The Interstate Highway "Snow Job"

In the 1960s federal and state lawmakers, whose palms were regularly greased by special interest groups representing the American trucking industry, paved the way for the nation's first “Interstate Highway System”.

The first step in this ill-conceived program of greed and avarice was the government seizure of private land by “condemning it” and invoking the “right of eminent domain”. These corrupt and vision-less bureaucrats put thousands of productive family farms out of business with reckless abandon and cut small-town America in half so that trucks could begin hauling the goods that America’s railroads once hauled. These were the goods that the railroads delivered without endangering motorists by sharing the same road with them and at one-fourth the cost of trucking those same goods. But no one seemed to care about any of that.

Built for trucks, but showcased as modern highways for family travel, America’s interstate highways soon turned small towns all over America into empty “bedroom communities” while turning America the Beautiful into a giant concrete scar littered with unsightly billboards.

And only Lady Bird Johnson seemed to give a hoot about that.

Ponytails & Puppy Love

The first girl I ever had a crush on back in the mid-20th Century wore her hair in a "ponytail", a hairdo that instantly gave any girl or young woman that "All-American Girl" look. And, when the girl wearing the ponytail was a high school cheerleader, it was even better. And it was even better than that if she had just the right amount of freckles on her face and in just the right places.

Back in the 1950s I was still in elementary school but that didn't keep me from being fascinated by swinging, bouncing ponytails on neighborhood girls and on women in the movies. Even the mannish Katherine Hepburn took on a whole new feminine look when she pulled back that beautiful mane of long, dark hair into a ponytail.

When the "Peace & Love" movement came along in the late 1960s, the ponytails started to disappear. They were replaced by Indian braids and long hair parted in the middle. I was the young guy on campus who longed for Sandra Dee in a ponytail and who had to settle for Janis Joplin's greasy mop instead. What a bummer. But the bummer eventually became just a bad memory. After all, what guy in the mid-1970s could resist rubbernecking when an attractive coed jogged past you with that athletic ponytail bouncing and swaying? Thank heavens for the "Me Generation" and their resurrection of the ponytail.

I'm way too old now for "Puppy Love" to strike and I long ago stopped wishing I weren't immune to its temporary effects. But whenever I see a woman of any age sporting a ponytail, whether it's on her bare head or protruding from the back of a baseball cap, you can bet I'm discreetly watching and thoroughly enjoying.

“The Jet Set” in 25 Words or Less

In the 1960s and 1970s rich, vain, shallow people — mostly from Hollywood — flew everywhere in jets without any purpose and thought their shit didn’t stink.

Lo-Tech Cartoons

I was a lucky kid. On Saturday mornings and after school I got to watch cartoons on television featuring comical and cute characters who were most often animals. Even the villains in these cartoons were cute in a kind of non-threatening way. But the most interesting thing about all the cartoons I watched on the tube as a kid was the wonderful absence of high technology. The big four cartoon makers in the 1950s and 1960s were Warner Brothers, Disney, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera. A lot of their cartoons were made in the 1940s and were also aired prior to theatrical movies.

Warner Brothers cartoons were my favorite, with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck sharing the highest honors, followed by Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester the Cat and Yosemite Sam. The interesting thing about all these characters is that they were not really good guys. Bugs Bunny was a rabbit who loved to rattle anybody’s chain. He was a pest and a menace but you just had to like him. Daffy Duck was temperamental and vengeful but who cared? He was a laughable goof with a pronounced lisp and ideas that always backfired on him. Foghorn Leghorn was a lazy southern rooster who liked to devil a stupid, lazy dog. Sylvester was a stupid cat (with a very pronounced sloppy lisp) who could not outsmart a little, sissy, yellow bird. And Yosemite Sam was a southern outlaw who hated Bugs Bunny more than anything in the world. And none of them carried ray guns or cell phones or had pals with cyborg heads and cloned anime bodies. Hip-Hip Hooray for non-computer-generated cartoons.

I seemed to outgrow Disney’s cartoon characters when I reached puberty. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy were fun when my feet still didn’t touch the floor at the table but they became boring as I got older. Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy and Droopy weren’t very funny anyway and I actually disliked Woody Woodpecker because he was an impish little brat more than anything else. Still, they were wonderfully low-key and low-tech.

Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters took over where Disney and Walter Lantz left off. Yogi Bear and Quickdraw McGraw were hard to beat. But Huckleberry Hound and Auggie Doggie were my favorite. They were dogs. One was blue and grown up and stupid and the other was a brown beagle kid who always managed to get into trouble with his father, Doggie Daddy. Liking cute cartoon characters today would not be cool or masculine but I have no regrets about my past fondness for these kind of cartoon characters. I still like them but I can’t find them on the tube anymore.

The human exception to the cute animal character rule, as far as Hanna-Barbera was concerned, were The Flintstones and The Jetsons. I really like Fred and Barney and thought Wilma and Betty were "neat" (i.e. "cool") cartoon wives but nothing beat the space-age Jetson family for me. I liked them all and never missed an episode.

Still, with all the color and imagined three-dimensionality of my favorite cartoons, the first one I ever viewed on TV remains my favorite to this day. When I watched Captain Kangaroo in the late 1950s and they finally got around to airing another episode of Tom Terrific, I was in cartoon heaven. Tom and his dog Manfred and the arch villain Crabby Appleton were merely black stick figures on a white background but they immediately stole my kid heart and captured my boundless imagination.

AIDS in 25 Words or Less

In the early 1980s extraterrestrial technology helped Earth’s One World Government invent and unleash this viral biological weapon upon the planet’s homosexual and African populations.

Big Wheels

Being ambivalent about most things allows me the freedom to sit on the fence for a spell and see both sides of the pasture. Then I don't have to jump off unprepared and step in the manure. That's the way I like it.

When I look back on America’s love affair with the automobile in the mid-20th Century, what I remember most about it was that it was both a wonderful thing and a ridiculous social phenomenon at the same time. But it was a great time to be alive and your car was as much a part of who and what you were as anything else and most Americans wouldn't have it any other way.

Cars in the 1950s and 1960s were very distinctive looking and there was a lot to look at. Not like the clones today, which are first designed in the wind tunnel for fuel efficiency and then copycat designed for style, with that cowardly fear of losing a particular market share as the second driving force. Back then, however, no one gave a damn about gas mileage and, back in the Fifties and Sixties, being different was an automaker’s key to marketing success.

Fins were in, especially on Cadillacs, Chryslers and Plymouths, despite the fact that they served no aerodynamic function whatsoever. But they looked really cool to me, as a kid growing up at that time, like fins on a rocket ship. Today they would look nothing but ridiculous but I’d love to see them make a comeback. Along with the fender. And, while they’re at it, they might as well throw in the running board. It made a great step for kids and older people.

And, man, did these big, boxy babies have real power steering and power brakes or what? You could literally stop on a dime if you touched that big-ass brake with anything more than just your toe. And you could steer a 1962 Pontiac Catalina (pictured) with only one finger. I once saw a man steer his 1962 Dodge Coronet with just his nose.

A lot of the cars in the 1950s and 1960s also rode like Cadillacs. Hell, just about all of them. They had big, sixteen-inch, bias-ply tires, a massive chassis and thick-rolled bodies that made some of these cars weigh in at two tons or more. I could lay down in the back seat of the 1968 Buick Wildcat I bought in 1980 as a grown man. And my head and feet never touched either door.

I miss the bench seat in front and the shifter on the steering column. That’s back in the days when the ignition key went into a slot on the dashboard. Right next to the Delco radio and the glove compartment with a lock on the door and a light inside. It was big enough to hold your lunch.

I think about those cars a lot these days and I pine away for one every time I squeeze into my aging 2000 Daewoo Lanos and bump my head on the rearview mirror and skin my knee on the door handle. But at least it still hasn’t rusted in the seven years I’ve been driving it. And that’s worth an awful lot to me.

Vietnam in 25 Words or Less

Under President Eisenhower, The United States entered into a twenty-year chess game with the Soviet Union in southeast Asia, squandering American lives for wartime prosperity.

A Real Meal Deal

When I was in college I used to frequent a restaurant that was right across the street from campus. I loved their breakfast specials and the one I usually ordered was two eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, toast and jelly, orange juice and coffee. All that for a whopping 69 cents.

That’s right. A complete sit-down breakfast for 69 cents. Of course, that was around 1970.

The restaurant I’m talking about is no longer there but a comparable breakfast anywhere else these days would cost ten times that much. Not twice that or five times that, which would not be way out of line after 37 years of inflation. No, a ten-fold price increase that reflects our willingness to swallow just about anything nowadays.

Hell, no wonder I rarely eat breakfast out anymore.

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.

Little League Life

In 1939 Little League was founded in Williamsport, Pennsylvania with only three teams. By the time I was playing Little League baseball in the late 1950s it was all over the country and now Little League is being sponsored all over the world. It’s a great way to foster a healthy, competitive spirit between children ages five through eighteen and in several arenas, based on age.

But back in 1959 through 1962 my Little League experience was a wonderful, exciting and rewarding competitive camaraderie between a bunch of boys. And a time for them to learn how to play baseball together and learn pitching, fielding and hitting skills from grown men who enjoyed showing boys how to play baseball and how to compete with a sense of sportsmanship.

The very notion of boys enjoying team sports under the direction of men who lent their time and effort to help boys become better youths became a topic of heated debate and contention by the time I was all grown up. It seemed that the new America, which had sprung from the bosom of the American Feminist Movement, somehow believed that boys having fun playing an organized sport were somehow depriving girls of the same age of the opportunity to play baseball.

No one ever thought to form a separate Little League for girls. Instead, the new America decided to instill in the boys entrusted to its care an undeserved guilt about playing sports with just boys, making them and the men who managed their Little League teams feel that what they were doing was somehow wrong, shameful and sexist. How in the hell a ten-year-old boy back in 1960 could be guilty of sexism just by swinging a baseball bat at a ball pitched by another boy is still totally beyond my comprehension.

What was really shameful and sexist was the false sense of righteousness in an America that allowed such an ill-conceived national movement to become Little League policy. Any arbitrary decision by adults which forces boys to play with girls (and vice-versa) and to forsake children's natural tendency to enjoy the company of other children of their own gender only masquerades as an equal opportunity of any kind for anybody.

“I Love Lucy” in 25 Words or Less

Movie star and pin-up, Lucille Ball, played a 1950's TV housewife from hell trying to get into her husband’s nightclub act, over and over again.

The Corner Drugstore

Not all small-town drugstores in the 20th Century were on the corner and not all of them had soda fountains but my favorite one did. It was replaced before the new millennium made its debut by a chain restaurant that mostly sells ice cream. I’ll bet there were a lot of corner drug stores around the country between 1951 and 2000, when I did my running in the last century.

These were places where you could buy tobacco and newspapers and magazines and men’s and women’s toiletries and get your prescriptions filled. But they were also places to leisurely enjoy a cherry Coke from a soda fountain or an ice cream soda or even a hamburger. The “druggist” usually wore a white smock and the soda fountain waitresses often wore pink or blue uniforms. I liked it when these women popped their chewing gum and winked at me.

I’ll probably never get to see a drugstore as cool as the one in the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” but I’d give an eye tooth to set my butt down on one of those high stools and order a double chocolate malted or an egg cream or a lemon phosphate.

Anyone have a time machine I can use for a few hours?

Air Raid!

In the 1950s school children like me, who would later become labeled “Baby Boomers” ( as if we had been shot out of cannons at birth), hid under our desks at school during regular air raid drills that began with a brief warning from the teacher, followed by the blast from a chrome whistle.

Like this “safety precaution” would have actually helped us in the event of a nuclear attack. Like desks and puny arms clasped over our innocent heads would keep a 50–megaton atomic bomb from turning us into vapor in a split second. Like all grownups from Russia were devils from hell and our parents and grandparents were all darling angels straight out of Heaven. Later, in high school, we put two and two together and thought this was a pretty stressful and hyped-up time to be alive.

And they wondered why a lot of us wanted to be stoned out of our skulls when we grew up.