Island Of Misfits

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This is my favorite pic of Walt. Makes ya wonder what alphabet soup group he belonged to back in the day.
cia walt.jpeg
 
Looks like I gotta be a tad more detailed: The Jap naughtybooks that these pictures are usually shown in are ALL carefully staged to make the painted butts look as real as possible. They line up the legs of the girls with the paint job. Looks weird as Bizarro World in some positions (legs going step-function sideways).<-- They explain this is in the blurbs.

Good job! They fooled me.

I'm defiantly going down to the barn, I still haven't found my Christmas decorations for the tree.

Buy another set and the old set will turn up shortly.
 
Aw, heck. I've written a dozen magazine articles about my Daddy. He was amazing.

My First Beer... How about my first caught fish? Daddy made it as amazing as the beer.

I was almost nine. It was a lovely day (school day :(). I finished my cereal and Daddy said,

"Hey Slug" (my cherished nickname) "Which would you rather do: Go to school, or go fishing with me?"

That was a question that boys wouldn't even fantasize about coming at them!

We went to Cold Spring Harbor on the North Shore of Long Island. Daddy had a brand-new Sea-King 4HP outboard motor. We zoomed out -- with me steering "toward that cloud" while Daddy set up the flounder rigs. Twin hooks on a little boom with sinker in the middle.

We stopped near a giant buoy. Daddy told me we had to let the bait get to the bottom where the flounders were.

But we couldn't. And so I caught my first-ever fish: a Bergall. All bones.
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There were gazillions of them, and we couldn't get past them. So we had to move.

We toodled back into the wetlands and tried there. We knocked 'em dead. I would drop my rig down about twenty feet, and BOOM! A fish... no, TWO fish were on!

This went on and on without a break. It was almost unreal. I had caught my first fish... and on the same day, I caught my 100th real fish.

We were using the smallest amount of those eldritch red bloodworms on the hooks. Eventually, we were scraping old detritus off the rented rowboat.

After a while, Daddy said: "OK, Slug, time to get back to the dock."

When I asked why, since the flounders were still biting like mad, he pointed to the freeboard left in the rowboat. We had so many fish in the boat, they were up to the seat tops. Any more, and we'd sink.

When we got home, Daddy filleted every single one of them. All the neighbors had fresh, boneless flounder fillets.
 
Well, I could tellya, but then I would have to blow this whole place up.
You do and I'll talk to the Warren commission about that black umbrella you were carrying in Daily Plaza. More of a range stake than a protest, eh? :)
 
Thinking you might have exceeded your daily bag limit Walt. Good thing a game Warden didn't wander by.
Bag limit? Wozzat? Even better, wozzat in 1940-fargin-9? Game Wardens don't look at flounder fishing folks. I don't think they ever had a game warden on Long Island.

Which brings us to two other things my Daddy taught me: How to catch a squirrel with a thin, whippy stick (sassafras was best) and a pocketknife... and how to tickle trout.
 
Even more trivia about life in the 1940's: Power outages were common. We had the only gas-powered refrigerator in the neighborhood.

So when the power went out, folks would show up at our place with labeled packages to put in our fridge. We were very popular in that neighborhood.

Memory hit. (I am told this happens to octopuses or whatever I am old of) I remember we would get a plastic bag of lard with a lima-bean-sized dot of reddish food coloring. My job was to knead and squoosh the bag of lard until the whole thing turned to butter color.

It was still lard. But you could put it on toast (toasters did not pop up in them days). There were two tilty sides, and you toasted two pieces one side at a time.

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I was born in '55, and I don't remember anything coming in plastic bags. Garbage went into a maggot infested galvanized metal can, milk came in bottles that were thick enough to beat someone to death with, and lard came in metal cans. I do remember some toys that came in plastic, but most were metal. Great for bouncing off the head of a brother that was twice your age that liked to pick on ya. :)

People always talk about climate change. The climate will change with us or without us. If you're serious about cleaning up the environment, ban all single use plastic items. Food used to come in cans or glass jars, both of which are recyclable. I'd miss garbage bags, but I can remember a life before them.

Most of all the lifeforms that lived on this planet died off way before us hairless monkeys crawled down from the trees. Wonder how many gas powered SUVs they drove?
 
I was born in '55, and I don't remember anything coming in plastic bags. Garbage went into a maggot infested galvanized metal can, milk came in bottles that were thick enough to beat someone to death with, and lard came in metal cans. I do remember some toys that came in plastic, but most were metal. Great for bouncing off the head of a brother that was twice your age that liked to pick on ya. :)
I tried to find a picture, but found something even better: Someone else talking about being the one to squoosh the lard/margarine plastic bag.
Barbara Lancaster
, Seeker of the better way at Systems Integrator
Answered 2 years ago · Upvoted by
Tara Nitka
, PhD Chemistry, The University of Texas at El Paso (2021) · Author has 1.1K answers and 274K answer views
Yes, as a child growing up in Canada in the late ‘50s, I relished the ‘job’ of squishing up the small blob of yellow dye in the bag of margarine. I understand that the reason to keep the margarine white until in the hands of the consumer was to ensure that we weren’t fooled into thinking it was butter.
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I note that she's talking the late '50s. So here's a guy closer to my age who squooshed in the '40s same as me:

Bob Mouk
, former Industrial Research Chemist / Chemistry Professor
Answered 2 years ago · Author has 1.4K answers and 223.3K answer views
I did it in 1946 or 1947. Tedious, but a good job for a kid.
 
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I imagine the longer you worked it, the easier it was due to the warming of the lard from the heat coming off of your hands. Makes my arthritis hurt just thinking about it!
Yer gittin' it wrong, bro. The kids LOVED to do it. If you think of the resources of little kids just after rationing (I remember ration books!) you'll realize that the unique opportunity to squoosh something -- with strong parental approval -- was something not to be missed.
 

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