Oklahoma, we called them horseshoe taps. I had a pair on my Engineer boots that I wore to school. Being the hot rodder that I was , I subscribed to the theory that mores better, a whole bunch is just right. Welllll... I added taps to the soles of my boots too. Walking on steel!!! After I busted my ass a few times, due to steel and painted concrete now working together, those suckers came off! Good memories! Thanks, hadn’t thought of that in years! Bones
Hello, In our first “real” house in 1948, we lived near Lions Dragstrip, when it opened in 1955. The area was a huge field surrounded by a farming field, full of crops, all year around. The old house was a perfect setting for some winter snow. It was an old white, Craftsman...(did not know it was called that, back then) house with a white, picket fence all around a huge, grassy yard. Our joys were answered by a white blanket of snow in 1949, that surprised all of us. What? Snow in So Cal? It was the first and last big snow we ever experienced in our Westside Long Beach home. The house backed up to our own huge grassy field next to the Terminal Island Freeway with the train tracks, just steps beyond. It was a walk to get to the train tracks, but we had to run across the freeway to play on the tracks. Our junior high school had a baseball field that backed up directly, to a tall berm for the railroad tracks. One of the cool or idiotic things we did (most cuckoo kids did) was to beat the oncoming train across the tracks to the other side berms and tumbling down the dirt slope. That was fun, but thinking about it now, very stupid. After that wore off, we used to put a penny on the track to get our version of a flattened Lincoln head. It was typical, dumb kid stuff. Then of course, walking down the same tracks back toward our house until another train came along. Those engineers and train workers probably hated us just for being near the tracks. We never damaged the trains or surrounding railroad ties. Somewhere along this timeline, we used the railroad tracks on the weekends, to sit and watch the Lions Dragstrip action and noise. That was cool. The train stuff just faded away. But, we were warned about messing around those trains. Jnaki 10 years later, our hot rod/cruiser days' history in full swing, we were in a college Sociology Class listening to a guy in a wheel chair talk about his experiences growing up in Long Beach. He was unrecognizable, even though, he said he had grown up on the Westside of Long Beach. As he kept talking, something crawled up my spine and gave me a tingling sensation. It was a guy we knew in elementary school, that was with us for a while and disappeared, until this moment in the college auditorium, 10 years later. He had a bad experience with trains, of all things. He told everyone of running along side, doing the penny trick, racing across the front, waving to the engineers, etc. It was all of those things we all did back then. Only he had a bad incident that made him move away. We never saw the accident, but, he lost both of his legs to the train and almost died. When the lecture was over, I walked up to him and he recognized me from our Westside Long Beach, little kid days. What a small world and what a disheartening story he told all of us. Sorry, R…
Oh, Man...Trains! Jimmy Anderson had some 'inside knowledge' of the train system...We had a switch yard and a roundhouse just south of the Santa Clara 'terminal'...(actually, S.C. term. was just a waiting room for the 'express' that ran to San Francisco) Just 2 city blocks North of the terminal was a spot along the tracks ('City side') where all the traveling men (tramps) would lay over for a couple of days (months, some of them) and live off the fat of the land. We were walking down the tracks late one summer afternoon, and somehow happened into this strange subterranian world... A group of men, some young, but most very old, at least 40! were seated around a small fire, where they had some sticks and some chickens turning on crude 'spits'. There was a large pot, and an old man was turning pieces in 'fat', I recognized it at once: Fried Chicken! We were invited to sit down, a huge log was there as a bench... a nice old fellow with a short beard told of 'travel adventure on the rails', yes, THESE rails. They ran to anywhere, you could travel for free. That was the life, for 'they were traveling men.' We were offered some chicken, and we ate with them, listening intently to their stories of places of wonder...It was...Marvelous. Darkness was coming down, and Jimmy and I had to go. Our hosts bade us farewell, we'd see them again... When I got home, my Mom was waiting at the door. She demanded to know where I had been, 10 years old, 'til 9:30 P.M.??? Jimmy's mom had called her, so I wasn't at his house. I fessed up, told the truth...about the wonder of the Southern Pacific and the fascination I had for REAL trains...beyond Lionel and Western Flyers... How the fascination proceeded to a walk downtrack, and the visiting of the dreaded 'Hobo Jungle!' I told her about the stories of travel, the adventure that starts 'right here', at the Santa Clara train depot...er, a little bit North of it...the romance of the traveling men was in my psyche! She was fuming, ready to explode...Then I told her about the fried chicken. "Really fine fried chicken, Mom...Better than yours, even!" That was the straw. The last one. As only a wise Mom can do, she immediately challenged all the truths I was learning in Catholic school. "Don't you know...That was STOLEN CHICKEN!" Cripes, Mom. A-men.
The Jalopy Journal
