Way back WHEN - do you remember

Remember Slow Food? 

'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.

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 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 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. 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 19 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 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--my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which he got to keep 2 cents.  He had to get up at 6 AM every morning.

On Saturday, he had to collect the 42 cents 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. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly 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.

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, but 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.

How many 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.
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz :
Count all the ones that you remember, not the ones

You were told about. Ratings at the bottom.
1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water 
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with table side jukeboxes 
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines on the telephone
8 Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11.. TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show

and were there until TV shows started again in the morning.

(there were only 3 channels...[if you were fortunate)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15.S&H green stamps
16. Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packard’s 
21. Roller skate keys
22.Cork popguns 
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

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 some of the best parts of my life.

What does it mean if you remember all 25?

Great Aunts farm still had 25 cycle electric until I saw it change to 60, had a party line phone hers was two short and two long rings, always fun to listen in on. Grandma's best friend had a early Year?? Hudson Hornet, another had a 58 Studebaker. Grandma's car was the one I learned to drive in, 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air two door Sedan, 6, 3 on column, no power steer Or brakes, six at 55 AC(vent windows included) and hard as rock bias ply 15" tires!

First "Fast Food" I ever had was a burger at a drive up diner in Greenville IL in a parking lot, the next was at Dog N'Suds in Wood River IL. Still were hand made burgers and fries, the Hot Dogs were bought packaged but from a local butcher.

Edited by DMiller - 07 Apr 2018 at 12:10pm

Missing Wildlife

Edited by Ken in Texas - 07 Apr 2018 at 1:40pm

yeah I got them all..
I remember  the milk truck being ELECTRIC ( early 60s) and a guy clanging his bell wanting to sharpen knives and scissors. Also a huge wooded area( 2 acres or more) that was carpetted with White Trilliums(Ontario's flower), they all got bulldozed over to make a parking lot for the new sports park. And... was on the LAST steam engine train from Hamilton to Toronto.
great now I'm really feeling old....
Jay

Other than cheap prices the thing I miss most is crank out vent windows in cars. I suppose I should mention also how big the world seemed when you are small and know absolutely nothing.

Edited by Walker - 07 Apr 2018 at 6:05pm

older than dirt here, Remember when the only seat belts were in the stock cars at the local dirt track. When I started as a volunteer fireman had a  fire phone that rang steady until answered then everyone on the party line would listen to hear where the fire was.

5. Coffee shops or diners with table side jukeboxes
 The only thing I don't remember, cause we never went to any restaurants and no local ones had em anyway.
 Our phone was an oak wall phone, wired across the pasture to Grandmas bedroom and she had one in the kitchen that went to the outside world. I was only allowed to use it a couple times to call my friend down the road, on our party line.
 TV came to our house when I was about 11 and the Preacher donated his old RCA black and white when he got a new TV.
 running water didn't come till we moved across the road and lived there a couple years. I think I was prolly 14 when we didn't have to bucket water to the house anymore.

When I was pretty small Western Auto stores had a super duper contest with bicycles and all kinds of goodies in the add for collecting pop bottle caps so for a whole summer I walked to town and went to every place I had permission to have their caps from mostly Coke chest type coolers which was probably all of them so they wouldn't have to empty them. Well anyways after carting them all home and persuading Pappy to take me 20 miles I got to a Western Auto with a trunk full of bottle caps. Wound up with a yoyo probably retail value of about 49 cents. I learned a lesson from that about gullibility but do still have the yoyo around here some place as a keepsake.

I remember cars with the ignition on the dash and floor dimmer, my 68 Torino is that way. Dad had a heater mounted on the floor of his truck with the ignition switch on the left side of the dash and manual choke from the factory. I had an aunt and uncle who still had a party line into the middle 80's.  The wax coke bottles, think they were called Nik L Nip? We used to walk up to the gas station for a 16oz glass bottle of pop, by then the 10oz bottles were getting scarce. There was a dime deposit on all glass bottles. Cans didn't have a nickel yet, but if you collected aluminum cans, the beverage distributors would pay by the pound for them to recycle. I got candy cigarettes at the neighborhood grocery store. By then home delivered milk was pretty much non existent. The milk boxes on the door step were still common and were used for news papers. We had the 3 major networks with one public TV channel. We had an antenna rotator box on the TV to move the antenna on the chimney. That and there was a fine tuning knob around the knob you turned to change channels that Dad was always fooling with. We used S&H Green stamps and also Regal stamps that came from the grocery store. You could still get 45 rpm records, but the 8 Track was well established and the cassette tape was becoming popular. I had a friend that had a Beta VCR. We still have a VHS VCR under the TV. I had friends with cable TV but Mom and Dad didn't get it until after I left home. MTV was music TV back then. We got purple mimeograph worksheets in school, we used hollowed out ball point pens to shoot spit balls, and I had a set of skates that used the key to clamp them on your shoes. Mom had a camera that used the big blue flash bulbs that had an 1156 bulb style base on them. Later on she got one that had the 4 sided cubes that rotated with each picture. Don't forget the 8mm and Super 8mm home movie cameras. We had 16mm films in school. I remember Grandma washing clothes with a wringer washer, we had cork pop guns, and went to the drive in. In my junior year in high school we lived across the street from the Star-Lite drive in. When they went to stereo sound you could receive the sound on a portable radio so I'd sit in the ft yard on a lawn chair sometimes and watch the movies.

Edited by Brian Jasper co. Ia - 08 Apr 2018 at 2:58pm

I remember riding with my Grandfather in a old Plymouth/Dodge, with the center armrest thing folded down, that was my car-seat!  And yes I rode with him up the road to get another case of  Black Label.   Riding in the old station wagon rear facing seat in the back with the window down inhaling all the fumes!! LOL  So that is the reason I am the way I am??

Yep older than dirt. 

Lou, I also had a '51 Chevy fastback, a nice car, I bought in '54 after getting out of the army. My father in law loaned us $500 to buy it, total price. Imagine being able to buy a 3 year old car today for that. How times change. When I was sent to the store back in the thirties I was lucky if I could have a penny for candy, times were tough. We lived in one room at my grandmothers til dad found a job, about 1940. Ah, the good old days!

One thing I remember that hasn`t been mentioned yet are hand chokes and especially  hand throttles.  Don`t remember cars having them,  but I remember a couple of late model 40s Chevy trucks having hand throttles.  Ma traded the 46 that didn`t run off for a cow and when dad asked her why would she traded a truck for a cow her answer was very simple "because the truck didn`t give milk".

"Fuller Brush Company" is one guy I can remember stopping by.