Foo Bar and Grill

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has an interesting thread going concerning odd things people used to believe when they were kids.

Here's some of mine:

That firemen started fires; after all, they were always wherever fires happened to be. And why else would they be called firemen?

That there was nothing on the eastern side of "the Mountains" (ie, the Sierra Nevada) since I had never seen them. I figured it was some sort of Communist plot, since that was what my uncle said about anything unexplainable.

That there was some cool place called "the West" where John Wayne lived and you could see those interesting mesas. It took me awhile to deal with the idea that "the West" was east of us.

That Texas was to the west of California, where I lived, since Texas had lots and lots of cows (as well as my aunt and numerous other relatives). We only had a few cows that I smelled when we drove down I-5 to Disneyland. And since there was nothing to the east of California, and Texas had no excess of Communists, I figured it had to be to the west.

That "In Saigon" meant "Inside a Gun". There were always guns involved whenever the TV guys talked about "In Saigon" when I was a little kid in the early 1970s.

That Red Chinese were literally red. I actually drew pictures of red-faced Asians as a kid...