Tabla de contenidos para April/May 2022 en Reminisce

AT WAR’S END Representatives from South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the United States sign the Paris Peace Accords, ending a conflict dating to 1954. Within two months, the last American troops leave Vietnam. NO LOVE MATCH More than 90 million TV viewers tune in to see tennis pioneer Billie Jean King, 29, right, defeat Bobby Riggs, 55, in straight sets in a match hyped for weeks as the Battle of the Sexes. DAKOTA STANDOFF About 200 members of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe occupy Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to protest broken treaties and the overall condition and treatment of American Indians. THE BLAIR PROJECT Movie crowds flock to The Exorcist, about the demonic possession of a girl played by 13-year-old Linda Blair. It is…

■ Green, a mail carrier, and his wife, Alma, moved to Harlem in 1918, at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance. ■ Inspired by Jewish travel guides and using his postal worker’s knowledge of the city, Green compiled lists of hotels and restaurants that catered to African Americans. The first Negro Motorist Green Book in 1936 was only 10 pages and limited to metropolitan New York. Even so, readers loved it. ■ The guide grew more comprehensive each year. Green gathered information from postal workers in other states, and worked with the U.S. Travel Bureau’s Negro Affairs department. By the 1940s, the Green Book listed thousands of businesses across the country that were Black-owned or verified to be nondiscriminatory. Green’s annual print run reached 15,000 copies. ■ Lists were longest…

The year was 1947. Dad was building a new house in Walkerton. It had two bedrooms, though we were a family of six. I slept with my brothers, Ernie and Gary, in one bedroom, and our sister Kay slept in the other. Our parents, Lorin and Elizabeth, bought a foldout couch for their bed. They used it through the 1960s. Three of us children had started our own families around that time, so Mom and Dad could finally have their own bedroom and a real bed. The couch was still in very good shape, and our parents used it as extra seating. But within a few years, this sturdy piece of furniture, already 20 years old, was about to embark on a long journey. My daughter Dawn took it with…

MY FAMILY WOULD take trips to the San Bernardino Mountains near the Big Bear area of California in the early 1970s. Every year, we’d rent the same cabin on Lake Gregory. It was tiny and close to town. As we all know, every old cabin comes with a ghost story. Ours had “the invisible hand,” which would grab you while you slept. With what we believed was our resident ghost waiting to terrorize us, none of us kids could get any sleep in our own beds. My siblings and I took to sleeping together in the old, squeaky, bar-in-the-back foldout sofa in the living room for the entire trip. Our parents didn’t understand why we weren’t using our bedrooms. They just thought we were unusually close. HAVE A SEAT (OR…

After mass production made greeting cards affordable for everyone in the late 19th century, sending them at holidays became something of a craze. Easter cards used sacred and secular symbols to mark spring’s arrival—icons such as the cross honor the Christian observance, while budding apple trees, fat bunnies and hatchlings in the ever-present egg symbolize awakening. A quirky scene of chicks imbibing under a sprig of pussy willows has an unexpected tongue-in-cheep humor. COMING UP: Mother’s Day Post your photos: REMINISCE.COM/SUBMIT-A-STORY…

My friends Anna and Luke were expecting their first child in a few weeks. Anna was tidying in the kitchen when she called to Luke, who was reading the newspaper. “I think it’s time. Pull the car to the front curb while I get my bag.” Luke said, “OK, in a minute.” He continued reading. Anna was surprised. “Luke, we have to hurry. We have to drive to the hospital, because the baby is coming!” “I want to finish this article about the Cincinnati Reds first,” Luke said. Anna couldn’t believe her ears. For the past eight and a half months, he’d been just as excited about the baby as she was. “What’s the matter, Luke?” she asked. “Don’t you understand? We have to get started—the drive will take about…

A deckhand aboard a merchant ship delivering medical supplies for the Army in 1947, I was 16. The ship was anchored off the shore of Okinawa, Japan, and my shipmate Zach and I had the never-ending tasks of removing rust from the hull with a special sharp chipping hammer, then applying a lead paint sealer over the exposed area. We perched on a 12-foot-long wooden plank that hung outside the ship about 50 feet above the briny sea. Pulleys on each end of the plank allowed us to raise or lower our rig as needed. It was near sunset, and we were hungry and tired from our labor and the pungent smell of the red paint. Over the rat-a-tat of our chipping hammers hitting the steel hull, we made out…

ON A WARM MAY NIGHT IN 1965 we loaded suitcases and bags of food in the trunk of Velma Duncan’s Ford and left Hamilton, Alabama, for Panama City, Florida. Mrs. Duncan was a brave soul. She agreed to chaperone our party of five, including her daughter Sarah Ann, on our road trip, which began the day after our high school graduation. Joining Sarah Ann and me as the Florida Five, as we’ve been known ever since, were Glendia Brown, Judy Finch and Judy Holcomb—yes, we had two Judys. Mrs. Duncan secured our beachfront cabin for seven days, and we chipped in for rent and expenses. Our drive to the Sunshine State was not without drama. It was midnight by the time we got underway. We had gone barely 50 miles…

LOIS AND I, with our two kids, Brian and Gina, decided to go on an adventure in the summer of 1977. Loading our car with a couple of weeks’ worth of supplies, we headed south out of Oregon to the Mexico border, not really knowing what we would do when we got there. After crossing at San Diego, we were instantly lost. We knew only that we wanted to get to Ensenada, a city about 70 miles from Tijuana. We looked for a nice highway that would take us there, but we had no clue how to find it. Finally, I asked someone about reaching the freeway. As we made our way along the route, we realized that there was a freeway and a “free way,” which had no toll…

When I was 15 months old—in 1955—my twin siblings were born. We were now a family of seven living in Navy housing at China Lake in California, about 150 miles north of Los Angeles. The area had very few single-family houses at the time. Like almost everyone else in China Lake, we lived in a duplex. Our portion had three bedrooms, a full and a half bath, and the other usual rooms (kitchen, living room and dining room). Space was tight, especially with three babies in the house. My brother was 7 and my sister almost 10 when I was born. Each of them had a bedroom. Mom and Dad moved out of the master bedroom and installed three cribs for the twins and me. That left Mom and Dad…

My wife, Peggy, and I started dating near the end of the school year at Brigham Young University in 1970. When the summer began, she went back home to work, while I stayed to work at the campus radio station. Our dates meant a round trip of 80 miles. One Saturday night, we had tickets to a Glen Campbell concert, and we knew it would end late. Peggy’s parents graciously invited me to stay over after the concert and then go with the family to church the next day. My assigned sleeping spot was in the family room downstairs on an orange Naugahyde couch in a style called the New Yorker. Bright orange was a common decor tone at the time, but the shape of the couch was new to…

She was stunning, with curly strawberry blond hair that framed her face. I first met Jill in late 1957, when I was 11. I adored her, but through the decades, she and I drifted apart. Then in early 2009, we reconnected while I was going through a memorabilia drawer. Jill, almost 52 years old by then, was a pitiful sight: balding, arms and legs detached from her body. And her outfit? Well, let’s say it was nothing to speak of. How could I have neglected this 10½-inch former beauty? An internet search led me to a doll restorer not far from my home. While Jill underwent a transformation that would take a couple of weeks, I researched Jill dolls. They were made by the Vogue Doll Co., which sold Jill…

Practice, practice, practice. That’s what I needed so that I could pass the Ohio driver’s license exam in 1974. And the best place to do that was behind Logan Elm High School in Circleville when nobody was around. I had my learner’s permit. Dad had insisted that it was important to learn to drive a manual transmission, so I was already pretty smooth with our family’s Volkswagen Bug. But parallel parking was my nemesis. One Sunday afternoon, with Mom in the passenger seat, I drove the Bug around to the back of the school. Mom exited the car to watch and give encouragement. I got the car into position near the sets of posts that marked the practice parking spot. The posts were set in concrete in metal cans, and…

ACROSS 1 Noisy weather phenomenon 7 Promo spot in print or on TV 10 Large region of cold rotating air, 2 wds. 12 Fluid in a pen 13 August: _____ County 15 Partially frozen raindrops 18 Hold onto it in a windstorm 19 Fox’s lair 20 Canadian maritime province, abbr. 22 Violent storm in the Atlantic Ocean 26 News agency, abbr. 28 Garden irrigator 29 Retirement account, abbr. 30 Ice balls formed high in the atmosphere 31 Warm West Coast winds, 2 wds. 35 Decomposed bog matter 37 Transport to Oz 39 Happy as a _____ 40 Not down 42 Tiny particle 45 High-altitude air current, 2 wds. 47 Compete (for) 48 Hot spell 49 Come down like cats and dogs DOWN 1 Violent storm in the Pacific Ocean 2 Remove…

Our grandfather was a famous lawyer in China who fled when the Communists took over in 1949. We visited him every summer in Princeton, New Jersey. He—disgruntled, without meaningful work and perhaps being a typical Chinese grandfather—sat on his sun porch all day, reading and never talking to us. His second wife, who was younger than my mom, had been a “dancing girl” in China. She was kind to us, but we couldn’t speak Chinese and she couldn’t speak English. That left us kids—ages 5, 6, 7 and 9—with only one another on those visits from our home in Detroit, Michigan. One evening, we went outside to catch fireflies. My sister and I watched surprised as our brothers played and wrestled on the lawn with Bill, a Princeton Ph.D. student…

UPCOMING FEATURES: FALLING FOR FALL Share vintage images of playing in leaf piles, homecoming games or harvesttime. Use our online form at Reminisce.com/submit-a-story or email submissions@reminisce.com with “Fall Photos” as the subject. PYREX LOVE Tell us about your favorite piece or share a memorable story involving Pyrex. Don’t forget family pictures featuring Pyrex. Submit by June 1. Use our online form at Reminisce.com/submit-a-story or email submissions@reminisce.com with “Pyrex” as the subject. GHOSTLY FUN Do you have a real family ghost story? We’re all ears! Submit by June 1. Use our online form at Reminisce.com/submit-a-story or email submissions@reminisce.com with “Ghost Tales” as the subject. DEPARTMENTS Submissions for our many standing departments are welcome. Below are a few favorites. Still can’t decide where your story belongs? Send it along and let us…

My brother, Jerry, and I were more than a bit naughty. We enjoyed a colorful, adventuresome childhood with our longsuffering mother, Helen, and our father, Frank, called Zeke, whose hobby was hunting small game and preserving their pelts in our garage. Jerry was younger than I, and we were baptized at the same time in 1949 at the Chelsea Baptist Church in Kansas City, Kansas. But we didn’t change our frisky ways for the better until we got older. We loved trips to our uncle’s farm outside of Kansas City. Uncle Robert had a mob of chickens and a milk cow, Bessie. Tall weeds grew in Bessie’s pasture—when they became dry and brittle, they made excellent spears for two battling brothers. One day, my side of the pasture was out…

My father, Paul, was very close to his grandfather, who lived with them. Great-Grandfather Henry, or Paw, as my dad called him, was born in what is now Germany in 1861 and traveled with his parents to America when he was about 6. Henry grew up, farmed, married Katherine and raised a family in western Kentucky. When World War II began, Henry, then 82, feared he would be deported to his home country, even though he’d lived so many years in the U.S. So he began the process of applying for citizenship, and on Nov. 17, 1943, Henry Kortz Jr.—Paw—was admitted as a U.S. citizen. Paw’s naturalization certificate was one of his most prized possessions. I remember seeing it displayed at my grandparents’ house. Paw wanted my dad to have…

1904 Rand McNally’s first road map shows streets in and around New York City. 1906 AAA’s Official Automobile Blue Book recasts traditional bicycling guides for motorists. 1911 Trail to Sunset by AAA covers a route from New York to Jacksonville, Florida. It’s a precursor to TripTiks, the club’s spiral-bound, custom route guides. 1917 A highway numbering system on Rand McNally’s new map of Peoria, Illinois, becomes a model for the system used across the country today. 1924 Auto Chum is the first edition in what will become the popular Rand McNally Road Atlas. 1926 Harry M. Gousha, former head of Rand McNally’s Auto Trails department, forms his own business to make route maps for oil companies. The folding maps are given out for free at gas stations. 1936 Gousha creates Touraide guides…

When Lipton introduced Cup-a-Soup 50 years ago, the trend for powdered and dried food that had been building for years took a new turn. The company already had a winner with its dried onion soup mix, introduced 20 years earlier. West Coast cooks elevated it to food legend by making it the key ingredient of California dip. By 1972, cultural shifts contributed to the success of Cup-a-Soup and convenience food in general. In more than one-third of American households, both parents worked full time. Single-serve soups, among other child-friendly mixes, meant latchkey kids could help themselves to a snack after school. Other trends helped, especially the letting go of strict proprieties about when food should be consumed—breakfast at 8, lunch at noon, dinner at 6. Now you could eat when…

When the Board of Education in Dayton, Ohio, hosted a fundraising dinner for its Head Start program in 1982, my wife, Virginia, and I went to see the featured speaker at the event, author Alex Haley. I was an editor in nearby Sidney. I met Haley months earlier after his keynote address at the California Writers Club. This time I hoped to interview him. After Haley finished his speech at the fundraiser, I reminded him of our previous meeting. He invited us to his hotel room to talk. I was nervous about interviewing such an important writer, but he put me at ease. He offered us sweet potato pie and talked about his family, including his parents, Simon and Bertha, his brothers, George and Julius, and his many cousins. We…

He was cool. He was rebellious. He was everything the average auto executive was not. John DeLorean’s career took off like a rocket at General Motors Corp., where he created an automotive icon and was the wunderkind CEO of the flagship brand. Then, in 1982, his rags-to-riches rise crashed spectacularly. DeLorean’s Pontiac GTO still occupies the summit of the muscle-car era. But his venture as the independent maker of the gull-wing DeLorean DMC-12 drove him into financial ruin. The low point came when he was caught in a government sting that trapped him into offering to finance a cocaine deal. DeLorean’s father, a Romanian immigrant and alcoholic, worked sporadically at the Ford factory. Home life was strained, and DeLorean’s parents divorced when he was in his teens. Young DeLorean excelled…