This Day In Boomer History THE BIRTH OF GENIE FRANCIS May 26, 1962
Does a picture say a thousand words? Well, Bread certainly thought so. But this pic just says two words....and to a generation brought up on GH, that's enough.
I give you....Luke and Laura.
Forget the fact that he was much older. Forget she was married to the young lawyer Scotty Baldwin. Forget that Luke was, at one point, Laura's rapist. Somehow, we forgot all that....and fell in love with this couple in the late 70's-early 80's.
Now that the weather is getting warmer, my kids are constantly in the fridge, reaching for the drinkables. We go through a gallon of milk a day, plus several pitchers of lemonade, numerous liters of soda and countless bottles of Gatorade. And, of course, water, which comes right out of the front of the fridge (unheard of back in my day).
When we were growing up, we had milk for breakfast and lunch. At dinner, my mom would bring out the sleek plastic teacups, and we would have a cup of hot tea liberally cut with milk while my parents had their evening coffee.
Of course, the real treats were the rare occasions when my parents allowed us to have chocolate milk. Remember Ovaltine? Those chocolate crystals never quite dissolved all the way, sticking to the top of the glass until we scrapped them off with our spoons. They were delicious.
When summer came, however, the four of us wanted something lighter and cooler than glasses of chocolate milk or hot milky tea. By the time school was out for summer, we were pleading for Kool-Aid, in fantastic colors and flavors. My mom reluctantly agreed....the packets of unsweetened drink were cheap enough, but we weren't the neatest kids when it came to adding sugar (and we always complained the drink wasn't sweet enough when she added it). What was your favorite Kool-Aid flavor?
In 1964, Pillsbury decided to challenge the Kool-Aid monopoly by introducing the Funny Face Drink mixes. I can remember the original line up - Goofy Grape, Injun Orange, Freckled Face Strawberry (my personal favorite), Chinese Cherry (complete with gong), Loud Mouth Lime and Rootin' Tootin' Raspberry. I remember loving their commercials, which started like this:
By 1966, the commercials were pulled due to protests from Native Americans claiming the name "Injun Orange" was racist. Pillsbury changed the name to "Jolly Olly Orange" and did some damage control by turning "Chinese Cherry" into "Choo Choo Cherry." The new commercials looked like this:
My mom preferred Funny Face to Kool-Aid because it was pre-sweetened, meaning we didn't need to be near the sugar bowl. Unfortunately, in the early years, Funny Face was sweetened with cyclamates, which were banned by the FDA in 1968 as a possible cancer risk. Goofy Grape and the gang were pulled from shelves, returning the following year sweetened with saccharine. The aftertaste was no winner, so in 1970 a new Funny Face was introduced with the tag line "just add sugar." Back to the sugar bowl!
Commercial Break CLASSIC BOOMER COMMERCIALS
The other day, the old Henry Mancini theme for The Pink Panther movies began looping in my head. (Yeah, these things happen all the time once you're on this side of the hill). So I hummed along, "Doo doo doo doo, do do, doo do doo do doo doo..."
"What's that?" my daughter asked.
"The Pink Panther song," I told her. Then the words of the old ad came back to me:
"Pink panther flakes are pink and sweet as you can tell The color of pink tickles me pink."
Pink Panther Flakes, the cereal introduced by Post in 1973 to coincide with the feline's Saturday morning cartoon, were actually frosted flakes with a pink coating which turned the milk in our cereal bowl pink. I remember the commercial in more detail than the actual cereal, and I found it on YouTube to appease my curious child:
So I got to thinking about the other commercials of my youth, back in the day when we couldn't TIVO the show and fast-forward through the advertising. Remember the Frito Bandito?
How about when Hawaiian Punch was downright violent?
And this ad for Good N Plenty must be one of my earliest memories...I remember it distinctly, yet it ran in the very early '60's:
What are the favorite commercials of your youth? We'll revisit this topic later, so let me know what you'd like to see!
This Day In Boomer History THE BIRTH OF ROBERT HEGYES May 7, 1951 "Welcome back, Your dreams were your ticket out..."
The year was 1975. TV, that nursemaid of my generation, was going through a lot of changes. In January, Another World became the first soap opera to air hour-long episodes. A brand new game show, Wheel of Fortune, made its debut, and the beloved Colonel Henry Blake was killed off on M*A*S*H.
And then - in September, of course - America headed back to school, and TV did too, by way of Brooklyn.Welcome Back Kotterentered our homes - and our vocabularies - in September 1975. It was a vehicle for stand-up comedian Gabe Kaplan, and based on his own high school years. Now, the show is probably best known as the show that introduced us all to a young unknown named John Travolta.
Travolta played Vinnie Barbarino, the leader of a group of, er, academically challenged teens who called themselves The Sweathogs. Check out this video - it looks like an early audition for Saturday Night Fever, eh? The other Sweathogs were the smooth black basketball player Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington (played by Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), the childish oddball Arnold Horshak (Ron Palillo), who raised his hand enthusiastically and yelled, "Oooh, ooh, oooh!" whenever he "knew" an answer, and the tough "PuertoRican Jew" Juan Epstein (played by birthday boy Robert Hegyes), who had a note from his mother for every occasion.
The Sweathogs' time in high school pretty much echoed my own, and the show was canceled in 1979. As a side note, Hegyes was a Jersey boy who attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), which is where I took my post-baccalaureate certification classes. While I was there, Hegyes came back (a conquering hero, I guess) and took the stage for one night in a college production. I attended the production, which was a vanity piece for the local-boy-done-good, who didn't turn out to be nearly as interesting as I remembered Epstein to be. But at least he isn't getting beat up by Screech!
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