And Twain's saying of "truth being stranger than fiction" almost makes each day's news a horror story in and of itself. As you note, UNLIMITED source material.
In 1951, when I was five, my mother and I joined my father, a USAF captain, in England. His duty station was a small joint RAF/USAF outpost that occupied Chicksands, a priory built not long after the Norman conquest. There was no on post family housing or school. My father sub-leased from a Royal Army major who had been posted to Germany half of a thatched roof cottage built (if you believed what was on the doorpost) 1597. The other half was occupied by a family that owned and ran the dairy farm that surrounded it.
During the time we were there (1951-'54) BBC TV only served the London metropolitan area; we were out of its range. Our link to the wider world was a Zenith short wave radio. We alternated between listening to the BBC - we heard the coronation ceremonies for Elizabeth II - and the U.S. Armed Forces Radio Network, broadcasting from Stuttgart, Germany. I loved Edgar Bergen's (Candice's dad) comedy show. He was a ventriloquist who had two dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. One evening we were listening to the American news and the announcer said something about someone named McCarthy claiming the State Department was infiltrated by communists. I asked how it was that Edgar Bergen's dummy was making so much trouble. My dad, a solid FDR/Truman Democrat, gave out a good laugh.
Not having TV was, I think, a great benefit for me. I learned to read early, and during those years in England I read voraciously, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn cover to cover. When we returned to the States in 1954 I had gaps in my cultural knowledge that included baseball and Howdy Doody references like, "No comments from the Peanut Gallery."
I should add that Chicksands, as befits an ancient priory, has its own very scary story. There is an inscription in Latin on a wall that, translated, reads something like "For virtue's glory and by virtue's grace, in this wall fair Rosette is placed." The story is that Chicksands once housed a monastery on one side and a nunnery on the other. Rosette, a nun, was found in a secluded part of the grounds in dalliance with a monk. The monk got the better of it; he was beheaded on the spot. Rosette's fate was to be sealed alive in the wall. It was said that on the anniversary of her entombment her ghost walked through the priory, part of which served as quarters for bachelor service members. An American lieutenant said she had stood by his bed and held his hand.
Oh my. Your first paragraph was literally a trip down memory lane (I am a few months older). The only TV in our little town was owned by the McKinney family across the street and across the railroad tracks from the CCC-built home we lived in. (They were a large family who had acres of cotton fields and the income that went with it.) I was allowed to visit on occasion to watch The Micky Mouse Club, Pinky Lee and Howdy Doody and that was it. Your journey into the writing sphere is fascinating and I wish I had been so lucky. But I WAS lucky in one sense.
On the very, very rare occasion when my parents went "out" (usually to play Canasta with friends, money being a commodity one never squandered on such things as "dates"), my sisters and I were treated to a babysitter bar none - she being our very dark skinned Mamie and as much a member of our family as any of us. Mamie and your Buffy could very well have been sisters in their expertise. She would lure us into the bedroom (her trick to get us to go to bed) with promises of scary stories. Lights out, she would deliver! I can still remember the thrills and chills and her rich, deep voice, and all the nuances and sound effects to this day! I was too young to do much besides keep a pathetic little journal in which I recorded all my sad little "love" stories, so there was no career path ahead for me...but there are certainly great memories to cherish.
And then there's Annette Funicello. Who didn't have a crush on her?
Well, the scariest story I've heard lately is the one you told of an entire spawn of blank eyed, twisted mind-controlled gop white kids growing up and taking over the country.
What, you think I've got to write about Trump all the time? If I returned to what you apparently snarkily call "the Village Voice days," a whole lot of people would be really, really happy.
Love this. My family got its first TV in 1956, when I was 5, so my father could watch the political conventions. I don't remember a time of have and have-nots in my neighborhood, but in my pre-teens I gorged on westerns 95% because of the horses. In my early teens I'd sneak into my parents' bedroom to watch David Frost (where I got addicted to Tom Lehrer). Before long we were watching the Smothers Brothers en famille -- well, at least my father and I were.
One very good side effect of my father’s assignment to the embassy in Athens, Greece from 1956 through 1959 was the fact Greece had no television. I was 9-12 years old, my brother one year older, and we had two younger sisters. We got first-run movies in film cans loaned to us by the U.S. Ambassador, along with an enormous 16 mm projector, every couple of months, but we never watched television - not once - for about three and a half years. After that, one hour per week, as a family only. This became more or less a lifetime habit. People told me I’d never be a jury trial lawyer because jurors are steeped in television. I believed, to the contrary, that I had learned better ways of communicating with people by what I did instead of watching television. Look at us now, as a country, with a third of our population slurping up garbage every day from Fox News thinking it’s the truth. Television, particularly as watched by most Americans, has not made us better as a people.
thank you Buffy! thank you Lucian! good memories came flooding back. neighborhoods with old Victorian houses in the middle of orange groves, we’d sneak around the property and run back home after having a dropped citrus dodgeball fruit fight…welted and sore and tell corpse zombie vampire martian stories until we were late for dinner, hanging out in somebodies treehouse. No basements in SoCal but lots of creature feature tales shared.
.....and now that darkness pervades, you have unlimited source material, so you’d better keep the tales coming!
And Twain's saying of "truth being stranger than fiction" almost makes each day's news a horror story in and of itself. As you note, UNLIMITED source material.
In 1951, when I was five, my mother and I joined my father, a USAF captain, in England. His duty station was a small joint RAF/USAF outpost that occupied Chicksands, a priory built not long after the Norman conquest. There was no on post family housing or school. My father sub-leased from a Royal Army major who had been posted to Germany half of a thatched roof cottage built (if you believed what was on the doorpost) 1597. The other half was occupied by a family that owned and ran the dairy farm that surrounded it.
During the time we were there (1951-'54) BBC TV only served the London metropolitan area; we were out of its range. Our link to the wider world was a Zenith short wave radio. We alternated between listening to the BBC - we heard the coronation ceremonies for Elizabeth II - and the U.S. Armed Forces Radio Network, broadcasting from Stuttgart, Germany. I loved Edgar Bergen's (Candice's dad) comedy show. He was a ventriloquist who had two dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. One evening we were listening to the American news and the announcer said something about someone named McCarthy claiming the State Department was infiltrated by communists. I asked how it was that Edgar Bergen's dummy was making so much trouble. My dad, a solid FDR/Truman Democrat, gave out a good laugh.
Not having TV was, I think, a great benefit for me. I learned to read early, and during those years in England I read voraciously, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn cover to cover. When we returned to the States in 1954 I had gaps in my cultural knowledge that included baseball and Howdy Doody references like, "No comments from the Peanut Gallery."
I should add that Chicksands, as befits an ancient priory, has its own very scary story. There is an inscription in Latin on a wall that, translated, reads something like "For virtue's glory and by virtue's grace, in this wall fair Rosette is placed." The story is that Chicksands once housed a monastery on one side and a nunnery on the other. Rosette, a nun, was found in a secluded part of the grounds in dalliance with a monk. The monk got the better of it; he was beheaded on the spot. Rosette's fate was to be sealed alive in the wall. It was said that on the anniversary of her entombment her ghost walked through the priory, part of which served as quarters for bachelor service members. An American lieutenant said she had stood by his bed and held his hand.
Writing about the GOP in AmeriKKKa is the scariest stuff I’ve ever read….and it makes me want to cry.
Oh my. Your first paragraph was literally a trip down memory lane (I am a few months older). The only TV in our little town was owned by the McKinney family across the street and across the railroad tracks from the CCC-built home we lived in. (They were a large family who had acres of cotton fields and the income that went with it.) I was allowed to visit on occasion to watch The Micky Mouse Club, Pinky Lee and Howdy Doody and that was it. Your journey into the writing sphere is fascinating and I wish I had been so lucky. But I WAS lucky in one sense.
On the very, very rare occasion when my parents went "out" (usually to play Canasta with friends, money being a commodity one never squandered on such things as "dates"), my sisters and I were treated to a babysitter bar none - she being our very dark skinned Mamie and as much a member of our family as any of us. Mamie and your Buffy could very well have been sisters in their expertise. She would lure us into the bedroom (her trick to get us to go to bed) with promises of scary stories. Lights out, she would deliver! I can still remember the thrills and chills and her rich, deep voice, and all the nuances and sound effects to this day! I was too young to do much besides keep a pathetic little journal in which I recorded all my sad little "love" stories, so there was no career path ahead for me...but there are certainly great memories to cherish.
And then there's Annette Funicello. Who didn't have a crush on her?
Well, the scariest story I've heard lately is the one you told of an entire spawn of blank eyed, twisted mind-controlled gop white kids growing up and taking over the country.
What happened to the "lets get the DJT SOB"; LTK? Are we revisiting the Village Voice days?
What, you think I've got to write about Trump all the time? If I returned to what you apparently snarkily call "the Village Voice days," a whole lot of people would be really, really happy.
Love this. My family got its first TV in 1956, when I was 5, so my father could watch the political conventions. I don't remember a time of have and have-nots in my neighborhood, but in my pre-teens I gorged on westerns 95% because of the horses. In my early teens I'd sneak into my parents' bedroom to watch David Frost (where I got addicted to Tom Lehrer). Before long we were watching the Smothers Brothers en famille -- well, at least my father and I were.
One very good side effect of my father’s assignment to the embassy in Athens, Greece from 1956 through 1959 was the fact Greece had no television. I was 9-12 years old, my brother one year older, and we had two younger sisters. We got first-run movies in film cans loaned to us by the U.S. Ambassador, along with an enormous 16 mm projector, every couple of months, but we never watched television - not once - for about three and a half years. After that, one hour per week, as a family only. This became more or less a lifetime habit. People told me I’d never be a jury trial lawyer because jurors are steeped in television. I believed, to the contrary, that I had learned better ways of communicating with people by what I did instead of watching television. Look at us now, as a country, with a third of our population slurping up garbage every day from Fox News thinking it’s the truth. Television, particularly as watched by most Americans, has not made us better as a people.
thank you Buffy! thank you Lucian! good memories came flooding back. neighborhoods with old Victorian houses in the middle of orange groves, we’d sneak around the property and run back home after having a dropped citrus dodgeball fruit fight…welted and sore and tell corpse zombie vampire martian stories until we were late for dinner, hanging out in somebodies treehouse. No basements in SoCal but lots of creature feature tales shared.