WHERE HAVE YOU GONE MARSHAL DILLON? 

or Things You Hardly See Anymore 

When was the last time you saw a double feature at the movies? How old were you when you last bought a piece of penny candy? There many things we experienced in our youth that you don't see anymore or just no longer exist.  Today’s column is in honor of the premiere of Gunsmoke 65 years ago tonight. 

Whether it's a ball, a stick, a rock or just running around, kids will always find something to play with. When I was a boy growing up in the early 60s, our toys rarely had batteries and certainly there was no such thing as a printed circuit board. We had to make our own noise. Almost every boy who ever lived back then had a cap pistol. Remember the smell of that minute amount of gunpowder that made us think we were shooting the real thing. When the pathetic pop of cap gun wasn't enough, we got the biggest kick from igniting an entire roll of caps, all at once. You see, all you needed was a hard surface, the sidewalk, a brick and something to ignite it with - daddy's claw hammer worked excellently. We would place the roll on its round edge (it seemed to work better that way) and then with one swift stroke of the hammer, bam!, you created an explosion. 

Every spring when the winds of March began to howl, we all asked for a new kite. There were no plastic kites with plastic frames in those days. Yep, our kites were made out of paper with a flimsy pair of wooden sticks which had to be carefully bent into a frame to hold the even more fragile paper. After you put the kite together, or got your parents to do it for you, the first thing you had to do was to prepare the string. Kite string came wrapped in an apple shape around a round piece of cardboard. This arrangement proved impractical when it came time to release the kite into a strong breeze. Every kid knew that the best kite string holder was a stick from a tree in the back yard. There weren't that many places to fly a kite in those days. The vast majority of our kites met their fates in the trees and power lines of the neighborhood. The best place to fly a kite was out on the farm or if you didn't have a farm, you could ride over to Hilburn Park, Battle Field or out to the parking lot of the Shamrock Bowl. 

In the last sixty years, the demographics of Dublin's neighborhoods have undergone a dramatic metamorphosis. When I attended Moore Street School in the 1960s, nearly every kid in the school lived between Rosewood Drive on the east, Green Street on the southwest, and Pine Forest Circle on the northwest. They were the western boundaries of the city. Whenever you wanted to get up a game of baseball or touch football, all you had to do was get on your bike and ride around the neighborhood. The majority of every household had at least one baby boomer at home, most of them three or four. 

When we didn't have anything else to do, we would just climb a tree. When was the last time you saw a bunch of kids in a tree? Pecan trees were the best and we had two of them in our back yard. When our mother wasn't looking, we would shinny as far up into the top of the tree as we could. The ultimate goal was to climb high enough to a perch where you could see the old brick water tower behind the City Hall. Luckily, I never fell out and neither did any of my friends. We could stay up for hours. When we got big enough, we learned that we could carry boards up in the tree and nail them into the tree to fashion out a seat or additional steps. Once again, daddy's hammer came in very handy. 

Saturdays were the best. When our mothers needed to go shopping or just wanted a break for awhile, we would get to go the movies. Oh, our mothers went sometimes, but there many days when they would drop us off at the Martin Theater and come back and pick us up four hours later. In those days, they had double features. You know, two movies for the price of one. Charlie Traylor, the manager of the Martin, would always keep us in line. "Feet off the seats, boys" and "be quiet!" were our orders. Banishment was our biggest dread. Calling our mothers was even worse. In those days, eight year-olds could go to the movies without parental supervision. Can you imagine leaving a couple of eight year old kids at the movies today? I think not. All we needed was a quarter to get in and the rest of a dollar to fill up on cokes, popcorn, sugar babies and red hots. If we were really lucky, we would all pile in the car and drive over to East Dublin to go to the drive in movie. 

When was the last time you saw a bunch of kids on bicycles? Most of us had them. We rode our bikes around the yard, around the neighborhood and when you finally convinced your mother that you were big enough, you could cross Bellevue Road or Kellam Road and ride downtown. Riding a bike by yourself wasn't that fun. You couldn't race by yourself, so we always sought out a friend to ride with. Every so often, there would be a pack of us riding down the street. The coolest thing ever invented for a boy of the sixties was the V-room motor. Before the V-room motor, we used mama's bridge cards or our Smokey Burgess or Roy McMillan baseball cards to simulate the sound of a gasoline motor. No one in his or her right mind ever fastened a Mickey Mantle card on the spokes of his bicycle tire. The V-room motor attached to the bike frame and came with a battery. You would hop on the bike, start peddling real fast and reach down and flip the switch, and wa-lah!, you were riding a motor powered bike.  What happened to phone booths, stand alone large mail receptacles, and full service stations?

When we were old enough, we got to ride to the neighborhood store to get, what else, candy. Candy was the salvation of our youth. It's what we dreamed of, what we lived for. Believe or not, you could buy a piece of candy for a penny. Remember Mary Janes, Kits (strawberry was the best), sour straws (with sour flavored sugar inside), wax coca cola shaped bottles with sugar water inside, wax vampire fangs, bazooka bubble gum with cartoons wrapped around it and best of all the 10 cent candy bar. Today, most of the neighborhood groceries, like Mercer's, Fairway and Ben's Pic and Pay (affectionately known to some as Ben's Grab and Run), and all of those delicious candies are all gone now. Actually Fairway Supermarket, which was located across from the old Dublin High School, is still in operation, only under a different name. We bought cokes in glass, not plastic, bottles. Glass bottles were expensive to produce; that's why we eventually went to plastic. There was hardly an unbroken bottle left along the streets and highways that wasn't quickly snapped up by a thirsty kid. You could pick up four of them, take them to the store and turn them in for a cold coca cola. If you wanted that cap pistol, a crate full would do. 

Many things I remember from the sixties are all but gone now. Board games, making frog houses with your feet, homecoming parades, the sight of the old rotating light beacon at the airport, TV the Cat -, the mascot of Channel 13 (the only channel that all of us could get all of the time) and polio vaccine served on sugar cubes, have all but disappeared now. I miss them. I miss "Dark Shadows" on a stormy afternoon. I miss chasing lightning bugs in the woods. I miss the smell of popcorn in Woolworth's Dept. Store. I miss the swimming pools in Stubbs Park. 

Almost everyday you can turn your television and catch an old episode of "Gunsmoke." In the early years of the decade, western programs dominated the airwaves. Cowboys were our heroes. Matt Dillon was mine. He was the epitome of what I wanted to be. He was the good guy and the good guy always won. He always did what was right. Despite the claims to the contrary, strapping on a cap pistol, donning a cowboy hat and shooting your best friend didn't turn us into a hoard of murderers and criminals. Other forces accomplished that task without the influence of Hoss Cartwright, Festus Hagan, or the Rifleman. In today's world, when the bad guys win with altogether too much frequency, I am looking for Marshall Matt Dillon. If Marshall Dillon was here, everything would be right with the world. Where, oh where have you gone, Marshall Dillon?