We don’t have many traditions in my family. We don’t sit around the Seder table asking questions; we don’t eat Chinese food on Christmas; we don’t have Taco Tuesdays or Gefilte Fish Fridays. We are pretty ordinary people in that sense. Or every sense.
There is one tradition that I’d like to keep and pass along to my kid – sitting down for the road.
Every time we were about to leave on a trip my Dad always said “Let’s sit down for the road” and we would set down our suitcases and sit quietly for a minute. It wasn’t my favorite thing to do – when you are a kid on the way to an exiting destination the last thing you want to do is to be stopped in your tracks and sit around even for a minute. But then again it’s a minute well-spent. You could realize you forgot something, or just look around one last time so a memory of your place will travel with you and eventually make you homesick. You could concentrate, finalize a plan, prepare for the departure, as a pilot might say revving up the engine. Many useful things you can do in a minute. Or you can just not do anything and wait for your Dad to signal that the sitting down for the road is over and open the door to something that awaits outside.
I’ve done this ever since I can remember. I sat down in places I’ve never returned to; I sat down with people who I never got to see again; I sat down before the trips I remember and many forgotten ones. Now I get to tell my kid to sit down and I like the continuity of it. It’s a real tradition, beautiful in its simplicity and as meaningful as one wants it to be.
Besides the name of the doctor -Frank J. Strick and the year these photos were taken in Kansas -1949, I wasn’t able to find much about this set. One photo shows a road sign with distances to Burlington, Yates Center and Iola, KS so that somewhat outlines the general area in the Southeast Kansas.
Dean Reed was an American singer who was more popular in the Latin America and the USSR than in the USA. He would have turned 70 today. Because he was a communist sympathizer he was one of a few English-speaking performers approved to entertain the Soviet people. I remember as a child playing his records and watching him on TV and in cheesy Easter European Westerns. I read that he was sometimes referred to as the “Red Elvis” due to his popularity, I personally never heard anyone say that, but at the time I didn’t even know who the real “Not-Red” Elvis was, so I wouldn’t get the reference anyway.
While staring at women doing research for my previous (and future) post at the Johnson County Central Resource Library – home of the new amazing microfilm readers, I couldn’t help but save a few unrelated pages. Going through the old newspapers with the benefit of a hindsight is a bit strange; we know which companies, technologies and trends survived and which ones failed; we realize that investing in Apple was a good idea but buying Atari stock probably wasn’t; we know who won the VHS – Betamax rivalry and even when the winner itself became obsolete; we know which policies would be successful and which are still affecting society in a negative way.
These clips are taken from the Kansas City Star and Kansas City Times published in January 1981 and in January 1986.They are in no particular order.
Not that long ago a person’s love for technology required substantial physical strength. Nowadays anyone can show up on a date carrying a laptop or an iPod. Here is what it would have looked like about 25 years ago.
