Innehållsförteckning för July 2022 från Reminisce Extra

My parents took up camping when my brothers were small, and they certainly didn’t quit when I came along several years later. I was conveniently born in the fall, which meant that by the time summer camping season rolled around, I could join them. I dread to think what those trips were like for my mother, with two rough-and-tumble boys under 11 and a baby. But she and my dad were never at a loss for real-life tales of the wild for the rest of their days. Among its many pleasures, camping offers fine copy for the family history book. My favorite story is the one where Dad, coaxing his bacon to a crisp over the Coleman stove one morning in the Great Smoky Mountains, looks up to find a…

On my first day of classes as a college sophomore in Stevens Point in the late 1950s, an instructor had all of us students introduce ourselves. I learned that one classmate had gone to a high school that was about a dozen miles from mine in Phillips. After class, that girl was waiting for me by the door. She asked me whether I had a car and would be willing to give her rides home on the weekend. That’s how I met Carole. The next year, she transferred to another college and we wrote a few letters to stay in touch. In one, Carole told me she’d be home for Christmas. She explained that her brother-in-law was playing in a band for a party on New Year’s Eve. Carole wanted…

When my wife, Maryann, and I started our family, we began driving family-type vehicles: she, minivans, and I, station wagons and SUVs. I do like my Ford Explorer, but I dreamed of driving sports cars with manual transmissions—driving a car with an automatic transmission isn’t really driving at all! After retiring, I started looking for a small four-cylinder sports car with a stick shift. I figured that Maryann would go along with my idea once I explained how much less gas a fun little car used than the Explorer, which could be reserved for winter weather and for hauling passengers. On the local Craigslist site, I came across this little five-speed, turbocharged beauty. The best part is that I got it for a fraction of the price I thought I’d…

UPCOMING FEATURES THEN & NOW We’ve done Then & Now Childhood and Then & Now Couples. Let’s keep the fun going. How about Then & Now: The Family Pet, Then & Now: Houses or Apartments, Then & Now: Appliances, and Then & Now: Sports? Tell us the story behind your choice. For House or Appliance entries, please include images with people in them. Submit by Sept. 1 with the label “Then & Now.” HOPE CHEST Did you or someone you know collect items in a hope chest as a young woman? Submit story and images by Sept. 1 labeled “Hope Chest.” DEPARTMENTS Submissions for our many standing departments are welcome. Below are a few favorites. Still can’t decide where your story belongs? Send it along and let us figure it…

My mother, Gilberte, was born in 1927 in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris, France. Her father, Gabriel Farge, was a French officer in the First World War. Gilberte was a teenager during World War II, and lived through four years of Nazi occupation. She will always remember June 6, 1944, D-Day. “My father came running into our home, shouting that the Americans were landing in Normandy.” She recalls that the people of the city were crying, laughing and dancing in the streets. She even remembers someone raising an American flag at the courthouse. After four years of German occupation and war, “It was like being born again.” My father, John Crowell, was part of the Normandy invasion, and was among the Americans who entered Paris after the city’s liberation in…

My parents wanted a different kind of life. In 1959, they sold their home in Chicago and bought a new 28-foot Airstream to travel and live on the road full time. When our adventure began, I was 18 months old. For the next few years, that Airstream was the only home I knew. My father became a traveling salesman, and we went all through the West. I had birthdays in Idaho and Christmases in Arizona. An only child, I learned to entertain myself. This nomadic existence continued until I was 6, when my parents decided to settle down so that I could attend school. Having grown up with frigid winters, my parents chose to live in Orange County, California. They were devoted travelers by this point. Each June, the day…

MARCH 1, 1872 Yellowstone is the first National Park. President Ulysses S. Grant sees works by Thomas Moran, who traveled with the geological survey in 1871, and is persuaded to protect the area. Moran’s 1872 canvas The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, right, was particularly influential. JUNE 21, 1880 Harry Yount, a Union veteran of the Civil War, is Yellowstone’s first gamekeeper. A leathery, tough outdoorsman nicknamed Rocky Mountain Harry, Yount’s main duty was to protect the wildlife from indiscriminate slaughter. Hunting was banned at Yellowstone in 1883. APRIL 24, 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt dedicates the basalt arch that bears his name. In Gardiner, Montana, at the park’s north end, the arch wasn’t meant to be named for Roosevelt, but he happened to be vacationing in Yellowstone and agreed to…

After high school, my mother, Mary Shine of Queens, New York, took a course at Brooklyn Telegraph School to learn to operate a telegraph key to send and receive Morse code. In 1918, she went to work at the Postal Telegraph-Cable Co. in Manhattan. Telegraph operators had to supply their own equipment, so Mary bought this semiautomatic, or bug, telegraph key, which has stayed in our family. At her workplace, Mary met another telegrapher, John Schwenk. He was self-taught, and had served as a telegraph specialist for the Army during World War I. After being discharged, he worked as an operator for the New York Central Railroad Co. He rented a telegraph key so that he could moonlight at the Postal Telegraph-Cable Co. There, he noticed the pretty red-haired telegrapher…

In the early summer of 1947, while flying near Washington’s Mount Rainier, amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted a fleet of “mirror bright” objects traveling at what he calculated to be supersonic speeds. He told a local reporter that the flashing objects skipped like saucers thrown over water, a description amplified in a Chicago Sun headline two days later: “Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot.” Similar reports of sightings were the raw materials for a frenzy of interest in comics and movies about alien invasion and outer space in the coming years. With the phrase firmly fixed in popular culture, Merriam-Webster gave it an entry that year.…

Earning money by carrying a bag of golf clubs for someone sounded like a pretty good job to me as a 10-year-old in 1949. So one Saturday, I tagged along with my friend to his caddying job at Plum Brook Country Club in Sandusky, Ohio. I sat around and waited until I’d almost given up on the idea when the caddie master hollered, “Hey kid, you want to go out?” He helped me shoulder a bag of clubs and pointed to the first tee box. “Hustle! Your man is waiting!” My duties for Mr. Walker included running back to the practice putting green to retrieve his sunglasses, staying very still—and in the correct spot—while he hit, and keeping track of where his ball landed. After four hours of toting his…

GO BIG OR GO HOME Land Yacht is family’s guide through Airstream country. My father owned a successful business in New Jersey, but as he aged, the sinus condition he suffered from all his life worsened. His doctor advised him to relocate to a warmer climate. My parents didn’t want to quit living in New Jersey entirely. Instead, they bought a 33-foot trailer. That fall of 1952 was the start of our annual trips to Florida to spend the winter at Briny Breezes, a trailer park on the ocean between Lake Worth and Delray Beach. Today, Briny Breezes is one of just two mobile home parks in Florida that incorporated as towns. At the time, my brothers and I didn’t think about how unique it was to leave New Jersey…

With a family of six, my parents preferred camping as the most economical means of travel. In 1964, they bought a big orange canvas tent and all the gear. We lived in Reading, Pennsylvania, and went on many weekend jaunts with friends to Ricketts Glen State Park. Our biggest adventure was a two-week tour through New England and eastern Canada. I don’t know how my parents survived putting up and taking down that tent so often on that trip. I was 9, and I’m sure that my brothers and I were absolutely no help. We traded in our tent in 1966 for a Coleman pop-up trailer. It was wonderful because it was easier to put up, and we were finally off the ground, with more room to sleep. We also…

When Marquis Mills Converse devised his over-the-ankle sneaker in 1917, it wasn’t a direct answer to a need in the marketplace. He had started Converse Rubber Co. nine years earlier in Malden, Massachusetts, making a variety of cold-weather rubber items, including galoshes and duck-hunting boots. But the business was seasonal. Converse thought of making athletic shoes as a way of keeping his factory operating through the summer. Those early shoes likely were designed with soccer and the basketball-like netball in mind. But around the time of the First World War, basketball was becoming popular in cities because it was a relatively compact game that could be played anywhere. Converse’s sneakers had features that seemed a good fit for basketball playing, including an ankle-hugging design. But sales were slow. It wasn’t…

QUAINT ATTRACTIONS These pictures of his family spending the day at Santa Claus Land in southwestern Indiana in 1959 are among several in Reminisce’s archives donated by Bruce Thompson of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Now called Holiday World, the park is still a destination, but most of these unique rides and entertainments are long gone. COMING UP: Nature postcards Post your photos: REMINISCE.COM/SUBMIT-A-STORY…