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Tue 13 Jan, 2004 06:57 am
”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 every day 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 Levi's, set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or 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 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.
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 didn't know weren't already using the line.
Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was.
All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered a 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 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.
If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.
Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?
MEMORIES from a friend:
My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to "sprinkle" clothes with because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old.
au- To this day, if I want to pantomime talking on a phone, I put one fist over my mouth, and one next to my ear. Now THAT'S old!
You forgot about the green stamps :-)
Montana- I have a Revere Ware copper bottom pot that I got for Green Stamps in around 1960. Still works fine!
Phoenix32890 wrote:Montana- I have a Revere Ware copper bottom pot that I got for Green Stamps in around 1960. Still works fine!
Wow! That's awesome. I remember when I was little I use to help my mom stick all the greenstamps in the little books. My brother and I always got something and it was a real treat.
When I was between 5 and 7 we lived here in Canada across the street from my grandparents. Most everyone in this area was poor back then, so I remember the old tv's, fridges, wood stoves they heated and cooked with, the old wringer washer my grandmother had. We may have been poor, but I have fond memories of those times. Those were the days were we kids actually played outside and when we were inside we played games instead of sitting in front of the tv all day.
Thanks, AU, i enjoyed this immensely.
I remember all that, and rummaging the neigborhood for pop bottles to take back to the store for the deposit....
And when penny candy was actually a penny.
My grandmother got TV before we did. It was a 10" screen. I would go next door to her to watch. About a year later, my parents bought a 16" model. It was a big mahogany box with doors, and stood on four spindly Queen Anne legs. A few years later, when things got more advanced, my father had the set converted to a 21"!
I remember when we had an ice box and the water all over the kitchen floor when we forgot to empty the pan.
au- We always had a refrigerator, but my grandmother had an icebox in her summer "bungalow".
When my mother was little, it was also a neighbor who was the first to have a tv and people would all gather at that neighbors house to watch it until people slowly started getting their own. Before that the radio shows were popular in their house. When my mother was little they had no electricity, woodstove for heat, and no running water. They had the outhouse out back and as big a family as they were, they all slept in the same small room on straw filled mattresses.
This is the house my mother grew up in. As you can see, it's abandoned now, but can you imagine 11 kids and 2 adults living here? The addition on the left hand side of the house wasn't even there when they lived there, although some of the kids were all grown and moved out by the time the youngest were born. This house still stands right next door and when you go inside it seems even smaller than it looks on the outside.
Au, you've brought back some of my childhood memories.
I remember my dad making a big bowl of popcorn on the stove, and we would all set around the TV together, watching a new show called the Twighlight Zone. Life was so much easier then... you only had a few TV channels to pick from.
When my Mom and Dad bought their first house, they had a refrigerator that worked like a vending machine. They had to put money in it every month to keep it working. A payment collector would come around every month and collect the money. This continued until it was finally paid off.
Remember when the milkman delivered milk in glass bottles to your house? And remember the cardboard cops that fit on those bottles? I can still hear the sound of our cat batting those tops around the linoleum floor in the kitchen.
Ha! Great post Au. It brought back memories of sitting at the table for hours because I refused to eat brussel sprouts (one of my mom's fav veggies) and praying that someday we'd get a dog so that I could feed stuff I didn't like to the dog when no one was looking.
Fishin, I also remember setting at the kitchen table for hours until I ate my vegetables. I can remember scraping them into a piece of tissue and taking them outside to the garbage can. I don't know if my parents were wise to that or not.
In the UK during the 40s & into the early 50s we had to endure Rationing of just about everthing. In WW2 we couldn't import the foods or raw materials from overseas & home production of food stuff had limitations. I can remember the Ration Books we all had. Tho the black market did a lot of trade off of the back of trucks.
anybody remember going to the saturday matinee for 6 Dr. Pepper bottle caps?
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