THROUGH THE PAST VAGUELY...

I look at these pics, I'm in '66

Time for yet another reflective reminiscence from yours truly, o panting Criv-ites, on the nature of memory and association.  "Oh not again!" do I hear you cry?  Don't be like that - if you had anything more interesting to do, you wouldn't be here to start with.  So let's get down to it before you bail out on me.

'Twas the year of our Lord 1966 and I was standing outside a department store called HENDERSONS of Sauchiehall Street while my mother was engaged in conversation with a friend we'd run into.  Before me was an oval-shaped fountain which, a couple or so years later, would remind me of the one at the beginning of The CHAMPIONS, though that one was on a far grander scale.  In my hands I held that week's issue of SMASH!, which I'd just had purchased for me in R.S. McCOLL's on the other side of the pedestrianised street of my town's main shopping centre.

An aerial view of the fountain, emptied for cleaning

As my mother chatted away with her pal, I studied the second part (the origin) of a new strip called The FANTASTIC FOUR.  I say "new", but the strip had first appeared in its own American mag around five years earlier, though most readers of the ODHAMS' comic probably wouldn't have seen it back then so it was all new to them.  Oddly, the strip was simultaneously published in WHAM!, sister publication to Smash!, but I wasn't aware of that until many years later, not that it matters much to my story.

Six years on, in late 1972, new weekly comic The MIGHTY WORLD Of  MARVEL reprinted the story yet again.  I was off school on Thursday 5th and Friday 6th October because I was ill, and on the Thursday, I recall my mother bringing me a bowl of tomato soup while I lay propped up in bed re-reading the FF's origin for the umpteenth time that week.  (MWOM #1 had only come out on Saturday 30th September, five days before, so the thrill of the new comic hadn't yet worn off.)

The early '60s, when the HENDERSON'S side of the shops was still under construction

Anyway, as I perused the pages of the FF's iconic origin tale, my mind idly wandered back to that day in '66 when I'd first experienced the strip, and familiar images of Henderson's, the oval fountain, and R.S. McColl's, all of which then yet existed (though today, no longer, alas), resurfaced.  (Henderson's may have changed their name to BAIRDS by then, but was still a HOUSE Of FRASER store.)  So what's all this got to do with memory and association you ask.

Simply this.  When I look at this story today, often (but not always), it's usually my 1972 experience of the strip that my mind first returns to, but it depends on what page I'm looking at, and whether it's in black and white or colour.  However, even when I'm recalling that long ago Thursday, the memory of my 1966 encounter isn't far away.  Curiously, although I can access the '66 recollection via the one from '72, it's not quite so easy to do the same thing in reverse.

When this page I view, I'm in '72 

Could it perhaps be that, because I'm mentally reliving that moment in '66 and (from that perspective) '72 hasn't yet happened, my mind finds it harder to make the jump forward?  It's easier for the mind to jump backwards to a previous event, than forward to one that, from a past point of view, is yet to occur - even when one is recalling both instances from a future point in time when the two are distant memories.

Anyway, no doubt I've expressed myself in my customary vague and incoherent way and failed to fully convey what I was trying to say.  Nevertheless, I think there's enough there for the intellectuals among you to work with, and even if you don't reach the finishing line I was pointing to, hopefully the journey itself will prove interesting, whatever your stopping point.