Margery Williams’ “The Velveteen Rabbit” was another book that made a big impression on me when I was a young kid; I think I was given this when I was in kindergarten or the first grade. It’s funny how memories can be bizarrely specific about some things, but silent about others — I know this was a birthday present, but I cannot remember from whom.
You can find the whole book online, complete with the original illustrations right here at the University of Pennsylvania Digital Library.
Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories” was one of my favorite childhood books — a gem I found in my elementary school library. (I seem to remember the nuns just sort of setting us loose there during reading class with the instructions to find something we liked. It was the kind of unstructured activity that I don’t often remember from Catholic School.)
It’s basically a short collection of fables that Kipling concocted for his daughter about how certain animals got their key traits (“How the Elephant Got His Trunk,” “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” etc.). This was one of two favorite books that were consistently a magnet for me in the tiny, tidy library beside the principal’s office. The other was the collection of Arabian folktales, “One Thousand and One Nights.”
Growing up, I never realized that Kipling was the same author who wrote “Gunga Din” — both the 1890 poem and the eponymous 1939 war film with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (That movie was beloved by my father and brother, and later by me.) I just never made the connection.
These early 80’s Clairol ads, of all things, came up on Facebook — after I lamented the waves of gray that have flourished across my head with astonishing suddenness. (I swear this seems like something that happened overnight. I honestly thought that there something wrong with my eyes, or maybe the bathroom light.)
I remember this little jingle quite well — it’s catchy, and there were a few variations of the 1980 TV spot that you see below. I never knew that it was a send-up of a number from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” — “I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Outa My Hair.” For some reason, my friends thought that was really funny.
Harriette Sheffer Abels’ “Galaxy 1” books appear to be fully consigned to obscurity — I don’t have a single friend who remembers them. They were published by Crestwood House in 1979; I certainly loved the ones I found in my elementary school library in the 1980’s. And that says a lot, because I was a kid who loved the fantasy genre far more than science fiction. (I had an older brother who played “Dungeons & Dragons,” and Ralph Bakshi’s animated take on “The Lord of the Rings” had captured a lot of kids’ imaginations since 1978.) I remember how pleased I was to discover anthology-style books that featured the same cast of characters on different space-based adventures.
I’m pretty sure that “Mystery on Mars,” “Medical Emergency,” and “Silent Invaders” were among those that I read. My favorite, however, was “Green Invasion,” which featured alien vines that grew uncontrollably and crushed anything they could ensnare and tangle. Lord knows that was a scenario I re-created with my G.I. Joes at home.
Eilis Dillon’s “The Singing Cave” was another favorite childhood book of mine for the obvious reasons — a young boy explores a seaside cave and discovers a Viking skeleton, complete with a sword and armor. That pretty much hit all the right notes for me when I was in early gradeschool in the 1980’s. (Some sort of age-appropriate young-adult mystery unfolded after the skeleton disappeared, possibly involving the townspeople, but I don’t even remember that very well. What thrilled me and stayed with me was the kid finding a armored Viking skeleton in a cave.)
The book was published first in 1959 in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber; Dillon was Irish and the story was set in Ireland. It was released here in America the following year by the now defunct Funk & Wagnalls — the same company that produced those huge reference books that Gen X’ers remember lugging around before the arrival of CD-Roms. (Funk & Wagnalls is a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. It turns out they quite bein’ a thing in 1997.)
I went through one hell of a Viking Phase when I was a kid. (I suppose it wasn’t too different from other kids wanting to be pirates.) I was thrilled with stories about Leif Erikson, and I was pretty happy that his last name sounded like my first. It would be years later when my parents told me that I was actually named after another Viking, Erik the Red, albeit very indirectly. (My parents like the name featured in the “Erik” cigars television commercial.)
I might have talked about this at the blog before, but I even constructed my own “Viking ship” with the kid next door when I was very young. It probably wasn’t seaworthy; it was really just a wooden pallet with some two-by-fours nailed together as a mast, and a white sheet for a sail. (Where had we gotten that sheet? It seems to me that if I’d stolen it from the laundry, I’d have gotten into some trouble for that with my Mom.) Bizarrely, my friend and I etched a bright red Spanish Cross on the sail — even though that emblem had nothing to do with the Vikings. You kinda can’t excuse our stupidity because we were kids … we’d seen plenty of pictures of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in school.
My Dad also cautioned me and my buddy that our Viking ship might not float. (The hindsight of adulthood assures me that it definitely wouldn’t have floated, but my Dad didn’t want to dash our hopes too abruptly.) He explained to us patiently in the backyard that in order for something to float, it had to “displace its own weight in water.” And … I actually understood that, surprisingly enough. It’s probably the only physics lesson I’ve understood in my life.
In fact … I don’t think we even had a plan in place for moving that boat from the backyard to the water. We were so enamored with the concept of shipbuilding that we kinda didn’t think things through very far at all.
(I was talking about ABC’s “Donny & Marie” show from the late 70’s, which I really enjoyed as a tot.) At the time I suggested they the Osmond siblings were immortal vampires because they are still performing in Las Vegas.
I take it all back. I was just reminded that Osmond is the unnamed dancing man in the 2008 “first take” video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy.” Have you seen the way this guy mugs and dances for three minutes straight? He’s hilarious. And he’s a goddam force of nature. He’s like Spider-Man 2099. He’s cooler in that three minutes of video than I will ever be.
Besides, I’m old too. I feel certain I was told at some point years ago that the guy was Osmond, yet I completely forgot about that when I discussed the show. I also don’t know if “throwing shade” has fully replaced “smack-talking” in the vernacular, or even if the term should be hyphenated.
Hot damn, did I love this book when I was in grade school. I’d be surprised if any of my friends remember it, because it was published in 1958 … I’m not sure how it wound up in my hands in the early 1980’s. The eponymous “homework machine” depicted in the book was a 50’s-era computer owned by Professor Bullfinch, who was Danny’s mentor or father figure or … something.
This was actually the third in a series of “Danny Dunn” books published between 1956 and 1977. I read one other — “Danny Dunn and the Fossil Cave,” which I also liked a lot.
The authors were Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, and they were quite good at their craft. Danny, along with his friends Joe and Irene, were pretty relatable characters to a kid in the second grade.
“The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979) is another show that I remember fondly, if very vaguely, from my very early childhood. It ran on ABC for a scant three seasons (over a two-year period), and that sounds positively odd to me, because my memory has morphed it into something that seems like a much bigger part of the 1970’s.
I also remember it being two different shows, but that maybe makes sense — the first season of the program had a weird format in that you saw a standalone adventure of the Hardy Boys one week, and then a Nancy Drew outing the following week. (The characters, of course, were based on the young adult books written respectively by Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene.) They eventually went on to have adventures together, Wikipedia tells me, although Nancy Drew had a reduced role, and was eventually dropped altogether in the third and final season.
Wikipedia also tells me that the show’s third season portrayed the Hardy Boys as … adults? And that they were agents of the Justice Department? And that the Season 3 premiere saw the younger brother’s fiancee killed by a hit-and-run driver? I definitely don’t remember that — and it seems a little darker from what I remember of 1970’s primetime television shows.
I loved the show, even if I was too young to follow its relatively simple stories well. (I would have been in either kindergarten or the first grade.) But it was a program intended for “big kids” (my older siblings had the books), and that made it wonderfully cool to me.
I moved onto the books myself, by the early 1980’s. I loved those too. The two that I remember are “The Secret of Wildcat Swamp” (with the Hardy Boys) and “The Secret of the Old Clock” (with Nancy Drew). It was the Wildcat Swamp adventure that inducted me into the club — you see that snarling mountain lion on the cover? That was utterly enticing to me when I found the book in the bottom of the closet I shared with my brother, when I was … maybe in the third grade, I guess. (It looked a lot like the “saber tooth tiger” baddie in that Aurora model kit that I loved so much.) I kept pondering that scene and wondering what the outcome was. (Did they even have guns?! Would the dad or whoever that was protect them?!) One day, I finally accepted the challenge of reading what seemed like a very long book to me at the time, and I wasn’t disappointed. That’s the power of a good book cover, I guess.
Chuck Barris’ “The Gong Show” (1976-1980) was another show I remember vaguely (but quite fondly) from when I was in kindergarten or the first grade. (It aired its original run between 1976 and 1978, and then was syndicated the latter two years.) I still remember laughing uproariously at its weird acts, and it might have been one of those shows that ended just before my 8 PM bedtime.
The idea was this — a panel of three celebrity judges would view a handful of amateur talent acts, and would bang the titular gong if an act was so bad that they decided they couldn’t allow it to continue. (Along with legitimate talent, the program deliberately fielded acts that were weird or just plain bad.) What’s interesting is that this seems like a very tame precursor of contentious current reality shows like “American Idol” or “Britain’s Got Talent,” which are still going strong since their advent in the early 21st Century. “The Gong Show” was a lot more laid back.
You think that 80’s kids are old? Well, I also have memories of the 1970’s; after all, they fully occupied the first seven years of my life.
And I remember “Donny and Marie” (1976-1979), which ran on ABC. It was a sanity-challenging, Kafkaesque combination of disco, country music, family entertainment, themed-comedy skits, sequined outfits and … ice-skating. Which made it either the height of 70’s cheese or the very nadir of Western civilization — you decide.
I’m embarrassed to admit here that I loved it, even if I was a tot at the time. (Hey, if you’re five or six years old, then the sight of Donny being a non-threatening goofball on stage was the very height of hilarity.) You can see what I mean in the second clip below, if you can stomach all four minutes of it.
What’s interesting about this show is that it was kind of a dinosaur in its time … variety shows had been on the decline for a while in the late 1970’s, and were already being supplanted by the situation comedies that would become the trademark of the 1980’s. Bizarrely, NBC tried to launch Marie in her own solo variety show during the 1980-81 television season, but it just didn’t catch on. It was cancelled after seven episodes.
What’s truly crazy is that Donny and Marie are still performing in Las Vegas. I kid you not. Google it. You can even see them tonight at The Flamingo. There’s at least a chance that they’re immortal vampires.
Postscript: I at first typed “Donny and Maurie” in that blog post headline, and I feel certain there’s a terrible joke hiding there somewhere about Donny hearing the results of paternity test on “Maury Povich.” That would make a great “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 