Red Skelton who ened each of his TV programs with “Good night and God bless..”

Go all the way to the bottom past the pictures. I think you’ll enjoy it. Whoever wrote this must have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a ‘T.’ Hope you enjoy it.

Black and White TV

(Under age 40? You probably won’t understand.)

You could hardly see the TV program for all the snow,

Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.

Pull a chair up to the TV set,

‘Good Night, David – Good Night, Chet.’

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and?I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE…and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option… even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

If we got into trouble, it was time for a HACK on the butt from either a principal or our teacher.  We weren’t cocky and smart-ass [excuse the expression] to our teachers . . . because of this.  There wasn’t any law suits for abuse.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses?

Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah… and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either, because if we did we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off.

Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house.

Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run a muck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.

How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes.

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac!

How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.

I WOULDN’T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!

Fanita Barrett, Gloria Jones, Jewel Cobbs, Pat Howard and twin sisters Annette and Nanette Williams all came from musical backgrounds. The twins had taken vocal and dancing lessons as youngsters. Fanita’s brother Ronald was already a success with his vocal group, The Meadowlarks. The Dreamers were introduced to local musicians through Dexter Tisby, then successful with his own group, The Penguins, who had hit the big time with Earth Angel.

The Dreamers joined Richard Berry in the studio after much rehearsal. During 1955 and 1956, the unit made several recordings for Flair and RPM Records. Among them was a version of Harry Warren and Mac Gordon’s “At Last” and several of Richard Berry’s compositions, “Together”, “Wait For Me”, and “Daddy, Daddy”. The Dreamers gained attention as versatile singers and began getting studio work singing backup for other artists — as well as recording a few singles of their own — as The Dreamers and The Rollettes, although only Fanita, Gloria and Annette were involved in The Rollettes projects.

The Dreamers then signed with Capitol Records. One of the executives, noticing their different skin tones, said they looked like a bouquet; which is how they became The Blossoms. Even though signing to Capitol was considered a step up, the group’s stay at Capitol was short, yielding only three singles, none of which made the charts. The Blossoms also underwent significant changes at this time. By 1958, Annette was married, pregnant, and planning a leave of absence from the group.

Darlene Wright (later known as Darlene Love) replaced Annette, and she was also selected to be the lead, which the ensemble-based Blossoms had not previously had. The addition of Wright would change the style of the group, but despite Darlene’s unique presence as lead on songs like “No Other Love” for Capitol in 1958, “Sugarbeat” for RCA (as The Playgirls) in 1960 and “Write Me A Letter” for Challenge in 1961, chart success was still elusive.

During the summer of 1962, The Blossoms finally emerged successful on the charts, but under an alias. Then-unknown producer Phil Spector used them on a song he had acquired from singer-songwriter Gene Pitney. Spector was having success on the East Coast with a quintet of young Brooklyn girls named The Crystals, who already had two hits with Spector.

Problems between The Crystals and Spector prompted him to record this new song without them. Instead he used The Blossoms, who received a meager session fee. The song, “He’s a Rebel,” turned out to be a monster hit, firmly establishing Spector as a force to be reckoned with in the music industry. The single with The Blossoms’ voices was billed as The Crystals, much to the dismay of the real Crystals. Over the next three years, The Blossoms, with Darlene as lead, would be the favored singers on all of Spector’s sessions recorded in California. They were The Crystals once again on “He’s Sure the Boy I Love.” Darlene and Fanita sang with Bobby Sheen as Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans. This combo achieved hit singles for Spector, including a version of the Disney classic “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

The Blossoms more than likely recorded all the backgrounds on numerous sessions by The Crystals and The Ronettes as well as on Darlene’s solo efforts under the new stage name Spector had given her, Darlene Love. The surname was in honor of Dorothy Love-Coates, a gospel singer he was impressed with; however, this association would prevent the group from establishing themselves as primary artists. At a crucial time in the industry, when new sounds were striking the listening public at full speed, The Blossoms seemed to be floundering as recording artists.

In 1964, the trio, now Darlene, Fanita, and newcomer Jean King, were a featured part of a relatively successful weekly rock’n'roll television program called Shindig!. The Blossoms used their vocal versatility to their advantage, singing in various styles behind a variety of artists, including Patty Duke, Shelley Fabares and Marvin Gaye. They were the backup group for Fabares on her recording of “Johnny Angel”; Fabares stated in an interview quoted in The Billboard Book of #1 Hits that her strongest memory of that recording session was the “beautiful voices of the backup singers”.

The Blossoms appeared in 1964′s “The T.A.M.I. Show”, providing backup vocals and dancing for all of Marvin Gaye’s songs; their name appeared in the opening credits, but they were not introduced – they are later seen at stage left encouraging an exhausted James Brown to take the stage one last time after his climactic performance. The Blossoms also provided backing vocals to Doris Day’s “Move Over, Darling” from the film of the same name. They resumed recording under their own name later in the 1960s for labels such as Reprise, Ode and MGM. They recorded their only album, Shockwave, in 1972 on Lion.