Carolyn, 35 sounds about right. It's within the expansion of five years, or so, that my prof mentioned. Btw, I was able to reconstruct what he said from my shorthand notes. My shorthand at the time was pure and quite accurate, so anyone who knows Gregg can read it. Later my shorthand got idiosyncratic and is harder to decipher. (I still use brief forms, do you?) Anyway, I'm in the process of transcribing a lot of my old notes, as my kids requested, something I mentioned in the Memoirs thread. They are afraid that if I don't, in the future no one will be able to figure out all the 'gibberish' I put into hundreds (thousands?) of entries.

Ooh, I remember you mentioning the Million Dollar Quartet. I bet that was fun. Did they give out 'sweat cloths' as souvenirs for the 'overheated' ladies? My daddy loved Carl Perkins's 'Blue Suede Shoes', and I have a vivid memory of dancing with him to that song. Before he let me dance with him while I stood on his shoes, but with that song, he told me that I would have to stay off his shoes. I thought that was funny. Also his rendition of Jim Lowe's 'Green Door' -- What's behind the green door? It drove me crazy. What was behind it, anyway? It took me years to understand it.

I recall the hymns in the Lutheran hymnal. I can't imagine our staid congregation 'rockin' around the altar' as some denominations do nowadays. But I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed a fundamentalist service I attended with my Alabama cousins in Clarke County, AL. The music was nothing like I had experienced before. After that service -- on the way home, I thought -- we stopped in a parking lot of a black community church and joined other white folk to stand outside the church to listen to the gospel singers inside. I think they sang for an hour or so, and I don't know how long they had been singing before we arrived. My Iowan ears were mightily impressed.

Vee, 'Doctor Zhivago' is not my favorite film, but it is one of my favorites. I'll never know if I would have liked it as much if I had first seen it at 25, but I think I probably would have.

I had tried to read Pasternak's book but I couldn't get into it at thirteen or fourteen. It was too episodic and I couldn't keep all the Russian names straight. I was bored or frustrated; thus I gave up. So, when I saw the film, I was flabbergasted. The characters came alive for me, and I think Robert Bolt did a helluva job adapting it so it made sense. I loved the music, the cinematography, the casting (although I'll admit that Christie was a bit too '60s modish), and the use of the prologue and coda.

I'm sorry the film bored you, but I guess it just shows a difference in your taste and experience from mine. I eventually did read, finish, and reasonably understand Pasternak's book, but, truthfully, I am still bedazzled by the film and don't like the book very much.

Janalyn, what are some of the more recent movies that you have preferred over what you saw in the 1970s and '80s? As I said, I haven't watched enough of the newer films to really know if they are better or worse. I just know that very few have really appealed to me enough to have sought them out.

I like a lot of very old films, made before I was born, even. But the biggest cluster of films that made the greatest impressions on me date from about the mid-1960s until mid-1970s. I liked a good number of movies in the '80s. Then in the early '90s, I saw several that I still like to watch occasionally in my start-and-stop way, e.g. 'Enchanted April', 'In the Name of the Father', and 'Last of the Mohicans'. But after about 1992 or 1993, I can't think of but a couple, including 'Master and Commander' with Russell Crowe.

I think I opted out on a lot of movies because of the overhype, and I'm not a blockbuster lover anyway. If a movie is really good, it will still be good months and years later so I don't have to see a movie as soon as it's released. Being current, much less 'first' to see or read something, has never mattered much to me.

Hmmm
I am not really educated when it comes to the cinema - I remember years ago the cinema forum at glyphs was very active and I was astonished when I read some of the posts. Those people were extremely well informed. I was a kid during the 60's so I do remember going to the drive-in as a family and watching James Bond movies. Also Old Yeller (we all needed therapy after that one) and Bambi. And then there was The Sound of Music which, I grant you, I can still watch and enjoy.

In the early 70's I was living in Europe and watched many forgettable western
Saturday matinees at the base theatre. My mom took me to see Dr. Zhivago but all I remember is how sexy Omar Sharif was and it had a bad ending. More therapy. I do remember Hawaii because it was the first time ( I was 13) I had seen female breasts bobbing on the screen and was rather shocked. I went to that one with my mom - I think I was shocked because she took me to a show with nudity. LOL
My dad was in the military so we went to a LOT of war and airplane movies...some of them were good actually but it got to the point of being "oh no, not another one!"

For most of the 70s I rarely saw movies and didn't watch a lot of tv. Ones I do remember seeing were The Exorcist (more therapy), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Jonathon Livingston Seagull (barf *tried hard to think of a polite word for this but couldn't!). During the late 70s I mainly went to "date" movies while at university. The ones I remember that impressed me were Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Alien (more therapy), the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, that kind of thing. Some idiot took me to see The Clockwork Orange which I didn't understand then and do not now.

Frieda - this post could go on and on as I try to remember specific years. I am copy pasting a list of academy award nominees for the past 70 years to help our memories. Some of the problems I have with the early movies: the quality of the film (that cannot be helped), the actors look plastic or are just too pretty, they just scream "Hollywood!!!". I saw Cleopatra with Liz Taylor and R. Burton for the first time last year and could not finish it, just dreadful, for example. Some of the "big" movies from the 60s or 70s which I was too young to see then, like Midnight Cowboy and last Tango in Paris...did not impress me when I did finally get around to seeing them a couple of decades later.

Anyway, here is the list:
2013 Nominees ��" American Hustle, 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, Philomena, The Wolf of Wall Street, Captain Phillips, Nebraska, decision pending

2012: Argo ��" beat Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild

2011: The Artist ��" beat The Help, The Descendants, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse, Extremely...

Janalyn, I remember when Circle Theater had a lot of well-informed posters. They knew a lot about watching films, but very few of them seemed to have ever read a book from which a film was adapted and they didn't care. That's about par, I suspect.

Thanks for the memory-jogging list. Reading through it, I'm struck by which films SHOULD HAVE won instead of the ones that did. In my opinion, of course, but the academy picked the right film about 15 times out of the 70-plus years. Some of my favorite films of particular years weren't even nominated.

I laughed when you noted the movies from which you needed therapy to recover. I agree with 'Old Yeller' and 'Bambi' especially. But the one that traumatized me most was the original 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. My mother who should have known better took six-year-old me with her to see it. She loved anything SF, but I think that movie put me off that genre forever. I was afraid of watermelons for quite a while because, you know, they might have an alien inside them.

I saw 'Last Tango' the year it came out and wasn't impressed then, and have never wanted to see it again. Yuck! My first nudity was in the Swedish film 'I Am Curious Yellow'. It was curious all right! The first full-frontal male nudity I saw in a film was Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling in those famous scenes of 'Women in Love' (1969). Whew! I adored Alan Bates, though.

I didn't understand 'A Clockwork Orange' either. Someone talked me into seeing 'Ghostbusters' -- I had to leave because the sound was so damn loud that every time the music started all I wanted to do was howl!! I don't think it was my kind of film, though, so I haven't ever wondered what I missed.

The only one of the 2013 films nominated that I want to see is 'Philomena'. My DH rented 'Captain Phillips' recently and asked me to watch it with him, but I just couldn't.

Frieda, I had to go outside the auditorium when the film"The Last Wave" was shown, the soundtrack was ear-splitting. Otherwise a good interesting film.
Perhaps you could see "Ghostbusters" in a more quiet version, I thought it was funny. Although what strikes one as funny one time may not be so much later on!
I was the local paper's film and play critic in the early seventies and got to see a lot of freebie films with my journalist husband in the eighties. A mixed bunch!

I don't think my taste in books has changed much since my early years. I still like biographies and fiction taking place in foreign lands. Don't like mysteries, sci-fi, or horror. I wouldn't touch chick-lit with a ten foot pole.

As far as music, my early childhood did not include music of any kind in our house, but somewhere (this was in 1943 or so, when I was 7), I heard The Nutcracker Suite and asked for the album for my birthday and was SO disappointed when I got the album of 78's and found out it was played by Freddie Martin and his dance band. I then discovered that my much older brother liked classical music so I frequently listened to his. A few years later he got two tickets to see Carmen when the Met tour came to town, and wanted to take me, but my mother decided I was "too young", so he took her, the non-music lover, instead. I cried.

Since then my tastes in classical music have become more mature, to Mahler, Stravinsky, etc., and I do enjoy being challenged by some late 20th century classical music. I also love Russian choral music and liturgical music, and I have been accused of bring back home from Russia a tape of every singing monk there was available. I also love organ music, chamber music, and Gilbert and Sullivan.

In the late 50's I went through my folk music phase, but quickly returned to the classics. Now I find It is painful to be in a public place and be subjected to rock, rap and that ilk, usually at a volume that in intolerable.

I do think "Dr. Zhivago" (film) has stood the test of time. I own it now, and have re-watched it several times, since.

I have always enjoyed off-beat and foreign films: for example, I loved "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and "The Last Wave." My all-time favorite movie ever is "Jules et Jim". I watched it so often,( beginning in Paris), that I have actually memorized many of the lines in French. I am also a fan of all of Ingmar Bergman's films, even the darker ones, as well as Antonioni "L'Aventura" and "La Strada". I find the foreign films often more subtle and better directed on the whole than most American films.

I am unbelievably eclectic when it comes to music. I like almost any sort of folkloric music. My collections run the gamut from "The Singing Nun" to "Gypsy Kings" to Greek bouzoukia to Welsh and Russian choruses to Carlos Nakai to Quena flute of Latin America, and beyond.

I think certain broadway musicals and their songs have stood the test of time: I adore "The Sound of Music", "My Fair Lady", "Camelot", "Brigadoon", and others of that period.

I do not think I would enjoy Ghostbusters today, as much as I did in my early-mid twenties. My friends and I were all Saturday Night Live fans.

One thing I noticed going through the list - a lot of the movies I remember easily had great soundtracks. I do not recall a lot of the plot sometimes, but I certainly recall the music.
American Graffiti/Blues Brothers/Ghostbusters/The Sting/Dr. Zhivago/The Exorcist(who will forget Tubular Bells?)...you can keeping adding to this list. Remember Jaws? Music can sure sell a movie. Interesting.

Also, some movies that I thought were scary at the time - like the Exorcist - just do not work anymore. Is that desensitization? Yikes.

Do you think jazz is an aquired taste? I often like it with vocals but I feel like I am visiting an alien planet when it is just instruments. Three years ago I went to a Sonny Rollins concert with some jazz loving friends. It was painful, I was so bored, he just seemed to keep playing the same thing and at first I thought it was just because he was so old. But I looked around at the audience and many people had their eyes closed, moving to the music, totally involved and you could tell it was a blissful experience for them. I just couldn't wait for it to be over.

Janalyn, jazz probably is an acquired taste if you weren't weaned on it. Re Sonny Rollins: maybe you just aren't fond of his style of saxophone improvisation. But I'll bet you've absorbed a lot of instrumental jazz that you may not be aware of, such as Henry Mancini's 'Pink Panther' and 'Peter Gunn' themes.

Have you listened to Dave Brubeck? 'Take Five' is his quartet's most famous song, with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone.

You probably are familiar with Dixieland Jazz (e.g., 'When the Saints Go Marching In'), too, New Orleans-style and the Jazz Funeral. Thelonious Monk greatly influenced Steely Dan, to whom they give credit in 'Midnite Cruiser'. You can hear jazz in just about any of Steely Dan's songs. You've probably heard, and maybe liked: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Wynton Marsalis.

Jazz is said to have been almost as influential as blues on modern music. Jazz grew out of blues.

You're familiar with the great jazz vocalists already. I love the ladies especially: Billie, Ella, Dinah, Sarah, and that lovely gal from North Dakota -- of all places! -- Peggy Lee.

So that's what it was...saxophone improv. Makes sense. Felt like chinese water torture at the time. Frieda you are like an encyclopedia sometime. :)

Frieda and Vee, check your email as I sent you a request. Thanks!

Janalyn, I like your point about memorable music in films. I tried it out on the movies in the list and found that, like you, I could remember the songs/soundtrack but not much about the stories themselves. I do recall these stories, but 'The Third Man' (1949, not on the list) and that zither music theme always sticks in my mind, and 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' whistling march is unforgettable, I think. Cat Stevens hadn't entered my awareness until I saw 'Harold and Maude'.

Remember when nearly all films, besides the obvious musicals, had obligatory musical interludes, such as 'The Graduate' with Simon & Garfunkel's 'Mrs. Robinson' and 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' with B. J. Thomas's 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head'. Going back even further: Dooley Wilson singing 'As Time Goes By' for Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in 'Casablanca' and Hoagy Carmichael accompanying himself on the piano while singing his own 'Hong Kong Blues' in the Bogart/Bacall fire starter, 'To Have and Have Not' or Lauren's song that she actually sang herself -- I can't think of the title at the moment. See, Janalyn, you got me started. :-)

Oh-oh, one more: Rita Hayworth singing 'Put the Blame on Mame' in 'Gilda'. I love this little exercise! It would make a wonderful parlor game...if people still did parlor games, that is.

Janalyn, I'll send you an email. If you don't see it, let me know. Sometimes my messages hit the ionosphere and skip to heaven knows where.

Mary, thanks for sticking up for 'Doctor Zhivago'. I knew I wasn't the only one who likes it. :-)

I like off-beat and foreign flicks, too. What do you think of Peter Greenaway? ('The Draughtsman's Contract', 'The Belly of an Architect', 'Drowning By Numbers', 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover') I like to freeze his scenes and study them. He's definitely not for the squeamish viewer, though.

Well, I think there's a consensus here that my professor was more right than wrong about taste being established pretty early. However, most of us continue to refine it.

Do you think books, films, and songs are the best cultural markers? I was trying to think what else could be considered. Television -- no, too regionally or nationally specific, although not as much so as it used to be; clothing -- not really, some people don't give a fig about fashion; food -- yes, but again too regional; art -- too subjective, etc. I sometimes wonder about books, since there's a lot of people who don't read much or at all.

Foreign films? To some people the US films are the foreign ones! :-)
I know what you mean though. I used to go to see French films in the fifties, like "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" in spite of the subtitles because they had something different about them. We used to get quite a few at one of the Brighton (in Sussex) cinemas because of the many French students and tourists.
Also the Swedish "Smiles of a Summer Night". Because of mild sex scenes and nudity they were R rated for Adults Only!

Well-said Ann!. A while ago on the Circle Theater thread there was a 'guess the movie' game going on and a poster said no 'foreign films' could be used as eg's. I suggested that to me (a non American) a 'foreign film' would be a non-English language movie. The idea met with some disbelief. Perhaps the game players didn't know that some films are actually made in the UK, Australia, New Zealand etc. ;-(
Frieda, for what might be described as culture/cultural I checked in my very large Collins dictionary and it is described as artistic and social pursuits, expression or tastes valued by a society or class as in the arts, manners, dress etc. and the enlightenment or refinement resulting from these pursuits' which in some ways widens your list . . .you could for eg add the theatre ( I refuse to call it live theatre . . .what other sort is there?) and go on to plays, opera, ballet. On the other hand it might be possible to argue that pop music, some movies, off the top of the head, stuff like Laurel and Hardy add little to the 'enlightenment or refinement' of their watchers/listeners however enjoyable we possibly find them.
I agree that books are difficult to put a cultural label on. I know the long lists one sees in the so-called quality papers are full of high brow/heavy tomes, but I somehow always tend to question those who claim that War and Peace and similar, is their favourite bedtime reading.

Yes, Annpan, I know it's one of those ethnocentric absurdities that creeps in. It's really shorthand/shortspeak, though, when conversing with familiars, as I consider Mary to be. I was referring to Greenaway as being off-beat not non-English language, but I wasn't paying attention to the closest antecedent. Sorry about that!

I sometimes turn off the subtitles to find out whether I can make any sense out of what I am hearing. I do fairly well with French and sometimes Spanish and Italian, if they're not too idiomatic, but less well with German (surprisingly to me because I grew up around German speakers) and not well at all with the Scandinavian languages. I think it was 'Wild Strawberries' that I watched without subtitles -- the one about the old man recalling his childhood/youth -- and I built up what I thought was happening only to find out when I switched on the subtitles that I was completely wrong. I've always been amazed with what Bergman did with black & white that lesser directors couldn't have accomplished with color.

I'm still thinking about Maxmom's missing out on seeing/hearing 'Carmen' because she was "too young." I guess I was lucky that my parents never put restrictions on what I read, listened to, or watched (or maybe I was unlucky, as in the case of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'). I think I would have been kicked out of Vee's convent school!

Btw, Vee, I didn't know a thing about the William books and had to look them up.

Frieda, I, too, liked all the Peter Greenaway films that I saw, FWIW.
I want to add one more "pensee" to your thoughts herein: I was living in a foreign city at age 19, forced to learn a new language, while living in a French family in Paris. While studying at the Sorbonne, I was forced to read a lot of French literature. Now, I see how this imersion in a totally unknown culture during my formative years shaped my point of view, even to this day. I learnt the Gallic way of seeing things, the Gallic philosophy of life, etc. I think I was changed forever by my year in France, and the literature I had to read in a new language shifted my persona, perhaps. I've only come to realize this late in life. Any comparable experiences out there?

Vee, certainly the theatre, plays, opera, and ballet, as well as those I listed, could expand the markers if the definition of culture maintains enlightenment or refinement resulting from these pursuits. However, that phrase is loaded sociologically as 'cultural elitism' if the definition of culture itself is inclusive of all groups:the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: middle-class culture, Appalachian folk culture, youth culture.After all, everyone has a culture, whether or not it's 'enlightened or refined'.

I remember about twenty years ago reading a book titled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E. D. Hirsch. The biggest criticism was how white, Eurocentric, and male-gender oriented it was. And, of course, it was one author's opinion of what Americans needed to know, the result being top-heavy with the 'snob factor'. Snobs seldom realize or won't admit, though, how ignorant they themselves actually are. Accusations of 'elitism' are au courant in American dialogue. Americans are finally catching up, in effect, with the British cultural preoccupation with class.

Mary, I don't doubt that every experience in a person's life affects him/her. The aphorism is, I think: We are the sum of everything we have done.

I picked up some Gallic philosophy. I've probably told this before -- as long-standing RPers have no doubt had to read all my stories multiple times: I was in the Gare du Nord when a load of American tourists disembarked. They scattered, in a dither. One woman approached me frantically, asking, "Do you speak English?" I didn't feel like saying yes, so I remained deadpan and gave a Gallic shrug. The woman went off and, no doubt, found a kinder, more considerate person to speak English with her. It took me a while in France to remember not to smile too much, a dead giveaway of my American origin. It usually takes me a day or two in France to readjust that smiling habit.

I am keying off something Rosefolly said upthread with the following:

Have any of you experienced reading a book that you think 'came too late' for you? Almost as if you missed the right window of opportunity for it to have been something you would have really liked earlier.

The opposite could also be true: you attempted to read something for which you just weren't ready yet, and because you didn't like it then, you didn't want to try it again from a different age perspective.

I think I've had both experiences. For example, I had heard my English friends talk about Enid Blyton and how much her books meant to them as children. I gave them a try, but I knew immediately, although I can read some children's books as an adult and enjoy them, that I had definitely missed the boat for Blyton. In the other direction, I was required at too young an age, I think, to read Ole Edvart Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (it's a staple academically in the upper Midwest where I grew up), and I was resistant to 'inflicting' myself with further torture for many years. Many of my classmates felt the same about 'Old Ole' as we called him back then. It was only when I was older that I was able to appreciate it for the classic it is.

Friedag, I read the Just William books and saw a couple of the films and TV series. Although written for children they have an appeal for their parents too, with some sly observations!
I also read one of her adult books of short stories, one of my mother's cherished pre-war books. "An Infamous Regiment". It was about women from all ages and I can still recall some of the plots from over sixty years ago.

Annpan, did you also read Blyton? The Famous Five and Secret Seven series are the ones I've heard most about. Something that strikes me about adolescent reading; Nowadays, British and American kids read pretty much the same books -- Harry Potter, etc. -- but when you and I were growing up, there were more differences. I have the impression, although I haven't any supportable evidence yet, that American kids (well, girls that is) tended to read more British children's books than British children read American books. Did you read much American juvenilia?

I am currently reading/studying Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and when he described the popularity of drama societies that sprung up from the latter part of the 19th century and lasted well into the 1950s and '60s, I thought of what you told us about your drama studies. I'm not sure that Americans have ever been as similarly gung ho in an amateur (in the best sense of the word) way -- at least not out in 'Middle America'. However, it's likely to have been different in New York City and the East Coast more generally.

I read Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome. Frieda, this was in the sixties and I do not know about the rest of you, but the library was small. I read what was on the shelves and it was limited, and perhaps as a Canadian it was only natural to have British authors. I got books as birthday and Christmas presents, they were special. I am trying to think of wellknown American authors at that time who wrote young kids' books, besides Dr. Seuss, Frank Baum and Carolyn Keene. I recall Mark Twain with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer but I could never wrap my brain around the dialects as a child. And the stories were just so strange, I didn't like them much. ie) Jim being tarred and feathered.

I think that what we read for enjoyment is what we can relate to, so there is a natural progression in our reading tastes as we grow older. I did enjoy favourite books of my childhood when I read them to my own kids, but that is the only time that I revisited them. As a teen I avoided books about people who were over thirty...much too old and probably quite boring, I thought then. Now I can identify with the old fogies and appreciate books about aging and the issues that come along with that. That is not to say I still do not enjoy books about younger people; because, as my Grandma used to tell me, "No matter how wrinkled and saggy you get, in your mind you are still 16." :)
I would change that to about 25, because teenage years are actually quite awful....

Janalyn, I read two or three of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series. I don't remember how I got hold of them but I probably found them in my mid-sized hometown library, which was well stocked with children's books. But if it also had the Blyton books, I didn't notice them. In fact, I didn't run across a lot of children's books that many people here at RP have mentioned that they loved. The only explanation I have for that is I didn't stay long in the children's section of the library, and the children's books I did read were in my family's home library.

However, I did read most of the Newbery Medal winners up to about 1965, and I also liked a lot of the Caldecott Medal winners, too. My favorite Newbery-winning author is Elizabeth George Speare: The Witch of Blackbird Pond and The Bronze Bow as well as her earlier Calico Captive, all historical novels. I've been a sucker for historical novels for a long time, indeed, starting in the second or third grade with Alice Turner Curtis's Little Maid series; e.g. A Little Maid of Naragansett Bay and A Little Maid of Ticonderoga. Now I can understand that the subject of the American Revolution might not be favorite reading material of British children...perhaps Canadian children as well. :-)

Louisa May Alcott, especially Little Women, does seem to have been read by quite a lot of British girls.

Although Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is usually considered a children's book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn probably shouldn't be since it is an adult's book that just happens to have a child as its narrator/protagonist. In the U.S., however, Huckleberry Finn has often been abridged for young readers with some of the more unpleasant parts omitted, including Jim's tarring and feathering, Pap beating Huck, and the naked cavorting of the Duke and the Dauphin at "The Royal Nonesuch". I don't claim that Huckleberry Finn is perfect, but it's been one of my favorites since I was nine years old. And I always thought deciphering the dialect writing was great fun, and it became another of my long-standing interests.

I never liked Seuss or Baum, but I also didn't like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, so it was not an American v. British thing.

I wouldn't want to be sixteen again, either. Yikes!

This post was edited by friedag on Fri, Feb 21, 14 at 0:22

US children's books I read from about the age of nine to eleven(?) were some of the series headed ' - - - Twins' Dutch/Eskimo/Japanese etc by Lucy Fitch Perkins illustrated with simple line drawings.
My US based grandmother sent us many books. First some of the 'Little Golden Books' then The Bobbsey Twins which didn't make much impact as it was about the 15th in the series. Nancy Faulkner's Rebel Drums and The West is on your left Hand were set in pioneering days and my copies had been signed by the author (otherwise fairly unmemorable). Little Women & Joe's Boys were others as were the 'What Katy Did' books which I didn't enjoy.
The 'Little House . . .' series didn't reach the UK, via Puffin books, 'til I was an adult, nor did the books by Elizabeth Enright. I'm sure I would have enjoyed them as a child.
I still have the ancient copies of Tom and Huck (c.1913) sent over by my great grandmother to my Mother and brother.
I read several of the Arthur Ransome books, with their primitive illustrations but though he wrote about children his characters are rather wooden and he is better on the sailing details . .. of which I still understand nothing.
Much more readable was Noel Straetfield Ballet Shoes etc. I enjoyed 'family' stories, perhaps because my own was a tad disfunctional. ;-)
As for Enid Blyton. A generation of UK/Aus/NZ librarians are probably still gnashing their teeth at the sound of her name, but she was immensely popular and seemed to write a couple of books a day. I was never her biggest fan. I wanted to read a book that lasted more than an hour or two and one with characters who were more than the same children with different names. Luckily I never came across 'Little Noddy' and his pal Big Ears but there must have been dozens of books about them.
Blyton, a school teacher had started writing stories about nature in educational journals in the '20's which were well-received and she 'blossomed from then on.
An interesting book by her younger daughter Imogen Smallwood A Childhood at Green Hedges paints quite a harsh picture of life where 'real children' had to be neither seen nor heard.
Overheard at a writers conference was a conversation between Richmal Crompton and Noel Straetfield, something along the lines of "Miss Blyton certainly sells very many books. It is just a pity that her characters are so flat."

Friedag, I did read Enid Blyton books but with a certain scepticism about her portrayal of poorer children, I recall. I read some US books but remember this was from a public library with restrictions on books even after the war. From the quality of the paper one could tell when they had been published!
Little Women was one I read and never knew there were others in that series or that Alice through the Looking Glass existed!
I liked Angela Brazil's and other author's private school books and "Sue Barton" a US nurse series.
We were only allowed to borrow, I think, two books at a time and used to hide a book we wanted later behind the others. A ruse sometimes discovered by a zealous shelver when tidying up!
I think the amateur societies for drama and singing etc. were a good way to socialise if one didn't care for pubs or dances. They were seen as respectable meeting places for the sexes!
I also did go to a photography group for a while and learned to develop, print and enlarge my own photos but film and good cameras were rather too expensive on my salary so I didn't go there for long.
I also went to a couple of political groups of both parties but was bored with all the discussions.
My favourite evenings were spent at a hairdressing school where I was a model and got a new style tryout for the cost of the materials used.
These things and the "pictures" were my evenings entertainment in the 1950s.

Vee, the name Lucy Fitch Perkins rang a bell with me, so I looked her up and, sure enough, recognized that I read The Dutch Twins and The Spartan Twins. But even as I child, I think I realized that the books were idealized, with almost unbearably 'pretty' plots.

I didn't read those two books by Nancy Faulkner that you were given, but I did read another titled Tomahawk Shadow that I remember liking but can't recall much else about.

Did you read The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson? It's not really a children's book, I suppose, but it probably has appealed to teenaged girls since it was first published in the 1930s. Of course I was attracted to it because of the Brontes appearing in the title, except it's not about the real Brontes themselves but about what the fictional Carne sisters imagine of the Brontes and everybody else they come across in their lives and literature. They like to make up stories about people they barely know, and some outlandish stories they are! The Carne family is a 'tad' dysfunctional.

Vee, in Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British... that I mentioned above, he relates a study in the late 1960s in Britain of people evaluating their schooling from 1900 through 1965 and their satisfaction and dissatisfaction with it. Those who had attended Catholic boarding schools thought they had a much harder time compared to those who went to other types of schools. What they thought of the quality of their education ran the gamut from those who thought they were taught everything they needed to know to continue their education (or for life in general) to those who thought what they were taught was stultifying dreck. It (not the dreck, but the whole experience) reminded me of what you have related.

The first Newbery book I read was Caddie Woodlawn. I loved it and reread it so many times that my mother ordered a couple more for me--Roller Skates and Rabbit Hill, neither of which appealed to me much. I did love the Sue Barton books and liked Tom Sawyer, but as Frieda said, I think Huck is for adults. In fact it was assigned in a college American Lit course I took. Good memories.

Another interesting RP thread.

I have one sister who is 7 years older than me, so I was listening to The Beatles at age 7. My musical tastes are very eclectic - I like popular music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, but then there is a big hole until you come to Australian hiphop. My liking of this latter genre is strictly due to a son involved in it, but there are lots of really interesting lyrics in some of the songs. I am not so keen on US hiphop, apart from Atmosphere, as a lot of the lyrics seem to be misogynistic and violent, and the 'beat' (the musical background in hiphop) less interesting and more repetitious.
As a child I read Blyton's Famous Five but didn't like the Secret Seven books. She had another series about a group called The Five Find-outers and Buster the dog which I liked, and yet another where all the book titles started with The Adventure of .... and had a boy who lived with circus performers and owned a monkey.
I also read Little Women, and through my sister had a couple of US children's books which I liked - two of the Bobbsey twins and one Cherry Ames (it was called Cherry Ames Dude Ranch Nurse which seemed very exotic to me).
Recently DH and I have been watching movies from one of the 'best ever' lists, and I have been a bit surprised at how many of them haven't impressed me much. I'm not happy about the couple of hours of my life I won't get back that I spent watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can see that some of the film techniques were ground breaking for the time, but the story did not impress.
Films I remember from my younger days are mostly children's films like Mary Poppins and then when I started going out with DH and going to the pictures was a safe thing for us to do at age 15 :) We have never been big movie goers though.

These things and the "pictures" were my evenings entertainment in the 1950s.Annpan, what did you do in the evenings when you didn't go out?

Stipulating that reading was probably a given for most RPers and the television probably dominated a lot of our living rooms once it came into our lives, other than those what forms of social entertainment were either frequent, or at least indulged in occasionally, when you were at home with your family or with your house/dormitory mates? Did you play cards, dominoes, and board games? On nice summer evenings did you play games in your backyards -- maybe croquet, pitching horseshoes or washers, volleyball, or badminton?

About once a month my parents would have some of their siblings and their spouses over to our house to play dominoes. The adults played '42' and '84' at the dining room table. All of the kid cousins would play 'moon' at the kitchen table or hover around the adults, watching them play and trying to figure out what they were doing. The traditional food for domino-playing was chili con carne with soda crackers. I don't know why.

My brothers, my young aunt who lived with us for a while, and I played a lot of board games, particularly Monopoly, which I called Monotony because it took forever to complete a game. I hated it when the boys began cheating, which they invariably did. They said they were only being ruthless like real businessmen, but my aunt and I would threaten to quit playing if they didn't stop cheating. They would play straight for about fifteen minutes, then it was back to swindling us girls.

When I lived in the college dorm, there seemed to be a perpetual game of spades or hearts going at one corner table in the lounge. Bingo was a popular group entertainment, too. The Bingo players would get so raucous, the old party-pooper television watchers would complain

I remember in the early 1980s my DH and I played a lot of Trivial Pursuit, the only box-type game I was ever really very good at playing.

Does anyone pursue such quaint entertainments nowadays?

Friedag, after I left school, I boarded with my grandparents and when I wasn't going out, I listened to the wireless programs. They had a separate room where i could listen to the shows they didn't like such as "The Goons" and a space series in particular. They wouldn't have TV as my grandmother said it gave her a headache. My grandfather and I played a card game (sounded like Clabiash) that he had learned from Jewish workmates but I wasn't very good at it so we mostly played cribbage which was slower. We never played on Sundays. Although they weren't churchgoers, they paid some traditional respect for the day. I wasn't allowed to sew either!
I had played some card games with my parents when I was young but after age 11, I had homework every week evening or played with friends.
My daughter played board games with her children. I often bought them requested ones for gifts.
My husband played Trivial Pursuit once with other hotel guests when we were on holiday in Bali as there wasn't TV in English there but he had to give everyone several goes to his one as he used to be a Quizmaster for charity games and knew too many answers!

As I mentioned before, I grew up basically without a television until late high school. Also, I grew up in the deep south without air conditioning. One pass-time was to gather the neighbors, including kids, and sit out in the back yard with the new hammack my parents got. Kids drank coca-cola; adults drank, well, you know.... Pets and babies were included on these hot summer afternoons. I wish I could recall the small talk, now.

As to card games: We used to play "Old Maid" and "Authors." My mother and her friends tried to play Bridge and Canasta. (I never learnt the rules of either). In winter, in front of the fire, we played dominos, checkers, and something similar to Scrabble. The more "exotic" families played Backgammon and Mah-jong.

Without a TV, the radio assumed importance in our home: I recall listening to "the Shadow Knows", "Father Knows Best" and a comedy that featured Blacks, which name escapes me now.

I spent 4 summers at a girls' camp in the mountains of NC. We had all sorts of exposure to tennis, horseback riding, canoeing, archery, badminton, volleyball, swimming, drama, riflery, etc.. The big deal was to be able to shoot a rattlesnake with a rifle.

On high school dates, we went to movies, when we did not attend dance parties. There was an "art house" theater in Atlanta that showed English films, such as "the Lavender Hill Mob", "The Red Shoes", "Kind Hearts & Coronets", and "The French they are a Funny Race".

One American film I never got to see through to the end on a date was "The Apartment." My parents had insisted that I be home by a certain time in the evening, so my date and I reluctantly had to leave early.

Woodnymph, was that Amos & Andy? We listened to the radio a lot, too. One program my dad especially liked was scary and opened with a screeching door. I've forgotten the name of it, but I can still remember a couple of the more hair-raising stories.

We played Old Maid and Authors, too; and when I was taking literature courses as an adult in college, those images of the authors would spring to mind. The adults played ongoing cut throat games of Rook. Outdoors, we played Hide & Seek and Mother, May I, and those kinds of games. Not having sidewalks, we roller skated in an old, unused school gym.

Freida, as my sister is disabled and hence not able to play outdoor games, we used to spend a lot of the time in our holidays playing games like Scrabble, Monopoly, knucklebones (jacks) and card games.

We played Scrabble with one set of grandparents, and they also had a set of 'table croquet', where a cloth 'fence' was attached to the dining table, and there were small hoops and hand mallets to play with. I seem to remember they may have had indoor bowls too.

On holiday with our parents we played Rummy, and with my father in law and DH I played many many games of crib.

I also played various card solitaire games a lot, even into my twenties.

Trivial Pursuit was a favourite with our university friends, and then about 15 years ago our sons discovered Risk, a world domination board game. That one lasted about 2 years I think. Our boys also played Test Match, a cricket game.

Carolyn, was the screeching door program called 'The Inner Sanctum'? I just asked my 92-year-old mother and she thinks that's what it was. I never listened to it myself, but I've heard some of the stories retold in nostalgia fests. Evidently, it was a great favorite of many radio listeners.

I got in on the tail end of the radio-program era that wasn't all music or talk. I do remember listening to 'Gunsmoke' and 'Have Gun, Will Travel' before they moved to television (or maybe they were running concurrently). Years later I was astonished to learn that the Marshal Dillon on the radio was the very corpulent William Conrad. Richard Boone, I think though, was Paladin on both radio and TV.

I think it's fun to read all these cultural details, some we share and others that are so different from my own experiences.

Kath, I played Risk with my sons and their dad; or I should say that I attempted it. I've always been lousy at strategy games. My brothers were into war games with a world map, battleships, fighting men, etc. When they deigned to let me play with them, I was usually killed off in short order. I did get some benefit from playing, however, because it helped me learn all the names of the geographical features and the countries in the world during the time period of whatever war they were fighting.

My mother was a great crossword puzzle solver; but as much as I've always liked words, I've never been fond of crosswords. I preferred cross sums (now called Kakuro) and number place (now called Sudoku). My family played Scrabble and a math version called Numble. I was better at Numble than Scrabble. However, I did enjoy solving anagrams and cryptograms. My absolute favorite pencil puzzles have always been the logic problems, once I figured out the tricks of solving them. But don't ask me to play chess!

Okay, did your folks have a family phonograph/hi-fi/stereo? Or did you have your own record player like Vee's brother to play in your own room?

Did you or other family members play musical instruments? I grew up in a very noisy, musical family. Each one of us played something, with varying degrees of skill.

Frieda, back to your question based on the sociology book (btw did you study this at university or are you a keen amateur?)
Didn't know the meaning of 'dreck' and thought it might be related to dreich, Scottish for gloomy/dull, but according to the internet dreck means sh*tty. I live and learn.
My school education was of a pretty high standard and locally well-regarded, plus discipline was strict. Those in the 'top sets' could/did go on to 'higher things'. As an also-ran and not given to working at subjects I found difficult eg maths/languages I rather coasted along.
It was the out-of-school boarding side (only a hundred odd against total school pop. of 800) that was dreich rather than dreck.
You asked about plays/drama clubs. They are still alive and well around the UK with Am-Dram groups putting on a couple of shows a year. Usually an Xmas pantomine and some other light-ish play in the summer. Nothing like Ibsen or Shakespeare. Look in any UK local paper and there will usually be something 'dramatic' going on.

Family games were not big in my childhood, we never much went in for bonding. Very occasionally after Christmas my Father would order us to play cards or a board-game. He always won and we were convinced he made the rules up as he went along, but we never argued with him!
Mother never joined in. She enjoyed crosswords and would battle with the cryptic one in the Telegraph or Times. These days John and I do the 'quick' one in the Telegraph plus the 'General Knowledge' ones at the w/end. Sudoku is not for me. ;-(
I played the odd board game with our children, scrabble etc. and simple games with youngest son. DH has never joined in preferring to sleep.
Re TV radio. We had a large 'wireless' in the living room which Grandfather had on for dreadful organ music (not hymns) which was popular then. A portable (weighed a ton) in the kitchen was for my Mother's private listening, although I tuned in the comedies and The Archers (farming soap); still going strong after 60 something years. We had a TV from the early '50's and watched children's progs between 5-6pm but nothing later.
We didn't 'do' much together. Sometimes my father would take us out in the car and we would sit in it while he went to "see a man about a dog" or we would go on cycle rides with Mother. She took us on summer holidays, Dad was always working then. We almost never went anywhere with both parents.
Music-wise I learnt the piano and the violin (badly), youngest brother took up the piano, gave it up, wanted to play the trumpet, then the drums . . . he had/has no staying power so parents wisely refused to pay. Both the boys were in their school choir and my father had a good voice and sang in the chorus of the G and S operas when they came to town.
Our older son played the trumpet and continued at University and 'did' Music technology. DH and younger son are tone deaf but drone along happily. Neither can 'hear' a beat/rhythm.
Kath, I had forgotten about...

My grandparents had a gramophone which needed a wind-up and a needle was manually placed on a 78 record. It had been the latest thing at some time. The needles were stored in an ornament which featured a bird with a magnetic beak who was dipped to pick up a new needle when required. The records were mainly operettas and musical theatre shows and old time variety songs. i bought the Vaughan Williams "Greensleeves" when I could afford it. Records were expensive.
We had a small record each made at the local funfair with my sister who had a sweet voice singing "Cuckoo" and me with a croaky one belting out "Let him go, let him tarry". It was a popular song and I didn't know what "tarry" meant!
My grandparents also had a piano as my mother trained to be a pianist. They sold it eventually as we had no room for it at our place when we moved after the war. It was many years before we got another one. My father played "by ear" all the latest songs but none of us children had any musical lessons other than singing at school.
I am glad that my son and his children play, guitar and drums and my grandson and his son also play the drums.
My husband couldn't play an instrument but both he, my son and grandson have been professional DJs.
My husband presented radio programs and the other two did it for dances etc. with their own equipment as a sideline to their normal work.

Carolyn, yes, it was "Amos & Andy."
My parents had a large collection of classical records, both 78's and 33's. I recall the big day when they bought a "magnavox."

When we went to grammar school, we were all forced to have music lessons and learnt to play the "recorder" (a cheap plastic flute, as I recall). My parents forced me to take piano lessons, which I hated, as I preferred ballet. I studied for years -- then just when I finally could play decently, they forced me to quit because they thought I should be preparing for college. I never went back to the piano again, sadly. I had a curmudgeon of a teacher who lived in an old Victorian house in downtown Atlanta, an opera snob, who cut her students' nails almost down to the quick. For many years, I was a nail-biter.

How could I have forgotten "jacks"? I adored that game and got pretty good at it. I recall playing Solitaire, also, and in Paris, my room-mate and I played "Oh Hell", a card game whose rules I have long forgotten, but we were addicts.

Does anyone remember in "olden times" going to a movie theater and before the show and the cartoon and newsreel, someone was playing the organ in-house? The famous Fox theater in Atlanta did that, and I always wondered why an organ?

Frieda, yes, it was Inner Sanctum. I remembered the name after I posted, fortunately not at 3:00 am.

My aunts had a Victrola, a piece of furniture with a picture of the RCA dog on the front, similar to what Annpan describes, to which they danced up and down the long front hall in my grandparents' house. My grandmother had a piano, and she and the aunts played by ear. I am pretty tone deaf and had no idea what she meant when Grandma tried to teach me a simple tune on it. I put my five-year-old fingers on the keys and looked at her. She played it again and said, "Can't you hear that?" No. My dad could sing, and my daughter has a pretty voice.

Vee, I studied sociology at university as an undergraduate and graduate. Actually I started in high school with a half-year elective class because it was the only thing available during a particular slot in my schedule. It was a stroke of luck for me because sociology became an abiding interest. As for the book in question: It's part of my continuing education in the subject.

When I was a reporter, I covered hard news, but if there wasn't anything 'deep' going on, I was sent on 'cultural' assignments. I found that I really enjoyed covering the cultural stuff. It's an example, I think, of developing a taste for something when young that I've carried through to the present. I've had many interests over the years, but the three that have lasted the longest are reading, music, and sociology.

Maybe I'm just nosey by nature, but I like to know the ordinary things people do, the little things that don't get mentioned in the usual history and social science textbooks. About twenty years ago I was introduced to photojournalist Peter Menzel's Material World: A Global Family Portrait. I've worn out two copies of that book looking at the photos of people and their possessions around the world, from dirt poor Malians whose most valued possession is a bicycle to a family in Kuwait with a 45-foot long sofa. Somehow Menzel and his crew talked folk from some thirty far-flung locations into dragging the furnishings of their dwellings outside into streets, yards or fields to display them for photographing.

I'd be hard-pressed to give up any of the cultural benefits I have enjoyed, but I realize that most of them could be done without. If I were ever marooned on the proverbial desert island, I would miss books most, I think, and then music although I think I would find a way to make music of some sort if it's only banging two coconuts together. I probably wouldn't miss movies much and television hardly at all. Which would you miss most? After books, that is -- I'm stipulating again because this is RP. :-)

This post was edited by friedag on Mon, Feb 24, 14 at 0:47

Toilet paper!
Banging two coconuts gives you the sound of horses hooves.Make a windpipe instead!

Toilet paper indeed, Annpan. And medicine. But I was thinking of the big four markers in First World culture: Books, Music, Movies, Television. I added television (not the technology but what is transmitted on it) because other people have told me it's a great social achievement "with great overarching ties." I have my doubts, though.

I could fill the empty coconuts with crushed shells and make mariachis. Bird bones make dandy flutes. Of course I could whistle and sing, too, since I wouldn't have anyone to offend if I was off key.

Pen/pencil and paper. After books, ofc.

A diary would keep me sane. Poetry and drawing would keep me satisfied. There is music in waves, wind on the sand, rain and birdsong. So music would be after pen and paper. If music consisted of me and coconut mariachis, I would put tylenol ahead of music.

Hee! Janalyn, I'm for active participation in music, not passive, although the music you mention is lovely.

Yeah, a few gross of pens/pencils and reams of paper could be conveniently marooned with me, too! Otherwise, I might have to take up tattooing myself with mollusk inks.

I'd take a wind-up radio as I presume my desert island would be an electricity-free zone. I could then listen to music, plays and readings. As some small child is supposed to have said on the rival merits of TV/radio "The pictures on the radio are better."
My DD had to interview Trevor Baylis the inventor of the wind-up radio for some PR 'thing' and was shown his then latest development of 'wind-up' walking stick, designed for older or less mobile people. It incorporates a torch, safety lights and a magnet (for picking up dropped car keys) and works by use of 'elbow grease'.

Here is a link that might be useful: Trevor Baylis Inventor

"The pictures on the radio are better."I suspect that wasn't said by a child of the Internet age.

And I thought the patented 'Hurrycane' was the latest technology in walking sticks. It stands alone -- won't fall over -- and has a pivoting base. I have one at my bedside for nocturnal ambulation (my knees and ankles don't immediately function when I want/need them to). The ingenuity of inventors/tinkerers is amazing, although seemingly wacky at first. Bless Mr. Baylis and those like him.

It's almost too uncomfortable contemplating doing without our favorite entertainments, I guess. Right now on American television, one of our commentators seems to be fixated on "how stupid the devices are making Americans." He's right in many ways: Why memorize a poem when all you have to do is click a button or touch a screen to read it? Why learn to do math in your head? Why learn to read a map? Why know how to measure when you can use a laser? On and on.

Why do any thing when you can plop down in front of some device and say, as in the words of the Nirvana song, "Here we are, now entertain us."

So, do you think your taste developed primarily because of your parents' influence or in spite of it? I mostly wanted to please my parents but they weren't as pushy as some parents are. I had some petty rebellions when the last thing I wanted to be was like my mother. I never liked mama's favorite genre of books and movies, science fiction, but in many other genres our tastes are remarkably alike. However, I know other parents and children who have what seems like very little in common, taste-wise.

This post was edited by friedag on Tue, Feb 25, 14 at 23:22

My Mother had started reading Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens when quite young. Along with all her other books I have a copy of Little Dorrit presented as a school prize when she was only ten. Apart from A Christmas Carol which I think we read at school I have only just started to read Dickens and have never read Scott, nor did I enjoy Galsworthy who she suggested to me.
Had my Father suggest I read/listen/look at something I would have probably done the opposite. Luckily he never did, so no 'confrontation' took place.

Vee, those books given as school prizes are mentioned frequently by many of the British memoirists I've been reading lately. The recipients seem to have been very proud of them. One of the East End writers related how she brought home her school prize of David Copperfield where it was enshrined on the mantel next to The Bible, the only other book the family had. Dickens seems to have been the favorite author for prize-giving.

If books were ever awards to American schoolchildren, they don't seem to have been recalled as often in memoirs or diaries. It's a curious lacuna, if indeed that's what it is.

I'm struck by how difficult were some of the books read by the English working class. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is often cited as a great influence and much loved book. Really! I have no reason to doubt those claims, but I didn't try reading Sartor... until university, and about all I recall is it gave me the devil; appropriately, I suppose, when the main character is named Diogenes Teufelsdrockh -- that I do remember! What people read and enjoyed a hundred years ago can make me feel inadequate. Do you reckon they could do it because they had fewer distractions?

Some of those working-class folk could show up the aristos. I remember what the Mitford girls (Nancy and Jessica) wrote about their father: He had a huge library that he inherited, though he claimed he had never read a single volume in it. But he was smug because of who he was. What a philistine!

In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class mothers are often cited as the more influential parent, perhaps because fathers worked too much to have anything but intermittent interaction with their offspring. I think that was pretty much true in the U.S., too, at least up until the 1960s, maybe 1970s. My father was interested in what we kids read, watched, and listened to, but he left it to our mother to be 'in charge'. However, I had some friends whose father dictated just about everything, and I always felt sorry for them, especially when their mother would've allowed stuff but she didn't dare go against HIM and his wishes!

Vee, is it just you and I? RP sure seems dead lately. Has there been a log-in problem?

I thought there had been a problem as there seemed to be no traffic so I posted to check. Perhaps just nothing to discuss?
Books were expensive, almost luxuries for the working class for many years, which is why a school prize was cherished. I had a copy of Potter's "Pigling Bland" and another, but I forget the title, for Sunday School prizes.
My father sometimes brought books from his job "on the buses" that were from the Lost Property box and unclaimed. These were added to our small personal library and were read many times over. A very mixed bunch of titles!
My small sister and I played "libraries" with them and lent them to our friends, using scraps of paper for borrower's tickets. We both worked in real libraries for a while when we grew up!