Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Tag: 1970s kidhood

  • Captured: Foodliner

    I remember a time, during my 1970s kidhood, when the IGA Foodliner was the official grocery store of the rural Midwest. Even through the 1980s, if you drove out of the city and into the cornfields, when you came upon a small town you’d almost certainly find a Foodliner. In the intervening years many rural…

  • Cars I’d only ever seen in pictures, which I now present to you…in pictures

    When I was a car-crazy boy, I spent a large amount of my allowance on car magazines and books. My favorite book was the Encyclopedia of American Cars, an exhaustive look at virtually every automobile ever made on these shores. My copy was from the 1980s, but the publisher updated it periodically through the early…

  • Summer’s denouement

    Longtime readers may remember this post from three years ago. I’m very much feeling the end-of-summer blues this year and this explains the roots of my affliction. I’ve updated this post a little to keep current with the times. During my 1970s kidhood when schools started after Labor Day as God intended, my mid-August birthday…

  • When a classic car is not beautiful to behold

    I used to love to sit on my parents’ front stoop and watch the cars go by. I counted the Impalas and Furys and Galaxies that were so common during my 1970s kidhood. I got a special thrill from every Mustang and Camaro, and I even grooved on the ubiquitous Beetles. I still love the cars…

  • Vintage TV: 1970s weather forecasts

    I watched a lot of TV news during the recent ice storm so I could catch the weather forecasts. Local stations went all out during this storm with expanded and extra newscasts. Reporters were live all over the city showing what it looked like outside, in case our living-room windows were malfunctioning and we couldn’t…

  • Root beer and dead ends in Washington

    US 50 has a colorful history in terms of realignments across southwestern Indiana. I-64 was originally going to be built along the US 150 corridor from Louisville to about Shoals, where it would pick up US 50 on its way to Illinois. But lobbying got I-64 built farther south, passing closer to Evansville. That didn’t…

  • February snows

    I complain about Indiana winters, but that’s because during my 1970s and 1980s South Bend kidhood I shoveled enough snow to last a lifetime and it soured me on the whole season. Lake Michigan being only 20 miles away, lake-effect snow squalls dump more than 80 inches of snow on the city in an average…

  • Vintage TV: Adam-12

    When I was five, I wanted to be Jim Reed, the rookie police officer on the TV show Adam-12. The show had everything a five-year-old boy could want – cop cars, sirens, and bad guys – and Reed was in the thick of it, yelling “Freeze!”, cuffing suspects, and saying “One Adam 12 roger” into…

  • Summer’s denouement

    During my 1970s kidhood when schools started after Labor Day as God intended, my mid-August birthday always meant summer was beginning to end. By then, the afternoon sun was at its hottest and most intense, the annual August dry spell began to toughen and dry spring’s tender greenery, and the street lights switched on earlier to…

  • Vintage TV: Classical Gas TV news theme

    During my 1970s kidhood, local stations’ news programs were austere affairs of scowling men in dark suits at gray desks droning on about attempted assaults and school board meetings. Then in 1976, WNDU-TV in my hometown, South Bend, unveiled its revamped news program, NewsCenter 16. WNDU’s bright new orange and tan set and upbeat, hummable…