This Will Tell Your Age
&
Memories From a Friend
Sent by Dean Cook and Marilyn Smith Graham, both Class of 1963
Author Unknown
This Will Tell Your Age
&
Memories From a Friend
Sent by Dean Cook and Marilyn Smith Graham, both Class of 1963
Author Unknown
This Will Tell Your Age
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 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 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. 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.
Blackjack chewing gum
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
Party lines
Newsreels before the movie
Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
Howdy Doody
45 RPM records
S&H Green Stamps
Hi-fi's
Metal ice trays with lever
Mimeograph paper
Roller skate keys
Cork popguns
Drive-ins
Wash tub wringers
A Note from Kerry:
My first pizza pie was a couple of slices from Shakey's that I ate on a family vacation with Steve Paris and Bradley Olds in Colorado Springs or Manitou Springs. We all thought it smelled terrible. Our family seldom went on vacation alone. We would take other families along and rent a cabin. Steve brought Brad along to help survive this ordeal. The kids and the dads would go fish. We never ate out. That would have taken money. My dad would drive us to a tourist site and ask how much it was to go in. As often as not we would then turn around and drive back. So we never went into the Cave of the Winds or saw Seven Falls. But we got to see the entrance to both. We always went to the Garden of the Gods. It was free, of course. And we would get to go into the gift shop. They often had Indians dancing outside (free of course) and we might be allowed to buy one souvenir if it didn't cost too much. Usually we just bought postcards to send. These were a dime to a quarter, and we seldom bought the expensive ones, since we had to have enough money to buy the stamp. Conservation of resources they would say today.
We ALWAYS stopped at the big Welcome To Colorado sign and had our pictures taken. Back then a car was designed to run at one altitude, so often it would not run well in the mountains. We had 4-50 air conditioning. This consisted of all 4 windows down at 50 miles an hour. Kids today might be amazed to find that back then the windows rolled all the way down, and that you used a cranking device to raise and lower the glass; that you unlocked the car with a key; and that locking the car required pushing down four lock knobs. There were no cup holders in the car, and everyone did not have something to drink every minute they rode in one. We had one telephone and it was in the sun room. My parents were extremely happy to get away from it all, and we did not touch a telephone from the time dad took vacation until he returned to work. We would go to either Grand Lake, Rockaway Beach, or Green Mountain Falls (Colorado).
One year dad put a special fan in one window of the car for vacation. You put ice into the container and when you drove it drew the air across the ice and into the car. It was not unusual to see a canvas bag on the front of some cars that was used to hold water and cool by air that was drawn in by the radiator fan. Since it was a family of 4 boys, a roadside rest stop could be the car beside the road with the right hand doors open.
We would stop in Garden City, Kansas to eat. NOT at McDonalds, which didn't exist, but at a roadside park with one hole toilets. The wind would blow so strong we would have to hold onto the bottles and food as we ate. Mom would cook meatloaf and make sandwiches out of it. They would have tea, which was in a container that she wrapped in newspaper to help keep it cool.
Dairy Queen did NOT cook food. I was in college before I had my first McDonalds meal and in the Navy before I had my first "Whopper" from Burger King.
Dad owned a Ford Model A in the 1950's. He loved anything that had a motor or that plugged in. He would have been delighted to have survived to experience the new electronic world we live in today. Esley E Elkins, Jr, or Junior Elkins as he was known, died at the age of 48.
