Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!
We’re going into the new year by looking back. Randy at GeneaMusings encourages us to reminisce. So the group remembers the Good Old Days.
When I Was Young
I used to say that I didn’t really like to wallow in nostalgia. But now it’s more of a mental exercise. Can I remember that stuff anymore?
1. Tell us about a time when your family got a newfangled invention (your first air conditioner, color TV, VCR, microwave, computer, etc.).
Our family got a color TV in either Christmas 1969 or Christmas 1970.
The only times I remember seeing color TV before that were some summer nights c. 1962/63. My sister Leslie had a best friend, Christine, who lived next door to my maternal grandmother.
They, I, and maybe my baby sister would be at Christine’s house watching this piece of furniture. It was usually the Wonderful World of Disney and Bonanza on Sunday nights on NBC. ABC and CBS weren’t broadcasting in color until 1966.
So when we got our color TV, I remember seeing The Wizard of Oz for the first time in color. I had watched it a dozen times before that, but I never saw Oz that way before. I finally got the “horse of a different color” reference; the equine used to be different shades of gray.
Pharaohs?
2. Is there a particular song that sparks a childhood memory?
If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that there are HUNDREDS, maybe THOUSANDS of songs I can identify from when I was 4 to 18. And most of them generate a memory, many of which I have written about.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about Wooly Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. I liked the song a lot, especially the countdown: “Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quatro.” Here’s an oddity: per Billboard magazine, it was the number one song of 1965. However, it never reached number one on the weekly Billboard charts, though it did top Record World.
It wasn’t the song as much as the outfits I was struck by as a kid. These guys weren’t Middle Eastern/Egyptian, were they? No.
Regarding the lead singer, “most sources refer to Domingo Samudio’s ancestry as Mexican-American. However, a 1998 Chicago Tribune article described Samudio as of Basque/Apache descent. In a 2007 conversation with music writer Joe Nick Patoski, Samudio described his grandparents fleeing the Mexican Revolution and settling in Texas, where his family supported themselves working in the cotton fields.”
Learning
3. What is something an older family member taught you to do?
My paternal grandmother taught me canasta, and my paternal grandfather taught me gin rummy. My father’s cousin Ruth described my father at her home, feverishly trying to figure out my name and initials shortly after I was born.
4. Back in the day, what name brands would we have found in your family’s kitchen?
Joy dish detergent, Kellogg’s/Nabisco/General Mills cereals (I LOVED cereal), Fro-Joy ice cream (a truly inferior product), Pyrex bowls, General Electric (refrigerator, maybe?) Our stove/oven was ancient, and I have no idea what brand it was. Maybe my sisters recall.
5. As a child, did you collect anything (rocks, shells, stickers, etc.)?
Stamps, baseball cards, LPs. coins. I was really put out when some kid, the child of my parents’ friends, purloined some of my half-dollars.
Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.
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