My dad’s parents lived in Kansas City, about a 4.5 hour drive from where we lived in Tulsa.
We visited them on holidays and my brother and I usually stayed with them for several weeks every summer.
Kansas City had a UHF television station that aired Star Trek on Saturday afternoons. I’d never seen anything like it.
 |
| The “salt sucker” was the scariest monster ever on Star Trek. |
Incidentally, it was in Kansas City that we could see Rocky and Bullwinkle.
My grandparents had purchased the World Book Encyclopedia. They also had the years updates. I can’t remember what year the original volumes were, but there were probably six or seven yearly books there…
Grandma and Grandpa had hundreds of fiction books, but I was mostly fascinated by the encyclopedia.
I absorbed information from the World Book.
And there were the cousins!
Andy and I have lots of cousins. In Kansas City, we would join up with Rona (my only older cousin), Lisa, Aaron, Adam, and Jill.
What was cool was that while we had not seen each other for months, we usually just picked up playing where we left off.
Besides riding up and down the sidewalks with our Big Wheels, we also made newspapers and wrote fake news and put on skits with fake news. You know, kid stuff.
Grandma had a manual typewriter on a desk in one of the upstairs bedroom, so we were just compelled to write things with it.
This was a time before video games, when all we had to entertain ourselves with was ourselves.
Something that’s really interesting: My cousin Adam and I are like opposites.
Adam is this math genius type of guy who reasons things out and probably always takes the prudent course. I generally fly by the seat of my pants.
We’re both programmers, but Adam is more of an actual computer scientist than I am.
My grandparents had a three bedroom house, so when everyone was in town for Thanksgiving or Passover or Hanuka, whatever, the adults would sleep at a motel and the kids would sleep upstairs in the house. The girls would sleep in one room and the boys in the other… There were a number of cots employed.
When it got late, our parents would send up upstairs to sleep. But, we didn’t sleep right away, of course. We talked and told jokes and laughed. Sometimes we sneaked down the stairs to have a peek at what was going on down there.
One night while we were staring at the ceiling, Adam and I started talking about time travel. I remember that Adam kept shooting down my dreaming with what he saw as the cold hard facts about the matter.
Dinners in Kansas City were always eventful. Usually there were discussions about political matters and my Grandfather was conservative and some others there were quite liberal.
I can remember when someone in Kansas City on welfare had her welfare stopped because the government found out that she was saving money in a bank account. Wow, was there a debate about the nature and necessity of welfare…
My cousin Rona liked to drop bombshells in the middle of thing and get the adults fired up. One time during a pause in the conversation, Rona blurted out, “I’m thinking about buying a gun.” Wow…
When the discussions got too heated, my dad would always play the cooler by hanging a spoon on his nose.
Ok, that’s all.
Leave a Reply