I don't need to be hooked up to the information highway to know I'm getting older. It's nature calling.

No satellite, wires or cable receivers needed when that biological clock kicks in. It's like Yellow Alert, Scotty standby with warp driveóit can hit any time, at work, walking home, or just waking up in the morning.

You can't run from it. You either deal with it or kvetchóit's just part of the interconnect of life.

Prepare for incredible midlife urges to see film and TV images, as well as numerous other artifacts from your youth, including intense memory flashes from days gone by.

Ira & the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan show

Maybe you're watching the news. Faster than you can say Manchurian Candidate you're comparing the plight of the young today to when you were just starting out. "Wait till they get older, they'll learn."

Wait a second, what's going on here, did I say that? Boy, that's something my parents would say. In fact, I'm as old as my parents were when they had me.

Where's my life gone, how old am I anyway? Jerry Garcia, Kurt Cobain and John Lennonówhat's it all about, Alfie?

The 1950's to me wasn't Elvis Presley, James Dean, or juvenile rebels creating the first rumblings of an uprising against the establishment.

I was too young to worry about things like that. The only trouble I got into was the kind the "Beev" would in Leave It To Beaver, like breaking a window with my baseball and trying unsuccessfully to cover it up-kid stuff.

And the A-Bomb or the notion of the Russians invading Brooklyn was the farthest thing from my mind.

The only Cold War that troubled me was my mother rubbing Vicks medicated gook on my chest when I had a cold. I'd rather have been in bed, congested, watching TV, than at school anyway. But most of the time I was better off in school because daytime programming wasn't for kids, and I was not a soap opera fan. Years later, of course, I would learn to appreciate daytime talent like Art Linkletter, Kate Smith, Arthur Godfrey and the unsung hero of daytime TVóand my favorite hostóDennis James. Ira and his sister Rona, 1956 In the art of film history documentation, pioneering author Herman Weinberg once told me, quoting Nietsche, that in regard to history writing, "There are no such things as facts, only interpretations of facts." That's the theme of my life as I uncover incredible artifacts of film & TV history that haven't been seen since they first aired, sometimes over forty years ago. It's up to you to make use of these findings and write about them. You can go out and document a piece of TV history, and uncover some incredible people and shows. But then, all of a sudden, I find myself in the business of nostalgia documentation, and I'm also a lot older. Norman Gallen & Sylvia Hirschstreet dating (our parents) I'm overwhelmed at times over what was my childhood and how it was (and still is) reflected in the images and artifacts of the era: Toys, comics, magazines, and, of course, the television commercials and TV shows that I've uncovered over the years. I like to time trip in the early fifties because of the kid shows I loved to watch. But it was a very different era from that other great treasure-trove of nostalgia, the sixtiesó Donna Reed's dresses, with crinolines underneath, matched against Nancy Sinatra wearing a mini skirt and go-go boots. In the fifties, I was still too young to have girls influencing my life. I'd rather have been riding the range after the bad guys alongside Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger. Every kid in America owned a gunóa toy gun, that is. There were 32 Westerns on TV back then, and just about as many detective shows, and if you were a typical preteen viewer, you had to have a Roy Rogers, Have Gun Will Travel, or Wanted Dead Or Alive gun set to play with while you watched your favorite shows. NEXT PAGE