It’s easy enough to remember but perhaps hard to imagine how we celebrated the coming of Christmas 50 years ago. There was news in The News Tribune that week of a rocket into space, a commie on our doorstep, Elvis in Germany – but much more than that, for a child of the day, there was a trip downtown.
Let adults have their office parties where bankers, brokers and other business folks gathered for office parties, booze and buffets.
Let the aunts, uncles and grandparents gather at their ethnic halls: the Slovenians, the Italians, the Norwegians, and, for my people, Valhalla, where 90-year-old matrons and codgers, otherwise unable to walk half a block, took to the floor as accordions played. They danced the polka and the schottische for hours, fueled by hardtack, meatballs, lutefisk and occasional nips at a flask of schnapps that always seemed at hand.
Let them have their adult version of Christmas cheer.
For us children, there was downtown Tacoma, the bustle of Broadway, the department store windows in front of Rhodes Brothers and the Bon Marché.
Here was real magic. Within the worlds of these windows sat Santa’s workshop, with busy elves hammering away at a mountain of toys. Here was an electric train lumbering its merry way around a snowy forest. Candy canes hung from perfectly green trees. The air was rich with the smell of peppermint candy married with cocoa.
Upstairs at Rhodes shone the real Christmas. There was a real train to ride, and it was just our size. After the train was Santa’s lap. He knew which of us was naughty, which nice, and it was our task to admit regret and find his forgiveness.
Wide was the selection of things we were prepared to ask for, given the advertisements in The News Tribune that Christmas week. Rhodes had doctor sets, nurse sets, Hula-Hoops, a gun and holster set and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head for 88 cents each.
And those were the days when the Potato Head family required the use of actual potatoes, not the plastic facsimiles available later. Those were the days when Mr. Potato Head smoked a pipe, just like St. Nick.
Mattel had a burp gun at $1.88. There was an unimaginably magnificent Ride-a-Car for $12.88. Or a bike, for $39.88.
For teenage girls, Woolworth’s had lockets and crosses for $1. For younger girls, the Bon offered Madame Alexander dolls for $13.88.
For any child, there was a parakeet in a cage, only $6.88 at Sears.
We knew we were probably destined to receive a pair of those $1.88 pajamas from Peoples Store, or a flannel shirt at $1.50, but this did not deflect our interest in a baseball glove or an electric football game.
Let the adults worry that Anastas Mikoyan, who held multiple posts in the Soviet Union and was the man The News Tribune called the world’s “No. 2 Red,” was headed for a U.S. visit.
Let the old folks wonder at the marvel of space travel, as America that week blasted an Atlas rocket into space and from that rocket came a recorded message from President Eisenhower: “Peace on Earth and good will toward men everywhere.”
Let the parents and their friends go see Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” at the Temple Theatre or “The Robe” at the Roxy.
For us, it was “The Blob” at the Riviera or “The Fly” at the Proctor.
Yes, there was bad news for those worried about such things. Nino Valdez had scored a first-round TKO against Tacoma’s Irish Pat McMurtry at Madison Square Garden in faraway New York. Pilots were on strike at American Airlines, and there was a question of whether pinball machines should be legalized in Tacoma.
For us, however, there was the magic of television. No other generation will ever have access to such targeted local entertainment, as we could freely choose among J.P. Patches, Stan Boreson or our own Brakeman Bill.
Here was our contemporary Bethlehem, and it was the Brakeman who that week announced an invitation to the “Cammarano Bros. Canned Pop Western Theater Party” slated for the Temple two days after the holiday.
He would be there himself, in the flesh, accompanied by Buckskin Joe (whoever that was). There would be cartoons on the Big Screen, and there would be a bike – not just any bike, but a Schwinn – given away to one lucky kid.
Admission would be six empty cans of Cammarano’s Paradise Pop, a brand nobody in their right mind actually drank, but drink it we did that week, just so we could see the Brakeman and win that bike.
The adults of Tacoma that week might have been pleased with the news from the Tacoma Retail Trade Bureau that Christmas sales were “up anywhere from a few points to 10 or 12 percent over last year. Virtually all downtown stores report this year is better than last.”
Given the prosperity of the times, our parents and their friends might have had trouble choosing from among the eateries featured in The News Tribune’s “Cooked, Delicious, Restaurant Dinner” guide. Would it be Honan’s, The Islander, Busch’s, Ceccanti’s, the Top of the Ocean or Ben Dew’s?
Our fathers might have been a bit jealous that Elvis Presley, stationed in Germany, had driven a $3,750 BMW 507.
And what was this about a new design for the Lincoln penny? Wasn’t the old one, with the wheat stalks on the back, good enough? Why must life be complicated in 1959 by a penny that depicted the Lincoln Memorial?
Let them worry, let them wonder, let them be befuddled by the things that traditionally bother grown-ups.
It was our job as children, most of all, to wish and dream.
C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535
This is one of a series of stories appearing during The News Tribune’s 125th year. Every Sunday we look at what happened during the same week sometime in the past 125 years.