2015 Christmas post #2 - A New Tongue-in-cheek HR&J Magazine Cover & 50's & 60's Rickard's Family Christmas Photos in our home towns of Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario

This post starts with one more tongue-in-cheek Hot Rods and Jalopies Christmas Magazine cover.....Enjoy!  This is a large post so scroll down, click on all the pictures to enlarge and enjoy this second Christmas post for 2015.

It goes without saying that I have a ton of fun doing these blog pages, especially around Christmas time, because of course Christmas brings back more memories to most people than any time of the year.
For the past couple of years HR&J has featured my friend Roger Rickards and his brother Bob's photos as I believe their father took more pictures each Christmas back in the 50's and 60's than anyone else I've known...including our own family....so on we go with one more year of Roger and Bob's Christmas presents.  I enjoy analyzing all the photos in detail and it is amazing when you enlarge photos, you see things that you never knew existed or even thought of.
So here we go....

The first Christmas year here is 1955....
Roger is peeking out from behind the Christmas tree just waiting for his baby brother to look away for a second so he could knock the blocks down.

 As I said before...strange things pop up when you analyze photos too much.....back on the sofa behind Bob and Roger is a real strange little character....a gnome?  An elf?  A clown?  ....something spooky anyway, but no more spookier than this little Santa doll I found searching for a color photo of that other little spooky character.  The little Santa looks very apprehensive, definitely has a baby's face, but white eyebrows, beard and mustache?......What the hell is that???   .... Something from Christmas PAST !!

Here is Bob again by himself this time but there are other interesting things on the carpet under the Christmas tree...... a couple of Marx toy trucks, very popular heavy duty toys in the 1950s and also a toy bus.  I can't actually figure out what is in the back of one of those trucks.  Scroll down for a few Internet photos of what those trucks would have looked like.

Similar large toy blocks.

This next photo moves ahead to 1959, where Roger and Bob are playing post Christmas in their basement with all the boy toys they received from Santa Claus....... This is another great photo full of toys any kid would have given his eye tooth for to receive from Santa for being extremely good boys all year........ Roger and Robert(Bob) must have been sooooo good they actually have halo's over their heads....:-))

An Internet find below shows the detail of the "Superior Service Station" from someone's personal collection today.  You can also see this Marx toy RR stop signal on the layout above....the train is definitely a Lionel Steam train.  You should be able to find the items below on the boy's layout.

Every Kid must have had one of these at one time or another.

In this photo above you can find one of these
very popular toys of the era.

Another family basement item in
the winter...

This nice 1960 picture at the Rickards' family home of Robert(Bob) with his mom one year later than the above one.  There are a ton of great items in this photo which are also shown individually below....see if you can find them before you scroll down....

The Hot Rod Kit was even motorized....I had one of these too.

The Girder & Panel Bridge & Turnpike kit shown here was very popular as I also had one of these, but no picture proof...LOL.

The best part about this paint set shown in the photo above is that it was only .98 cents for ALL the paints....not $3.49 each like they are today.......

Their pet dog Panda, like the pets we all have today are so much part of the family life that they can't be left out at Christmas...Here are a couple of ads showing what Panda got from Santa....

Bob here....same 1960 Christmas day as above playing with this Tonka trucks and is loading his truck with the steam shovel........Just close your eyes and you guys can remember doing the same thing....and couldn't wait 'til spring to get these supertoys outside to play with in the dirt.

A similar Steam Shovel...

A similar Tonka Pickup truck as above....

Here's the boys playing with their Girder and Panel set.....A blow up of the photo below shows what I believe to be a 1959 Pontiac promotional or model toy car. Roger thinks it may be an Edsel.

Many of the promotional toys before styrene plastic came into being were made from celluloid, which over time distorted the roof lines etc as shown in the photo to the right

Going back a bit to 1957 in this nice under the tree photo, Roger and Bob are playing with their toys....Roger sure liked the old cowboy pistols and Bob sure liked the toy trucks.  You can see Roger's bullets for his pistol on the carpet and Bob's red "Structo" toy car hauler in the foreground.

Moving way ahead to 1963....wow you guys grow up fast....Roger and Bob are opening up their new HO scale train set which was made by the very popular model car/plane manufacturer Revell.

REVELL HO scale Electric Trains.............

Here is one last in the house Christmas at the Rickards' jumping ahead to 1965.  

It's obvious that Roger is old enough here to work on real cars....His dad was very smart to get him a creeper so Roger could do the oil change on his dad's car.  

There is a Crazy Clock game on the floor (similar to the Mouse Trap game I remember)....and on top of it looks like a tool box, but can't quite make it out.

Also in the photo is a Daoust Skates box, and a pair of ski's leaning against the wall.

In those days, if you had steel edges on your skis...you were a pro....these items seen below.

 Here you can see the screwed on first generation steel edge skis....as a beginner I couldn't believe the better control I had with my first steel edge skis.

This is the last of Roger's and Bob's photos this year.  This one  goes back to around Christmas in 1955.  Roger has his pistol in hand and a pair of binoculars around his neck getting reading for the hunt.... :-))  I love Bob's snowsuit...It reminds me of Ralphie's brother's winter outfit in the film "The Christmas Story".

Their car was what looks to be a 1952 Austin A40 Somerset...a newer photo of a similar car in colour is shown below.

At this time I would like to thank Roger for letting me have fun with his family photos...they make for such a great story line.  Be sure and look back to last Christmas and the Christmases before to see more of this if you haven't already.

 Thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed this....HAVE A VERY SPECIAL HOLIDAY CHRISTMAS TIME...........

Christmas Season Post #4 - Roger's Childhood Christmases 1948-62 here in Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario......

All of you may recall that last Christmas I did a few posts as well, one featuring my good friend Roger Rickards and all the wonderful toys he received when he was a child here in Fort William, Ontario.  Have a look again at last years post (link below) then come back to see more of Roger's childhood at Christmastime.
Last Years Christmas Post - Roger
....then scroll down for some more photos and we will decipher what is under the Christmas tree as well as a surprise way down at the end of this post.

Here is Roger in 1948 about 1 year old and under his family's Christmas tree opening up his treasures..... In Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario back then, times were simpler, and of course as a child you had nary a care in the world....but like any child then and now, you could barely wait until Christmas to open up your presents.

The first of the toys Roger unwrapped was this wooden toy...I think every child must have had one of these at one time or another.  They were made by many manufacturers as well and called a toy lawn mower, clickety clack toy or whatever.

Be sure again to click on all the photos in this post once or twice to enlarge....

In this next 1948 photo Roger has many more toy presents opened including a whistling top, a riding steam engine and a wagon full of great treasures....some to be explained below....

The following collage is that of a number of riding steam engine toys of the era, and none of which were actually identical to his....

...Then the whistling top.....every child had one or more of these in their lifetime....

I have always appreciated vintage ornaments, especially the blown glass ones.  The vintage pine cone ones shown below were quite common for their day, but when my kid brother Corey was little, our parents put only plastic decorations on the bottom two feet of the tree, because there would be none left intact by the time Christmas came.

Here's Roger looking totally content riding on his train.... and look at all the wonderful items in the background....The American Beauty wagon, the tree light reflectors, the vintage (likely Zenith) upright radio that the family gathered around to listen to Christmas music and shows, and the toys inside the wagon.

Lastly, the icicles on the tree (we called them tinsel) that actually had lead content.

My uncle Wally had the most perfect tree of anyone I ever knew.  year to year he would actually iron the tinsel so they hung perfectly straight.  It would take him weeks to finish decorating the tree.

Below is a colour photos of what the American Beauty wagon would look like, and in the wagon was this fantastic little Ferry Boat toy complete with little 1940's plastic toy cars.  We're not sure exactly what the other items in Roger's wagon are.

The next two items are fairly close to what is shown in the black and white photo above.  Here we have a Zenith upright radio, which was an absolutely beautiful piece of furniture in the day, where the family would gather round every evening, sit together and enjoy all the excellent broadcasting that was available in those days.  Then there were the light reflectors (metal of course).  You would unscrew a bulb, place the reflector over the base of the bulb and screw the bulb back in.  I was always leery about getting an electric shock from these babies....and as I recall my dad did once or twice.

In this next photo, we are jumping ahead to 1953....Roger's brother Bob was just an infant (I don't see any toys for Bob...I guess Roger got all of the incredible toys shown here.  Bob was even too young for an abacus....well maybe the Bobo Clown was his....LOL

Their dog Panda also raked in a ton of his favourite canned treat "Pard Dog Food".

OK...here's the abacus and the slush cast RED tractor, likely by the Tootsie Toy Company.

.....and here is the Junior Doctor Kit, the Binoculars and the Bobo Clown which might have been Bob's...

Finally from the picture above we get to the PARD dog food....I'm thinking....could this be Roger'stoo?  Roger said his dog's name was Panda, but I don't see any dogs in any of the photos.  

                                              Forgive me Roger, I couldn't resist.... :-)

For these final few Christmastime photos and graphic items we jump to 1962...Roger would be about 15 years old, smack dab in the age of adolescence.  Yes...now we have colour photos.  

I truly loved the decorating in that era here in the Lakehead cities of Fort William and Port Arthur.  I remember my parents home looking almost exactly the same inside...similar nick-knacks, furniture and draperies.

BUT.....look what is just to Roger's left on the chair... It's an AMT model kit.....not just any model kit, but George Barris' New for 1962 Ala-Kart double kit....build the Ala-Kart and the stock model A in one kit.....WOW

We all loved our model car kits....so much so that I still build 1;25 scale model cars to this day.

OK....there is one more photo below.........SCROLL DOWN to see how we view Roger today........

WE HOPE YOU ALL HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS 2014 - There will only be one more small post before Christmas Day - from Dave and his entire family at Hot Rods and Jalopies!!!