It was just a doll, people! And a rather homely doll at that….
RONALD REAGAN
The President’s President. Those of us who were around back then remember him being just as vilified by popular media and the entertainment industry as any one of the current GOP contenders. Now, politicians from both sides of the aisle are cat fighting just like the Real Housewives of New Jersey over which of them is the fairest of them all…er…the most Reagan-like. Go figure…
Looking back, this was a good time to be a teen. After all, the 80′s was all about having fun! Then again, these movies encouraged us all to look something like the love child of Boy George and Madonna. Kiddies, see if you can spot Jon Cryer from Two and a Half Men…back before he was Alan Harper, he was “Duckie”
FUN MUSIC…AND POLITICALLY INCORRECT DANCES TO GO WITH…
THE MULLET…BUSINESS IN THE FRONT, PARTY IN THE BACK
Lest you think this totally tubular trend is isolated to the 80′s, I am here to report that the mullet is alive and well in 2012: Rate My MulletMullet Joe.com
My grandmother Kay taught me three things…Take an avid interest in your surroundings, never miss an opportunity to visit historic sites (that goes double if they’re free), and never, under any circumstances, allow anyone to photograph you without your lipstick. That last one has come in handy over the years, and the first two were highly useful today when I found myself with two long hours to kill in a small town…
I was in Bartow, Florida, which also happens to be the county seat of Polk County, in Central Florida. There on Main Street, which is the main drag through Bartow, is the Polk County Historic Museum (also the old courthouse). My grandmother would have been proud of me…I walked all around, looked at all the exhibits, and not once did I whine and complain that it was borrrrr-ING. She sure heard that a lot when I was young and was a frequent travel guest of her and my grandfather. I saw a lot that interested me actually–I’ve evolved, I guess. And, I wish she had been there with me today because I saw a lot of of items that would have caught her eye too.
So, from Kay and me, here are just a few of the fascinating things Polk County Historic Museum has to offer…
A Very Vintage Hair Dryer & “Permanent Wave” Machine
An Exhibit About The First Theater In Polk County
America’s Oldest Man, Charlie Smith
And His Letter From President and Mrs. Ford
A BIG Catch…
An Old Fashioned Curling Iron, and a Rather Creepy Hair Braid…
Old Traffic Lights (With No Little Gotcha Cameras Like the Ones Nowadays In Polk County)
Scary, Prehistoric Monster Heads…And One Modern One…
Vintage Law Man Accessories
Women’s History…
And Some Fascinating Florida Trivia…Thanks, Ponce…I Love Those Oranges!
Museum Information & Fees
LOCATION
The museum is located in downtown Bartow at:
100 East Main Street (corner of Main & Broadway) Bartow, Florida 33830
When I was growing up, I was encouraged to be grateful that I was born in the United States, and to be proud to be an American. Nobody ever told me my country was perfect, or beyond reproach…they just said that I should thank my lucky stars that I live here and can speak my mind, be free to become whoever and whatever I want to be, and vote to have my views represented as closely as possible. In other words, I grew up thinking and feeling that being patriotic was a good thing. I’m not sure what has happened over the last 45, nearly 46 years but nowadays if you’re patriotic you’re encouraged to hide it, or at least tone it down, lest you subject yourself to all manner of ridicule and whispers behind your back. This year, I have a blog, and I have absolutely no intention of toning anything down for anybody online or anywhere. As always, this year I’ll…
Like most girls growing up, I had a Barbie Doll…mine was the 70′s version, the blonde, tanned California Girl one. Of course, being dark haired and dark eyed and not from California, this did a number on my self image. But, I got over it…eventually.
These days Barbie has branched out, and recently I stumbled upon their Barbie Collector line…a fabulous assortment of pop culture and entertainment inspired dolls. And Holy Moly! My entire life, the t.v., movie, and musical part of it anyway, flashed before my eyes…
My mother was a big time Elvis fan…she and I would watch Elvis movies that ran on Saturday afternoon t.v. back when there were only 3 channels…
The Carol Burnett Show was a favorite of mine on Saturday nights…Nobody is funnier than her comedy team, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard at any comedy sketch as I did when I saw “Went With The Wind” for the first time…
Ahhh, the 80′s…the excess, the big hair, the catfights! On Dynasty, not in real life…well, I’ve always had big hair…
I did like to have fun!
This little gem of a movie led to leg warmers, off the shoulder t-shirts and a very unfortunate perm…
And present day…my favorite obsession! And the only real Victoria in my opinion…I’m still mad that they replaced her in Eclipse.
To see the entire Barbie Collector pop culture collection, click here: Barbie Collector
As an entertainment genre, I really miss the mini-series! This week, I’ve been re-reading The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough on my Kindle, and when I picture the characters interacting according to the words I see on the screen, I see Rachel Ward, Barbara Stanwyck, and Richard Chamberlain. Back then, when the mini-series The Thorn Birds aired, just about everyone I knew was riveted for a week and couldn’t wait until the following evening to see what was going to happen…even though we already knew ‘cause we’d read the book.
And, during the heyday of the mini-series, none of us knew Richard Chamberlain was actually gay in real life, so it was easy to believe his portrayal of an ambitious, committed priest who simply couldn’t control himself because he loved Meggie so much. Richard finally came out a few years ago and good for him I guess, but I still choose to suspend my disbelief regarding the heat between him and Meggie…oh that beach scene when he finally went to her…wow! It helps that the Thorn Birds was cast with such amazing actors and will, to me anyway, forever be the epitome of the classic, spellbinding American television mini-series.
My favorite romantic beach scene EVER!
Entertainment seems to go in cycles and come in waves. The mini-series dominated during the mid 70’s-mid 80’s, along with nighttime soaps like Dallas and Knots Landing, comedies like Friends ruled the 90’s, and reality television (yuck) got a grip on us in the late 90’s and hasn’t let go yet. I guess we television viewers are easily bored and get tired of a particular medium, which is probably what happened to the mini-series. Here’s hoping it comes back…Certainly, bestselling books are made into movies still, so it’s not much of a stretch. Lots of them are ending up on the big screen these days, so in reverence to our still bad economy, I think Hollywood should slash those budgets, hire some unknowns and maybe one big has been star, get those cameras rolling and stretch it out over a few nights. People still have water coolers at work, and I can promise you they’ll all stand around them talking about what happened last night and what’s going to happen tonight, just like they did in the 70’s and 80’s.
In addition to my beloved Thorn Birds, here are a few other infamous mini-series’ you may have forgotten…
Roots, of course! This one was epic, and encouraged important dialogue, around the water cooler, and everywhere else in the 70′s regarding a shameful part of our nation’s history…
The one that supposedly started it all…Rich Man, Poor Man
East of Eden-WOW! I’ll never forget the tag line, “And she took them ALL, somewhere East of Eden…” Jayne Seymour was brilliant!!!
North and South…a favorite of all us Southerners! The late Patrick Swayze at his best, and before he ever danced with Baby or made sexy pottery with Demi…
Lace, with the wonderful Phoebe Cates, who uttered the best mini-series line ever–”Incidentally, which one of you bitches is my mother?” Ahhh, those were the days when saying bitch on t.v. was a very big deal….
Yes, these are all a part of television history…I don’t know about you, but t.v. seems to be getting a little stale these days. People are ready for a change–something new. Well, at least something new to them anyway. I’m tired of seeing people eat bugs on t.v., dance, sing and model, try to find the love of their life–cattle auction style, and watching obnoxious middle aged women who’ve had one too many boob jobs have cat fights and pull each other’s hair. Here’s hoping the Great American Mini-Series can make a comeback…I’ll be watching!
With another big Royal Wedding looming on the horizon, I’ve been thinking a lot about the first one we “Yanks” got up early to watch on television–Charles & Diana, of course! This fabulous blog I read this morning by my fellow blogger, “WithyWindle”, really got me reminiscing. I’m not now, nor have I ever been much of an Anglophile by nature, but I was, at the time of the seemingly magical nuptials of “Lady Di”, a 16 year old girl. So, I was a goner in the naïve romantic department…not to mention the fact that my great grandmother was staying with us for a couple of weeks at the time and she indeed was a pretty hardcore Anglophile. So much so that she, unlike lazy teen me, actually did get up in the wee hours to watch it all live from the get go. I arose at my usual 10:00 or so, and watched reruns of it—over and over and over, with my Great Grandma Rhodes who had a twinkle in her eye that day…ALL-DAY-LONG…no matter how many times she watched the whole thing with me…rerun after rerun.
We were both enchanted, of course, and it was an intergenerational bonding experience for us. Now, I am somebody’s grandmother, albeit not quite old enough yet to be a great grandmother—yet. It’s coming soon enough…because the clock ticks for all of us, whether we are aware of it, or whether we choose to accept and embrace it or not. So, as the wedding of William and Kate approaches, I am also keenly aware of how I’ve changed, how much more I know (thank God), and also how jaded I may have allowed myself to become over the years. Knowing what I now know…about the realities of life, and marriage, and how sometimes things just don’t work out…I find myself considerably less starry eyed and romantic about this Royal Wedding. I blame Diana and Charles for this, of course, because their reality disappointed me so as it unfolded before my eyes during the 80’s and 90’s. And frankly, my own reality disappointed me as well…as I looked for love in all the wrong places, had my heart broken more times than I care to recall, and lived out a decidedly un-fairytale like existence…
Despite all the madness that ensued for Charles and Di after that dreamlike day…the bulimia, the affairs, the Squidgy-ness of it all…I allowed myself to become wistful once more, if only for a moment when I listened to a Diana biography on audiobook awhile back. The author described, in great heart wrenching emotional detail, a story of Charles frantically and obsessively searching for his former wife’s gold earring so that she could have it on when he had flown to France to escort her body back home to England after the car crash—he knew she’d want it that way, and he wanted to find it for her. Even though these two people had torn one another to pieces in life, were clearly not meant for one another, this man obviously cared for her, and cared enough to look after her in this very touching, special way. Maybe this is the real fairy tale behind the fairy tales that we are told growing up, and actually believe in until the world teaches us otherwise…that people aren’t perfect, even princes and princesses…and sometimes we never appreciate the people who pass through our lives until they’re really gone…
Well now, enough of that! I intend to keep a stiff upper lip, just like the Brits! I am determined to look forward to this upcoming joyous event, and maybe even become a little twinkly eyed and romantic again as my great grandmother was that day. Surely she had much more call to be far more jaded then than I do now. After all, the woman had lived through women’s suffrage, The Great Depression, two World Wars, and the 60’s—which had to be traumatic for anyone with Victorian sensibilities. I do wish these two lovebirds the best! I think they have a better shot at it than Charles and Diana. For one thing, “Wills” did not have to scour his countryside for the last remaining virgin in the United Kingdom as Charles did. Since that was obviously the criteria, that should have been our first clue that it wasn’t necessarily a real love match. Royal bridal searches have evolved since the late 70’s, early 80’s, thank goodness, and William and Kate were allowed to meet and fall in love over time, just like any other couple. So, they have just as much chance as any other married couple of being happy and having a lifetime together. And there, readers, I will bite my tongue. I am purposely choosing to suspend my disbelief now, rather than being my old 16 year old self who just didn’t know any better. I’ll watch this Royal Wedding this time around with a purposeful twinkle in my eye, just like my great grandmother had for Chuck and Di. Reruns of course, because I haven’t changed that much…
In the meantime, get your wistful on with me and let’s remember when…back before we knew how it all would end….
Speaking of entertainment trends and nostalgia, as I have been lately, it seems that yet another favorite genre of mine is going the way of the dinosaur. The longtime favorite daily escape of at-home wives and mothers (formerly known as “housewives”), the daytime drama, is being yanked from the airwaves at an alarming rate these days. While those who stay home to tend home and hearth have always loved these “Soap Operas”, when video tape recorders became popular in the 80′s, this form of melodramatic entertainment also seemed to appeal to many a working woman (and man, yes, we’re onto you guys), as well as college students. Today, die hard Soap fans record their favorites digitally to watch when they get home from work. Soaps are also now available via streaming video online, which is how I enjoy mine. I watch “The Young and the Restless”, each evening once I finally settle down to relax after a long day of homeschooling, housework, and completion of my own brain twisting grad school assignments.
Vintage “As the World Turns” Intro
Lately, those shows that have been on the air nonstop now for 40+ years are disappearing into the ether, never to be forgotten by those of us who remember watching them, and their familiar cast of characters, literally from the playpen on… The first to go in 2009 was “Guiding Light”, the longest running daytime drama in history. “Guiding Light” was so long running that it first began on radio in 1937. This one was a favorite of my mother and grandmother, as were all of the soaps on CBS. Another long term family favorite, “As the World Turns”, began in 1956 and ended the year after Guiding Light made its final exit. The “As the World Turns” characters were like members of the family….Lisa, Bob, Kim, John and especially Holden Snyder, who kept my heart racing for decades, from the moment I first saw him jump down from that hayloft–shirtless.
Josh & Reva in a Classic Scene from “Guiding Light”
Why do I like Soaps? Well, I guess I like them because I tend to get attached to television shows and certain characters. And really, what other show can you think of that has run half a century, featuring many of the same core characters, played by the same actors and actresses? “The Simpsons” is an up and coming contender, but since it’s a cartoon, it really doesn’t count. There’s just something comforting about knowing that those people are going to be there day after day, even if they have to defy scientific law and medical reality to return from the dead multiple times in order to show up for you. And, while the storylines really are silly at times, soaps can always magically pull it off–because they’re Soaps. I’ve seen some really great performances over the years on these daytime gems as well, and obviously Hollywood agrees. Several of today’s major stars “honed their craft” as it were, on soap operas–Meg Ryan, Tommy Lee Jones, Julianne Moore, Eva Longoria, just to name a few. Now it appears that two more Soaps are scheduled to end their multi decade run on television–One Life to Live, which premiered in 1968, and All My Children, that has been on the air since 1970.
Marisa Tomei AND Julianne Moore on “As the World Turns”
So what’s going on? Reasons given by the networks for the cancellations always seem to point back to high costs of production and increasingly lowered ratings–typically a deadly combination for any television show, or any business for that matter. This might explain the demise of one show, but four in under 5 years? That tells me something else is at play here. Have we, as a nation, “outgrown” the daytime drama as an entertainment genre? I like to think not, because I really do enjoy watching “The Young and the Restless”, so I don’t want to lose it. But, in many ways, the handwriting is on the wall for Soap Operas. A few, like Y&R, “The Bold and the Beautiful”, and “General Hospital”, seem to be hanging in there–for now. And new formats for daytime drama have hit the scene as well. Martha Byrne, “As the World Turns” fans’ beloved “Lily” for several years, has launched her own web based Soap,“Gotham”, which is delivered in under 10 minute “webisodes” featuring many familiar faces recruited from her “As the World Turns” days. Is this the future of Soap Operas? Perhaps…
But really…are we just too busy multitasking these days to “waste” more than six minutes and 21 seconds on infidelity, evil twins, the ever popular logic defying total plastic surgery to look just like your arch enemy, paternity tests every time the stork visits, and the inevitable Friday afternoon cliffhanger? Let’s hope not! Because I really need somebody’s life to be crazier than mine….
Now THOSE were effective dramatizations of multiculturalism, folks! Thanks for ruining this one for me Will Ferrell…you suck…
Way back when…way before Richard Hatch ever flashed a butt cheek on the first Survivor, even before Ross and Rachel took a break (or not) on Friends, cartoons existed between the hours of 8 and 12 on a Saturday morning, and they were special because of it. For many, many years now, kids have been spoiled with several cable cartoon channels, running all the cartoons anyone could handle, 24/7. I guess this is considered progress and improvement for kids, but cartoons’ ho-hum availability has also robbed my children of the excitement of Saturday morning that I remember so well…
Where the criminals ALWAYS would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you kids!
When I was growing up, I waited all week for Saturday morning. It was comforting to get up and eat my breakfast in front of the television, staying in my pajamas till noon for just that one special day. There, I communed with my favs….HR Pufnstuf, Isis, The Land of the Lost, The Jetsons, Lidsville, Scooby Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, and more. Now, most of these aren’t considered “cartoons”, I guess, due to their lack of animation, and use of actors, puppets, etc. I still think of them as cartoons, because these were the quintessential 70’s cartoons to me. This also seems to be somewhat of a lost art in children’s programming today, as the pendulum has swung back to all animation.
I don’t know what Sid and Marty were smoking in the 70′s, but the manifestations of their acid trips made for some great t.v.!
And every Saturday, my weekly cartoon event always wrapped up with The Bill Cosby Show, the perfect hybrid of real people and animation, with entertainment provided by Fat Albert and the gang, followed by life lessons from the eternally cool Bill Cosby. And throughout Saturday morning cartoon viewing, we kids were treated to mini animated educational spots in between our cartoons, courtesy of SchoolHouse Rock. Those were the BEST! How do kids learn how a Bill becomes a Law nowadays, anyway?
We should put up a big screen on the Beltway and make them all watch this one looping while they are sitting in gridlock. They seem to have forgotten how it’s all supposed to work…
Oh, and a trip down cartoon memory lane would not be complete without a mention of the annual Superbowl of my childhood—the Fall Sneak Peek that each of the networks did on a Friday night, about the time school started. This always preceded premiere Saturday of the new Saturday Morning Cartoon season, with all the new and exciting shows the networks had in store for us kids. I remember this being a huge deal for me every year…rather like my current yearly Oscar Red Carpet fashion snark-fest, held each and every February on my Facebook Wall for me and all my snarky Friends.
Back when cartoons were special, it also seemed that kids spent more time watching “family programming” with their parents…shows like The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, and the like. These types of shows were designed to appeal to a wide audience, and gave kids and adults talking points as well, in a 70’s touchy feely, socially progressive sort of way. And really, if you were a kid back then, you had no other choices in television viewing during primetime, because with the exception of the aforementioned Fall Sneak Peek Special once a year, these shows were all she wrote during the week. Now the one exception to that rule was, of course, the infamous After School Specials, which melodramatically chronicled the kid and teen social disaster du jour, and were also designed to get parents and kids talking.
I guess it’s probably not PC to call Albert by his full given name anymore–Fat Albert…Na, Na, Na, gonna have a good time…Hey, Hey, HEY
Time marches on…fads come and go….and trends like the one I’ve described here, come along and change everything permanently. I embrace that, because hanging on to outdated ways of doing things, or clinging to bygone days is generally not good for people. But that being said, I miss the days when Saturday Morning–and Cartoons, were special. No apologies.
It was September of 1977, back when school always started the day after Labor Day the way God intended, not in the middle of August before our summer was even over. And, it was also when the new season of everybody’s favorite television shows premiered in September too, not October-January, or whenever the Hollywood folks felt like coming back to work for 6 weeks before they took their first of several “hiatus” for the year. I was 12, in my first year of junior high, and like kids and adults all across America, I anxiously plopped down in the family room on the red shag carpet, glued to the one television in the house that received only three channels—ABC, CBS, and NBC, to watch The Fonz jump the shark! He did, and we watched nervously as he barely cleared the enclosure of Jaws, The Ripoff, to live to be cool another day and to also spawn a new phrase, “Jump the Shark”, which is now used routinely to describe a television series whose best years are behind it and has resorted to outrageous, gimmicky stunts to retain viewers. AYYYY!
It’s truly hard for me to believe that was well over 30 years ago now. It’s also hard to believe that in anyone’s wildest imagination, the decadent, hedonistic 70’s could be considered a simpler, more innocent time–but they really were. At least if you were an average kid growing up in the suburbs, and not hanging out at Studio 54, that is. In 1977 we were much more insulated from everything that was going on in the world around us. Television was still monitored by censors back then, and there was no way my 12 year old eyes would have ever flipped the channel during prime time to accidently witness a graphic murder, and then the victim’s corpse splayed open on the medical examiner’s table. There was no 24/7 cable news to give us overly private details of the trainwrecked lives of celebrities, some of whom are not much older than I was when I sat on that shag carpet that night to watch the shark jumping. There was no sexting, no cyberbullying on Facebook, no Internet at all.
So, while the world was not really any more innocent than it is in 2011 (it’s naïve to think there is anything new under the sun), at least we had a somewhat gentler introduction to its harsh realities than kids do today. Kids who would probably howl with laughter at me and my generation breathlessly gathered around the t.v. to watch a hokey stunt involving a grown man in a leather jacket jumping over a shark on his water skis while Opie Taylor drove the boat.
Other Noteworthy Events of 1977:
President Jimmy Carter pardons almost all Vietnam War draft evaders
Alex Hayley’s “Roots” premieres on ABC
Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” released
Bank of America adopts the name VISA for their credit cards
Libyan Socialist Arabs People’s Republic forms
“I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC & Sunshine Band peaks at #1
Elvis Presley Dies in Memphis, Tennessee
Last broadcast of “Mary Tyler Moore Show” on NBC-TV
TV’s Rhoda gets divorced
President Carter raises minimum wages of $2.30 to $3.35 for Jan 1 1981
Miss World Contest – Miss UK wears $9,500 platinum bikini
