Category: Suburbia

Boomers Participated in Spring Cleaning

The annual ritual known as spring cleaning seems to wane in popularity with each passing year. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that time is so much more structured in the average family than it was in the 1950s and 60s. Another big consideration is that when boomers were growing up, the vast majority of mothers stayed at home. Yet even though they stayed at home, they were modern women who were most definitely interested in any technology or product that would lessen the drudgery of house work. They were not about to do things the way their mothers had to.

For the Mister Boomer household, spring cleaning fell into three main categories: personal space, seasonal replacements and seldom-performed household tasks. Mister B’s mom, the acting general in the spring cleaning attack, would request each child to “clean” their own closet. This amounted to, for the most part, removing the piles of toys in the bottom of the closet, cleaning the dust bunnies that had taken up residence, and carefully selecting toys that had been outgrown and relegating them to the storage areas of the basement. Rearranging the toys to place back completed the bottom half of the closet cleaning. Of course for some, like Mister B’s brother, the piles that went back in looked a lot like the piles that started.

The second part of the annual closet cleaning was connected to seasonal replacements. Each spring, fall and winter, clothes in the closets were gathered and moved en masse to an armoire in the basement. From the basement storage, spring and summer ensembles, smelling of moth balls, were resurrected and, like spring itself, renewed for another year in the light of the season.

The family hall closet got the same treatment. Each family member removed and stored the winter coats, scarves, hats and gloves and replaced them with the lighter-weight outerwear needed for spring weather.

Sometimes, Mister B’s mom would want to kick it up a notch and clean the walls in the bedrooms and living room. The kids hated that job, but, armed with old rags and buckets filled with warm water and sudsy Mr. Clean or Spic ‘N Span, they’d dutifully wipe the walls, climbing on chairs to reach up to the ceiling. Part of the reason Mister B hated the job was that brown gook — residue from the smoking habits of his parents — would streak down the walls.

Cleaning the Venetian blinds were another spring chore. Every window had Venetian blinds. Having the oldest child assist in removing them from each room, the blinds were set out on the backyard grass. There, Mister B and his brother would train the garden hose on the horizontal slats, “power washing” the winter’s dust from the white aluminum. Next they’d drape the blinds over the backyard clotheslines to dry in the sun, while Mister B’s mom took a brush and soapy water to any tough remaining spots. When things weren’t coming clean, she’d fill an aluminum tub with soapy water and dunk the blinds, letting each soak a few minutes so the modern cleaning technology could do its work.

All-purpose cleaners like Mr. Clean appeared in the 1950s, appealing to women looking to save them from the drudgery of housework the way their mothers had to do it. As far as boomers’ moms were concerned, these cleaners did a great job while simplifying their lives with one product for multiple uses.

Marketers, ever tapped into popular culture, never missed a trick to tie their product into popular movie and TV shows of the time. When this commercial was released, the James Bond series had hit the silver screen while The Man from U.N.C.L.E. appeared on TV.

The final spring cleaning ritual was delegated to Mister Boomer and Brother Boomer; it involved the outdoor storm windows. The boys retrieved window screens from the basement and brought them to the backyard, where a quick hose-down removed any remaining dirt from the previous year. Then, Brother Boomer, as the eldest, got on the family’s six-foot ladder outside each window outside as Mister B took up position on the inside. Sliding each storm window up the aluminum slats until reaching the opening where it could be removed, the boys took down the heavy glass storm windows and replaced them with the summer screens.

Completing the window-to-screen task, a simple twist of threaded screws on the aluminum frame of the front door was all that was needed to removed the door glass, and quick as a wink, it was transformed from storm door to screen door.

What spring cleaning tasks were you required to do as youngsters, boomers?

Please note: This is an edited version of a post first published by Mister Boomer on May 22, 2011.

Boomers Count Down Another Rockin’ New Year’s Eve

Well, boomers, this week we’ll flip the life odometer on another year. 2026 will see the youngest boomers turning 62, while the oldest among us will reach 80. As the clock strikes midnight, we’ll still be wondering what “Auld Lang Syne” means. For the record, it’s Scottish for “times long past,” a phrase popularized by the poet Robert Burns in the song from the late 17th century. Are there boomers of any age who can recall all the lyrics to that traditional New Year’s song? Probably not.

Perhaps the reason is, unless your family was Scottish, the version you probably heard during your formative boomer years was an instrumental played by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadiens. It’s probably playing through your brain right now as you read this. (Sorry.) His TV presence and rendition of the song became synonymous with New Year’s Eve, first for our parents, then passed on to us through family TV osmosis. Mr. Lombardo had performed on a radio broadcast each year since 1928, then his first live New Year’s TV broadcast was aired beginning in 1956. He continued the tradition until his death in November 1977. His brother Victor took over for a year, but the band disbanded in 1978. In addition to his live broadcast from New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, there would be coverage of the Times Square ball drop. While most boomers that Mister Boomer knows couldn’t stand Guy Lombardo (the “old fogey” that he was represented the past, man!), boomers did want to see the ball drop. That is yet another shared memory boomers have in history.

New Year’s Eve was one of the few days of the year when boomer children were allowed to stay up late. Mom and dad, along with possibly some family members, friends and neighbors, would down cocktails and watch Guy Lombardo on the black and white TV, until the time arrived for the big New Year’s countdown.

In Mister Boomer’s household, the children were dressed in their pajamas (with the feet on them), had coats draped over their shoulders like capes to ward off the winter chill, and were issued pots, pans and wooden spoons. The young troop was then marched out the front door, where Mister B and his siblings lined up along the porch edge waiting for the countdown. The TV volume would be turned up so it could be heard from the porch, as the group shivered in anticipation. “5-4-3-2-1 … Happy New Year!” was their cue to bang as furiously and loudly as possible. Their percussive cacophony was joined by a few neighborhood children also banging pots and pans on their porches, along with the sounds of horns, shouts of “Happy New Year,” and car horns that echoed through the neighborhood. Then, as the noise began to diminish, Mister B’s father would step out on the porch with his shotgun that he used for pheasant hunting. All eyes were on him as he loaded a shell into the gun. He raised it to his shoulder, and, aiming at the front lawn, fired into the ground as if the bang were a finale to the neighborhood noisemaking.

As the years progressed, shotgun firing was dropped from the family tradition. It wasn’t long after that, that the banging of pots and pans also became “times long past.” We were getting older, and Guy Lombardo wasn’t going to cut it for the Pepsi Generation. Finally, in 1972, Dick Clark offered boomers another choice. Calling his show “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” he put the older generation on notice that his was not your father’s New Year’s celebration. Boomers already knew Dick from “American Bandstand,” of course. Boomers liked him, and trusted him as a voice of the generation. If he wanted to rock New Year’s Eve, boomers wanted to rock with him.

As the decades-old tradition of one television for the whole family began to crack, boomers had New Year’s parties in basements, where they could watch Dick Clark on a second TV while their parents sat in front of Guy Lombardo, upstairs, for another year. That first Rockin’ Eve show in 1972 featured Three Dog Night as hosts, and musical guests Blood, Sweat & Tears, Helen Reddy and Al Green. Mister Boomer recalls several house parties in the seventies, when, rockin’ or not, the show seemed pretty boring. Since it wasn’t Guy Lombardo boring, boomers would continue to watch.

Any overview of boomer New Year’s celebrations would be remiss without the mention of the Soupy Sales Show. Almost every boomer remembers some version of the Soupy Sales Show on TV. It was New Year’s Day 1965 that marked a momentous day for boomer fans of Soupy. The network had forced Soupy to work the holiday, and that didn’t sit too well with the pie-man. Soupy jokingly looked at his young viewers and asked them to tip-toe into their parents’ bedrooms while they were sleeping and remove the “funny green pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards” from their pockets and purses. He then instructed his viewers to “put them in an envelope and mail them to me.” That week the station, WNEW in New York, received what has been reported as $80,000, though Soupy himself revealed that most of it was was play money or Monopoly money. Soupy was suspended for two weeks, but his show was not canceled and continued another two years.

Many boomers like to say they were among those who sent Soupy some dollars in 1965. Unfortunately, Mister Boomer cannot make that claim. Others say it’s more likely the same situation at work in the Soupy incident as the number of people who claim to have been at Woodstock. How about it, boomers? Does Guy Lombardo, Dick Clark or Soupy Sales loom large in the annals of your New Year’s memories?

Please note: This is an edited post first published by Mister Boomer on December 26, 2010.