Innehållsförteckning för January 2023 från Reminisce Extra

Lola was a white dog, with brown patches on one shoulder and her head. She may have been a mutt, but she was a natural service dog. We lived in Reading, north of Boston, in a large house on several acres of wooded land in the 1950s and ’60s. Lola was wherever we kids were, playing games and sledding. She even let my sister Cindy dress her. My brother Steve was born with arthrogryposis in his legs. After each of his multiple surgeries, he relearned to walk, leaning on Lola. She seemed to know when to start and stop as Steve took tentative steps. Even when Steve could walk again, Lola stayed near him. Our younger brother, Jamie, learned to walk at Lola’s side, too. She never flinched if he…

From the time I was born 80 years ago until I married at 22, my home was a three-bedroom, two-story colonial house in Eggertsville, outside Buffalo. It was a good fit for our family—my parents, Walter and Pearl, my brother, Michael, my sister, Barbara, and me. It was a nice white clapboard house built in the 1940s. Its only downside was the wood siding, which meant frequent painting—and it was a huge project each time. When Michael and I were small, the neighbors would get together every summer to paint one of their houses. For our immediate neighbors, this system meant that each house got a fresh coat of paint every four years. When Michael and I were old enough to swing a brush, our parents drafted us into the…

When I graduated from high school in Spokane in 1966, my boyfriend, Rick, surprised me with a Lane cedar-lined hope chest for a graduation present. I’d told him my friend received a chest from her fiance for Christmas, so I was thrilled that he took the hint. Rick and I weren’t engaged yet, but we were certain we’d get married. My family teased me about planning for marriage so young—I was 17—but I loved my hope chest and enjoyed buying household items to store in it for my future home: place mats, napkins, pillowcases, measuring cups, pie plates. We married three years later. My chest moved with me to Germany, to several midwestern states, and back to the Pacific Northwest. It was always a treasured piece of furniture in our…

Old cars have always fascinated me. I’ve owned models from 1949 and 1956, and several from 1957. While in Texas on a business trip in 1999, I spotted an ad for this vehicle in a local buyers guide. After returning home I called the owner and arranged to make the trip back south to look at it. I found that the car was complete and mostly rust free. I rented a U-Haul trailer and towed it home to Wisconsin, where I had it painted, overhauled the engine and did some minor customization. This wagon has become one of my favorites because of its rarity. A one-year-only model, it turns heads whenever I drive it. People admire it but often can’t identify it by model or year. I think part of…

SURPRISE VICTORY Days shy of 32 years old, Arthur Ashe, above right, is the past-his-prime underdog when he beats upstart favorite Jimmy Connors, 22, above left, in a strategically brilliant match at Wimbledon. Ashe is the first Black man to win Wimbledon, but not the first Black player: Althea Gibson won in 1957. TV MAINSTAYS Three of today’s longest-running programs debut, including game show Wheel of Fortune and sketch show Saturday Night Live (both NBC), and ABC’s Good Morning America. All weathered cast changes, but Wheel of Fortune had the fewest: Pat Sajak became the host in 1981; Vanna White, below, joined a year later. NEW LEADER Britain’s Conservative Party elects Margaret Thatcher as leader. Four years later, her party wins the majority in parliament and she becomes the U.K.’s…

We moved from the small Kansas town of Kingman to Wichita in 1951. Our little ranch house was the epitome of cookie-cutter housing. Two Dutch elms the city planted flanked each front yard on the block. Although the houses were alike, the families living in them certainly weren’t. Very quickly after we all moved in, new landscaping and other changes appeared at each property, as if to say “This is who we are.” Some houses sported a TV antenna, which was a big status symbol at the time. The first houses with televisions became the most popular on the street. The first family near us to get a TV had two preschool children. The parents magnanimously invited all the neighborhood kids to join them after school. Kids up through middle…

West Coast architect Clifford May designed the first ranch in 1931, based on California’s Spanish colonial dwellings. Both the original colonials and May’s updated versions had sprawling, single-story footprints, gently sloped or flat roofs, and distinct horizontal lines. Unlike the two-story or saltbox styles back East, the ranch had an open floor plan, with low or no walls separating kitchen, dining and living areas. Rear sliding doors oriented focus to the backyard, where the family relaxed on a patio or around a pool. Most ranches were under 1,300 square feet, but picture windows made them feel bigger. The style suited warm climates, but posed problems in wet or cold areas—rain pools on a flat roof, and sprawling, single-story houses are harder to heat. But the design was adaptable, affordable and…

Lifting the flip top on a box of rainbow-hued crayons is like opening a time capsule. Binney & Smith, the company behind the beloved Crayola brand, introduced the first box of eight waxy coloring sticks in 1903. While Europe was the birthplace of the modern crayon—made from a mixture of charcoal and oil—Alice Binney, a teacher and the wife of company co-founder Edwin Binney, suggested Binney & Smith create an inexpensive alternative to the imported versions. The company, based in Pennsylvania, already knew how to manufacture steadfast pigment—automotive tires sported Binney & Smith carbon black, and farmers dressed up their barns with paint tinted with Binney & Smith red oxide. Alice Binney dreamed up the name Crayola, combining the French craie (chalk) with “ola,” a short form of oleaginous or…

Star Trek premiered in 1966, shortly before my sixth birthday. I loved the series, and my favorite character was Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, the chief engineer on the USS Enterprise. I am not sure if it was Scotty’s devotion to his job or that he was Scottish, one of my nationalities, that made me appreciate the character. I was quite saddened when the original series went off the air in 1969, but I continued to be a fan through the books, movies and TV reruns. In 1983, I learned of a Star Trek convention featuring James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty. The event was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, driving distance from my home in the Quad Cities. I was in my early 20s, but I wasn’t comfortable driving to the…

My father, Keith Bourne, served in the Navy from 1982 to 1985. In November 1983 the ship he served on, the USS Leftwich, was sailing along the coasts of Washington and Oregon when it was caught in a severe storm. The waves were 30 feet high, causing the destroyer to roll nearly onto its side. Crew members who happened to be walking in the passageway during one of these rolls wound up walking along the seam between the bulkhead and the deck. An officer was nearly washed overboard but saved himself by grabbing on to the lifelines. After that, only the lookouts were allowed on deck until the storm subsided three days later. One day during the storm, my father and another sailor were mess cranking, the informal name for…

When I was born in the early 1960s, my young parents lived in a row house in Allentown. IBM offered my father, Robert Bauer, a job at its offices in Endicott, New York. I wasn’t quite a year old and my mother, Margie, was pregnant with my brother Eric. So Dad had to go to Endicott alone to look for a house that would suit his growing family. Mom gave Dad a wish list, but most important for her was that the house have a big yard. She’d grown up in Oregon and wanted her kids to enjoy the outdoors, too. They chose a brick ranch built on a hill with a driveway leading to a one-car garage. All the houses in our neighborhood looked different from each other on…

BASHFUL BALLERINAS Shy and awkward, we girls were not happy when Mom enrolled us in ballet lessons in Brick Town. After three years, she put an end to our misery, but not before several dreaded dance recitals, including this one in 1965 when I was 9 and Jen was 5. ELIZABETH MAHON POINT PLEASANT, NJ CUTE SALUTE When I was 8, I took dance lessons from three different studios in Fresno, but tap was my first love. This military number is from 1945. JOAN ZOLDOSKE • CLOVIS, CA DOUBLE TAP My tap partner Phyllis Ribble, right, and I are clutching the silver dollars we won in our town’s dance contest in 1935, when we were 11. AVIS CLAEYS • TUCSON, AZ MISS ALYCE’S DANCE SCHOOL Mom loved to sew, but…

Back in the late 1990s, I bought a book of posters designed by artist Peter Max at a used bookstore. A few words about the artist: He was born in Germany in 1937 as Peter Max Finkelstein. His family moved to avoid the unrest during World War II and finally settled in Brooklyn, New York. During the 1950s, Max studied art at the Louvre Museum in Paris and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He went on to be very influential in the pop art movement, creating colorful surrealist artwork for major events such as Super Bowls and the New York City Marathon. The book of posters I found contained 16 loosely bound reproductions of some of his most famous pieces on heavy, glossy paper suitable for…