45 years ago today

© Rudolph J Klein

July 20, 1969. Nixon is new to the White House. Ted Kennedy has just driven off a bridge. John and Yoko have shocked the world (at least my small, suburban part of it) by going to bed publicly and staying there for two weeks.

Here we are on a picnic with neighbors at Valley Forge Park. My mother's in the plaid Bermuda shorts. She'd ironed the heavy cotton floral tablecloth put down on the table. That's me on the left, trying to sneak away with an extra Ho-Ho. I'm wearing my favorite flower-power pin.

That night, I wear it to a CYO dance held in the gym of our parish hall, in a dress my mother made, trying to look like I know how to twist. At some point in the evening, the record abruptly stops spinning, lights go on and we are called to come to the school kitchenette where one of the chaperones has set up a portable television. It is a 5 inch screen, black and white of course, with an antenna you have to keep moving to keep picture. The picture is grainy and the sound is crackly and the most audible narration comes from a pocket transistor radio tuned to the same station. A man, at that moment, is walking on the moon. We live in a new world order in which what was impossible for our parents to imagine, happens to us as a matter of course: presidents get shot, women burn their bras, wars are waged in a jungle by children. Now, this: a man from earth stepping onto the moon. 

Grown-ups hunker close to the miniature screen, squinting their disbelieving eyes while we kids shift back and forth in our weejuns, waiting for the music to start up again.

for post that makes an impression, spend 29 cents

I received a postcard today. A handheld postcard in a 3-D mailbox. How to describe the beauty of this. The lovely heft of the paper. The sincerity of the hand-written message, ink-smeared by weather. The satisfaction of getting a message to which no response was expected--no Like or Thumbs up, no request for repost. Curious to me that this formerly common means of correspondence can be a source of wonderment today.

if you know what this is

you once wore metal roller skates with adjustable clamps that gripped the sides of your PF flyers. Of course, you needed a key to get them on and off. 

Who would have guessed that something so benign and ubiquitous years ago would come to be this strange and vaguely sinister looking object? (Thanks, Terri, for the memory.)

apple memorial

Thanks, Gawker, for this trip down memory lane where Apples were Lisas, phones stayed in one place and art directors' default type was Cooper Black. (For more remembrance, visit the Apple ad graveyard)

32 things I miss about new york

Today's NY Times memorializes New York Past, citing gone-but-not-forgotten institutions like automats, subway tokens, the Dodgers and other things endemic to the city when I moved here in 1979, meaning to stay just a year or two. For some of us, New York is like those old Roach Motels (where bugs check in, but they don't check out.)

Other icons of Manhattan that I used to think were forever:

1. grafitti "art" on subways

2. The Mill Luncheonette and its sublime egg creams (the first time I had one, I wondered where was the egg)

3. checker cabs with jump seats that folded

4. John Lennon

5. Pan Am sign on the Met Life building where I used to work

6. Alphabet City--such a better name than the Lower East Side

7. selzer delivered in colored glass bottles in wooden crates (although I cancelled our service after it brought in roaches)

8. Not having to dial 212 when you called someone in the city. Phone numbers had letter code "exchanges" that told you where someone lived: MU meant Murray Hill, CH meant Chelsea. So you'd know if a prospective hook-up was GU (geographically undesirable)

9. Andy Warhol

10. Studio (nobody said 54)

11. Rumplemeyers

12. orange paper transfers for buses

13. phone booths where you could make a call on the street in peace

14. Gimbels (where I bought our dining room table at its going out of business sale)

15. used book stores

16. Claremont Stables

17. cabbies who spoke English

18. buying subway tokens (with cutout Y) at the newsstand

19. straps on the subway to help keep your balance

20. Woolworths (where my toddlers were entertained by the birds in cages long enough for me to shop)

21. Being able to leave your toddlers safely for a few minutes in the pet section of a Woolworth's

22. Tower Records

23. Columbia Bagels on 110th & Bway

24. Fulton Fish Market

25. Plaza Hotel where I used to take my daughters for tea and a look at the Eloise portrait

26. Breakfast with Santa at Lord + Taylor, before the store opened, when counters were covered with sheets.

27. Thalia Theater which screened movie classics on the UWS

28. Russian Tea Room (not that I went there more than twice, but liked hearing about it)

29. Maxwell's Plum (hangout for young creatives)

30. smoking cigarette billboards on Times Square

31. the skyline

32. The chatty subway conductor on the #1 who had a running commentary all the way to South Ferry. His sardonic announcements like "Do persuade yourself to join us. Allow the doors to close" put you in a good mood, even if was Monday, even if you were going to work.

A few things I do NOT wax nostalgic for:

1. "window washers" with dirty squeegees who used to attack your car when you came out of Lincoln Tunnel

2. being afraid to walk in Central Park after, say 4 pm

3. dueling shoulder-mounted boom boxes on the subway. Although some riders play their IPODs loud enough for me to want to reach across and thumb down the volume.

4. ugly old Bryant Park 

5. meetings in smoky offices

art credit: My Father in the Subway III, 1982 (oil on panel) by Max Ferguson