I am linking here to ABC 7 Eyewitness News for some clips about Hurricane Gloria hitting Long Island in 1985. I smiled when I heard people talking about the long-defunct “LILCO” (The Long Island Lighting Company). It was the region’s much-maligned electricity provider (and the company behind the doomed Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant.)
Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday
Throwback Thursday: Wista-SHEER Sawce.
Flashback to the early 1990’s. I worked the cafeteria at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. (It was a work-study program.) Southern kids would line up at the counter for me to serve them Worcestershire sauce, because they laughed at the way I pronounced it.
It’s “wista-SHEER sawce.” Years of seeing it passed around my New York Irish dinner table could not have misinformed me. It was the Southerners and their adorable “WAR-is-to-Shire” pronunciation that deserved laughter.
I’m glad we had this talk.
Throwback Thursday: these little ice cream cups!
These were a treat for special events when I was in grade school (both public and private). We used to get them on field days and such.
Throwback Thursday: World’s Finest Chocolate!
I haven’t thought about these candy bars in over 40 years. Then my friend (and famed journalist) Jason Brooks shared this meme on Facebook.
These were sooooo good. And they were such a pain in the ass when you were asked by your school to sell them. (I was assigned the task along with all my classmates in Catholic grade school in … 1981? 1982?) As an adult today (arguably), it strikes me as a little odd, because my parents were paying tuition for me to go there. I also question the prudence of sending a young child to sell candy door-to-door.
I even remember that weird white box that they came in. I also seem to remember there being a contest or something if you sold a high number of these. And there were a couple of kids who sold like a dozen boxes or so. The scuttlebutt around school was that their parents worked in large offices and sold them on their kids’ behalf.
Anyway, World’s Finest Chocolate is still around. (And my astute fellow comic book fans will know that they should not be confused with {World’s Finest Comics. )
Throwback Thursday: “Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Monster,” 1975!
This was was one of my favorite books from early childhood. It was written by Jean Lewis and illustrated by Ralph Canady. (I also had two other titles that you see on the back cover below — “Hong Kong Phooey” and “Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Doghouse.”)
But this was the one that rocked my imagination. Scoob and the gang follow some “monster” footprints to discover nothing less than a rampaging wooly mammoth. (The big reveal is that it is a malfunctioning robot created by a friendly scientist. If memory serves, he had a little preserve of robotic extinct animals in his backyard.)
My fondest dream as a five-year-old was to somehow “create” miniature dinosaurs that I could keep as tiny pets in a little corral beside my house’s chimney, like an equally misguided pre-school John Hammond or something. (I won’t embarrass myself further here by describing my modus operandi. Suffice to say that no actual dinosaurs resulted from my efforts.) So the idea of ice-age-beast machines was pretty magical to me. (Hell, in the 1970’s, there were always a couple of anachronistic wooly mammoths or saber-tooth tigers thrown into a set of plastic dinosaurs.)
Believe it or not, I think I can actually remember my mother buying this book for me. I remember a long, tidy, below-street-level bookstore on a New York City block, and being told that I could pick out two books. The other was definitely a nonfiction dinosaur book. (I want to say it was Jane Werner Watson’s “Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles.”)
Good times.
Source: Scoobypedia
Throwback Thursday: this 1985 ad for Kronoform watches!
Throwback Thursday: the Roller Rink!
I remember. For us, it was Skate Grove in Middle Island, New York.
This meme actually fails to convey three elements that were key to the experience — flashing lights, crowds of kids and The J. Geils Band blasting on the speakers.
Source: “I Love the 80’s” on Facebook
Throwback Thursday: Opryland USA (1972-1997)!
My parents took me and my siblings to the “Opryland” amusement park in Nashville, TN around … 1981 or so; I would have been about nine years old. It was part of a family vacation that took us from Long Island, New York through two mountain ranges — I saw the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time (though certainly not the last), and the Great Smoky Mountains. (That, by itself, seemed like traveling to fantastic new dimension to a young kid.)
But Opryland was a blast. I’m surprised I’ve never heard it mentioned by anyone I knew since I saw it over 40 years ago. (And I’ve been friends with quite a few Southerners.) The shot below is one of the few public domain photos I could find of the park itself (and it dates from the mid-1970’s).
My parents were excited about a stage show called “The Grand Ole Opry;” the theme of the amusement park was … historical country music, or something. That wasn’t of much interest to a kid, but I had a blast with rides like The Log Flume, the Skyride and those Tin Lizzie antique cars on the safety track. (Somewhere there’s a family photo of nine-year-old me happily “driving” one.)
As it turns out, there actually are a lot of people who remember Opryland if you look for them online. There’s an official Facebook page, with tons of photos and links, along with this documentary from Nashville Public Television.
The “Grand Ole Opry” lives on as a live stage performance series and a radio show, but Opryland closed in 1997. It really is missed by a lot of people. Take a look at some of the comments on the Facebook page — this place had a hell of a loyal fanbase.
Photo credit: Chris Faulkner, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Throwback Thursday: that one time an eclipse heralded a vampire apocalypse.
Seriously, if you’re a horror fan and you’ve somehow missed the television adaptation of Guillermo del Toro’s “The Strain” (2014-2017), then you don’t know what you’re missing.
Throwback Thursday: “Enemy Mine” (1985)!
Louis Gossett Jr. passed away last week at the age of 87. While everyone else is remembering him for “An Officer and A Gentleman” (1982), we 80’s sci-fi kids are remembering him for 1985’s “Enemy Mine.”
I am linking here to Vintage Movie Trailers on Youtube, by the way.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 