Thread: Am I the only teen who envies.....

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Paper, you MAY be the only one since only us ol' coots is respondin'!!


I think that lots of folks can romanticize about whenever their youth was, but since there's so many of us that grew up in that era our tales of yore seem to dominate at this point in time.

Having said that, I don't think cruizin' like we did will ever happen again, and was never to the degree we enjoyed before then either. Living in the So Cal scene it was tops. Van Nuys blvd, Hollywood Blvd, Bob's Toluca Lake, a little tire turnin' action out by Forrest Lawn Cemetary........Down the street from Bob's on Van Nuys was Mashak Motors with the tan A990 Plymouth for sale on the show room floor (the inspiration for the Dodge I'm buildin'). Jim, the Rocketdyne engineer around the corner, and his new Shelby GT 350. Sundays at San Fernando and Flamin' Frank Pedregon literally lighting the tires (with a little help from gasoline )......see picture below. No dance (sock hop?) was complete without "Louie, Louie".

Having grown up as a pre-teen in Chicago, and as a teen in So Cal, that racial prejudice thing was a mystery to me. Although I did have a cop hold a scatter gun on me during the Watts riots. But I got a first hand dose of it in Biloxi, Miss, 1966. Had to leave a bar when they wouldn't serve my buddy George Wilson (yep he was black). You woulda thought (well obviously naive little ol' me did) in a GI town like that there would have been more tolerance.......but no!

One odd (to me anyway) note to make you feel like you have company paper....................In '73 "American Grafitti" came out, the catch line being "Where were you in '62". After seeing the flick my 9 year younger sister says to me......."You guys sure had fun back then!" After only eleven years?!?!? Just might be a commentary on how apparent the decline some have talked about was gaining momentum in the '70's.