Although it seems like the current election season is particularly brutal, politics have always been full of underhanded dealings and scandals. We have become used to squeaky clean(ish) political conventions that are really mega advertising events for candidates who have already been chosen. Who knows what will happen this year? It brings to mind a time not so long ago, when delegates actually wheeled and dealed for their favorite candidates AT the national conventions. A "brokered" convention wasn't something people were afraid of, it was the norm. I watched the 1960 Democratic convention with my family. My Mom and Dad followed the elections closely. They were strong Kennedy supporters but they also had hope for Minnesota’s favorite son, Hubert Humphrey. I looked up some old TV footage of the event and, sure enough, there were NBC news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at the convention discussing the probable nomination of John Kennedy. It wasn’t a shoo-in. Reporters were on the floor of the convention with big headphones over their ears, covering different areas of delegates. There was excitement and tension in the air and it wasn’t the fake kind of excitement found in more recent conventions. I remember my parents telling us how the convention worked as each state’s spokesman (I’m pretty sure they were all men in those days) announced the votes for their delegation with a great deal of pomp. The spokesman stood at a microphone next to someone holding a giant vertical sign that spelled out the name of their state. He bellowed out something like this: “The great state of Minnesota, home of the Loon and the Gopher, casts all of it’s 65 votes for Hubert H. Humphrey!” Little did I know that Robert Kennedy was in the very same hall, twisting arms and using every means possible to make sure his brother got the nomination. Deals were being made in the aisles and back rooms. JFK himself was not a stranger to political intrigue. He barely defeated Richard Nixon in 1960 and there were questions about voter fraud in Chicago. Chicago’s Mayor Daley, known for his corruption and manipulation of the democratic process, was a strong supporter of JFK and friend of his father. He encouraged supporters to "Vote early -- and vote often." Daley may have contributed to Kennedy's narrow victory in Illinois by stuffing ballot boxes and rigging the vote. Daley was also instrumental in creating the disastrous situation at the 1968 Democratic convention. I remember watching in horror while anti-war protesters outside of the convention were beaten by police with Billy clubs as they chanted “The whole world is watching.” I hope that the anger brewing in the current political climate doesn’t bring a repeat of something like that. I have been watching a “docu-series” on CNN called “Race for the White House,” narrated by Kevin Spacey, that tells the stories of historic campaigns for the presidency and all the intrigue that went with them. It’s a six-part mini series featuring elections from Andrew Jackson vs. John Quincy Adams to Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush and includes the elections of JFK and Abraham Lincoln. Yes, there were even dirty dealings involved in the election of “Honest Abe.” A brutal Senate race in 1858, that Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas, left Lincoln ready and willing to do everything he could to gain the Republican nomination for President in 1860. Lincoln’s campaign team bribed leading delegates with the promise of Cabinet-level positions in exchange for their support. They also packed the convention hall with Lincoln supporters by printing 5,000 counterfeit tickets. In “Race for the White House,” David Plouffe, President Barack Obama's campaign manager in 2008, describes Lincoln’s willingness to get down and dirty. "Make no mistake, Abraham Lincoln was chief political strategist: He relied on his aides maybe sometimes to do the dirty work, to be ruthless, to cut deals, but he was the lead dog," Lincoln won the nomination, defeating his future Secretary of State William H. Seward, who probably received his appointment in exchange for his support of Lincoln in the presidential race. Lincoln went on to defeat his political nemesis, Stephen Douglas, in the Presidential election. I was surprised by the actions some of our former presidents took in order to get elected. Harry Truman compared business supporters of his rival Thomas Dewey to Nazis. John Quincy Adams supporters published articles in the newspaper accusing Andrew Jackson’s wife of bigamy. Apparently attacks on the wives of candidates is not something new. She was accused of marrying Jackson while she was separated, but not divorced, from her previous husband. It was true, but it so devastated Jackson’s wife that she died from a heart attack before he was inaugurated. Would Lincoln or Kennedy not have become president without an element of dirty politics? It’s discouraging to know how corrupt the search for political power has always been. Considering the fact that it has been going on for centuries, I am not surprised at the shenanigans I see every day on the news. It’s sad but it seems to be ingrained in our political system.
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I have been reminiscing with my sister about the toys we had as kids. Here are some of our most memorable baby boomer toy stories. Bonnie Braids My sister got a Bonnie Braids doll as a special gift when she came home from the hospital after a serious bout with the flu. Bonnie Braids was based on a cartoon character from the Dick Tracy comic strip. She was the daughter of Dick Tracy and Tess Trueheart. Bonnie had little pom poms of hair sticking out of the top of her head and one tooth in her smiley little mouth. She came with a tooth brush and a mini tube of Ipana toothpaste. She was my sister’s favorite doll, and mine too. Even though she wasn’t mine I coveted her big time. When we played with Bonnie we paired her up with Teddy, my Teddy bear. My sister had a bear too, named Patty, but she liked Bonnie way better than Patty. Bonnie and Teddy had many adventures together but the most memorable one was when they went on a trip in a trailer. In addition to dolls we also had cars and trucks. We decided to find a box that could be towed to make a trailer for Bonnie and Teddy. We found the perfect box in Mom’s closet. It was just the right size and had exactly the right shape for a trailer, long and thin. We were happily ready to send Bonnie and Teddy on a travel adventure when Mom came in and saw the “trailer.” She was taken aback and told us we would have to find another box. She didn’t explain why, she just said that it was not an appropriate box to use and we had to put it back in the closet. Later, when we were more “mature,” we found out it was a box of feminine hygiene pads. Thank goodness we didn’t haul the trailer box out onto the front porch and invite our next door neighbors over to play. Robert the Robot Space themed things were very popular in the 1950’s. Our space toy was Robert the Robot. Robert could talk. He was hard to understand, but he could actually say whole sentences in an odd electronic voice. I think there was a string you could pull on his back and he would say "I am Robert Robot, Mechanical Man. _?_ me and _?_ me where ever you can. I am Robert Robot, Mechanical Man.” I never could quite figure out what he was saying. When I looked online I discovered that he was saying “Ride me and steer me where ever you can.” If that actually is what he was saying, it’s rather strange because he was way too small to ride. He could move, however, on little wheels. He had wrench-like claws for hands and you could make him hold and carry things. I have more positive memories of Robert than my sister. She was somewhat traumatized by how we acquired him. Our Mom was always entering contests, mostly on the radio. Robert was the grand prize in a contest on a local TV show and my sister, under the encouragement of Mom, won him. My sister would probably never have even entered the contest, but Mom in some strange version of an attempt to build my sister's self esteem made her enter the contest. It was an art contest and my sister remembers that Mom made her trace the picture of a bird from a coloring book and color it in. Art was not my sister’s thing but it came easily for me. Kids were always comparing us and asking her why she didn’t draw like I did. I suppose Mom was trying to boost my sister's confidence by making her enter the contest. It had the opposite effect. By submitting a drawing that was traced, my sister felt that she had cheated. She was mortified that she had won the contest in what felt to her like an underhanded way. It’s fascinating to me how my sister and I could have experienced the same things and yet remembered them in such different ways. I remember Robert the Robot in a fun sentimental way, but my sister remembers him as tangible evidence of major demoralization. I didn’t even remember that she had won him in a contest until we started talking about our toys and she told me the whole story from her perspective. Now I feel bad about Robert the Robot too. If we still had him we could both boost our self esteem considerably. An original Robert the Robot is now worth between $200 and $1200! Clue We played a lot of games including Chinese Checkers, Sorry, Pick-up Sticks, Tiddly Winks, and Monopoly, but my favorite was the board game CLUE. I still have a thing about mysteries. The object of the game was to determine who murdered the victim "Mr. Boddy," where the crime took place, and which weapon was used. Each player was one of the six suspects: Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, Mr. Green, Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, and Mrs. White. They were represented by colored wooden pieces that you moved through the various rooms in Mr. Boddy’s mansion. Each time you entered a room you could make a guess about who the murderer was. After checking out the game on the internet I discovered that we had the 1950 version which was the second version to come out. The first version came out in 1949 and had a piece of string for the “rope.” Ours had a plastic rope, but the other weapons were metal: a gun, a wrench, a lead pipe, a candlestick, and a knife. I loved the board. It had all the rooms in the mansion pictured with 1950’s style furniture as if you were looking down into each room. I never got tired of playing Clue. I have played newer versions including a Clue Jr. with different looking mansions and different pictures of the suspects, but I like the original the best. There is something very satisfying about checking off the clues on your clue sheet with the squatty little pencils. I loved the moment when I was finally ready to make an accusation and slide the cards out of the mysterious mini black envelope to see if I was right. These toys are bringing back a lot of memories. I can think of other ones I would like to write about. The dollhouse my Dad made and the plastic furniture and dolls that went in it, my older sister's doll with the fantastic wardrobe my Mom made, and the Oujia board that my twin sister and I both swear we never consciously controlled, all deserve a special blog. Maybe later. Not every memory from my childhood is happy and carefree, but when I see images of those old toys they transport me back to the times I spent playing board games on the living room carpet with my sisters. I can’t be a kid again, nor would I want to, but it’s a little reminder that I am never too old to play. I think I might even still have that old Clue game stashed away somewhere. Front Page News: Twins Sleep!My sister and I (I'm the one in the back trying hard to stifle a smile) appeared on the front page of the local newspaper on December 25, 1953. Unfortunately I laminated the newspaper clipping in my younger days to preserve it and the plastic wrinkled over the top of the photo. Oh well, what are a few wrinkles anyway. It's all part of getting older. The day we got our first TV was an incredibly memorable day. The local newspaper had called my Mom and asked if they could take pictures of me and my sister to be published on Christmas day. They found us by looking in local birth records to see if any twins had been born near Christmas who would be around 5 years old. My sister and I were born in January 1948. Evidently we fit the bill. Mom dressed us up in identically adorable little dresses, with a ribbon tying our hair back from our foreheads. Normally we didn’t wear ribbons in our hair. This was a really big deal! We were excited about having our picture taken for the newspaper but we were even more excited about the fact that our TV was scheduled to be delivered that very same day. I think the photographer and the TV arrived at about the same time. My sister and I just wanted the picture taking thing to be over with so we could check out our new TV. The photographer decided that they wanted to take a picture of us sleeping, the basic “sugar plums dancing in their heads” shot. So Mom took everyone upstairs and put us into our pajamas. We each had our own bed but the photographer put us together in one bed. Actually it was the foot of the bed, which I suppose made a better angle to shoot from. We had our Teddy Bears, Teddy and Patty. Patty only had one eye, but they altered the photo and drew another eye on the published photo. I think she was cooler with one eye. It gave her a pirate kind of vibe. My sister was so much better than I was at pretending to be sleeping for the photo. She told me recently that she was doing everything the way they wanted because she wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. She remembered she could hear them moving in the TV downstairs. As a result of her focused cooperation, she looked completely relaxed and natural. I, on the other hand was self conscious and way too smiley to look like I was asleep. Not wanting to be outdone by my sister I tried really hard not to smile and they were finally able to get a decent shot. This, of course, was in the days of film as opposed to digital cameras and we had to wait for Christmas day, when it was published, to actually see the photo. We didn’t care. As soon as the photo shoot was over we scrambled downstairs to see the TV. The amazing thing is that although we both clearly remembered the first part of the day, neither of us remember actually sitting down and watching the TV. I suspect there was some delay in getting it set up. Or maybe we had to wait until our Dad came home. For whatever reason neither of us remember watching TV that day. Later I remember dutifully watching Crusader Rabbit. Dad watched it with us. We would be seriously glued to the screen and he would be laughing hysterically. I think it was actually geared as much towards adults as it was for kids. Life Before TV and BeyondAll of this and more we watched in black and white with no remote on a TV that had two channels and unpredictable reception. One of us had to stand by the TV and hold onto the “rabbit ears” antenna. It was magical! In 6th grade I had a kind of boyfriend. I did not "date" but there was a boy in my class who always picked me as his partner when we did square dancing for PE. We would meet at the skating rink and he would grab my waist from behind and push me around the rink. It was thrilling. He could skate much faster than I could and I remember flying around the rink, exhilarated by the speed and the fact that a boy had his hands around my waist. Unfortunately he eventually dumped me for the minister's daughter at my church. Skating was never the same after that. I tried skating once as an adult and time did not improve my skills. I still couldn't do crossover turns or skate backwards and my forward progress was even worse than it was when I was a kid. It's fun to remember the "good old days" at the skating rink, however, so I am glad I saw that Hockey store even though I had no desire to go in and check out the skates. I was exploring a shopping center near the apartment complex where my sister lives and they had an entire store devoted to Hockey. You don't find this kind of store in California where I live. It would be very weird to see a Hockey store next to the O'Neils surf shop, so it had a big impact on me. It reminded me that I actually used to live in a land of ice and snow. The few times I have been back to the Midwest in the winter, all I could think of was how unbelievably cold it was, but at one time in my life I barely noticed the cold. When I was a kid we were always outside playing in the snow. Skating was THE big social activity in the winter. All the girls had white figure skates and all the boys had Hockey skates. It would not have been cool for anyone to go against this tradition. For a boy to wear figure skates or a girl to wear Hockey skates would have been social suicide in 6th grade. In the winter every neighborhood park was a skating rink. They flooded what were the baseball fields in the summer. Our rink had a warming house with ramps going down onto the rink. You could glide easily to get down, but you had to work up some speed to get enough momentum to get up the ramp. There were wooden benches on the inside of the warming house that were ravaged by years of people slamming their skates into them. When we got too cold we would go into the warming house and pull on each other's skate runners to get the circulation back in our feet. Evidently there were snacks available because my sister remembers buying her favorite, Milk Duds. I am not athletically inclined and skating was no exception. I admired the kids who could whisk along doing crossover turns and skating backwards. I was lucky just to be able to make forward progress as I followed the crowd around the rink. It was like roller skating only a lot colder. The music playing through a loud speaker signaled everyone to change directions. I have a photo of myself as a kid where I look quite adventurous. I'm heading up a ladder with a big smile on my face. My Mom told us that she saw me going up the ladder and snapped the photo. Then she put my twin sister on the ladder and took her picture, but you can tell from the photo that my sister was not a happy camper about the experience. In my mind I always saw myself more like the tentative little girl in my sister's photo than the adventuresome mini-me in the other picture. Sometimes I look at that photo and wonder where did that little girl go? When did I loose that fearlessness? Twins on a ladderI babysat a friend's five-year-old granddaughter over the weekend. I don't have grandkids, so this was an opportunity to be a pseudo grandparent. It was fun, but I am 62 years older than this child and I felt every one of those 62 years just watching her play. She is very physical and fearless. She climbed and scrambled over every piece of playground equipment at the park, and ran through a trail in the woods, with an energy and gusto that was boundless. Even when she fell, she got up with a smile on her face as if falling was part of the fun. I don't think I was ever like that. In my earliest memories I was cautious and afraid of anything too physical. I remember a friend of my Dad's who visited us and liked to rough house with kids. I was NOT into rough housing. My Dad was more cerebral. We spent a lot of time fishing, picnicking, looking for berries and wildflowers in the woods, and going to the library and reading books. I loved every minute of doing these things with my Dad, and they were all very low key activities. They were not the kind of thing you could base a reality TV show on unless it was something like "Extreme Picnicking," or "Super Wild Wildflower Identification," or "Library Book Selection Mega Challenge." I think that risk-taking was not high on my family's agenda. I could probably analyze my childhood experiences and come up with a lot of reasons why risk-taking is difficult for me as adult, but what's the point. The fact is that this is who I am. I am fascinated by that photo of me on the ladder, however, and I would like to recapture that part of me and put it to work in this phase of my life. I know I do embrace adventure and risk taking in some things in my life, but not when it comes to things that are physical. A couple of years ago my "little old lady with cats" foot went sideways into a hole in the sidewalk and I ended up with a broken ankle. I'm not anxious to repeat that experience. Still, I wish I could be more like my friend's little granddaughter and look at falling as part of the fun, even if it's just in the spiritual sense.
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Leslie Masona woman in search of her post-retirement future Guess what! By subscribing, you get notices about the latest Little Old Lady with Cats posts sent to your mailbox!
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