E Ticket

An E Ticket is something different than an eTicket. This is a Disneyland E Ticket. Those rides and attractions listed were the most expensive when each required its own admission ticket.

The nice thing about this was the admission price to the park was a lot cheaper and we could go more often. That's a good reason to promote season tickets.

They stopped using these in 1982. Southern Californians looking for cheap adventure had to go elsewhere.

Disneyland Miniature Golf Course

I never went there. Most people remember it. I always wanted to go there but I never got the chance...

Sigh...

Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

It was the last newspaper that used children to deliver it. It took about two hours less to read than the Los Angeles Times. It was owned by the (in)famous William Randolph Hearst Jr. And the comics were much better than the Times, too.

But it came out in the afternoon and no one wanted an afternoon paper. When they started it as a morning paper, it didn't take hold, and the paper went out of business in 1989.

Howard Johnson's Restaurants

Did you know we had a HoJo's in Colton? Clam rolls in the land of burritos and taco burgers. Actually, it was a nice change of pace. Too bad you can't eat there anymore.

American Bandstand

As a kid growing up in the 1960s, we had a lot of the teen dancing shows. They weren't a lot like the music shows that air here in the Philippines. Once these programs were over, they were over. The shows that are on now seem to linger on for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years afterwards.

Bandstand was one such local show that was seen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1952. It had a number of hosts until Dick Clark (1929- ) took the reins in 1956. Until 1957, it was seen only on WFIL-TV, channel 6, in Philadelphia (now WPVI), when it went out every weekday afternoon to ABC affiliates throughout the country. The name was changed to reflect this: American Bandstand.

The program didn't specialize in any one area of music. Performers of all genres of music that appealed to young people appeared on the show.

In 1963, the show began running on Saturday, after the morning cartoons. At that time, the live broadcasts were now being taped ahead of time. The weekday shows gave way to soap operas.

In 1964 the show moved to Los Angeles.

Dick Clark stayed with Bandstand until 1989, when it had one more host, but he remained the producer. He ended up producing specials, game shows, and documentaries. Bandstand went off the air in 1989.

Today he's best known for his New Year's Eve TV show, in which he didn't appear after he had his stroke, but now at age 79, he remains active.

Dyed Chicks for Easter

Being a devout Christian, I never celebrated Easter in the Pagan way with egg hunts and chocolate bunnies (except after Resurrection Sunday when I could get them at a sizable discount... I do like Chocolate).

I never understood why someone would want to dye baby chickens different colors. And I was a sadistic kid growing up, too. I loved to dye the dog's hair with Kool-Aid (pink and green were the best colors for our beige poodle).

But to dye a chick... I'm not an animal rights advocate, but that's cruel and sick...

And they still do it here in the Philippines. This is Holy Week.

Telephone Answering Machines

Living in Asia, where most people don't have a landline phone, they aren't much fun.

For a while, they were a lot of fun in America. But, like Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, it was a fad bound to die within a few months.

My favorite line was to record my message:

"Hi. You've got me when I can't come to the phone. Please leave your name, number, and a short message after the tone. Thanxcelot!

And that was supposed to be the end of the message, but I pretended to make a mistake in recording...

"HONEY, WHERE'S THE TV GUIDE?"

Nowadays, if you have Voice Mail, you don't need the machine and that works even during a power failure.

Bank of America

It began in 1904 as the Bank of Italy by Amadeo Giannini in San Francisco, California. After merging two banks together to form the Bank of Italy and America in 1916, it was shortened to the Bank of America in 1929. It managed to branch out of California in 1967. And it had its own credit card, the BankAmericard. That became Visa in 1975.

With all the bank mergers that took place in the last thirty years, it isn't a wonder that the Bank of America was bought by the former NCNB (North Carolina National Bank), when it was still known as Nations Bank. Since the Bank of America was an older and more reputable institution, it took on that name.

It's not the same as the Bank of America that existed when I was younger. That was a California bank. It's now based in North Carolina.

Walt Disney's School Bus Lunch Box...

When I started school, this is how I took my lunch. Do you know they wanted seventy bucks for this thing on an auction website?

By the way, most schools would ban this lunch box today because it's made of metal and could be a weapon. You could do the same thing with a plastic box, too. (By the looks of the dents in this thing, it looks like it had been used as a weapon once or twice!)

Made by Aladdin Industries in Nashville, Tennessee, which made the first character lunch box, which pictured Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd.)

Cigarette Commercials on TV

In the United States, these were banned in 1971. It is my belief that this was one of the factors to make my native country one of the lowest per capita of tobacco users in the world, if not NUMBER ONE.

No one in this part of the world (I live in the Philippines) believes that this is so, since they see it in the movies. Having worked with movie actors on several projects let me put it to you this way:

They will not smoke in the movies unless the script calls for it... Smoking is such an addictive practice that the actors cannot just stop. It's a pitiful web.

The LoyalTubist has been smoke free since 1977.