On the radio they were playing "Stop! In the Name of Love" by The Supremes, "Everybody Loves Somebody" by the movie star Dean Martin who we saw on TV with Jerry Lewis, and the dangers of driving fast with Jan and Dean’s  "Dead Man's Curve".  

On TV we started watching fewer westerns and I still liked My Favorite Martian but we started watching several new shows.  There was Bewitched about a pretty young witch marrying a regular man  and the trouble her spells get them into. There was the strange but silly Addams Family who father was Frankenstein and had a severed hand that walked about on it’s fingers. The whole family loved Flipper about a boy and his pet dolphin who was always saving the boy from some mishap, kind of like Lassie but with a dolphin instead of a dog.  What soon became one of the family favorites was Gilligan’s Island in which a small cruise boat with the Captain, five passengers and of course the ever inept Gilligan on board get caught in a storm and get shipwrecked on a deserted island.  The show had a catching opening song that soon got stuck in everyone’s mind, “Five passengers set sail that day,….”

The Ballad of Gilligan's Island
The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.  

The ship set ground on the shore of this uncharted desert isle
With Gilligan
The Skipper too,
The millionaire and his wife,
The movie star
The Professor and Mary Ann,
Here on Gilligan's Isle.

   On Saturday morning the cartoon Johnny Quest started, a science fiction, action series about a boy who accompanies his scientist father on extraordinary adventures. In "Arctic Splashdown", Johnny goes with his father to the Artic to find a downed missile.  In "Treasure of the Temple" Johnny goes into the jungle with his father looking for an ancient Mayan city and is threatened by a greedy, ruthless British treasure hunter.  This same theme was later used in the popular Indiana Jones movies.

The whole family went to see Mary Poppins at the movies and we all loved it. Then there was Flipper's New Adventure we liked because it was based in Florida.  The Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night came out, but I would see it until I was much older.  And Dad took David and I to see the new James Bond movie Gold Finger with the woman with the unforgettable name Pussy Galore and then there was the scene when James Bond wakes up to find his lover dead in the bed next to him covered in gold paint having died from “skin suffocation”.  

Robby the Robot with Will Robinson

I continued reading more science fiction with the expanded selection at the Westwood school library. There were many author’s the best were the books from the big three, Heinlein’s Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Red Planet, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Methuselah’s Children; Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot with its positronic brain and the three laws of robotics and his Foundation trilogy; Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood's End, Islands in the Sky.   Another favorite was Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and after reading ·  Something Wicked This Way Comes I was always a bit wary about carnivals.   And there was the movie Forbidden Planet that came on TV in black-and-white with Robby the Robot who help the starship crew fight off a monster trying to kill them.  Robby the Robot later appeared in the TV series Lost in Space  when he was always waving his arms wildly and saying “Danger, Will Robinson, danger”.  The future, space travel to other planets and amazing technology, I couldn’t get enough.

The Florida Gators had a really good year winning all their games, beating SMU, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Auburn and then Miami on Thanksgiving weekend.  Dad was a happy man.

Come December and my birthday was uneventful, Mom made a cake, and I got a few presents but everyone, including me, was more focused on Christmas three days away.  We spent Christmas at home, opening our presents on Christmas morning.  David and I got socks again from Grandma Junior.

Updated: 05-29-2023

1965