What Are Your Earliest Memory Signposts?

by James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, April 3, 2019

When I was young I thought people all saw the same external reality. Over time I learned that we each have a variety of different perceptional abilities, and no, the external reality didn’t look the same to everyone. I still believe there is only one external reality, and we just have limited access to perceiving it. I don’t believe we all live in our own subjective realities. But I guess those limitations give us subjective experiences.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve become obsessed with memory, and it fascinates me how varied the memory abilities are in the people I know. I’ve always known folks were smarter than I am, but that didn’t bother me. However, it does upset me that some people have vastly better memories, especially if they remembered more details about the past than I do. I guess memories seem more real than knowledge, but both are just faint shadows of the external reality.

My friend Linda and I were both born in 1951.  She in February and me in November, so she has a 10-month head start. The other day we were talking about first grade and I mentioned we started school just a month before Sputnik was launched (October 4, 1957). Linda said she remembered listening to Sputnik on the radio with her grandmother. I was incredibly envious! I have no memory of Sputnik but I wished I did because my school years were bracketed by Sputnik and Apollo 11.  We got to talking, and Linda remembers a lot more about the larger world than I did in 1st-grade. I’m so jealous.

And it wasn’t just her ten months head start. The first space launch I remember is Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 flight on May 5, 1961. I was in the 4th-grade and we listened to it over the PA system. Linda remembers more about the greater world than I did at the same age.

Linda says she’s always paid more attention to her surroundings than other kids. She’s an observer, I wasn’t. I think I was always focused on playing. I was like a kitten with a peanut, oblivious to the larger landscape. This got me to thinking about our earliest memories. Most people when they think about their first memories conjure up something personal. That makes me want to ask:

What are your earliest memories beyond your Charlie Brown existence?  

I’m wondering if I could make up a fun list of questions to put on Facebook that asks people what year they were born, and then the year they remember something from the world beyond toys. Here are some things I remember seeing for the first time:

Jim – 1951

• 1st house. An upper duplex in Memphis. I think it was 1954 – I was 3+. Next a house in Miami on SW 64th Court I believe. I was 4 – I think. Memory is so unreliable. I know I lived in 2-3 houses before 64th Court. I have the vaguest memory of the one before it. It hurts to think about it because memories of that house are like thoughts on the tip of my tongue.
• 1st teenager. At the apartment above met a teenager with a broken leg in a cast. Before that only remember my parents and my sister. The cast is what probably anchored that memory.
• 1st time riding a bicycle. 1954-55. I was 4. at SW 64th Court. Also, remember learning to swing in a swing from the same time period. Also, the first time I saw a bow-and-arrow. And toy trucks. I loved toy trucks, even before toy guns.
• 1st television show. Topper in 1955, I was 4-5. I saw TV before that and have vague memories, but Topper was the first show I wanted to see on my own.
• 1st western. Gunsmoke in 1955. I was 4-5. This began a life-long love of westerns.
• 1st car. 1955 Pontiac in Miami around 1956-57. I was 4-5. I remember being in earlier cars, but not their make and model. My heart still twinges when I see 1950s cars. I love looking at cars. My grandmother would quiz me on models and makes as I got older.
• 1st realization of death. 1955-1956 from watching Gunsmoke. At 5 I knew what pretending to die was. You fell down and laid still. But watching Gunsmoke one night I realized that not pretending to die, to really die, meant not ever moving again. That blew my little mind.
• 1st Coca-Cola. 1955. Probably had them earlier. But that’s when Becky and I started begging for them every time my father took us for a drive.
• 1st real gun held. 1958. The first gun I remember holding was my father’s .22 rifle that his father gave him. We lived out in the country in South Carolina and my parents tried to raise chickens. My father would shoot at dogs who killed chickens. He never hit one though. He said he would give me the gun when I got older. When we moved to Hollywood Florida I took it outside to show the other kids and their parents complained. It disappeared.
• 1st movie on TV. High Barbaree (1947) around 1958 in South Carolina.
• 1st movie at the theater. Snowfire (1958) around 1958 in South Carolina.
• 1st phone number. Yu-3-6954 – 1958 in Hollywood, Florida. Lake Forest subdivision.
• 1st science fiction. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Around 1958. Saw earlier SF but don’t remember any details. Hollywood, Florida at babysitter’s house.
• 1st 7-Eleven store. 1958.
• 1st memory of music. 1958 I think, from a car radio. We didn’t have a radio or record player in the house then. Linda remembers Elvis from 1957. Another big envy.
• 1st grocery store. Kwik Check, Hollywood, Florida. 1958. I was 6-7 and in the 2nd grade. Again I remember being in grocery stores before that, but only vaguely. I don’t think I understood what they were. I remember this Kwik Chek because my grandmother took me there to see a sock hop out front.
• 1st book. I remember my mother reading Treasure Island to me in 1959 when we lived in New Egypt, New Jersey.
• 1st magazine. Highlights. 1959 New Jersey again. At the dentist office.
• 1st newspaper cartoon strip. I don’t know.
• 1st political campaign. Kennedy-Nixon 1960. But only because I remember getting in a fight on the playground. I was for Kennedy and the other kid was for Nixon. We started shoving each other and ended up rolling around in the dirt and the teacher broke us up. Marks, Mississippi, 1960, 3rd grade.
• 1st time watching The Twilight Zone. 1960 in Marks, Mississippi.
• 1st library. 4th grade 1960/61. It might have been a public library in Hollywood or Ft. Lauderdale. The first library I know by name is Homestead Air Force Base Library 1962/1963. I was in 5th grade.
• 1st book I read on my own. Kid’s version of Up Periscope by Robb White from Scholastic Books. Summer of 1961.
• 1st time learning songs and singers. 1962 at Homestead AFB. One of the earliest songs I remember waiting to hear on the radio was “Telstar” by the Tornadoes (August 1962). I had been listening to music for years but didn’t pay attention to the song titles or who artists who created them.
• 1st plane seen up close. An F-104 at Homestead AFB is the first specific planes I remember seeing up close in 1962. Also F-100, F-102, F-106, and B-52s. In the 5th grade. F-104 has always been my favorite plane ever since. I was told I first flew in a Constellation when I was little, but don’t remember. My father worked on the flight-line and took me to a public exhibition.
• 1st memory of regularly watching the news. 11/22/63 – Walter Cronkite. I have vague memories of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, but not intentionally wanting to watch the news. I have even vaguer memories of the Kennedy-Nixon campaigns, but too vague to recall a specific memory. After the Kennedy assassination, I became a regular news watcher.
• 1st time hearing The Beatles. February 7, 1964, on the Ed Sullivan show.
• 1st time hearing Bob Dylan. July 20, 1965, on AM radio with “Like a Rolling Stone.” I’m sure I heard his folk songs but have no memories.
• 1st used bookstore. Perrine, Florida, 1965.
• 1st new bookstore. Now, this is a weird one. 1967 in Coconut Grove, Florida. I was in 10th grade. I don’t know why I was so late seeing a new bookstore.

This is just some of the memories of the outer world I can recall at the moment. I’m open to other suggestions that would be good signposts. I feel I really woke up as a conscious being in 1964. I turned 13 on November 25, 1964. I had rejected religion by then and was already thinking politically. The years between 1962-1964 are full of great memories, but I’m not sure how aware of the wider world I was at the time. For example, in 1962 John F. Kennedy visited Homestead Air Force Base. They let us out of school to go see him. I went fishing instead. When I got older I kicked myself for that. I was very focused on all the things I thought fun and didn’t care about the world at large.

It wasn’t until Kennedy was killed a year later that I started watching the news and began paying attention to the larger world. I was in 7th grade. Was that the normal time most people start? Or was I late? I’m sure Linda began noticing things much earlier.

JWH