Tag: Suburbia

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.

Boomers and Safety: “Let’s Be Careful Out There” Was the Order of the Day

The notion of safety is yet another in a long list of things that have dramatically changed since the 1950s and ’60s. It makes Mister Boomer recall the before-and-after poster that was circulating after the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was passed in 1970: on the left of the horizontal poster was a cowboy on a horse, and on the right that same cowboy after OSHA. Various safety belts and devices had been attached to the cowboy, and a safety net was suspended from the horse. An exaggeration, to be sure, but it illustrates the point.

A decade or two earlier, parents viewed safety as more of a “let’s be careful out there” teaching moment than a pro-active sheltering of their children. From an early age, “no” was sufficient to train boomers from sticking things into electrical outlets or handling pots on a stove. Many boomers have noted how they were free to come and go, especially in the summer months, without either parent knowing where they were or what they were doing. True, and probably inevitably, what Mister B and his neighborhood boomers were doing wasn’t always the smartest activities, like riding bikes (or sleds) down impossibly-angled hills; jumping off swings at the peak zenith to the rocks or asphalt below; building tree houses in the woods with found materials; climbing and playing on heavy construction equipment; and many more.

It’s not that the notion of safety was absent from boomer lives altogether. In school boomers would see safety films (complete with rattling projector noises and garbled voiceovers) about electricity safety, fire safety, swimming safety, street-crossing safety and most notably, bicycle safety. It is the latter that brings a chuckle to Mister Boomer, because his school once saw a bike safety film that had Mister B’s brother in it. Somehow, the local police had filmed neighborhood kids — including Brother Boomer — riding their bikes no-handed in the middle of the street.

It was common practice for neighborhood kids to be riding no-handed, or attempt “wheelies” and other tricks on their bikes in the street, so Brother Boomer could have been filmed at any point. It’s a mystery why the filmmakers chose to use Mr. B’s brother as an example, though.

Mister B recalls one no-handed ride by Brother Boomer that was part of a game the neighborhood kids had devised. Since the block had a hill that sloped down to a highway, the kids would use it for sledding in winter, and bike or homemade go-kart riding in summer. In this particular game, the kids — mostly boys — would ride down the block as fast as they felt was “safe,” then jumped off the bike across the street from Mister B’s house near the bottom of the hill. The object was to lift the bike up the curb, jump off and land in the grass. It was fun. Extra points were obtained if the riderless bike went on to hit the tree at the edge of the neighbor’s property. Brother Boomer did a run no-handed once, upping the ante for participants.

The film did not show the game and the jumping off part, but made a point of showing that riding without both hands on the handlebars was not a safe thing for kids to do, even on a side street.

Mister Boomer has written previously about how the building of the Interstate Highway System became a playground for him and his neighborhood boomer friends. Whenever construction was finished for the day or week, the kids would be on the sites — which were not fenced off — climbing on equipment and playing in construction trailers and on mounds of dirt. Hazards were everywhere, and the mere thought of kids on construction sites would be unthinkable today.

Chances are these and many of the activities of boomer kids would not have been sanctioned by their parents had they known, surely all in the name of safety, but they did not know, and the kids weren’t going to tell them. There were occasional consequences to their actions, resulting in some blood, cracked teeth, shattered glasses and broken bones, but for the most part, the kids walked away from their fool-hardy tossing of safety caution. When these incidents occurred, the reaction of parents was often one of concern, but in the end, supportive healing and a lecture to not do whatever it was again was their response.

Helmets were never required for bicycle riding; there were no knee pads available at the sporting goods store, unless your child was to be a baseball catcher or hockey goalie, and a few bandages and a couple of broken bones were thought of as part of growing up. Safety was taught and older siblings might intervene in some instances, but it was up to each child to internalize the lesson to keep themselves safe.

By comparison, today’s helicopter parents are more like the cartoon drawing of the cowboy after regulatory assistance: it seems they would prefer to bubble wrap their children head to toe, if they are to be allowed outside at all. Kids are often not allowed to be on their own these days. One of the things that made that possible in the boomer days was that most families had several kids. The oldest were often charged with watching the younger ones, so it was not unusual to see a group of kids ranging in age from seven to 16 all playing together. In retrospect, that may not have been the wisest thing for safety as the harebrained schemes of the older kids filtered down to the younger ones.

Today there are more than 100 million additional people in the U.S. than fifty years ago, and with more people come more problems — so some measure of caution is in order — yet Mister B feels that surely there is some middle ground that should be the target for keeping kids safe. Perhaps boomer experiences were the extreme on the other end of the spectrum. It is true parents today have more to think about in terms of safety; add Internet safety to the list of usual kid safety themes of watching out for strangers, fire, electricity and water safety, bike safety, traffic safety and even playground safety. Nonetheless, Mister B feels sorry for today’s kids who can’t wander around, come across a stick with a nail it and have some fun for a few hours.

What was safety like for you, boomers?

Please note: This is an edited post originally published on May 17, 2015.