Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 22, 2013

Baby Boomer Brains

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I firmly believe that today's young people (meaning people under 55) have weaker brains due to the many electronic devices available. And when I say “weaker,” I mean weaker than those of us with massive, powerful, throbbing brains who spent much of our childhood cultivating our mental faculties in the days of yore (meaning the 1950s). This became abundantly clear to me last week when Marilyn and I were caught in a traffic jam on our way to Birmingham.

Sitting there in the van, waiting for the people in front of us to quit talking on their cell phones and move forward a few inches, we did what most people our age do. We shook our fists in the air and said several bad words. No, what we did was amuse ourselves the way people used to amuse themselves in traffic jams before the electronic age. We played “Name that Theme Song.”

“Hey Marilyn,” I said, “DUM, DUM, DUM, DE DE DUMDEMDUM!” The melody was unmistakable.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked.

“It's an old TV theme song. What's the show?” I did it again, and with my resonant voice and perfect pitch, she answered immediately.

“I have no idea,” she said.

I did it again, and this time she said “It sounds like the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

Obviously she was distracted by the fire truck that went by, or she'd have recognized that tune as the theme to the I Love Lucy show. The River Kwai?

We exchanged several more old TV theme songs, including tunes from the Burns and Allen show, Have Gun Will Travel, and Rawhide. We had some trouble remembering the theme to Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best, but then the traffic began to move and we gave up our intellectual theme song pursuits and turned on the radio.

Two deejays, Rick and Bubba, were discussing the death of Jonathan Winters. Winters was my favorite comedian when I was a youngster, and in those days when my parents and I were traveling, I often tried to entertain them with my impressions of Winters doing Maudie Frickert and Elwood P. Suggins. They always laughed, and I thought I was hilarious. Later I learned that I was often more annoying than funny, but they didn't want to stop me for fear I'd start reciting the little poems from the Burma Shave signs again. They'd grown very weary of Burma Shave signs.

And then Rick and Bubba's on-air conversation drifted, somehow, into an assessment of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and they complained that Edgar Bergen wasn't much of a ventriloquist, since you could always see his mouth move when Charlie talked. Of course, if those two deejays had traveled with my parents and me on one of our trips from Michigan to Florida in the old Studebaker, they'd have realized that since Edgar Bergen did most of his act on the radio, it didn't matter if he moved his lips. For all I know, Charlie may not have even been in the studio when Bergen's show was on the air. Edgar might have been talking to his hand.

But the point here is that in those early days, before the advent of all of today's mind-numbing electronic geegaws, we had to entertain ourselves, constantly flexing our mental muscles and making them strong. Even as kids we knew we might need those brain muscles later on. Had I traveled in that old Studebaker, wearing a pair of earphones and watching a movie on my iPad, here's some of what I'd have missed.


MELODY AND HARMONY - One fall morning, Dad and I were on our way to northern Michigan. Since it was a hunting trip, our head beagle, Queenie, was nestled on the floorboard at my feet. Somehow Dad managed to get his favorite radio station on that old car radio. A singer with the unlikely name of Homer Rodeheaver, who sounded a lot like Al Jolson, was singing a hymn, and Dad was inspired to sing along. Dad's voice may not have been particularly melodious, but it was loud. And the Rodeheaver/Sanders duet caused Queenie to raise her head and howl. The duet had become a trio, and Dad, until the day he died, felt that Queenie simply recognized good music. The notion that his voice might have hurt a beagle's sensitive ears never occurred to him.


PADIDDLE - This intellectually challenging travel game involved spotting a vehicle with A burned out taillight, hollering PADIDDLE, and then giving another passenger either a kiss or a punch in the arm, depending on whether that passenger was a Leon or a Leona.


READING ROAD SIGNS - On one of our trips to northern Michigan, we took my friend Scott Perkins along. He and I were in the back seat, and he noticed a sign that indicated we were in the huge metropolis of Bitely. Scott collapsed laughing, and so did I. My parents thought we'd lost our minds. Actually we were only exercising our minds by exploring various possible reasons for naming a town Bitely.

And of course there were the little red Burma Shave signs that I always read and memorized:
“He lit a match to check the gas tank.

That's why they call him Skinless Frank.”


Now I don't care what you say, Homer Rodeheaver was a musical genius, Bitely is funny, and Burma Shave signs were a literary gift to mankind. If I'd had earphones plugged into my head, or been playing some stupid video game, I'd have missed all of that. And my generation's brain power would have been diminished by half.
So when we arrived in Birmingham and were sitting in that crowded room, waiting to see my doctor, it came to me. Unbeknownst to me, my baby boomer brain had been hard at work, on automatic pilot.

“DUM, DUM, DEE-DEE-DUM, DUM, DEE-DEE-DEE, DE-DEE-DEE-DUM!” came tumbling out of my mouth.
“AHA! Marilyn said. “Father Knows Best!”

And then her own powerful baby boomer brain, which had been hard at work while she thought she was only reading a magazine, gave her “DOOT-DO-DOODLE-DE-DOOT-DE-DO, the Leave it to Beaver theme song she thought she'd lost back in that traffic jam on I-59.

So we congratulated each other, and then the receptionist asked us to “please keep it down!” We could have explained it to her, but she appeared to be in her thirties, and wouldn't have understood.