Those Were The Days My Friend - We Thought They'd Never End

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Adventure is just bad planning. ~ Roald Amundsen

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[Daniel]

Boy, life was REALLY different back in 1957! Our perspective is completely different now. It's almost as if it were ages ago...half a century!

Will it run? Tulsa to dig up car buried for 50 years

TULSA, Oklahoma (AP) -- Organizers of a coming-out party for a buried 1957 Plymouth Belvedere could use some help.

The car, which was buried in brand-new condition under the lawn of the Tulsa County Courthouse in 1957, is scheduled to be unearthed June 15 as part of the Oklahoma Centennial.

Promoters are looking for people who helped lower the car into its crypt in 1957 to perhaps shed some light on what to expect when the car is unearthed.

There's speculation the car may have turned into a pile of rust. Or that it's in pristine condition and worth thousands of dollars.

Sharon King Davis, who has chaired Tulsa's centennial efforts, looked at photos of the people responsible for burying the car in 1957 and found her grandfather.

"I wish grandpa had left me some instructions," she told the Tulsa World.

The car had been largely forgotten until Davis and her group started work on the centennial. Files on the car have vanished, so it's not clear what to expect when the lid is lifted.

What's known is that the car is on a steel pallet with jacks under the axles. Efforts were made to preserve it, but it's unclear if moisture has gotten to the metal and caused rust.

"There's a kind of Rip Van Winkle reaction," Davis says. "Most people had long ago forgotten the buried car, but as the time to dig it up nears, they are waking up and wondering about life in 1957."

Another unknown is who will be able to claim the car.

When the car was buried, a contest was announced to award the car and a $100 savings account to the person who came closest to guessing Tulsa's population in 2007.

Organizers concede that finding that person or his or her heirs may not be easy.

At the time, the guesses were recorded on microfilm and sealed in a steel container buried with the car.

[jimtzu]

ahhh 1957.. the year i was hatched.  i'd seen that article in the paper but didn't know what a Belvedere was, thanks for the pic.   now if they can find a way to read the microfilm 

[Daniel]

If they buried some original issue, still sealed and unplayed Elvis Presley records then that would be cool, and maybe some Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly along with Elvis...and a Howdy Doody record.

[marianthi]

It must be nostalgia time in the U.S.A.  A friend from there sent me this email yesterday :

For The Oldtimers

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 icepack 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.

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 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 amuck.

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?

[henry]

1957. Ike, marilyn was queen, micky patroled center for the yankees, willie[say hey] at the polo grounds. not to mention elvis. we bought our first car a '57 buick and i was the poster child for modernism.  AND.....something was stirring beneath the radar. kerouac published "on the road" and ginsberg, cassidy, kesey, gary snyder and the beats were the vanguard of the beatniks and then hippies and the cultural shift of the sixties. everything continued to appear normal until 1963. ..henry..........i wanted to add this morning that '57 is likely the year mike murphy returned after 18 months of integral practice at the aurobindo ashram in pondicherry. After meeting dick price at what would become the california institute of integral studies in '61(?) they would found esalen in 1962.