I was a senior in high school on January 28, 1986. The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger occurred that day at 11:39 a.m., EST.
The explosion took place just 73 seconds into the shuttle’s flight, and killed all seven crew members. Among the dead was Christa McAuliffe, a Massachusetts teacher who had been a guest astronaut.
That year I had a part-time job in my school’s cafeteria. I was operating a soda machine in the lunch line when the students began filing in, talking about what had happened. This was one of those national tragedies that was announced in classrooms, rather like the assassination of JFK, when my parents were in high school.
The Reagan Administration had been hoping to revive interest in the U.S. space program, as well as to inject some life into math and science education. (Even then, there were concerns that American students were falling behind their global counterparts in math and science.) The presence of teacher Christa McAuliffe on the mission was a key part of that effort. McAuliffe’s inclusion would have been a good idea, perhaps, if not for what happened.
I’m not going to exaggerate, and say that the Challenger disaster depressed me for a month, or anything like that. I was sorry for the loss of life, of course. But in 1986 I was a self-absorbed teenager, and this was a faraway event.
The disaster did have a sobering effect on me, though. At my present age (I’ll let you do the math), I am acutely aware that life is fragile, and that bad things happen to good people. I wasn’t as aware of this in 1986.
The Challenger crash dominated the news for weeks afterward. A case can be made that Christa McAullife received a lion’s share of the media attention. This was probably inevitable, given that she was a civilian volunteer and a teacher. McAuliffe was about the same age as my mother, I remember noting.
The investigations and Congressional hearings surrounding the disaster lasted for several years. In 2004, President George W. Bush conferred posthumous Congressional Space Medals of Honor on all the Challenger crew members.
On the night of the disaster, President Reagan delivered this televised speech to the country. One of his more moving oratory moments, in my opinion.
A sad moment for the country, and one that I still remember, almost four decades later.
To be clear about the title of this post: no, I do not have firsthand childhood memories of World War II. I was born in 1968, twenty-three years after the war ended. By the time I became aware of names like Pearl Harbor, Hitler, and Hirohito, the war was at least thirty years in the past.
My grandfather, however (pictured above) was a WWII combat veteran. He served in the Atlantic in the US Navy. His experiences were roughly similar to those depicted in the 2020 Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound.
From a very young age, I was captivated by history. And what better way to learn about history, than by listening to the stories of a relative who actually took part in it?
My grandfather regaled me with his accounts of Egypt, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Syria. He also told me stories about fighting the German U-boats and Messerschmidts.
My grandfather was, in many ways, my first “action hero”. His experiences, though, were very common among men of that generation, who have been called (for good reason) the Greatest Generation.
I don’t remember a thing about World War II. But some of my fondest childhood memories involve listening, with rapt attention, while my grandfather told me about it. He has been gone for decades now, but I still miss him, and I miss his stories. He gave me an enduring interest in World War II, and it isn’t surprising that the war should show up in some of my stories.
Last night I went out for a walk in my neighborhood around 7 pm. (We’ve had an unseasonably warm spell here in the Cincinnati area.) I didn’t take into account how quickly the dusk settles in this late in the year. I was only halfway out when it suddenly became very…well, dark.
I therefore walked back to my house in the dark. The houses around me were festooned with various Halloween decorations: skulls, black cats, and even some cool Halloween projector lights.
I love Halloween. For me, Halloween is the time when we mortals come to terms with two constants of human existence: a.) the unknown, and b.) the inevitability of death.
The celebration of Halloween is an act of acceptance. Our lives will always contain tragedy, dissatisfactions, and uncertainty. But we cannot allow ourselves to paralyzed by fear…or by sadness.
Halloween is a time when we laugh at death, and embrace our mortality.
A few years ago, I wrote a Halloween novel called 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN. This nostalgic, coming-of-age horror tale is set on Halloween night, 1980. Check it out here.
I last upgraded my Macs (I use an iMac and a MacBook Air) in June 2016. Which means that I was more than due for an upgrade, by any reasonable standard.
I take a conservative approach to upgrading computer equipment…just like I take a conservative approach to practically everything else. My criteria when contemplating a computer equipment upgrade are as follows:
a) Is the existing equipment starting to malfunction?
b.) Could the new equipment provide substantial benefits (as opposed to simply being “the latest thing”?)
My 2016 iMac, which actually rolled off the Apple assembly lines in 2015, was starting to have problems. The webcam had not worked for quite some time. This was preventing me from restarting my YouTube channel—something that has been on my to-do list for a while.
More recently, the mouse had gotten buggy. Last week, the mouse stopped moving laterally (in either the right or the left direction) at all.
Okay, it was time for an upgrade. So I took the plunge. And hey, Apple needs some more of my money, right?
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I’m quite happy with the new iMac, which is shown in the photo at the top of this post. I won’t turn this into a sales pitch or a tech review, but I will elaborate on one feature that is near and dear to my heart: native dictation capabilities.
The Siri dictation functions on the Mac have improved greatly. Dictation is something that interests many writers concerned about repetitive stress injuries.
But dictation has been problematic for Mac users.
A few years ago, Nuance Communications stopped supporting its Dragon Dictate products on the Mac platform completely. That included support for people (like me) who had already bought it. Thanks, Nuance Communications!
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Apple needed to make progress on its native dictation functionality. That seems to have happened.
I’ve been using the dictate function for composing several rough drafts. The Siri dictation is still not quite as accurate as Dragon Dictate is at its best. But Siri dictation is worlds better than it used to be.
Like I said, I’m conservative when it comes to upgrades. Not only is there the cost of the new equipment to consider, but also the hassles involved in moving everything over to the new machine(s). My 2015 MacBook Air, purchased in 2016, continues to function with relatively few problems. I’ll probably replace it by the end of the year, but I’m in no hurry just yet.
After an early May that veered between March-like cold and constant rain, summer has come roaring into Southern Ohio. Afternoon temperatures in the Cincinnati area will flirt with the low 90s this weekend. (That’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit, for you readers in Canada and the UK.) No rain on the horizon for at least three or four days.
People in my neck of the woods are currently getting worked up about cicadas. Cicadas don’t bother me. Bring ‘em on! as they say. I survived the great cicada outbreak of ’87. I’ll make it through this one, too.
There is only one insect—only one creature, in fact— that I despise with implacable, murderous intent: the wasp. I have always hated them, and my market share of wasp spray is likely a line item on the balance sheets at both Raid and Spectracide.
There is an old German proverb, “God made the bee, but the Devil made the wasp.” It’s absolutely true. Wasps are pure evil. And they know when you’re about to come after them. I have the stings to prove it.
There is a group of wasps building a nest under the eaves on one side of my house. Armed with a good supply of chemical warfare agents, I intend to send as many of them as possible straight to Hell before the weekend is over.
I usually pimp my short horror story, The Wasp, in late May or early June. It’s like an annual rite of summer for me. But you can read it for free here on the site.
I hope you enjoy your Saturday, wherever you are. As for me, I’ll be cutting grass, trimming trees, oh…and killing wasps.
The next installment of The Rockland Horrorseries is set in 1917, early in the age of the automobile.
That, of course, means Henry Ford’s iconic Model T. The Ford Motor Company manufactured the Model T between 1908 and 1927.
The Model T was mass-produced with simple specifications. The car originally came only in black, though a few other color choices were added in later model years.
The Model T was also quite affordable. The base price for a 1916 Model T Runabout was just $345, or $8,324.76 in 2021 dollars. This was, obviously, much cheaper than just about any car manufactured for the U.S. market today.
But this simplicity came at a price. If the Model T was cheap (even by early 20th-century standards) it was also far more difficult to use than modern vehicles.
The Rockland Horror 3 (now in production) will be a horror novel, not a book about early automobiles. But the story does involve some car chase scenes, and I wanted to make these scenes reasonably authentic.
My maternal grandfather was born in 1921, and even he never owned a Model T. Driving the Model T is one of those experiences that has passed out of “living memory”, so to speak.
I therefore went to YouTube, where there were, indeed, a few videos about starting and driving the Model T. I’ve embedded two of them here.
You probably already know about the crank start. But even that isn’t the worst of it. To start a Model T, you had to arrange a series of switches and levers inside the car in the right combination. Then you had to “choke” the engine by priming it with gasoline, and then…
This past week two consecutive winter storms dropped more than a foot of snow on Cincinnati. I managed to shovel two driveways, twice, without a.) throwing out my back, b.) re-repturing my 2005 hernia, or c.) having a heart attack. At my current age of fifty-two, I consider that a not unnoteworthy accomplishment.
The winter of 2020 to 2021 has been a rough one so far in Cincinnati, especially compared to the past three or four. Yet more snow is forecast to arrive later this week.
Of course, for American adults around my age—especially if they grew up east of the Mississippi—there are two childhood winters that stand out in memory: those are the back-to-back “blizzard winters” in the mid-1970s: the winter of 1976 to 1977, and the winter of 1977 to 1978.
The winter of 1976 to 1977
The winter of 1976 to 1977 was the winter of record-breaking, pipe-bursting, river-freezing cold. Here in Cincinnati, there were three straight days of record cold in January 1977, in which the temperature stayed below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit the whole time.
The Ohio River froze solid—for the first time since 1958, and only the thirteenth time on record. In the Cincinnati media archives, there are photos of people walking across the Ohio River, and even driving across the ice that month. The freezing of the Ohio was quite a novelty, much talked about on the local news. One of my older friends has told me about driving his car across the Ohio River that winter on a dare. He was then nineteen years old, and he’s now in his sixties. So he obviously made it across.
January of 1977 was also a snowy one. Cincinnati had 30.3 inches of snow that year. (The usual figure for Cincinnati in January is six inches.)
Photo: Kenton County LibraryPhoto: Kenton County Library
The winter of 1977 to 1978
The following winter of 1977 to 1978 was just as bad, with almost as much cold, and even more snow. On January 25, 1978, one of the worst blizzards in U.S. history pummeled Cincinnati with almost seven inches of snow. There were already fourteen on the ground.
I remember the night of January 25, 1978 well. I played forward on our fourth-grade basketball team. That night we had a game at a rival Catholic school in the area, Guardian Angels. I remember walking outside at halftime with other members of my team. The air was not exceptionally cold yet by January standards. (It would soon plummet below zero degrees.) But there was a strange fog in the air. I think we all had the feeling that something momentous was imminent. On the way home from the game, the snow began. By morning, it was a whiteout.
Winter landscapes of the memory
At the age of eight or nine, one doesn’t have much life experience to draw upon. I could sense, though, that those two winters were worse than the handful of winters I could recall before. During those two winters, the outside air always seemed to be bitterly cold. Furnaces ran constantly. Fireplaces crackled nonstop. The ground was always snow-covered.
Many people are depressed by snow and cold weather, and winter in general. Not me. I will confess that some of my happiest childhood memories are winter ones, in fact.
I was particularly close to my maternal grandparents. During those blizzard years of the 1970s, they lived just down the street from us. When school was canceled due to inclement weather, I got to pass the day with my grandfather, who had recently retired. We spent a lot of time together in those years. I’m grateful for all the snow.
The cyclical nature of winter weather
It has been my observation that bad and mild winters tend to alternate in cycles. From the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, the winters were harsh, with record cold and snow.
The winter of 1981 to 1982 was cold. The Cincinnati Bengals went to the Super Bowl that year. On January 10, 1982, the Bengals won a key home game against the San Diego Chargers. The air temperature at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium on game day was minus nine degrees, with wind chills down to 35 below. That game has gone down in NFL history as the “Freezer Bowl”.
I was in the eighth grade in 1981-1982, and going through a (brief, in retrospect) rebellious adolescent phase. This included hanging out with an edgier crowd, and embracing a short-lived fascination with smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol.
Even in 1982, smoking and drinking weren’t acceptable pursuits for eighth graders. But hiding these illicit activities from adult authority figures was half the fun. I have many memories of shivering outside that bitter January, as I sipped a furtive drink of whiskey, or smoked a Marlboro. Even today, when I happen to smell someone else’s newly opened pack of cigarettes, or taste an alcoholic beverage, I’m transported back to that brutally cold winter of 1981 to 1982.
The last bad winter I remember from that larger cycle was the winter of 1983 to 1984. That winter brought record cold and snow to the entire United States, including Florida and Texas. As I recall, there was a lot of anxiety about the citrus crop that year, and skyrocketing prices of orange juice.
Over Christmas break in December 1983, my parents decided to embark on a rare family trip to Florida. When we reached Macon, Georgia, it was 4 degrees, with 23 degrees forecast for our destination in the Sunshine State. After spending a night shivering in a Macon hotel room with an inadequate heater, my parents decided to cut our losses. We headed home the next morning. We could freeze in Ohio for free, after all.
But the weather is no more constant than anything else in this world. That cycle of severe winters, from 1976 to 1984, transitioned into a milder pattern over subsequent years. The winters of 1984-1985 and 1985-1986 weren’t exactly balmy; but they weren’t severe, either. Throughout my last two years of high school, classes were rarely canceled due to weather. This was fine with me, because I generally enjoyed high school more than grade school.
And during my college years, spanning the winters of 1986 to 1987 through 1990 to 1991, the winters in Cincinnati were notably mild. I did not go away for college; I lived with my parents and commuted to two local schools. I did not miss a single class due to bad winter weather throughout my entire college career.
That mild cycle continued through the early 1990s, only to go the other way again in the middle of the decade. The winter of 1995 to 1996 was an especially bad one for the entire Midwest, resulting in a rare shutdown of the University of Cincinnati in January of ’96. By this time, I was a working adult in my mid-twenties.
The winter of 1995 to 1996 drew comparisons in the media to the blizzard winters of the mid-1970s. I remember scoffing when I heard this. Having been a kid during those fabled winters of the 1970s, I never took the comparison seriously.
But then, everything seems to happen on a larger scale when you’re a kid…even the weather.
Krampus, Dickens, and what I saw on Christmas Eve, 1976
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Yes, I know this has been a lousy year. It’s almost over, though.
Christmas is generally a festive holiday, but there are some macabre Christmas traditions, too. And they didn’t necessarily begin with this very macabre year of 2020.
Consider, for example, the Dickens tale, A Christmas Carol. This is one of my holiday favorites. Who can forget the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, which reminds us of the Grim Reaper? Or, for that matter, Marley’s ghost?
Krampus and St. Nicholas
In some parts of Europe, Christmas includes the Krampus, a horned creature that incorporates both Christian and pre-Christian (pagan) traditions. In Germanic folklore, the Krampus works in conjunction with St. Nicholas, rewarding children who have been good, and punishing those who have been bad.
Let me tell you about something that happened to me on Christmas Eve many years ago…in 1976.
I was at my grandparents’ house in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. The family had just had our Christmas Eve dinner—Grandma’s turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. (My grandmother also used to prepare a festive gelatin salad made with raspberry Jell-O, diced nuts, sliced carrots, and Cool Whip. (I realize that might not sound very tasty, but it was.))
Anyway, I had just left the table for a call of nature. This took me to a hallway in another part of the house.
There in the semidarkness of the hallway, I saw the shadow of a small, gnomish creature. It was right there, within lunging distance of me, cast on the wall.
I was startled—though not necessarily in mortal terror. Being eight years old in 1976, I ran back into the dining room, and told the adults.
There was something in the hall!
They accompanied me back to the hallway where I’d seen the unusual shadow. Needless to say, it was gone.
But there had been something there. I know there was.
My grandparents lived in that house for the rest of their lives. I was close to my grandparents, and visited them often, well into my adult years.
I never saw anything there resembling that gnome shadow figure again. Nor did I ever see any other other strange phenomena in the house.
But I know that something made a brief visit there on Christmas Eve, 1976.
A bad elf, maybe? I don’t know. But like I said, I saw something.
The other day, quite on a whim, I shared the above photo for my personal Facebook tribe, which consists disproportionately of former high school and grade school classmates. (I am 52 years old, and I was recently reunited on Facebook with a fellow who sat behind me in our third grade classroom. But that’s another story for another time.)
The above is the entrance to Beechmont Mall, on the east side of Cincinnati, Ohio. Beechmont Mall was opened in 1969, the year after I was born; and the above photo is from circa 1973. Beechmont Mall was a fixture of my childhood and adolescent years.
Beginning around 2000, Beechmont Mall was gradually dismantled, and replaced with an outdoor monstrosity now known as Anderson Towne Center. Twenty years later, what is left of Beechmont Mall would be virtually unrecognizable to a time traveler from 1970, 1980, or 1990.
Beechmont Mall was a place of wonders. There were bookstores, a record shop, and several well-stocked department stores. During the holiday season, there were elaborate Christmas displays.
Anderson Towne Center’s main draw is a Kroger grocery store that vaguely resembles a state correctional facility. We used to hang out at Beechmont Mall. No one wants to hang out at Anderson Towne Center.
I posted the above photo in my personal Facebook feed without expecting too much reaction. To be honest, I’d realized that with last month’s election and all, I’d been posting too much partisan political content there. I wanted to lighten the tone a bit.
I didn’t expect many reactions…maybe a like or two. But the photo got lots of likes. Almost immediately, my old friends and classmates began typing comments, detailing their fond memories of Beechmont Mall.
I wasn’t the only person who missed Beechmont Mall. Not by a long shot, as it turned out.
If you didn’t grow up on the east side of Cincinnati between 1970 and 2000, Beechmont Mall and the above photo mean nothing to you. I get that. This is my nostalgia, not necessarily yours.
But beyond the little corner of America where I grew up, there was a Golden Age of the American mall, between roughly 1970 and 1999. This is evidenced in the films of the late 20th century. Consider the centrality of the mall used in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and other Reagan-era teen movies.
The local mall was a place to people-watch and to be seen. It was a place to go to dinner with your parents. (But you didn’t want to be seen by any of your classmates on those outings, because going to dinner with one’s parents was just so uncool, no matter how much you loved them.) The mall was a place to spend your grass-cutting or babysitting money on the latest album from Def Leppard or AC/DC. I bought many Stephen King novels at Beechmont Mall’s two bookstores, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks.
Many of us had our first jobs at the local mall, too. I worked for a time at the Woolworth at Beechmont Mall. This was a Woolworth store built on the original model, complete with a little diner inside the store. The Woolworth had a unique, mid-2oth century environment. It was a time capsule of sorts even in 1985. I enjoyed working there.
By the time we entered our early twenties and college/working life, the magic of the local mall had faded for most of us. But the mall was a good place to be a kid or a teenager in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
The American mall can’t be replaced by today’s impersonal outdoor shopping centers. Nor can it be replaced by Amazon, even with free 2-day shipping.
Opening mall scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
I had a brief flirtation with Ayn Rand the year I turned twenty. The most torrid part of the relationship lasted only about as long as some of Dagny Taggart’s warm-up love affairs in Atlas Shrugged. Officially, I broke off the romance; but it remains a memorable phase in my formative years.
Twenty is probably the perfect age to have a fling with Ayn Rand. In the enclosed terrarium of your teenage years, it is easy to hold any hifalutin concept of yourself that you can imagine. When you are twenty, though, things begin to change. The adult world looms large in the windshield. You realize that you aren’t quite as special, quite as brilliant, or quite as destined for spectacular success as you fancied yourself to be, only a few short years ago.
Ayn Rand, with hyper-individualist titles like Anthem and The Virtue of Selfishness, is the perfect salve for the twenty-year-old who suddenly fears that he might turn out to be quite ordinary, after all. The twenty-year-old’s brief burst of Ayn Randian egoism is a final cry of rebellion for the self-important teenager that is slipping away.
I first heard of Ayn Rand around 1983, when I was in high school. My favorite rock band was Rush. Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer and main lyricist, wrote at least two songs based on Rand’s novels and philosophical tracts. Continue reading “Ayn Rand and me”
My hometown of Cincinnati isn’t exactly Paris or New York. It is therefore somewhat understandable, I suppose, that our local news media is making a big deal of the episode of The Brady Bunch that was filmed here nearly a half-century ago:
While I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, going to Kings Island—Cincinnati’s only real amusement park—was a “big deal”. Much of the scenery in the above clip from The Brady Bunch therefore looks familiar.
Kings Island is still there, by the way. But it’s changed a lot since 1973.
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A few feature-length films were shot in Cincinnati in the 1980s. Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, comes immediately to mind. This movie was filmed in various locations in and around Cincinnati.
80sThen80s now is one of the few accounts I follow on Twitter, because, well…I’m nostalgic for the 1980s.
Today the account tweeted this post about the movie Red Dawn (1984). In response to the poll, I gave the movie a 9.
Red Dawn wouldn’t necessarily be a 9 if it were released today, mind you. But you have to evaluate a movie by the filmmaking standards of its era. A lot of movies in the early 1980s were pretty rough, compared to the slick, CGI-enhanced productions of today. And so it is with Red Dawn. Continue reading “Remembering ‘Red Dawn’”
Today I turn 52 years old. I am not making a big deal of the day in my real life, because well, when you’re this old, what’s another birthday but a step closer to the grave? (We’ll get to that matter shortly.)
Due to a misspelling on my Ohio driver’s license, I recently had to order a copy of my official birth certificate from the State of Wisconsin. My Certificate of Live Birth lists my parents’ ages as 22. It is difficult for me to imagine either of them as twenty-two today. For that matter, it’s not so easy to imagine myself as twenty-two.
Not that I have much to complain about, mind you. During my teen years, I developed a habit of moderate diet and daily exercise, and I’ve stuck with it. I’m not going to say that I feel like a 19-year-old. I don’t. But I don’t feel much different than I did when I was in my thirties. That’s something.
Of course, I’m also at that age where seemingly healthy men drop dead, out of the blue, from heart attacks. I’ve known several 50-something men who did just that. Once you reach the half-century mark, you really could go at any time.
Fifty is a special milestone in that regard, perhaps. But every birthday much beyond 40 carries with it a realization: You’re on the downhill run now. You’ve reached and surpassed the halfway point. There is more time in the rearview mirror than there is in the windshield.
This means being more deliberate about the choices you make, about how you spend your time. I have a good autobiographical memory. I remember being very young, under the age of 21. I can even remember my years from ten to fifteen with surprisingly clarity.
In those days, I often looked at adulthood as some distant, golden point on the far horizon. Now I wouldn’t mind being 10 again. (But I would want to be 10 in my own times, in my own life. I wouldn’t want to be someone else—and certainly not a random 10-year-old in 2020.)
I realize that it’s vaguely possible that fifty-two years from now, I could be seeing out the last of my days at the age of 104. Frankly, I hope not. As I note elsewhere in this blog, I’m a man of the last century, not this one. I’ll cope with the twenty-first century as I must; but I have no desire to live beyond its midway point.
Every human life has its limit. This is a universal that the atheist and the believer must both come to terms with. Likewise, every person (in my way of thinking, anyway) has their times. Just as I have no desire to be alive one hundred years ago, I have no desire to be alive one hundred years from now.
On this point, I’ve been fairly consistent over the years. I’m a nostalgic, not a futurist. The idea of making it into the record books for my longevity has never been a prospect that much appealed to me. I would rather make the most of a reasonably long—though reasonably limited—span of time.
My coming-of-age supernatural thriller, Revolutionary Ghosts, is set in 1976. The tale’s hero, an Ohio teenager named Steve Wagner, has a summer job at McDonald’s.
