childhood

You might say it was a cake walk

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Every year my elementary school would have a big carnival. It was great, I loved it. It was a small school and thus a pretty small carnival, but then again, it had everything it needed to have: Moonwalk, dunk tank, karaoke, overpriced carnival food and 8 or 9 games of chance to win some crappy prizes.

We didn’t have a lot of money for tickets, and they always seemed to go fast. My main goal at the carnival was to maximize my profit: what was the most economically advantageous way to spend my tickets? For example, buying a personal pan pizza from the Pizza Hut truck cost like 7,000,000 tickets. So, even though I desperately wanted a personal pan pizza, I knew my mom wasn’t going to let me starve so it wasn’t really worth using up every single ticket to my name. The Moonwalk was like 5 tickets for 10 milliseconds or something. This was somewhat worthwhile, because a Moonwalk is awesome, but you still didn’t have anything to show for it when your 10 milliseconds were done (other than a stitch in your side, because bouncing in a Moonwalk is hard work!)

Then I discovered the cake walk.

For some reason on this particular year, the cake walk just wasn’t that popular. I don’t know if people didn’t know it was there, or if it just wasn’t considered cool to devour an entire cake all by yourself, or what. In any case, I had that baby to myself. For the low price of one ticket, you were entered into the cake walk. Numbers would be drawn until a winner was chosen, so if nobody was on the number, they’d pick again. In other words, if you are the ONLY PERSON DOING THE CAKE WALK, you were guaranteed a cake.

Like taking candy from a baby.

Even if there were 2 or 3 or even 4 people participating, your odds of winning an ENTIRE CAKE are pretty good. So while my friends were bouncing their heads off in the Moonwalk, or winning tootsie rolls on the spinning wheel of chance, I spent every single last one of my tickets on the cake walk and took home in the neighborhood of 5 cakes.

Carnival – 0, Shane – 1

It was so cold… (How cold was it?)

/ Shane / 1 Comment

 

Brrrrr!

Brrrrr!

I took this picture on the way home yesterday and, judging by how it felt while I was getting gas, I’d say that was correct.

I was home over the weekend and I cleaned out a closet from my childhood. I found a lot of things that brought back memories, although most of it went in the trash because I’m not overly sentimental about such stuff. We found some old cassette tapes with recordings we had made when we were little, and it was fun listening to them (though I was reminded how awful it is to find anything on a tape: fast forward, hit play, fast forward, hit play, fast forward, hit play, rewind, hit play, etc.)

Some of the highlights were a friend and I making a “radio station”, Nathan “calling” a fake baseball game including one sequence that went, “Strike one! Strike two! Strike three, he’s out! But he tried hard so we gave him a home run anyway!”, my mom calling into a radio show (a real one this time) on Valentines day trying to win a $25 gift certificate to some restaurant for the most interesting “how they met” story*, a tape made for my dad in which a very young Rachael makes up a song that roughly goes, “I love dad, I don’t want him to be sad, I don’t hate him even though I said that.” Finally, the gem find of the day was a tape my mom made of herself singing to see how she sounded. We listened to it for a while before she found out and came running in to destroy it. She was very embarrassed even though it sounded good, so we got to tease her all day about her “demo tape”.

I took a giant box of papers and stuff to go through when I got home. As I was unloading the box from the trunk of my car, the bottom ripped out. All the papers from my life fell into the snow with a hardcore wind swirling around. I think I grabbed everything except one paper which blew away, but I scraped up my hand on the pavement and I think I pulled a muscle trying to get the box and the other box I put under it in the house.

Okay, time to go through that box (or what’s left of it)

 

*My parents actually had a kind of cute “how they met” story. My dad was a bouncer in a bar and my mom was there for her birthday. She had a balloon and the people with her were trying to pop it as a goof. She had to go to the bathroom and she asked my dad to hang onto her balloon so they couldn’t get it. While she was in the bathroom a fight broke out in the bar and my dad had to break it up. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw him breaking up the fight with one hand and holding her balloon high above his head with the other hand so it wouldn’t get popped.

Isn’t the Internet great?

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Not too long ago, I wrote a post about a childhood hero of mine, Commander Mark Kistler.  So, imagine my delight and surprise when I should receive a comment from the man himself on that post!

This is a win-win.  From his comments, it sounds like he is happy to hear he made an impact on people and that people are still thinking of him.  And obviously it is awesome for me to get a personal comment from someone that I would never have expected to have any contact with.

So, thank you Internet (and Mr. Kistler) for making my day!

Happy’s Place

/ Shane / 8 Comments

One thing about having a baby is that it forces you to remember a lot of things from your childhood that you thought you forgot.  So naturally every time Evie was playing with a frog I had to rasp, “FROGGY’S PAAAAAAAAD!”

For whatever reason, we didn’t have a local Bozo the Clown, instead we had our own equivalent named Happy the Hobo.  It was essentially the same thing as Bozo.  The show was called Happy’s Place and kids could come on the show to be in the audience.  They would show cartoons and, in between, the kids would play games, etc.  At one point all the kids got to come and stand in a long line and Happy (Mike Fry) would ask each kid a question.  So, you were guaranteed to be on T.V. if you came.  There was also a vaguely frog-shaped puppet named Froggy who mostly hosted a morning cartoon show on the same set.  Being on Happy’s Place was sort of a local rite of passage.  You can see a few videos here.

Happy was a local celebrity, nay, a god.  He was the real deal too, I remember seeing him do back flips and stuff in the parade.  He juggled, he made jokes, he did it all.  His show had ALL the best cartoons.  Any kid would have taken a bullet for him.  One day he fell off the roof of the Happy Mobile and blew out his knee (apparently it is a rumor that he was doing a handstand at the time).

We were only on Happy’s Place one time, but my mom has the tape so I have seen it many times.  I was wearing an iron-on Tyrannosaurus Rex shirt and Happy asked me if I would ride one.  I snottily responded, “If I saw one.”  My sister was sort of camera shy and giggly and Happy commented on that and had her giggle.  My brother, however, stole the show.  He was very little, maybe 3 or so, and wearing his very favorite California Raisins‘ tee-shirt.  Happy asked him about it and he spontaneously burst into song: “I uuuuurd it troo the gape bine!”  You could see that Happy totally didn’t expect it and quickly looked to the camera man (probably the only adult around that he knew) for confirmation with a smile on his face.  It’s fantastic, I wish I had it on youtube.

So anyway, next came Cousin Happy and then a 3rd Happy the Hobo.  Now, I don’t know that they were bad Hobo’s, but I didn’t like them.  Perhaps I just got too old for the show.  Perhaps the shoes they had to fill were just too big (get it, like clown shoes?)  Perhaps it was just a job to them and their hearts were never in it.  But all in all, I thought I was done with Happy’s Place.  Then along comes Happy #4, Adrian Guenther.

Happy #4

Happy #4

In this incarnation, Happy was a little different.  He was still a juggler, but he was a little goofier than the original Happy.  Two additional characters came on board, Chester T. Fox (I assume because the show was on the Fox network) and Lawn Boy.  Both were great additions to the show.  Now that there were 3 people, they did more skits.  Maybe it was because I was older, but I got the distinct impression that a lot of things they did they did because they thought they were funny.  I’m not sure the kids were always in on the joke.  It always just seemed like they were having so much of their own fun that you couldn’t help but enjoy it.

There were two promos (or maybe it was the intro?) that played over and over again that influenced my life.  One was Happy telling Chester, “That’s nacho cheese!”  (I realize that as I type that, the joke only makes sense out loud) which I found just hilarious.  The second was Happy (after being tricked by Chester) saying, “You’re not a fox, you’re a weasel!”  This single quote led to a roughly 6 month campaign by me and my brother to convince our dog that she was in fact, not a dog but a weasel.

So anyway, like Commander Mark, if this should ever reach the eyes of any of the people involved in the show I just want to say that you made a lot of kids happy.  I hope you all got rich off the show, though I highly doubt it.  But even if you didn’t, your work was not in vain.

If there are any readers out there who have Happy’s Place memories (hmm, I don’t think there really is), feel free to share!

P.S. While researching for this post, I came across another blog post about Happy’s Place.  People really got into the comments with memories, etc. about Happy’s Place and other local celebrities so it is quite the trip down memory lane.  There are even a few posts from the guy who was the voice of Froggy and from 4th Happy!

Commander Mark

/ Shane / 9 Comments

Today’s post is dedicated to Commander Mark Kistler. 

He’s like pretty much the awesomest man ever.  I used to watch his shows when I was little, like The Secret City and The Draw Squad.  That was back when he was Commander Mark and he wore the jump suit with the pencils and everything.  In fact, he even came to my school!  I still have the drawings I made that day.  Also, he would have this enormous drawing and at the end of every episode he would add on a little bit to it.  I took to doing that also and I think I still have that somewhere as well.  Later, when I was about in middle school, I would hurry home to watch the Imagination Station.  He lost the jump suit and all by then, but everything else in the show was pretty much the same.  We still drew like ninjas (“Hiiiiii draw-draw-draw”) and learned how to shade (“shade, shade shade…we love to shade”) and draw in 3D.  Every drawing somehow involved a guy leaning out of a space ship to hand you a twinkie with “action lines” to show he was waving.

Anyway, I forget what made me think of him today, but he was definitely a highlight of my childhood.  Looks like he’s still out there and still doing school assemblies, God love him.  If I were in charge of a school I would have him out so fast his head would spin!