St Cirq!! Yes, Bomb shelters! We have neighbors, just down the street, who have just paid $4000.00 to have the 50's shelter removed fron their garden! It took some big trucks with big "balls"...oh my!.. several haulage trucks and 3 days to get it removed! Now they are waiting for a few yards of dirt to fill in the pit!

I remember that, St. cirq. There were a couple of families in our neighborhood that built bomb shelters. Some people thought they were smart. I wonder what those shelters are like today?
A&W Drive In was the big hang out for my high school in Houston. I pulled up in my lime green '67 fastback mustang and thought I was so cool.
I remember Howard Johnson's Coffee Brandy Ice Cream! Yummy!
The first time I went to Europe was in '73. I was 22. My parents gave me $1500 for graduation from college. My best friend and I went to more than 10 countries and stayed for 2 1/2 months, and had money left over. We had a blast!

tonight after dinner, we watched on PBS, Margaret Rutherford, in "Murder Ahoy." I watched every Brit film as this one when it premiered in Boston at the no longer Exeter Street art house and there was a church below where I heard Bridey Murphy's brother give a lecture. I sold pop corn and candy part time in the theater and smuggled my yorkie in to wwatch movies.

During the Cuban missile crisis we practiced hiding under desks and covering our heads. We had to learn the way home in the event that school was dismissed and the buses weren't running. Our neighborhood was several miles away from Spring Street School in downtown Atlanta and I remember all the kids sticking together, following the lone sixth-grader who rode our bus. We trusted him to get us home the one time we actually had to try walking. He seemed so old, but I now look back and realize that he must have been scared to death himself.

The first time we went to Spain we stayed at a beautiful resort a little north of Barcelona. We had a beachfront suite with balcony - the hotel also had 2 or 3 pools, tennis courts etc - and the entire cost for 2 - including breakfast delivered to the room and dinner with wine - was around $40 per night. (A big splurge for us then!)

Ira: my folks often used that expression "now you're cooking with gas": you've figured out how to do it best - i'm thinking that phrase is meaningless to younger folk and though i might say it, along with other archaic phrases like my dad's old retort, 'you don't know sh.. from Shinola - Shinola being a popular shoe polish that was a dark brown color. Or i still often say 'ice box' instead of refrigerator - i can never remember having an acutal ice box, a refrigerator cooled by ice, delivered by the ice man every few days but my folks always called it an ice box - i still use this term and my 21-yr old son is a bit baffled.
And when we visited our farming uncles in the 50s when giving directions they said 'to go down to the "tarvia" - the word i've never heard used now about a road that wasn't regular asphalt but i think a tar road that they periodically dumped gravel on that cars would then drive over and crush into the roadway.
Howard Johnsons were an East Coast thing - we only saw them on the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes in rest areas until later during college there was one in town that we went to for the fantastic Friday fish fries - known of course for their humongous ice cream cones - which brings to mind another old-farts saying
"you scream
I scream
we all scream for ice cream!"
Probably developed by some ice cream marketing association in TV ads. but ice cream in stores was fairly new.
Pizza in the 50s - we went into Detroit to visit my aunt and uncle and we encountered pizza for the first time - an Italian place near their house had take out pizzas - about 1956 - pizzas took off when i went to college - Tom Monaghan, founder of Dominos, used to deliver to himself to dorms - his free delivery was popular with students.
It's fun to think of what todays teens will say when they get old - reminiscing about things we oldsters are - hard to believe such phenomenal changes are we and our older generations have seen but then think about the advent of cell phones and in Internet in just the past decade and wow!
But saddest of all the many mentions of WWII and depression austerity - the rationing and suffering of the quality of life by being denied consumer comforts reminds me that the real tragedy of the Iraq War, regardless of how you feel about it is the the ordinary Iraquis, who are not terroist supporters but just regular folk trying to live as happy and comfortable life as possibe - what they are going through, which make our sacrifices in WWII seem paltry - what a tough tough life they've had - both under the previous tyrrant and now through a breakdown things we now take for granted - security, steady electricity or water, etc.

I was one of the first "civilians" treated with penicillin (no, not a STD).
Dad was droping bombs on his mom's vill in Germany when I was born.
Flew all the US in DC 3's and the first Constellation to FL.
The Andria Doria - the sea was fairly warm.
M 1 rifles for target shooting.
First decent wines were '45, '47 and '49 vintages.
Polio - much like West Nile.
First real job was as a bus driver for Riverdale Country Day School; first professional job was as an intern working 100 hours a week for about $1. an hour.
The birth of clinical Nuclear Medicine in the 60's.
M

PalQ you reminded me...of the drive-in-movies where we were sold these awful egg rolls that had the caricature of an oriental, a Chineese but the maker didn't know the difference between a Japaneese annd a Korean. The wrapper had a buck-toothed long pigtailed figure in long dress. Shame on us. We imprisoned in Boston harber many nisei whose only sin was being born Japanese and we also kept Italian prisoners of war on an island in the harbor. This is not a political statement but to tell how it was to younger people who are not aware of these things.

Wow, does this thread ever bring back childhood memories!
We got one of the first TV's in the neighborhood and I remember watching Howdy Doody, Pinky Lee (I even remember most of the words to the song he did with his dance), Elvis' first appearance on Ed Sullivan, and later, American Bandstand every day after school.
We had the S&H green stamps, but I also remember blue stamps, but not the name of them.
Massaging the bag of margarine until it turned yellow.
Thursday nights at the movies were dish nights, and if you went every week, you could end up with whole place settings.
Going to the record store and listening to records in the little booths before buying them.
Two to four party lines; two rings were ours, three rings were the neighbors, etc.
Going to friends' houses and standing outside yelling their names for them to come out and play (don't know why we never knocked on their doors).
Getting to play outside after dinner until the street lights came on - then it was time to go in.
Saddle shoes, poodle skirts, and shirtwaist dresses.
Reading every Nancy Drew mystery and my first novel, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". (That started my love affair with reading.)
My grandparents' farm, where I spent part of every summer, going with my grandpa to take the pickles to the pickle factory and stopping at the general store on the way back to the farm for a bag of penny candy that would last a week. Pumping water to put on the wood stove to heat for doing dishes, the dreaded outhouse, and the ice box with fresh milk in a pitcher with cream on the top. Running in and out of the farmhouse with all my cousins on a Sunday afternoon while my dad and uncles sat near the radio listening to the Detroit Tigers games.
Making Christmas gifts for our parents at school - usually very small calendars glued to red and green poster board. Also Christmas pageants (usually playing an angel).
Many of us have strayed from this being travel related, but boy, its been fun!

PalQ, but you've left off the rest of the Pizza story. It was never called pizza -- it was pizza pie! At least in Ohio and in "That's Amore" -- when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. . .

And speaking of early TV, anyone else remember Winky Dink and the "magic screen" you put on your tv and traced clues section by section until they spelled out a message?

And I still laugh at those practice sessions at school of getting under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Yea, that was going to save us from the fallout!

this has to be one of the funniest and most interesting threads ever. i'm gonna print it just to read over again. excellent, wonderful, and so interesting.

i'm not that old but i do remember my parents getting coloured tv for christmas one year and being amazed by it.

and getting to sit up really late to see the first men on the moon.

now i live in ireland, but i remember my summer hols here when i was a child and living in the uk and having to drink milk which was taken from a real cow (as opposed to via bottles of it which just appeared in the fridge). and granny selling 'pandys' of milk to local people who called to the farm. and being told the 'banshee' lived in the water butt outside (clearly to keep we kids away from drowning in it but terrifying to us at the time).

Pizza was around for as far back as I can remember in Brooklyn. But I don't think there was pizza in PA when we moved there around 1951. I loved Pennsylvania, but many of the "normal" food products of my childhood were missing from the stores there, and there were some "strange" things in their place. Then, back in Brooklyn in 1954, there was the pizza again, this time in a few more places. The lemon ice (granita) and "spumoni" (really it was gelato, but for some reason this vendor called it spumoni) vendor who used to sell from a cart had opened up a tiny snack stand, where he sold very good lemon ice, spumoni, and pizza. In a few years it grew into a bigger casual restaurant with mostly outdoor seating on picnic tables under umbrellas, and sold other foods as well, but the lemon ice, "spumoni" and pizza were the main attractions. But when we moved to NJ two years later, there was some more commercial version of pizza all over the place with erzatz cheeses and soggy crusts.

I do remember having to hide under the desk for air raid practice in 4th and 5th grade in Brooklyn. But I don't remember having to do that in PA where I started school, in kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grade. In NJ a few years later, there were vendors of fallout shelter kits in the parking lots of big stores. I remember thinking I'd rather die than have to be stuck living in our basement for months.

There was pizza when I was a child in the late 30s.

My father's cousin made pizza in our town in 1940's and returned to Italy
a few years later.

I remember the first time I saw TV--around 1956 and we had just moved to Brooklyn from Panama, where we had no TV. The neighbors invited us over to watch the Kentucky Derby.

The TV box was the size of a small refrigerator. It was B&W, and the screen was round--maybe a foot in diameter. I was amazed.

I attended PS 201 in Brooklyn the 3 years we were there. The big decision every day was whether to walk to the Jewish deli or the Italian deli for lunch.

I also remember the nuclear attack drills crouching under our desks. The desks had holes for inkwells--but they weren't used by that time.

One afternoon a week (or was it every two weeks?), the Catholic and Jewish kids left class for their respective religious schools.

Just to introduce a new idea here:

Many years ago the Manchester Guardian had a column by an elderly gentleman who would reminisce about old people he had met and whom they had known: one lady had dined with Napoleon.

Some of us might have met people whose parents were slaves.

How far back do you have a link?

((I))

RufusT -- my job in grammar school was to fill the bottles in the inkwells with ink from a larger bottle with a special spout. Had forgotten that.

And TravelerGina, my goodness -- everything you wrote brought back memories.

As for travel-related -- well, it just wasn't that common. Sunday afternoon it was a Big Deal to go for a Sunday drive all together in the family's one car. We'd putter around parts of our own state (Mass.) we hadn't seen before, but one of the big deals was to drive in to Logan Airport (then, just a couple of 1-storey yellow concrete buildings) to watch the large DC 7s and TWA Constellation TriStars arriving and taking off. The Observation Deck was just the roof over the terminal, next to the tower -- open, windy beyond belief. But it was exciting to see those "Connies" and DC7s arriving from Europe, it seemed so very exotic. And it was "just like in the movies" to see the rich travelers step down the fold-out stairs to the tarmac, clutching their hats and coats as they whipped around in the wind.

Ira, that's sort of like the six degrees of separation concept, yes? Extraordinary. I still beat myself up because I didn't write down the stories my grandfather told me of his life growing up in Illinois. Stories of Al Capone and Buffalo Bill and other legends.

I fear that we'll be bashed because we've slipped away from the travel theme (Well I did sort of stay on it with my Graceland aside), but how about the radio programs you used to listen to. I remember being transfixed by a serial called "Boston Blackie", which I listened to tucked up in bed at night. I really didn't know there were so many late-middle-agers at this forum. J.

Just so you know - the nuke drill was to "duck and cover" because most casualties of explosions are blindness and fatal lacerations caused by flying glass and structural material, not direct blast effects. If you got down below the level of the projectiles, your chances of surviving unscathed were greatly enhanced.