Back to School and Lunch Boxes

What more needs to be said? Summer is over, and it's time to head back to school. In our case, that would have been Hambright Elementary. Located a convenient two blocks from Wagners, it was the elementary school most of us Manor Ridgers went to. Those on the outlying areas in Fairway Park and Colonial Manor may have been bussed to ER Martin, Eshleman, or another elementary school. But those of us nearest Wagners went to Hambright.

The approach of the new school year was always heralded by an ominous development - the appearance of "Back To School" sales at JC Penney's, Sears, or Two Guys. These advertisements would always begin to appear in the newspaper, and even on TV, sometime in early to mid August. Like the geese returning to their winter nesting grounds in the south, the coming of the Back To School advertisements meant autumn, and school, were right around the corner.

It might have been time to get a new lunch box for the new school year? Mine is pictured above - from the famous 1960's TV show Gomer Pyle USMC (which I never much cared for and was thus rather disappointed in my parents selection of my lunch box). The great retro-60's, 70's, 80's site Retrocrush even included my crappy Gomer Pyle lunch box in their list of crappy lunch boxes kids had to carry to school. But it got the job done. I never carried the enclosed thermos and instead bought my milk - it cost a nickel and you got a pint bottle of milk complete with push down cardboard cap. You had to return the empty bottle at the end of lunch to the empty bottle rack or risk retribution from one of the lunch ladies.

My Gomer Pyle lunch box typically contained a sandwich, maybe some pretzels, but always, some TastyKakes - Butterscotch Krimpets or Chocolate Cupcakes. My dad bought these at Wagners for me and my brothers and sisters lunch boxes - my dad was a big lover of what he called "goodies" (and pastry). He himself always had TastyKakes in his lunch bag he took to work at Armstrong.

For me, the presence of TastyKakes on a regular basis in my lunch box opened up an entrepreneurial opportunity. Many of my fellow lunch mates never got TastyKakes, either because their parents could not afford them or refused to buy them. I would sell a single TastyKake cupcake or Krimpet for anywhere from a nickel to a dime (depending on the going rate of exchange and the number of kids willing to get into a bidding war over them). Since there were three TastyKakes in a single package, I could sell one, or even two of them, and still have one left over to eat for lunch.

With the pocketed 10 cents to 20 cents in profit from my lunchtime trading activity, it was, of course, time to visit Wagners on the return journey home after school. Since a pack of TastyKakes cost ten cents, I could replace what I had sold, and have some money left over for penny candy, or spend it all on a soda, candy, what ever. It was, for me, quite a lucrative business for a couple of years in elementary school. It seemed there were always those willing to exchange milk money for a TastyKake.

Those old lunch boxes, pieces of brightly colored stamped American steel with pop icon images of the day, now are collectible items that sell for hundreds of dollars in good condition (with the thermos bottle). My Gomer Pyle disappeared shortly after I left elementary school, never to be seen again. I never missed it.

A Picture Tells a Story - Part II

Old Manor Ridge photographs are, for me, a type of archaeology. When I see one I am instantly transported back to that time and place and I want to reconstruct as much of what can be known about that instant as I can, both from memory, and by piecing together the clues every photo offers.

Take this family photo from summer 1966. How do I know it was taken in the summer of 1966?

Well, I know I broke my leg that summer, so that is a pretty strong memory - confirmed by the cast on my leg.

And what a great Manor Ridge story that is!

I broke it at the Maple Grove pool one bright sunny summer day in June. We had just left for summer vacation and as I liked to do on days that were especially hot and especially boring, I begged my mom for the money to go to the pool. We were not members so I had to pay the admission. My mom gave me enough to get in and with the change; I always had enough for a soda and French Fries at lunch. What a treat! There is just nothing like the good taste of French Fries and chlorine. More on the Maple Grove pool days in a later post.

Anyway, I was walking along the edge of the pool – you know – the thing your parents tell you not to do at the pool or you will get yourself hurt (like running on the concrete)? Unlike getting cramps if you went in the water sooner than 30 minutes after you ate (which was one of those diabolical tricks your parents played on you to get you to stay out of the water with them for a few minutes), the “don’t walk along the edge of the pool!” warning was real! As I was about to found out.

I slipped and my left foot went into the water and all my weight landed on my ankle. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I was at the deep end of the pool, but I wasn’t – the water was shallow. I felt the pain of the snap of my ankle right away. I hobbled out of the water but a little thing like a broken ankle was not going to ruin my day at the pool! Or so I thought. I tried to tough it out for a while, but eventually I gave in to the pain and decided it was time to walk home.

That’s right – walk home, on a broken ankle.

Before the days when parents drove children everywhere, we got to where we wanted to go by bicycle, or by foot. As I was all of seven years old and would not get my first “real” bicycle (a Schwinn 3-speed) until my eighth birthday, it was hoofing it on foot for me. And as we lived on Hawthorne Drive – my walk to Maple Grove pool was just about as far as a Manor Ridge kid had to make back then. The journey was all the way down Hemlock and then left onto Stone Mill Road to Columbia Avenue, across the bridge at Boas, and in the main entrance to the pool. That was quite a hike for a seven year old on a good day, and this was decidedly not a good day. But somehow, I managed to hobble home on a broken ankle.

Back home in the very same living room where this picture was taken, my mom was mortified that I might have seriously damaged my leg. My dad took one look at it after he got home from work and pronounced me with a broken leg. So it was off to the hospital for the first time ever and a new cast. This was putting a serious damper on my summer vacation – the crutches sucked! Fortunately, after a week or so, they put a plastic heel on my cast (you can just see it on the bottom of the cast next to the one crutch), which allowed me to get around without crutches. This meant only one thing……..kick ball and wiffle ball were back!!! You could really clobber the ball kicking with that cast. My parents told me it was like I didn’t even have a cast on – I seldom if ever used the crutches after I got the heel. But one thing I could not do was get it wet – so no more Maple Grove pool trips for me that summer. Taking a bath was a real trick – my mom would wrap my cast in plastic bread bags and use rubber bands to try to create a waterproof seal (hah!). And there was no stopping a seven-year-old boy from playing in the grass at night – grass covered in dew or still wet from a summer rain. By the end of that summer my cast was in tatters and the heel appendage was hanging on by a few pieces of plaster of Paris. But it got me through.

Some more evidence of the age of this picture can be found seated next to me – my little brother and sister. My brother appears to be about a year and a half to two years old, which is just right for a kid born in January 1965. My little sister – the one with the most beautiful smile in the world, looks to be about the right age – five. So that makes me seven as I am two years older than her.

Note the summer pajamas we are all wearing. That’s right – even though it was sweltering hot and humid and we had no air-conditioning, we still wore pajamas to bed (but lighter weight and short sleeved compared to the winter variety). And speaking of no air-conditioning, note the Two Guys blue floor fan along the wall. Every Manor Ridge house came equipped with at least one of those floor fans – the only way to move the hot air in the summer. That and the ever-present window fans.

I think the photo was taken closer to July than June. One reason is the tan my sister and I have. We are both pretty well tanned so we had been out in the sun playing for a couple of weeks already.

Another hint - we moved to our new house in Manor Ridge in November 1964. My first memory of that house was playing on that very carpet with my Army men. I pretended the edge of the carpet was land and the hardwood floor was the ocean. There was no other furniture in the living room – just that ugly old area carpet. Since we still had that carpet – this was an early photograph from soon after we moved in – so summer 1966 is just about right.

The living room furniture was classic mid 60’s Americana in a style then known as “S&H Green Stamp décor”. I love the ugly lamp, the hideous floral pattern drapes, the touch of seasonal color my mom added with the little white vase and plastic flowers, and especially, the groovy green sofa with the puke orange pillow. I’m guessing someone slept on the sofa the night before because there is a sheet on it – probably so hot they had to sleep in the living room. But that’s what you did back then, anything to try to beat back the heat and get a nights sleep (good luck!). The S&H Green Stamp catalog folding metal coffee table is at the end of the sofa.

Another form of confirmation is the Lancaster Sunday Newspaper at my feet. It had to have been tossed there by my dad, who loved the sofa. Obviously he plopped it there when he was done reading it (my mom always read the Sunday paper in her chair – as a matter of fact, she still does). You can just make out the Sunday supplement (in color) more proof that it was a Sunday paper. Also, the TV supplement for that weeks TV shows always came with the Sunday paper and you can see that on the floor too. It says “Daniel Boone” and “WGAL TV 8.”

This gives us another clue as to the date of this photo. The TV series Daniel Boone starring Fess Parker as the intrepid frontier explorer ran on NBC from September 24, 1964 to September 10, 1970 (isn’t Wikipedia amazing?). Of course WGAL was (and still is) an NBC affiliate, which carried Daniel Boone during that time period. So we know the photo had to have been taken between 1964 and 1970.

So I know the photo was taken on a Sunday – but which Sunday?

Well, I don’t know the date I broke my leg but I remember it was soon after school had let out – early summer vacation. I know this because I had to wear that stupid cast and use crutches for a whole summer! I got the cast off just before school restarted.

Judging by the amount of signatures I had on the cast, I must have had the cast on my leg for at least a couple of weeks to garner so many autographs. That puts us at June 19 or 26 at the earliest. But I am thinking this photo was probably taken the weekend of the Fourth of July Holiday – on Sunday July 3^rd 1966. Possibly a week later – Sunday July 10^th.

Mining Manor Ridge history – one photo at a time.

In Through the Side Door

If you grew up in a Manor Ridge house you knew there was one rule above all others: no one ever used the front door.

As odd as this sounds, it was a fact. Nobody ever went to anyone’s front door – you always went and knocked at the side door.

I had a friend named Greg and his family lived on Hemlock. His was one of the very few houses that did not have a proper side door. His side door was inside a screened-in porch. So I had to knock at his front door – which always seemed odd.

Another friend I had was Glenn who lived on Manor Ridge Drive. Glenn’s house had two front doors, but you knew which one to knock on - so it was a side door by default.

Yet another friend, Matt, also lived on Manor Ridge Drive and he had no side door but a back door. So that was where we knocked, the back.

But if the house had a side door – you went for it like a bee to honey.

There were two times per year where it was acceptable to knock on the front door of a Manor Ridge house.

The first was Halloween. What ever was the fastest, most expedient way to get to the adults handing out the candy, that was the door you went to. All rules were off on that glorious day of Trick-or-Treating.

The other was also seasonal – Christmas. To be precise - Christmas caroling. Caroling was something people often did at Christmas back then, but not anymore. I recall groups of carolers coming to our door most every Christmas, but by the 1980’s, you seldom saw or heard them, and then they stopped coming all together. The carolers did not have to memorize all the lyrics. It was common for carolers to have a cheat sheet - caroling sheets printed by WGAL TV 8. Channel 8 must have printed those caroling sheets every year – people always seemed to have them. How sad that caroling is almost gone as a Christmas ritual. Anyway, it was acceptable to go to a front door if you were caroling.

In Manor Ridge - front doors were strictly for show. It was the side door that was utilitarian.

Even today – if someone comes and knocks on my front door, I think it is odd. But anyone who grew up with me in Manor Ridge, when they come to visit my house – they always go to the side door. It’s automatic.

Those exiting the house were also required to use any door but the front door. Really, think about it. How many times do you remember anyone exiting a Manor Ridge front door? How many times did you exit using your front door? Nope, you used the side door, and so did anyone else in your house. Again, it was automatic.

Only visitors from the outside world (non-Manor Ridgers) used front doors. It was almost as if Manor Ridge front doors were portals to another time and dimension - a Hawthorne Drive or Temple Avenue Star Gate.

Front doors were typically decorated by mom with seasonal stuff – a wreath or garland at Christmas, a turkey and cornucopia at Thanksgiving, Easter eggs and bunny rabbits at Easter, and so on. Being a kid you could tell the season of the year, the month of the year, simply by looking at what Manor Ridge mom's had placed on their front doors. There's Abe Lincoln? Must be mid to late January. Is that a four leaf clover? Must be mid March. And to add to the door decorations, the shrubbery and flowers next to the door were immaculately maintained.

Side and back doors were another thing entirely. There it was permissible to have to run the gauntlet of bicycles, sports equipment, and lawn mowers. This is where Bootsy the mailman brought your mail and the milkman brought your milk. A milkbox at the front door? Au contraire. If you want to see what a Manor Ridge side door looked like, circa 1968, take a look at my previous blog post.

A Picture Tells a Story - Part I

Perhaps you have old family photos of Manor Ridge from the 50;s, 60;s, or 70;s? If so, I'd be glad to have them and post them along with your stories right here.

Here's one of mine, taken about 1967-1968. I can guess the date accurately because I am holding my new glasses, which I started wearing that year. And my little brother looks to be about 2 or 3 years old, which would have been his age in 1967-1968.

The picture was taken, probably by my dad, of us standing in our carport. You can tell a lot about Manor Ridge life in those days just by carefully studying the image.

For example - note at our feet is chalk on the driveway for hopscotch. A perennial favorite for Manor Ridge kids. Sadly, a kids game that appears to be all but forgotten today.

In the background is the ever-present bicycle. That little red thing was a hand-me-down I rode after my older brother outgrew it. It had coaster brakes and I remember well learning the limitations of those brakes riding down "rabbit hill" towards the Conestoga Creek and the skeleton bridge. As I was cruising down that long hill just about where the apartments are, I tried to stop but the brakes had other ideas and I smacked right into the rear bumper on some old 1950’s American piece of steel car. My bike didn't even scratch the bumper and I went flying forward straddling the cross bar - leaving a huge purple bruise on my inner thigh. Lucky I didn't land a bit higher up on the anatomy.

The second bike is visible underneath the picnic table. That was my little brother’s tricycle. That too was a hand-me-down (new bikes were expensive and not something your parents went out and bought on a regular basis - so you got what was available). Unfortunately, soon after this picture was taken that tricycle met an untimely end as my dad crushed it with the 57 Chevy as he was backing out of the driveway. My little sister left it parked behind the rear wheel. A big no-no and she heard about it.

On the picnic table appears to be an assortment of tools and yard implements my dad always had at the ready - possibly a garden hose sprayer and an oil can nozzle/opener. Note the two cans of Quaker State oil on the top bench and the plastic milk bottle with some fluid in it. That fluid would be used oil. Back in those days, there were no Jiffy Lubes and 30-minute oil change stations. If you wanted to change the oil, your dad did it himself. You needed a catch pan, milk jugs to put the used oil, a new filter, a filter wrench (to pry the filter loose), a socket wrench (to crank open the drain plug) and a tool that has all but disappeared - the oil can opener/spout. This was a stout instrument that with an unmistakable sound would pierce the can along the edge and then allow the oil to come out the spout. Every house had one, but today with screw off caps for oil (plastic bottles, no more cans), the oil can opener/spout has gone the way of the carburetor.

Also on the top of the picnic bench you can see my dad's shoes alongside one other thing that all Manor Ridge houses had, but which today, sadly, is gone - the milk box. Everyone had milk delivered to their home by one of the multiple local dairies. Glass bottles of milk, not cardboard or plastic. If you have never had milk in a glass bottle, there is no substitute. When you needed more milk, you simply put the empties in the milk box and the delivery man would replace them with fresh milk. Of course the delivery man brought more than just regular milk, he could also bring chocolate milk (if your parents could afford it). When you went away on vacation (something you did once per year - for one week), you put a note in the milk box telling the delivery man to not deliver that week. Amazingly, that was all the communication needed, no emails were required. And the delivery man never screwed up.

In the 1960's and perhaps even into the 1970's, you could also have baked goods delivered to your house, especially bread. Now the bread delivery man had something very special he would bring with him - the "goodie caddie". This was an amazing box he would carry and the box would open with all these cool fold-out drawers. Inside these drawers were magical stuff your parents could seldom afford to buy - but when they did, what a treat! Pastries and raison bread and all kinds of baked delights.

Some of the real Manor Ridge old-timers remember (though I don't) a man who would come around in a horse-drawn wagon selling meat. That's right, a freaking horse-drawn wagon! How cool was that?!

Back to the photo - my dad's ever present wood step ladder is planted onto the side of the house next to his trusty rake. Note the asbestos shingles on the house. Many Manor Ridge houses were built with these durable asbestos/asphalt/cement shingles. It was the vinyl siding of the day. I remember very well when my dad took these shingles off the house to replace them with siding. I had to carry box after heavy box of old shingles to the curb and place a box or two each week by the trash cans for the trash collectors to pick up. Back then the trash collectors would dispose of asbestos shingles no questions asked.

Also - note what is running up the side of the house. That is a piece of black antennae wire. This was not coaxial cable for cable TV - that was a good decade in the future. No - what you are looking at was the antennae wire my dad ran from the antennae on the roof, down the side of the house, and into the basement (so we could watch TV in the basement as well as the upper floors). All Manor Ridge roof tops had one form of TV antennae or another. The Manor Ridge skyline looked like a NASA tracking station. But if you wanted to get anything more than Channel 8, you needed an antennae on the roof. Really advanced household TV systems had antennae that would rotate. To rotate the antenna you would turn this really cool dial, which was usually located on top of the TV. This then mechanically turned the antennae in the direction you wanted it. If you wanted to tune in the Philadelphia TV stations like Channel 3, Channel 6, Channel 4, or Channel 17 or 29 (UHF), point the antenna east. Want to pull in Channel 11 from Baltimore? Turn it south.

My dad loved college basketball and most of all he loved watching the Big Five games out of the Philadelphia Palestra arena. But to see these games in anything other than complete static fuzz and snow on the black and white TV, he needed a better antennae. He got one and placed it up on the roof (risking ones life to erect an antennae on the house roof was well worth it to get better TV reception for Philadelphia sports). A great side development from our new rooftop antennae was we could now (pretty) clearly see channel 17 (Wee Willy Weber and his cartoons!) and Channel 29 (Flyers hockey!) for the first time. My dad ran antennae wire into the second and first floors and the basement so we were one of the few families back then that had three, even four TV's going at the same time. I spent many hours in the basement watching cartoons on the little black and white TV.

The fact that the picnic table is stacked in the carport and not out in the back yard meant it had to be either fall or spring when the photo was taken. Judging by the hoodie sweatshirts my brother and I have on, and the low angle of the lighting it could be either. However, I spot what appear to be bare tree branches reflecting in the doorway glass. If so - then that means the photo was taken probably in the spring - March or April.

Fourth of July and Manor Ridge Pyro's

Boom!

What would the Fourth of July in Manor Ridge have been without fireworks?

In a word - unthinkable.

For me, it was the one time per year our next door neighbor, Mr McGaw would bring out his carbide canon. For those unfamiliar with this especially cool instrument of destruction - it was (is) a small iron or steel canon that is primed with carbide powder and then ignited with a spark. The resulting Boom! was very cool and I always looked forward to Mr McGaw bringing it out on the Fourth and firing away.

For us kids, it was sparklers. And I am not talking about the crappy, impossible to light, wimpy sparklers they sell today. No sir. The sparklers we had were like welding rods! Light one of those and it was all you could do to hang on! The sparks were hot, bright, lasted a long time, and were awesome. Run around and make a tracer with one. Or better yet, toss a sparkler high into the air and watch it streak across the sky. Then try to pick it up without touching the "business end". And of course there was always the danger of a sparkler ending up in someones head, or even - in their eye! Of course objects taking out ones eye was a widely believed fact by all Manor Ridge mothers, yet in all my years of sparkler throwing (or shooting BB guns, or throwing lawn jarts, or the thousands of other things we did involving projectiles) I never witnessed or even heard of anyone losing an eye. Still, our mothers warned us "you'll put someones eye out with that ________."

But I digress. Sparklers were just one of the many Fourth of July traditions we held. Another was concocting our own cap bombs. These were made by taking an ordinary roll of caps for a cap gun, and unrolling them and overlapping each "dot" of powder on the cap roll onto a pin. The key was to pierce each and every dot of powder with the pin, then slowly pull out the pin without setting off the entire roll of caps in your hand (something I did several times - always leaving a nice black burn mark on my thumb or finger). Once the pin was extracted, you had an accordion of punctured caps in your hand. This would then be squeezed tight and you would wrap it with Scotch tape to hold it together. A match was placed on the top and taped into place as a fuse. Light the end of the match and when it burned its way up to the top of the match bomb - Boom! (well, a loud pop was more like it, but it was still cool).

Later we would move on to bigger and better home-made pyrotechnics.

A very nice smoke grenade could be fashioned by taking an entire box or two of Ohio Blue Tip matches (bought at Wagners of course) and breaking off each and every match head. This took some time but if you had 3-4 Manor Ridge pyro's working together, it could be done in about an hour. Then you would customize one of the boxes by taping the striking surfaces of the other box onto the inside of the box (so then match heads had something to strike when it was thrown). Then all of the match heads would be crammed into the prepared box. The box would be heavily taped shut and when thrown with great force against the ground (preferably macadam or concrete), at least one match inside the box would strike the ignitor surface, and then ignite all of the other matches inside the box creating a classic Manor Ridge chain reaction. The resulting white smoke billowing from the box was impressive.

Later we moved on to chemical engineering of our smoke bombs.

This required two primary ingredients - saltpeter (ammonium nitrate) and sugar. The one was readily available at no cost in moms kitchen. The other required a purchase at Wagners. Yes, the Wagners always had a box of saltpeter ready for us (located behind the penny candy counter on the shelf of household items and groceries). We always wondered what the Wagners were thinking when we would buy them out of saltpeter, but they never asked and always sold it to us.

Mix the saltpeter and sugar in the proper ratio, wrap a measured portion of the mixture in tissue paper, light the tissue paper with a match and throw it. Very cool. Of course you could do so much more, especially if you could get your hands on sulfur and charcoal (which of course we did). Then you could try to make your own homemade gun powder!

Now this being the days before the Internet, learning how to make saltpeter and sugar bombs, let alone real gunpowder, took some actual research (as in, reading books). Us being the pyro's that we were, this was no obstacle. We found the proper ratios of ammonium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, and set about hand grinding each ingredient into as fine a powder as we could make them. Mix the powders into the proper ratios, and you had something close to actual gunpowder. This could be used in all manner of explosive devices. In fact, we kept a book of our pyrotechnic inventions, giving them clever names such as "the green grenade" or the "saltpeter eater".

The saltpeter eater was my design and I was quite proud of the result. The saltpeter eater was our homemade gunpowder stuffed into a steel soda can with a hole punched in either end of the can. Into each hole went a sparkler (as a fuse). The idea was - by lighting each sparkler, you could get the can to spin wildly (in theory) as each sparkler burned its way into the can from either end. I envisioned a spinning whirly gig of flaming joy. What we got was something unexpected, and very cool (and dangerous, but that's what made it cool).

At my friend Matt's backyard driveway/basketball court, we set the saltpeter eater on the macadam, and Matt and I each lit a sparkler. We stepped back (good idea) to watch and wait. The sparklers did their job and burned like a fuse into the can. Then there was a bang, and the saltpeter eater simply disappeared in a cloud of smoke! Where did it go? We had not the slightest clue until a moment or two later when the can came clanking back down to earth in his backyard. We blasted it into the atmosphere! Far more cool then something that simply spun around emitting sparks and smoke.

The use of saltpeter and sugar and homemade gunpowder was common knowledge all over Manor Ridge. Once we went and visited our friend Norm who lived in Fairway Park. At that time, there was an open field next to the Manor Animal Hospital (what is today apartments). On a hot summer day, Norm and his friends had concocted their own device - essentially a pipe bomb. One end of this pipe filled with homemade gunpowder was shoved into the dirt in the middle of this open field, and the other end was lit with, as always, a homemade fuse. We stepped back (very good idea this time) to watch and wait. Boom! And I mean Boom! It blew a hole into the ground and it is fortunate none of us was hit by steel pipe shrapnel.

Improvised fuse using sparklers, matches, and all kinds of other homemade inventions worked, but there was nothing like actual fuse. You know - a real fuse - the kind that Mr Phelps lit at the opening of every episode of the Mission Impossible TV show. And we had real fuse on occasion, thanks to another mainstay of the Manor Ridge community - Smitties Hobbies over at the Manor Shopping Center. Real fuse was precious and seldom used but was cool as anything to watch. My friend Jim still has some actual fuse from Smitties, and not just any fuse - fuse that burns underwater! How cool is that?! Of course today you could never buy real fuse, let alone underwater fuse, but back then, in the hay days of rocketry, fuse was very available for hobbyists. Or for Pyro's.

Another pyro tool was lighter fluid, also widely available back when 70% of the adult population smoked. Wagners was also the stop for this essential tool of the trade. Once we fashioned a tennis ball cannon out of soda cans (see "Glass, Steel, and Aluminum") which required lighter fluid as the ignition source and accelerant. After blasting many tennis balls high into the air, one failed to ignite. We placed the match at the end of the canon......nothing. Did we forget to add lighter fluid? My friend Glenn decided to have a look (literally) and peered into the business end of the canon and Boom! Out blasted the tennis ball, just missing his head! The flame did manage to singe away his eyebrows and part of his long blond bangs. In other words - "we almost put out Glenn's eye!"

As you can see, the use of pyrotechnics was a year-round vocation for us, but there was nothing like the Fourth of July to make it .......sanctioned.

Of course Fourth of July's in Manor Ridge were also known for picnics. Every house had one and on the Fourth of July Manor Ridge backyards would be filled with families. Picnic tables were set up under trees to get some shade and out would come food prepared by your mom, your aunts, and your grandmothers. Dad would slave over the charcoal grille (no propane grills in those days just good old Kingsford charcoal and lighter fluid). Dad made the hot dogs and burgers which the flies and bees feasted upon along with the people in the hot summer sun. There was no point eating inside "to get out of the heat" because the inside of the house was just as hot as the backyard.

Then that evening it would be off to Mountville for the annual fireworks display. You had to get there early to lay out your blanket on the grass and get a spot. It seemed like forever until it was dark enough for the fireworks to start. After the show all the cars would leave and there would be a massive traffic jam - one of the few such traffic jams we ever experienced because there was so little traffic on the roads in those days.

Back at the house there would be more sparklers and cap bombs and of course, blasts from Mr McGaw's carbide canon as the lightning bugs lit up the July evening.

As soon as it had started, the Fourth of July gave way to the Fifth of July and unused fireworks as we returned to the tedium and routine of summer vacation.

Summer Thunder Storms in Manor Ridge

It's already looking like another long hot humid Manor Ridge summer here in the old neighborhood. The other night I saw my friend Jim (unless otherwise specified all of my friends mentioned here are from the old neighborhood) and he asked me what the recent weather reminded me of. He asked me this on June 16th, a Wednesday, after we had just come through several days of almost constant thunder storms and rain showers in the 5PM - 7PM time period. My answer, of course, was "it reminds me of summers when we were kids". "Correct! - Jim exclaimed.

You all remember those hot, humid summer days of the 60's and 70's, right?

Summer vacation had just started! The first week or so was OK, not too hot and sticky, and then came the lightning bugs. And with them came the heat and humidity.

We could start a typical Manor Ridge summer day anywhere, but let's start with bedtime. If you were not yet old enough to stay up real late like your older brothers and sisters, - it was off to bed by 11:00 PM, maybe midnight at the latest. Yes it was summer vacation but there were still rules to follow - rules like what time you had to be in the sack. During the school year of course you had to be in bed by 9:00 PM but this was summer so you got another two, maybe three hours tacked on. This allowed you to watch those never seen 10:00 PM - 11:00 PM dramas, police, and doctor shows you never saw during the school year. Of course, it being summer, they were in repeats. But since you never saw any of the episodes, they were all still new to you. You soon realized why these TV shows were on at 10:00 PM, they were meant for adults. You grew bored with them and stopped watching (except Love American Style - now there was a great late night summer show!).

For some unknown reason - your parents still insisted on you wearing pajamas to bed. In the winter they were fine - no - they were essential! You would freeze without a nice warm set of pajamas! But in the summer? Even the light fabric, short sleeves and shorts were too much in the Lancaster County summer sauna. But still, rules were rules, and you wore them to bed anyway.

You woke up after a night of trying to sleep in an upstairs bedroom with no air-conditioning (no one had AC back then, at least no one we knew). If you were lucky you had the air-conditioning of the day - a window fan. But all this did was suck the humid and hot air into the already hot and saturated room. It also rattled and vibrated and made noise all night long - noise you came to know all too well as you tossed and turned in bed, trying in vain to get to sleep.

You went downstairs to start your day with breakfast. Stepping outside to get the milk bottle out of the milk cooler you noticed the day was already hot and sticky and you knew it would only get worse. The cicadas would be shrieking their high-pitched noise as you looked across the street to try to see where the noisy rascals were coming from. But you couldn't see too far because there was so much humidity in the air it was like looking through a cloud. The early morning sun was rising over Achey's Farm to the east - ready to bake another day.

You spent the morning playing outside - if you were lucky you got to go to Maple Grove pool for the day. But by afternoon the heat and humidity were brutal. You stayed outside anyway, what else was there to do? But you might have curtailed some of your more strenuous activities by afternoon.

Then, invariably, sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 PM, the clouds would roll in and there would be thunder heard in the distance. Soon there would be the unmistakable odor of the approaching thunderstorm - that chemical-like smell just before the wind picked up and the storm hit. I read for years that this was ozone in the air created by the lightning. But later I learned it was really the odor of dust rising off the ground. What ever the science behind this odor, an odor that will always take you back to your childhood when you smell it - it was far more mysterious and magical when we had no idea what caused it.

Then the rains and wind would come. The Manor Ridge trees, which were still young at that time but always seemed to be gigantic Sequoia-like spires to me, would start to thrash back and forth. The rain came heavy, in "sheets" as they said. My mom would always be running out into the backyard with her laundry basket - trying to get her sheets off the cloths line before the rain soaked them. All other Manor Ridge mothers were doing the same - rushing from their houses, interrupting The Guiding Light or The Mike Douglas Show, to save their clean laundry which only moments before was baking, as you were, in the summer sun.

This was one of the many great things about late afternoon summer thunder storms in Manor Ridge. They broke the tedium and routine of our typical summer afternoons. What other great force of Nature could make Manor Ridge mothers run outside all at once!

The storms also brought welcome relief, temporary though it was, to the unending heat. The temperature would plunge and with the wind and rain it felt so cool, so refreshing. Almost like a bottle of Sprite from the Wagners cooler.

Personally I loved these storms and the lightning was the best part. I would sit outside underneath our aluminum and fiberglass car port, sheltered from the rain, but sill able to see the lighting bolts and hear the thunder up close. Of course this made for an attractive target for the lightning, but I never thought anything of the danger. Far from it - the danger is what made it fun.

The car port had an aluminum framework which filled with water and anywhere there was an open hole where a rivet was missing, out would shoot a thin stream of water - like a fountain. The fiberglass roof made the rain a cacophony. No wonder I can't hear.

I loved to watch the trees bend in the wind and the streets flood. The ally behind our house which separated all houses with their backyards between Hawthorne Drive and Millersville Road, swelled with water if it was a heavy downpour. This was the greatest because then we could run and slide in the rain-covered grass. For a few short minutes it was like having our own rain water pool. We called it "Lake Hawthorne".

Your dad might pull up in the family car, just getting home from work. As our car port was never used for the car, my dad would get wet running from the street to the house. But he loved thunder storms as much as I did, so he didn't mind. As a matter of fact, he loved storms so much he encouraged us kids to go outside and watch.

And if you were really lucky, the storm brought hail! Hail was the rarest of rare summer storm events, or at least it seemed to me. One time we got so much hail my mom made us gather up some and we put it in a dish we kept it in the freezer to show people. This was high entertainment back in the 60's and 70's. I think we had that well preserved hail in our freezer for a year.

But all too soon, the rains and winds would die down and the afternoon summer thunder storm was over. You could almost set your watch to it.

Then the sun would come out again - this time creating a steam bath - you could see steam rising from the streets as the water cycle you had just learned about in fourth grade repeated itself.

And just like rain going back up into the clouds as water vapor - prodded along by the heat of the sun, as twilight set in, the lightning bugs would come out, and the beautiful cycle of life in summertime Manor Ridge would start over again.

Here's a short video I took of our recent hail storm. You can hear the fire and police sirens wailing in the background - it was quite a storm. As you can see, I still sit outside during Manor Ridge summer thunderstorms. I always will.

Still Cold After All These Days

Well, not cold, but not hot either.

Just an update. When last we blogged we were loading beer and ice into the old Coke cooler for a graduation party. That was eleven days ago and when last I checked the beer (Budweiser - ick!) was still luke warm.....and it has been hot here this week, daytime temperatures in the high 80's and 90's.

If ever a beer deserved to be baked and destroyed by the heat of the sun it was Bud. But the Wagners cooler abides!

I could not bring myself to post a photo of that swill so instead enjoy a photo of a nice bottle of refreshing Fresca soda.

A Graduation Party and the Cooler

We had a graduation party today for my oldest son - another Manor Ridge kid who made it through Penn Manor School District like we all did (well, almost all of us did).

The party gave us our first chance to try out the old cooler and it worked great - like it never stopped since 1976. Of course we didn't actually turn it on - the power cord is far too frayed and worn to risk doing that (someday I hope to fix that and crank it up and see if it still blasts cold air). But for now, placing the beer and soda into it and packing it with ice worked just fine.

As you can see in the bottom photo, there is a drain plug opening at the bottom of the right side of the cooler. This allows the melted ice water to flow out. And cold! Yes it kept the bottles plenty cold - the inside metal walls are so well insulated they felt like blocks of ice once the ice got them cooled down.

We had several guests who were old time Manor Ridgers and they well remember Wagners and the cooler. For all of them it was the first time they had a chance to glimpse this piece of Manor Ridge history in, well, at least 34 years. They most enjoyed putting a cold bottle of beer into the old bottle cap opener, tilting and lifting to remove the cap, and hearing that bottle cap "clink-clinking" down into the cap collector. Of course my kids don't know what a bottle opener on a soda machine even is or why one was needed to remove bottle caps. Weren't bottle caps always screw off?

A Day in the Life of a Tree

These two photos are of Wagners as it looks today, and how it looked in the early 1950's. In the almost 60 years since the two photos were taken, the store (house) has hardly changed a bit.

What has changed is the size of the tree!

Mrs Horn told me the photo of the house from the early 1950's was taken the day they planted the young tree in their yard. Could the Wagners have predicted that tree would still be standing (and going strong) sixty years later?

Think of how many kids that tree saw walk in and out of Wagners store? How many kids rested underneath the branches in the shade on hot summer days? Perhaps you were one of those kids?

Gigantic trees, 50-60 years old, are not rare in Manor Ridge. I myself have two pin oak trees, probably planted around the same time (early 1950's) which stand well over 50 feet tall.

These types of slow growing, but long living trees were the types planted by our parents when Manor Ridge was a young and brand new development. They were planted by people who knew it would take decades for these trees to fully develop, decades until they could begin to enjoy the shade and fruit of these trees. But it was their belief in the future, patience, and knowledge that they would still be living in their home (and enjoying the trees planted around it) for forty or more years, that led them to plant these types of trees.

Sadly, in new developments today, if people plant trees at all, they are typically the fast-growing but short lived variety, trees like the Bradford Pear. People today don't think forty or fifty years into the future, and certainly do not expect to still be living in the house where they are planting a tree, that far into the future.

There is something to be said for the stability, the routine, and the certainty of the era we grew up in, the era of the 1950's-1970's. The pace of life was slow, like the speed at which these trees grew. But the culture our parents built in Manor Ridge, like the trees, was made to last, to persevere, to grow straight and tall and strong and last for a very long time.

Like the Wagners house, and their tree, and the memories we still have of those days.

A Wacky Shared Memory

From my friend Terri:

I remember: the smell ( not in a bad way! ) when you walked in the door.

Going behind the counter with your little brown bag and counting out your pieces of candy on the "honor" system - Do you think our hands were clean?

Grape shoestring licorice

Comic books

Buying wacky cards

Oh the good old days.

Yes, Terri, they were the good old days. I still laugh at some of those old Wacky packages cards to this day. But then I still laugh at Mad Magazine too (which I am proud to say both of my teenage sons still find to be hilarious - good old Mad humor, it is timeless).

Here is a great book that shows the history of those old Wacky Trading Cards.

And from the book:

Wacky Packages—a series of collectible stickers featuring parodies of consumer products and well-known brands and packaging—were first produced by the Topps company in 1967, then revived in 1973 for a highly successful run. In fact, for the first two years they were published, Wacky Packages were the only Topps product to achieve higher sales than their flagship line of baseball cards. The series has been relaunched several times over the years, most recently to great success in 2007.

Known affectionately among collectors as “Wacky Packs,” as a creative force with artist Art Spiegelman, the stickers were illustrated by such notable comics artists as Kim Deitch, , Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Norm Saunders.

This first-ever collection of Series One through Series Seven (from 1973 and 1974) celebrates the 35th anniversary of Wacky Packages and is sure to amuse collectors and fans young and old.

Pretty impressive that Wacky Packages cards out sold Topps baseball cards, especially as that was the era of classic baseball cards.

And you will be happy to know Terri that you can still buy grape shoestring licorice though I am sure it would not have the same great flavor as that which you bought and ate at Wagners. Nothing ever can.

Hurry Home Early, Hurry On Home...

Wee Willie Weber's cartoon show has come on.....

And hurry on home we did, every day after school ended at Hambright, straight to our parents old black and white TV sets in the basement so we could catch the very end of Kimba the White Lion before settling in for a full round of cartoons that are today, legendary:

• Astro Boy
• Marine Boy
• Speed Racer
• Ultra Man

To name just a few. And Wee Willie Weber, all 6' 5" of him, was always there to show them to us.

Weber passed away yesterday at the age of 80. To say that he was a household name and friend to our generation would be a huge understatement. Our older brothers and sisters may have had the Mickey Mouse Club and Howdie Doodie, but we had Wee Willie Weber and great early anime and other cartoons from 3:00 - 6:30 PM every Monday - Friday.

Weber hosted the Wee Willie Webber Colorful Cartoon Club on Channel 17 out of Philadelphia from 1965-1975. And from 1976-1979 he was on Channel 48 with his "Kids Block" from 4 to 7 p.m.

It's hard to imagine today when there is so much entertainment on TV aimed at and made for kids. But back in the 60's-70's, all we had were shows like Sally Star or Wee Willie Weber, and the wonderful Saturday morning TV line up of cartoons. If you got up early before school you could catch The Mighty Hercules and of course there was Captain Kangaroo and Channel 8's Percy Platypus show. Sunday mornings before church you could watch Hector Heathcoat and the Hashimoto-san. And once a year you got to see How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Charlie Brown's Christmas, and Rudolph.

But that was pretty much it. There was not much choice, but what little there was, we found it, watched it, and ate it up.

I watched a great deal of after school cartoons on Wee Willie Webers show while holding a small brown paper bag filled with ten cents of penny candy from Wagners.

Goodbye Wee Willie and thanks for all the fun and the memories.

First Shared Wagners Memory

I received the first official memory of Wagners days from my good friend Norm (the one who had to make the long journey from fairway park to reach Wagners). I hope more of you will share your memories. Here is his what he sent me:

I remember the dust covered house hold gadgets that hung above the cooler and behind the penny candy. Sockets, screws, fuses...

They may have hardly ever been needed, but by golly, Wagner's sold them just in case. Mrs. Wagner got pissed off at me once when she over heard me say to someone that this stuff is covered with dust and never gets sold.

Also, there was a moment in all the neighborhood kid's life when the big realization came into being...that is that Wagners simply turned their living room into a store!!!! As a kid, your thinking...how great is that!!! Living in a house with all those goodies!!!

Yeah, those were the days. You would wait all week in anticipation of getting your "allowance". All 12 cents! And then make the arduous trek (it was an expedition for those of us from Fairway Park) the whole way to Wagners. 12 cents...and you had choices! Should I spend it all on penny candy and get a whole 12 pieces! Or should I get a 12 ounce soda? I could, if I drank it there, get the soda for 10 cents and spend the other two on penny candy. Or maybe buy two bags of Stehmans chips for 5 cents each! And still have two cents left over. Ahhhh Stehmans. You bit into the chip and the fine "juices" of grease would coat your tongue. Sometimes, if you were lucky, when the chip was made during the frying process, it created a bubble. Inside that bubble was a reservoir of grease. You would bite into it and the "dam burst"! Delicious!

I sill buy a bag when I am in Lancaster at Subs and Suds.

I could not find a photo of Stehmans Chips so I made do with the venerable Charles Chips we all remember from our youth (the big metal Charles Chips cans that, once empty, our moms would save and use for various other things such as storing their home-baked Christmas cookies). Apparently the Stehmans Chips Norm recalls were made in Ephrata, PA and no longer exist. But Stehmans Chips are still made in Mohnton, PA.

Thanks to monkeytime at Flickr for the use of the photo

Short and Long Walks and Other Journeys

Some of us were lucky enough to have our homes close to Wagners. Others lived further away.

In this photo from 1972 we have both the lucky and the unlucky.

In the foreground is my friend Glenn who was luckiest of all. His house was just across the intersection from Wagners on Manor Ridge Drive.

Standing in the back is me, I was next closest - I lived just up the street on Hawthorn. For me, a trip to Wagners consisted of walking one full block.

At the far end wearing the life jacket is my friend Matt who lived two blocks away on Manor Ridge Drive.

The guy holding the board (which were our makeshift paddles for our inner tube journey down the Conestoga River (Conestoga Creek is what we all called it, and still do) is my friend Norm who was the unlucky one. He lived all the way south in Fairway Park. For him, and kids like him who did not live close, a trip to Wagners was a real journey.

In an age where our parents did not drive us where we wanted to go, our only means of transportation was a bike, or our feet.

If we road our bikes, it was not uncommon to see the front yard of Wagners store five deep in various kinds of bicycles of the day. Mine was a blue Schwinn 3-speed. Glenn's was a green Sting Ray with banana seat. Matt road a red Schwinn with racer handle bars and I can't remember what Norm rode.

More often than not, we walked to Wagners, especially in the summer vacation months. Unlike today where kids have busy summer schedules, we had next to nothing to do all summer vacation (except form maybe the one week family trip to the mountains or the shore). Therefore, we were in no particular hurry to get there, or back. Besides, it was far easier to eat a bag of penny candy walking home from Wagners than riding a bike.

Summer vacations for us was a fantastic month of June where the weather was still not too hot and muggy and the newness and joy of being out of school for the summer was still fresh. This was followed by the slow, hot, but still fun month of July which we spent a lot of time playing board games, exploring the neighborhood, and playing flashlight tag at night.

If not at Wagners, many a hot summer day was spent in the relative cool of family basements, especially my basement because we had a pinball machine. A real "Williams Jungle" pinball machine. My dad got it second hand from some guy in Lancaster city my grandfather knew. My grandfather knew everyone in the city.

In an age where no one even thought to make any fun for us, we were left for three glorious months to make our own fun. Which brings me to the photo.......

It was the summer of 1972. That June, Tropical Storm Agnes devastated Lancaster County and much of the eastern USA. Especially hard hit was eastern Pennsylvania.

That July, after days of playing Risk, we needed something new to do. That's when, sitting at Glenn's house - we conjured up an idea for a real adventure. We would use several large inner tubes his family had and float down the Conestoga Creek! We spent days planning the expedition, using pieces of wood for paddles, getting life jackets, even fashioning our own anchor out of an empty gallon milk jug filled with gravel and tied to a rope.

But first we had to find four of our friends who would (and could) make the trip. Glenn, Matt and I were instantly in, but the other two members of our "gang", Tim and Greg, were not allowed to go. For some odd reason their parents must have thought it unwise to let a bunch of 13 year old boys risk their lives floating down a river. But not our parents!

Still - we needed a fourth friend for the fourth inner tube. One of us, probably Matt, came up with the idea of asking Norm who lived all the way up in Fairway Park. So the three of us walked or rode our bikes to Norm's house. His mom answered the door that sunny summer afternoon (as mom's always did when moms were almost always home makers) and we asked if Norm was home. She said he was and fetched him for us. We proposed the idea to Norm then and there and being the sport that he is - he promptly posed the question to his mom - could he risk his life and float with us down the Conestoga? His mom said - yes he could. That was it! We now had our full compliment of mariners.

We christened our inner tube raft "The Titanic" and set the day. Matt's father had a station wagon, standard suburban transportation in those days, and he agreed to transport all of us and the inner tubes to the Conestoga Country Club where we would put in at one of the foot bridges (for golf carts) over the Conestoga. He would also pick us up at our expected finish point - Groff's Sporting Goods store (what is today Scheid Funeral Home). It is Matt's father who snapped the photo of us on the bridge just before we put in.

Being 13 year old boys, we knew where the Conestoga Country Club foot bridge was, and where Groffs Sporting Goods was, and figured - how long could it possibly take to go from point A to point B? The distance as the crow flies between the two is only four or five miles. Of course we neglected to take into consideration the fact that rivers and creeks don't flow in straight lines. In fact, the Conestoga takes a huge sweeping turn away from Groffs Sporting Goods before doubling back - making out watery trip three times as long as we had calculated.

But no matter - hope springs eternal and we had all the confidence in the world of our ability to complete the journey.

We set off and the first "big" set of rapids we encounter was a hard left hand turn the creek makes in the Conestoga Country Club. It was thrilling to go through this fast water and The Titanic managed just fine. Later on, near what is now the Manor Township park on Charlestown Road, we encountered a tree that was blocking the entire creek except for the one side. This made it just possible for us to raft through, and the water fast. It to was thrilling and fun.

Little did we know that not only the distance of the journey would confound us and our best laid plans, but also the slow current of the Conestoga in other parts. We drifted along slow, sometimes hardly moving at all.

But the worst miscalculation of all was deciding to set out on our journey after Agnes. The storm had knocked down what seemed to be dozens of trees, fully blocking our path. Time and again we had to ford around these blockages, scampering up muddy and burn hazel infested bank, porting our inner tubes across land, to put back in. Then, a short time later, another tree blocking the creek and we had to do it all over again.

But press on we did.

The dangers of drowning in the Conestoga in late July are minimal because the water depth is seldom about three feet. In fact, many places were so shallow our tubes would bottom out and we'd have to push ourselves along with our improvised paddles, or stand up and walk the inner tubes to deeper water.

As the hours passed we had no idea where we were or how much longer it would be until we got to Groffs. We would try to stand on the tubes and peer over the creek banks, trying to get a fix on our location, but it was hopeless. All we could see were trees and endless fields of corn.

Then we realized we failed to bring food or water. Matt had brought along a bagged lunch, but it became water logged and unfit to eat. This left only Norm who had the sense to bring a can of Potato Stix. Dry, salted, Potato Sticks. But it was all we had, so we ate the salty snack food.

Finally, somewhere near what is the Bowling Green housing development off Charlestown Road, we decided enough was enough and got out of the water one last time at a huge tree blocking our way. We carried our inner tubes up and out of some farmers corn field, not knowing where we were or where we needed to walk to find civilization. We stumbled out onto a road, figured out where we were, and somehow called Matt's dad to come pick us up, which he did.

We figured me must have gone, what? Easy twenty, thirty miles? In fact, in the many hours of floating we had covered a distance of barely two miles as the crow flies from where we put in.

We never did reach our goal of Groffs. But the following year - Titanic II did make it all the way to Groffs!

That is the story behind the photo, a story of kids entertaining themselves over summer vacation. A summer vacation made all the more wonderful by the presence of Wagners.

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Thing of Beauty

Bring back memories?

"Tab" is "Bat" Spelled Backwards

And the makers of Tab (see below) deserved the same punishment dished out to the Coca-Cola vending machine, administered by Colonel Bat Guano.

Let's face it. Diet sodas of the 60's-70's were what you drank if there was absolutely nothing left to drink and you were just dying for a soft drink. Often you would raid your friends refrigerator hoping to score a Pepsi or a Sprite or 7up only to find bottles of Diet Rite or Fresca or worst of all - Tab.

It's surprising how popular diet sodas were in the 60's-70's - given their awful taste, and especially as the labels sometimes said.....:

"Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals."

But the Wagners cooler had Tab, as well as other diet soft drinks of the era including Diet Pepsi, Fresca, and Diet Rite. To my discerning taste buds, Diet Rite was the best of the "faux colas", and Fresca was the most drinkable of them all.

I found this interesting history of Tab soda here.

The development of Tab - which was the first major diet soda, is an interesting one. The story began in 1958 when diet soda controlled merely 1.5% of the soda market. By 1962, this percentage had doubled. Coca-Cola decided that it was time to get involved. The development of Tab began in June of 1962. The workers had until April 1, 1963 to have the drink, its bottle, and its brand identity ready for market.

After hundreds of taste tests, researchers narrowed the choices for flavor down to two. They sent the candidates to families around the country to find the one people liked better. Naming this new drink was also a problem. Market research said the name should be something short and easily remembered (three to six letters). They configured an IBM 1401 computer to print all four letter word combinations that had a vowel. This generated over 250,000 words; they also added names suggested by employees. Coca-Cola narrowed the list to 600 possibilities and checked each of these against existing trademarks. By the time of the final selection, there were less than two dozen choices left. TAB was the final choice.

The original Tab bottle was a complete departure from all the previous bottles. They wanted a completely radical design, but it had to be compatible with all of the automated equipment in use at the time (bottle fillers, packagers, vending machines, etc.). It had to be "unique but the same." A textured bottle was the final decision. Although this took some engineering skill to design, the bottle was also ready by the deadline.

In short - after years of product development, consumer research and taste testing, Coca-Cola came up with the foulest tasting swill ever to be placed inside a bottle and sold as "soda".

As I would not part with precious money to actually buy a diet soda at Wagners (why would any sane kid do so when he/she could gulp down a delicious sugar-laden bottle of Pepsi or Dr Pepper?), my first encounter with diet sodas came from hanging out at a friends house during long hot summer vacations. He and his family were all overweight so his parents always had diet soda in the refrigerator while we, if we had soft drinks in the house, always had the good stuff - Weis markets, A-Treat, and other low-cost generic brands (but which tasted fabulous!).

So if we wanted a soda at my friends house it had to be Diet Rite, Fresca, or Tab. Punished by the heat, weakened by thirst, we would grovel and drink (or at least, try to drink) a bottle of Fresca or Tab. I quickly learned Tab was bitter and essentially undrinkable. My scrounged from the refrigerator drink of choice fell to Fresca. Fresca had a surprisingly palatable and decent citrus/lemon-lime type taste. And the saccharine after taste was short-lived and somewhat masked by the flavor.

Obviously, Wagners patrons were like me, they seldom parted with their hard earned cash to buy a Tab or Fresca out of the Wagners cooler. This was evident by the disproportionate number of diet soft drinks crammed into the cooler. Also - many of these were covered with a thick layer of frost - a 60's-70's era form of carbon-14 dating indicating the length of time the diet sodas sat in the cooler. A very long time indeed.