Recent content by Jack Armstrong

Agreed. Penny was probably the most underrated babe (and for the longest time) in all of Hollywood. A real stunner.

Lordie, Lordie, how I wanted to go to Disneyland when I was seven years old! It was always the star of the Disneyland TV show, and featured heavily in the Mickey Mouse Club most of the time. But my family lived in Pennsylvania, and money was not that easily come by for us. I never did get...

The movie is very good, too.

Maybe so, but A Christmas Story (and the Jean Shepherd stories on which it's based) was set in the Thirties, not the Fifties.

I'm glad someone noticed that.

I don't think you'll ever find out, because I don't think it was ever a uniform thing in all parts of the United States. The earliest funeral I can remember was in 1951, and no one was wearing any black armbands. That was in the coal country of Eastern Pennsylvania. It may have been more...

I do, and I think you're right about the date. I always thought the new color scheme looked gaudy. In my town, at least, they were red, white and blue in three horizontal bands from the top down. The all-blue boxes didn't come till much later.

This has been a most interesting discussion. The things that annoy you folks also get under my own skin, but it's good to see them all discussed so eruditely. I work for a large university, so I see this up close and ugly all the time.

As I recall, both Teresa Brewer and the Maguire Sisters both started their careers with Twenties-revival music.

What's especially bad about it is that it's obviously deteriorating. If it were part of someone's collection, it wouldn't be returning to its component elements the way it is.

I can top that. I was at a funeral, and during the service, some idiot's cell phone started buzzing away. He fumbled around from pocket to pocket, and when he finally found the phone, he didn't just turn it off, he had to answer it and tell the caller that he couldn't reply just now. As for...

I love those GM postwar fastbacks. Our family car when I was a kid was a '51 Chevy fastback two-door. The Buick and Pontiac versions were even slicker. I wish there were more GM fastbacks available in 1:18 scale.

Since I collect (and use) antique cameras, photo magazines from the 1935-1955 period are my favorite. But I also have Life, Collier's and a few workshop-fantasy magazines of the Science & Mechanics variety from the same period.

You're probably right. Wearing rings of any kind was frowned upon by mechanics in the Fifties, since getting zapped by a jolt from the battery or coil would turn it into a wraparound branding iron in less than a second. I don't know if today's mechanics still avoid rings or not.

My father wore his wedding band for over forty years, until he got a groove around the ring finger of his left hand -- he never took it off. The decision was taken out if his hands (no pun intended) in the late Seventies, when he took a bad injury to his left hand, and the ring had to go...