Tag: growing up in the 60s

Under The Weather? Impossible!

Why do people say they are “under the weather” when they don’t feel well?. If I recall correctly, you need a temperature above 98.6 to have a fever. Considering that most people drop dead when their temperature goes over 103 degrees, it would have to be pretty hot aside to be under the weather.

When I was in third grade at the tender age of eight I used to come up with stomach ailments to try to avoid going to school or at least until a little later in the morning when I felt better. By shortening the school day even a little bit I felt I was cheating “The Man”. Ma didn’t seem to mind since she was from that generation of ladies before the feminist revolution. She stayed at home and did the housekeeping unless she had to go shopping which meant taking out the baby buggy with a kid sister in it and walking three or four blocks to Madison Street in the Austin neighborhood. In 1960, you could park your stroller outside a store front and expect to see it again thirty minutes later.
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The Sweetest Sounds

By Larry Teren
rogers&hammerstein
“The Sweetest Sounds, I’ll ever hear are still inside my head” invokes a special memory for me. It was written for a musical play called “No Strings” which debuted in 1962. It is the opening line to just another in a series of many great songs put together by the team of

Rogers and Hammerstein

.
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The Forty Year Summit

It finally happened. I got an email from a childhood friend that it was time to get together one evening and reminisce. Our families had shared a two flat in Austin on Chicago’s far west side He also said that he would invite another friend over whom I also had not seen in more than forty years. Can you imagine that- freezing the clock and then being able to roll back time as if several decades had not passed?
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Cheap Thrills

By Larry Teren

 

When we were baby boomer kids in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Dad would find the least expensive way to provide us entertainment and get us some fresh air at the same time. Usually this meant going to a handful of choices. Continue reading “Cheap Thrills”

With Respect

As a kid, if I opened my mouth to an adult, I’d get a smack in the spot the words came out of. If that were to happen in today’s world, I’d be visiting the person who did it- even a parent- as they sat behind prison bars. Nowadays, when a kid says something adult-like, the parent smiles and says how cute and smart they are. Recently, while visiting at a friend’s house, his three year old daughter said to me, “you’re fat.” (ed. note: I’m not and I’m not rail thin. Like everyone else, I’m somewhere in the middle) Her father looked at her and said, “is that nice?” She replied, “I’m just kidding!” This from a three year old!
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A Bridge Too Close

skyway_bridgeEveryone has their phobias. One of mine is traveling over a bridge, presumably even over non-troubled waters. It all started when I was a little kid in the late 1950’s. We lived on Chicago’s Far West Side a few blocks from the newly constructed Congress Highway (years later it would be renamed the Eisenhower Expressway). On Sunday family outings, Dad would take the Congress (until today I still call it this) east towards the Loop, the downtown area. The end of the highway was signified by the gigantic US Post Office built smack dab on top of it. I understand that they built it with the cutout for the normal height of semi-trailer truck traffic in mind. After you went under the building tunnel, you were immediately hit with crossing over the Chicago River. At that spot, the river was no more than fifty or so feet wide. For a kid it was terrifying going over the steel waffle-like bridge pavement rather than solid cement. I was convinced that the ground beneath us was not sturdy and that we would eventually fall into the river.
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Always in the Middle

I am not a middle child but the second of five. I don’t often take the middle ground unless it is to get someone else to compromise toward my way of thinking. I am middle aged, I guess, unless I live to 120, which is possible.

One thing I enjoyed being in the middle of was the streets I lived on as a kid. Between 1955 and ’59, home to me was Jackson Boulevard in the West Garfield Park Chicago neighborhood between Kostner on the right (or east) and Kilbourn, to the left or (west). Situated in the middle of the block gave me an opportunity to roam a little further every year with more confidence in each direction without adult supervision. The moment my feet touched the sidewalk of our block on a return trip from elsewhere I already felt as if I was on the stairs leading to our first floor apartment. The only time I crossed to the other side of the street- the north side- was with my parents when the car was parked there. I was too young to play with a ball on the sidewalk out front so there was not even a chance of me running out onto the roadway to grab an errant throw.
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Prize Worthy

At the age of eight I was old enough to recognize when Spring had sprung. The days were at least a temperature of fifty degrees Fahrenheit and Daylight Savings arrival and made the sun stay out past 8:00pm. That’s also when three different ice cream trucks would make its way at various times of the evening within a few block radius of Quincy Street in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. Each truck driver knew his territory in the fight for a kid’s hard won allowance money and made sure not to bud in on the competition or suffer the consequences.

The compact, white colored Good Humor truck had a picture of an ice cream bar on the side panel. Chiming bells was instant recognition that Good Humor was somewhere in the area. The driver dished out to willing customers with appropriate coinage orange colored creamsicles, various flavored popsicles and sundry ice cream cones.
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Ode To Golf

Arnold Palmer was the king of Golf in the early 1960’s before Jack Nicklaus came along and wrestled adulation away from him. Palmer’s legion of fans used to follow him to all the tournaments he played in. They were called “Arnie’s Army”. Being no more than ten years old, I worshiped him from afar watching him on television. On Sundays, if none of my siblings had grabbed the old black and white tv set first, I’d flip on a golf game because there was no baseball action during the period from January through March. In the early part of the afternoon, the ABC network would always seem to be broadcasting an NBA game involving the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks or Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers on the parquet floor in Beantown . By 3pm the golf matches were aired.
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Class Action

September of 1960 I turned eight, ready for third grade. The previous autumn I made a fool out of myself the earliest that I could remember when I rushed home to our new apartment in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood a half block from school to proudly tell my mother that I saw a 1964 car. Ma told me that there was no way as it would be four more years before that year’s models would be introduced in the fall. “But”, I insisted, “Perry told me that we both saw a 1964 car pass by”. She then explained to stupid me that my buddy probably meant that the two of us had seen a 1960 Ford car.

Another dumb thing I did that second grade school year was beat up a kid a year older than me during lunch recess. When we returned to class, a student representative from the third grade class was sent to my room to come take me for a dressing down by the ex-nun who taught the eight years old kids. She told me that it was wrong to hit other kids. I tried to reason with her that he started it and that he was a year older than me and should have been able to do a better job defending himself. She didn’t like my answer and had a look on her face that indicated that she couldn’t wait to get a hold of me the following year.
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