03/14/20 Weekend Grif.Net - Good 'ol Days
Robert Griffin
Today is my 72nd birthday. Grandson 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. 'Mom cooked every day and when Dad 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, NEVER wore Levi’s, NEVER set foot on a golf course, NEVER traveled out of the country (or even outside their state) and NEVER had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears & Roebuck. Either way, there is no Sear or Roebuck anymore. Guess they’re both dead.
My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we grew up in America and never had heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed around 50 pounds and only had one speed, (slow). We didn't have a television in our house until I was 10. It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the national anthem and a poem about God; it came back on the air at about 6 a.m. And there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people.
I was 12 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.
I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was on the wall in the kitchen and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line. Our number in 1952 (had to memorize it for kindergarten) was Hi (for Highland) 2324
Pizzas were not delivered to our home but milk was. All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which we got to keep 2 cents. Got up at 5 AM every morning. On Saturday, we had to collect the 42 cents from customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave 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.
Cowboy movies saw the hero tip his hat to the lovely school marm, kissed his horse (not each other) and rode into the sunset. Can’t recall ever hearing a profanity or graphic violence or most anything offensive.
Here are some of my memories growing up in the post WWII ‘Baby Boom’ -
*Royal Crown Cola bottle with a stopper with a bunch of holes in it sitting on the ironing board
*Head lights dimmer switches on the floor; ignition switches on the dashboard and only manual transmissions
*Real ice boxes with ice to keep things cool
*Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards, and no self-respecting person wore a helmet except in battle
*Soldering irons and curling irons you heat on a gas burner
*Using hand signals for cars without turn signals; hand grabbing the toddler standing in the front seat since seat belts were only for stunt pilots
*Blackjack chewing gum
*Wax Coke-shaped tiny bottles with colored sugar water to wash down candy cigarettes
*Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
*Coffee shops or diners with a juke box but no place to dance
*Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
*Party lines on the telephone and 3-minute limit on long-distance calls
*Newsreels before the movie nickel cones with your friends after
*P.F. Flyers and Butch wax
*TV/Radio dial that actually was a dial
*Rotary phones, Peashooters and Howdy Doody
*45 RPM records played on Hi-Fi’s
*S&H Green stamps when we gassed up for 23 cents a gallon
*Metal ice trays with levers that never worked
*Purple “ditto” paper (I can still smell it) with rows of multiplication problems
*Blue flashbulbs for my Brownie Starflash
*Wishing I could afford a Packard
*Roller skate keys, Cork popguns, Drive-in movies and Wash tub wringers
My best memory is that we all were allowed to be kids, to dream, to invent and to play. I might be older than dirt today, but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.
~~
Dr Bob Griffin
"Jesus Knows Me, This I Love!"