By Don Taylor
I’ll admit it. I grew up with television. Every morning it was TV time. During the summer, and other times when there
wasn’t school, it was TV for lunch (“Lunch with Casey” comes to mind), too. And, of course, after school was filled
with more kid programs. It was the golden age
of television and kid programs of early 1960s were wonderful.
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| House at 8316 Monroe still stands (Modern Picture) Photo by Don Taylor |
lived in Spring Lake Park (A suburb of Minneapolis), Minnesota. It was a tiny little one-bedroom house, about
780 square feet. I didn’t have a bedroom;
rather, my bedroom was the “breezeway” between the house and the garage. In the
summer, it was glorious, but in the winter, the unheated room, without
insulation, which had louvered windows was a bit chilly. So, when I’d get up in
the morning it was quick into the main part of the house to warm up.
lived there. I was an early riser. Most
of the year, I’d have cold cereal, but in the winter my grandmother (Donna)
would make hot Purina or Cream of Wheat for me. Thinking about, it we were
pretty much a Ralston Purina household.
We ate Chex, for the most part, when it wasn’t hot cereal. However,
mostly morning was getting ready for school, watching cartoons, and playing poker.
I was usually up by 6:30AM when “Siegfried and his FlyingSaucer” came on WCCO. Siegfried wasn’t really a cartoon; he was a drawing that
was put on screen. No animation, just a
drawing. My memory is a bit fuzzy about if he even had a voice but his drawing
was better than the test pattern that was there before the show began. On Siegfried’s
there was also “Wallace the Weather Bear.” Wallace was also nothing but a
drawing on the screen, but he provided the expected high and low temperatures
for the day. I think there were rain and
snow stickers they added to the drawing of Wallace when appropriate.
taught me poker. We had a couple jars of
pennies, one for her and one for me and played penny poker every morning. She taught me five-card stud, seven-card
stud, and five-card draw. I think five’
stud was our favorite game. Years later
I was talking with my mother about my learning poker from “Grams” and she didn’t
recall it. Maybe we didn’t begin until
after she left for work. I don’t think
it was a secret, I think that it was just the way the morning were and poker
didn’t occur until I was ready to catch the bus to school.
School was a five-mile bus ride to the Twin Cities Army Ammunition
Plant (TCAAP), also known as the Twin Cities Arsenal. Spring Lake Park didn’t have enough schools to
support the ballooning boomer generation. Rather than building new schools,
they rented some facilities and the Arsenal was one such place. It was an odd place, even for its time. I’m sure they couldn’t use such a place today
as, I recall, it still had bars on many of the windows left over from its World
War II factory days. Interestingly enough, I returned twenty-some years later
when I got a government job with the Defense Contract Administration Services
(DCAS) and inspected the Area Denial Anti-personnel Mine (ADAM) bomblets made
there. Occasionally, I needed to go to
another building at the facility which was same building I went to for
elementary school twenty years earlier. They had taken the bars off the windows
by then.
and evening. Axel and his Dog broadcasting from his “tree house” on “Magic
Island” was the highlight of the afternoon. I think my sense of humor from his
closing poems which, continuing in the Robert Louis Stevenson tradition, always
began with:
cocked a shining eye and said:”
recollection I have of the Spring Lake Park years was learning poker from “Grams.”
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Thoroughly enjoyed this post! Thanks so much.
I remember that show so well…do you remember Tom Terrific?
Yes, I remember Tom Terrific. I loved the old Terrytoons back in the day. Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, Deputy Dawg, and Lariat Sam to name a few. Great cartoons.
Pingback: Personal Memories – Fifth Grade – Parkview & Spring Lake Park Elementary
I remember Siegfried quite well. Actually, I was a little past the age level he/it was intended for, but I got a kick out of it. It was silly and harmless, so why not. I was in Minneapolis at that time, and I grew up with a steadily changing TV format. The local stations had a lot of things that simply disappeared later on. There was ‘Axel and His Dog’, ‘T N Tatters’, ‘Casey Jones’, ‘Arle Haeberle’, AND the beautiful ‘Jan Werner’, who captured my 16-year-old heart and never let go. ‘Those Were The Days’, and regrettably we’ll never see anything like that again .