And when they come, we talk about some fun things that went on in Racine when maybe you
were growing up, maybe when your parents were growing up or sibling was growing up.
And today it's Christmas time and I forgot to get your song up.
I'll do it in a little while. I forgot about it. We were too busy talking, but we'll get it
up there in a moment. Carol and Jimmy here, we're taking you back to the presence you got when
you were a kid in the 1950s and Carol actually brought hers in and you brought a couple into.
Look at this. I can't believe you saved them. Well, just in case this is be live on TV down,
I guess it isn't though, but I have to tell you, I've been sitting here. Would you believe
that Jim brought in his David Crockett? It's not, well, yeah, it is a David Crockett has more
life. It's more like the raccoons on the honeymoon. That was the that was the happy war on the
honeymoon. Yeah, I have to sit through that too to our listening audience at these two guys.
They were former. They'd like to have been former members of the raccoons. We would have been
done, right? I think so. And North and Ralph Crampton and the raccoons that they had a David
Crock. As a matter of fact, there's one episode of the honeymooners where the little kid says,
and he looks at Ralph, every way to say, I never knew David Crockett was so fat.
Okay, let's go. Let's talk about the toys in the 50s at Christmas time and nothing was computerized.
Oh, nothing. Nothing. These were not electronic toys for the most part. These were all toys.
You had to just enjoy the way they were and they were really well built back then too.
And, you know, Donna, there's just nothing like our childhood Christmas memories of some of our
favorite toys we got. You know, back in the 50s, there were so many different toys to pick from,
and we're going to mention a few of them today, right, Carol? Yes. And enjoy, I guess what would you
say, the innocence of our childhood where in those early years of grade school, we believed in
Santa Claus, and we were just delighted, delighted with the traditions that we were learning,
less complicated life, I think. So we did develop, though, lists for our parents to know and
Santa to know of what we were hoping for. So lucky you got those cardboard blocks.
Yes, that was my big gift. That was in the 50s. My brother got 245 RPM records. I still remember
what they were. And I got the, that was for my uncle. I got the cardboard blocks for my parents,
but they were, they were pretty big. They were like, you know, that a foot long. And they looked
like bricks. They had, you know, the printing on them. Sure. And you had to assemble them,
and we had about, I know, a dozen of them. And we used to make walls and try to, you know,
make me get around the bricks and stuff. I had so much fun with those blocks. I hate to sound
like an old conjure, but it was really fun. Yeah. Did you finally let him go when you were 30 or so?
What makes you so sure I let him go? After a while, they get kind of ragged, you throw him around,
and it's just cardboard. And they get kind of used in, you know, some. Yeah, I'm going to turn 20.
21. I had to get rid of them. Yeah. Graduating from college, the blocks are going.
Well, Jim, now we talked about without a lot of television or the internet. How did we get these
wish lists going for ourselves? Back in the 50s, we would probably hit some of the stores downtown,
walking through them. Of course, back then, downtown was, for a kid's viewpoint, it was the
center of the universe. It was magical. And that's where we got a lot of our ideas.
And it was a lot of fun because there were stores like Zons, who had a whole toy department downstairs,
pennies, had a pennies annex, which was full of toys, just right next door to pennies,
just to the south. There were stores like Firestone and Premium Sales. More Jones, I think, was the
King of Toys department. They had toys on a mezzanine, and you could see it from the
from the lower level, just loaded with toys. So that was the place to go to get ideas
was these downtown stores. So, Don, I have to ask you, did you ever hear of our more Jones store
when you were living in New York? No, it was not. You missed more Jones? Yeah, we didn't have that one.
You missed Zons too, probably. You missed it. Well, another part of developing our wish lists
would be the window shopping downtown. And we did it all times a day, but how magical it was at night.
Getting dark for 430. I can just see the block of Zons down to Fanny Farmer. And across from
Monument Square with the Nativity set in the Christmas tree. And the windows. Now, of course,
we had the more Jones with the big windows for toys. Premium sales, we could see windows.
But we also did window shopping just, well, some of us young gals for clothes, idols, pennies,
Zons. And even for some of you guys, you might have noticed Joseph Lawrence, the millers,
flowers, and the flower shop next door to it. Big window shopping filled with red point
setters. And porters, a half a block long with those beautiful guild gallery rooms that you could
see like dining rooms set for multi millionaires for Christmas. Window shopping, we really got a lot
of lists and wonderful times. What else would you say? Well, from the catalogs too. Remember,
Montgomery Ward, they had a catalog. Penny's had a catalog. Sears had that real thick and heavy one.
There was also one from Eldens, I remember my parents getting. But we have a couple of them here,
which we brought. One is from Zons. Again, they had a toy department downstairs. And Firestone.
Firestone was the store just east of the courthouse right in the corner. And you wouldn't think
Firestone would be having a they had trucks and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, a catalog.
I just heard a new story. I'm making a comeback. I got a catalog in the mail from Amazon.
Yeah, you would think Amazon was the last people to put one out. It was a toy catalog. And it was
about, you know, maybe a half an inch thick and it came in the mail. But yeah, you know, you know,
why I think I think if you look at something at the table while you're eating and just thumb through
it, you pay more attention to it than you do when it's online. Because now you're relaxed. You're
just looking through it. Yeah. Well, something else I noticed. And Jim, we have to thank you again
for all your collections. Because these two catalogs that are out out out here for Don to see
from Zons and Firestone from the 50s. I mean, they are really vintage. But what I'm getting at is
whoever did this. It maybe was the toy companies. These write-ups, they were like masterful
write-ups. No matter if it was 98 cents, it wasn't just something like a toy car.
Little children will love this metal. If you read it, you wanted it. Yeah. I mean, these
write-ups are incredible. It's like J.P. Durbin catalog on Seinfeld. They take the simplest
little thing. I mean, write this paragraph. Yeah. That's what they do. They take a simple hat
and they're going to say, how do we sell these hats? And they make this storage backstory on this hat.
Yeah. They could have condensed these catalogs instead of 70 pages down to about 25 if they just
listed the item. Right. We're going to share some of these toys from these catalogs in a little bit
here. Well, I sure remember paging through them. Sure. Yeah. We had this old, comfy dig. We called
it the wing chair. And in our old house, it was right in front of a heat register.
Ever happy then. Childhood, joy and mystic, very toyland. Once you pass its borders, you can never return again.
Boy, that must have been fun back then. Toiland. Yeah. I know, I know if you go to
Florida, farm and fleet, they do a toyland every, every October, which was kind of at least a
broadcast in there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's kind of fun. Now I just look at it and say, well,
that's expensive. I'm sorry for people that have young kids. All right. Let's move on.
When the kids are older, you just write a check, put in an envelope and say Merry Christmas. Yeah.
Thought put into it two seconds. All right. I interrupted. We have we have Carol G and Forte
and Jim to see you here. We're talking about growing up and with our toys that we used to have
and they actually brought their toys in here, which is kind of neat. I can't believe they still have
them. All right. Let's continue. You got the little peculiar saving these things, but yeah,
Carol off before. So why don't we continue? Well, just that we we how do we make our wish lists?
And it was for walking downtown and seeing our beautiful stores and the catalogs and now TV
commercials too. I guess I don't really remember an influx of gift commercials, but Jim,
you've got a better memory. And we had the Saturday morning cartoons in the Mickey Mouse Club
and the Westerns. And you watched sci-fi too. Yeah. We had some sci-fi shows to watch. I remember,
of course, everybody remembers Superman. And if you were back in the 50s growing up in the 50s,
you certainly remember Flash Gordon Deserial. Now, I watch Superman every day. I recorded it.
It's on one of those, you know, way back channels. Yeah. And every day when I come home from here,
I watch an episode of Superman. Yeah. And I know all the dialogue. I know everything about it.
It's the same crooks every week. All the time. Yeah. And I still want to know when Superman
flies and lands, what's he doing with Clark? Can shoes suit? It's never it's always pressed.
Where's he putting that hat under his cape that has never had the hats always in good shape?
Where's he hiding all this stuff? These are very important questions to keep going tomorrow.
Where's my brother? Where's my brother? Said the flying part doesn't that doesn't bother you.
You got past that. Now you're worrying about what you do with the shoes.
We also had science fiction theater. I remember a show called Captain Midnight. Well,
what we're getting to here is that they all heavily advertise for kids. And I still to this day
remember a commercial for slinky member slinky. It was walking down the stairs by itself. The
slinky was two years ago. Our son got my wife a slinky for Christmas. You're just two years ago.
They still make them. I've been doing research. And I want the metal ones out the plastic ones.
Yeah. The metal ones. Yeah. That's when they pick them up. You get a slice your finger on them.
That you want those metal ones. Yeah. And in my research for this program right now,
the figures are 300 million slinkies have been sold. So a lot of slinkies in this world.
You know, and when you think about it, it's really just a, I mean, the guy who came up with slinky.
He was discovered by accident. He probably dropped the bed spring one day.
Oh, that would be fun. Yeah. It had something to do with a ship.
Shipbuilding because I read that also. What's it you? I know. It's pretty impressive.
It all came from something with a ship. Another commercial I remember was a Ford Apache.
And this was made by Mark's Mark's toy company. M-A-R-X. That's right. Yeah.
Not the Mark's brothers, but Mark's. Ford Apache. I mean, when they had that commercial,
every kid just wanted one immediately. Yeah. I really had plastic fences. You build it all
for the plastic. It was, it looked like a wooden fence, but it was plastic. You know,
one around, you had the Ford. Yep. And then you had that politically incorrect thing
within Indians attacking the fourth. It's very, very politically incorrect. Yes. That's right.
And from our catalogs here, for boys, we had the Wild West costumes. And you could buy a
Davy Crockett costume and see, I got my coons again, with me here. So I already tried that
on for Don, so he knows all about that. I'm really happy there. Because I got a quick story to tell you.
Sure. My dad, he did work in the plumbing business, but not plumbing for like a house,
one of the big skyscrapers in Manhattan. And he was up at Fred Trump's apartment,
Donald Trump's father collecting some money for a job he did. And getting the next job lined up.
And there was Donald Trump, three years old, riding a tricycle with a cowboy outfit on.
No kidding. My father said, maybe a little cowboy outfit to hat and the old things. And so,
when my cousin who worked for Fox James Rose and was interviewing him, he said, my uncle already
remembers you with a cowboy outfit, riding a tricycle in your dad's apartment in your apartment.
And he looked at and he said, I remember that cowboy outfit. So yeah, there's a cowboy outfit.
See how important this program is about remembering our toys. Even the president of the United
States, he was remembering Donald Trump's toys. I didn't have an outfit. You could also buy a
lone ranger outfit at Zons for two bucks. And that came complete with chaps, a flannel shirt,
a 10 gallon hat. You had to have one of them, right? Bright bandana, a laryette, or a rope,
a pistol. And of course, the mask. And it said down the ad, be ready to tame the toughest outlaw.
I hope you got one of those. I think I did. I hope so. You could buy Lionel trains.
I was in a stadium. Our friend Marsha post. She wants to remind us that girls had
Wild West. Yeah, I could do that too. Lionel trains could be bought at Firestone for under 60 bucks.
That was the old gauge, of course. And it came with smoke and a whistle, cold tender, operating
lumber cars, hopper cars, two box cars, and a caboose under 60 bucks. Zons sold a cheaper
Marx Brothers train sets for a lot, a lot less money. A service station or a gas station,
you could buy that at Firestone for seven bucks. It had lighted gasoline pumps, which actually
held water, a working elevator, a complete with a working car wash as well, even a hydraulic lift.
Again, seven bucks at Firestone, toy fire trucks. You have a, have a toy fire struck.
Yes, it is. Yeah, I did. Okay, one. Remember to have a toy. Oh, yeah, yeah, plastic though. These,
I think, were metal. You could buy this hook and ladder metal truck complete with a working siren,
which had to drive your parents, not some sugar. Other trucks you could buy there was a large
crane truck with a magnet and even a garbage truck. That's what I wanted when I was a kid.
Erector set. The famous AC Gilbert, complete with mechanical motor, five hours at Zons.
You could make a hundred different models to choose from. My favorite was the merry go round
and the working Ferris wheel. You can make all that stuff by yourself, sleds and saucers and
toboggins. And these saucers were metal. I mean, if you got hit by one of these, you felt it.
I hope you weren't throwing them at people. Yeah, they were too big for that. And this was for
our famous Washington Park, toboggin sleds. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the toboggin was, right? Sleds,
we'll get into sleds a little bit later. Yeah, we have a whole list of toys. Yeah, I'm going to
get some commercials that actually talked about these toys. They're old jingles and we'll play
some of those too. Here he come. Here he come. Great to toy you've ever been. And his name is
Mr. Machine. He is real. He is real. And for you, he is ideal. And his name is Mr. Machine.
Just outside you know, that's the toy I got. Yeah, when I was a little kid, Mr. Machine. And it was
like a walking robot with a million gears inside. They said, take it apart, put it back together.
You never get it back together again. Chris, there's no diagram on how to take it apart and put it back
together in a different memory. And what five-year-old kids see, they show it, they come and go,
I'm looking at the commercial, they show it in pieces. But you know, you're talking about a little
kid doing this. I couldn't get a student from MIT to take that apart. Chris, Christmas
tantrums or something. No, when you get apart, it doesn't work again. You move on to the next toy
and destroy that one. Just keep moving. Speaking about toys, Jim Bissier is here. Carol,
GM4, we're talking about toys from the growing up years, in the 50s, maybe early 60s. And Jim's
going through his list, his wish list, when he was a little Jimmy. Go Jimmy. We left off with
sleds. And these were not the plastic ones we see today. These were the actual wood with the
metal runners. And if you got hit by that, you knew about that. You could buy the silver streak for
$7 at Firestone. Toy guns, every boy had to have a pistol and a holster set, of course, a buck
over at Zons. You could also buy a twin pistol set. And the ad set, you've never seen such a swell
set. You wouldn't see that word anymore, right? I remember getting the blunt line special from
that was Wyatt Earps gun when I was a kid. Chemistry sets, I think we got a lot of chemistry sets,
or at least I did, 350 had Zons, includes plenty of chemicals, test tubes, racks, and a wooden
lab cabinet. You could make 345 experiments. And that was your chance to blow up the house.
Tinker toys, we all played with tinker toys, 75 cents at Zons. Remember these don the smooth wooden
rods that fit into holes and around blocks. It kept kids busy for hours. Ice skates, 10 to 15 dollars
at Firestone. The ad says skate your troubles away. Hockey skates were mostly for boys. They were
built for speed while figure skates were mostly for girls. They were made for comfort. And like Carol
reminded me, we used to skate at the zoo pond, Washington bowl, and almost every neighborhood have
an ice skating rink at one time. And the last thing I remember was the road building equipment.
At Zons, bucket piece, you could get a steam roller, road grader, bulldozer, and a bunch of other
things. And these were the metal ones, not the cheap plastic ones. Now I get the most dangerous toy
of all time. What's that? This was actually sold in 1950. It was called the Gilbert U-238 Atomic
Energy Lab. They came with actual uranium. It had four glass jars, each with a small amount
of radioactive material inside. So you can use a Geiger counter to test the radiation levels.
Wasn't that dangerous? If you opened the jars, it became dangerous. But if you kept them closed
when that dangerous, it was like being exposed to the sun for a full day. I guarantee you at least one
kid cracked open that jar and ate the uranium. And those are usually the backstores and how the
superheroes began. And uranium when I was a kid, now I'm a superhero. Less than 5,000 sets
were sold between 1950 and 1951. It got pulled from the market thanks to government restrictions.
And because it was just too hard to get the uranium. Could you imagine buying that for your little
kid of uranium? So with real uranium in there, it's radioactive. But you know, on a less dangerous note,
when I'm going to talk about toys for girls, I'll jump ahead and say, we had stoves,
like, you know, kitchen sets. And we had stoves that actually, they heated. I mean, it was electricity.
We're not talking about canner easy bake oven, are we? That was a light bulb in there, I know.
But I had to look up. Now, what was the agency that tried to regulate this? So I came up with
underwriter's lab, UL. So you must have said you can blow up, you can get the uranium and do all
that. I'm kidding. You don't buy your kid uranium that he can take out of a glass jar and
eat and become radioactive. He just don't do it. Yeah, right. Good thing I was a girl because we
just had dolls to think about at the time. And you had the chemistry sets too. All the chemistry sets.
Yeah. All you know, it was a big stink bomb. So talk about that presence for girls. What I
have found political correctness, this is kind of to an extreme, but in your two catalogs, Jim,
this was the era in our grade school times before Barbie. And so the dolls that we liked in these
catalogs and the accessories, the kitchen accessories, the phrases were little mothers. We were all
little mothers. Now, eventually we came to say that dads could take care of kids, dads could bake,
dads could make supper. So I don't think the little mothers is anymore at the page after page of
us little mothers. But that's how our catalogs were. And so as a little mother, the big dolls were
Betsy, Betsy and Tiny Tears because you could give them the bottle and they would wet their diaper.
But we know this, Jim, you're going to break in now and say about your friend, Betsy.
I have a cousin in California named Betsy and she was always teased in grade school. Hey,
Betsy, did you wet your pants, Betsy? She was so embarrassed. She hated that though. And her name for
I was Donald Duck. Oh, sure you were. I bet you were. There was coming. There we go.
And well, let's join in here. Pity me. My, my maiden name was Burrow. So I was docky.
It was very painful. Donald Duck, get over here. Docky? Yeah. There's another name you could
well go into that. Yeah, we were, we were still innocent that day. It was the lighter version.
But you know, everything centered around being little mothers. And so dolls, bride dolls,
little Ginny dolls, paper dolls. I had a set, oh, Queen Elizabeth had just been her
coronation. So Queen Elizabeth, paper dolls. Then we had to have our doll houses and furniture.
And I looked up mine, 10, you can get the same version used all over the internet.
Maybe $5,200. But it was open to you. You didn't have to open doors. There was one
cycle completely open. So you just looked into the garage, the living room kitchen upstairs,
the bathroom and two bedrooms. There didn't happen to be a staircase. But you just assumed that
you got up to the second floor. Fine. Now, the play kitchens I was mentioning, even with
stoves. And I was going to read from the catalog, but we'll watch the time. Yes, they even heated.
We had high chairs and ironing boards and irons that heated. So dolls and kitchens for our little
mothers. Now crafts, my friend Maria and I turned out woven pot holders for several years.
We would sit watching our TV shows and everyone was getting a pot holder for several years.
Little girls, we were aware of birthstones. And so some jewelry, not necessarily expensive at all,
but brands, pennies. Maybe we got a little jewelry box with velvet inside,
girls and clothes. You know, I don't think you boys were too interested in the clothes that you
were going to get. Not at all. But we got things like muclux with bells on. Did you have muclux
out east? No, no. Maybe it's our Indian heritage out here. No.
Muffs to put your hands in, you know, fluffy muffs. But I brought in today a couple of my saved
books because we all love these toys so much that were some are saved today. In third grade,
our teacher at Lincoln School read to us Charlotte's web. And I think it became a classic. I still
have that book. And I still have one that my grandmother inscribed little tiny books. Golden
books were big right here in Racine. And Poke Little Puppy was the biggest seller there.
Did you get Golden Books out east? Yes, I did. I didn't live in a cave in the
Adirondex mountain. In the Poke Nellies, in the Catskill Mountains, I live in a cave.
I gave my daughter that book, Poke Little Puppy.
Number one for Golden Books forever. We did a lot of coloring us girls. And Crayola,
had gone from small boxes, would you believe to 48 or 64? 64 and the 64 had the crayon
sharpener in the back. Yes. So even as a young man, as a boy, you were acquainted with this. Yes.
Yes, boys used crayons, yes we did. And then roller skates. Now they were the clamp on type.
And from our catalog too, they were only four or five dollars here. They have your roller skates
with a key to make the clamps go tighter. Don't lose that key. Don't lose the key. Yeah. Yeah,
because no two keys ever operated this in there for roller skates. You had to have a locksmith
to go to get the roller skates off you. Well, roller skates were big in my life for several years
because on Carlisle Avenue, we had the old old trees. And when we were really young, the sidewalks
were all raised from the tree roots. So maybe when I was in second or third grade,
three houses in a row, mine, our knowns and Jackie Olson, we all got new sidewalks at the same
time. And that meant roller skating. We could roller skate for three properties, learned to turn
around at the end. That was really thrilling. And then I wasn't into this, but finally a lot of
girls, they loved their batons and little costumes. And we would watch the baton girls in the
fourth of July parade. You know, they knew how to throw their baton way up into the air, catch it.
So they were training, they were training for our fourth of July. Yeah, or they throw it up and
it would drop on the floor. And then, you know, for the rest of their lives, they're scarred.
They'll be remembered as the person who dropped the baton. Jim Messier, Carol Jean Forte,
here. We're talking about Christmas gifts back in the 1950s, maybe early 60s. And we did the toys
for girls, the toys for boys. Now, here were the toys for both boys and girls. Yes, both.
One that I remember was silly putty. Remember that one done? Silly putty, notty putty. They had
them all. It was the same thing. It was just different names. Okay. Etch's sketch was another one,
two knobs, one for horizontal, one for vertical lines. You can draw a thing. You really couldn't draw
much. Everything had to be a straight line. That's right. That's right. What else did we have here?
Mr. Potato Head. Still around. There's still cells. Yeah. It used to be with an original potato,
but they cut that out because they got a lot of complaints that it was rotting and everything.
So they had to stop that. It used to be a real one. That was the plastic one. And that was the
first toy that was ever advertised on TV. It was a really. Okay. First one, right. Who remembers
Cody? Cody Shared Dice. Yeah. Yeah. Keep adding legs and all that's right. Yeah. Different
the pieces. Carol, you remember a few? Well, we had the old card game of old made and go fish,
pick up sticks that came in that cylinder. Oh, yes. And all these things were best played on the
floor. I mean, I look at my eight-year-old granddaughter. The floor is everything. Now it would be
hard to be playing anything on the floor for me. That's right. That's right. And Yo-Yo's. Now,
I never got into Yo-Yo's, but in my research, would you believe that the Duncan Yo-Yo,
they think now that 45 million have been sold. One of our teachers where I went to high school,
he was a Duncan Yo-Yo national champion. That was before I went to high school, but he
he was Mr. Parks. He was on TV and all the national champions. He used to drive his car around
the town where it lived and take out a suitcase and do an impromptu show right there on the street
with all his Yo-Yo's Mr. Parks. I wonder if he's online. Do you think anything was saved?
I'm sure he's dead by now. I know, but look up the Mr. Parks. Mr. Parks, Tom Parks.
Yeah, I think it was Tom Parks. Yeah. I think the toy that we love the most for boys,
Angerls, was view master. Yeah. Remember the view master? They do. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
And you were surprised. I guess you did cartoons and stuff. I did Washington, DC. That's how I saw
Washington, DC for the first time. Okay. It's a very blossom time in front of the monument.
It really good 3D, by the way. Yeah. The early ones, like you said, had different locations,
like Niagara Falls, DC, Grand Canyon, but then they got smart and they went to like Roy Rogers,
Alice in Wonderland, Lassie Mickey Mouse, and one of my favorites, Little Red Riding Hood.
It was so lifelike, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. I mean, you were right there. That's right.
That's right. Well, and then we had our record players. Oh, yeah.
Gina Drew was here, a major Christmas. He was. Yeah. A vocalist across to the snowman. Yeah.
And Rudolph. Yeah. That's right. That's right. But Jim, I think for back to our wish list,
we had to tell Santa what we wanted. Did you go to Zanz? Absolutely. And I think every baby
boomer in town went to Zanz to get their picture taken with Santa. Oh, my. Look at this.
And we have one here. Don, don't look at this roller. This is where every kid in town had their
picture taken with Santa. Boy, Zanz had a great costume. Oh, my God. Little Jimmy. Who's that young
lady? What do you want? Sister Kathy. Little Jimmy and Kathy. Zanz the park. That looks like
the real Santa. That's the guy. Yeah, that was a great. It was a great costume. A great costume.
That's right. Little Jimmy. Well, do we have time now for our favorite Christmas story?
Yeah, we'll make it fast. Okay. Yeah. Well, my best Christmas or favorite story about getting a
present. My, you know, only child, my father, mother and I, we were sitting Christmas Eve
cold night around our Christmas tree, maybe seven o'clock or so, starting to open our presents.
And would you believe the telephone ring? We only had one phone. My father got up. He answers
the phone. He comes back in the living room and he says, Carol, the phone call is for you.
Well, I mean, who called? I mean, you didn't even use a phone much. So I'd go out there.
It was Santa Claus calling. And he told me that the president was too big to go down the chimney.
And so what I needed to do was tell my parents he had left it in the garage.
So we got on our, our clothes, our boots. My parents played this to a tee.
Had to walk out to the garage, open up the garage, the locked garage, turn on the one dangling light.
And there was my new two wheeler. Love the best Christmas ever. And always thank the next
star neighbor who eventually I discovered Philip Wiler was playing Santa Claus.
My best Christmas. Jim, how about you? Well, my story involves my dad. He always played Santa Claus
for Kathy and I. And after dinner, he would go with the intent of delivering some soup to my
grandmother. That was his way of changing in the garage and coming back to the front door,
which he did. Doorbell rang. There was Santa Claus. And when he came in, my sister kept noticing his
shoes. And after he left, she said, you know, Santa has the same shoes as dad. How could that be?
And she got real suspicious when he came back. You know, he had the same shoes on again. So she
knew right then and there because of those dang shoes. There's always a slip up. Yeah,
that's right. Merry Christmas to you and Terry. Thank you. And thank you. And should we jump
ahead to January? Yes, let's do that. We're going to talk about grade school memories.
I have a ton of them. There you go. Okay. It's going to be maybe a three-parter because
there's just so much to talk about. But we're going to relive some of our pleasant grade school
memories, the recess, the teachers, our classmates, what we learned, what we didn't learn.
It's endless. It's endless. So that's all winter. Yeah. It could be. It could be. It could be.
It could be. It could be. I want to thank you guys. Great year. It's so it's just fun.
Oh, thank you. And if you missed any of the Jim and Carol's that we have done on the radio,
they're all podcasted. Everyone of them just go to www.JN.com or civicmedia.us. So we're
every get your podcast you can see. And this one will be on probably late tonight,
early tomorrow morning. It'll be up there in case you missed. Thank you guys very much.
Dan, you're a gift to all of us. Thank you. And I thank you guys. I wish you both
Merry Christmas. You're in your families. Thank you. And a lot of fun. I'm going to take
a few pictures of all this. Thank you guys very much.
