The Upper East Side of Milwaukee our neighborhood in the 1970s

Our Neighborhood:

 

Milwaukee in the 1970s was a city in transition. A city famous for its breweries and beer consumption, heavy industry, machine shops and factories, it was slowly but relentlessly being eaten by the rust belt. Breweries began to close, industry to relocate, and experts prophesied that the death of the American City was upon us. The population began to fall as more and more people moved to the surrounding suburbs. The downtown shopping area began to see empty storefronts. Workers that had held factory jobs allowing them to raise families began to lose those jobs as businesses closed. Milwaukee’s decline or transition would be slow through the 60s to the 80s, and would avoid the drastic decay that cities such as Detroit saw.

 

Milwaukee’s citizens thought of their city as the best “Small town-large city in America.” Milwaukee was made up of ethnic and industry neighborhoods. The Lower East Side was Italian, the South Side Polish, the 3rd ward Irish and then Italian, and the Central City German transitioning into African American. The ethnic makeup of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods would slowly change as the 20^th century wore on, but the local flavor is retained to this day. Each neighborhood had its own shops and business districts. Large factories such as Allis Chalmers transformed or built whole neighborhoods as workers wanted to live close by in inexpensive housing of their own. Above all, Milwaukee neighborhoods were dominated by two institutions; taverns and churches. We had more of both than almost any other city in America, some on the same block. In fact, some blocks contained a bar on each corner, leading to the term “Corner tap.” Each neighborhood was a whole community in itself. Anything one needed was within walking distance or a short streetcar ride away.

 

Our new home on Downer Avenue was in the neighborhood roughly known as the Upper East Side.

Sandwiched between the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and the Lake, the Upper East Side was populated by a diverse mixture of middle-class families, students, and University professors and their families. In the ‘60s and ‘70s it became the city’s cultural center and trendsetter. The houses were built mainly in the 1920s and possessed charms as varied as their architecture. The neighborhood was special, and remains much the same today, only barely touched by the disease of plastic sameness so prevalent in our American culture. It passed nearly untouched through the phase of “Urban renewal” which bulldozed so much of America’s unique neighborhood architecture in the name of progress. It survived for the most part, because it was insulated and filled with owner occupied family houses owned by prominent citizens who would fight against overt changes in their neighborhood. In the 1970s, every city had neighborhoods like this. When relatives came to visit, they would mention that the Downer Avenue section of the East Side reminded them of a treasured neighborhood back home where bookstores and ice cream parlors sat side by side, and everyone strolled the sidewalks seemingly in no hurry to get anywhere particular.

 

 

 

The biggest external influence that dominated life in the Upper East Side was the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Concerns regarding its growth and what that would mean to the neighborhood were always on resident’s minds. The 1970s saw student protests against the Vietnam War spill onto the surrounding streets. Following the uncovering of our secret bombing of Cambodia and the covert escalation of the war under Nixon and Kissenger, the students held mass protests, sealed off the streets, and took over the University. I remember my father escorting Mom from work at the Student Union, and carrying me on his shoulders through the seated throng of protesters. Unaware of danger at that age, I looked out at the strikers with interest from my high perch. From the late ‘60s through the middle of the ‘70s, the residents referred to most of the students rightly or wrongly as “Hippies.” The whole youth movement became a confused morass in which political idealism, new music, drugs, long hair and strange styles of dress merged together to become what was referred to as the “Counter Culture.” Instead of influencing the average American, it often frightened people. The important political and social messages and ideals were lost or misted over by “free love” and the drug culture. The idealism of the 1960s became helplessly lost and confused in the 1970s. The reaction to this fear lead directly to Nixon’s presidency as the common American went to the polls with their own safety in question. East-Siders may have wanted us out of Vietnam, supported local food cooperatives and alternative press, were often active in the woman’s movement, supported equal rights and housing access, but they drew the line at having groups of wild young adults congregating in the neighborhood where their children played.

 

To protect Milwaukee’s East Side neighborhood and others against what the then Chief of Police Harold Brier considered undesirables, special squads of police were formed called the “Tactical Squads.” These goons did what they could to disrupt student protests, ad-hoc rock concerts, and gatherings of youth in area parks. Their heavy-handed ‘tactics’ were barely legal at best. Members of the youth culture did not help things either. Far from realizing that they needed to clean up their act if they wanted to influence others, they instead seemed to be increasingly trying to shock Milwaukee’s citizens with ‘love ins’, or free magazines such as Kaleidoscope and the Bugle American. These local publications actually had some wonderful content, but it was characteristically buried behind advertisements for drug paraphernalia and cover stories no one over thirty years old wanted to read. Progressive East-Siders such as my father were torn between support for the political and social ideas of the youth, and being repulsed by the counter-cultural elements and disruption of neighborhood safety. During the 1970s, Dad spent much of his time staring out our front window on the lookout for “Teenagers” who were in his opinion “all up to no good.” “Teenagers” in his view were anyone under 25 dressed funny or with long hair. This sort of split personality between progressive social views and ‘Archie Bunkerism’ was quite common.

 

The University didn’t just supply hippies. Art students drew and sketched on the lawn of Mitchell hall where through open windows in summer music majors could be heard. Philosophy students argued their theories over coffee, and mathematicians walked into trees. Everywhere there were people of all ages that were socially aware and had opinions. Then there were the professors…

 

Quite a few University professors and their families lived in the immediate three blocks surrounding our house. We knew many of them on a first-name basis. Since our house was on Downer Avenue, which was a main route to the University, we could observe them daily. Most were brilliant, if a bit eccentric. Some of them were so immersed in their own thoughts that they marched to school every day oblivious to the world around them. Many were dressed in sport coats and sweaters. I remember an Irish professor of literature who seemed to live in a local dive bar, a professor of comparative religion who was always talking to himself, and a professor of history who had an air of superiority and had run off with one of his graduate students. We knew a teaching assistant who had the most pungent body odor and always wore a long tattered wool scarf. Engaging and always smiling, he was very fond of his beer, and late one evening he tottered past our house on his way home from a local bar. He staggered back and forth down the street, until with a crash of broken branches he fell into a hedge. There he would spend the night, only to wake up and toddle the rest of the block or so to his lecture. One professor of physics stood out above all others. He was a friend or relative of a family we knew, sported a huge beard and long bushy gray hair, and always rode a bike. He rode the bike rain or shine, winter or summer, dressed in a pair of shorts and with bare legs. For some reason, he believed that fresh air was good for his sperm production, and thus never wore long pants. Even today, if one walks down Downer Avenue past the University you are likely to encounter a bearded professor riding a moped dressed in a patched tweed jacket in the middle of a 90-degree day.

 

The Upper East Side in the 1970s was filled with children. The stately houses, distance from urban turmoil, and the easy availability of the beautiful expanses of Lake Park contributed to the ideal cosmopolitan atmosphere that parents desired, as well as the safety they wanted for their children. Milwaukee had a great park system rivaling any major city and perhaps the finest in America. Milwaukee’s socialist mayors described our park system as a place where “The people could go to breathe,” and it is due to this philosophy that we owe the legacy of our parks. Frederick Law Olmstead, a socialist who also designed New York’s Central Park, designed Lake Park. We citizens of the East Side, especially us children seemed to spend much of the summer virtually living in the park. It was well supplied with playground equipment, baseball fields, a seasonal ice-rink, and other facilities. It also retained a subtle wildness contained in its many ravines, in which on any given day could be seen deer, songbirds, or pot smoking teens, among other flora and fauna. During picnics with multiple families, we kids ran all over the park, exploring every bridge, wooded ravine, or jungle gym. What strikes me today is the lack of fear children and our parents had while in the park. I don’t think we were ever warned about lurking pedophiles, drive-by shootings, abductions by space aliens, or any other looming threat that causes parents today to place their children on leashes while wearing hockey armor and sporting a GPS tracking device. The times were just simpler. Despite political assassinations, urban unrest, war, inflation, racism, and other woes of the day that worried the minds of parents, children were allowed to be free and engage in unstructured and mostly unsupervised play. It was a wonderful time to grow up.

 

Above all, there was Lake Michigan. The great lake would keep the neighborhood cooler in summer, and provide us kids with a free place to swim. During overcast evenings and nights, we fell asleep to the distant low bass of foghorns. The lake seemed the biggest body of water in the world to us kids, and we could look endlessly to the east, north and south without ever seeing the other side. It was our ocean. On Independence Day, the Schlitz brewery would sponsor a huge fireworks display on the lakefront that we could walk to. Unlike many other cities, Milwaukee protected it called its “Riviera”, and no development marred the lake view that anyone could have by simply walking down Lincoln Memorial Drive. One drawback though, was the periodic die-off of the alewife, a smelt-like fish and invasive species that would from time to time in the ‘70s cover our lake shore with their rotting carcasses, causing us East-Side residents to wish we lived anywhere else. The smell was indescribably bad.

 

Although the neighborhood was quite safe, like any other it had its less desirable areas. I rarely ventured alone past Murray Street to the west. We kids knew Murray as “Rip-off Street.” If one was unlucky or careless, venturing further west than this could result in getting harassed, chased by bullies, or having your bicycle stolen. At least that was the legend. None of these things ever really happened to us children, instead they always seemed to happen to a friend of a friend. It was more of a psychological boundary than anything else. On one side of the street, we felt safe, while only twenty feet away lay the fearful unknown.

 

Our neighborhood certainly had its share of kooks and eccentrics, but unlike today, we knew who they were and where they lived. In the ‘70s, we knew all of our neighbors for several blocks. Everyone knew the goofballs. We didn’t need the local news to scare us every evening with tales of pedophiles and predators lurking behind every door and peeping out of windows. We were just warned every now and then by our parents to avoid “Old lady Fussbudget’s house,” or not to bother “Mr. Loner.”

 

Although some of the residents could be considered characters, the biggest source of weirdoes in our neighborhood was its position between the University and the Lower East Side of North Avenue and Brady Street; both areas being magnets for eccentric people who wanted to loiter around. Every day several transients, former drug addicts who had lost their marbles, and other familiar characters wandered down Downer Avenue. I remember a guy who constantly laughed out loud as he walked. For years we saw him pass our house laughing and laughing as his ratty and too-small clothes dissolved on his back. Every once and awhile someone must have cleaned him up and he would sport a new pair of shoes and a haircut, but then as time went on he would decay back to his old look which was rather like an hysterical laughing Frankenstein monster with long hair and a beard. Dad always warned me to stay away from him, and called me into the house when he was spotted, but he never seemed to do any harm. He just laughed and walked, and walked and laughed. He was known locally as “ The Laughing Guy.”

 

Another character that made a weekly appearance was the “Potato Chip Guy.” He was a transient elderly man with a huge gray beard who wore a decaying black trench coat. Under the coat were stored dozens of large bags of potato chips. He hung out at bus stops eating bag after bag of chips between trips to the local food store to re-supply his stock. Again, this character never hurt anyone, and seemed to be concerned with nothing but eating potato chips, hoarding potato chips, and procuring more potato chips. He never seemed to speak a word to anybody.

 

Mom vaguely knew one of the local characters from the University, and tried her best to avoid him. He wore a white hardhat and laboratory coat, and rode around on a bicycle accosting innocent passersby and talking to them about arcane subjects. It didn’t take long for the poor unsuspecting victim to get the point that there was something odd about this guy, and excuse themselves from the conversation.

 

Our local cat-lady lived on Downer several blocks south of us. She was a very intelligent and eccentric woman who served in local community groups with my father. She always wore heavy coats and scarves and carried a flashlight. She also smelled suspiciously like something that died. Her house was always dark and cold because she had the electricity and gas disconnected. (Thus the coats and flashlights…) Copious juniper bushes and wild overgrown weeds hid the front of the home, so that if you didn’t know there was a house there you might think it was an abandoned lot. There seemed to be rumors that she kept a lot of cats, and when the police came to her door for some reason or another, her home was found to be in an unlivable condition, filled with felines and feces. She was taken away to God knows where and her house was bulldozed.

 

Several local characters were conspicuous Jesus freaks. The most notable drove around in dilapidated black station wagons with ranting religious writing scrawled everywhere in white paint. They used loudspeakers to broadcast themes of sin and repentance, and predicted the end of the world and hellfire. There seemed to be several of these nuts and their cars over the years.

 

The main shopping district in our neighborhood was on Downer Avenue between Park Place and Webster. It was only five blocks from our home; so simple shopping could be accomplished with relative ease. The whole area was modeled on a European village square, centered on St. Mark’s church, and still retains much of its former charm. It was the center of the Downer avenue community, and a common meeting place. There was a Sentry food market and Sendik’s, an upscale grocery store with excellent produce. Later came the Coffee Trader with exotic roasted coffees, fresh baked bread, and imported cheeses. In the mid 1970s I was sent three times a week to the Coffee Trader to buy a loaf of sourdough rye bread. For years the clerks at the Coffee Trader referred to me as “The sourdough kid.” Interesting small retail shops lined the avenue, and one could purchase craft supplies, imported woolens, Earth Shoes, visual art, candles, and get your hair cut by a barber with a real working barber pole.

 

My earliest memories of shopping expeditions pre-date our owning a car. Instead, we owned a succession of broken down two-wheel wire shopping carts. One of the carts was barely held together with old rope. These carts stood on end, and were supposed to fold up. (Hopefully only when you wanted it to, and not on its own accord.)

Mom and Dad would tow the cart to Sentry, where once filled with several grocery bags, it became hard to maneuver. Dad would carry two large bags in his arms, so it was my task as a five-year-old to help Mom lift the cart over curbs at street corners. (Handicap equipped corners came much later) Several times, I remember the carts falling over or the collapsing, spewing groceries to the street. It always seemed to be raining or snowing when this happened. If it were sunny, one could fill the old cart with bowling-balls and it would make the trip home, but if even a single drop of rain or snow fell, the cart began to wobble like a drunk, and the bottom would then fall out. It only did this when one was the maximum distance from home. The groceries would have to be piled back into the wet brown paper bags, and returned to the cart. We then would continue home towing the broken down cart, its geriatric wheels wobbling and squeaking.

 

When it snowed, my sled was substituted for the cart. During snowstorms, we would not be the only family shopping by sled or toboggan. Without a car, it was the only way to get groceries home.

 

Sendik’s market on Downer had a machine that squeezes oranges before your eyes and turns them into orange juice. The oranges were loaded into the top and then like a pachinko game would tumble down through a hole where an apparatus would squeeze out the juice. You could see the whole thing happening in front of you, as the front of the machine was made of glass. Every time my parents shopped at Sendik’s I stood in front of the machine, and had to be dragged away when it was time to go. The smell of orange juice that was so incredibly fresh was a real treat.

 

My favorite store to visit was Downer Hardware. At the time, it was one of many neighborhood hardware and general stores on the East Side, but as time went by and other shops closed their doors, it became unique. Downer hardware had a blended smell of paint thinner, fertilizer, pest killer, and oil that was perfume to my young nose. They had a key-making machine, and I watched with fascination as the staff ground keys for customers. There was always something fascinating to watch or something new and interesting to see in the hardware store, along with lots of stuff you were warned not to touch. Like many small local establishments, they had to cater to the neighborhood needs as a bit of a general store. One could purchase alarm clocks, American flags actually made in this country, cookware, lawn chairs, nuts and bolts, glues, coolers, and twenty varieties of mosquito repellent. Downer hardware also carried a decent selection of Christmas decorations, all which were over thirty years old and perpetually on sale. I spent hours looking longingly at the pocketknife display. They must have had over fifty different versions of what we then called ‘jack knives’. Everything in the store in those days was covered in a thick patina of dust, even the employees. After a trip through the store, you could relish the smells of hardware the rest of the day, as you took it home with you on your hands.

 

Two first class pharmacies were in the same little area. Lake Park Pharmacy and Bellview Pharmacy both smelled like candy and castor oil, and had varieties of goodies now missing from our big-box world. There was a comfortable atmosphere to these little corner stores, and the clerks, usually smiling older folks with thick glasses and white smocks often knew you by name. Important to us kids, they had penny candy and shelves of comic books to look through while your parents did stuff you could care less about.

Next to Downer Hardware were the Blue Ribbon Pet Shop, and a café-soda fountain. Both were to be destroyed in a fire in 1975.

Past Bellview to the south was the Downer Theater; Milwaukee’s oldest Film Theater in continual operation, and across from that was the most famous of local landmarks, the Popcorn Wagon.

 

The Popcorn Wagon was Milwaukee's oldest, and possibly the oldest wagon of its type in the country. Some residents say it dated back to 1916. If you have never seen one, they resemble a small circus wagon in appearance.

 

Besides popcorn, the wagon sold a large collection of nickel and penny candy. One could get: wax lips, spaceship candy with little candy balls inside, plastic pixie sticks filled with pure sugar that no child could manage to open, a miniature plastic garbage can filled with garbage shaped candy, a tiny coffin filled with candy body parts, wax soda bottles filled with stuff that made you sick, packs of baseball cards that contained a slab of vulcanized chewing gum, candy lipstick, JuJubes which accidentally removed your fillings, and various other crazy treats that us kids found irresistible.

 

On any given day in the summer, one could join long lines of kids anxiously waiting their turn for goodies with a dime or two in their pockets. Children with sugar highs ran around the Popcorn Wagon in circles, while other kids that had consumed a lethal combination of Pixie Sticks, circus peanuts, cotton candy, and popcorn lay on the pavement clutching their stomachs in agony. Each day in summer each of us consumed more sugar than the entire population of India. One of my favorite candies was a jawbreaker. For ten cents, you could get a jawbreaker the size of a billiard ball made up of a thousand layers of flavors that varied from orange, grape, lemon, red (which tasted like chemicals), and a myriad of other colors and tastes only remotely related to anything in nature. These things were so large that we kids could barely get them in our mouths, and once inserted, we walked around the rest of the day unable to speak and drooling all over ourselves, incapable or unwilling to remove them.

 

Our two east-side theaters (Downer and Oriental) have survived the efforts at urban progress (destruction), and remain much as they were when they were built, full of charm and representing a slower time. Unfortunately, as I wrote this, the Popcorn Wagon is being relocated to make way for a parking garage. Progress anyone?

 

One block to the north of our home and across the street from the University was Riegelman's Downer pharmacy. It was an old-fashioned drugstore with a lunch counter and soda fountain, and had an extensive candy selection. Serving the neighborhood from 1969 to 1984, it was a place of refuge for students and staff of the University as well as local characters and children. For 45 cents one could consume as much coffee as one wished while reading the newspapers, eating wonderfully greasy burgers, talking to the local cat-lady, or debating Schopenhauer with wild-haired philosophy students. It became an East-Side institution in the 1970s.

 

Six blocks to the west of us on Oakland Avenue between Linwood and Locust streets were a Ben Franklin store and East Side Foods. Mom would ride her bike to this shopping area carrying me on the back in a child’s seat. East Side Foods was an inexpensive grocery store where she often found bargains on food that was still good but ‘had to go’. Ben Franklin was an original five and dime variety store that filled a need on the East Side for a mini-department store. They carried pets, craft supplies, clothing, bathroom and kitchen accessories, party notions and decorations, greeting cards, and a vast supply of toys and candy. Those were the days of cheap toys made in Japan out of recycled tin. The reverse side of the tin toy was often covered with ideograms advertising beverages. I loved to come here because the toys were so cheap that I often could pester Mom into buying me something just to shut me up.

 

On special occasions, we would visit other specialty shops in Milwaukee. At Christmas, we would take the bus to Glorioso’s Italian market on Brady Street. In business for over sixty years at the time of this writing, Glorioso’s was a throwback to the neighborhood ethnic markets of the early 20^th century. We bought chestnuts to roast in our oven, hard Italian salamis and exotic cheeses covered by cloth and suspended from strings, and ogled the various canned specialty goods such as smoked oysters and stuffed grape leaves. I loved the smells of the deli. Often on the same trip, we would proceed to Usinger’s on Old World Third Street. Usinger’s is another treasure of Milwaukee. Since 1880, they have made the most divine sausages in the German tradition. The sales shop had (and still has) a European charm of by-gone years. It featured murals of German Sausage-making elves painted in 1906. The murals depicted the elves in the various processes of production, from capturing the pigs by the tail, mixing the meat with special spices, all the way to the table full of delicious steaming platters of sausage surrounded by happy pudgy elves with beer steins. In our family, Usinger’s sausage was a treat to be savored, and as we waited in line, Dad would tell stories of his boyhood, when he accompanied his Grandfather to local German butchers. We savored: knackwurst, braunschweiger, bratwurst, natural casing wieners, landjager, and summer sausages, always purchased from the ‘seconds’ bin. When we got home with the treasured box of sausage, Mom would put the Knackwurst on to boil, and once on our plates, it would be consumed with smacking noises accompanied by German mustard and pumpernickel bread.

 

Another destination we frequented from time to time was Nick Topping’s International House and Imports located in the Sydney Hih building on the east side of Downtown Milwaukee. Nick was a progressive who marched in civil rights protests and was best known as the man who brought the Beatles to Milwaukee for a concert. As a leftist, he and Dad had long conversations about politics and society, while Mom shopped for exotic Pilafs, and I picked out imported candies from China. The whole shop had the smell of a middle-eastern bazaar.

 

Being poor, Mom and Dad were always looking for inexpensive entertainment. One outlet was Pat and Tom’s Murray Tap, an inexpensive neighborhood bar on the Lower East Side. A sort of dingy and dark smoky atmosphere pervaded the place. Not able to afford a baby-sitter, my parents dragged me along with them. It took little coaxing. The place was full of local characters that entertained me. They bought me Beer-Nuts and Hershey’s bars and I usually ate so many that I got sick. Mom and Dad had a few quiet .25-cent beers and had a chance to people watch and a change of pace. The reader may recoil in horror that my parents were so irresponsible as to take me into a bar when I was only six, but they didn’t see it that way, and I loved it. I still remember the revolving Schlitz beer signs and the jukebox that I could never figure out how to play. (I had no coins-duh!)

 

Through the years, the Upper East Side has changed little. Unique businesses came and went, only to be replaced with other interesting stores. Citizens and local characters wandered into history, but others took their place. It seems that the neighborhood lives outside of time, attracting similar people each year that want a progressive cosmopolitan experience. I like to think of it as the “Greenwich Village of Milwaukee.”

Play and toys in the 1970s, a Memoir

Play in the 1970s

 

The 1970s were a more innocent time for children’s play. Parents didn’t rush their children to the emergency room for a ‘boo-boo.’ We rode bikes and inevitably fell off. No one wore helmets. Some of our bikes even had neat shift levers right in front of the seats at crotch height.

 

Roller-skating caused knees to bear scabs and Band-Aids, which were badges of honor to the injured. If one could travel back in time and look at the children then, one would be surprised at the amount of missing teeth, torn clothing, bloody noses, and other field damage inherent in actually having fun. Make no mistake about it though; we did have fun! Kids in those days climbed trees. In fact, it seems that a great deal of time was spent up trees either seeing how high you could go, throwing endless rotten apples at girls, or eating mulberries until you got sick.

 

We collected things. Kid’s pockets contained frogs, nails, and slugs for soda machines, marbles, string, pocketknives, firecrackers, yo-yos, and pennies. Found objects were often the topics of wild speculation as to their origin. These small items were often traded back and forth and argued over. Everyone envied everyone else’s pocket possessions.

 

Like most children, I was endlessly curious. I took apart old alarm clocks to find out what made them tick, peeled and unwrapped golf balls to see what was inside, and was always peering into cupboards, wondering what that jar on the top shelf contained. Chimneys had to be investigated, berries tasted, kittens teased, and manhole covers peered into with flashlights. When mom cooked in the kitchen, I was at her side, mixing flour, pickle juice, and colored sugar crystals into imaginative but disgusting concoctions with a toy cook set. Everything in the basement was fascinating, especially the things that I was told not to touch or couldn’t identify. Discoveries awaited around every corner. I peeked into endless boxes full of bric-a-brac, poked into the old wooden barrel containing coal, and played with the old cast-iron gas stove that thankfully was disconnected. As a child, I viewed our basement as a combination of haunted house, museum, and chamber of curiosities and spiders. Things made sounds in the basement. Things ticked, groaned, whispered, and sighed. The ancient furnace fascinated and scared me with its explosive power and hundreds of little gauges, pipes, and ducts.

 

Most of us in those days were skinny. It may have been the home-cooked meals and all the exercise we got from running around outside every day. Although we spent part of our allowance on dime store candy and Popsicles, we never wandered down the street eating fast food out of a bag. Bedtimes were conservative too. Most of the kids in our neighborhood had bedtimes of around nine o’clock, and mine was at eight. The late evening was adult time, as parents emerged to sit on front porches and talk to neighbors while having a beer or lemonade.

 

Kids ran free and innocent, and play was not the structured activity it is today. Parents set up boundaries as to how far away from home we could stray, gave us instructions and severe warnings, and then let us free to play. The term “Play-Date” did not exist. Our parents supervised us by having a beer in the backyard or on the porch.

We ran through neighborhood yards wearing army helmets and waving cap guns that were excellent facsimiles of real firearms. No one even thought to call the police.

Every block saw elaborate games of Cops and Robbers, or Cowboys and Indians complete with costumes.

 

I spent entire summers in our back yard playing games by myself. Since I was never sent to summer-camp, the backyard took its place. I made bows and arrows out of fallen branches and string, constructed copies of stone-age tools I saw in books, built forts from logs and twigs, and was constantly folding and inventing new paper airplanes. Dad made wooden swords for me, and I built cardboard suits of armor and a shield, copying pictures I found in a children’s encyclopedia. The neighbors must have thought I was nuts as I ran back and forth enacting my fantasies dressed up in my latest costume creations. One summer I built a submarine out of a cardboard appliance box, and fashioned a torpedo launcher from paper-towel tubes and rubber bands that would fire smaller toilet-paper tubes. I drew controls on the inside and had a ball sinking imaginary enemies and backyard squirrels until it rained and the submarine sank into the lawn.

 

There were no video games yet, and even if there were, my parents would have banned them from the house. I was not allowed to watch television during the daytime or after school, with the exception of Public Broadcasting or Popeye, which Dad felt had some redeeming messages.

Dad demanded that the house was a quiet area, and no yelling or tearing about was allowed, so I spent most of my time outside, alongside most of the other children. Above all there seemed a sense of time that had no stress or hurry. We spent hours on sunny summer days laying on our backs and seeing shapes in slowly moving and emerging cumulus clouds.

 

Sometimes the restrictions on noise and what we could and couldn’t play with cost me friendships. On a summer day, a newfound friend named Sean came over to play. He loved our back yard, and soon set about climbing our wooden fence. “Don’t climb that,” I quietly said, “Dad says it’s not allowed.” Sean then began swinging from a large wooden pole that routinely held a clothes-drying line. “We’re not allowed to play on that either,” I told him with regret. He then began bouncing a ball against our house. “Don’t,” I said with increasing embarrassment, “Dad says…” Half an hour later Mom came out with sandwiches but Sean had departed for home, opting to walk the five miles rather than wait for his mom to pick him up. I learned a lesson from this. From that day onward, I would play at other kids houses, but would seldom ever invite anyone over. Our home was just not amenable to play. Sometimes my friends were not even at home, but I would visit their yards and homes anyway so that I could play in peace without being nagged or yelled at for making noise.

 

My best friend in the early ‘70s was Alex. Alex lived a block south of us, and was one of two sons of a University Professor. We had met in a summer activity group when I was around six, and the next year we became fast friends. Alex had a large sandbox in his backyard, and we spent great lengths of time after school playing war with toy tanks, or constructing rival cities of sand and debating which was the best or biggest. All our play was unstructured, and we mostly made up our own games. Alex and I formed a club called the International Spy Agency, and spied on the neighborhood kids while hiding in bushes.

 

I often made my own toys. Rubber band guns were easily made out of a piece of scrap wood and would entertain a kid for hours when used to knock down plastic army-men. I made ‘Polish switchblades’ out of Popsicle sticks and a clothespin. Receiving a toy army-man complete with parachute called a ‘Parachute Jumper’, I discovered that the parachute was no more than a round plastic disc with strings tied to it. I cut sandwich bags into circles, attached my own army-men and action figures and had hours of fun endlessly throwing them into the air and watching them glide back to earth. That is one of those unique aspects of childhood. Anything worth doing once would be worth overdoing or doing repeatedly until you finally got tired of it or annoyed your parents to the point that you were sent to your room. Like most other kids in the Apollo generation, I also was fascinated with space travel. Many of my friends had the plastic multiple stage rocket toys that were so popular. I made my own out of cardboard and construction paper. Theirs may have looked more realistic, but mine actually flew. The compass needle that I used to simulate the nose-cone antenna was probably a bad idea though. Sorry Mom.

 

Dad built me toys too. I was the only kid on the block to have an authentic 1940s hand made apple-crate cart with roller skates for wheels. Dad had constructed it for me, but with the cheap plastic roller skate wheels we used, it barely made it down the neighbor’s driveway. He showed me how to make depression–era rubber guns, which fired strips of inner tubes and could take out a stray cat at 30 feet. These things were dangerous. He also showed me how to make other toys from his childhood. We made button hummers, wooden-spool and dowel tops, and even little ‘spool tractors’ that would run across the table.

 

I was also obsessed with kites, and destined or cursed much as Charlie Brown never to be able to fly them successfully. Much of the reason for this was that my kites were homemade. I used balsa wood or drinking straws as spars and covered them with tissue paper. They never flew right. In fact, most of them dissolved or came apart on their maiden flights. To me, the process of creating the kite was more important than its performance, and I spent much of that time painting imaginary machine guns on the kites, or attaching razor blades to allow my kite to destroy other kites. Never mind that there were no other kites in the area. All the added weight along with the plastic army-men I attached pretty much guaranteed a short flight.

 

An inexpensive toy that my parents often bought me were rubber band powered balsa wood airplanes. They only cost a quarter, and since they had to be enjoyed outside, it guaranteed Mom and Dad a few hours of peace. These things really flew, often attaining heights up to 50 feet and sailing forever. The problem with the planes was that with each landing the wings and stabilizers came off. The planes were made up of a main section with propeller, and plastic clips that allowed all the other pieces to be attached. The clips barely held, and after awhile one or more of the pieces broke. The planes were equipped with landing gear, but I think this was strictly for show. Mine always landed propeller first. I finally came up with the idea of saving all the unbroken parts of multiple planes in a box, so that I could swap parts out as they broke. These balsa wood planes also had a unique ability to home in on tall trees or nearby roofs and get stuck. After a particularly violent windstorm, I would often go out into our back yard and find that one or more lost model planes had been blown down.

 

Some toys I found other uses for. When Mom bought me a set of ‘jacks’, I would ignore the jacks themselves and play with the rubber ball. Marbles were used in races down neighbor’s driveways, and never as intended. Hot Wheels cars were an early favorite. Most of mine ended up wrecked because I was obsessed with seeing how fast I could make the cars go. To that purpose, I often ran the track down the concrete stairs or even out my second floor bedroom window. The cars that I raced on these occasions went quite fast, but never seemed to stay on the track. They usually plummeted to earth and ended up scratched and with bent wheels. Here was another mysterious aspect of childhood. No matter how many times we did things and got poor results, we just kept on repeating the same mistakes. Building skyscrapers out of blocks, we would get to a critical height, and our architectural masterpiece would collapse. Then we would set out to build one even higher! If we attempted to jump over a box with our bicycles and crashed, resulting in a badly skinned knee, you can bet as soon as Mom had us fixed up, we were back on the bike ready for a second round. We gleefully pushed every activity to the limit, butting our young heads against the barriers of physics and our abilities.

 

When I was old enough for a bicycle, Mom bribed Ocaboo (Uncle Bill) to drive us in his delivery van to the police auction to bid on a bike that had been stolen, lost, or repossessed. Mom as usual had reasoned that if I was going to soon outgrow or ruin something, then why pay good money for it? The auditorium where the auction was held was huge, and full to the rafters with bicycles. A lot of kids in those days must have lost their bikes. Maybe there was a crime wave, I don’t know. Mom had allocated ten dollars as her budget for my new bicycle, so the first 90 percent of the auction went by with us being outbid. Finally, Mom was the high bidder, and for a grand total of six dollars and some change, we went to the dock to pick up the treasure.

 

My ‘new’ bike was a blue Schwinn Stingray complete with banana seat and a slick rear tire. Ignoring the fact that half the seat covering was torn off and the foam hanging down, the tires bald, the chain rusty, and the handlebars crooked, I jumped with joy. I had learned to ride neighbor’s bikes with training wheels, so I looked forward to a bike of my own. I don’t know if it was the gearing or what, but that bike was the slowest in the neighborhood. It was truly a case of form over function. It was good at skidding out, popping wheelies, and tossing me over the handlebars, but when I actually tried to go someplace, toddlers passed me up on tricycles.

 

A bicycle is a boy’s best friend and most dear possession, but mine looked and rode like it had been in an accident with a semi-truck. I didn’t care though; it was mine. The bike expanded my domain by several blocks, and allowed me (in theory) to keep up with the other kids. For some reason, I was not allowed to ride it to school, as my parents feared it would be stolen. What kind of desperate or nearsighted thief would have stolen my bicycle, I could not imagine. Bicycles were also an expression of a kid’s personality and had to be customized or decorated. Mine sported neon strips on the spokes, and baseball cards taped to the fork to make sounds. I covered the dilapidated seat with political bumper stickers and Wacky Packs. Many of our bicycles were intended to look like motorcycles, and Mattel even made a toy that attached to the handlebar and made motorcycle sounds so that our imitation of reckless adults could be more realistic.

 

When I was older and fascinated with fireworks, I designed and built my own rockets. Carefully scooping the various contents from the fireworks such as bottle rockets, snakes, sparklers, etc. that I had found at area parks, and combining the resulting powder with match head scrapings, I would encase the fuel mixture in rolled aluminum foil tubes along with a wick from a firecracker. The finished engine would then be inserted into a carefully made paper rocket complete with nose cone and fins, and elaborately decorated. My rockets produced a lot of flames and were good at self-immolation, but seldom traveled far enough to make the ordeal worthwhile. I also got the idea that if I combined the same mixtures in one of Dad’s spent rifle cartridges, the resulting homemade device would be like a Roman candle or fountain. Now all of these fireworks were commercially available and could be purchased during a short drive to an adjoining county, but I just had to create my own. The first test of ‘Erik’s Cartridge Thing’ took place in my friend Ricky’s parent’s garage (unbeknown to them, of course). The resulting shower of sparks and fireballs reached to the ceiling accompanied by shouts from us kids of “Cool” and “Neat”. Now that I saw the idea was a success, I experimented with other applications.

 

 One of our favorite commercial fireworks consisted of a cardboard tank with three cannons that shot little balls of fire and sparks. The only problem with them was that for some reason one of the cannon’ was dedicated to propelling the wheeled tank forward as it fired the other barrels, and therefore had an irritating and downright dangerous habit of going in directions not necessarily planned for, and setting fire to nearby objects. This gave me an idea. I constructed my own tank of balsa wood and encased it in protective aluminum foil. Accenting the tank was a little window made of clear plastic behind which sat a tiny army-man. I then mounted several of my latest cartridge cannons on the front and challenged Ricky to a battle to the death with one of his store-bought tanks. We duly lit the fuses and ran like hell, only returning a little closer when my tank did not immediately explode. The resulting conflagration was spectacular. The cardboard store-bought tank fired a couple of rounds at my tank before being set ablaze by my cannons, and burning to the ground. Ricky was so impressed that he designed his own tank, filling aluminum tubes with powdered firework stuff similar to mine. He painted his tank an army green, and amid endless debating as to which tank was better, faced off against the ‘Helm Eliminator Tank’ in the ally behind his house. The battle was more or less even until the aluminum tubes on Ricky’s tank sort of melted closed while combustion was still taking place, thus transforming themselves into miniature pipe-bombs. KABOOM! We didn’t know quite what had happened yet when a stentorian female voice rose above all of creation, emanating from Ricky’s mom seated somewhere in the kitchen. “That’s enough of that!” she commanded. It sure was.

 

As far as commercial toys were concerned, few parents in the ‘70s were concerned with the safety of the toys their children played with. After all, they remembered playing with BB guns, homemade fireworks, and other hazardous devices when young and they had survived. Most of the toys and games we played with would never make it on the market today. Toy safety groups would see to that. I am a little split as to whether this is entirely a good thing. Removing overtly dangerous toys and lead paint content is definitely progressive, but it is hard for me to not think that the pendulum has swung too far, and that children today are missing out on fun because toys which might be even remotely dangerous (if little Johnny really tries hard, he can fit the latest action figure up his nose) are taken off the market. I would hazard a guess that the average household has more inherent dangers in any square yard of the kitchen or living room than we had in our toys in the ‘70s. Sacrificing joy and imagination for clinical safety might also rob children of needed life-lessons, such as the discovery of why you don’t aim your new missile firing toy tank at Mom’s cherished Japanese vase. If that tank had never made it to market, you may never have learned so much about 18^th century Lithuanian poetry; having been forced for two weeks to copy in long hand the entire entry from the encyclopedia while seated at the kitchen table.

 

My parents were rather meticulous in choosing toys for me. I received many construction sets, and educational toys. I whiled away the hours with Spirograph and Etch-A-Sketch, Erector Sets and Tinker Toys. I built elaborate machines from the Austrian wooden engineering set I received for Christmas. Dad, of course, kept tight controls on the more valuable toys, and they all had to go back onto their proper place on shelves when I was done playing with them. He even kept my wooden erector set on a top shelf in his bedroom, and I had to get permission to play with it, which may explain why all the pieces are still intact to this day. My Tonka trucks and construction equipment had to cleaned off after play and returned to their own box too. When I was about seven, Dad bought me a little red toy Alpha Romeo car. After a bit, Dad noticed that I had scratched it while playing with it, and it was taken away and hidden in his dresser. There it stayed until I was considered responsible enough to play with it. When I was visiting one Sunday when I was thirty years old, Dad found the toy car while cleaning out his sock drawer, and gave it to me with the words, “Well, you might as well have this.” Perhaps I had achieved responsibility?

 

Like any boy, I had my share of toy cars and hot-rods, but these were always balanced with educational games. However, I still got to experience the thrill of popular and hazardous toys through play at houses of friends, or through acquisition at rummage sales.

 

One of my favorites was Jarts. Jarts was a game in which two teams (of adults…right?) competed to toss large plastic and metal darts into rings placed on the grass. The Jarts were heavily weighted at the front end and sharpened in order to aid penetration into the lawn, or someone’s skull. Sort of like horseshoes using spears. In order to get the Jarts to stick and stand up properly, one had to achieve a high angle of fire. In other words, one lofted the Jart high in an arc and tried to land it in the ring. The Jarts came down from above, and any errant throw would see people in the classic duck and cover position with hands over their heads scattering in fear. It was bad enough that this game was often played by adults while consuming copious amounts of alcohol, and that had not thrown anything in the last ten years, but children added a whole new dimension to the game.

 

After playing the proscribed way for a while, we kids made up our own rules. One version was to see how close you could land the Jart to your friend. Another great game was to see if you could toss the Jarts over your house into the front yard and land them in the grass. Of course, you never looked to see if anyone was in the impact zone first.

Putting a friend’s little sister’s favorite doll in the ring and trying to hit it was also fun.

The best game by far was the distance competition. Begun with the boast “I bet I can throw it farther than you,” it saw us children launching the missiles into other people’s yards and not having the foggiest idea where they would land.

Needless to say, Jarts were taken off the market after multiple ‘accidents’ were reported.

 

Being a boy, I never had an Easy Bake Oven, but many of the sisters of neighbor kids had them. These were miniature ovens in which budding homemakers could cook gourmet confections with the aid of a 40-watt light bulb heating element. Even a 40-watt bulb can get hot enough to burn someone, and girls around the neighborhood often sported gauze bandages.

Now after a day of slaving away over a hot oven, every peewee housewife wanted to have one of us guys enjoy their creations. I don’t know what was in the mix for those cakes that would allow them to be cooked by a 40-watt bulb, but whatever it was it wasn’t food. I think it consisted of pureed cardboard and sugar, and was about as appetizing.

 

Junior chemistry sets were popular. Designed to teach children science while they played, they contained small vials of chemicals, several test tubes, and a book of experiments. Far from using them as proscribed in the instructions, we instead mixed the chemicals at random in the test tubes and shook them up until something cool happened. Often the cool thing that happened necessitated a large cleanup effort by Mom and an airing out of the house.

 

I had many toy guns. Everybody had them in the ‘70s. I had a toy ray gun that shot sparks. It had a revolving abrasive wheel that contacted flint in order to produce the sparks. If you really got it revved up, you could set fire to things, including your clothes.

I had cork-guns. The fun thing to do with them was to substitute pointed sticks for the cork and shoot them at your friends.

I was a huge fan of the toy Star Trek Phaser gun. It shot small plastic discs at great velocity in seemingly random directions. No matter where you aimed, you were apt to hit something breakable or someone’s eye. Pennies were the same size as the discs, and did a lot more damage. Once you ran out of plastic discs, pennies worked just fine!

 

Cap guns were popular too. The caps came in rolls of 100 and were filled with little chambers of gunpowder. None of these worked right, and each roll of caps had as many misses as ones that went ‘bang.’ The cap guns looked real too. Few parents back then really worried about their child becoming a criminal from playing with toy guns, instead it was assumed that we kids knew the difference between playing games and the real world. No one even dreamed of a school shooting.

 

Some toys, however well marketed and popular, were poorly thought out and remarkably unsafe.

 

One such game was called the Slip N’ Slide, and consisted of a long strip of plastic with a perforated tube in the middle. One connected it to the garden hose and laid it out on the lawn. When the water was turned on, the whole thing became a big wet slippery ride. The problem was that when one built up enough speed you could not stop sliding. When you consider the small backyards these things were often set up in one can readily understand what happened when a child reaches critical velocity and terminates his or her slide by impacting the side of the garage, some lawn furniture, or even other kids standing too close.

 

Another very popular toy was the Nerf Ball. These were originally marketed as the ball you could throw in the house without damaging things, as they were made of soft foam. There are probably many kids like me that ended up in solitary confinement in our rooms after destroying some treasured keepsake with those damn balls.

 

When I was at School at St. Robert the popular toy for many girls were Clackers. These consisted of two hard acrylic balls connected with a string. You made an up and down motion with your hand and the two heavy balls came together with a solid “clack.” If you were good, you could get them clacking hundreds of times in a row. The string that connected them eventually broke of course, which saw the heavy balls careening into kids teeth or worse. Often they managed to hit your head, thus excusing you from recess of gym for a week due to concussion.

 

Several friends of mine had a toy called Sock-em-Boppers. These were inflatable toy boxing gloves best used after eating several dozen pixie-sticks full of colored sugar, and were guaranteed to encourage violence, general mayhem, and a severe grounding after knocking one of your playmates unconscious. They also were often borrowed by adults for use in marital disputes.

 

I begged my parents for a toy called Super Elastic Bubble Plastic, which promised the creation of multicolored semi-permanent balloons. It actually worked. One squirted different colored latex goo from various toothpaste-like tubes to form a ball, and stuck it on the end of a hollow tube. You then blew into the tube until a balloon of the desired size was reached. You then played with the resulting balloons. The problem was that the latex goo caused my eyes to water and turn red, and my lungs to burn. I don’t know what sort of toxic waste the stuff was made from, but I can still smell it.

 

Like most boys, I had a fascination with fire engines. There is something primal about giant red trucks that emit ear-shattering noises that kids find irresistible.

When I was about eight, I received a metal fire engine for my birthday. It was a pumper truck with removable ladders, and featured a real squirting fire nozzle.

One simply hooked up the garden hose to the back, and the water shot out the nozzle. You could direct the water onto objects and play fireman.

 

Of course, the obvious attraction was to put out real fires, and I soon put the fire truck to that task.

We had a large stump of an elm tree in our back yard that was slowly decaying. It had been cut down during the Dutch elm disease scare in 1968.

I borrowed Mom’s large magnifying glass and on a sunny day went to work setting fire to the stump. It smoldered convincingly, and I was soon using the fire truck to squirt water on it while running around the yard wearing a plastic fire helmet and making siren sounds. I must have thought I put the fire out, and soon was onto another activity. Far from being extinguished, the stump continued to smolder for the rest of the day until Dad came peering outside to see where all the smoke was coming from. He tackled it with the garden hose, and I got a stern lecture.

Didn’t the designers of the fire truck foresee this? I wonder how many other children set fire to things in order to play fireman with that truck. What other purpose could that water-squirting nozzle be used for anyway?

 

Probably the most infamous of all toys in the 1970s was the Creepy Crawler Thing Maker. It consisted of a hot plate, a dozen metal molds for bugs, skeletons, fake fangs, etc., and various tubes of colored liquid plasti-goop material to form the creatures with. My parents would never have bought this for me, but I found one at a rummage sale for a dollar and pestered my mom until she caved in.

I was in the middle of a monster kick at the time and this became my favorite toy.

The idea was that you squirted the plasti-goop into the mold, cooked the goop on the hot plate that hardened it into a rubbery consistency, and then when cooled, played with the creations.

There were some inherent dangers with the toy. The refining hot plate reached temperatures of 300 degrees. The flimsy tongs provided for unloading the hot molds were inadequate, and often resulted in dropping the molds on yourself, or losing the skin on your forefinger. The plasti-goop itself gave off a noxious cloud of toxic fumes when cooked, and I often got stoned or sick during the creation process.

If you didn’t pay attention to the exact timing of the cooking, your little creatures became blackened and acrid smoke would fill the room.

 

If everything went according to plan, the hot mold was placed into a cooling pan of water and gave off a sizzle. Once removed from the molds, you had a whole set of rubber creepy things to scare the neighborhood girls, throw at people, or just irritate your parents with.

The picture on the box the ‘toy’ came in showed a kid wearing the plastic Dracula fangs one could create with the Thing Maker. Yes, that’s right, we were supposed to put the finished products in our mouths!

I played with the Creepy Crawler until I ran out of goop to make the bugs and monsters. That was the end of that.

 

In later grade school, the popular toys for a young lad were action figures. Most every home had a G.I. Joe or twelve, and the endless accessories that the poor parents had to keep buying to make their kids happy. The action figure genre really took off with the production of Star Wars action figures. We played for days with Luke, Darth, and the others.

Of course, anything worth doing is worth doing to the absurd, and soon action figures included weird and dubious products like the Love Boat figurines. I don’t know what kind of kid ever played with those.

 

Every home with kids had a supply of board and card games to keep the children occupied. I had Parcheesi, Monopoly, Uno, Tank Battle, Mastermind, Which Witch, and others. Being an only child, my parents were constantly being pestered to play the games with me, and to uphold the peace, usually let me win.

 

Some other memorable toys included SSP Racers, Romper Stompers, Hot Wheels, Matchbox cars, and Tonka trucks. Slinky was a fun toy. It was kind of like your friend’s little sister, if you left her alone she didn’t do much, but when pushed down the stairs, she entertained for hours. One birthday I received one of those toy rocket launchers that you filled with water and then pressurized by pumping it up. It promised to fly up to heights of up to 100 feet. I think that was kind of conservative. On its maiden flight my new toy rocket took off with a ‘swoosh’ and climbing over the roof of our house, disappeared forever.

 

In the 1970s, Japan produced hundreds of cheaply made wind-up toys. They were made from old recycled tin and aluminum cans, and contained plastic gearing. I had motorcycles, helicopters, racing cars, and jet planes. They were quite inexpensive, but we got what we paid for. Most of these toys lasted no more than a few days of being wound up before they broke or fell apart.

 

Above all, I loved to build plastic models. I received .25 cents a week as an allowance for trimming the lawn and dusting, neither of which I was very diligent at. The Ben Franklin on Oakland Avenue had Aurora’s ‘Monsters of the Movies’ series, as well as a good selection of WWII airplanes and warships. The monster models cost $1.49 each, so I had to save my money and dream for a month and a half before I could buy one. I had Dracula, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Godzilla, The Wolfman, and The Mummy.

For many of these projects, Dad helped assemble the model and supervise the gluing process. The models were best assembled by using very little glue; just a touch on the edge of the plastic. When on my own, the gluing got a little careless. Like most other things to a kid, if a little glue is good, then a lot of glue is even better. Aiding in this process were the tubes and spouts that the toxic glue came in. They inevitably clogged, necessitating the use of pins and nails to unclog them. After a few squeezes, the tubes developed holes in other places, usually squirting the glue into the palm of your hand. Finally, you gave up, made a big pile of glue on a piece of cardboard, and used a pin to apply it to the model. That is, if you weren’t too stoned from the fumes at this point to care. Crooked propellers on planes, things assembled backwards, broken parts, and other mishaps may have been more toxic glue-related than a sign of carelessness.

 

Once the model was assembled and had dried, it was time to paint it. I used that ubiquitous Testers stuff that seemed to do a better job of sticking to my hands and getting on my face than staying on the model. Like glue, the more paint you used the better, and many of my early models literally dripped with it. The paints usually were sold in sets containing eight or ten colors, but containing only one brush. Buying extra brushes never seemed to occur to me, so I simply dried the brush on my jeans or shirt and moved on to the next color. After two or three colors, the pigment on the brush began to blend with the remnants of the former colors, and some models became unintentionally psychedelic in appearance.

 

I often wondered why my creations never looked like the ones pictured on the box cover.

 

 

One of the most destructive ‘toys’ we had in the ‘70s was Wacky Packs. Wacky Packs were stickers sold in a random group and made fun of common consumer products; such as “Monotony” instead of “Monopoly,” or “Valveater” instead of “Valveeta.” Each card/sticker had colorful artwork highlighting the spoofed product. There were literally hundreds to collect. The problem was that they stuck incredibly well to any surface they were placed on, and soon became the bane of teachers, janitors, bus drivers, and parents who had to scrape them off of every conceivable surface. In the ‘70s, it was nearly impossible to find a surface not somehow marred by the plague of these kooky stickers. Why we kids found these funny I can’t say, but just like everyone else, I had a couple of them myself.

 

In our neighborhood, even our semi-organized play and games were kind of ad-hoc. Our football field was the Front of Mitchell Hall on the University campus. Here the first downs were not marked by chalk lines, instead trees and bushes took their place. Kids in our neighborhood played hundreds of hours of touch and tackle football here. We mostly played touch football, because when we switched to tackle, there was inevitably some big kid who would join the game and score touchdowns at will, dragging us along while we hung on for dear life. We used a ‘Nerf’ football. As far as kid’s sports go, it was the greatest invention since the jock strap. It was soft, so when it hit you in the face during a long pass when you were staring at a blonde coed instead of paying attention, it hurt a lot less than a leather ball. It also allowed even the most challenged of us to pass like Bob Griese or Roger Staubach. One drawback was playing in or just after a rainstorm. The ball was made of foam rubber, much as a sponge. Like a sponge, it was also good at soaking up muddy water, and equally good at disgorging it onto our faces when we caught a pass. After a game in the wet, we were all pockmarked by muddy impact points where the ball had been caught. 

 

In addition to the lawn at the University, we often played football in the street. We were not suicidal enough to play on Downer Avenue, but usually chose less busy streets such as Hackett or Stowell, those being the two nearest quiet streets. Even then, we faced hazards. Running for a pass often lead to crashing into parked cars or chased by dogs. The pass patterns we ran had nothing to do with professional football at any level. We would simply tell the quarterback that we were going to “Run past the blue car, fake to the right, and fade toward the house with the cat-lady.” Our teams were goofy too. We mostly played with teams of two persons for each side. One kid would play quarterback, and the other the running back or receiver. We were constantly making up rules and arguing about them. That was half the fun. One thing we all agreed on. All play temporarily stopped when someone yelled “Car!”

 

Our baseball field was likewise not exactly regulation. In fact, it was an alley. We never had a neighborhood fat kid that perpetually wanted to be a catcher, so we constructed a ‘strikeout’ field instead by chalking a strike zone on a brick wall of the Christian Science Church. One of us would pitch a tennis ball, while the batter stood against the wall and swung one of several dilapidated bats we owned. If the ball struck in the chalk-box, it was a strike. If you hit the ball, then various landmarks determined how many bases you were awarded. If you hit it into the fenced-in yard with the angry dog with diarrhea and its perpetually stoned owners, then you had to supply a new ball.

 

After Dad bought me a baseball mitt, I began practicing fielding by throwing a tennis ball at our large ash tree in the backyard. Many kids in the neighborhood had one of those pitching nets that had a marked strike zone and returned the ball to you. Completely by accident, my idea of using the tree provided the perfect training for shortstop. Since the tree was round, if you didn’t hit it dead center, the ball would careen off in wild directions which you had to anticipate with split-second timing. How ironic it seems now that because I lacked the proper equipment and just used my imagination, I became one of the best fielders in our neighborhood.

 

I fear those days are gone in America. Imagination has become an orphan. Kids no longer play hide and seek after dark, no longer wear crazy costumes or climb trees. We are free from the minor scabs and injuries that we thought were part of having fun, and a game of cops and robbers is likely to end with the interdiction of a real cop. There is a silence in our neighborhoods that seems uncanny until we spot the culprit, the blue glow of the television screen. We certainly watched our share of television, but it never seemed to interfere with our outdoor games, roaming on bikes, or exploring creeks and ravines. Scooby Doo and Johnny Quest only fueled the fires for our own adventures. Toys may have been an important part of our play, but only as props in a larger unending game or story. We may have been the last generation to spend all afternoon absorbed in playing with a cardboard box or a flashlight. Our parents were freer too. Instead of spending every day shuttling us back and forth to structured activities, they had time to engage in their own hobbies. Although parents in the ‘70s were busy, they were never “Too busy.”

Perhaps falling down and skinning your knee, burning your hand on a creepy Crawler oven, or barely escaping being skewered by a Jart wasn’t as bad as it now seems.

Christmas Memories and Hijinx

It was Christmas Eve of 1974. Dinner had been served and savored, and after coffee, my parents prepared cocktails and started a fire in the living-room fireplace. The room was dominated by Dad’s immaculately and obsessively decorated tree, which was placed next to the grand piano. The windows in the room were tastefully lit with dozens of Italian miniature light sets. Each set of lights was entwined by matching garlands. The mantel over the fireplace was cleared of the normal curios, lined with holly, more lights, and little chocolate ornaments hung by strings. Candles dotted the cozy and warming room where presents awaited from Santa for a little boy who couldn’t wait for opening time.

 

Usually it was about this time when Dad’s patience with me and his anxiety about Christmas and what it must have represented in his childhood memories got to the point where he melted down internally, and threatened to “Ruin Christmas” for us. I think the whole syndrome came from his mother. She always made an epic fuss out of everything. She took hours to get dressed-up to go out, threatening the whole time that she was not going. I call this the Helm “Gotterdammerung” gene. It lies dormant until a big occasion such as a wedding, concert, Christmas, etc. and then rears its ugly head sort of like a grand cataclysmic final act in an opera. My dad got extra helpings of this gene and whenever there was pressure on him, it came out.

 

It’s funny that Christmas meant everything to my father. He was a socialist and an atheist. This being a religious holiday one would think that he would shun it in both its original meaning and its modern manifestation of greed and consumerism.

 

Instead, Dad was a child again at Christmas. Soon after Thanksgiving, his eyes would get large, and we would begin the elaborate and careful process of picking out the tree. I should say that HE took elaborate care picking out the tree, because in Wisconsin in December the ground is frozen, and so were my mom and me as we followed my dad from lot to lot trying to both find the perfect tree and a bargain. We didn’t have a car then, so some other poor soul (often my dad’s brother Bill, who drove a van) was commandeered into the unending frostbitten search for balsam perfection. After ten or twenty lots were visited the chosen tree was duly paid for by my mom. It was then hauled home into the kitchen where Dad sawed off the bottom inch or so of the trunk, as my mom and I held the tree.

“You’re holding it wrong!” “I can’t see… my glasses are all fogged up!” “I cut it crooked and it’s your fault!” “Hold it tighter!” “I am going crazy here!”… Ah, the memories. Mom and I always seemed to be holding something and usually to be “Doing it wrong.” We were the captive audience and helpers while Dad and the tree enacted a play of chaos and slapstick starring a saw, various household objects careening to the floor, and terror sweat.

 

Once the tree was up and was allowed a deep drink of water, the limbs would spread out and the second-guessing of the tree selection began. Holes in the foliage would begin to appear, followed by muttered cursing. Nobody wants to get his or her carefully picked tree home only to discover it has transformed itself overnight into the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. One year we had a tree for only two days when all of the needles fell off overnight. A second tree had to be purchased immediately and my mom and I were dragged along on the arctic expedition a second time. We were poor and frugal, and neither parent could bear to throw anything away, so the tree without needles was duly decorated too, and that year we had two trees: one green and the other brown.

Another year we bought a drunken tree by mistake. Dad repeatedly sawed the stump and tried to make it stand straight, but the derelict tree had other ideas. One day it would lean to the right, only to lurch to the left the following day. We finally attached wires to the damn thing and it finally stood still.

 

Barring any further disasters, Dad began the process of sitting and looking at the tree, thoughtfully smoking his pipe. Several days would pass until the possibilities for trimming would speak to him. Then one afternoon the boxes of lights and antique German ornaments would begin to pile up in the living room. Dad always put the lights on himself. Mom and I were only allowed to help place the ornaments. These had to be coordinated with the many color lights so that each set each other off ‘just so.’ Trimming the tree was a task that could not be hurried and took two or even three days, but the result was spectacular!

 

Christmas to my father was all about the tree, decorations, Old World carols, smoked sausage, presents, and tales about the German Christmas of his youth in Milwaukee during the depression. I never really put my fingers on it, but this elaborate holiday preparation seemed to be in compensation for something missing in his youth, or simply a supreme desire to recreate his happiest memories. Whatever the reasons, Dad sure knew how to make Christmas an occasion which memories are made of. Despite his threat every year to “Ruin Christmas,” he did the opposite. He made it joyous.

 

If you wonder what my mother was doing all this time, I can sincerely say that although she cared about the holiday of Christmas, this overblown preparation was not her cup of tea. Of course, she had to provide for Christmas, dad being chronically out of work, so in reality it was all her doing. She would sit on our couch near the tree with a cocktail and cigarette after dinner for awhile with my dad, but was often too busy with other things to “Come and enjoy the lights” all the time as my dad often scolded. We couldn’t just turn the lights on when we wished either. Dad controlled the turning on and off of any Christmas lights. They only were allowed to be turned on after dark. It was my job however, to climb under the tree to plug in the lights when directed. This “Enjoy the lights” thing began on December 26^th, and ran until the second week of January when the tree finally was dismantled. I couldn’t get enough of the tree and decorations. I would sit for hours in the evenings near or under the magnificent tree looking at the colors, reflections, and the ornaments. Christmas is the greatest time of a boy’s life.

 

 

Of course, there were the near disasters that any holiday might bring on. One year we had several of my parent’s friends over for cocktails. One of the guests sat near the tree and kept gesticulating wildly as he talked and consumed my mom’s lethal martinis, causing the tree to shake. Dad was on pins and needles. Sure enough when the tipsy guest tried to get up, he toppled toward the tree and had to be saved by dad.

 

With a live tree, there was always a chance for fire, and Dad told me stories of ‘the old days’ when trees were lit with candles and fires were common. To this purpose, we always kept a bucket of water handy near the tree. If the tree did catch fire, at least the bucket would give us something to do while we watched the living room go up in flames.

 

 Another year we started a fire in our fireplace on Christmas Eve, as was our tradition. This was the first fire of the year for us, and the chimney had somehow gotten clogged with something. Despite increasingly desperate manipulation of the flue, the house slowly filled with thick smoke. I remember being terrified. Dad sent me outside to see if any smoke was coming out of the chimney, and as I watched, the chimney disgorged several frantic and smoldering squirrels whose winter home now lay in ashes.

 

My mother loved company and to socialize. The holidays were the time to invite family and friends over for cocktails. This social aspect is what I think my Mom liked best about Christmas. Dealing with the beginnings of Dad’s increasing neurosis without anything to guide her, and raising a son while working full time, she looked to others to help keep her sanity. Over the years, her attempts at holding small social gatherings were a success, but with a cost. The very escape mechanism of hosting guests often caused increased anxiety in my father in the preparations for the event.

 

Christmas was always an occasion for my Uncle, Bill Schafer to come to dinner and help us celebrate the season. Bill was my father’s older half-brother and a bachelor. He was always incredibly kind to me. I called him “Ocaboo”, doing my best to pronounce his name (Uncle Bill … Ocaboo  see?)

 

Ocaboo was a somewhat tragic figure. He had spent several years in an institution. In the 1950s psychiatry was not yet a compassionate profession, and people who today would be treated as outpatients were routinely locked away. Ocaboo held a job with a flower wholesaler and drove a delivery route. He had a company van and was often persuaded to drive our car-less family here or there. He had a troubled childhood, and in an attempt at discipline, my Grandfather had beaten him regularly. He had a curious way of eating his dessert before the main course of dinner, which was a habit left over from the days of the institution. Like dogs, the patients would wolf the best food right away before it was taken away or stolen from them. Following the completion of his meal, which he usually finished in less than 30 seconds, he pushed his plate away from him. This habit always drove my dad nuts.

 

My parents were always glad to have Ocaboo as a guest as he had nothing to speak of as his own, and after my Grandparents and my Uncle Franklin moved to Florida, no nearby family other than us. He always had gifts for us, especially me, although he must have earned pitiful wages. The problem with Ocaboo was that after imbibing a few drinks he would start to talk of vast conspiracies and wax poetic on his fractured views of the world. Usually he retired to a local tavern after this to the relief of my parents.

 

One of the stories from my dad’s childhood I remember well. There was an older man in my dad’s (German) neighborhood that played the German Santa-Claus or Weinacht’s Man. He traveled throughout the neighborhood on Christmas Eve dressed in costume visiting households with children, and dispensing gifts that he bought with his own money. Keep in mind that this was the great depression; everything was hard to come by, and every penny was precious. At each stop, the grateful parents would insist that he stay a moment for a quick glass of schnapps. By the time he got to my dad’s house, he had had a snootfull. As he appeared in his costume, now sort of askew and disheveled, and cried out “Schone Weinacht” to the three children, he fell down the stairs, landing on his bag of gifts. Imagine as a kid actually seeing Santa in your house, only to have him drunkenly tumble down the stairs and land in front of you in a heap. What makes the story touching and not just comic is the fact that the man was a widower who lived alone, and had buried his only son years before. The boy had died near Christmas when only six years old and the old man never got over the loss. In compensation, he had adopted the entire neighborhood.

 

Back in that evening of 1974, my parents relaxed for a while after dinner while I was sent to my room for a short nap. (Both so that I calmed down enough, and so that Santa Clause could come). Dad was a genius when it came to dramatizing and choreographing the coming of Santa. I would be downstairs playing when from the second floor a stomping and ringing of sleigh bells was heard. Dad would come running down the stairs shouting that he thought he heard Santa. I would go tearing up the stairs to see if I could spot any reindeer on the roof, giving Mom time to quickly remove the presents from their hiding spot and arrange them under the tree. It all seemed like magic, but of course, I was easily deceived. After awhile the scene was ready, and we gathered around the tree to open presents. I don’t know what else I got that year, but the big box was saved for last. I tore the wrapping paper off and found an electric train set complete with engine, boxcars, and a cool maintenance car with a working crane. It had a round track and a box of telegraph poles, signs and miscellaneous accessories. I couldn’t wait to play with it.

 

After singing carols around the piano, Dad and I went upstairs to set up the train. Now most people would have set it up in a craft room or basement, but Dad chose his bedroom floor. I guess I was deemed not responsible enough to have it in my own room right away. We got it working and I probably played with it for an hour or so before going back downstairs to the family Christmas. Mom and Dad were well into cocktails by that time and later we went to midnight mass at the Newman center across the street.

 

The next morning I went into Dad’s bedroom to play with the train. Dad was snoring away. The train sat on the track kind of ‘funny’ and many of the cars were separated. Then I noticed that several of the cars were crushed and had been carefully glued together. Of course, it was easy to see what had happened. Dad had come up to go to bed and in the habitual darkness of his bedroom, had trod on the poor train, crushing it on his way to turn on the bedside lamp. I am sure I was angry at the time, but now I just think of the time and care he took staying up all night to glue each piece back together, especially after a night of cocktails. He must have felt terrible as he squinted in the basement work area trying to figure out where each piece went. The train still ran, but it now it had a history that I always would remember.

 

My parents always spent time picking out just the right gifts for me. It was quality over quantity. Instead of the latest must-have plastic trash advertised on children’s shows, I received wooden erector sets from Austria, castle building sets from Spain, and toys generally designed to enhance the mind and allow a single child to play alone for hours on end. The one Christmas gift that I still have was my first ever. It was Christmas Eve of 1965, and my dad was roped into attending an office Christmas cocktail party after work. Much beer was consumed until he looked at his watch with an exclamation, realizing that by now most of the stores were closed, and he had yet to get a gift for me. He scoured Wisconsin Avenue in hopes of the luck of an open shop. Boston Store had stayed open late that year and he hurried in to try to save the situation. As he searched the toy department, he spied a small white stuffed doggie with big soft eyes and a little black nose. “Eureka!” He must have thought with profound relief. As he told it, my eyes lit up like candles at the sight of that little doggie, and it was my favorite gift that year, my first Christmas. My parents used to bring the dog out and sit it in a little chair of its own as a kind of decoration in later years. By then the dog, which had seen a lot of love and drool, had clumps of hair missing and one leg was taped up.

 

In the early 1990s, after Dad started to get his social security payments, the whole Christmas epic on Downer Avenue became even grander and more over the top. Literally hundreds of unlit candles and holders, little figurines, and plastic holly were attached to every square-inch of the house. With the garlands of faux pine surrounding every room entryway, it was getting crowded and hard to move. One evening my Uncle Charles and Aunt Carol were over, when my mom, who was by that time connected to an oxygen tank due to emphysema, slowly made her way to the bathroom on the second floor, trailing the oxygen hose behind her. The hose kept getting fouled on the garlands that spiraled up the staircase railing, thus impeding her progress. My dad saw this and in his typical fashion said to my mom “You are ruining the decorations with that oxygen hose!” One of us commented “ That’s OK Fritz, she will be dead soon and then she won’t ruin your garlands.”

 

Christmas dinner was one of the special times when my dad often prepared the repast. Far from my mothers simple and wonderful cooking, my dad always made a huge production of holiday dinners. We often had goose or duck, which had to specially selected and prepared. The talk about the fowl would finally drive my mom to the limits of her patience, and she would give in. We would traipse to the local butchers looking for the right bird. The search and the preparation were similar to the Christmas tree in that the final product was fit for an Epicurean feast, but the stress and buildup to the dinner often spoiled our appetite. One year Dad made Beef Wellington. This is a traditional Anglo-French dish of beef roast covered elaborately in puff pastry strips. Something went wrong with the pastry and he started the anxiety and blaming. Of course, it was somehow my fault or my mother’s, or that he had the “wrong tools” for the job. The resulting mummy-like roast was delicious, but eaten in total silence.

On another occasion, we were to have dinner guests several days after Christmas. They were to arrive at 7:00 p.m. Around the time they were supposed to arrive, Dad started his pacing. The hour grew later as 7 o’clock turned to 7:30, then to 8, then 8:30. By now, Dad was furious and put the roast in the oven on broil. By the time the guests arrived at 9 o’clock, the roast was charred and black. Dad served it to them anyway out of spite.

 

In the 1970s in Milwaukee it started snowing sometime after Thanksgiving and usually didn’t stop until March. We nearly always had a white Christmas. Houses during the holidays kind of glow with warmth when viewed from outside, and ours always seemed the warmest.

The music that surrounded our Christmas on Downer was very traditional. We often sang carols while Dad played the piano, or listened to several LPs of choral groups with Christmas themes. Milwaukee was blessed to have an excellent classical music station in the 1970s, WFMR. The station would broadcast carols and sacred music full time starting early on Christmas Eve and going throughout Christmas Day. Favorites included the carols sung in German such as ‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen’. I never was exposed to the horrors of jazzed up holiday music until much later. There was no ‘Rockin‘ round the Xmas tree’ in our house. Till this day, I consider being forced to listen to horrible holiday music as possibly the worst form of torture imaginable. Far from luring me into stores, it instead drives me screaming out the door. Perhaps if I had grown up with it, it may have been different, but I doubt that. Christmas in the Helm family was about sublime beauty. Bad music didn’t fit in to that.

 

Another activity I miss about Christmas as a child in Milwaukee was going to the Gimbels department store downtown to look at their window displays. These featured a snowy North Pole landscape populated by elves in various stages of making toys. Some of the elves were animated, and as a child, I thought they were real. The scenes seemed to go on forever, and later were moved to their basement and expanded. When Gimbels closed its doors Milwaukee lost a Christmas treasure.

 

Christmas is indeed the best time in a child’s life, but it is short lived. The wide eyes and joy on the face of a child as he or she rips open every package under the tree, and the smiles of parents knowing that they had succeeded in making Christmas special are at their zenith only while a child has faith in Santa Claus, and is delighted with everything. When the child begins to get choosy about specific toys and moody when he or she doesn’t get them, some of the magic dies. Luckily for us, Dad made the holiday such a pageant that it was always special.