Innehållsförteckning för September 2020 från Reminisce Extra

WARM FUZZIES Envelop yourself in a warm, fluffy towel pulled directly from an Amba warming rack. Warmers are energy-efficient and protect towels from mildew. $218 and up ambaproducts.com REAL DISHES Radiate midcentury Hollywood Regency chic with bathroom organizers like these gems from Target’s Opalhouse line. $8 and up target.com WELL IN HAND A caddy is the bathtub version of a coffee table. This Shayna bamboo caddy from Mistana keeps books, candles, fresh flowers and even a cocktail dry while you soak. $30 wayfair.com RETRO BATH TIME Talk about a throwback: Mr. Bubble has returned—this time for adults. Milk Bath is made with coconut extract and relaxing Dream Bubble scent for a night of solid shut-eye. $5 mrbubble.com…

IN JUNE 1946, I TURNED 17, just in time to qualify for a summer job as a long-distance telephone operator with Pacific Bell Telephone in Oakland, California. The company actively recruited workers at my high school in Oakland, and the hourly wage was terrific—much better than what I was paid at the naval supply base where I’d worked the previous summer. With but a week’s training, I had to figure out call routes, take collect calls, distinguish sounds of different deposited coins and reach long-distance operators all over the United States. Often calls went to rural areas with party lines that required sequences of different rings. Every workday was exciting and sometimes emotionally charged. One particular day I’ll never forget: I handled calls from a phone booth at a naval…

WARDROBE INJUNCTION Bermuda shorts, hot pants, jeans, nylons, pants (for girls, at least)—all these styles at one time or another exposed wearers to the attention of the fashion police, if not the real police. Here’s a look back at several times when the latest thing got the hairy eyeball. MODESTY PROPOSAL Depending on one’s sex, showing leg was either informal or immoral. Up to midcentury, the suit was a man’s go-to outfit, from the office to a baseball game. Too-casual clothing, unless work related, was bad form; shorts, most informal of all, were for sport. But patrolling propriety was a lost cause: At Dartmouth College in 1930, 600 male students protested for the right to wear their “delegged” trousers. Women faced worse judgment. Even at beaches, police checked hemlines to…

FRIENDS ROAD TRIP At Reminisce, we love stories about young adventurers getting behind the wheel to see where the road takes them. If you ever did this with a bunch of friends, we want to hear all the secret details. Label your story and photos “Friends Road Trip.” AMUSEMENT PARKS Next year, two iconic parks, Six Flags (founded 1961) and Disney’s Magic Kingdom (founded 1971), celebrate milestones. Did you visit these parks in the early years? Tell us about your experiences. Label your story and photos “Amusement Parks.” KOREAN WAR With the approaching 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, we are gathering stories for a series of features. Label your story and photos “Korean War.” OLYMPICS Do you have a story about seeing the Olympics, either in…

Folks couldn’t get enough of Oklahoma!, a classic love triangle set in farm country. Test your recall of the songs from the 1943 Broadway sensation that ran for a then-unprecedented 2,212 performances. 1 Richard Rodgers composed the songs; his new partner, ___________, wrote the lyrics. 2 This female choreographer gets credit for the show’s innovative dance numbers. 3 “All the sounds of the earth are like music,” according to this jubilant song. 4 Curly McLain boasts, “Ain’t no finer rig I’m a-thinkin’” in this catchy tune. 5 Ado Annie laments, “But when I’m with a feller, I fergit!” as part of this ditty. 6 An ensemble emphasizes “territory folks should stick together” in this rousing number. 7 Laurey Williams tells Curly, “Your eyes mustn’t glow like mine” in this love…

WHEN I WAS 21, IN 1958, I lived in a pipe—actually a Quonset hut—with my husband, Glen, in the Vetsville area at the University of Colorado. Quonsets didn’t look like much, but they had charm. Our first purchase was a wool carpet that appeared to date to the Buchanan administration. I ended up hiding most bare spots with furniture; the rest I stood on when we had company. Next was the $5 sofa. I used ordinary gingham to cover the old mohair base. It was itchy seating, but better than nothing. I hung curtains by stringing them on rods at both top and bottom so they would lie flush against the windows on the curved walls. My decorating skills must have been better than I thought, because the university’s housing…

My nana, Margaret Kreidinger, was an expert seamstress. She made clothes for her children, and then for her grandchildren. I was the first grandchild, and she sewed outfits for me and my favorite doll, using scraps and old material to create new things. In 1956, when I was 7, I loved to watch Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on TV. Nana made me a cowgirl outfit with a faux red leather skirt, a fringed vest and even boot covers. The only thing she couldn’t make was a horse. One of her specialties was adding little designs and decorations to improve plain patterns. I was petite, and all my store-bought clothes needed her touch. As she measured and hemmed, we talked about what was happening in our lives. In 1967 she…

1933 IT’S A K IDS GAME Campbell’s adopted its Soup Kids, drawn by commercial illustrator Grace Drayton, in 1905. The mascots were so popular, they were made into a set of dolls. Use of the icons diminished in the ’30s—note how small the girl appears here—but Campbell’s brought them back in the mid-1950s. 1962 S LURPY SECONDS Where Campbell’s used illustrated mascots, Lipton’s showed real children in its ads and wasn’t afraid to have them looking messy, such as this little girl with noodle bits stuck to her chin. The message, like Lipton’s mix itself, is instant: Kids love it. 1962 CHECK IT O UT A striking graphic ad that plays on Campbell’s iconic red and white label, which was already more than 60 years old when this ran in…

My father, Ted, loved console TVs. I suspect it was because they were BIG. You felt like you were getting something for your money, even if it was an oversize box around an ordinary size screen. In the 1980s, he found one (at an estate sale, no doubt, for an excellent price) that he parked facing the bed in the master bedroom—perfect for The Tonight Show viewing. My mother, Ange, wasn’t thrilled. It worked for about three years. Then, with a sizzle and pop, the screen went black. So Dad plopped a slightly smaller console TV on top of it. Mom sighed. The second console died two years later. Surely we’d remove the carcasses and start anew? Oh, no. Mom and I watched in stunned silence as my brothers hoisted…

TELL US HOW TO FIND YOU Whether you send your submission via mail or email or post it online, include your full name, daytime phone number, email address and mailing address. If you have a post office box, tell us your street address too. HELP US SORT THINGS OUT Include the name of the department your submission is for (Motoring Memories, Growing Up, etc.) on the first page of your submission or in the email subject line. For any photos you submit, please identify the people, city, state and year the photo was taken. We reserve the right to use submissions in any section of our magazine, or elsewhere. We do not return unsolicited materials. Send quality photo reprints or email high-resolution JPEG files (300 dpi at 8x10) so you…

The golden days of September signaled the end of summer, and the start of school. In 1944, at Logan Elementary School in Wilmette, Illinois, our class prepared to face the dreaded Miss Myrtle Cash. She was a strict, old-fashioned schoolmarm, and just looking at her made our knees weak. I’d had a run-in with Miss Cash the previous year when, on a visit to her classroom, I absent-mindedly scraped the paint off the underside of the desk I was sitting at, and Miss Cash had publicly reprimanded me. AT THAT MOMENT I HATED SCHOOL, I HATED CADDIE WOODLAWN, AND I ESPECIALLY HATED MISS CASH. Now in Miss Cash’s fifth grade classroom, my best friend, Marjorie, and I liked going to the reading corner, where Marjorie read aloud to me. Marjorie…

Allied forces invade Sicily, and America mobilizes for war. By year’s end, two-thirds of the U.S. economy supports the war, with women picking up the manufacturing slack—more than 310,000 in the aircraft industry. Meat, cheese, canned milk and fish are added to the ration list. Film companies release twice-weekly newsreels on the war, and radio broadcasts carry frontline reports. The New York Yankees beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, but baseball’s superstars are off serving their country. These words are in common use, according to Merriam-Webster. BAZOOKA: Officially a rocket launcher, this portable antitank weapon resembles the harmless novelty instrument. BOBBY-SOXER: Frank Sinatra’s young female fans wear rolled-down white socks with their saddle shoes. BOFFO: Variety magazine’s term for a big box-office success, such as the popular…

Paulette Goddard“Any woman who would tell her age would tell anything.” Spritely, athletic and dark-haired, Paulette Goddard was far from the lithe blond temptresses popular in Hollywood’s Golden Age—but no less irresistible. Her good friend and writer Anita Loos once said of her: “Gentlemen prefer blondes, until they get a load of Paulette.” On screen, Goddard was best playing resilient, smart women such as Lt. Joan O’Doul in the 1943 war film So Proudly We Hail, the only role of her career that earned her an Oscar nomination. She broke into showbiz as a Ziegfeld girl on Broadway. Accounts of her early life, including her birth year, vary—Goddard was famously secretive about it—but there is no doubt that her first stage appearance in New York was in No Foolin’ (1926),…

Wearing a suit and fedora, carrying the black bag with his instruments and medicines, my father, Chester Widmeyer, was obviously a doctor. Doctors in the 1950s were given respect second only to ministers—depending on the minister. Dad came from a family of tough West Virginia miners who moved to Akron, Ohio, to work in the tire factories after his father got black lung disease. One of 11 children, Dad was the only one to go to college, first becoming a pharmacist, then going to medical school at Ohio State University. He was the oldest student in his class. Dad’s office was above the pharmacy where he had first dispensed medicines. He made hospital rounds early in the morning, then held office hours, followed by house calls, which my mother scheduled…

Constructing a timeline to research each ancestor is important. Try to locate birth, marriage and death information; census localities; and military records. Then each person can be viewed in the context of events happening in their region, their country and around the world. Carl August Neddermyer grew up in highly ethnic Chicago neighborhoods, surrounded by others from Germany, Italy and several other countries. In the 1910 census, his mother states she is married, yet she and Carl, 15, live alone. Two years later, Carl married Helen, just three months before he registered for the WWI draft. Prohibition was in full swing from 1920-’33, and during that time Carl ran an underground trade. The 1920 census lists him as a tool-and-die maker. In 1930 he is listed as an engineer in…

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