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TV Memory Lane
Click HERE and enjoy a special slideshow of memories from when Television was a sweet experience. The show will open in a separate window.
Letter of the Month:
Hi Guys,
Our family's cousin campout is this weekend in El Paso, Wisconsin and
our theme this year is "Back to the Fifties". We happened upon your
website looking for 50's recipes.
Question: Do you know where or why the dice hanging from rearview
mirrors originated? We're having a sock hop for our Saturday night
entertainment and will be decorating our dance tent with old 45's and
foam dice, and we got to talking about where/why folks hung dice in
their cars???
Rock on,
Rhoda Foley
El Paso, Wisconsin
THANKS so much!!
Daddy-O! wrote:
Hope this helps.
The tradition of placing dice in a vehicle may have begun during World
War
II. Pilots would place dice on their instrument panel with sevens showing
to bring them good luck on their missions. After the war, cars begin
hanging plastic dice from the rear view mirrors. But, as the story goes,
the plastic dice often melted, and were eventually replaced with flocked
material... and so the Lucky Fuzzy Dice was born.
Fuzzy dice first appeared during the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the
birth of the American hot-rod culture. Young returned servicemen with
money
to burn and hotted-up older cars would participate in illegal street
races.
It was this "dicing with death" and play on words that inspired the
creation of dashboard dice.
- R.C.
Will You Remember?
TO THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED
the 40's, 50's, and 60's
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstation, Nintendo's, X-box, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones,
no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live in us forever.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little league had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
*These 2 were suggested by Paul Jennison:
We had plenty of guns in the house
(with no trigger locks).
We knew how to
use them and we knew better than to even touch them without out parents permission.
This generation has produced some of the best
risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!
Please pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?

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