Halloween 1970: Fifty Years Ago

 

Fifty years ago I was a lion for Halloween.

FIFTY YEARS AGO! That's amazing to me. What's equally amazing is that I remember--I think, anyway--going with my mother to the Woolworth's at North DeKalb Mall and buying this costume. Or do I just remember her bringing it home to me? I'm not sure. I have a very vague memory of the yellow Volkswagen Beetle we had then ("we" I write, as if I sometimes drove it), and bringing in a shopping bag containing a box containing this costume.

And this is what Halloween costumes looked like in 1970: a plastic mask you put over your face with an elastic band, doing your best to align your eyes with the imperfectly-placed eyeholes, and a thin plastic (vinyl? I'm not sure what it was actually made of) one-piece suit that was an appropriate color for whatever you were supposed to be, that had a picture representing what you were supposed to be on the chest. Costumes like this didn't so much make you look like the thing you were supposed to be as make you look like someone wearing some kind of weird advertisement for the thing you were supposed to be.

The first picture was taken in the basement ("fellowship hall"? I'm not sure what it was actually called.) of the old Ingleside Presbyterian Church in Scottdale. Back in the 1970s, Ingleside used to have Halloween gatherings every year (though I suspect they were on a Friday or Saturday night, not necessarily on the actual date of Halloween); there's a picture I'd love to post but which I can't find, taken at Ingleside the year my brother Jeff dressed up in a fantastic Cookie Monster outfit Mom made for him.

The second picture was taken at our house in Clarkston, the living room of which apparently had a floral motif. I don't know if the Trick or Treat bag I'm holding is in an empty pre-trick-or-treating state or is full of candy. I'm not sure if I actually went trick or treating in our neighborhood or not; I have no memory of it. It's possible that the second picture above was actually taken before the first one.

Another amazing thing is thinking about how different the country, and my world, were when these pictures were taken. The Vietnam War was still going on; Nixon was still in his first term as president; the Watergate scandal was still a couple of years in the future, and the first moon landing was less than a year and a half in the past. Dad still had another week as a twenty-five-year-old, and Mom wouldn't turn twenty-five for another year. All of my grandparents were still alive, and several of my cousins had yet to be born. First grade for me was still nearly three whole years away.

Nearly Everything That Was Wonderful About My Youth

This picture, from one of our family vacations to Florida around (I'm guessing) 1978, illustrates nearly everything that was wonderful about my youth:

First of all, we're in Florida, and among my most treasured memories are those of our annual family vacations. And, as you can see, Jeff and I are playing miniature golf--you probably can't read it, but the oval sign at the left edge of the frame says, "No. 9  - Woolly Mammoth - Par 2." Was there, for a young boy in the 1970s, any place cooler than a miniature golf course with statues of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures and monsters of various kinds? (The answer is No, no place cooler--though admittedly quite a few places equally cool; many of them also happened to be in Florida.)

If you look closely, you can see that Jeff and I are wearing Star Trek and Star Wars shirts. Jeff's shirt has a picture of Chewbacca on it; mine features the star ship Enterprise. There was nothing more wonderful back then, nothing more wonder-filled and pure, than the love of an eight or ten or twelve year old boy for Star Trek and Star Wars. (Equally wonderful, though, I will admit, was the obsession we had back then for the collection of Micronauts and Shogun warriors that we were amassing at home...but that's another story.)

Most important, though, is the fact that somebody took this picture. Somebody cared enough to preserve this moment on film so that more than forty years after the fact I can appreciate it. Somebody loved us enough to have bought us Star Trek and Star Wars shirts, enough to take us to Florida, enough to pay our admission to the miniature golf place.

And that is the most wonderful thing of all.

Decorated Cakes

It's a pretty wonderful thing to be a kid in the mid-1970s with a mother who can make cakes like this:

(As I write this, Easter 2020 is less than three weeks away, though the wisdom of the usual Easter festivities right now seems in doubt, given the coronavirus pandemic and the social distancing and stay-at-home orders with which we've been living for the past couple of weeks. Maybe I can convince Anna and the girls to recreate the above cake for us this year anyway.)

Mom took a cake decorating class sometime around (I'm guessing) 1975, I think at Sears of all places. Maybe it wasn't Sears; that doesn't matter, what matters is that I remember being amazed that my mother could make these beautiful cakes, which in my memory she was doing almost constantly, for every occasion, such as the one above, which must have been an Easter cake, probably around 1976, and this one:

If you can't tell, it's a Scooby-Doo cake, and must have been for Jeff's birthday, which apparently we celebrated (at least in part) at my grandmother's house in Tucker (where this picture was taken). (And oh how I wish I could remove my ridiculous grinning self from this picture, but I don't want to misrepresent my past, and plus also I remember the navy winter coat I'm wearing here, with its fur-lined hood, with an indefensible fondness. One year I wore it as my Trick-or-Treating costume; I zipped it all the way up and said I was an Eskimo. But I digress...)

Until I found the picture below, I remembered this one as a Scooby-Doo cake; I must have been conflating it in my mind with the one above. I remember Mom meticulously decorating Yogi Bear with frosting stars applied with a piping bag and tip:

I'm happy that my children continue the baking tradition. In fact, after I click Publish on this post, I'm going to eat a piece of the Oeey-Gooey Butter Cake that Elyse made for us tonight. It's not decorated, but I'm excited about it nonetheless.

Me and Mom in the Kitchen, Lilburn, Georgia, ca. 1981

We’re both wearing blue, and neither of us looks all that happy. Not unhappy, just…normal, average, the way most of us look most of the time. We were just living our lives, starting our day (whatever random day that happened to be), getting our breakfast together—in front of me is a plate of pancakes, and also a bottle of syrup, the same kind I use today, I think; in the background, on the left edge of the frame about halfway down, you can see that there’s still some coffee in the coffee pot.

This picture shows an everyday scene of such mundanity that I doubt most people would think it worth pointing a camera at, especially back then, before digital cameras and smartphones with built-in cameras, when film had to be purchased, and then you had to pay to have it developed after you’d used it. I’m not sure why Dad took this picture--I’m pretty sure it was my father who took it; who else could it have been? Maybe it actually was a special day, though I can't find here any clues as to what that might have been (a birthday? Easter? the first or last day of school?). Maybe Dad was testing a new camera, or using up the last exposure on a roll of film so he could take it to be developed. Maybe he did it just to annoy Mom.

Whatever the impetus for this picture’s existence, I’m glad I have it. It offers a glimpse into my youth I treasure. I'm pretty sure that at the moment this picture was taken, Mom and I were mostly taking that moment for granted. I had, I’m quite sure, no idea I would someday look at this scene and be happy to revisit it. I’m sure I just wanted to eat my pancakes. I hope I enjoyed them.

What I hope even more, though, is that it would have occurred to me, at least every once in a while, to be grateful I had a mother who would make me pancakes, and who on other days made French toast, or creamed chipped beef on toast (sometimes without the beef), or bacon and eggs, or any one of a whole host of other breakfasts she regularly made for us. I am grateful now for all of that.

And though I'm sure it would have been surprising news at the time to say that that kitchen would ever be an object of appreciation, all these years later I have a great deal of affection for it--linoleum floor, tacky wallpaper, and all. On the counter, in front of the syrup, is a little container Mom used to screw on to our blender to make...what? I have no idea. And behind me, just at my left elbow, you can see the red bun warmer that we had for years. Above that, just under the vent hood--where some years later a microwave oven would go--hangs an assortment of spatulas and ladles and strainers. And, as I pointed out earlier, on the left edge of the frame you can just make out the coffee maker. Mr. Coffee? Maybe. We had one at one point, but I don't remember what we had then. Proctor Silex? Hamilton Beach? Perhaps. Maybe it doesn't matter.

But in a way, it does matter. These little details, in their very ordinariness, their everydayness, are among the things I love to see when I look back at these old pictures. Most of them are pretty mundane, with nothing special about them, but put together enough ordinary little details and they just might add up to a whole past.

Remember what Emily asks the State Manager near the end of Our Town? "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" The answer, of course, is "No."

Maybe one of the reasons I love looking back on these kinds of pictures is because they help me realize life, even if what the picture shows happened thirty-five years ago. In one of her short stories, Amy Hempel writes something like, "looking back shows us more than looking at." Sometimes looking back is good enough. If you realize life in retrospect, that still counts.

Chris and Jeff Rocking Out in Jeff's Bedroom, Lilburn, GA, 1980

Jeff’s wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and mine says Star Wars, but there was no rivalry between those two science fiction universes back in late 1979 or early 1980 when this picture was taken. One was an old TV show that had been off the air for more than a decade, the other was a fairly recent, wildly popular movie—but just a movie, singular, and not a whole franchise, or, for some people, a way of life. (By the time this picture was taken, Star Trek: The Motion Picture may have been released, but it wasn’t very good so I don’t think it counts. Also, I don’t think The Empire Strikes Back had come out yet, and besides, Star Wars is the only real Star Wars, as far as I’m concerned.)

“Star Trek” and Star Wars aren’t the only science fiction represented in this photograph: on the top left you can see a Shogun Warrior, whose fists (if I remember correctly) could be shot from his arms like missiles at the press of a hidden button, and who probably had other weapons as well. On the shelf directly below that is a space vehicle of some kind from the Micronauts line.

At one point Jeff and I had quite a collection of Shogun Warriors and Micronauts. Among my many wonderful memories of childhood are the times when we could convince my mother to take us to Lionel Playworld, which was on Buford Highway in Doraville (though I may not have known either of those facts at the time), and which was (as far as I was concerned) the greatest toy store in the world. I can’t recall how much was actually bought when we would go; I think we had maybe ten dollars each saved—though in the late 1970s, ten dollars was a lot—and we could buy one or two things. Just being in Lionel Playworld was enough, even if I didn’t get to buy everything that caught my eye. We did eventually amass quite a collection, as I said, but most of the toys we had we got for Christmas or our birthdays.

Of course, most people might not even notice the Shogun Warrior and the Micronaut. The focus of the picture is me and Jeff in all our youthful, untrained musical glory. I got the guitar for Christmas just a few months (or maybe even weeks, or days) before this picture was taken. It was a black Memphis Les Paul copy, which had a mostly hollow body that was badly prone to microphonics. My amp, which isn’t in this picture (or in Jeff’s room at all), was a twenty-watt Crate amp.

This wasn’t originally the guitar I was going to get; Dad had an Explorer copy on layaway at Joe’s Music in Norcross, but I changed my mind at some point and decided I wanted the Les Paul. Though it’s been nearly forty years, I sometimes think about that and wish I’d gotten the Explorer.

The drums may have been more my idea than Jeff’s, I don’t know. I was eager to put together a band, and figured the guy in the bedroom right next to mine was a good candidate for the drums. How interested he really was, apart from a level of enthusiasm than an older brother can sometimes inspire, I don’t know, but he never really learned to play those toy drums. At one point, a year or two later, I somehow managed to get him outfitted with a bass, but we never really coalesced into a band. (Interestingly, it was that instrument, a cheap copy of a Fender Telecaster bass, that my cousin Scott played when he and I were in the band with Roy, so I did, in a manner of speaking, achieve my end.)

It took me a few years, but I finally realized that I don’t actually have any musical talent. Not enough, anyway, to become the working musician I once aspired to be, and definitely not enough to even approach the skill of the guitarists who were (or would become, in the months and years after this picture was taken) my idols: Steve Howe, Steve Morse, and especially Alex Lifeson. Within five or six years of this picture being taken, Jeff would become a much better guitar player than I was.

But this picture doesn’t remind me of lost dreams or a lack of talent—though I will admit that those are things I still occasionally struggle with. This picture reminds me of how great it was to be young and to have hopes and aspirations, and to have a brother you could try to rope into being involved in them, and, perhaps most important of all, how fortunate I was to have a mother who would put up with all the noise coming out of my bedroom (small though it was, that Crate amp I had could really wail), and who could macramé a lion for your brother’s bedroom wall, and take you to Lionel Playworld so you could dream of one day owning the entire collection of both Shogun Warriors and Micronauts.

Notes from a Midlife Crisis

When Socrates insisted that "the unexamined life is not worth living," most people agree that he was encouraging us to examine our interior lives, the ideas and beliefs and motivations and choices and reactions that propel us through the world. Ever since I turned 50 a few months ago, however, I've been equally interested in doing some exterior examination: How have I changed over the years? Do the physical changes I've gone through in the last few decades--the added pounds, the new wrinkles, the ever-multiplying gray hairs and slowly-receding hair line (and, if I'm really honest, the additional chins...*sigh*)--say anything about the interior changes that I've also experienced?

Yeah, probably. I don't know. Maybe.

But there's one thing I can say: My hair has changed quite a bit over the years, but my hair style hasn't changed at all. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, indeed.

The above picture is me from sometime around 1977 until July of 2017, approximately every thirteen or fourteen years. Maybe one of the reasons looking back on my life like this is valuable is because, seeing myself at ten, at twenty-three, at thirty-eight, I can remember many wonderful things from my life at those times, and, if I'm smart (and that's a big if!), it prompts me to count all the wonderful things there are in my life right now, even if I am (gulp!) fifty years old. Midlife may not be quite as much fun or as free as childhood, or young adulthood, or not-young-but-still-not-old adulthood, but it's still life, and that's worth a lot.

Also, I find a great deal of pleasure in this Peanuts strip from 1973, drawn when Charles M. Schulz himself was fifty:

For Laura

Six months ago today someone who was very special to me lost her life-long battle with depression. I can't tell you how sorry I am she's gone.

Her name was Laura Travis when I got to know her, but for more than half of her life her name was Laura Caudle. She was only 14 when we met, 15 when this picture was taken, 46 the last time I saw her, and just a few weeks short of her 48th birthday when she died. She is survived by her sister, Kate; her husband of twenty-five years, Keith; her daughter, Lisa; and two grandchildren.

I am grateful that I knew her when I did. She was good for me when I was 16 and 17; it was a great gift to be close to someone who was smart and funny and loved books. It was because of her that I read Stranger in a Strange Land and learned to play backgammon. She helped shape who I am today.

We grew up and went our separate ways, as people do, and stayed only loosely in touch as adults; we both married people who were good for us, and had kids, and led our own lives, and, frankly, probably didn't think about each other all that often. But the world feels emptier without her in it.