halsey02
;191966]Ha ha ha ha...those where the fun & innocent days...!!wasn't it!!, life was simple, uncomplicated..men were naughty!!...:p
Did your mother catchhe 'rat'?, or when he sighted the 'rat catcher' he hid behind those girls..and slinked away? & what happened, when the "RAT" was caught?, his allowance suspended?, and every pay day, he has to empty his pay to the 'rat ctacher'?
and be given enough to survive for a month...
btw... in case you guys out there don't know:
there was
1. Great World - Kim Seng Rd
2. New World - Jalan Besar
3. Gay world - Geylang Rd
LOL...No recollections of that but I saw my Dad dancing the joget with a Malay lady. You know in those days they actually wear flowers in their hair!
But anyway here's some of recollection of those easy days...
So many memories I have of the place...
Remember the basketball stadium right smack in the middle of Gay World? The first Western Wrestling matches brought to Singapore were held there. And the wrestlers actually got into fights with bouncers of brothels they visited. I witnessed a few and I tell you it was hilariously comical, they just walk away while the shorter built bouncers were raining punches on the wrestlers' bodies and they apparently did not feel a thing! They were so muscular and big sized.
So too in the same stadium I watched the world famous "Sphere of Death" show where up to three or four motorcycles riders rode their bikes within the sphere. I was too young to get excited over it , just suffering the discomfort from the screaming engines and roars of the audience.
And too were early overseas Chinese concerts. I met the legendary Teresa Teng one afternoon as an 11 year old kid when she went through a rehearsal. She walked out of the Stadium with her rotund mum who was in a cheongsum. I followed by Teresa's side as she walked out of Gay World to hail a cab. She had those tiny little pimples all over her face but she was a very pretty. 20 year old at the time. Uncomfortable with the way I was staring at her, she giggled at her mum and remarked, "Why is he staring at me like that?" while covering her face with one hand exaggeratedly. My last sight of her was her hailing a cab to a stop and getting into it with her mum. She looked so confident with herself.
Anybody remembered the Australian Funfair held in the Gay World carpark which was always mistakenly called Lorong 2 and stretched all the way back into Guillemard Road and the old Kallang Airport track field?
It had amusement features like the "Crazy House" seen in the movie "Grease" beside the usual food stalls and floating balloons. What I could never forget was the little Malay woman born without legs begging in the middle of the flow of people and receiving much donations of cash. It was rumoured that a Mercedes Benz will pick her up at the end of the evening.
Sin Wah Emporium, later to be part of Emporium Holdings was my favourite haunt. Air conditioned, spacious and not packed like warehouses for departmental stores of today. I bought my first aeroplane chess game as well as Airfix aeroplane models like the Hunter and MirageIIIc. I paid returning visits to with the largest model of them all, the Stirling bomber priced at $6.90, yes I remember the price, but could never accumulate enough pocket money to buy it.
And then there was the endless music from music stores, we called them record shops then,playing all the popular Chinese pop songs from Taiwan. And for the boys and men there was the games centre where we played coin operate table football, table basket ball and the first electronic arcade console games like Space Invaders! I remember adults shooting air rifles at rows of empty glass bottles.
My late beloved grandfather worked as a projector operator in the now long gone New Happy Theatre for more than thirty years. Either alone or with my cousin, we would always turn up at 3.45 in the afternoon either to get in for a free movie or to stand in front of the cinema and whistle our presence to our grand dad who could always be relied upon to be perched on his chair by the window of the projector room. He would wrap twenty or thirty cents in cigarette foil, the equivalent of $2 in today's currency, and threw them down to us.
I was brought into the projector room once to observe my grand dad at work. The projector was a huge and hot machine. It wasn't a bulb that produced the high intensity light needed to project images to the distant screen, it was carbon rods burning like welding rods. My grand dad allowed me to monitor the burn down and to compensate by pushing it tighter against the ignitor. It was exhilarating for a child!
A side privilege of having a grand dad working in a cinema is that we get first bite at tickets to watch the first run of the most popular movies of the day like Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon which were Saturday midnight shows, bypassing the ticket pirates who resell tickets to you at a premium.
Not surprisingly, secret society gangs fought for territorial rights in Gay World. Fights I've witnessed first hand but never the murders that happened occasionally.
Those were the days and the memories will stay with me until I leave for whatever that is waiting on the other side..
