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What posters did you have on your bedroom wall?
One of the favorite things about my parents: They saved all my stuff. As previously reported, the moment I left for college, my parents covered my room in Laura Ashley. But they neatly boxed up my possessions, which they've been handing back to me in slow increments for the past 22 years. My life is a never-ending time capsule.
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Was this on your wall?
My mother will drop by to see the kids, and bring a box full of letters I kept from girlfriends I went out with in my teens. Or my father will bring a small leather lockbox filled with my old Army men. Some of these gifts are themed. When I became a reporter at the Chronicle, my father sent me the 1983 services contract between myself and the San Francisco Newspaper Agency (on pink paper!) for the Chronicle paper route I had in the mid-1980s.
One of the more recent hand-offs was a rolled-up collection of posters -- held together by a rubberband that disintegrated in my hands before I could pull it off.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Some posters from your room," my father said, as if he pulled them down last week. Inside was a perfectly preserved representation of what my room looked like in 1988.
Some highlights are below. Please inventory the posters that were on the wall of your childhood room in the comments. If you know where they are now, tell us.
(My posters tend to skew toward the teen years, mostly because I had a sweet wallpaper mural of a sunset on my wall in my pre-teens, and wasn't allowed to put up posters until I was maybe 14. If you had this on your wall when you were 7, please include that as well.)
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1. "Top Gun" movie poster
Not a huge surprise. Just like every college-aged girl in the years 1988-93 had this Robert Doisneau poster on their wall, every high school-aged boy in 1986 owned a poster from "Top Gun." Other than a tattered corner, the poster is in excellent condition. When I'm done with Phase 3 of my basement remodel, I'm planning to use lacquer to permanently affix this to my office door.
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2. Led Zeppelin band collage
I looked on eBay and this poster is actually worth some money. I probably bought it in 1986 or 1987 when I was at the peak of my Led Zeppelin phase. (I still appreciate the band, but don't have a single one of their tracks on my iPod. Still listening on cassette ...) I'm pretty sure I was stoned when I bought it from a smoke shop on Haight Street, and remember having a hard time figuring out whether to hang it vertical or horizontal. I also had a Led Zeppelin black light poster -- now worth hundreds of dollars in good condition -- but brought it to college and lost it in storage during the summer break in 1990.
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3. San Francisco 49ers 1980s team photo
This one has been relocated to an honored spot in the Wall of Fame in my Chronicle office. (Note the photos of Pat McCormick, Ann & Ross and my Johnnie LeMaster baseball card collection.) It was one of several 49ers and Warriors posters that my dad handed over. I can't explain what a poster from 1989 was doing with the others, considering the tranformation of my room occurred in 1988. I think a black hole might have been involved.
When I shared this office with fellow 49ers fan and ex-Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman, we would both tap the poster twice on the way out to bring good luck to the team. It didn't do much for the 49ers, but Tim got a new gig with The Hollywood Reporter ...
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And the one that got away ...
4. A blank wall is the disease. This poster is the cure.
Yes, I rocked a Stallone "Cobra" poster. Over the years, this has gone from being cool, to being very uncool, to being cool again, to being one of my proudest achievements. "Cobra" wasn't among the other posters that my father handed over. Initially, I theorized that my father kept it for his own office, but it never showed up there. Then I recalled that I hung it on the back of my door which faced a wall when opened, so it would be really easy for a realtor staging the house to miss it. In my dreams, it's still in the house, being enjoyed by the next generation ...
Enough about me. What posters were on your bedroom wall when you were a kid?
PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub. Your questions answered on VYou at www.vyou.com/peterhartlaub.
| January 11 2011 at 06:11 AM
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