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REMARKABLE CENTURY
• 100 years ago Canton City Council made it unlawful for chickens to run at large.
• 90 years ago five men gathered at a drug store on Greensboro Avenue in a meeting that would eventually evolve into Tuscaloosa’s first and largest service organization, the Rotary Club of Tuscaloosa.
• 80 years ago poolside entertainment at the hotel meant synchronized swimming and alligator wrestling.
• 70 years ago the Waterman Arrowbile, the world’s first successful flying car, made its maiden test flight.
• 60 years ago Swedish aircraft manufacturer Saab decided to supplement its declining post-war aircraft sales with land-based transportation.
• 50 years ago a plea for a compromise between those who wanted to rock and roll at Malvern Winter Gardens and those who did not was made by Councillor J K Clarke.
• 40 years ago Brian Boyett walked the streets of the East Valley carrying two small glass bottles — one filled with unfiltered “hard” tap water and the other with water that had been softened through a filtering system.
• 30 years ago the weather in Penang Hill was so cold that even cooking oil in tin containers would solidify.
• 20 years ago it occurred to Dr. Ifay Chang of Somers that whenever he played the board game Scrabble with three other people, it was only his turn to play the game 25 percent of the time.
• 10 years ago a developer in Minneapolis, Kan., the county seat of Ottawa County, wasn’t able to follow through with a planned project. The city eventually acquired the land but did not know what to do with it.
Feel free to offer your own decade-specific recollections in comments. Especially if you were ever party to an illegal running of chickens.
We call them chooks in Oz, as you should well know. Plucking the feathers in boiling water is a smell I will never forget.Really memorable, though was the headless chooks flapping around the backyard after my eldest brother delivered the coup. Two chooks a year, for Easter and Christmas. I was always glad to see them dead, because I had the job of feeding them each day and being pecked mercilessly in the process. Suburbia in Australia in the 1960s. Those were the days.
I don’t know if it’s relevant, but a chap I knew in Rockhampton in th ‘70s used to cruise East Street in a highly modified ER Holden station wagon, asking strolling local ladies if they liked chicken.
If they replied in the afermative, he’d exclaim "well suck my cock, it’s foul!!"
I don’t recall him ever getting any follow-up.
PIMF again, EH Holden. But who’d know the difference?
Hmmmm.
Especially if you were ever party to an illegal running of chickens.
You know I’ve never really understood the reason why people did the “Running of the Bulls”. Seriously. Those horns can hurt.
But a “Running of the Chickens”? Now that’s something I can definitely support. And if I accidently step on a chicken?
Hey, fried chicken for lunch!
Posted by memomachine on 2007 02 26 at 10:59 AM • permalinkTwenty years ago, I was learning the joys of urban dwelling and commuting, working as I did in the Chicago Loop, and living in the suburbs. Riding the train was an interesting way of observing my fellow inhabitants of the urban zone.
Also, a buddy and I found an interesting and entertaining means of exercise: we would run to the Northwestern train station from our office near the post office, trying to catch the 3:55 train. Imagine, if you will, two guys hauling ass through a sea of commutings leisurely strolling along. We kept on wondering if the cops were ever going to chase us down, especially when we ran on the road.
Thirty years ago I was a freshman in college, dealing with the social dynamics of being an ubergeek in an ocean of geeks (I went to a small engineering college in the midwest). Probably a good thing I was too young to worry about what other people thought of me, else I would have been scarred for life. You see, this was immediately after the fall of Vietnam, my college had only recently shut down mandatory ROTC (it’s a landgrant school)....and I liked wearing my ROTC jacket around school. Even my fellow cadets thought I was goofy.
Forty years ago I was too focused on watching Star Trek to worry about the world. Spock rocks!
50 years ago, I was awaiting my impending trip through my mother’s birth canal. I don’t remember much about that time.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 02 26 at 11:01 AM • permalink40 years ago - February 21, 1967
Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed when a fire erupted in their capsule onboard Apollo 1.
I remember this event well, I was 8 years old at the time. My dad had worked for NASA and was part of the “I.U”, instrument unit team for the Apollo missions. The I.U is the big round ring that you see falling away as the stages separate. My dad vividly recalled that while the three astronauts were touring the production facilities for the various sections they would address the assembled workers and exhort them to do their best, be diligent and leave nothing to chance, saying "Boys, my life is in your hands"
Damn, I’m crying again....
Posted by joe bagadonuts on 2007 02 26 at 12:04 PM • permalink50 years ago I was living in Crown Point, Indiana, where the townsfolk were getting their very first single-party, direct-dial telephone service. It had been my first experience with party lines and central operators ("Hey, Sara, would you get me Floyd over at the barbershop") and I was sorely disappointed, but time and progress marches on…
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2007 02 26 at 01:07 PM • permalinkThirty years ago at Belfast Uni, I earned the nickname of the Chicken Strangler, after disposing of about 40 chooks (using the said method) I’d been experimenting on for my thesis.
The legally approved method of disposing of chickens used in scientific experiments was to gas them using CO2 in what was little more than a carboard box,
After an hour, one dead chook and at least 5 that escaped - unsuprisingly chooks don’t like being gassed and go crazy trying to get out of the box - I decided, sod the law and started breaking their necks, which of corse the chooks don’t see coming.
However, in my zeal to kill the buggers, I managed to pull the heads off several.
Interestingly, my female friends were both appalled and fascinated by the story.
sixty years ago my dad was growing up on a large high country sheep station in the McKenzie Country of NZ (Think ‘Edoras’ in Lord of the Rings).
Due to the reclusive nature of his mother he met very few other children, until he was seven, and got sent off to boarding school. Until he was six, and his younger brother came along, he believed he was one of the farm dogs.
In their teenage years he and his brother spent their weekends shooting, skiing, and dynamiting stuff. They would tell my grandad they were dynamiting tree stumps, but in fact would blow up anything that took their fancy.
Farm got sold eventually, because the isolation drove my grandmother mad. She spent the last eighteen years of her life in bed, in almost perpetual darkness, mumbling inanities to the walls.
Ah yes, those were the days…
#2, You too, mareeS?
We used to let our chooks out of their pen to run at large in the back yard where good peckings were to be had in the vegetable garden and, at fruiting time, in the lower branches of the mulberry tree.
My jobs were to scatter pellets and collect eggs, and help clip wings when needed. Mum did the axe work and feather plucking.
The boilers who’d gone off laying went into chicken curry but we only sacrificed one bird a year that was suitable for roasting. That was for Christmas.
Those were the days, alright.
About 80 years ago, my grandfather was looking for work in Ripley, OH. He had just rolled into town—either hitchhiking, walking, or hopping a train—and as a stranger, was suspected of being involved in the previous day’s bank robbery. He was cleared.
They say you can still see the bullet holes in the bank from that robbery.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2007 02 26 at 08:04 PM • permalinkNot a decadal (is that a real word? if only I were a visiting professor to know such things) anniversary but “today is the 14th anniversary of the first WTC bombing attack, which killed six and wounded more than 1,000 people.”
[lawhawk blog via LGF]Posted by andycanuck on 2007 02 26 at 08:14 PM • permalinkFifty years ago, Peggy Sue by Buddy Holly was the year’s top selling hit.
Forty years ago, it was Sunshine of Your Love by Cream.
Thirty years ago, Stayin’ Alive by the BeeGees.
Twenty years ago, Faith by George Michael.
Ten years ago, 2 Become by the Spice Girls.
Has public taste declined or am I old and jaded and cynical?
#16 - JonathanH
Congratulations to your father. He is probably the only New Zealand farmer in history to relieve his boredom in an RSPCA friendly manner.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2007 02 26 at 09:01 PM • permalinkFifty years ago we moved from the farm to the edge of town. Later that year my mother was in an accident that everyone (including our family doctor) would kill her. She died this past month. We were blessed.
Twenty years ago I was finishing my BS only 22 years after starting my college studies.
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2007 02 26 at 09:21 PM • permalink#23 “He is probably the only New Zealand farmer in history to relieve his boredom in an RSPCA friendly manner.”
Not at all, I have a friend who also spent his time blowing things up on his dad’s NZ farm. As the son of an Aussie sheep farmer I would have you know that the entertainment on sheep farms is ALL RSPCA-friendly. The allegations to the contrary mostly come from people who are just jealous - dreaming of what they could get up to if they were ‘working in woollies’.
25 years ago the community here in Texas still had Chicken Flying Contests during the Summer commemoration of shooting the outlaw Sam Bass. (Long story for another time.)
=Chicken Flying involves a 5 foot platform
=A mailbox with the back sawed off, box on a 4 foot post, on top of the platform.
=Chickens either owned or rented for the contest
=And a plumber’s helper to help persuade reluctant contestants, who tried to stay in the mailboxThe objective was to see which chicken would fly the greatest distance. Most didn’t like to fly and fluttered to the ground. Then the unofficial race began.
Children were waiting at the base to catch the contestant. Most chickens were faster and more elusive than the kiddos.
I doubt PETA would approve. Kids had fun, though, and the adults all had a good laugh.
Today:
A chair was destroyed in Kendal, Lake District. Who’ll forget that in 10, 20, 30+ years?About 40 years ago, I wanted to be an Astronaut like Neil from 7 Up. When I was told I had to be an American to do so, I changed my name to Stevad Dawoud and wanted to have revenge on the world. What I’m telling you is what I told my dad. I’ll become an Astronaut one day, even if it means strapping C4 to my backside to blast off.
The thing about Neil at 7 was serious.
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