Episode 36: Cape Cod's 1st Radio Station; Going Back to School; 9/11 20 Years Later; Gettysburg PA; Movies That Gave Me Nightmares(9-9-2021)

Episode 36 shines a light on Cape Cod's first-ever radio station.  It came in with a lot of buzz but quickly died out.  It did however lead to all of the stations that exist now so it deserves its spot in history.
We take a special Road Trip to the hallowed Civil War grounds of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  It was an amazing and humbling experience to walk the battlefield and the cemetery.  Hear all about why this was a Bucket List spot for me. Also, did I see any spirits?
Labor Day has passed and it's time for kids to go Back to School.  I'll go way Back In the Day to my memories of the beginning of the new school year in the 1980's and early 1990's.  The clothes, shoes, supplies, and how the first day was.
For some laughs, this week's Top 5 list will feature Movies That Gave Me Nightmares as a kid.
There is a new This Week In History and Time Capsule as I remember where I was on September 11, 2001.
Be sure to watch for my livestreams called Without A Map Friday's at 8pm on Instagram which serve as a sort of postgame show for the podcast. Find them on IGTV and YouTube after they've finished.

Helpful Links from this Episode(available through Buzzsprout)

• Purchase Iconic Hotels and Motels of Cape Cod
• Wear Your Wish
• DJ Williams Music
• In My Footsteps: Gettysburg, PA
• Destination Gettysburg.com
• Christopher Setterlund's YouTube Channel
• September 11, 2001 - I Remember
• Christopher Setterlund.com

Listen to Episode 35 here.

Transcript

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to the in my footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. Coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 36. This week's episodes got a lot of ground to cover. We're gonna start off with the story of Cape Cod's very first radio station. It is not one that likely any of you have heard of, but we'll dive into that. We're going to take a road trip to the Civil War icon town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, we're gonna have a new top five, these are the top five movies that gave me nightmares so you can laugh at me. We're gonna go way way back in the day to my memories of going back to school like in elementary school and middle school was a new this week in history. As I look back at my memories, September 11 2001 20 years later, all that and so much more coming up right now. Episode 36 of the in my footsteps podcast. Welcome in. We have passed Labor Day, kids have gone back to school, it's almost time for fall, my favorite time of the year has officially started. It's basically once labor day ends all the way through the end of the year, all the way through New Year's Eve. It's always been like that even when I was in school, it was my favorite time of year, although less so when I was in school. I just love how it goes from still nice summer weather all the way through a lot of October. And then you watch the leaves change. You've got great holidays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and birthdays, like my own, then we get into winter. And I liked that first snow living on Cape Cod usually get more than one good snow a year. And then I get tired of winter. And then I can't wait for spring. I'm excited I got a lot of fun stuff to cover in this week's episode. I always say that, but this one's going to be good. It's going to be a lot of personal stories. I guess when I'm talking about the road trip to Gettysburg, it's gonna be a lot of my feelings as I went there. We'll dive into that in a few minutes. First, I wanted to give a little bit of news as last week, or almost two weeks ago, I got official confirmation of my seventh book, it's going to be my first photography book. And it should be out about this time next year, end of summer 2022. It's the first in a series called photographers America. And it's going to be Cape Cod, beyond the beach, the heart, and soul. So that's going to be a lot of fun. I've already got photo trips planned around the book. So you'll have to see the places that I choose. If you read my first book, The Cape Cod travel guide, it's a little bit similar. It's like a cousin to that book, where instead of it being more of a travel guide, it's flipped. So it's more photography and fewer words, if that makes sense. And if you've been tuning into the live streams, you know that this is not the secret book project that I've been working on that I've mentioned, but I can't give too much detail on because I'm waiting for an agent so I can pitch it to the big publishers. But stay tuned on the live streams every Friday at 8pm on Instagram. If I get new news, I usually share it there first because it's all off the cuff. But yes, Book number seven is in the works and it's going to be coming out next summer. We got a long ways to go until then. So why don't we dive right in and let's go into the story of Cape Cod's very first radio station. This one will be I'd say 99% of you will never have heard of especially if you don't live on the cape. You really won't have heard of it. Let's dive right into it though now Cape Cod's very first radio station on episode 36 of the in my footsteps podcast. 

Cape Cod’s First Radio Station

Over the last several decades, there have been many legendary radio stations on Cape Cod, those of you that live down here or have lived down here a long time you know the ones like 106 Wcod that's been around since 1967. Others like wqRC 99.9 and even 107.5 WFCC the classical station. They've been supplying music to audiences on Cape Cod for decades. However, Cape Cod's very first radio station came in with a bang made a quick splash, and then left with barely a whimper. And this is going to be the story of that station. In order to share that story though we've got to go back to November 2 1920. And that's when Pittsburgh radio station KDKA aired the very first commercial radio broadcast. The station had chosen election day to have their very first broadcast so that Americans could hear the results of the race between Warren G Harding and James M Cox which Harding one, the radio broadcast was a huge success and within four years there were 600 commercial radio stations in America, including W M A C in Boston, which will become the future W RKO and W E I. The stations along with New York's W E. F could occasionally be received on Cape Cod. So you know how it is if you try to tune into stations from Boston or Providence or further you get every now and then it'll come in, but you get kind of staticky. That's how it was back then, but I guess it was brand new, so people didn't mind. In the years after the first radio broadcasts in 1920. The popularity and profitability of radio led to Cape Codders wanting their own station in July of 1926. Their wish came true. A radio station was created in osterville through the efforts of James Henderson, who was the president of the firm of Henderson and Ross. This station was a 200-watt Station, located at the Sepuit golf course, which was one of the first built in America along South County Road in Osterville. The station which would operate on the 250-meter band was to be known by the call letters WJBX. However, it debuted with the letters WSGC, possibly as a nod to the Sepuit golf course. A man named William Harrison, who had been working as a broadcaster for WEEI in Boston, came down to run the new radio station on Cape Cod. Opening night for the radio station was Saturday July 24 1926. And the hype was palpable and all the local newspapers, William Harrison said to the newspapers that the station signal was strong enough to be heard throughout Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts. There was an additional promotion that was basically a $25 cash prize for the telephone call received at the station from the furthest away by midnight of the first day on the air, and all other telephone callers would receive complimentary copies of Cape Cod magazine. This was the original version of Cape Cod magazine, not the more recent one. The original Cape Cod Magazine ran from 1915 to 1927. The opening night of the new ws GC radio station began at 7:30pm with a half-hour performance from Joe rinds and his Sunkist garden Orioles orchestra. Sunkist garden was briefly the name given to the Mill Hill pavilion in West Yarmouth, which is now DiParma restaurant. The music was followed by a brief introductory discussion by founder James Henderson. He then threw it to a discussion featuring Massachusetts amateur golf champion, Freddy Wright, and golf course architect Donald Ross, among others, and that was kind of fitting for the station headquarters being on a golf course. from nine to 11pm There was a collection of Dance Music featuring the likes of Jim Moynahan orchestra, Soprano singer Jean Hinkle, and pianist HC Labrie. And the night was definitely a success. There were more than 200 phone calls received by midnight, the furthest point they could hear the radio broadcast was Lexington, Massachusetts, approximately 70 miles away. From that point on wsGC was to be on the air every evening except for Monday between 730 and 11pm, typically following the same format, musical interludes, and discussions of topics central to life on Cape Cod, and it found an audience with letters coming in from as far away as Concord New Hampshire by the middle of August, William Harrison continued to bring in big-time local musicians like Chet Kopp and the Eagleston Inn orchestra out of Hyannis. The first issue came on August 17 1926, when Harrison was contacted by the Department of Commerce from Washington DC, informing him that the station's call letters were originally supposed to be WJBX and not WSGC, and the department was immediately changing them. So the station continued on it was now WJBX. It was still successful with programming six nights a week throughout the remainder of that summer of 1926. Then the problem came, so it was announced as Labor Day passed so roughly around this time of year that the radio station would cease operating until the following spring. It was almost like a seasonal restaurant or hotel. The final night was Sunday, September 5 1926. It featured a worship service led by Reverend HP almond, Abbott, and finally a short recital featuring Jean Hinkle. WJBX closed for the season at 11:30pm. In an interesting bit of irony, only eight days later on September 13 1926, RCA the Radio Corporation of America created the first national radio network, the National Broadcasting Company, also known as NBC. In the local papers, William Harrison stated that due to the station's success, he was excited for the second season to start 1927 promising new shows from outside the confines of the seaport golf course station. Being in the same vein as a seasonal restaurant or hotel, the likely relaunch was set for June 1927. Unfortunately, the relaunch never came. It's not really clear why the radio station WSGC/WJBX ended up being nothing more than a flash in the pan. But basically, once it was done, everyone went back to their old jobs. William Harrison went back to Boston to do his radio up there. The Sepuit golf course slowly declined through the Great Depression before the entire property was purchased by Canadian aluminum King E.K. Davis. The golf course was abandoned after severe damage during a hurricane in 1944. And today, there are very few if any reminders of that golf course and Osterville. Once the station closed down Cape Cod would not see its own radio station again until the formation of the Cape Cod Broadcasting Company in 1937. Two years after that came a proposal by Joseph Goulding for a station on eight and a half acres of land on South Sea Avenue in West Yarmouth. He said the station would have the call letters WOCB for Only Cape Broadcasting. Interestingly, the new WOCB it was a success, but it actually ran out of money and folded just like WSGC did, but it was resurrected by new owners Anthony and sons after a couple of years. In May 1948, WOCB became Cape Cod's first FM station, and it remained in business until Hurricane Bob knocked the tower down in August 1991. And the owners couldn't afford to rebuild it. The station was purchased by automobile dealer Ernie Boch senior and it became the flagship station for his Boch broadcasting, which is WXTK. And that's still going strong today. And despite being the very first radio station on Cape Cod, WSGC is just a footnote. And not maybe not even that. It's maybe because it only lasted two months in 1926. Or it could be because it's home base, the Sepuit golf course is also long gone. However, despite its ending, and it being just a mere footnote in history, there's no getting around the fact that WSGC was the first the original Cape Cod radio station. So every station that exists now and every station that came since it owes a little tip of the cap to WSGC and Osterville.

Road Trip: Gettysburg, PA

We are back on the road, it's time for another road trip. We are still we are actually still on the second day of my epic 2019 road trip to all these places, you can see where I didn't have much time to stop and enjoy. But I will tell you this week's one we're going to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania which was one of the top spots on my list of places to go. It has a deep, deep connection to the Civil War and that time period civil war through the rest of the 19th century. That's basically my favorite time in history to research. I was just thrilled and fascinated with getting to go to the Gettysburg National Military Park museum. So I'm going to dive into what my experience was like there with a little overview of the town in general also, where we left off last time was Hershey, Pennsylvania. So I went from Hershey to Gettysburg. It's a little over 45 minutes to get there. And time was of a premium because sunset was a little after five. I think when we got to the end of November. It was an interesting little note. And this is a little bit morbid. But when I was driving through New York, upstate New York coming down, I would see deer everywhere. I mean, they were like squirrels all over the place. And they were just walking around on the sides of the road. And I kid you not I mean, it probably wasn't 100% True, but when I crossed into Pennsylvania, I saw all kinds of deer again, but this time they were all dead. It was like New York deer were smart enough to not get hit by cars and Pennsylvania deer just were like squirrels just hanging out in the middle of the road. It was the weirdest thing. I didn't see live deer basically in Pennsylvania until I got to Gettysburg. Gettysburg in general is about 40 miles south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and about 60 miles northeast of Baltimore, Maryland to kind of put it in perspective for you. As of 2019, the population in Gettysburg was just under 7700 people. So it's a small town, but it gets a lot of people visiting in general Gettysburg gets about a million visitors a year, which is actually down from his heyday in the 1960s and 70s, where they'd get anywhere from two to 6 million visitors. The Gettysburg National Military Park Museum, which was where I wanted to go more than anything is located at 1195 Baltimore Pike. When I got there, there wasn't that much light left. So it was basically like this was the only spot I was going to get to see before dark, wanting to soak in and take in as much of the actual Gettysburg area while I was there, I decided to walk out to the actual battlefield you can drive. So if you get there, you can do a driving tour of the battlefield and some of the other sites. There's a great visitor center that can kind of give you a better overview of what if you're not familiar with Gettysburg or the Civil War, any of that, it'll give you a better idea of why you're there and why it's important. You can also go to nps.gov/gett, that's the official site of the National Military Park museum. I didn't have much time to go into the visitor center, I kind of wanted to get out to the actual Gettysburg Battlefield and soak it in as much as I could to be in that spot where such history took place. For those that don't know, Gettysburg is considered the most important one of the most important battles of the Civil War. Definitely the bloodiest with 23,000 Union soldiers and 28,000 Confederate soldiers losing their lives in July 1863. Like I said, you can drive out there from you basically do a driving tour of the sites I decided to walk. I started off there as a statue of Abraham Lincoln fittingly right there. And that was how I started my walk out there. There's a nice little walking path, a paved one that goes through the woods to get you over to the battlefield. And it's a little over half a mile, which is fine. In the daytime I walked out there, they had these really nice, bigger-than-life-size, portraits of soldiers from the Afghan war that were black and white, which are pretty white if you're not expecting them to see these huge faces in black and white off in the distance in the woods. So that kind of caught me off guard. And then there were at least a dozen deer out there just eating I thought they were squirrels foraging for food, but no, they were big deer. You come out of the woods and you're on route 134. It's just a rural road, and you cross straight across the road. Once you're out in the open on the battlefield, it really hits home. First thing you notice is dozens and dozens of monuments and memorials to the different regiments and the people that lost their lives from different states. It was interesting and sort of fitting that once I got out there and it was getting on close to sunset, my camera batteries died. So I had to use my phone more so and I had an older phone then that would die when it got cold out. So it was almost like no one wanted me to take photos. I still got a bunch but not as many as I'd wanted. Even on a November evening, there was still some people out there like a dozen, but there weren't that many. So you could really soak it in and look and imagine being there in 1863. And just the carnage that happened. It's known as Cemetery Ridge. And that's because 1000s of people died there. But I wanted to see the final resting place of some of them. So there's the Gettysburg National Cemetery is not too far from Cemetery Ridge basically just walk across the street. And that's really humbling. It's here that Abraham Lincoln gave his legendary Gettysburg address on November 19 1863. But what's really sad, I suppose about this cemetery is it's the final resting place of more than 3500 Union soldiers. But a lot of them are literally just these numbers on small stones. There are these little dots in the ground, and at best, they're collected by state. So you might get say, Michigan, and it would have however many men from the state died there and then there's just these little dots and even worse. There's collections of these stones. And it just has a big headstone at the front and it will just say, unknown bodies, and it'll have a number. And that's it. It's very humbling and sad to think that all these people fought for a cause they believed in, and then they're just they're not even remembered. They're just bodies with no name with a stone. You can feel the importance, though. It's not all sad, you know that you're standing in a place where something very, very significant in American history happened. I stayed there a while I waited until the sun had gone down. Because the other big thing with Gettysburg in the battlefield is that it's considered one of the most haunted places in America. I didn't plan on staying there super late. But I thought maybe if I'm there after dark, maybe I'll see something. Maybe I'll hear something. And fittingly, as I said, my camera didn't work. My phone still worked. So I was hanging out there. The other people that were in the parking lot that had done the driving tour, they were all leaving, because it was chilly out it was probably in the upper 40s. And I'm out there waiting to see if any spirits show up. I stayed out there maybe a half hour, just out in the area. I didn't stand still it was too cold. I would walk back and forth looking and listening. I didn't hear anything. And then I realized in the dark I had to find my way back to the parking lot, which was closer to a mile away after I had wandered off down to the Gettysburg National Cemetery. This is the best part. So now it's dark. It's totally dark. I don't have I have my phone with a flashlight on it. That's not much. It's like a penlight. I'm walking down the trails, the paved trails, I got to get out there. And now I'm just hearing noise everywhere. And all I kept saying to myself is remember it's only deer. You saw the deer on the way out. It's just deer. It's not the spirits of dead Civil War soldiers. I had to walk back through an auxiliary like an extra parking lot that was totally empty. Some walking across that just hearing things like oh man, I never officially saw any spirits but I got back to my car was the last one in the parking lot. And I got out of there and headed for my next stop. If you're any sort of history fan, I can't recommend enough going to Gettysburg. I only had time to go to the National Military Park museum but I would recommend taking more time and checking out more of what it has to offer. Go to destination gettysburg.com and get a better idea. For me this was one of the bucket list type places to go to the Gettysburg Battlefield so I can't recommend that enough. And join me again in Episode 37 where I'll have the next stop for my epic 2019 road trip which was basically where I went after Gettysburg

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This Week In History

This week in history is one of the biggest dates, especially in recent American history, maybe ever in American history, the 20-year anniversary of September 11 2001, and you're gonna hear a lot and see a lot of retrospectives, and shows and people's stories from those days, and you're gonna get inundated with what happened, the facts, who did it things like that. I wanted to give more of a localized version of it. My Remembrance is of that day and those things that happened right after, I can just remember it being a Tuesday morning, and I was off from work working in a restaurant. And I was actually sending an email to my friend Barry, who I've mentioned a ton on this podcast. And it was mundane. That's kind of the idea that the moments before and the moments after, it was mundane. It was basically Oh, I think I'm gonna go to Nickerson state park up in Brewster and have lunch, maybe take some photos, maybe write a little, my mother was actually going off somewhere she was in the car outside. I was inside with my sister, Kate. She was pregnant with her second child, my oldest niece, who was two and a half of the time we were all inside watching, probably some children's show. And we hear our mothers screaming from the driveway. So we thought something happened to her. But she screamed to put on the news. And that's when we saw it one of the World Trade Center towers with a gaping hole in it smoking. From that moment on from 9am until probably 5pm. We sat there just staring at the TV because it didn't seem real. It seemed like one of those dramatizations of the end of the world where you were waiting for someone to pop up on the screen and say, All right, that was a great documentary. But now here's reality is back to normal. The strangest thing was the next day being at work. And it wasn't really busy, but being outside and because all airplanes had been grounded, just standing there. And it was just birds and nothing else in the sky. no planes, no nothing. We had a prayer vigil at Patriot square and Dennis, where there were a couple of people that had been working on recovering bodies and rescue down in Manhattan at Ground Zero, and listening to them and what they had seen. It was just incredible. On September 11, I remember sitting and watching that TV with my sister and my little niece, who she's now 22, she was just looking at us like she could tell something was wrong. But she was too little to really verbalize what was going on. I thought back to my seventh-grade trip to New York, and actually being in the World Trade Center, we didn't have time to go up to the top of the building. So we got to go in and up to that first level concourse for anyone that had been inside. That was it having the memory of being inside one of the Twin Towers, and imagining them being gone, you could kind of I could make the connection from being there. It still feels like it's yesterday that had happened, I can close my eyes. That's why I have all these minute details like what I was writing in an email, because it's all emblazoned in my mind. And now it's been 20 years. Like I said at the beginning of this, you're going to see and hear a lot of things on TV coming up in memory of 9/11 20 years later. So I didn't want to dive into the actual technical details of everything. I wanted to share more of my personal experience. And I'll go more into it on the live stream on Friday to dive a little bit deeper and see if we can have a little conversation about it. But this week in history, 20 years ago, America and the world changed and it still changed to this day from the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. 9/11 20 years ago. We will try to end this with a time capsule that is a little more beat. So we're gonna go back I just picked a random date 46 years ago this week, September 8 1975. For this time capsule, the number one song in America was Rhinestone Cowboy by Glen Campbell. The song was off of Campbell's album of the same name, Rhinestone Cowboy. It spent two weeks at number one on the top 103 weeks at number one on the country chart. It was a huge hit with sales of more than a million copies. The number one movie in America was jaws. And we may be hearing more from Jaws in a little bit. But everyone knows this movie about the man-eating shark off of Amity Island, which was actually Martha's Vineyard down here on the cape. Jaws spent 14 weeks at number one, imagine that the same movie for 14 weeks we're talking over three months. This one was Steven Spielberg with Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw. Based on the book by Peter Benchley. It made $472 million at the box office in 1975. That's equal to about $2.4 billion today, so it's one of the highest-grossing movies ever. It spawned three sequels, JAWS two was pretty good. Jaws three was not as good Jaws four was terrible, but definitely check out the first one. The number one TV show was all in the family. The Norman Lear classic. It was on TV for nine seasons, and 205 episodes starring Archie Bunker his wife, Edith, their daughter Gloria and her husband Mike, also known as meathead. It's one of those trailblazing shows one of those most important and funniest sitcoms ever. And it spawned Archie's place which wasn't as good. It also spawned the Jeffersons, which actually lasted longer than all in the family did. And if you had some spare money on September 8 1975, and you were looking for a fad or something to waste your money on, the pet rock was available for $3.95. This toy was made by advertising executive Gary doll, and they were said to be smooth stones from Mexico's Rosarito Beach, they seem like the stupidest idea. But doll sold more than a million of these pet rocks at 3.95 a pop Just in 75 and in early 1976, so he became a millionaire, over a rock in a box that looked like the old Happy Meal boxes with holes in it. Imagine that it just shows you there's a market for everything. That's going to wrap up another time capsule another this week in history. Now let's dive into my top five I said stay tuned for JAWS possibly again. So this is going to be the top five movies that gave me nightmares, so you can laugh at me because one of them you will laugh at. But let's dive into that now.

Top 5: Movies That Gave Me Nightmares

I'm a child of the 1980s if you couldn't tell, but all the times I say it on the podcast and all my retro segments. But here if we go back in the day to the movies that gave me nightmares, you're going to notice kind of a time frame here. Basically, I'm sticking to the 1980s because I don't really think there were any movies that gave me nightmares. Once I became a teenager. I would think that if you mix a child eight 910 years old with gory horror movies, it's a recipe for nightmares. So keep that in mind. So for this top five, there are a couple of honorable mentions movies that gave me nightmares. Number one was Cujo. Because obviously if there's a movie about a rabid dog killing people, you see dogs every day. So you're gonna naturally put two and two together that that could be reality. Another honorable mention the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's actually not that gory, but it's psychological about a guy with people's skin on his face and a chainsaw hacking people up. If you see that when you're 10-11 years old. Yeah, that's gonna give you nightmares. But now for the actual top five movies that gave me nightmares. Number one, A Nightmare on Elm Street, part two. And this one is funny because it was one of my first sleepovers a friend's house. He lived right around the corner so I could walk to his house. And he thought it would be funny to show me that movie have the poster of the movie on his wall. And I just couldn't spend the night there. Freddy Krueger hacking kids up. I believe I was eight or nine years old. That was all too much. That was the original. I was too scared to spend the night at my friend's house. My mother had to walk from our house to come and get me because of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Part Two gave me nightmares. Number two creep show. This was like an anthology horror movie, George Romero from Night of the Living Dead. directed at Stephen King wrote it he's even in it. The main one that gave me nightmares. Well, all of them did. But there was a father that these kids killed. And he came basically he came back to life as a skeleton. And he's coming at them as a zombie. And he just kept saying, where's my cake, it's Father's Day, but in this really scary gravelly voice and that gave me nightmares, especially when he took one of the people and just twisted their head off. Seeing that when you're 9-10 years old, that'll give you nightmares. And Stephen King became like a human plant, he got like a meteorite on his fingers and he turned into a plant. Nowadays, it's an awesome movie. But you see that as a kid? Good lord. Number three is Jaws, like I said, living on Cape Cod surrounded by water and seeing a movie about a man-eating shark. Especially where it kills the little boy. The kitten, their boy grabs him right off his raft. And then you go to the beach. It's like, yeah, there could be great whites out there. And now ironically, there is. That's the funny thing is that the nightmare came true that Great White Sharks are all around Cape Cod. But it definitely made me afraid to go into the ocean. I'd rather go into a pond or a lake than go in the ocean, especially now. We actually had someone die from a shark bite a couple of years ago here. So now the jaws thing is real. Number four is Hellraiser. That's pinhead. That's another just oh my god. It's a supernatural movie by Clive Barker. There's this mystery puzzle box and it summons these demons. They're called Cenobites. And there's this one big fat slimy looking one that he has these chattering teeth. And that was the one that gave me nightmares was just the chattering teeth one. pinhead was alright. But I mean, even he was terrifying. And finally, number five on the movies that gave me nightmares, the one that will make you laugh is Pinocchio. And why? So when I was a kid, they rereleased a lot of the classic 40s and 50s Disney movies to theaters. And I went and saw Pinocchio in the theater. And what scared me was when the boy gets turned into the donkey, and they're showing the shadows, and his hands are turning into hooves. And being eight or nine years old. And seeing this little boy turned into an animal was just terrifying. It's almost like the werewolf and American Werewolf in London, but for kids, so yeah, when I saw it, Pinocchio gave me nightmares. Seeing a little boy turned into a donkey would terrify you to have your little. But there they are the top five movies that gave me nightmares as a kid in no particular order. Just like always, did any of those give you nightmares which ones gave you nightmares shoot me a message. If there's any, I won't laugh if you all laugh at mind. We'll have another top five list coming up next week in Episode 37.

Back In the Day: Going Back to School

Back to school time, all the kids having to go get on the bus or get dropped off at school or if you're in high school and you can drive yourself God bless him back to school starts earlier and earlier every year. It's like the beginning of July, they start back-to-school sales I used to always hate. It's like we've still got six, or seven weeks of summer left, calm down. But here on the podcast, we're going to go way way back in the day to what I remember about going back to school, specifically elementary school and middle school, and just the things that surrounded it. So that's what we're going to do right now. The very first thing that I thought of when putting this together for the podcast, going back to school, it was always that night before having to actually go to bed at a reasonable hour after months of staying up till whenever you wanted to. Even when I was in elementary school, I think my mother would let us stay up. Not as late as we wanted. But I mean, we're talking 10-11 o'clock, as long as we were quiet and not annoying. Then when it came time to go back to school, suddenly it's like 830-9 o'clock, you got to go to bed. It's almost like you had to go to bed earlier, just to make sure you got up on time to give yourself time to fall asleep. You know how it is if you've stayed up late several nights in a row and then you have to get up early for work. It's almost like you've got to go to bed earlier and wind yourself down. It's even worse as a kid. If you remember in episode four of the podcast, I went over old-school clothing brands for back in the day. So I'm not going to dive too deep into the clothing because you can check that out in the podcast. But I will go into shoes. So 1980s shoes. Yeah, we had Nike and Reebok Nike with the Air Jordans. That was later on in elementary school was what I wanted but they were so expensive. I remember going to stride right to get shoes. And when I was really little like elementary school we're talking kindergarten through fifth grade was what we considered it down on Cape Cod. But I would get I think the first shoes I had were Roos and they were Velcro. Does anyone remember Roos? I think they're still around. They had a kangaroo logo on the side. But I remember those being one of the first shoes that I got, as far as for school, you always wanted to look cool. But back in first, second third grade, I didn't really care as much. I think I had Roos I had Puma. Later on, they had the converse, the Chuck Taylors. I think I had those, I got them at Kevin McHale camp, but didn't really wear them. As he got more into middle school, that's when you wanted to look cool. For the other kids, like you were showing off for them. That's where you wanted Nike and Reebok. And you were cool. If you had an LL Bean backpack or a Jansport backpack, I always remember being the ones. I was one of five kids. So basically, when I was maybe in seventh grade, by that point, there were five of us kids all in school. So obviously our parents couldn't buy us all, LL Bean and Jansport. Those weren't cheap. So we basically got whatever they could afford, which was fine. They worked. But you see the LL Bean are the people that had their initials on their backpack, or their full name with like, designs around and you're always like, oh, man, I want that. I want my name with a design on my backpack. I think I wrote with marker on mine, like initials, just in case it got lost. So you had the new clothes, you had the new shoes, you had your backpack, you have to fill your backpack with school supplies. As I got more into middle school, you kind of knew what you needed. Elementary school was like a lunchbox and maybe a couple pencils. And crayons, it was much simpler. Then, as you got into middle school, you needed real supplies. I like the erasable pens, those were pretty good, because they always want you to write in pencil, but I didn't want to get up to have to use the sharpener, the one you had to crank and it had the little spinning dial almost to fit different size pencils in it. So I like the erasable pen or the one that was the fatter pen that had it was multicolored, so you push the side down. And there were usually four different colors like red, blue, and black. That was the time you'd have to have they would I think they would give you a list of the supplies you need. And almost like you would go in with a few things you thought you needed. And then you get a list with Protractor and ruler, and the compass thingy that had the little point like you could draw the circle, you would hook your pencil into it and spin it around. Maybe that's more of an 80s and 90s thing. Of course, we needed a trapper keeper, I mentioned in Episode 35. About that being one of the big 1980s fads. It obviously stuck around longer, but there was nothing cool like you had to have a really cool design on your trapper. And if not, you had to put your own stickers and such on it. When you were younger, you got those scratch-and-sniff stickers that have like different fruit or it basically was whatever the smell was, and it was animated on there. Those were pretty neat. In high school, you went like at first you had to have a regular calculator, like the normal little flat one. And then later on in high school, I think when I started taking pre-calculus, I needed the graphing calculator, which I might still have in my mother's basement. But it's the Texas Instruments one, it's bigger than any TV remote. And back in the 90s. That thing was as high-tech as a guide, you can make the graph with the XY points on it. I think I even made like cheat programs in it. So I knew how to solve equations, which made me seem smarter. And then there was the first day getting on the bus and seeing a lot of the people that you remember, kids in your neighborhood that was always you know, at the bus stop. You didn't have to walk too far. Usually. I think in high school, I chose to walk to a further bus stop because more of my friends were at that one. It's interesting because today kids get picked up in front of their house. Back then I think it was at least three streets over that I walked to catch my bus. Not always, oh, this was more in high school. I would just walk but today you don't do that. That first aid of the morning announcements bringing you back in. Everyone would be upset. Welcome back for another school year. The first day was usually easy though, just meeting the teacher and learning like what you were going to be learning about you usually get your textbooks that were in middle school, I think was when I first started to have to do the covering your books. You get the paper bags and turn them inside out and make it into a book cover. And you could draw over it. Because if you drew inside it and such then you had to pay for it and I don't think anyone's parents wanted that. I'll do a deep dive in a future episode about lunch and recess, because that's a whole different animal. That will usually be it the first day of school, you get back on the bus and go home and it will be How was your first day? Although it usually wasn't bad. I enjoyed school for the most part. So I think I was an anomaly. I mean, look at me right now. It's like I'm teaching a class, although I don't know much. It's basically like all stuff that I'm interested in. And a lot of these things, history and the retro and road trips and such. That's all stuff from school kind of learning how to put a lesson plan together. Like I said, we'll do deeper dives into other aspects of school as the school year goes on. But what are your memories about getting ready to go back to school? Those of you with kids, are you passing on any of your traditions you remembered growing up to them for school? shoot me a message and let me know.

Closing

That's all the time for episode 36 of the in my footsteps podcast. Thank you so much to everyone who has tuned into any of these episodes. I have so much fun putting them together and recording them and sharing them. And I hope that you enjoy listening to what usually turns out to be a pretty random assortment of topics. I tried to keep it on track, but it's still more organized in my live streams. Check out the live streams Fridays at 8pm. On Instagram, they're called without a map. I go over the most recent podcast and preview next week's episode. And then it just goes off the rails. We talked about anything. People in the chat a lot of my family, they'll bring something up and then it's like we just go down that road. It's a lot of fun. Besides Instagram, find me on Twitter, I'm always sharing things about the podcast. There'll be videos and photos that have to do with each episode. The in my footsteps podcast has a Facebook page you can go find to be a fan of it's also got a blog the in my footsteps podcast blog, there's only one I've got a lot of good posts that I've put up in the last few weeks Cape Cod history about shootflying Hill in Hyannis fiddlebees restaurant, also in Hyannis, the history of Cape Cod community college like the beginnings of it, and a neat one about the butterfly effect in life where if my life had gone the way I had planned it to go, I would have been living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. So that's an interesting little tidbit. Tune in next week for Episode 37, where I'm going to share the story of what it was like to write for the Travel Channel's website. I did several articles for them, this was back in 2014. But it's interesting how it came about, and some of the benefits that came from it. We'll do the next stop on my 2019 road trip. We're going to be in Hagerstown, Maryland, which is an interesting story of how I ended up there. We're gonna go way, way back in the day, and I share with the younger generation Just what the hell of photo mat was and what went into it. There'll be a new top five that are top five defunct New England stores, which is going to be really fun. I had fun putting that list together. And there'll be a new this week in history and Time Capsule centering around the Surreal 27 club when it comes to music. Look it up, you'll know what I mean. All that's coming up next week on episode 37 of the podcast. If you're listening on Stephanie Vivas, lemonadio howdy shout out to all of you. Shout out to Stephanie also for being voted Best of the Best of Cape Cod times 2021. As I said, You got my vote, I always say check out Wear your wish you've heard the ad already visit Wear your wishes.com If you're in need of an alignment, or you want to do some training with me, check out mind body, spine, chiropractic and Brewster. That's my day job. So if you want to come in Dr. Michael Singleton, he's amazing, excellent chiropractor. And way more than that, we're going to have big news coming up with that by the end of the year. So check them out to wish a happy new school year to all of my nieces and nephews that are back at the grind in the physical buildings of school. Hopefully, everyone is safe and you learn stuff. And remember to take care of your mental health. Lean heavy into what makes you happy and what keeps you happy. Because there's a lot of stress. You know, besides COVID it's just life in general. I sometimes get the whole thing where people say they're tired of being an adult. I'm at that point, looking for a new place to live in the worst possible time to do it is not fun. So I have to really lean heavy into what makes me happy, this podcast, as does photography, I recently did an amazing sunset shoot out at Race Point Lighthouse. So just whatever it is for you lean into that, and hopefully it'll help your boat sail through turbulent times. But whatever it is, remember that in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path. And enjoy every moment you can on this journey because you just never know. Tune in tomorrow, Friday for my live stream. I'll be back next week with episode 37 of the podcast. Thank you all so very much for giving a little bit of your time to me for my passion project. And I will talk to you all again