Ahhh, 1963...

[conditionfreak]

Okay. I know that anything I write that is not exactly correct, will be correct immediately, but I am going to do a little bit of nostalgia. Just because I want to. This is all from memory with no research to verify my memory.

 

Many of you, if not most of you, were not around in 1963, but I tell you, in many aspects it was the greatest time of my life.

 

There have been watershed years in history that eclipse most other years. I can not speak of 1939 or so, but it was one of those times. War, comic books, etc, all affected life a great deal during that year. But I was not around then so I can not speak of it with any first hand knowledge.

 

1963. I was 10. JFK was the big news to the U.S., as was the Beatles. There was a glutton of rock and roll, country and folk groups wow-ing the nation and the world.

 

The Stingray bicycle was big. Banana seats, stick shifters for five and ten speeds. High rise handle bars.

 

Then there was the very start of video games. "Pong" is the one I remember as being the first.

 

Spiderman, Flash, the FF, and many many more were just coming out. McDonalds restaurants were all the rage. Hippies, free love, LSD and marijuana were all the rage also. Glue sniffing was in vogue. Long hair and tight pants on guys. It was the time that I found out that there were men who actually tried to pick up boys. I noticed that when I would walk around the neighborhood, old guys in Cadillacs were always offering me rides. No, I never did , but I soon found out from the older kids in the neighborhood what that was all about. I must have been a good looking kid

 

Yep, a fantastic time. Good and bad. There were race riots galore. Cops had the authority to bust heads when they thought it was called for. I remember the two Cincinnati cops that patroled my neighborhood. Frank Fellhouse and Willy Wright. Frank was an old guy and Willy was a young buck ready and looking for any challenge. Frank knew everything that everyone did, whether we knew he knew or not. I did some things in the dark that I thought no one knew about, yet Frank showed up at my home and told my Grandmother that she better have a talk with me or he was going to. I still do not know how he knew, as I was only with my brother when I did those things. Willy had a habit of catching us kids being bad and giving us an option. He would give anyone that he had in custody the option of having a one block head start, and if he could not catch you, running on foot, he would forget whatever he had on you at the time. BUT, if he caught you, he had the right to beat your butt and you were not allowed to tell anyone. I do not know any of us that ever took him up on his deal, so I do not know if it was all bluster or not.

 

Gasoline was 19 cents a gollon and during what was called the "gas wars", it actually dropped to 9 cents a gallon in Covington Kentucky, which was just across the bridge from Cincy. The cars on the road were 55, 56 and 57 Chevy's and the like. BIg, strong and beautiful cars. Cadillacs with long fins and Corvettes that looked like space ships. Cars were actually able to have music on demand, sort of. You could have an 8 track player in your vehicle. Color TV was just starting to become affordable and they actually added TWO more channels to the TV stations selection. Making it a whopping total of 5 channels you could view. ABC, CBS, NBC, and channels 25 and 55. My favorite cartoon was Tom Terrific. Captain Kangaroo was the most popular kids TV program.

 

The letter "J" had just recently become an official letter of the alphabet (betcha didn't know that, huh?) Previously, it was a "slang" letter, used but not officially a part of the alphabet. Drive thru restaurants had girls on roller skates coming up to your car window to take your order. Just like "Happy Days". They were putting a man on the moon soon. In school, we had drills in case of a nuclear attack. We were told to hide under our school desks (which were only really chairs), or bend over in our seats and put our heads between our legs. AS IF any of that would help in a nuclear explosion. HaHa.

 

All telephones were equipped with dials. Many phone lines were shared with other families. Those were called party lines. You could listen to your neighbors talking with whoever, at least until they yelled at you to hang up the phone and quit listening in on their conversations. Which is not to be confused with todays "party lines", that usually charge by the minute for "hook ups".

 

I was stealing change out of my mothers and aunts purses, to buy the latest comic books. Twelve cents for Spiday #1, FF #1, and all of the others. I got my first dog, and a very small painted turtle (which is illegal now to sell) from the pet shop. I got a "horned toad" as a pet also. MY best friend was a black kid named Tony and Tony and I used to collect cats from wherever we could find them, and put them in my grandmothers back yard which was closed in on all four side by brick building walls. It took me years to figure out why Tony would just call our only black cat Sam, as I had named it Little Black Sambo. I just didn't understand then what I understand now.

 

Lawrence Welk was introducing some of the future stars of the music world. Elvis was King. Chubby Checker was just around the corner, as was James Brown, and Sonny and Cher. I t wasn't too long later that I "fell" for my first movie star female. Jane Fonda (whom I now despise) really got to me in the movie "Barbarella". She was just plain hot. That was probably a couple or so years later but I am not sure.

 

I have not experienced another time like it. I met my future wife that year. I was ten and she was 8. We have been together ever since. I was Babtized that year also.

 

I am sure that some of you younger people have had certain years in your life that will stand out to you years down the road, but for me it was 1963. Good and bad. What a time!

 

Would I want to do it again. YOU BET! And I wouldn't change a thing.,,,,,,,,,,,, Except buy more comics and keep them in better shape.

[Superman2006]

Right on, man! Sounds like good times. Thanks for sharing.

[PokerKid]

Me thinks maybe the LSD and glue had more to do with bouncing flashes of light than video games. Pong was first, but it didn't start burning its image into cathode ray tubes until 1972. (OK maybe not too much acid as a 10-year-old)

 

Great time and nice to see someone looking back fondly.

 

[Subliminal]

So you were fond a Jane...

But Barbarella was in '68

 

 

[lizards2]

I was two, and I was bouncing that little blue ball down the hall of our new house in Oakridge.

 

That is all I remember, but hey, I was only two.

[FFB]

Great post. My own personal "1963" was in 1985. But even though I was still nine years away from being born in 1963, I felt like I was right there when I read this.

[conditionfreak]

"Okay. I know that anything I write that is not exactly correct, will be corrected immediately".

 

See. I can sometimes be right , even when I'm wrong.

 

It wasn't acid. It was age.

 

Yea, like I said, Jane was maybe a few years later. No matter. She was hot.

 

What are the chances that someone actually already knew that Barbella was in 1968 and Pong was in 1972, without doing a google search? Slim to none I think.

 

This is a great way to do my research, without actually having to do research.

[cloudofwit]

I was negative four years old (:shrug:), but do know that in the career of Bob Dylan, 1963 was the release of the monumental "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" which included "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." What Dylan wrote by age 21 is fairly astounding.

[cloudofwit]

Great post. My own personal "1963" was in 1985. But even though I was still nine years away from being born in 1963, I felt like I was right there when I read this.

 

I totally agree; a good piece of writing will often do that.

[toro]

Wow, I didn't see my first Stingray's until 1968 or so. They came out in 63 but they were too expensive for most people around $50 in 63. You must have had some rich friends. My mother got her first car in either 62 or 63, it was a 54 Chevy. In 66 she got a 62 Chevy, then in the 70's a 68 Chevy. Wish I had all of them today.

 

The riots in my area didn't happen until 70. Black Panthers even came down for that one.

[conditionfreak]

Concerning the Stingrays, I actually lived in a very poor part of Cincy. Peete street (an alley), and then Clifton and Vine. But there was a kid in our area whose father passed away and he had been a truck driver and his wife got some big money from insurance and she spoiled their child. His name was William Allen Johnson. He was one of my best friends at the time. She bought him a Stingray and I traded him some stuff for it and she just bought him another. I don't remember what I traded him, but we were rather poor at the time. My family didn't have anyone in it that made good money but there were so many of them in my family that with each making some small money, it added up. I had a mother and three aunts who were waitresses, and they always had some change in their purses, from tips. I remember also that my Stingray got stolen when I left it outside the corner store and went in to buy something. It was heartbreaking at the time, and the following Christmas, I got a new bike but it was one of those bikes like Pee Wee Herman was chasing through his movie "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" (which is a movie I really laughed a lot watching not too long ago). All I remember is that it was a Schwinn and red.

 

Mostly good memories. I used to play with those little army men that were posed in various positions and I would rough up the covers on my bed to make it like mountains so that I could play with them on the mountains. We also used to play a game called "Kick the Can". You put an empty soup can on a certain manhole cover, and whoever was "it" would have to cover their eyes and count to fifty. Then the rest of us would run and hide and the person who was "it", would have to go around the neighborhood and find someone who was hiding, then outrun them back to the can and kick it first. If the person who had been hiding kicked it first, he or she could run and hide again while the "it" person ran to get the can and put it back on the man hole cover and start again. He was "it" until he beat someone back to the can and kicked it first. We all played with friends OUTSIDE. No one ever came into the house to play. I was ten and twelve years old and would be gone for 6 to 8 hours at a time and no one worried. They knew I was just out playing.

 

 

All of the homes in our neighborhood had front doors that were right on the sidewalks and there were no porches. No air conditioning. So, when it was hot, everyone on our street would put kitchen chairs on the sidewalks in front of our houses and spend all of our time out there. You had to walk in the street to walk down the street. The sidewalks were filled with chairs in the summer time. Everyone knew everything about everyone else. When we kids and teenagers had a fist fight. That is what it was. A fist fight, with rules. No guns or knives. No kicking in the groin. No eye gouging. No weapons. If another said "uncle", you stopped. We used to play sword fighting with metal garbage can lids and sticks. We used to roll a car tire beside us with our hands and race up and down the street. How fast can you run while keeping the car tire rolling right beside you?

 

Good times.

[thehumantorch]

I was born in '60. I remember my first bike, a mustang with a banana seat. Man, I loved that bike. Those were the days your parents didn't escort you everywhere. All summer my four friends and I rode our mustangs around the south side. All summer long we played sports, baseball, football, hockey. TV only had 2 channels and they frankly..... sucked. We would pick up pop bottles and trade them to the candy store. We would also check all the soda vending machines for bottle caps. Pop companies would often run a contest with cap liners with free pops. We were dirt poor and I knew it but best time of my life.

[benz]

Like travelling back in time through a time machine.

[Detroit MIke]

Great post. Where did you get most of your comics as a kid... the drugstore?

[Zonker]

The letter "J" had just recently become an official letter of the alphabet (betcha didn't know that, huh?) Previously, it was a "slang" letter, used but not officially a part of the alphabet. .

 

 

 

"Recently," as in the last 100 years from 1963?

 

Samuel Johnson's dictionary, published in the mid-18th Century, had all the I and J words mixed together. It was only in the mid-19th Century that scholars fully accepted that these were separate letters and that there are 26 letters in the alphabet.

[PokerKid]

The letter "J" had just recently become an official letter of the alphabet (betcha didn't know that, huh?) Previously, it was a "slang" letter, used but not officially a part of the alphabet. .

 

 

 

"Recently," as in the last 100 years from 1963?

 

Samuel Johnson's dictionary, published in the mid-18th Century, had all the I and J words mixed together. It was only in the mid-19th Century that scholars fully accepted that these were separate letters and that there are 26 letters in the alphabet.

 

However, it did take about a century for it to become fully utilized. A lot of the print ships did not have "j" in their type cabinets, so it did take a long time until was was consistently used. The letter "u" faced some of that same indignity. Linotype and typewriters helped get it all made more consistent.

[Mr. Zipper]

Hippies, free love, LSD and marijuana were all the rage also. Glue sniffing was in vogue. Long hair and tight pants on guys.

 

Really? In 1963?

 

I thought the hippie movement didn't really hit until 67/68 and was in full steam in the early 70s.

 

[Silver]

"Okay. I know that anything I write that is not exactly correct, will be corrected immediately".

 

See. I can sometimes be right , even when I'm wrong.

 

It wasn't acid. It was age.

 

Yea, like I said, Jane was maybe a few years later. No matter. She was hot.

 

What are the chances that someone actually already knew that Barbella was in 1968 and Pong was in 1972, without doing a google search? Slim to none I think.

 

This is a great way to do my research, without actually having to do research. [/quote

 

Actually, I knew the Pong and Barbarella facts without looking it up, but it really doesn't matter if anything you remembered is historically accurate or not. Your reminiscence was cool to read. I was only one in 1963, but my 1973 was a time I fondly remember as well. It was the year I started "collecting" comic books!

[burntboy]

I say all of this in the spirit of just trying to set things straight. I enjoyed your flashback moments and recollections of things past... (thumbs u

 

and i won't be googling anything either as i was a 15 year old comic enthusiast in 1963...

 

as has already been pointed out, the letter "J" had LONG been a part of the alphabet by 1963, and PONG came out in the early seventies.

 

FLASH wasn't just coming out and had been around for 7 years already. One didn't buy FF#1 for 12 cents in 1963 but 10 cents in 1961.

 

Hippies and "Free Love" were not a part of 1963. niether was long hair on boys. all of this was post the "British Invasion" of 1964. long hair came first courtesy of the Beatles and then "Hippies" followed. I can't recollect a single long haired friend in catholic high school in 1964 nor in public high school in 1965. (and i lived less than 20 miles from NYC). I believe the "Hippie" movement began around 1966 on the west coast (Haight Ashbury?).

 

The groups/songs associated with that latter time (Hendrix, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead/ "White rabbit", "If you're going to San Francisco", Whiter Shade of Pale", Incense, Peppermints" etc, were all post 1965.

 

The Beatles had not arrived in America yet in 1963 and The Beach Boys, Four Seasons and all the Motown groups were still kings of the charts.

 

Of course, Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, but the Moon Landing wouldn't be for another 5 years.

 

And i sold ASM #'s 1 thru 5 to little Mario around the corner for the princely sum of $10, as the year came to a close...

 

 

[joeypost]

Okay. I know that anything I write that is not exactly correct, will be correct immediately, but I am going to do a little bit of nostalgia. Just because I want to. This is all from memory with no research to verify my memory.

 

Many of you, if not most of you, were not around in 1963, but I tell you, in many aspects it was the greatest time of my life.

 

There have been watershed years in history that eclipse most other years. I can not speak of 1939 or so, but it was one of those times. War, comic books, etc, all affected life a great deal during that year. But I was not around then so I can not speak of it with any first hand knowledge.

 

1963. I was 10. JFK was the big news to the U.S., as was the Beatles. There was a glutton of rock and roll, country and folk groups wow-ing the nation and the world.

 

The Stingray bicycle was big. Banana seats, stick shifters for five and ten speeds. High rise handle bars.

 

Then there was the very start of video games. "Pong" is the one I remember as being the first.

 

Spiderman, Flash, the FF, and many many more were just coming out. McDonalds restaurants were all the rage. Hippies, free love, LSD and marijuana were all the rage also. Glue sniffing was in vogue. Long hair and tight pants on guys. It was the time that I found out that there were men who actually tried to pick up boys. I noticed that when I would walk around the neighborhood, old guys in Cadillacs were always offering me rides. No, I never did , but I soon found out from the older kids in the neighborhood what that was all about. I must have been a good looking kid

 

Yep, a fantastic time. Good and bad. There were race riots galore. Cops had the authority to bust heads when they thought it was called for. I remember the two Cincinnati cops that patroled my neighborhood. Frank Fellhouse and Willy Wright. Frank was an old guy and Willy was a young buck ready and looking for any challenge. Frank knew everything that everyone did, whether we knew he knew or not. I did some things in the dark that I thought no one knew about, yet Frank showed up at my home and told my Grandmother that she better have a talk with me or he was going to. I still do not know how he knew, as I was only with my brother when I did those things. Willy had a habit of catching us kids being bad and giving us an option. He would give anyone that he had in custody the option of having a one block head start, and if he could not catch you, running on foot, he would forget whatever he had on you at the time. BUT, if he caught you, he had the right to beat your butt and you were not allowed to tell anyone. I do not know any of us that ever took him up on his deal, so I do not know if it was all bluster or not.

 

Gasoline was 19 cents a gollon and during what was called the "gas wars", it actually dropped to 9 cents a gallon in Covington Kentucky, which was just across the bridge from Cincy. The cars on the road were 55, 56 and 57 Chevy's and the like. BIg, strong and beautiful cars. Cadillacs with long fins and Corvettes that looked like space ships. Cars were actually able to have music on demand, sort of. You could have an 8 track player in your vehicle. Color TV was just starting to become affordable and they actually added TWO more channels to the TV stations selection. Making it a whopping total of 5 channels you could view. ABC, CBS, NBC, and channels 25 and 55. My favorite cartoon was Tom Terrific. Captain Kangaroo was the most popular kids TV program.

 

The letter "J" had just recently become an official letter of the alphabet (betcha didn't know that, huh?) Previously, it was a "slang" letter, used but not officially a part of the alphabet. Drive thru restaurants had girls on roller skates coming up to your car window to take your order. Just like "Happy Days". They were putting a man on the moon soon. In school, we had drills in case of a nuclear attack. We were told to hide under our school desks (which were only really chairs), or bend over in our seats and put our heads between our legs. AS IF any of that would help in a nuclear explosion. HaHa.

 

All telephones were equipped with dials. Many phone lines were shared with other families. Those were called party lines. You could listen to your neighbors talking with whoever, at least until they yelled at you to hang up the phone and quit listening in on their conversations. Which is not to be confused with todays "party lines", that usually charge by the minute for "hook ups".

 

I was stealing change out of my mothers and aunts purses, to buy the latest comic books. Twelve cents for Spiday #1, FF #1, and all of the others. I got my first dog, and a very small painted turtle (which is illegal now to sell) from the pet shop. I got a "horned toad" as a pet also. MY best friend was a black kid named Tony and Tony and I used to collect cats from wherever we could find them, and put them in my grandmothers back yard which was closed in on all four side by brick building walls. It took me years to figure out why Tony would just call our only black cat Sam, as I had named it Little Black Sambo. I just didn't understand then what I understand now.

 

Lawrence Welk was introducing some of the future stars of the music world. Elvis was King. Chubby Checker was just around the corner, as was James Brown, and Sonny and Cher. I t wasn't too long later that I "fell" for my first movie star female. Jane Fonda (whom I now despise) really got to me in the movie "Barbarella". She was just plain hot. That was probably a couple or so years later but I am not sure.

 

I have not experienced another time like it. I met my future wife that year. I was ten and she was 8. We have been together ever since. I was Babtized that year also.

 

I am sure that some of you younger people have had certain years in your life that will stand out to you years down the road, but for me it was 1963. Good and bad. What a time!

 

Would I want to do it again. YOU BET! And I wouldn't change a thing.,,,,,,,,,,,, Except buy more comics and keep them in better shape.

 

I was born in 63 so I don't remember much of the decade. The early 70's still held some of the flavor (especially the fashions). I had a Schwinn bike with a banana seat. The old metal roller skates and bell bottoms. The 70's was the best time of my life. games of stoop ball and stick ball that seemed endless, train rides to the beach, the NYC blackouts, Summer of Sam, cars without seat belts, the original oil crisis....ah, those were the good old times