GOOD OLD DAYS:

All Brady Rhoades, our managing editor, wanted for Christmas in 1972 was a “cherried out, chopper-looking” Schwinn bike with a banana seat and a sissy bar.

On Christmas morning, Brady got his bike. It was black and yellow, no less. And it came with tassels on the handlebars.

Even Brady admits he looked like a bumblebee riding down the street on it, but he was one cool bumblebee.

“It was the coolest, brightest, most decked-out bike on my block,” Mr. Journalism Guy reports. “It was straight-out bitchin.”

Brady rode that bike around practicing his wheelies up and down the cul-de-sac he lived on in Claremont. He was getting pretty good at it, looking cooler every day, when he and his friends decided to pay a visit to his neighbor’s pomegranate farm.

Old Mr. Smith grew pomegranates and sold them for 10 cents each. Paying for them was never as much fun as stealing them, Brady said, especially since Old Mr. Smith patrolled the farm with a shotgun, shooting rock salt at would-be thieves.

Brady had been the proud owner of that bumblebee bike for about a month the fateful day he parked it outside the farm and went in “guerrilla style” to steal those pomegranates.

When he came out front with his booty, the bike was gone. Stolen. He searched everywhere, denying the truth, believing it had to be a joke, and praying for the bike’s return.

“It was a karmic lesson in thievery,” Brady laments. “Crime doesn’t pay. I got two or three pomegranates and lost the best bike I ever had.”

Brady isn’t the only one at the Daily Pilot old enough to remember Christmases past. Many on staff were happy to share their stories.

City Editor Paul Anderson grew up in Chicago, where he was the certified sports nut in his family. When he was younger, his coveted gift was a football helmet, shoulder pads and jersey, followed in later years by everything Vikings — a tough cross to bear in Chicago.

In 1977 Paul got a first-generation, hand-held digital football game complete with LED lights. “It was basically the equivalent of Pong,” he recalls. He mastered it quickly, delighting in walloping the computer 140-to-nothing. “I found myself wishing my beloved Vikings could do as well.”

I was 8 and living in New York in 1963, the year Hasbro introduced America’s first functional toy baking appliance. At that time, the Easy-Bake Oven cost a whopping $15.95, but it was all I wanted. Turquoise, with a carrying handle and fake stove top, it cooked all sorts of delectable treats with what was probably, at best, a 100-watt light bulb.

I grabbed my fake oven by the handle, carried it upstairs and didn’t come out of my bedroom until every last cookie, cake and biscuit mix was gone. I loved how great it felt to prepare and electrify my own food.

When you want a guitar and don’t think you’ll get one, you try to think smaller, which is what Features Editor Elizabeth Glazner was doing when she asked for a harmonica. She was 10, and living in Mount Prospect, Ill., where the only gift she was sure she would get was a new winter coat (“That’s what Christmas was for”).

On Christmas Eve, when all the kids got to open one present, Elizabeth looked for the smallest box. It was the prize — a Hohner Marine Band harmonica in the key of C.

Sitting in the bean bag chair in the living room, she was sure she’d master “Silent Night” by dinner, but all she managed was some awkward screeching. “Eventually I could play the theme song to ‘Welcome Back Kotter,’” Elizabeth boasts.

As an 8-year-old living in Corona del Mar in 1954, Editions Planner Pat Tool wanted a train for Christmas. “Electric trains are self-contained, and they act just like a real train.” On Christmas morning, he put the oval track together pretty fast, and the boxcar, gondola, tank car, locomotive, tender (coal car) and caboose were up and running in no time.

The set didn’t come with any people, so Pat grabbed some little green Army guys and set them up on the tracks, where the train could run them over. And over again. “It was no fun to just simply watch the train go around,” he recalls.

Growing up in El Salvador, children are told baby Jesus brings the presents on Christmas Eve, right after he’s born. Nobody wonders how the tiny baby gets around, or oversees the gift giving, says Vilma Saenz, our office manager; they just know that he does it.

When Vilma was 3, she wanted a doll — a big doll that stood up almost as big as she did. Vilma says that was the year she figured out her dad delivered the presents, not baby Jesus — how could a baby carry a doll that big?

In 1961, Fred Christian, Daily Pilot graphic artist, was living in Los Angeles with his three brothers and four sisters. He was one of the older kids, past the whole idea of believing in Santa Claus. Lucky thing, since this Christmas morning he helped dad bring the presents in from the car. At least they were wrapped, and Christian says his best gift he ever got was the carrom table he found under the tree that day. The playgrounds at school had carrom tables he played on all the time, and now he had one of his own. Fred’s table was like a pool table. It had pockets on either end, two cue sticks and the carroms — flat red and green disks with a hole in them that you tried to shoot in the pockets. The older boards he’d played on had wooden carroms, but his table was “top of the line” with plastic ones. Over Christmas vacation, Fred played every chance he got. By the time he returned to school he was an ace. “I was sharp,” he said.

SUE THOENSEN may be reached at (714) 966-4627 or at [email protected].