"When I Was Your Age....."

One of my friend's 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 our food was slow." He said, "C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?" I told him, "It was a place called 'at home,'" I found I had to explain to him some facts of our life. I remember when I was young and my dad would say "When I was your age...." and now I was going to get my chance.

I told him, "MOM cooked every day. 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. If I didn't develope a taste for it that night, I would have another chance at it again the next morning and every meal time after that until I did." When I saw the movie "Mommie Dearest" I must say I was stunned to see that Joan Crawford pulled that same bullshit on her kid. Damn....if only I had been adopted by some famous aging Hollywood Starlet, I could have written my book so much sooner and had an audience already waiting to read what ever it was that I had to say. Back to my story....

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 them about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it. Some things like:

Some parents never owned their own houses or wore Levis, 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 Mom never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we had never heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed... me peddling... slowly.

We didn't have a color television in our house until I was 11, but my neighbor 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 all programs, specially those that had scenes of fire trucks riding across some one'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.
The only car in our family was my dad's Ford. He called it "machine." I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the kitchen on the wall and it was a dial style and ugly mustard like yellow. Lots of the phones at my friends houses were 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. When we were bored, we would listen in on their conversations...

Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was. [In bottles !!!!] All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. My brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 20 cents a paper, of which he got to keep 4 cents. He had to get up at 4 AM every morning. On Saturday, he had to collect his money from his customers. His favorite customers were the ones who gave him 50 cents and told him to keep the change. His 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.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it? My aunt & uncle cleaned out her mother's house (when she died) and they 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. They thought she 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 before they invented steam irons. Man, I am old. How many of these do you remember? Head lights dimmer switches on the floor. Ignition switches on the dashboard. Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall. Real ice boxes. Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards. [or a clothespin] Unless yuor folks had more money and then you could have a "Varoom Engine". Do you remember using hand signals for older cars without turn signals. I still see hand signals but I don't think they have anything to do with turning

Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about.
Ratings at the bottom.
1. Blackjack chewing gum [and Teaberry] or Sen Sen
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water and wax lips
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
12. Peashooters [Still get that urge when somebody bends
over and creates a great target
13. Howdy Doody, Bennie & Cecil, Rough & Ready, Space Ghost and Felix the Cat (G rated)
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps & Blue Chip
16. Hi-fi's [Man, Deb could really dance to this music in front of my bedroom mirror.]
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers [Judy's arm has painful memories of this one! ]
If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!
I might be older than dirt but those memories are the
best part of my life.

I remember taking milk money to school. I remember having a coat room and teachers that paddled you if you were bad. "Assume the position"..Mr. Britton was our "Paddle Master"..and no kid would dare think of suing anyone. We got hit with a belt. We got smacked up side the head, parents smoked in front of us. We made cocktails for our parents guests and felt very grown up. I didn't wear a helmet on my bike...and we didn't have safety regulations. We played with lawn darts for goodness sake...after drinking alcohol!!! That our parents gave us...(holiday's only....or so they thought :)

We weren't protected, insulated, padded or programed. We walked several blocks to the bus stop for school. Parents didn't wait outside with us in the snow, and our bus didn't' stop at every driveway to see that child got home safely. We went trick or treating until late in the night, dressed up and on our own...well.. in a pack of kids. We looked great and we were safe.

My Mattel "Creepy Crawler" maker was a very hot 300 degree metal hot plate where I took liquid plastic, poured it into metal molds and then with no heat protection, safety goggles, parental supervision we played with and poked, spilled, burned the crap out of ourselves and it was all just fine, we all lived and we learned how to behave with some common sense and confidence.

My Easy Bake Oven was a 100 watt light bulb in a plastic box with tin racks that we baked little cakes and stuff in. It was so easy to use and I never had a horrible accident....never. ( I was the best cook on the block too!)

No one wore a seat belt. Listening to the news they are now going to require kids under 4' 9" to sit in a booster seat, that is about an 8 year old kid. Can you imagine being made to sit in a booster seat at that age? Oh man...I would have walked rather than endure that humiliation....but if our parents said we had to...we did it. We had "healthy fear". No one wanted to make your parents mad...especially your dad. And to get sent to the Principal...never happened in my lifetime. Listening to the news and hearing about kids bringing guns to school...not even on the Richter scale no way no how. Getting in trouble hurt back then and there was no "calling the police" on your parents. Nope, we would have not lived long enough to make it to the phone.

I liked growing up when we did. I am proud to have caught the tail end of the generation of innocence We were young, and naive, innocent and ignorant....and we were ecstatic to be alive. We weren't savvy or sophisticated....nope. We didn't care what our mom's picked out for us to wear. School clothes shopping was all about a $100 bill....that was it. No name brand nothing. We wore our clothes, they didn't wear us.