How old are you?

. . . THOUGHT YOU MIGHT ENJOY THIS . . .

'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 Levis, 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 19.

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 21 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 6AM 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

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.

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 tableside juke boxes
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 greenstamps
16. Hi-fi's
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

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.

How about this one? - A cast iron pot in the back yard, for boiling white sheets (and all sheets were white) before hanging them on a clothesline to dry.

I worked for my dad during the summers I was in college, in the engineering department at the shipyard. One of my jobs involved typing tank calibration sheets to be copied using a blueprint machine. (Anybody remember blueprints?)

My typewriter had an extra-long carriage. I had to take a specially sized sheet of blueprint paper (11 x 17 landscape position), and back it with a sheet of sepia paper - like mimeograph paper, only the coated side was turned to face the back of the blueprint paper. If I made a mistake, I had to - very carefully so that the paper wasn't shifted - roll the carriage back and scrape the number(s) off the back of the blueprint paper with a single-edged razor blade (remember those?). Then I had to paint the sepia paper with a special correction fluid (remember correction fluid?), let it dry completely, then very carefully roll the carriage back to the exact same level and continue typing six-digit numbers into little graph boxes that were about an inch long and a quarter-inch high.

About once a day he would stop by my desk and tell me that if I didn't stay in college long enough to meet a man who could support me in the manner he was able to, I would be typing tank calibrations sheets for the rest of my life.

It was a slight variation of the story his father would tell him when he was fourteen and his work involved scraping barnacles off the bottoms of boats that were in dry-dock.

Don't times change, though?

Annie

I seldom think of those things. My present got so complicated just to keep up. Each new thing I have tried to grasp so I wouldn't show "my age" simply added more layers. For every convenience, there is a new annoyance.

Of all the technological changes, I miss real people at the other end of a telephone. I am a pretty steady temperament person; but I have nearly lost my cool more often pushing buttons on a telephone then any other place. I especially love the ones that go through nine choices of which none are appropriate and then ask if you want the menu again with no "zero" for operator option.

Or the other day when I did not have the contract number to type in the phone and after going through several digital voice layers, her parting words were, "I do not recognize the number. Thank you for calling. Good bye." Click. Recognize the number? I didn't have one - that was the purpose of the call!

I try to use "1-800-free-411" to get phone numbers on my cell so I don't pay $2.25 charge to get a phone number. Sometimes, though, only 411 works and I am then grateful for a real person. No longer. 411 sounds just like the 1-800-free-411 digital voice without the ads. Can't win even for $2.25.

Ann, I remember the mimeograph machines. That blue stuff was hard to get off.
And the clothes lines. My mother, until the day she died, hung her wash out to dry. Cooking the clothes on an iron pot I remember as a kid. My how things have changed.

DK. I feel your frustration. I just hate calling and getting those options that more often than not, lead nowhere. The days of talking to a live person are gone. I miss the human relations of the past. Calling a company and getting an operator that was very pleasant and would chat if she had the time.

We live in a new world. Technology has taken over. Those of us who experienced the old days are now part of history. When we tell our children the way it was, they think we are ancient. We lived history. There were good times and bad times and we remember the good. The struggles and hard work are memories we forget. For me, it is the human contact that I miss. Families getting together and actually talking before TV became the center of attraction. Kids today don't experience falling out of trees and breaking an arm. The games we thought up on the spur of the moment just for fun.

Oh well. Onward we go. The future is now. Live it to the fullest.

Black Jack Gum can still be had--Amazon.com. Beemons and Clove too

The only fast food I had as a little child was Breast Milk!
Maybe on a Thursday night Mum would send one of us down to the Chip shop for some fish and chips (fries). Or else if money was short it would be a baked potato from the oven with real butter.
A roast dinner every Sunday.
Sunday night bath time at six pm bed at nine.
Monday was always cold leftover roast meat with mash cabbage and chutney.
Drive in movies? No such thing!
Coke was a black coal like thing you put on the fire!
A fridge who needed one? The larder was cool enough for most things.
Shopping was done every day except Sundays.
An Ice box was my bedroom in the winter.
Duvets never existed just rough wooly blankets and starched sheets.
TV black and white 405 lines resolution Mono sound and vacuum tubes instead of transistors.
Kids TV shows started at five pm and finished at six pm then the news program would run.
Sunday afternoons was always a movie on TV at about three pm.
Six pm was the God slot with a church service on TV so dad switched off the TV and listened to the radio. Seven pm the TV goes back on for 77 sunset strip or Sea Hunt.

Great stuff, David.
I remember those cold bedrooms. A stove pipe from the kitchen went up through our (my brother and I) room, but that just took of the edge. My mother would take one of the irons that always sat on the steel kitchen stove and run the iron over the bed sheets before we jumped in. Of course before jumping in, we knelt beside the bed to say our prayers. "Now I lay me down to sleep..." Those prayers were said very fast, and then Mom tucked us in. That is still a pleasant memory.

Abe,
I remember them all and then some...What's older than dirt?

Horse drawn plows
Outhouses
Woodburning cook stoves
Party line phones
Soda Fountains in the Drug Stores

Yes Don, I forgot the outhouses and Chamber buckets.
My grandmother had a six-seater outhouse. Ours was a three-seater.
Magazines were always in the outhouse to read and use. Toilet tissue was a luxury.

I remember all those things and some others too.

Bomb shelters
McCarthyism
Jim Crow laws
Lynchings
Blackouts
Civil Defense ID cards
Poll taxes
Internment camps
Atomic bomb drills
Minstrel shows
The holocaust

and worst of all...

No air conditioning

Al, I forgot some of those. Thanks for the reminder.

Al Stevens wrote:

I remember all those things and some others too.

Bomb shelters
McCarthyism
Jim Crow laws
Lynchings
Blackouts
Civil Defense ID cards
Poll taxes
Internment camps
Atomic bomb drills
Minstrel shows
The holocaust

and worst of all...

No air conditioning

So much for longing for the good old days.

Thank you, Al, for keeping it real. The good ole days weren't so good for many people.

I love reading this kind of stuff. There really is far too much technology these days. It's ridiculous. And you're right about the phone thing. I refuse to call businesses and places like that because if I'm lucky enough to get a live person on the other end, chances are they're rude. And I've been on the other side of it too. I worked at a calling center for one of the wireless networks (we were a third party vendor with a contract with them), and everyone that called in did get to talk to a live person even though they had to go through some automated options first to find out where to direct them, and I want to say about 98% of the calls that I got were extremely rude people. They would yell at me because they would have some sort of fee on their bill that reflected an action taken by the company because they haven't paid their bill on time. And unfortunately you can't be blunt and just tell them that they need to start being honest and pay their bill on time, you have to beat around the bush and be all nice about the fact that they're basically trying to steal from you. So you get yelled at because they're not getting the free money they're looking for. Sorry about the rant, but the rudeness of people these days just drive me crazy.

Oh and I don't work there anymore. I just don't have the personality to handle getting yelled at for ten hours a day. Or for being lied to.

But I love these kind of posts; they make me smile.

dmondeo wrote:

The only fast food I had as a little child was Breast Milk!

Fish and chips was the only fast food I remember in those days!

Along the idea of the Good Old Days.

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags,
because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today.Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."


She was right: Our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store.
The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over.
So they really were recycled.But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that were used for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right:
We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then,we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 240 volts: Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days.Kids got hand-me-down clothesbfrom their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.
But that young lady is right: We didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then,we had one TV, or radio, in the whole house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen,we blended and stirred by hand,because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.
But she's right: We didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were, just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish, old person who needs a lesson in conservation from the all-knowing young people.
We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to tick us off!

All good points, Don

Excellent Don. I remember all of those things and still do most of them. I remember the old saying that "a penny saved is a penny earned."
Where I live conservation is a standard. We still use glass bottles and they have a deposit on them and therefore are returned for recycling. As for plastic bags at the grocery store, it doens't exist. People either bring their own cloth bags or use a basket or carton to carry their groceries. Plastics are not good.
It is a matter of habit in many cases. Conveniences come with a price both to the comsumer and the environment.
When I visit the States, it is a cutural shock. A throw-away society and gadgets to eliminate human power. I still don't use a garage door opener although there are times when it would be a convenience. I am still able to get out of the car and open it. When the time comes that I can't do that, I'll get one.

Thanks for the reminders of the things we once did and lived well.

Very good, Don. I remember going to Germany in the late 1960's. I saw women in the small stores picking up their stuff from the shelf and putting it in their large purse. I was in shock. They then put the things from their purse to the counter to pay for them, put them back and took them home. I had to go buy a big purse...

I had to shop every day as nothing was packaged and my refrigerator was 12 inches by 12 inches and I had a similar oven and two hot plate type burners on the stove. The hot water was heated with charcoal brickettes that were expensive in a tank once a day. That water was for anything and was used sparingly. The tank heated the kitchen where the tub was, and it had a shower hose to waste less water.

The electricity meter was in the hallway, and I could see the thing zoom around if I used anything that required any beyond a lightbulb.

For entertainment on Sunday, we walked around the town square or in the woods. We window shopped as the stores were closed except for the bakeries for a cup of coffee and a sweet.

We had a car, but seldom used it, preferring instead the public transportation that felt safer than driving in a foreign country. Most of our friends that were German could not afford the insurance or the driver's license and shared cars.

We made Christmas presents: candle holders and cards with pressed flowers and socks and shawls. We had few clothes because they were expensive but very well made. We had special clothes and sport clothes.

Containers? I used my own containers for anything that required one. The stores had things in large containers from which they poured into mine. Shopping every day we ate what was purchased so there were few remainders to package or packages to store. We saved every jar from canned goods (in jars, not cans) to use over.

I used to think that must be what the U.S. was like in the "old days." I found it quaint and endearing since I had the option of returning to the conveniences (yes, even in the 60's) of U.S. life.

I heard once the statistic on landfills and diapers - it was ghastly. However, washing diapers was an awful task, not missed by modern mothers I'm sure. Every once in awhile I wish I had a clothesline, though. My mom still does though it's seldom used. I remember taking down frozen clothes in the winter.