The benefits of being a really old guy

Knowing dark history is the surest way not to repeat it; like turning Germany, a democracy, over to a dictator and winding up with over 50 million killed in World War II. But what about us oldsters who have lived a chunk of history and would do it again if we could? For instance:  

In 1936, at age 5, I stood on the sidewalk and watched some old men in their 30s dig an asphalt trench in Bixby Road next to our Long Beach, Calif., home. They were sweaty, dirty and probably penniless, but cheerful; grateful to have jobs in the Great Depression. They gave me a piece of tar to chew. They said they were with the Work Projects Administration, FDR’s historic New Deal. When I said I wanted to be like them when I grew up, they slapped their thighs and roared with laughter.  

One would happily revisit a loving mom in the early 1930s leaning over a blue oak bed kissing a post-toddler son goodnight after reading from one of three original Winnie the Pooh books by A.A. Milne. Published in the 1920s, they were given by a Brit businessman working in Southern California, a loving mom’s between-husbands beau, who later died defending England against Hitler’s war machine. “They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace; Christopher Robin went down with Alice. A soldier’s life is terrible hard, says Alice.”  

Terrible things scarred the 1930s. However, if you were lucky enough to be 6 in 1937, you could have seen the first showings of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." The only thing that might mar a Saturday afternoon at a downtown theater was the black-and-white Pathe News shorts showing in brutal detail “The Rape of Nanking” by Japanese soldiers. A bloody harbinger of World War II, when the Chinese were good guys and the Japanese were not. 

The original "King Kong" movie was also unsettling (to some). Grandma Nancy Harriman,  a Long Beach grande dame, took little sister and me. As Kong climbed NYC’s Empire State Building and peered in a window at scantily clad Fay Wray, little sister screamed and we had to scurry from the theater. I was furious, and still am. But then tiny Margaret from Glasgow, beloved family live-in cook and surrogate mom for some 25 years, took this 6-year-old aboard the USS Lexington (sunk in a 1942 Coral Sea battle) visiting Long Beach Harbor. Elevators the size of warehouses disgorged scurrying sailors onto the swarming flight deck where Navy fighter planes taxied off the giant carrier and went “climbing high,” as the old Army Air Corps song went, “into the sky.” 

If you had the good fortune to be 7 in 1938 and lived a brief bike ride from Gavin's drug store, you could have spent glorious hours with the first Superman comic book. It cost a dime. A cherry phosphate at the soda fountain cost half that. Same for the good humor man's “milk nickel” ice cream bar from his tinkling truck. So get one or both and stretch out for free on the linoleum floor with Superman. Owner Eddie Gavin, a parent, was not about to toss you out. (That first Superman recently sold for $6 million. Who knew?)

This really old guy’s mom, a late 1920s collegiate flapper, amassed an imposing assortment of 78 RPM pop music recordings over the years. King Cole Trio, Mills Brothers, Bing and The Andrews Sisters, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Peggy Lee, Ink Spots, and international soloists Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, the big bands. This preteen’s first romantic stirrings were not over movie stars but big band singers June Christy, Liltin’ Martha Tilton and Kitty Kallen. The first pop recordings I remember from the living room Victrola featured jazz men Slim Gailliard and Slam Stewart scatting "Flat Foot Floogie With A Floy Floy," 1937, and Bing crooning "Sweet Leilani," 1938. 

If you were lucky enough to be 8 in 1939, you could have seen new movies like "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone with the Wind." And the first black-and-white Tarzan films starring Olympic swim champ Johnny Weissmuller. If you were so fortunate as to be 10 years old in the fifth grade on Dec. 8, 1941, you would have listened on Mrs. Smith's radio, brought from home, to President Roosevelt declare war upon  Japan: "Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a day which will live in infamy ..." After school, we warriors perched in backyard trees with slingshots waiting for German Stuka dive bombers. When they failed to show, we switched enemies and sang, from Snow White, "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to war we go ... we'll blast the Jap right off the map, hi ho, hi ho." 

The pity of growing up in the 1930s and '40s was that we had no smartphones, no apps, no computers, no video games, or TV! Life was cruel; we couldn’t text! Little boys had to play with marbles, yo-yos, and toy soldiers and construct balsa wood fighter planes from model kits. Deprived of electronic luxuries, we built underground forts, tree houses and played tackle football in vacant lots, of which there were then many in SoCal. But, poor urchins, we played without uniforms, coaches, officials, cheering parents or press coverage. 

Confidentially, it wasn’t all comic books and milk nickels back at the drugstore. As we ruffians aged, we pilfered Lucky Strike cigarettes in the original green package and then in white, after The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers Magazine ads explained that “Lucky Strike green has gone to war." And when Eddie Gavin wasn’t watching, we swiped condoms and then rode our bikes to the nearby Los Angeles River, which dribbled through Long Beach en route to the ocean. There we’d blow the “rubbers” up, and as they drifted seaward, blast them with BB guns. (A fellow 11-year-old thief was a Baptist minister’s kid, Jimmy Edson, who became a lawyer, civic leader and much-admired judge).   

Little girls, sadly deprived of today’s high-tech necessities, collected dolls and dollhouses and played dodgeball, hopscotch and jacks. Not privy to the really cool explosions, death and destruction dished up by today’s TV and movies, they suffered radio programs like Let’s Pretend, with chilling commercials like “Cream of wheat is so good to eat, we have it every day … it makes us smart and makes us strong and makes us shout hooray." Extra lucky little girls took piano lessons and went shopping downtown with their mothers. When families went out to dine, they didn’t tap-tap on obscenely expensive smartphones; they talked to one another!  

Not having a TV was, of course, the toughest thing about being a kid in the 1930s and '40s. We deprived progeny were forced to use our imaginations — actually listening to Walter Winchell report the news. Without the boob tube, we had to visualize "The Lone Ranger," "The Shadow," President Roosevelt’s reassuring fireside chats "… the only thing we have to fear is fear itself …” and heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis, “the brown bomber,” pummeling “Hitler’s boxer” Max Schmeling and countless others. 

All that notwithstanding, we didn’t feel underprivileged listening to Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Henry Aldridge, Charlie McCarthy, I Love A Mystery, Abbot And Costello, Dagwood & Blondie, Amos ‘n Andy, Lum ‘n Abner and, thanks to CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, Winston Churchill from beleaguered, sandbagged 1940 London as Royal Air Force hurricane and spitfire fighter planes battled Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombers overhead.  

It was more comfortable being ill when we fogies were kids. If one had mumps, measles, the flu or a fractured thumb, the family doctor showed up at home and, like today’s generalist Doc Martin on PBS, fixed everything. Today if a kid catches a baseball on the nose, he’s dispatched by the family MD to a “nose guy,” maybe even a left or right nostril nose guy. However, today the family doc and the nose guy might both be women. That’s progress, even though the majority of robed, self-serving politicians on today’s Supreme Court and modern-day congressional GOP toadies would disagree.  

Downtowns were where the action was. Shopping malls, supermarkets and big box stores were but a gleam in developers’ eyes. Amazon, Walmart and Silicon Valley were fantasy. Same for Disneyland, Disney World, and interstate highways. Grocery stores the size of Sandpoint’s Winter Ridge were found closer to where people lived. But Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Woolworth’s five & dime, banks, jewelry stores, theaters and big churches were downtown. One way to get there was to hop aboard the “Red Cars” of the Pacific Electric Co., America’s largest electric interurban rail system, blanketing then yet-to-explode L.A. county. If you were 14, had a learner’s permit and were driving an older model car with your mom, say a blue 1940 Oldsmobile, you needed to remember to stick your left arm out the window and straight up if you planned to turn right, straight out if turning left, and straight down if hoping to stop. Always leave at least two car lengths between you and the car ahead of you. (You’re kidding!)    

Thanks to radio reporters, the New York Times and LIFE magazine, we pipsqueak warriors crouched in the jungles with real (not John Wayne’s) U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal and were aboard the landing crafts at Normandy. We cheered Hitler’s demise in Berlin’s Fuhrerbunker and celebrated VE and VJ days riding the roller coaster at the Long Beach amusement park, The Pike. And who among us ancients will ever forget the puzzlement wrought by the Pied Pipers' vocal group recording of "Mairzy Doats?" Some of us are still figuring it out. 

After school on April 12, 1945, junior high buddies were standing on a corner waiting for the Pacific Electric railroad car to come clanking along. Two female classmates joined us, in tears. FDR had just died in Warm Springs, Ga. When this eighth grader arrived home, he found his mom weeping and wondering what we were going to do now, with VP Harry Truman, a failed Missouri haberdasher, in charge. She needn’t have worried. 

Kids in 1945 felt passionately proud of the United States. So did our parents. Black, white, brown or blended, and regardless of social/economic status, citizens pulled together to safeguard this 250-year-old democracy. School kids memorized The Gettysburg Address, which  Lincoln delivered at the historic battlefield in 1863: “… and that this government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” His words in an earlier time of national crisis are worth remembering — and honoring — today. 

Addendum: Really old guys get hugged a lot by women. Really old guys assume it’s because they are attractive and charming, but they are wrong. It is because they have sagging skin, neck turkey wattles, oversized ears, and hairs peeking from nostrils. Women feel motherly and protective, not romantic, toward really old guys. So they hug them. 

TIM HENNEY

Sandpoint