MY HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED ! By ?

"Hey Dad," one of my kids asked the other day, "what was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?"

"We didn't have fast food when I was growing up," I informed him. "All the food was slow."

"C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?"

"It was a place called 'at home,' " I explained. "Grandma cooked everyday,

and when Grandpa got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate, I was allowed to sit there until I did like it."

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table. But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it:

- Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis, set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their later years, my parents had something called a revolving charge card.

The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears AND Roebuck.

Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

- My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer.

- I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow).

- We didn't have a television in our house until I was 11, but my

grandparents had one before that. It was, of course, black and white, but they bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue, like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like grass. The middle third was red. It was perfect for programs that had scenes of fire trucks riding across someone's lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look larger.

- I was 13 before I tasted my first pizza. It was called "pizza pie."

When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still the best pizza I ever had. - Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was. - We didn't have a car until I was 15. Before that, the only car in our family was my grandfather's Ford. He called it a "machine."

- I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room, and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you shared the line with weren't already using the line.

- All newspapers were delivered by boys, and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered a "morning" newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 4:00 am every morning. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

- Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. Touching someone else's tongue with yours was called "French kissing" and they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what they did in French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.

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If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with the younger folks.

Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

MY HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED !.

Studlover (imported) wrote: Sun Nov 24, 2002 6:39 am ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with the younger folks. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

Tends to make the younger generation think that we are really old. I remember all of those.

Here is more.

How Did We Survive?

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have.

As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a convertible a warm day was always a special treat. Our baby cribs were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or the BB gun was not available. We were always outside playing. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers.

We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), the term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors.

I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.

Speaking of school, we all said the pledge (amazing we aren't all brain dead from that), and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for about the next two weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then.

Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot. He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got spanked (physical abuse) there too... and then we got spanked again when we got home. Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas. Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations. I should probably sue my folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent. Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive.

How sick were my parents? Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall a local; kid coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead she pick him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes?

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

How did we survive?!!!

Some things that I remember:

When it was time to go to school, we were all amazed at this half-day Kindergarten thing. Fortunately, the lady down the road had a car and SHE got stuck with all of us. A two-car family then was almost unheard of. Grandma gave her gas money.

Later that year, we got a phone. We had a B&W TV already. Grandpa got a 27" one and put it on a flimsy aluminum gold painted TV stand that bowed over the first two years. The TV would wobble when you pulled the ON knob. "I" was the remote control: "Turn it to 4, boy ... turn it up, turn it down ..." and I did it and liked it.

As for school, Grandma called the school on the new phone the next year as I would ride the bus; she needed details, which the secretary gave her with no legal paperwork involved. She walked me out to the bus and stood in the driveway waiting for me to come back that evening.

Everyone knew the secretary at school. If you got wet or very dirty at recess, they had a change of clothes for you. Even spare shoes. No deposit required. We watched movies on projectors that used movie film, just like the theater. It was a huge thing to be taken to the "movie house" or the "picture show" by someone, and we got to do that maybe twice a year. It cost 50 cents usually, with a 'pop'.

Finding a quarter on the playground meant running it in to the secretary, as it was probably someone's lunch money for the week. A quick look in her log would tell her who it belonged to. Her office, as well as the Principal's, were decorated by student art, not "modern art".

In the event of missing the bus, the secretary or the janitor would come to your house and get you, if not the Principal himself. Being touched by a teacher - there are still a few brave enough out there to do that - was a wonderful thing. A hug of congratulations or ruffling the hair was something to look forward to - not something to sue over. Teachers and the Principal were usually to be found on the playground at recess as well.

Teachers used a paddle back then. If you screwed up, you got it ... usually in the little AV room where the projectors were kept. Then you got it at home. Chances were that when you got it there, you'd have to go over to your friend's house - as he'd been in it WITH you - so you could get it THERE too and vice versa.

The library had a card catalouge, not a computer, but then again Mrs. "R" knew where every single book was without that. We read books back then, and we were in awe of typewriters. Lessons were handed out on purple inked copies that smelled, and if you rubbed on it, your nose or fingers turned purple.

If the bus broke down, we'd walk to the nearest rider's house and hang out there while his dad ran everyone else home. In the event of this happening in the morning - which it did a few times - a call to the secretary made by ME while the driver worked on the bus would suffice. In the event of the "crick" bein' out in the road and high water, or foul weather beginning late in the day, it was the driver's call as to whether or not he'd go out in it or take the rest of the kids back home and make a run for it. No early warning radar back then ... radar was a black and white sweeping round thing with blobs on it. In the event that the driver was giving up, a call from the last kid to the secretary was good enough - "We can't make it, the crick's out," or "it's icin' here, bus slid off in my yard."

In good weather, we rode bikes to school. One kid rode a horse that grazed on the playground.

Show and tell back then would bring one hell of a lawsuit today. Injuries were treated by the secretary, who didn't even wear rubber gloves. If you puked, YOU mopped it up. If you had a phone, you called home. If you needed a ride home being sick, the secretary or Principal took you.

Violence at school usually meant a playground scrap, where both the offenders got spanked and no one wanted to hear the story. Expulsion was unheard of, because that was JUST what you wanted! If you damaged the school, your parents paid for it and you REALLY got it!

Homework was unusual; we had ample time at school to do our work there. Extra-curricular activities were rare, and you were in ONE thing, if any. Cub Scouts was the big one, followed by flag football and baseball.

The big video games of the day were COMP IV and MERLIN. I still have MERLIN, and it works. Ricochette Racers, Tonka trucks, Tyco slotted race car sets, Mighty Mo's ... anything that took batteries was nearly unheard of, and batteries were a hot commodity if you needed them. Stomper 4x4 trucks with lights ... wow! I still have a couple of those, but they don't run anymore.

Christmas vacation was the big one to look forward to. We didn't have all these odd breaks that they do today. Letting out at 12:30 on Good Friday was a big deal.

Clothes : you got what they gave you, and it was always too big. Pantlegs were hemmed or rolled up in cuffs, shirts were loose and baggy then too - because you grew into them. Those clothes had to last all year long. Clothes usually came from Sears or Penney's - Plain Pockets or Toughskins that could stand up on their own. Shoes : two pair for all year. A good pair for church and other formal events, and a pair of sneakers. Choice of white or black, usually, Converse Chucks. Or Keds. If you were lucky, you had boots for the winter - green gum boots with yellow strings and soles. If you got wet in the winter, you sat on the "heat registers" until you dried out.

I could go on, but I won't. Isn't progress a wonderful thing?

:tongueout