Random Bloviation

[xolo]

Perhaps it's just that I'm not around children much, but I don't see toy pianos anymore. These used to be something that every kid had. When I was little (two or three, maybe), I got a bright red, two-octave one. My mother and my uncle Billy both, in their frustrating way, could just sit down, goofing around, and start pounding out music on it

Comments

[c_eagle]

RAEBNC!

[whitetail]

We also had a Palace of Sweets in my home town, and a more contemporary place across the street called The Sugar Bowl. The latter became the centerpiece of a nationally syndicated comic strip called Harold Teen. This was all long before my time (Forties/Fifties), of course, but it was interesting to me that the general concept of a community sweet shop was evidently a major social phenom over wide swathes of the country in the earlier Twentieth Century. Not anymore, though. It's a downright fossilised stratum of the American experience now.

[xolo]

OMG! I'm actually vaguely familiar with "Harold Teen", although more as a pop-culture thing of the 20s and 30s than from any real exposure to the comic strip. That's amazing that you lived near the original Sugar Bowl. Those were everywhere, largely (I think) as a result of Harold Teen. I was reading a true crime book not too long ago about a murder in rural Pennsylvania in the 1940s, in which the local Sugar Bowl figured in a minor way