My parents did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturday nights. My father often worked Saturdays at the Firestone store in Flushing, so Saturday night was often the only time they could go.

The day they couldn’t go was Sunday. Because no supermarket in New York was open on Sunday.

Blue laws, which mandated closing stores on Sundays to honor the Christian Sabbath, were in full force in much of the nation at the time I was born. Not just supermarkets, but department stores and other retailers were shut.

The one place my family could shop on Sundays was near my father’s parents’ house in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. There, in that heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, stores were closed on Saturday.

But if you were not Christian in other places, tough. The political sway that Christian churches held in those days made the repeal of blue laws a slow process.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that supermarkets in New York were allowed to open on Sundays. Other retailers joined them soon after.

Blue laws have been erased in most of the nation. But vestiges remain. In some states, alcohol sales are forbidden or restricted on Sundays.

And Bergen County, New Jersey – a shopping mecca Monday through Saturday that’s just a few miles from my home – still prohibits retailers to open their doors on Sunday. Even if, as was the case this past year, Christmas Eve is on a Sunday.

My birthday was 16 days before Easter in 1954.

Easter in New York meant many things. One of the biggest was the arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus to Madison Square Garden, which was then on 8th Avenue and W. 50th Street in Manhattan.

I remember going for the first time when I was six. You walked through the menagerie with the people seen as curiosities. It seemed exploitive and cruel, especially to a kid with weight issues.

But the big attraction was the animals performing tricks in the three rings of the Garden. It smelled a little funky, but people seemed to enjoy it. And besides, it was a tradition; parents take their kids to the circus.

Or maybe not.

Ringling Bros. had management issues and various problems. People were revolted by the way other people were put on display. And concern about treatment of animals turned people off.

Competition came from circuses that focused on spectacular acrobatics – something that had also been a part of the Ringling shows – such as Cirque de Soleil and the Big Apple Circus.

The biggest circus in the world stopped touring in 2017. It is trying to make a comeback, sans animals.

One of the more shocking things you could have told my parents on the day I was born was that, 200 miles or so northeast of where they were holding their infant, there was a 25-year-old Boston University student for whom a national holiday will be celebrated.

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a Rev. or a Dr. in April 1954. He was a year away from obtaining his doctorate. He was married for less than a year to Coretta Scott. He wasn’t a father yet – of either his children or a civil rights movement; the Montgomery bus boycott was a year away.

(As an aside, I don’t think the idea of Black History Month, which we’re beginning, would have shocked my parents. There has been a commemoration of African-American history since the 1920s, known as Negro History Week. It was expanded in the early 1970s to all of February – the month in which Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born.)

No celebration of Black History Month can be made without considering the legacy of Dr. King. A Nobel Peace Prize winner and an agent of remarkable change in our nation, my parents – especially my Mom – admired Dr. King and were as crestfallen as most of the nation when he was assassinated in 1968.

My parents might have been shocked that someone less than two years older than my father would be the reason millions of Americans have the third Monday in January off. But once you told them about why, they would have understood.

At the time I was born, my parents had not flown on an airplane.

So when my father flew for the first time, from LaGuardia in New York to Cleveland Hopkins in 1962, one of the first questions we asked him was “What were the stewardesses like?”

It seems like a weird question in 2024. If only because nobody is called a “stewardess” anymore.

When airlines tried to build their business in the years after World War II, they believed the fastest way into the wallets of their potential customers – most of whom were male – was to appeal to their libidos.

That meant hiring young women who fit a stereotype of beautiful and dressing them in outfits generally not suited for the kind of work they were doing, Often, the women had to wear heels on long flights while handing out trays of food.

The advertising of the era would make most of the younger women I know cringe in horror. One airline, National, had a campaign that depicted stewardesses as the vessels on which they were flying. “I’m Cindy,” said one young woman. “Fly me to Miami, Tampa, Orlando, all over Florida.” Another, Southwest, briefly put its attendants in the hot pants that were the craze of the early ‘70s.

The women couldn’t be married. They couldn’t gain weight. Movies suggested the women had promiscuous private lives. When they were in their early 30s, they were done.

The raising of awareness in the late 60s put an end to this. Lawsuits successfully killed marriage, age and racial discrimination. And men took on the job in increasing numbers.

Now the term is flight attendant, which seems more appropriate, because it’s a tough job. Helping elderly and disabled passengers. Coping with crying babies of all ages.

There are still some vestiges of the old-style glamorous stewardesses on international carriers. But, fortunately, the sexualization of flight attendants seems to have gone the way of actually serving food on a flight.

My mother loved trivia. That might be obvious to anyone who knows how obsessed I am with it.

But in 1954, when I was born, trivia wasn’t a particularly big deal.

Yes, there were quiz shows – some of which were rigged to give the answers to contestants. But there weren’t a lot of outlets for trivia.

For one thing, there wasn’t as much of it. The amount of trivial content exploded with the advent of television, the proliferation of entertainment options and the expansion of professional sports.

Also booming was the population. The biggest generation in history had a shared past in common and seemed very interested in what about it they remembered.

Trivia as a source of game-playing and entertainment didn’t really take hold until the 1960s, when college students realized there were interesting – to trivialists – questions to be asked about old TV shows and baseball players.

One of the first manifestations of the trivia boom was “Jeopardy!,” which debuted in 1964. It was a daytime TV show that allowed trivia experts to show off their knowledge by making them come up with the questions for the answers given.

About 20 years later, Trivial Pursuit made trivia an obsession. The board game was once so popular that copies sold for $40 apiece and were really hard to come by.

In the 21st century, trivia is a social phenomenon. A few years back, my kids and I invaded a Rockland brewpub and wiped out the reigning champs. My mother heartily approved.

By the way, it’s Ouagadougou.

I know that my mother didn’t see a taco until 1965, when she and I each had one at the New Mexico pavilion of the New York World’s Fair.

So to tell her in 1954 that tacos would be among the most popular foods in America in 2024 might have drawn a blank expression and the question “What’s a taco?”

Of course, tacos were hardly new to the Southwest. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, Mexican immigrants had brought their food to the United States.

But in the 1950s, when New Yorkers thought about Hispanic immigrants, they thought about Puerto Rico. It’s a big point in “West Side Story.” And not a lot of Puerto Rican dishes spread beyond certain neighborhoods in the city.

So tacos and other Mexican-type food were slow to come east. Taco Bell, which is to Mexican food as Pizza Hut is to Italian food – that is, not really – didn’t open its first location east of the Mississippi until the late 1960s.

Tacos became popular for several reasons. One is that as more people come to the U.S. from Latin America, the food of the region – Mexican as well as from other nations – has become more popular. Tortillas and salsa take up considerable portions of a Safeway’s aisles.

Another is that they’re amazingly good. Even at Taco Bell.

Among the people who loved tacos was my mother. She made them for the first time in the late 1960s and loved them all the rest of her life.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” had been the national anthem of the United States for only 23 years on the day I was born.

Before 1931, there was no national anthem. “America the Beautiful” and “Hail, Columbia” were performed as anthems throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But Herbert Hoover, whose presidency was a general disaster, signed the legislation that made Francis Scott Key’s ode to the Battle of Fort McHenry the representative song of the nation.

The song is notoriously hard to sing (although, bragging here, my daughter knocked it out of the park in the fourth grade). And, around the time I was born, it was performed in a very straightforward way.

Usually, it was some sort of band or orchestra that performed it. Occasionally, there was a singer, a pop or opera star who sang the words as though they were afraid of messing it up.

Then came the fifth game of the 1968 World Series.

Recruited for performing the anthem that day was Jose Feliciano, a folk singer and guitarist. He sat on a stool and played the song in a different key, changing the inflections of the tune from the traditional melody.

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkY2UFBUb4

It was the Vietnam War era and baseball crowds – especially the ones who attended World Series games in Detroit – didn’t particularly care for Feliciano’s rendition. The blowback was tremendous – my father was among those annoyed about the performance. I, age 14, thought it was cool.

Feliciano single-handedly changed the way the anthem is performed. Famously soulful and emotional versions of the song came from Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin.

The anthem is played before every Met game I see at Citi Field. And in this day and age, singers seem to compete for the most stirring and hip way of performing it. If he, she or they strike a chord with the crowd, it’s a powerful minute-plus.

I think it would have surprised my parents to tell them that in 1954, as the anthem played on TV as a station’s broadcasting day ended.

When was the last time you made a pitcher of orange juice from a tube of frozen mush?

If that sounds strange to you, consider this: Around the time I was born, there were generally two ways people were able to drink orange juice in the morning. 

One was to use a manual squeezer and extract the juice from an actual orange. Some people loved it, but a lot of people were turned off by the pulp that inevitably got into the juice.

The other way was to go to the freezer aisle of a store – there was only one back then – and buy a tubular can of orange juice concentrate. You would dump the frozen juice into a pitcher, fill the can with water from the sink three or four times, then stir it. You’d put the pitcher in the refrigerator and it would last as long as you needed it.

Frozen orange juice was relatively new when I was born. It came into grocery stores just after the end of World War II (which only ended nine years before I was born) and soared in popularity after Bing Crosby promoted the most prominent brand, Minute Maid, on his nationwide radio program.

So if you told my parents that their grandkids would have no idea what frozen orange juice is, they’d be surprised. I wouldn’t say shocked – again, frozen OJ wasn’t that old.

What did in the idea of frozen orange juice concentrate is, well, actual orange juice.

At about the time I was born, the idea of keeping fresh orange juice cold was just taking hold. The biggest company involved was Tropicana, which produced juice in Florida and shipped it to lucrative markets in the Northeast. 

As easy as it was to make a pitcher from frozen mush, it was a lot easier to pour something from a carton.

And Tropicana had one other advantage: No pulp. They added it relatively recently for those people (Ed: nuts) who really want it.

It’s my understanding that there was great joy in my family when I was born.

But with that joy – as you know if you’ve experienced parenthood – comes anxiety. How will I keep my baby safe?

In 1954, one of the biggest fears was that your child might contract polio – the disease that killed more children than any other. Those people it didn’t kill suffered paralysis, among them President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who contracted it as an adult. 

Polio fostered one of the biggest medical charities, the March of Dimes, which was much more prominent in the 1950s than it is now.

But to tell my parents on the day I was born that they needn’t worry would have been a gross understatement. Not only was polio neutralized, it was practically obliterated from the planet.

The reason first became known to the world a year after my birth. In April 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, announced a vaccine to prevent polio. Six years later, Dr. Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine that is still in use today.

Much to my discomfort, my parents weren’t waiting around for an oral vaccine. I got the needles. Three of them. And I was not a particularly good shot taker. 

In the second grade, my entire class got the oral vaccine. Except me. I already had the shots, so I didn’t need the sugar cube that carried the vaccine. I apparently complained about this and was given a subsequent dose that may or may not have been a placebo.

Today’s infants get their polio “shot” as part of a combination vaccination to combat diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough or pertussis, and hepatitis B. 

All diseases most parents don’t even think about in 2024.

Unless they’re idiots who’ve decided vaccines are a hoax.

In the first months after he was born in 1994, my son wouldn’t sleep at night. He would bawl until you held him and then cry again if you dared try to put him down.

When I was on sit-up-with-the-baby duty, I took for granted that I could occupy myself sitting there by watching TV – in particular, the rebroadcast of that night’s installment of Ken Burns’ “Baseball” series on the local PBS station.

Here’s the thing: My son inherited his inability to rest at night from his father. And unlike me, my Mom had nothing to keep her company.

That’s because TV stations – and there were only seven of them on the VHS band in New York in 1954 – signed off the air at or soon after midnight.

They played a filmed recording of the National Anthem, and then put on patterns of bars and circles called a test pattern with a ringing sound in the background. The patterns were crafted by individual stations – some of them used a template with a Native American in a headdress. 

At 5:30 or 6 a.m., the stations would take off the pattern, play the National Anthem again, mention that they carried the Seal of Good Practice from the National Association of Broadcasters, show some local minister delivering a sermon, and then do some kind of start-of-day programming.

Unfortunately, my Mom is no longer around to tell me what she actually did while trying to get me to sleep the first two years of my life. But as the broadcasting day lengthened over time, she spent quite a bit of time staying up and watching old movies.

The CBS station in New York pushed the limits, at one point only being off the air for about a half-hour a day. By the late 1970s, local TV stations were on all night. 

Now, of course, it’s not just the local stations that are on all night. So is every cable channel – although many of them run infomercials to fill those late hours. And you can stream stuff.

My mother could only dream of that as her son refused to go to Dreamland.