Remembering the 60's in McAllen

Some of my many aunts and uncles were still going to the old McAllen High School on South 10th Street when I was a kid. That meant I got to see and own a lot of the cool things that the older kids were digging in the late 1950s and early ’60s, things you just don’t see anymore.
   There was a huge fad back then of braiding strips of vinyl into long multi-colored braids. Kids would buy long, narrow strips of different colored vinyl or plastic, and braid them into round or square “ropes,” about a half-inch wide and a foot long.
   I don’t remember what they were called (trensitas?), but my relatives had a lot of them. I remember yellow and black vinyl braids, with different objects interwoven in them, like marbles and coins.
   These vinyl braids weren’t used for anything, they were just cool to make and own. This was also the time when making things out of Popsicle sticks was popular. People made intricate model houses, jewelry boxes, pencil holders, fans, little cars and other stuff.
   Football ribbons were a big deal. For each football game, silk-like ribbons could be bought at the high school snack bar, urging the Bulldogs on to victory. The girls wore them on their blouses; the guys pinned them to the outside bottom of their pant legs. The ribbons got wider and longer as the Bulldogs advanced into the playoffs.
   And blue jeans were folded up at the legs to make cuffs back then. You weren’t cool if you didn’t have cuffed jeans, taps on your shoes and those purple and gold ribbons every football Friday.
   Eating green Valley Lemons was a popular pastime. We used to cut a hole in the lemon, stick a straight candy cane in there and suck up the juice through the cane. We’d also eat those lemons with rock salt.
   One of my favorite soft drinks of the time was Pomac. It was sold in a glass bottle and had the color and foam of beer. I loved that drink, but I must have been in the minority because it suddenly just disappeared from the market in the mid-’60s.
   Another cool drink was A&W Root Beer. They sold it in white, wax-coated megaphones. You’d pull off the cardboard cap at the narrow end to drink the quart or so of buttery, chilled root beer. Once empty, you’d pull off the bottom to yell through the container/megaphone at football games. Each root beer megaphone had the Bulldogs’ football schedule printed on the side.
   These weren’t sold in stores; you could only get them at the A&W Drive-in on
the west side of McAllen. When A&W opened in about 1964 at Business 83 and South 29th Street, it made a huge splash with the young crowd.
   It took a lot of kids away from the usual 10th Street hangouts of Sammy’s Red Barn at La Vista and the Jolly Giant at 10th and Sycamore. This was about the time that the Burger Chef and Mr. Q hamburger joints went up, also on North 10th. When they first opened, hamburgers cost 15 cents and fries and drinks were a dime each.
   We lived less than two blocks from Burger Chef and went there so often we knew the couple who owned the place. Sometimes we’d be sitting outside on their cement tables eating a hamburger when the owner would come out to give us free fries. We really liked him and his wife.
   Unfortunately, one time he was cleaning the floor of his restaurant with gasoline
when it ignited and burned him severely. We never saw him again.
   We knew the owners of A&W because they moved in to a house in our neighborhood on Vine Street. Their last name was Heron. They had about five kids. They came here from Alaska to open their franchise. We neighborhood kids sampled the root beer and hamburgers long before the place ever opened.
   Another cool item that comes to mind that just disappeared is suicide knobs. These were round doorknob-looking things that strapped on to a car’s steering wheel. They spun freely so you could steer a car by holding the knob.
   We put them on the handlebars of our bicycles for decoration. When I was about ten, I had one that depicted a scantily clad female. I once took it to my grandmother’s house. She gasped when I showed it to her. When I showed it to my aunt, she covered her eyes and said, “Holy Toledo!” She always said that. Like the little traviesito that I was, I roared with laughter and shoved it back in my pocket, on the prowl for my next unwary victim.
   I remember playing for hours with magnifying glasses, marbles, tops, toy cars, yo-yos, whistles made from bottle caps, slingshots, cap pistols and Red Ryder BB guns.
I wouldn’t trade those times for all the iPods and video games in the world. •