Dean Shalhoup

It’s springtime in the early 60s. President Kennedy is in the White House, the Space Race is on, the Cold War is freezing over, Fidel Castro is making noise again, and John Birchers are rifling through closets and attics and looking under beds for “Commies” intent on turning the good old US of A into another Russia.

First-runs of The Beverly Hillbillies, Route 66 and The Price is Right are coming into our living rooms via aluminum twisted tentacles called TV aerials, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and the “Monster Mash” are testing the tiny speakers in our transistor radios, and I’m out in the backyard wearing a blindfold competing in a hotly-contested game of Pin The Tail on the Donkey.

If you’re a baby boomer you know that scenario well, assuming the old memory bank is still processing the gigs and megs. Indeed, if there’s any tradition that shouts “baby boomer!” more than the backyard birthday party, I don’t know what it is.

We boomers are blessed, really, to be able to look back fondly upon those special couple of hours after school, or on a Saturday morning, when every neighborhood kid was your friend, simply because he or she showed up with a colorfully-wrapped item that had your name on it.

For this baby boomer, those special couple of hours happened to come around this time of year, right about when lawns were really greening up, trees were coming back to life and flowers – not that I really ever noticed, but anyway – were blooming in the yard.

Unless the weather gods were kinder than I remember, my annual couple of hours as The Birthday Boy must have been rained out at least once or twice, and the fact that I can recall opening presents and devouring cake and ice cream in the living room, rather than the backyard, is probably pretty good evidence that the weather gods threw me a curve once or twice.

Who remembers that game that involved clothespins and milk bottles? The object was quite simple: Drop as many clothespins as you can into the bottle within a set amount of time.

The rules said you had to stand straight and drop the clothespin from no lower than your nose. How do I remember all that? Probably for the same reason I remember blowing up balloons by forcing the “neck” of the balloon into a small hole on one end of a cardboard cylinder, then fitting a slightly larger cardboard cylinder over the smaller one and pumping furiously until the balloon reaches its maximum size.

Of course, the majority popped free prematurely, but who cared?

I never took a scientific poll, but I think our parents preferred indoor birthday parties, because they almost never had to warn us to be careful not to get our clothes dirty.

That’s parents for ya – dress us up in starched, white outfits like we were going to church for our confirmation, then send us to a party with the instructions: “Have fun! But don’t you dare get those brand new clothes dirty!”

Musical chairs was another staple of kid birthday parties. The favorites going in were either the kids with the fastest reflexes or the ones blessed – for this purpose, anyway – with a slightly fuller girth than the rest of us.

Some kids, naturally, liked to turn games of musical chairs into contact sports, but I’m quite sure we never had to call an ambulance.

With kid birthday parties, like pretty much everything in which kids are involved, there was always the possibility of an unexpected twist or turn here and there.

While many such events may not seem like candidates for the “I’ll never forget the time … “ list, some do in fact become future reminiscences, perhaps even reach “legend” status.

Mine? There are two. One, which happened at a neighbor’s house, became the case of the party favors, streamers and other paper-based decorations placed a little too close to the birthday cake.

All was fine, until the birthday girl was told to make a wish and blow out the candles. Surely she didn’t wish for the decorations to burst into flames, but that’s what happened. There were a few anxious moments, but nobody was hurt and the damage was minor.

My other “unexpected” event occurred right in my own living room, not at my birthday party, but at little sister’s, to which she graciously invited me.

No, that’s not the unexpected event, although it’s a good guess. One of the guests, a girl, apparently liked the cake and ice cream so much she ate too fast – and too soon after winning a game of hide-and-seek out back.

Well, as Mom reasoned at the time, the carpet needed cleaning anyway.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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