What Ever Happen to the Cool Jocks?

Driving down the main drag with the radio blaring and listening to the top music of the day was quite a memory! What characterized those great days of the 60s was the cool disc jockeys that jammed the airways during that era. Whatever happend to them? Todays' radio DJs cannot come close to the jocks of yesteryear. The radio personalites today have to use explicit language to get listeners instead funny but innocent pranks that those of yesterday used. The 60s jocks' gift for gab was instrumental in keeping us tuned in. Not only the hit music but their talk kept us coming back.

In my home town of Circleville, Ohio, most of us tuned into 1230 WCOL. It was a very small radio station that broadcasted from Columbus with only 500 watts of power. You lost the station at night so we picked up drifted station which broadcasted with larger watts, like WLS, Chicago, WABC, New York and my favorite WHK of Cleveland, Ohio. At Cleveland, there was a DJ from Florida named Johnny Holliday. His opending monologue went something like "welcome and this is Johnny Holliday, your refugee from the Sunshine State." His craftmanship as a DJ resulted in him being selected for the "Cruisin" series of music featuring outstanding DJs across this great nation of ours. These tapes and CDS not only featured music but commericals, airway checks, and monologue from the DJs. Johnny Holliday was on "Cruisin 64," which I say without hesitation is the best of all the "Cruisin" Series including Robert Morgan of "Cruisin' 65" Where is Johnny today? He works for ABC sports and announces Maryland Terpin basketball games. Still today he has that great voice that so many DJs now fail to deliver.

I also remember the countdowns each and everyday at 3:00 from WCOL. Of course,the countdown usually didn't change but once a week but you listened anyway just to groove on the music and the commentary. It was common back then, if you remember, for a song to be interrupted for fast breaking news, like a bank robbery or something. It was so sensationalized.


Recalling back to the New Year's eves of the 60s, I recall WCOL FM station doing the countdown of the top 100 songs of the year and all my buddies would gather in the basement of my friend's house to celebrate New Year's while his folks had a party upstairs. We would make our bets on what song would be the number one song for the year. The number one song was played right before midnight.

The craziness of the jocks never ceased and they would upset Ma Bell with their telephone promotions that would tie up the phones. The phone systems were not as intricate back then as they are now. They would give away money, concert tickets and yes automobiles. What zaniess and fun was the 60s.

My old WCOL radio station now is a country station. Nothing wrong with country music, in fact I love country music but I still recall the crusin', parking, and just relaxing while listening to the fun radio of the 60s. Do you have a memory? If so please leave a comment.



Visit the 60s once again.

This 60s Icon Is Neither a Person nor a Place

The 60s, as any baby boomer who grew up in that decade, will tell you, was a happening. Our generation had its own music, fashion, war, cars, made specially for cruisin' and TV. Our television programs were so special that many have been made into movies and quite a few appear on TV shows such as TV Land and American Life TV. If the 60s were not special then why are so many young people of today fascinated with that era?

During the 60s, dating and competing with the opposite sex, was just as popular as it is today with one exception. In my opionion, relationships were more meaningful and going with someone meant committed to that person as long as you both continued to wear each other's ring. Remember exchanging class rings? The girls either wore the ring around their neck to signify they were going steady so it was hands off to the other guys. Also many of the girls wore the rings with angora wrapped around the ring, which made it easier to fit around their small fingers. Guys wore the girls' rings on their pinky or around their neck.

Both guys and girls really took particular care on their appearance. The girls always looked lovely and smelled very nice on dates. I always loved to smell the perfume on a girl's neck (as long as it wasn't overpowering). We as guys insured we looked our very best. We wore our best jeans or dresss pants, a pressed shirt and polished shoes. Which leads me to the icon of the 60s that no guy could do without and no lady could resist and that was Jade East Cologne. The girls just went wild over it. I believe it was a toxic agent that released the hormones in the girls. At least that is what I thought and the buddies I hung out with thought.

Jade East was a 60s icon. Who could ever forget it. Just ask any girl or guy from the era. Hey do you remember the cologne Jade East? I don't remember where or how I came about my first bottle but I know I would never go out on a date without splashing some on me. In fact I still have a bottle today and it is still available online.

I remember back in 1965 when a buddy of mine traveled to Waverly, Ohio to see these lovely girls we met down there. It became a weekly ritual it seemed to date these girls. Anyways my friend, Ron kept a bottle of Jade East in the glove compartment for emergencies, you understand. So as we got closer to our destination, I reached in the glove box and pulled out the Jade East and splashed some on me and handed it to Ron who in grabbing the bottle dropped it and it spilled all over the front seat, his sweater and trousers. We now smelled like a traveling (&*#$&*@) house. What a great surprise this will be for our dates.

Of course when we picked them up, the smell in the car was overpowering and perhaps these dates of ours might be the only girls that I know that doesn't like Jade East today. Don't bother polling a Jane or a Jeanne from Waverly, Ohio about how well they liked Jade East. I believe the smell of Jade East is still in that car. When Ron got rid of that car and got a useless Corvair, I believe that smell remained in the car for the new owner to relish.

Those were the days, weren't they?

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Remembering the Chaos of Daylight Savings Time in the 1960s

At 2:00 AM November 4, 2007 we turn our clocks back to standard time from daylight savings time (DST). Does that mean one more hour of sleep or does it mean we just get out of bed an hour earlier because our bodies has just adjusted to when the clocks were turned up an hour? Do you recall the chaos it caused in the early 1960s?

A Brief History of Daylight Savings Time

Daylight savings time (DST) has been around in some form or another for quite sometime. The idea of daylight savings time originated from Benjamin Franklin really as a humorous and witty comment.He first spoke of the idea publicly in an essay titled "An Economical Project" which he conveyed as an American delegate while in Paris in 1784. His original intent with the essay was to be whimsical, by poking fun at the tendency of the French to sleep until noon. The essay pointed out that if 100,000 Parisian families burned half a pound of candles per hour for an average of seven hours per day, they would use a total of 64,050,000 pounds of candle wax, costing an immense sum of money that the city of Paris could save every year by implementing a Daylight Saving Time. Many of his friends an acquaintances became fasinated with the idea and continued to discuss it with him.

Then in London, around 1907, a builder named William Willett was the first to seriously try to persuade officials that setting clocks ahead by 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April and retarding them by the same amount on the four Sundays in September would be beneficial to everyone in helping get some extra daylight time over the summer for work. Willett lobbied mightily and spent a fortune trying to convince others, but most just laughed at him and he died about one year before it became a reality.

From 1945 to 1966, there was no US federal law about daylight saving time. By the early 1960s, observance of daylight saving time was inconsistent, with some states on DST, and no agreement when to change clocks. In 1961, when studies made by the committee for time uniformity studied the issue found that along a 35-mile stretch of highway between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, every traveler passed through no less than seven time changes.

Widespread confusion was created during the 1950s and 1960s when each U.S. locality could start and end Daylight Saving Time as it desired. One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore—but Chicago was. And, on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles! The situation led to millions of dollars in costs to several industries, especially those involving transportation and communications. Extra railroad timetables alone cost the today’s equivalent of over $12 million per year.

Noted Chaos

This chaos of changing the clocks had an effect on my family. I remember walking to church holding my younger sister's hand and arriving when church was just letting out. Some "smartass" high school kid said "kind of late aren't you." My sister and I walked home a little embarrassed and of course our mother wondered why we were home so early so we explained our embarrassing experience. Mom said it was daylight savings time and she didn't know if Circleville, Ohio of all places was observing it. She set the clocks up an hour that Sunday morning. On Monday we went to school and we were an hour early as she was for work. This was a situation that was normal across the entire state of Ohio in 1960 or 1961. Part of the town observed it and other parts did not. I imagine the problem existed throughout the nation.

A man, born just after 12:00 a.m. DST, circumvented the Vietnam War draft by using a daylight saving time loophole. When drafted, he argued that standard time, not DST, was the official time for recording births in his state of Delaware in the year of his birth. Thus, under official standard time he was actually born on the previous day—and that day had a much higher draft lottery number, allowing him to avoid the draft.

DJs in Ohio and TV comedians everywhere made fun of daylight savings time and the chaos and humourous situation it caused. This continued until 1966 when Federal laws were enacted governing the implemetation of daylight savings time.

Not all states observe daylight savings time. Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, most of the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which _does_ observe). Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, due to its large size and location in three states." This presents problems because you have to try to remember how many hours they are behind or ahead of you especially if making a phone call. I have called my daughter in Phoenix getting her out of bed because of the time difference which normally on standard time is hour but with DST it is 2 hours as she has late at night waking me up.

Don't forget to turn your clocks back before you go to bed on November 3.

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The Haunted Bridge Near Yellowbud

I was sitting here at my computer one day working on my 60s site, when my mind wandered back to a time when I was a sophomore or junior in high school in Circleville, Ohio. I was thinking about the haunted bridge near a place called Yellowbud close to Williamsport, Ohio.

Yellowbud was a very small town probably with a population of less than 500 at that time. I have no idea what the population today would be, but I would imagine it couldn't be much more than that now.

There was nothing unique about Yellowbud except it sat off on a state highway to Chillicothe. It was a typical farming town. Many of us used its back roads and easy access to park and neck. So when asked what college are you planning to attend we would jokingly say Yellowbud Tech. Of course no school by that name ever existed. That line got so famous that T-shirts were made with a Yellowbud Tech logo.

There was a covered bridge near Yellowbud that many students from high school and other places would go and hang out, park, sneak a six-pack of beer (3.2 beer then, you only had to be 18 to drink but could only buy the lower proof of beer) and enjoy some innocent fun.

I really don't know how they spread, but rumors started like wildfire that the bridge was haunted. Many kids and some adults claimed that they had seen ghosts of a man and woman from the 1800s hanging around the bridge. (I had been there a couple of times and hadn't seen anything but my imagination sure went round with the sounds of the night) Folks claimed that a woman and man who had lived nearby died under suspicious circumstances back in the 1800s and were trying to find their home which had long since been torn down.

It was the talk at school whic resulted in the traffic to the bridge increasing tenfold as everybody wanted to see the ghosts. As the story continued to grow and be stretched beyond believability, so did the volume of people visiting the site. Now there was no privacy for your parking, necking and beer drinking. Everybody was stumbling over each other. This place was becoming a tourist attraction!

This is where the story really gets wild. If you can remember back when you were a teenager, you can really take advantage of this opportunity for some real fun; that's what four classmates of mine did.

On the weekend they would head out to the bridge before nightfall long before others would arrive. These pranksters would dress up in something scary and hide in the rafters of the bridge and make weird haunting sounds and throw things down on cars crossing the bridge and sneak up to parking cars where couples parking and scare the holy crap out of them. You can imagine what that would do to anybody, especially with the rumors of the bridge being haunted.

As I continue to look back, I also remember a sheet being dropped from the rafters onto the windshield of an auto as it was crossing the bridge. What these haunters didn't count on was that this car belonged to a resident of Yellowbud, so the sheriff was called to investigate which for a short period of time created a patrol to the area. Now the pranksters were gone but the sheriff was there and breaking up the parking and necking.

When the patrols stopped, the pranks began once again as the rumors continued to fly from people seeing the ghosts. Many described them as a young couple dressed in amish clothes who actually spoke to them. This didn't stop the pranks until one night all four of these pranksters swore on the good book they saw the ghosts. The pranks stopped immediately.

I never saw the ghosts and I had been there. Did they exist? I don't know. There were plenty of credible people who saw them. What I do know is the bridge is no longer there as this one many like them disappeared over the years. It was just too costly to keep them maintained. One thing is for certain the covered bridges themselves were ghosts of our pasts. It's funny how you remember these insignificant events of our lives. Man what fun we had back in the 60s. Wouldn't you like to re-visit that time for just one more day?

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