The question is often asked whether behaviors are the result of nurture or nature.
This one my wife recently found, was taken in '55, and shows that I was nurtured at 3 years to start drumming. My sister at age 8 got the doll. She eventually went on to have 4 sons. It isn't clear what my brother at age 13 had received. I'm guessing a model airplane with a fueled engine and cable control. However, he did not become a pilot.
That sweet tableau is reminiscent of the Christmas morning scene in A Christmas Story when Ralphie finally got his Red Ryder BB gun. He also got that atrocious pink bunny suit with the matching fluffy slippers. Did you have to model your fluffy bunny suit from your aunt?
Great photo Dan.
If I were to become tiresome on the philosophical question, I might say - people are nurtured by other people in every case, and since all people are products of nature, it's all really just nature. Within nature there exists a dichotomy though - genetics VS environment/circumstances/luck. Really just genetics VS luck. I'm guessing the ratio there might be infinitesimally different for each individual. There's always gotta be a bell-curve :)
[edit] I'm wrong above because genetics is luck too. As you were...:)
My sister walked up to the Smoke & Gift and bought me my first drum. Great photo Dan.
I was no older than seven in 1950 when some neighborhood friends and I did our own version of the Spirit of 76 for the little Independence Day parade around Thomas A Edison School. We attended the summer recreation program at this school that I attended from kindergarten through eighth grade. I'm the little chubby guy at the front right of the photo. We could start in school band in fourth grade. I started learning how to play various percussion instruments at age nine.
Great pics and stories. I am jealous of you early adopters.
I still feel true sadness and bitterness when think back on the first day of 7th grade band class. I wanted badly to play drums, but there were too many kids with the same idea, so the band director (Mr. Novi) strong armed several of us into selecting a different instrument. I ended up with the trombone...still resent that man. He looked like John Lennon but was a pompous tool box that stomped the love of music out of countless children. In the end the universe gave him what he had coming...
He was fired about a year later when my friend Brad "Beefo" Gustafson tossed a firecracker into the bell of a tuba during band class. Mr. Novi was so enraged that he screamed curse words and stormed toward Beefo at the back of the room pushing over kids and flattening instruments in his path. As fate would have it, a music stand that he shoved over in his rage sliced a girl's arm quite severely...that was Mr. Novi's last day.
Wow, Mr. Toast. That was some unfit teacher. I count myself fortunate to have had James Dycus as my band and orchestra teacher from fourth grade through eighth grade. Jim Dycus was a real positive influence on his students. His primary instrument was trumpet. I connected online with one of his daughters a few years ago. She informed me that her father was in his early nineties, and could no longer play his beloved horn due to breathing problems. He passed away a couple years later. That man was one of the three most influential people in my life in addition to my father and the CEO of the company I represented for nearly thirty years.
