shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Nov 22, 2016 15:06:42 GMT -5
I remember once her challenging us after she’d regaled us with yet another story of the torture and bravery of Chinese Catholic kids. “What would you do if the Communists came into this room and asked you to raise your hand if you believed in God?” We all said we would raise our hands, of course. There were no free thinkers in Sister Noreen’s classroom. Just savoring the irony in this.
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Post by Farrar on Nov 22, 2016 15:29:05 GMT -5
I recall that Friday, Nov 22, 1963 being in class when the principle made an announcement over the P.A. system. It must have been sometime about 2:30 PM. We were told that we were all being dismissed early and we should all go home immediately... I was playing in our building's hallway. I still have a very vivid image of my mother coming out of our apartment and telling me to come inside right away, that something terrible had happened.
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Post by Prince Hal on Nov 22, 2016 16:55:59 GMT -5
I remember once her challenging us after she’d regaled us with yet another story of the torture and bravery of Chinese Catholic kids. “What would you do if the Communists came into this room and asked you to raise your hand if you believed in God?” We all said we would raise our hands, of course. There were no free thinkers in Sister Noreen’s classroom. Just savoring the irony in this. Cooked it up special for you.
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Post by Rob Allen on Nov 28, 2016 18:59:54 GMT -5
Chiming in a little late...
I was six years old in November 1963, soon to be seven in December, and had just started reading comic books at the beginning of my year in second grade. I have earlier memories than that, from first grade and kindergarten and earlier. I remember noticing that the newscaster my parents watched, Kevin Kennedy, had the same last name as the President. I can recall virtually every panel from the two comic books I owned at that point, but for whatever reason, I don't remember the assassination. I don't recall if school was disrupted, I don't recall my parents being upset, and I don't recall missing my usual TV shows. Those things probably all happened, but they didn't stick in my mind. I don't remember whether I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan three months later either. Memory is a funny thing.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Dec 3, 2016 9:44:29 GMT -5
Even if your entries are briefer, don't you dare abandon this thread Prince Hal
Now entering 1964. The Beatles arrive in America. The movie Goldfinger hits the theaters and the whole spy genre takes off like a rocket. And possibly by now you are discovering Marvel Comics. Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston. War against the North Vietnamese is authorized by the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution. LBJ beats Goldwater. The Boston Strangler. The Warren Commission and the beginnings of JFK conspiracy theories.MLK Jr. wins the Nobel Peace Prize and Civil Rights legislation is passed. The summer Olympics. It certainly wasn't a boring year
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 8, 2016 21:22:10 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s MemoriesChristmas 1963Memories are often blurry, maybe because there are just so many and they are from so long ago that they can’t help from running together in indistinct blotches, like daubs of paint on a canvas. It’s frustrating, because you know that within that kaleidoscopic haze are hidden highlights and details that would make reminiscing even more rewarding. Then again, sometimes the blurrier the memory, the better. My parents were good to us at Christmas. I have no idea where my mother hid all the stuff she bought for us; the stash must have been easier to hide in 1963, when only three of us were over the age of three, but she actually didn’t have to be too crafty, because I was one of those kids who resolutely believed in Santa. I was crazy for the Marx playsets; they had one for every adventurous scenario; World War Two (ETO and PTO), Fort Apache, cowboys, the Civil War, The Revolution, Vikings and knights – you name it, Louis B. Marx and Company made it. By 1963, I already had a Roy Rogers set, a Revolutionary War set and I think the (smaller) Civil War set. I might not have found that Civil War set under the tree until ’63, though. I know that ’63 must have been the year my brother got the Fireball XL-5 space ship, though, because that’s when the show premiered, and we used to watch it on Saturday mornings. (Think Super-Marionation à la “The Thunderbirds” in outer space and you’ve got it.) The Mousetrap game came out in 1963 and I know we had it, so that was probably one of our gifts that Christmas, too. I don’t remember ever really playing the game itself, because we just wanted to set up the Rube Goldberg contraption. But it did work! And of course we got “Big Caesar,” which was not the name of a local mob boss (there were a few where I grew up), but a Roman warship. Given all of the Biblical and Roman epics in the movies during the late 50s and early 60s, a motorized Roman ship wasn’t all that odd a toy to be marketing. My brother and I played with all of our toy armies till the cows came home, often combining them into what would have seemed improbable scenarios… to a non-comics-loving kid, that is. We had every kind of soldier, cowboy, pirate, and Indian you could find. Roman soldiers marched into battle against Germans and Russians guarding a bunker with cowboys while Indians and Japanese charged down a hill (a box under a towel) to attack them all. I hadn’t yet read a JLA-JSA team-up or a science-fiction comic about time travel, but it was clear that the seeds of Silver Age nuttiness were a’sproutin’. In those days I would read my growing collection of comics and other books and play on the floor with my crazy-quilt armies for hours at a time. It was no wonder that when I found out about DC’s multiple Earths concept, where each Earth was a tad different from the next, I had no problem accepting it or understanding it. After all, I often spent hours in Earth-T (for toy soldiers), where armies of all times and places fought needless battles and returned to life the next day like the Vikings of Valhalla in the Norse myths I was starting to read. Those impossible armies, along with my growing pile of comics, became more than simple amusements for me, though; they were an escape, as I’m sure they were for so many kids. In my case, it was because things always were on the edge in our house, and the tension always escalated around the holidays. I can’t recall any Christmases that weren’t fraught with what today we’d call stress, but back then was what my mother called “upsetment.” Might not have been a word in the English language, but it was in our house. My mother used it the way the Irish use “the Troubles” to describe the battles with the Brits in the late 60s. We lived during the Upsetment. Every so often everything would hit the fan: suppressed anger, unfinished business, all the issues that never ever were settled, not even when my parents were old, not even when my mother was dying. It got particularly bad around the holidays. Screaming. Swearing. Some drinking. More screaming. More swearing. More screaming. Sometimes it got rougher. Furniture thrown down stairs. Lamps broken. The usual. At least that’s what my mother inevitably told us after things simmered down: “Every family is like this.” Made me feel a little better until the day I found out it wasn’t true. If we went outside to play with our friends, we could hear it all and our friends could, too. It was embarrassing. Sometimes my parents just wouldn’t let us leave. They knew the neighbors could hear them, too… but it never stopped them from bringing on the upsetment. For me and my brother, it was better to stay in the basement or go to our room, shut the door, spill out the box of soldiers and lose ourselves in a different kind of battle. The upsetment colors the memory of most of my Christmases. I was lucky to have Superboy and the Legion and Louis B. Marx to help me block it out.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2016 22:01:11 GMT -5
Sorry to read what you went thru as a child. I realize I was extremely fortunate to have such great parents. I have to give them an extra long hug when I see them.
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 8, 2016 22:13:00 GMT -5
Sorry to read what you went thru as a child. I realize I was extremely fortunate to have such great parents. I have to give them an extra long hug when I see them. Appreciated, but I know that many had it much worse. Hug them for me, too.
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 14, 2016 12:56:05 GMT -5
Even if your entries are briefer, don't you dare abandon this thread Prince Hal Now entering 1964. The Beatles arrive in America. The movie Goldfinger hits the theaters and the whole spy genre takes off like a rocket. And possibly by now you are discovering Marvel Comics. Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston. War against the North Vietnamese is authorized by the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution. LBJ beats Goldwater. The Boston Strangler. The Warren Commission and the beginnings of JFK conspiracy theories. MLK Jr. wins the Nobel Peace Prize and Civil Rights legislation is passed. The summer Olympics. It certainly wasn't a boring year Ish, I have a "very special episode" scheduled for February about the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show among the memories of 1964. And Clay/Ali Upcoming entries also will include thoughts on 80-Page Giants, PT boats, the "New Look" Batman, Blackhawk, Gorko the Night Creature and Sgt. Fury at last! Thank you for your continued patronage!
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Post by Farrar on Dec 14, 2016 12:56:26 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s MemoriesChristmas 1963... I know that ’63 must have been the year my brother got the Fireball XL-5 space ship, though, because that’s when the show premiered, and we used to watch it on Saturday mornings. The greatest Sat. morning theme song ever. Still love it to this day. ...The Mousetrap game came out in 1963 and I know we had it, so that was probably one of our gifts that Christmas, too. I don’t remember ever really playing the game itself, because we just wanted to set up the Rube Goldberg contraption. But it did work! I remember the commercials for Mousetrap, esp. that last "Mouse...Trap" intonation. I don't think we ever actually got Mousetrap for XMas (or our birthdays) but some of our friends had it. My vague recollection is that it wasn't as much fun as it seemed to be on TV.
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 14, 2016 13:01:24 GMT -5
No, Farrar , it wasn't. The gimmick was fun, and it usually worked, but how many times could you possibly watch that contraption go through its paces before you got bored? (Answer: not too many.) Fireball XL 5: Way cool, you're so right!
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 14, 2016 23:26:57 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 12 Welcome to Weisinger’s World
I remember buying Adventure 317 and Lois Lane 47, which both, according to Mike’s Amazing World, thank the All-Father, came out the week after Christmas 1963 at Tony’s Hi-Way Sweet Shoppe. (The place where Tony made book in the back, remember?) Both titles were edited by Mort Weisinger, not that I knew what an editor did or even that it was Weisinger who edited both comics I bought that week. It would not be until a couple of years later that I took notice of such things. I did notice that in the letter columns, though, there was this one guy who signed his responses “Ed.” who often didn’t really answer the readers’ questions or blew them off with a wise answer (which meant “snarky” in 1963), and I didn’t care for it. In the war comics, Sgt. Rock himself answered questions, but they were always about tanks and artillery and how many rounds of ammo a G.I. carried. “Ed.” always talked down to the letter-writers. Sgt. Rock never did. Now by this time in in my comics career, I really liked the Legion, and, I would have bought any issue of it that I saw on the stands in the poorly lit Hi-Way Sweet Shoppe. But even if I hadn’t liked the Legion, I’m pretty sure I would have bought any comic adorned with a heroine who looked as good as Nura Nal of Naltor, aka Dream Girl. YOWZAH! Next to Lightning Lass, or Shrinking Violet or for that matter, any of the female Legionnaires, Dream Girl looked like Marilyn Monroe standing next to Nancy Kulp. No red-blooded repressed Catholic boy could resist the charms of Nura Nal in her silver bathing suit, even when John Forte drew her, and Kid Hal was no exception. I still remember that splash page, with the male Legionnaires bringing her gifts as she lay back on her bed of cushions and pillows while the girl Legionnaires scowled and meowed in the background. Nura Nal knew what she had and she was out there! Of course, despite the female Legionnaires’ worst fears about losing all the boys’ affections to the Pulchitrudinous Princess, everything turns out fine; a dash of Silver Age silliness sees to that, with a bunch of the Legionnaires turned into toddlers, complete with new names. Half the fun of the story was seeing what the Legionnaire babies would be called. (Lightning Tot and Ultra Child were this issue’s named babies. Shrinking Violet was, well, Shrinking Violet. And Bouncing Boy was never mentioned by name, but probably because of course he would be known as Bouncing Baby. BTW, this gimmick of having the legion turn into toddlers must have sold well, because Mort Weisinger used it at least twice more, in Adventure 338 and again in 356. In fact, in 356, Dream Girl was hoist with her own petard and transformed into Dream Tot (*creepy*) and was put in a nursery with Element Infant, Little Mon-El, Superbaby, and Baby Brainiac. Mort also announced in the letters page of #317 the start of the “Hall of Fame” classic series, which was the umbrella title for the back-up stories, not just in Adventure but also in World’s Finest and Superboy. Princeling Hal was still not cynical enough to realize what the wily Weisinger was doing by slapping that designation on some old reprint. Calling something a “Hall of Fame Classic” only made me want to read the story more, of course. I wanted more “backstory” on all these characters and never suspected that by popping something like “The Shrinking of Superboy” into the back of an Adventure comic, Mort was saving himself work and the company money, as well as denying writers and artists a little extra dough. I realize now that I’d also bought Lois Lane 46 at Tony’s the month before. (Though given the type of distribution comics got, I may not have seen it till December.) I guess I was already being hooked by the idea of “Imaginary Stories,” because in LL 47, Lois, using a computer simulation (pretty advanced for 1963), becomes Krypton Girl and plays the beleaguered Superman role to Clark Kent’s nosy pest trying to uncover her identity. LL 46 had actually continued an Imaginary Story that ran way back in LL 34. It had her married to a changed-for-good Lex Luthor, with a no-good son named Larry who caused the death of Lex and then becomes a space-pirate named Black Luthor. Superman and Lana Lang’s daughter Joan, who has super-powers, seemingly falls for Larry because she loves “bad boys,” but it’s all a trick to get him to kiss her so that she can transmit an anti-evil med to him via her lips. But Black Luthor’s too smart for that and holds her hostage. Who said Silver Age stories weren’t realistic? Somehow it all eventually worked out and they live happily ever after. All that, plus plenty I left out, in 25 pages. Today it would have taken 25 chapters in 15 books. I loved this stuff, even though I didn’t realize that in both Lois Lane and Adventure, I was reading romance melodrama more than I was reading superhero stories. Anyway, that’s all that Tony seemed to carry, so that’s what I was buying. But I wasn't going to complain about Dream Girl.... Next: The Greatness of 80-Page Giants
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Dec 15, 2016 1:19:22 GMT -5
Nura (Dream Girl) Nal was the hottest DC heroine until the debut of the Inferior Five's Dumb Bunny. At least that's what I thought until I learned to appreciate real-life females. That was about 1966/67. Just in time for mini-skirts
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Dec 15, 2016 8:35:29 GMT -5
Fireball XL 5: Way cool, you're so right! Ahhh...Fireball XL5. Great stuff! Great opening theme tunes too!
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Post by coke & comics on Dec 17, 2016 16:36:13 GMT -5
I am almost 30 years younger than Prince Hal.
Yet somehow I cannot remember my childhood nearly so well.
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