Monthly Archives: October 2014

Remember PEZ? A Museum Does

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Concepts

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Among the fondest memories of we over-50s is penny candy. It amazes my children when I tell them that when I was a kid, you could actually buy something with a penny. In fact, you could often get two of something for a penny — like Bazooka Bubble Gum. In this age of packaged candy that costs a dollar or more, it is truly remarkable that there was a time when we could cash in an empty bottle, and use the two-cent deposit to buy candy!

And just when my children are telling me that the only use for a penny today is to pay sales tax, I blow their minds when I tell them that back when I was a kid, there was no sales tax. People just paid the listed price. Those pennies were just for candy.

Pez

Well recently I was travelling on I-95 in Connecticut and I passed a sign that advertized a museum of PEZ. Now PEZ is one of those special baby-boomer-era treats like penny candy. For the uninitiated, PEZ is a small brick-shaped candy that comes in several flavors. It started out In Austria in 1927 as a mint for people who wanted to quit smoking. In fact, the word PEZ comes from the German word “pfefferminz” meaning “peppermint.” The famous PEZ dispenser was designed to look like a cigarette lighter.

However, PEZ did not come to America until the 1950s. So we were the first generation of children to experience it, and the novelty of the now-iconic plastic dispenser. I think that it was certainly the dispenser that made PEZ special. They made hundreds of different dispensers with many famous characters on them. Collecting PEZ dispensers is still widespread enough that collectors gather annually for conventions.

Pez dispensers
At the PEZ Museum in Orange, Connecticut they have displays of the many ingenious dispensers that the company has made over the years. My favorites are the dispensers with the heads of presidents of the United States. But there are few licensed characters in the world from Mickey Mouse to Elvis Presley who have not had their heads on a PEZ dispenser.

In addition to the traditional cigarette shaped dispenser, PEZ also marketed guns as dispensers. This allowed kids to shoot candy into the mouths of their friends.

The PEZ museum is actually located at the plant where PEZ candy is made (the dispensers come from China). So if you go on a weekday, you can watch them make thousands of little PEZ bricks in scores of flavors. And of course, you can buy PEZ. Here, the self-guided tour does not just exit through the gift shop, it is integrated into the gift shop. But where else can you find a Thomas the Tank Engine or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles PEZ dispenser?

PEZ and penny candy are among the great treats of a baby boomer childhood. Sadly, only PEZ is still with us. The types of candy that a penny used to buy, if you can still find them, are now a specialty nostalgia item. But even at the current inflated price, a licorice pipe is a treat that I will want to share with my grandson. And I can amaze him with tales of the wondrous things a penny used to buy for a kid.

I Can Be Pragmatic About My Garter Belt

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Julie and Steve took off last week, bound for a two-week romp through Romania. She sent this along before boarding the plane:

I bought a black lacy garter belt …

black garter belt

… to hold up my 20-year-old compression hose stockings with holes in their soles.

compression hose

I Hardly Knew You, Laurie

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Men, Words

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BY BOB SMITH

Laurie ran a local farmstand that sold tomatoes, corn, peaches, the usual summer fare, along with odd items like jumbo homemade Hula hoops covered with electrical tape, and dreamcatchers made from jute and antique jewelry findings. She sold local honey at exorbitant prices, and by the cash register there was a take-a-book, give-a-book exchange-shelf filled with tattered thrillers from 10 years ago.



Often when I rode my bike, I would pass by Laurie’s to buy an overpriced peach or two and chat about the weather, or the tourists, or what it’s like in the winter at the Shore. Her black Lab mutt, corralled in the back, would whoof loudly when I approached the counter.  

“Calm down Sammy, it’s okay!” She laughed. “He’s almost 13.”

As if that explained his ill temper.

“He’ll probably outlive me.”



He did.

 Someone in town mentioned that Laurie had died suddenly two weeks ago. I couldn’t believe it, so I rode my bike over there and, sure enough, it was boarded up. There was a white piece of paper on the bulletin board outside, weatherized with a taped-on piece of plastic wrap, with a simple announcement: “LAURIE’S FARM MARKET WILL BE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND PRAYERS.”

Nearby, stood a creepy makeshift totem with purplish lipstick and braided blue rope for hair. It was decorated with draped netting and dangling clamshells, and at its base, lay a painted rock displaying the epitaph “Grow in God’s garden.”

Burnt-out battery-operated candles and a broken wine goblet completed the sad sidewalk tableau. A girl in her twenties passed by walking a dog. I asked her what had happened.

“She just died last Saturday night,” she said, shaking her head. “I live next door, so I heard right away. Real shame.”

“How’d she die?”

“Asthma attack. 54 years old.”

Now I was feeling uncomfortable, and very mortal. She had been six years younger than me. And dying from an asthma attack must be horrible – basically, you struggle for breath, unsuccessfully, until you suffocate. The neighbor didn’t know if the business would reopen.

“Depends if her kids want to run it,” she said, tugging her dog away from snuffling in the roadside weeds. “Which I think they don’t.”

She’d mentioned once she was divorced, but I had no idea she had grown children. And I’d thought the woman who made the hoops and dreamcatchers was her business partner or life partner or whatever, but nope – just someone Laurie had allowed to share the selling space, so she wasn’t taking over either.

She was a friend, but I hardly knew her. Like my older brother, she espoused a homespun hippie philosophy of live and let live, and doing the right thing for the world. With her jeans and work shirts and unruly blond hair, she could have been a pot-smoking Dead Head, but she wasn’t.

She worked hard. She got up early to go to the local farms to pick out whatever they had that looked good that day. Often she harvested it herself, and she had the dirty fingernails and scraped and calloused hands to prove it. But she wasn’t complaining. She seemed to love her work.

Two years ago she had boxes of exotic melons, perfectly round and bright yellowish green, like lime-saffron bowling balls. The fruit was remarkably sweet and juicy, with a subtle floral flavor that snuck up on you after the last bite. I tasted a sample Laurie had set out at the stand, and bought two on the spot. We cut one up that night and it was every bit as perfect as the sample. But we waited two days before cutting into the other one, and by then it was slushy, almost rotten inside, and we had to discard it. Apparently, they had a short shelf life.

“Snooze ya lose!” she laughed, plopping my free replacement melon on the counter. “Ya gotta eat the fruit while it’s sweet.”

Indeed.
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When a Peek-A-Boo was Simple

02 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Men, Opinion

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Frank post

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the greatest changes in the lifetimes of the over-50 set is the Internet. We were all adults when it first became available to us. We all spent our childhoods having to look things up in encyclopedias and almanacs. It’s truly been a blessing for the last two decades and I’m sure that few of us would want to go back to a time without it.

But there is one aspect of the instant gratification we now receive daily from the web that I fear may ultimately be unhealthy for us, particularly those of us of the male persuasion. It’s pornography. I am not talking about pornography in the legal sense. I am just using pornography as a shorthand here for pictures of unclothed people.

Men over 50 grew up in a sexually-repressed society where the only place we could regularly see pictures of naked women was in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. Obtaining these usually involved getting hold of a copy purchased by an adult male because most newsstands would not sell them to minors. So adolescent boys had to work to see pornography. Today, on the Internet, young males have to work to avoid it. (Now I know that there are some women who enjoy viewing pornography as much as men, but that’s the exception rather than the rule in my experience. I think that the limited appeal of magazines like Playgirl among women is evidence of that.)

Back when we over 50s were teens, the most common way for boys to see pornography was if a friend found his father’s stash and invited you over to have a look. It happened rarely. And back then, Playboy showed only (in the words of the song from A Chorus Line) tits and ass. Today, the most graphic pictures are only a few clicks away from any 12-year-old with an Internet connection.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I truly don’t know. There is one school of thought that says viewing porn allows males to vent some sexual energy that might otherwise be visited upon women against their will. And then there are those who say that viewing porn teaches men to see women as sex objects rather than people.

I suppose the truth is somewhere in the middle as usual. Like all pleasures, it’s a matter of degree. Where an occasional trip to a porn website can satisfy the curiosity of a young male, constant exposure to exposed bodies is probably not healthy. Nudists will probably disagree. They will argue that constant exposure is just what we need to take the sexuality out of nakedness. But even if that is possible, do we really want to remove sexuality from nudism?

Anyway, like it or not, it is a fact of life in the 21st century that before a boy can hear about the “facts of life” he’s already seen what makes the opposite sex different. The Internet puts it all within reach of everyone. So we all have to deal with it.

We try to deal with it by restricting the access of minors to the Internet. But that is even less successful than the prohibitions of porn magazine sales to minors back when we were kids. The reason is that the Internet is everywhere, not just on computers, but on phones, on tablets, and now even on watches. A child who wants to see what his favorite movie star looks like naked will probably succeed despite his parents’ best efforts. Nude selfies are not going away anytime soon.

So given that our children will be viewing and even creating pornography, I think the best thing we can do is educate them about what they are doing. Parents and grandparents need to do the difficult work of talking about healthy sex. As with curtailing all potential vices, it’s better to work on decreasing demand rather than restricting supply.

At the end of it all, we may end up with a society with a healthier attitude about sex. Or we may witness the fall of the American Empire. I’m not sure which. Life was sure a lot simpler 50 years ago.

I Blinked, and It’s My Birthday Again

01 Wednesday Oct 2014

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Looking towards 60.

BY JULIE SEYLER

Birthdays are funny. How we relate to the day we are born changes with age. The year we turn one we are incognizant of the significance, but parents and grandparents are feasting on the fact that a year has passed since you entered the world. By the time you are six, birthdays have been converted into knowledge that this is a special day. Presents are bestowed and there is cake galore. Anticipation builds for the next year, which feels as if it will take FOREVER. Gaining age is a positive.

The milestone birthdays set in: 18 and the right to vote, 21 and the right to drink (albeit in 1973 the legal age in New Jersey was 18), 30 and the idea that this is “old,” and 40 brings the recognition that this is “young.” The big 5-0 feels momentous, but with time passage, it dawns that this is still the minor leagues. After 55 things seem to change slightly, because it is this new era of approaching “old” age, and yet it is always relative. Young and old are only comparison adjectives.

40

Today, I turn 59. Amongst my peers born in 1955, I am on the “younger” side. I have friends that will be turning 60 in four months. It is beyond comprehension that this is happening. I remember my “Sweet 16” (it was a surprise party), and I planned my 40th with assiduous care.

Lois and me at my 40th

Lois and me at my 40th.

Nineteen years ago, and it seems like yesterday. But the reality exists: I shall soon be a woman of 60 years of age.

The cliche that time collapses as we age is proven as each year flies by. Twenty years is forever at six, and the blink of an eye at 60.

But I am going in with gusto, because while I may wither on the outside I am determined to take my Vitamin D and blossom on the inside.

With age comes wisdom, and knowing that the best and only defense to the right side of any age is staying active, curious, connected and laughing as much as possible.