Shows come and go so fast. For every I Love Lucy or Andy Griffith Show, there are hundreds that have vanished from the pop culture landscape. How many of these do you remember?
Bachelor Father
In TV-land, millionaires came in two flavors: the crusty old guy with a bushy white mustache (think Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly game) and handsome, dashing playboys.
Bachelor Father featured this second flavor and served as the launching pad for one of TV’s most durable actors, John Forsythe.
Still working? Great! You avoided the first mistake many Boomers make – retiring too early! The longer you work, the more secure you can make your retirement years.
Here are a few other common mistakes:
Taking Social security Benefits Too Soon – Sure, you can start getting your Social Security at age 62, but the experts say that can reduce yourt benefits by as much as 25%!
Retiring With Credit Card Debt – If you can it pays to pay off all your credit cards before you retire. If you can pay off your car loan and pay down the mortgage, so much the better.
Underestimating Your Life Expectancy – People today are routinely living well into their 80’s. The experts say it’s better to over-estimate than to underestimate; so to be safe, plan on living well into your 90’s!
We must never forget the contributions made to American pop culture by our animated brothers and sisters.
Fresh-Up Freddie got his big show biz break in 1957 when he was selected as the spokesbird for 7-Up. Exactly what kind of bird was never made clear.
The campaign was hatched by the Leo Burnett advertising agency and the design of the character as well as the animation was done by the Walt Disney Studios. Freddie made his debut on Walt Disney’s Zorro TV series, which also debuted in 1957. His voice was provided by veteran voice artist Paul Frees (best remembered as the voice of Boris Badenov as well as the narrator for “The Haunted Mansion” at the Disney theme parks).
The formula for nearly all of Freddie’s commercials began with Freddie asking a hypothetical question that began, “Right now, you’re probably asking yourself…” Of course, the answer to every one of the questions somehow involved using 7-Up. The commercials all ended with Freddie singing a sort of nonsensical jingle that sure sounded like “Beet-en, Beet-en, Beet-en/Nothing does it like 7-Up!” (You can watch one here.)
Alas, as we moved into the 1960’s, 7-Up morphed into “the Un-Cola” and Freddie’s contract was not renewed.
But there was a time when there were actually Fresh-Up Freddie toys, buttons and of course, lots of magazine ads!
Boomtown America is proud to salute this plucky animation icon!
Letting loose with a blast of foul language may have some benefits.
Researchers at Marist College in New York and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts determined that people swear profusely also tend to have a wider vocabulary than average.
Another study at England's Keele University found that swearing can help reduce stress and can also help endure physical pain.
The song that put Stephen Stills and his band, Buffalo Springfield on that map was inspired by the now almost-forgotten Sunset Strip riots of 1966.
By the mid-sixties, L.A.’s Sunset Strip had become the nucleus for the emerging rock & roll nightclub scene. The area was attracting large numbers of teenagers, many of whom simply loitered around the street, not really patronizing any of the clubs.
Local business leaders, not pleased to have so many young people using the Strip as a hangout enacted a 10 p.m. curfew. Resistance to the curfew was almost immediate. A local radio station called for a peaceful rally at one of the clubs, Pandora’s Box (appropriately named, as it turned out), to peacefully protest the curfew. The rally was anything but peaceful. It turned into a riot with kids smashing store windows and car windshields and the police smashing the protesters.
These nightly riots stretched on for weeks, capturing national attention. American International Pictures, always quick to capitalize on anything they thought their teenage drive-in audience wanted to see, even made a quickie picture about the phenomenon called (what else?) Riot on Sunset Strip.
Stills, whose band was part of that emerging scene, thought the whole thing was absurd. The kids were hopelessly outmuscled by the police. So he wrote “For What It’s Worth” as a way to urge his peer group to chill out and think before they got themselves really hurt.
The song became a huge success when it was released on Atco Records in 1967. It’s notable also as one of the few hit records whose title is never mentioned in the lyrics of the song.