>Wasn't that the place for the fried clams followed by ice cream?<

Yup.

They also served hot dogs in buns that were slit vertically instead of horizontally.

You mean you have a hot dog bun that is oriented horizontally, with a vertical slit and the hot dog standing up in it? Like a boat with a mast?

Having trouble getting a visual here.

I think he must mean it was sliced lengthwise, but instead of having all of the top of the bun on one side of the cut surface and the bottom on the other side, each side of it hwas made up of half top and half bottom. I think.

Place a bun flat on the cutting board.

Make a vertical (instead of horizontal) incision almost all the way through.

Gosh, that WAS a long time ago, then, because everybody does it that way now. Who would have thought---Howard Johnson's, food trendsetter.

I can't stretch my memory as far back as some but I can still befuddle my youngest colleagues with some of my recollections:

1. The vice principal holding up his index finger to boys' sideburns to see whether they came below that little spur in your ear. If so: "Get those cut"

(My spouse retorts: "The prefects stood at the gates of my school with measuring tapes to check that our trouser bottoms were at least 18 inches. And "No winkle-pickers")

2. French telephones used those impossible jetons, which you balanced atop the phone and released when your party answered. In Italy they were "gettoni".

3. In 1970, on the steepest streets in my college town, streets were cleared by horses pulling a "snow-sledge". At home in Ottawa, you went to Cundell's Stable downtown for a horse-drawn sleighride.

4. No-one had a credit card. Credit was for people who couldn't pay. The "lay-away plan" was the respectable alternative.

5. My first experience of airline security: 1972 in Halifax. I had walked over to the terminal (!) during a stop on an London-bound flight and had to empty my pockets in front of an RCMP constable to get back on the tarmac.

I was carrying 10 tabs of acid to my brother at Cambridge. I nearly passed out from fright.

(I wasn't caught)

6. Teenaged girls you slow-danced with were sheathed from bosom to bottom in rubbery foundation garments, beneath their A-line mini-dresses.

7. Black people were "coloured" or "Negroes" and your Mother would have slapped you if you ever referred to them as "black".

8. Phone numbers were a combo of numbers and letters. We were REgent 3-0239. PArkway and REgent were suburban but respectable. CEntral was iffy -- downtown, when nobody lived downtown. SHerwood was best: Rockcliffe Park. But it also served francophone Eastview -- and no-one knew any French Canadians except as "domestic help"...

I have a very vivid image of 1967 Paris. There were tons of old ladies wearing black. No, they were not trying to be chic; they were probably WWII widows. Everything to my 18 yr old eye looked different. I saw couples kiss on the street, people kiss in greetings, and of course no one spoke English then or hardly anyone it seemed. My first year of college French could not be understood. I had chicken served to me in a restaurant with some feathers. And more unusual than anything were that men and women were using the same toilets, though of course not at the same moment! I took a seven week college tour of 6 countries for $650 which included all transit between countries, sightseeing, three meals a day, hotels, etc. My flight was separate. I flew an almost empty Pan Am flight to France and on the way over we all laid down on the empty seats and tried to sleep, but of course were too excited to rest.I had $500 spending money and came home with $200!I still remember Arthur Frommer writing about how he and Hope (his wife) managed to travel on $5 a day. He really did start a travel revolution. I thank him for introducing me to Europe. He made it all possible those first few years. My mind'ssnapshot images show a very different world back then.

So old that I remember ...
- doctors made house calls
- ladies wore white gloves in the summer
- drive-in theatres were new
- there were no such things as shopping malls
but I am so young that I'm all atwitter about our next trip to France in April!

I think the rise and decline of Howard Johnson's is an interesting subject. Jacques Pepin got his start in America working for HoJo's, and Jacques Chirac worked at one for a summer abroad during his college years. But I don't suppose many ambitious young Frenchmen would think of working there nowadays.

HoJo's--what marketing whiz proposed that as a new and updated name for a motel chain? And why hasn't a rapper latched on to this for a song (or whatever it is they call it).

I didn't even know that Howard Johnson's no longer exists!

And doctors still make house calls in France. I had one come in last June.

In preparing for my first trip, I learned French by getting up early to watch the "Sunrise Semester" on TV. Before Public TV, I think it was on the DuMont Network, Channel 5 in NY.

I then topped off my French skills aboard ship, lessons given in the ballroom 10-11am. And so it was, that I became fluent in French! (I also witnessed Caesar's assassination because I watched "You Are There".)

I think they still do exist - they're just not what they used to be in numbers or significance.

Ah! I have fond memories of the $1.00 specials at HoJo's on Friday nights when I was in college -- all the fried fish you could eat. It was the late '60s. Other restaurants in my college town -- Mario's spaghetti house, the Little Acorn family restaurant, etc. -- also had dollar specials one day a week.

<i>My first flight to Europe was a PanAm jet from Idlewild to Orly.</i>

I was sitting in a UAL DC-7 on the apron at IDL (who else remembers that code?) when the captain came on the speaker and told everyone we were waiting for the first scheduled landing of a Pan Am 707, which we'd be able to see off the left side of the plane. We waited, then all of a sudden a squadron of fire trucks raced toward the runway and commenced foaming it down. In the early days the 707s had a problem with the gear doors or the gear assembly hydraulics freezing up, and several of them bellied in (not a good beginning for the jet age.) In this case, though, it was a false alarm; the plane got its gear down and landed normally, albeit forcing one of the runways out of service for a couple of hours. But what's a couple hour delay (for a nine-hour NY-LA prop plane flight) when you can see a <i>jet?!</i>

Fried clams at Howard Johnson's, Oh my goodness, you folks are driving me crazy! I'm back in Memphis in the early sixties on a family trip, and we're eating those wonderful clams, and we're just down the street from Graceland, and my little teenaged heart can't believe it, it's magic. This was before I ever even thought about European travel. J.

Howard Johnson's, what a hoot! We used to go there after school and gorge on French fries with gravy, something I could ill afford to eat at my current age!

Our '52 chevy, which we named &quot;Moddy&quot; because it was so &quot;modern,&quot; had a manual choke. And there was no such thing as AAA, or if there was we weren't members. If the car broke down, you pulled over and fixed it.

We didn't have air conditioning or a television until I was in my mid-teens.

More things come to mind:
-Television: We didn't have one because they hadn't been commercially available.
-Telephones: Almost everyone except maybe the most wealthy had to have a party line. In our town, the phone number was 3 digits and the kind of party line was a letter added to that. As I recall, a two-party line had the suffix -J, and a three-party (or more) had the suffix -W. Our phone number, which I shall never forget, was 818-W. It was a hoot picking up the phone and listening in on other people's conversations.
-Grocery stores: Stores would deliver groceries to your house, even if you lived out in the country as we did. All that was needed was to call in your order and some time later a pickup truck would arrive with it, and the driver would bring it into the house.
-Locks on doors: They didn't exist. We did have a hook-and-eye latch on the screen door, which for some reason was rarely used.
-Airliners: I'm willing to be that no Fodorite has flown in a Lockheed Lodestar. Capacity was about 12 people, I think. Coulda been a few more. The Ford Trimotor had just gone off the regular routes.
-Without checking, I believe we learned that FDR and Hitler gained power in their respective offices on the same day--March 5 or 6, 1933.
-But the best thing of all back then was that kids usually would do what their parents told them to do, and they would ALWAYS do what the teacher said. No one wanted to go to the principal's office. And there were no lawyers for the ACLU mucking up the works.

I remember when Pearl Harbor was bombed, my Daddy getting out the Enclopedia Britannica to see where it was.
My brother using his wagon to go from house to house to collect pots and pans and other metals of the for the war effort.
My mother saving grease from baking and cooking and taking &quot;her fat can&quot; to the local butcher.
My brother taking the wheels off my doll carriage to join with old crates to make a speedy race car and I was the brakeman, using a big stick.
Playing war and me being the nurse for the &quot;wounded&quot; boys.
Playing &quot;kick-the-can&quot; until it was dark
Gold star flags in the windows of the mothers of fallen troops
Later, learning the &quot;duck-and-cover&quot; maneuvers under your school desk
My Dad being a watch-warden to make sure everyone in the neighborhood had black shades and didn't show any lights at night
Still remember how we all adjusted to this new life and still managed to laugh and stay close.
Minette

How about, during the Cold War, families creating bomb shelters? We had neighbors who, despite not being even remotely wealthy, went to extraordinary lengths to build and stock shelters.