Traveling back in time: 1960 in Daydreaming on the Porch

Dec. 17, 2020, 11:29 a.m.
|
Public

This entry has me time traveling back 60 years to the impossibly distant year 1960. Surprisingly, I have a lot of memories from that time in childhood when I was 9 years old. Part of the reason is that I have so many rich associations of that special place in the past where time itself didn’t seem to exist. I was at that stage of life where pure experience was paramount. Experience is life, and every day when you’re a child seems suffused with living and being in their purest sense, as opposed to when we get older. Then, the innocence of youth fades and dissipates, and eventually we are only too aware of the passage of time. At last, when we are old, we realize only too keenly and regretfully that we don’t have that much time left.

I remember my elementary schools very vividly, the teachers and some of my classmates, in particular, a bully who truly disliked me in fourth grade. I remember the squares of pizza, and milk and fruit for lunch in the school cafeteria. I remember my mother’s delicious suppers and dashing back outside afterward to resume our endless games and re-enactments of favorite Saturday morning cartoons and Westerns. I had a vivid imagination and used to create Old West towns with large boxes and sheets of plywood.

I first gathered my recollections of that time in childhood and wrote about them in my inaugural online journal, Armchair Peregrinations, on August 26, 1998. Here is what I wrote:

When I think back to my childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans, I can recall very readily three business establishments.

First was the Katz & Besthoff drugstore down the street on Jefferson Highway. It was here that we kids would have those wonderful Cherry Cokes, Coke dispensed from the fountain into a glass that had cherry syrup at the bottom. That was a real treat on hot summer days. Canned Cherry Cokes today just can’t compare.

The second business was a small grocery store across the street from the school I attended. It was here that we could stock up on paper straws filled with tart sugar candy, miniature wax bottles of fruit-flavored juice, Fleer Bubble Gum, and baseball and other cards with bubble gum sheets inside. I always thought that was so cool.

Finally, between the drugstore and the hole-in-the-wall snack shop was the barbershop. Some of the keenest memories of my growing status as a soon-to-be teenager were associated with this establishment where I proceeded by myself, as far as I can recall, starting at age 9 or 10, to get my crew-cut. You could hear late 1950s hits on the small radio on the counter, songs by Brenda Lee, Pat Boone, Patsy Cline, and those classics by the Ray Conniff and Bert Kaempfert orchestras. To this day, I love to hear those songs, but I only appreciated them years later when they joined the pantheon of “Oldies.” They take me back to the golden days of childhood as surely as any other memory-triggering device. “Bye-Bye Blues” might be playing in the background while the electric clippers buzzed off broad swaths of my raggedy hair. Or, I’d be patiently waiting my turn, flipping through grown-up magazines such as “Argosy” and “Field & Stream.” I remember those two titles because they were in just about every old-fashioned barbershop I’d ever been in. Well-worn copies of “Look” and “Life,” “The Saturday Evening Post,” and various other hunting and fishing magazines, were there to discover. Very grown up stuff for a 9-year-old. They were strewn about on chairs, or stuffed in magazine racks with a cover that was about to come off. Yes, it was almost like a Norman Rockwell painting. To us city-raised kids, photos of deer hunting and trophy-sized freshwater bass were as exotic as if seen from an African safari. Occasional conversation, the pleasing clip-clip sound of scissors, the sound of the razor being sharpened — all were noted and stored away in my memory.

That’s pretty much how I remember it this evening, 22 years later. When I was 9, I didn’t have a radio that I’d run home and turn on after getting back from the barbershop to listen to those songs I had heard while waiting to get my haircut. But I remembered the songs so distinctly, that years later when I heard them again I became big fan of those singers and various orchestras and individual musicians. They produced some really outstanding instrumental hits in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The Lawrence Welk Orchestra had one of those big hits, “Calcutta,” which to this day remains one of my favorite songs that I never tire of listening to.

Thinking back, 9 seems a bit young to be going to the barbershop by yourself, but my parents must have trusted me and I think I was always a little too mature for my age.

The past couple of days I’ve been digging into the Billboard Top 100 songs of the years 1959 and 1960. I was amazed at the variety and quality from those two years alone. I realize I’m stretching the capabilities of my memory but I feel fairly confident that at least some, if not not most, of the songs below played on the radio during those memorable occasions when I started going to the barbershop myself. The music coincided perfectly with an unmistakeable rite of passage. Music and memories.

(Note: Apologies if some these songs were released after 1960. I still want to include them in this list.)

Billy Vaughn. La Paloma