Local Mail

Back in the good ol’ days of the 20th Century, the LOCAL letter slot at the Post Office was for letters that you were mailing to people who lived in the same town as you. The postal clerk would personally postmark that letter with a rubber stamp that had the name of your town on it and slip the letter into that local person’s mail slot. Usually, that person would get that letter the same day.

This local letter-handling method was prized highly by just about everyone but, alas, no good thing goes undone. In the high-tech paradise of today that local letter goes in with all the other mail, even the mail to other countries, and gets sent to a city where it gets scanned and bar-coded by a big-ass machine that cost a bazillion dollars. Now that local recipient will get that local letter sometime that week. Maybe.

Back in the 20th Century, when the USPS was simply called “The Post Office” and the local mail carrier was called the “mailman” (OH, that awful SEXIST word!), the Post Office didn’t raise its rates every year to pay for technology. Human beings were still allowed to handle the mail and make a decent living at it. And, way back then, the customer wasn’t always wrong.

The Media in 25 Words or Less

Everyone knew that television, movies and publishing were ethnically controlled since day one but no one had the courage to challenge this gross inequity. Cowards.

The Gypsies Are In Town!

You would think that the mid-20th Century was a time for overcoming some of the foolishness and unfounded fears that had crept over into that century from the previous one. By 1950, fewer people were throwing salt over their shoulders and refusing to let blonde children bring in the new year, for fear of bad luck. By 1960, not too many motorists would crash their car into a retaining wall in order to avoid crossing paths with a black cat in the middle of the road. And, by 1970, hardly anyone felt the blood rush from their face when someone at the dinner table accidentally “crossed steel” by absent-mindedly laying a stainless steel knife on top of a fork or spoon. But they still feared the Gypsies.

Every summer in the Pennsylvania Appalachians a “Gypsy Alert” would ring out from town to town. Better lock your doors because the Gypsies were coming to steal your children! The alert went from neighbor to neighbor and from one neighborhood to another. And it always occurred during carnival season, which meant most of the summer months, but especially during the Fourth of July weekend.

As children, we were instructed to walk in pairs or groups and not to speak to strange dark-haired women in old print dresses and paisley scarves who wore funny shoes. And to stay away from unshaven men with big-brimmed hats and suspenders altogether. No one stopped to consider that this tall order would eliminate contact with about half of our relatives at the time. It didn’t matter. The Gypsies were in town!

No one really knew who these Gypsies were or where they came from. They certainly didn’t come all the way from Hungary in their wagons to steal American children. As a child, I assumed that these people could not have children of their own and would take any healthy kid they could get their hands on. I felt sorry for them.

The word was out that these crusty and coarse people wanted somebody else’s children to clean out their wagons and shovel the horse manure and run errands for them because they were too lazy to do it themselves. No one in Appalachia suspected that these so-called Gypsies were just Americans called “Carnies” by the rest of the country, people who liked carnival work and carnival life and not paying taxes.

For us kiddies, the “dreaded curse of the Gypsies” was fearing them as much as fearing the devil, himself, without ever getting to see either.

The RAF in 25 Words or Less

During World War Two Great Britain’s Royal Air Force helped tame the hostile skies over Europe despite the bull’s-eyes they painted on all their planes.

At the Drive-In

When you think of a drive-in today you think of food-on-the-run. But back in the 1950s and Sixties a drive-in meant an outdoor movie theater. It was the biggest limestone parking lot in the world and the strangest and most exciting movie experience you’d probably ever have. The Drive-In Theater was a cinematic carnival that lasted all summer long.

The main features in the 1960s, when I was finally old enough to see the movie over the back of the front seat, were quite often Disney movies, and about half of them were animated. Dad got the speaker off a hook and pulled it toward us. He clipped it on his window and turned up the volume. Just for the heck of it he’d turn the volume clear off in the middle of a movie and we could still hear it. The sounds of swords clashing or six-shooters booming were carried on a wave of a hundred speakers into the atmosphere and, there we were, right in the middle of it. But the movie was just the tip of the iceberg.

There were cartoons and commercials for the concession stand. And there was the concession stand, a long flat concrete-block oasis in the middle of a limestone desert, full of smells that made your mouth water. Popcorn, pizza, hotdogs, french fries, soda in paper cups. Who needed the movie?

And then the Seventies came along and drive-in theaters all across America became vacant lots and weekend flea markets and porn theaters and no one seemed to notice or care.

I think few people would believe me if I told them that the first time I saw “Dr. Zhivago” I was sitting on the hood of a car and totally surrounded by trees.