When I was young

my baby sitter let me pass the hours away with her tits....

When I was young, we had a fancy cabinet tv that had a record play Built Right In!





On it, sat a driftwood lamp, much like this one...

The first TV I watched regularly was a Sylvania. It had a fluorescent ring of light about the screen, to lessen the glare on the eyes, they said. It belonged to my step grandmother. She had a windup Victrola in the back room, where I sneaked to play my Stan Freberg record, when she was out.

Our tv was a black and white and the vertical or horizontal was out of whack so the picture would roll over and over and over - very irritating.

Popsicles were 6 cents, chips were 10 cents and the bag was FULL, and you could get mojos - 2 for 1 cent. Unsliced whole wheat bread was 5 loaves for a buck. They came out with cheese slices (not individually wrapped, though).

I got paid 25 cents an hour to babysit 4 kids and my allowance was 35 cents a week.

Mia Farrow haircuts were in so we all had them, courtesy of our hair-mangling mother. Remember go-go boots?

Nobody had a clue where any of us were between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. and all day Sat and Sun.

Margarine came in bag and we would punch it to change the colour to yellow.

My father would play polka records, such as the "She's Too Fat" polka, and "Who Stole the Kishka" during the dinner hour.

My mother was partial to John Philip Sousa.


I would bring an ant in from outside and place it on the driftwood lamp, making the ant the king of a driftwood kingdom.

Sometimes I did that with a ladybug, but never at the same time as an ant.

Stan Freberg!!!
The American history parody?

Prior to the TV thing, my brother and I would rush in after school, to listen to such radio shows as, The Story Lady, Big John and Sparky, and Bobby Benson and the B Bar B Riders. Story Lady played records such as Horton Hatches the Egg, Little Orly and the Cabbage Worm, Hypotaneuse Turtle, and the Churckendoose.

Babysitters with little experience now get $6 to $10 and up.

based on the 25 cents you were paid, the popsicles would now be between $1.44 and $2.40 each, a bag of chips between $2.40 and $4.00, and your loaf of bread between $4.80 and $8.00

I can't complain.

On my first flight on an airplane, going from NJ to Fla, we got a hot meal, and the stewardess gave me a deck of playing cards (to keep!!!) and a pin for my shirt with the wings on pan am on them.

when i grew up we had a radio and a grammophone .
since there was only D.C electricity where we lived (the port of hamburg) , the radio required two sets of batteries to operate . one set was a mighty black one (size of two read boxes) , the other one had to be taken to a store for re-charging about every other week - so dad kept two of those lead-acid batteries .
i always enjoyed winding up the grammophone and play some scratchy records - particularly when we had a party at the house .

we didn't have a TV until we bought our house in canada in 1963 - we still live in the same house ; it's served us well - it cost the grand sum of $14,500 .
hbg

eager to move in ! the sign shows the name the proud new owners .

When I was young, we were the first in our building to get a tv. A giant piece of furniture with a 12-inch screen. The entire building poured into our apartment to watch. The antennas started appearing on the roof soon thereafter.

I watched Howdy Doody, Ding-Dong School, and the Mickey Mouse Club. I watched Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, My Friend Flicka, and Fury, the Story of a Horse and the Boy Who Loved Him. These animals shows caused major miseries for my parents. I wanted one of everything. A horse in the backyard of a Bronx tenement. I watched Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler on Wild Kingdom. I wanted an elephant--for the same backyard.

We played street games in the street unattended. We called our mothers from the street to throw down money (a nickel or a dime) if the ice cream truck was heading in our direction.

I often spent Saturday afternoons with my father going somewhere in the city. I remember my first blue whale-dinosaur experience at the Museum of Natural History. The T-rex was put together wrong and would later become more horizontal. I remember seeing the night sky at the Planetarium. I remember the dioramas at the Museum of the City of New York. The blizzard of '88 was one of my favorites. (That's 1888.)

We spent summers in the country (Catskill Mountains) at a bungalow colony. It was there that I saw the night sky without the benefit of a mechanical device. Always wished on my first star--still do. It was there that I learned that lights go out when there's a storm. That cats hunt birds. That worms are ooky. And that I wasn't cut out for fishing.

In school I was in the "smart" classes. I believe those have been done away with so as not to traumatize the unchosen ones. So now you've got the smart kids bored and the not-so-smart kids lost. Hurray for the average.

In many ways those were better times, certainly more innocent. Nobody locked the doors to their apartments. But the times were rife with overt bigotry and narrowness. A long-distance phone call was a major event (you needed the operator) and was expensive. People actually wrote letters on paper with envelopes and stamps--or you lost touch.

Smiling.

It was a 78RPM of St George and the Dragonette/Little Red Riding Hood.

Party line telephones. The operator actually having time to listen to individual conversations. My step father was jailed for using abusive language on a phone, having been reported by the operator.

when I was young I grew up outside of Philadelphia. My mom would send me to Komacks, in Wayne, with a note to get her salems! I was very young when I could walk to town -I would just take a couple of neighborhood dogs. I could get a Franks soda at Komacks for a nickel and the train station had a candy booth with a blind man. I was given a penny for every year old I was for allowance and 7 cents would buy me a whole brown bag of candy from the penn. dutch ladies on Saturday morning at the farmer's market.

We had a bell to call us in from outside and we weren't encouraged to be inside! I was out all day no matter the weather and we rode our bikes near and far. no one and everyone was watching if you know what I mean. Everyone knew your family and might tell on you but we were wild and free. I actually met hobos down at the tracks and no one knew. We made crank phone calls, played kick the can, observed mischief night with a vengeance, spent all our time at the creek, walked to school, didn't know what diet or overweight meant, watched tv on weekends only (we were alone in this as kids on the block which was socially awkward as we couldn't watch dark shadows), weren't allowed soda-but did have tom collins mix in summer courtesy of our 2 cocktail a night parents....ate in the kitchen ahead of dad coming home.

There is so much more but I should leave room. I miss it and loved all of it

i picked up pop bottles for the deposit at 2 cents each... if i got 19 cents i could get a pot pie and have dinner...

when i was yung i was nietzsche

when i was young, i made a 3D paper circus and my fake barbie (real ones were impossible to come by, nor did i care) was a lion tamer

i wanted to be a gymnast, i tied a long ribbon to my mothers garden stick, and i made another one for my girlfriend, and we practiced in the street, of course. we also used to have singing competitions there with the rest of the kids from the street.

when i was still very young, but older, i knew our house is tapped. we knew we are listened to non-stop. me and a friend thought it would be good to make it worthwhile for the 'listeners' as we called them. For hours, we'd stand on the washing machine (father's friend found the location of the bugs with some electromagnetic device, so we knew where they were) and sing, recite poems or prose that we both knew abundance of as we both competed in recitation or whatever its called. we'd quizz each other on homework, recount or day.... hours of fun. i wonder what the secret police listeners made of it.... wonder who was listening to us and what they thought and felt.

when i was young, i couldn't go to just any high school and my sister couldn't go to any sort of humanities university, since our father didn't have the right 'cadre background'. she ended up doing medicine, and she barely got in, even though she came in 2nd in the tests (my mother bribed someone to get her in).

When i was young life was a lot simpler. We were poor though not starving, but we were happy. Life was about people and friendships. Many people were indeed miserable, slaving to get a weekend house, or western goods on a black market....but that was so out of reach for my family that it wasn't an issue. When I was young I spent doing something with my parents and sister every weekend, mostly hiking or traveling around Czechoslovakia (no passports to go anywhere else).
Of course, when i was young, father was often in prison. Sometimes for 48 hours, sometimes 72, occasionally one or two weeks. Once it was three months, just before the communism fell. Everything changed after that dramatically.
When I was young, life was more extreme - much more wonderful and much more awful, at the same time.

When I was young, I loved to make things. I spent most of my allowance buying arts & crafts supplies. I even sold some things in junior high and high school.

One of my favorite projects was "The Mansion." This one started when I was about 8 years old and went on for years. I saved shoe boxes, and each one became another room. I would staple or tape them together and cut doors between them. Eventually they covered most of my bedroom floor. Of course, each room was fully furnished with doll furniture made of odds and ends. Windows would be cut out, and artwork drawn on the walls. The baby-sized boxes made great closets, and I filled them with doll clothes I made from scraps of material, sequins, feathers and such. I had a kitchen, many bedrooms, a library, and even a ballroom (made out of a boot box, of course.) All my friends were jealous.

I could masturbate with a thumb and a forefinger