Growing up a boomer - the 50's

I liked to sleep in the closet.

I was afraid to go in the basement at night.

Most of the girls in the neighborhood had a crush on me at one time or another.

I stepped on a rusty nail on my seventh birthday and had to get a tetanus shot.

I made the best catch anyone had ever seen in a baseball game at summer recreation, and everyone lined up to look at my glove.

I used to play that I was a super hero named the Black Hawk. I would dress up in a black turtle neck, black pants, black gloves, and the football helmet my sister had given me for xmas, and I'd run through the house and when I got to my room I would leap into my bed head first with only a pillow stopping me from hitting the wall. (Maybe that's how my spinal problems started.)

I used to ice skate in my back yard.

I used to go to every carnival that came to town and I'd get to sit between my two sisters on all the scary rides.

I knew all the words to the theme song from the Davey Crockett show, and I'd sing it at the drop of a hat.

My mom took a picture of me, as a baby, in front of the house where I obviously had a load in my diaper. Whenever we looked at the photo album I would try to get my mother to throw that picture away, but she told that there was nothing wrong with it, I had just fallen in the mud, and I believed her until I was in my 30's.

I once got in a fight to protect a girl, and I didn't even like girls at the time, and my sister gave me a dollar when she found out about it for being noble.

When I was a safety boy I once left my post unattended, and vehemently denied it when confronted with the facts.

My grandfather was visiting once and while he was saying grace before dinner I reached over to get a spoonful of green beans from the bowl, my mother looked up and yelled at me, after that I refused to eat any vegetables ... ever, and they couldn't make me, no one could make me, not even when I went into the air force they couldn't make me, or when I was in college they couldn't make, no one could make me, ever.

I used to listen to Big Daddy Zee on WXYZ after midnight, in bed, with the sound on my transistor radio turned down low, and I would pretend I was a teenager and I would pretend call in and request Happy, Happy Birthday Baby by the Tune Weavers, for my pretend girl friend's birthday, and then she would pretend call me up and we would talk the night away ... Hmmmmmmmmmm.