Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.....
 

After my last disastrous attempt at an interesting thread, Hope this one might prove more suuccessful.

Can't remember what we were really discussing at the time that prompted it (age-related short-term memory issues!), but had some interesting exchanges over Rin Tin Tin and Rusty with Wolf and others, and that got me thinking that there were probably lots of areas where a bit of communal participation could lift the fog on partially remembered memories.

There's almost a useful age reference thing here as well. When you're not sure about someone's age, then a quick: 'do you remember....' finishing with something date related should give you a guide to the real age of a person (and whether your assumptin is right or not) -e.g. (mainly for UK subscribers - but pleased to hear your US and other country equivalents):

Do you remember:

Born
1950-1955 - Muffin the Mule, Rag Tag and Bobtail
1956-1960 - Mick and Montmorency, frozen jubblies
1961-1965 - When the first James Bond movie was released, Mods and Rockers
1966-1970 - Watching the first moon landing, seeing England win the World Cup
1971-1975 - ....well, you get the picture

Following on from the Rin Tin Tin episode we touched also on Range Rider who was played by Jock Mahoney. Range Rider had a sidekick caled Dick, I think, played by Dick Weston who then went on to have his own series as Young Range Rider(?) - now whatever happened to Dick Weston? Then there were those other two - Cisco Kid and... (what WAS his Mexican partner's name - see what I mean...?)

Incidentally we have young (well not so young now) Jimmy Osmomd over here about to start in a reality show known here as 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' which involves 10 so-called celebrities being placed in the Australian jungle/bush and having to survive 'x' weeks - the public gradually whittling down the remaining ones by voting to eject one candidate every few days. There's other voting for individuals to perform various 'trials' to gain food for their colleagues - usually involving spiders, snakes and various other creepy-crawlies. Much as normally I hate reality TV shows, this one does have a certain charm about it!

Oh, well over to you. Will put my two-penn'th in as and when appropriate....

This is a difficult but very interesting game!

Was AIDS a major concern [1986-present] when you were in high school [age 15-18]? Born after 1968. College? Born after 1964.

Was Pee Wee's Playhouse enormously popular [1986-1990] when you were a kid [age 7-11]? Born 1975-1983.

Do you remember Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans? (50's)
Who was the first family on your block with a TV? (late 40's to early 50's)
How about those fun "duck and cover" drills in elementary school? (50's)
Where were you when JFK was shot? (60's)
Where were you when the Challenger exploded? (80's)

And who remembers Herpes (clearly late 70's early 80's as the main forerunner sexual issue pre AIDS) - god, we were checking under toilet seats and everything to make sure there was no chance of picking up that nasty little infection (didn't it feature in that murder mystery film with Michael Caine as the psychiatrist and Angie Dickinson (of Policewmman fame) as the victim?)

Herpes wasn't really stressed here in the US. The only really big deal thing about it that I remember was from Ice Pirates.

Eh, you're what - 10 years or so younger than me, Wolf? It was a big deal at the time, even here. People worried a lot about catching it and there was much debate about how it could be transmitted.

The whole herpes freak-out was stupid. If you've had a cold-sore, you've got herpes. Fuggitabout it.

I remember them, and I'm not 30 yet... They had a long run.

The Cisco Kid was the first television show to be shot completely in color. Cisco was played by Duncan Renaldo, who never was noticed for anything more in the USA, but his "sidekick" is somebody known well to all Southern Californians. Leo Carrillo was one of the most outstanding citizens of early Los Angeles, his career in movies and theater went back to the 1920's. His family actually owned Coronado Island in San Diego at one time. Fortunately for all of us, he spent his considerable earnings buying land on the coast and always shared it with anybody who would appreciate the wild and beautiful area. His investments in this land made him very rich, but he never changed from the generous person that everybody loved. A huge tract in the Los Angeles Hills near Malibu was donated by him late in his life, becoming Leo Carrillo State Park, so that it would never be developed and people could enjoy the way California was before the sprawl arrived. His work in conservation and philanthropy changed the face of Los Angeles and his popularity and influence was so great that he even brokered the Hearst Castle acquisition by the State. Many parks and public features of Los Angeles are there because of Leo Carrillo. It makes me very proud to say that a person of Mexican ancestry, although born here, has given us so much of what is good and beautiful in Southern California today. His foresight touches everybody who lives or visits there today.

Oh yeah?? Depends where that cold sore is situated....!! Cold sores are Herpes Zoster. The nasty little bugger down below is Herpes Simplex (it's OK, I only know that from hearing it on all those radio phone-in progs that were so popular in the late 70's - I think one here was called 'The way it is'
with the strap line: 'You'll never know the way it was until you here 'the way it is'!')

What about Dick West (not Dick Weston) and perhaps it was Buffalo Bill Jr rather than Young Range Rider (the cells in that area of my brain have definitely taken a holiday...)?

Damn! They must have had Alzheimer's by time YOU got around to watching them. I bet they were HILARIOUS! (for once ;) )

Isn't chicken pox also a form of herpes?

Mr. Moose never got older.

It has been proven that if you have never had chicken pox, you will not catch herpes. Herpes is a "retro-virus", after you recover from chicken pox the virus is still in your body forever and if you suffer a physical or emotional trauma it may show up again. Sometimes very elderly patients develop herpes sores for the first time. Doctors now believe it is resident in the nervous system of our bodies, and most outbreaks occur in the most "sensitive" parts of the body.

Although the chicken pox episode is the common denominator, sometimes the first time an adult is exposed by somebody with a cold sore, for instance, they actually get sick for up to a week, with fever, glandular swelling, headaches and light sensitivity as well as the awful pain of the developing sores. These are the worst symptoms that chicken pox has to offer, adults have actually died of chicken pox because it hits them so much harder than for the children. Unfortunately, herpes is the gift that keeps on giving. After you survive the first part, you have not by any means seen the end of it :thepain3:

Yes, it is. And as Tonchi says the vius remains ormant inside your system. IT can re-emerge when you are run down - hence cold sores arse when your resistence lowers during that illness.

Also herpes zoster is behind shingles, an illness that attacks the nervous system, again as a result of having the virus dormant in your system.


But what about Dick West...?????

Shingles is a freakin' nightmare. Four to six weeks (if you're lucky) of unimaginably painful hell and there is nothing you can do about it. I remember as a kid when I got chicken pox. I didn't know how good I had it.

Oh, OK, already!


Richard West's early years are hazy, but it is believed he was born in Texas. He migrated to Oklahoma as a hired hand on a trail drive and worked on the Halsell ranch in Oklahoma. West was considered a good reliable cowboy. It was here Dick West met Bill Doolin and joined the gang in 1892.
West was with the Doolin gang when they robbed the bank in Southwest City, Missouri. The robbery seemed to be going as planned until the gang mount their horses to leave town. An alarm had been sounded, the citizens armed forced the Doolin Gang to fight their way out of town. In the wild exchange, the gang members were shooting at everybody. Two people exited a building to see what the shooting was all about and Dick West seriously wounded these two innocent bystanders. West received wounds during the flight.

At Dover, OK, West assisted the rest of the gang in a train hold-up. Following Bill Doolin to New Mexico, West once again worked as a cowboy here until 1897. Doolin had returned to Oklahoma and was killed in 1896.

Returning to Oklahoma in 1897, West helped form the Jennings Gang. This Three Stooges type group bungled almost every attempt. They were unsuccessful trying to rob a train at Edmond and Bond Switch, OK and frightened away at a bank robbery in Minco, OK. Another unsuccessful train attempt in Chickasa and a store hold-up in Cushing, West left the gang doing odd jobs.

more ...

1896...1897...and the date on the stone is 1895? :eyebrow:

Goodness - you have both been so kind to be so informative, that I feel a little embarassed to say that the Dick West I was talking about was the actor who played the Range Rider's sidekick and could only have been in his early 20's in the late 50's and early 60's when I watched the series. I'll have a look see what I can find via the web in any event (lazy old bugger me not to have done this anyway!)

I've found this on the Range Rider series which gives a few links (no photos though), plus this one (with photos).

Poor old Jock Mahoney died in '89. Seems Dick Jones who played Dick West may stil be alive however...

Have foudn from same site a bit about is role in Buffalo Bill Jr

Think I might just have to mosey up int the old attic, see if I can find my old cowboy outfit.... yooo haaah!

Just ribbing you a little, Cyclefrance! I knowed it wasn't the same Dick West. I'm afraid I don't recall the Range Rider show, and I believe we are roughly in the same age bracket. Was it something that perhaps got more noteriety in the UK than here? Either that, or if it was on TV here, it must have been aired opposite of "Have Gun, Will Travel," my Dad's and my favorite western that we watched religously each week. The world could have come to an end, but we'd have had to see Palladin's latest adventure first!

[threadjack]herpes. heh. for 18 years i thought i was infected with it. until last week when i got a range of tests done. for those of you that don't know, my pop was a surgeon, and 18 years ago i got a pimple down there. a big one. told dad about it and he told me that's what it sounded like and so i lived with that for 18 years without running the test. kinda funny looking back really. allllll those conversations that i've had with girlfriends about the virus and i didn't even have it. what we've diagnosed in the last week is that i've got something called urethritis and the discomfort that i've had about once a year or so, well i just assumed that it was the herpes. urethritis can be caused by a number of things. i'm shaking my head (on my shoulders y'all) and laughing. well, hey, at least i was honest with every girl that i've ever been with. out of all of them, only one turned tail and ran. [/threadjack]


now.... G. Gordon Liddy/Watergate

Oh dear, I'm afraid you haven't taken your investigation far enough. If you had some symptoms similar to herpes, or what you thought should have been herpes but tests proved wasn't, then what you have is probably Human Papiloma Virus (HPV). Please get tested for it immediately, because HPV is far worse than the herpes virus. Although men may rarely feel the effect, it can cause cervical cancer in your partners.

had that test too. no worries.

Well did you ever. Who would have guessed that nostalgia could rely so heavily on a sexually transmitted disease....

Ove here we had Saturday morning pictures before TV took over. 6d (that's six old UK pence) a go. Remember some classic 50's SF serials (I suppose Flash Gordon must have been amongst them), plus the inevitable Gene Autrey and Hopalong Cassidy serials.

Then late teenage years were spent at the local Mecca ballrooms trying to attract the local talent who were inevitably dancing round their hadbags to such memorable hits as 'Spirit in the Sky' and then the early BeeGees 'Lights go down in San Francisco' for the slowie, for when you got lucky...

Then there were the coffee bars frequented by the Mods in the 60's. We had a couple of good ones in South London where I lived, in Norwood and Forest Hill, plus Wednesday evenings we went to some place in Balham to see the original Moody Blues with Denny Laine (main no.1 'Go Now') before he went on to join Paul McCartney when he started up Wings.

Now that's Nostalgia!

And there I was thinking that you could guess a person's age by asking about the sexual diseases they were afraid of catching in their prime :mg: !
Going backwards in time this would be ... HIV, herpes, VD, syphilis, gonnorhea (OK, YOU spell it better!) ... :worried:

Chlamydia (Clamidia). :smack:

Cyclefrance, you are a year younger than my Mum. She used to pose in tight sweaters in Milk Bars in Ilford & Romford, with little glass cups of milky coffee - which she hates the taste of even to this day - in order to look cool.

Strangely I found out she used to drink in a pub just across the road from where my ex lived in London. I only brought it up because someone had been shot there (we nicknamed the area Beirut - he only bought there to get on the property ladder). When I quizzed her about it further she admitted it was pretty rough even in her day, but they weren't fussed about how old you were & it was far enough from home not to run into anyone who knew her.... The things you learn about your family as you get older!

Didn't venture as far afield as Ilford. We occasionally went to Wapping or even the East End of London around Bow (Kray twins land - remember having been at the Blind Beggar two nights before one of the Krays enemies was killed there - there was an 'in' Chinese restaurant there called the Kwong Ming.

Wapping was fun with a pub called 'The Prospect of Whitby' being home to the rugby crowd and always good for a sing-song of ugby favourites - Mayor of Bayswater, The Good Ship Venus, Immobile, These Foolish Things and so on (ask your mum!)

As a south Londoner, a lot friends (and therefore the action) were around the Elephant and Castle, and also the Walworth Road where there were some good pubs with live music. But, of course we were all well-behaved budding parents in those days who wouldn't dream of getting drunk or causing any noise, or get into trouble with the police or anything like that, and drugs were never to be heard of....................................................................... (all those dots are for the stunned silence) - as I am sure you will appreciate we all were keen to set a good example for our generation, something for our childern to strive to repeat................................................................

LMAO, Cyclefrance!

Yeppers, how old did you say you were again? Never mind.

MY generation and me were extremely polite young people, ourselves. When we had anti-war rallies, we WHISPERED, "Two, four, six, eight, organize and smash the state!" We asked our parent's permission before we dropped acid or smoked pot and we all aspired to be just like Dick or Pat Nixon when we grew up and had our MBA's from the state university we attended, never cutting a single class.

Did I mention that we also walked barefoot to school through 6 foot drifts of snow? :lol:

Earliest memories - two to do with public transport: certainly travelling on trolley buses as a very young lad (check out the routes shown here - they were all around the area where we now live). They were normally-tyred buses but driven by electric motors which were powered from overhead cables - there used to be a problem in that the arm that ran from the bus roof to the cabling often came adrift and so the buses ground to a halt while they waited for a man with long pole to arrive and to push the arm back in place; then there were trams which were phased out before I was 5-years-old so only have a hazy memory of travelling on them (seem to remember a big solid wheel attached to the body at the back inside of the tram which you could turn but which seemed to do nothing - I've no idea even to this day what it was for!) - these again were powered by electricity from an overhead cable, but they ran on rails so had wheels like those on trains.

Well, see, there's the Brits for you. We had to walk barefoot through six foot drifts and you guys got to take the tram. There's no justice in this world, I'm telling ya! :lol:

Philadelphia had both proper trolleys and trackless trolleys (what you call a trolley bus). They're trying to bring them back.

IF you thought times were hard - this is how we had to get our milk delivered when I was a lad - and, yes that is me standing there, although I'm a bit concerned even myself at the shorts my mother had clearly decided suited me!

Bread was delivered in the same manner, although I don't have a photo of that.

Coincidentally I did some work for a software house two years ago that had its offices in what used to be the old dairy distribution point where the horse pictured was stabled. Small world.

Another memory involves the lampost just to the rear of the cart. My father worked as a manager in a grocer's shop that was near enough by that he could come home the odd day for lunch. One day he was just out of the house and crossing the road, when My mother called to him to give some message or other. He turned his head round and kept walking, turning his head back a couple of seconds later only to have it smash into the lampost. I remember he had a pretty good headache after that and a nice black-eye which he always claimed to have been the responsibility of my mother!

:rolleyes: It did have those new fangled pneumatic India rubber tires, though