Blogging, 1960s style

This is where it all started. The genesis of my blog was a cheesy little five-year diary that I bought in July, 1959 – the summer before my freshman year of high school.

It had a lock that was inconvenient, so I ripped it off.

I kept a daily log, condensed into four handwritten lines, from July 6 to Aug. 16, then took a break from journaling, making occasional entries until June 6, 1960. From that point on until Dec. 31, 1963, I kept a regular daily account of the events in my life – mostly trivial, but most of the entries trigger a specific memory.

Like, for instance, on this date in 1960 (a Saturday) a tree service cut down the elm tree in our front yard – killed by the Dutch Elm Disease epidemic that swept through the U.S. at the time – and I went to the Roxy Theatre in downtown Delphi, Ind., with friends to see “The Time Machine.” It was a forgettable movie, even though George Pal’s special effects won an Oscar.

It’s astonishing how many memory triggers a teenage boy can cram into such a little book. There’s also a lot of embarrassing adolescent emotion there that can make me cringe a half-century later.

Here are a couple of pages with the embarrassing stuff redacted.