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My wife’s 96-year-old mother has sent something in her most recent letter.
I will attempt to OCR scan it:
Someone 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.
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.
—My parents
never drove me to school. 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 10. It was of course black-and-white, and the station went off the air at 11, 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
never had a telephone in my room. The only phone was 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 weren’t delivered to our home — but milk was.
—All newspapers were delivered by boys, and all boys delivered newspapers. My brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. He had to get up at 5 a.m. every morning.
—Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least they did in the movies. There were no movie ratings because all movies were produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.
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.
Memories:—My Dad was 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 our ironing board to “sprinkle” clothes with because we didn’t have steam irons.
How many do you remember?-Headlight dimmer switches on the floor.
-Ignition switches on the dashboard.
-Pant-leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
-Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.
Older Than Dirt QuizCount all the ones you remember, NOT the ones you were told about (ratings at the bottom).
-1) Candy cigarettes.
-2) Restaurants with tableside juke-box terminals.
-3) Home milk delivery in glass bottles.
-4) Party lines on telephones.
-5) Newsreels before the movie.
-6) TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were on until TV shows started again the next morning; there were only three channels [if you were fortunate]).
-7) Peashooters.
-8) Howdy Doody.
-9) 45 RPM records.
-10) Hi-fi records.
-11) Metal ice trays with lever.
-12) Blue flashbulbs.
-13) Cork popguns.
-14) Studebakers.
-15) Wash tub wringers.
—If you remembered 0-3, you’re still young.
—If you remembered 3-6, you are getting older.
—If you remembered 7-10, don’t tell your age, and
—If you remembered 11-15,
you’re older than dirt!!!
THAT’S ME!!!My wife’s mother lives in a retirement-center, but still “independent-living.”
She still writes letters; computers and e-mail are anathema.
She has macular degeneration, and uses a print-magnifier, a machine which projects the image of a page in its enlarging screen, that is, enlarged type.
She’ll probably make 100, despite claiming she was at death’s door all her life.
She still walks to church, and takes care of “the old folks,” people much younger than her.
When we visit it’s “you kids sure are having fun with your gizmos,” this laptop and my SmartPhone.
My wife’s older brother visits often, and he too has a laptop and SmartPhone; “gizmos.”
(We’re both 68, he’s 70.)
I’d add a few things to this printout.
—A) Our bread was delivered door-to-door by a
breadman in a delivery-truck, just like our bottled milk.
—B) My father’s ’39 Chevy — the first car I remember; I was born in 1944 — had a large foot-button beside the gas-pedal. When depressed, it engaged the starter; you couldn’t start the car unless you depressed that foot-button, which I guess was the equivalent of a starter-solenoid.
—C) Our first car with turn-signals was our ’53 Chevy; the car I learned to drive in. Everything before that was arm out the window. —I fell behind a Model-T Ford the other day. Its driver stuck his arm out to signal a right turn. (The car was a black tea-cup roadster with its top up; no side-windows.)
If a younger driver had been following, he would have been dumbfounded.
—D) Studebaker? Anyone remember Packard?
—E) We also had a party-line, but only one other party was on it. Calling that other party was
near impossible. (My wife’s party-line was 10 parties per party-line; only two telephone-lines to her little back-country town.)
My wife says define “rubbering.”
“Rubbering” is to listen in, inadvertently or intentionally, to other calls on the party-line.
If anything significant happened in town, like a fire, the whole town jumped on the party-line, a massive conference-call.
My wife’s grandmother once lived in Lawrenceville, PA, just south of the New York border. Her telephone had a hand-crank, no rotary dialer. You cranked to get the operator.
Go back far enough and our family’s first telephone service was through an operator switchboard. You told the operator who you wanted, or what number.
—F) Our first TV, in 1949, was also black-and-white, made by RCA (Radio Corporation of America), not in the Pacific Rim for Wal*Mart — although it was purchased from Sears, where my father worked as a second job.
It received its signals, only three channels — all from Philadelphia — over a flimsy two-pronged aluminum antenna attached to our chimney.
All TV transmissions were
over-the-air, like radio, not via cable or satellite-dish. And all houses had that flimsy antenna, which you hoped a hurricane didn’t topple.
And that TV used orange-glowing hot cathode-ray tubes to function. It wasn’t transistorized.
DETAILS:—My recently-deceased slightly younger sister and I
walked to school every day, six blocks.
50 miles each way, uphill both goin’ and comin’.
And it was always snowing, even in summer.
Turn around and the snow turned with you. It was always in your face.
Barefoot in snow eight inches deep!We also rode our 50-pound bicycles to school; and locked them in a bicycle-rack.
When I drive through a nearby village I see mom at the end of the driveway in her idling minivan, teenagers without jackets inside, waiting for the schoolbus that takes them around the corner to the school.
No wonder today’s youth are flaccid and out-of-shape. —Heaven forbid they dress for weather; baggy shorts in a blizzard, for crying out loud.
My wife rode schoolbus, but her trip was over four miles on country roads without sidewalks.
—My mother’s sprinkler-bottle was an old glass Pepsi bottle, and she used to hang our laundry on a clothesline outside to dry. We didn’t have a dryer until I was a teenager and we moved to a house in northern Delaware that had a laundry-room. —I’m originally from south Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia.
And our first fully-automatic clothes-washer was a Bendix purchased from Sears. Bendix no longer exists, and I see Bendix was not the actual manufacturer of its washing-machines.
The dishwasher was
my mother, and the Bendix was in our kitchen, and it was often broadsided by our cat, sliding a corner on our linoleum for his supper.
I don’t remember a wringer-washer, just the wringer.
My wife explains doing laundry with a wringer-washer, an all-day affair, involved everyone carting tubs of water heated on the stove before school.
Completed laundry would be hung out to dry.
I’ll say a few things about Howdy-Doody and 45 rpm records.
Howdy-Doody was the first TV program I watched regularly along with The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy.
Howdy-Doody was a string puppet; the program’s emcee was
Buffalo-Bob in cowboy-garb.
The kids all sat in the
Peanut-gallery; and another character in the show was
Clarabell the Clown, a mute who was always spraying Buffalo-Bob with a seltzer-bottle.
The first Clarabell was played by Bob Keeshan, who later became Captain Kangaroo.
The Lone Ranger was played on TV by Clayton Moore; and his Indian sidekick, Tonto, was played by Jay Silverheels.
The Lone Ranger’s horse, a white stallion, was called Silver, and Tonto’s horse, a paint, was called Scout. (“Hoppy’s” white horse was Topper.)
45 rpm records succeeded 78s (78 rpm). 45s had a big hole in the center, and if I’m right were an RCA marketing invention. (Our family had 78s; and even had a Silvertone recorder that would cut 78s [like of my maternal grandfather, who died in 1954].)
I still have a few 45s in my record-collection, all classic pop records.
One is much better from iTunes. The iTunes download doesn’t have the warp the 45 rpm records had. (And every pressing had it — you’d hear it on the radio.)
What a chuckle this addenda was. Especially the sprinkler-bottle.
In the USA a lot of people didn't contribute enough to social security so they are now headed for social welfare or whatever miserable fate that the lack of money will deal to them. 
