Bring Back Any Memories?

This will get you thinking.  Someone asked the other day, “What was your favourite 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 home,” I explained!  “Mum 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 lad 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’d figured his system could have handled it:

• Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore jeans, 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 10 pm, after playing the national anthem and epilogue; it came back on the air at about 6 am, 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 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 seven days a week.  He had to get up at 6 am every morning.
• Film stars kissed with their mouths shut.  At least, they did in the films. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing without profanity or violence or almost anything offensive.

If you grew up in a generation before there were fast foods, 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 into 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 of these do you remember?

• Headlight dip-switches on the floor of the car.
• Ignition switches on the dashboard.
• Two postal deliveries per day.
• Trouser leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
• The street lights were turned off at about 11pm each night.
• Soldering irons you heated on a gas burner.
• Using hand signals for cars without turn indicators.
• Corona drink (Cherryade) was delivered in glass bottles by lorry each week, and the empties returned.

Older Than Dirt Quiz:

Count all the ones that you remember, not the ones you were told about.  Ratings are at the bottom.

1. Sweet cigarettes
2. Coffee shops with juke boxes
3. Home milk delivery in glass bottles
4. Party lines on the telephone
5. Newsreels before the movie
6. 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 two channels (if you were fortunate)
7. Peashooters
8. 33 RPM records
9. 45 RPM records
10. Hi-fi’s
11. Metal ice trays with levers
12. Blue flashbulb
13. Cork popguns
14. 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

If you remembered 11-14 = You’re positively ancient!

I must be “positively ancient,” but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.

From a 94-year-old British gentleman (Michael Sherbourne):

I could easily beat all of these.  They wouldn’t call me “ancient” but more like “ARCHAEOLOGICAL,” e.g., just one small example, not only did we not have steam irons, we did not have electric irons.  They were solid iron, heated either on the gas ring or the coal stove, and held with a thick cloth as the handle was as hot as the base.

Oh yes!, and we didn’t have electricity until I was 15.  And your Dad made the very first wireless set (now called radio) in the whole district, with two valves that lit up like electric lamps and powered by an HT battery that was 10”x6”x4”, as well as a wet battery containing sulfuric acid that had to be re-charged at Stein’s the baker every 10 days or so (cost: tuppence!).

We had never heard of television.  The word wasn’t even invented until I was about 28 or 30.  We didn’t have a telephone until I was about 17 or 18.  The heaviest traffic was from horse-drawn vehicles, mostly brewers’ drays pulled usually by two very large Shire horses—sometimes by four horses.  Kids today don’t know what real life was.

From a 65-year-old American gentleman (Tom Constantine):

Michael,

You should write a book!  When I was born in 1945, we still had an ice man for the ice box (refrigerator), the coal man, milkman, and bread man who came to the house daily or every other day.  We had a kerosene stove in the kitchen, and the iron had a detachable wooden handle so the handle would not have to get hot when the base was on the stove.

We did have a telephone. My son-in-law’s folks ( County Louth, Ireland) didn’t have a phone in their home until 20 years ago.  No one did.  They couldn’t afford it.  My son-in-law’s granddad was a horse-and-wagon deliveryman.  They would collect what the train delivered to the village, and his dad would unload the goods and deliver them by horse and wagon to the merchants—that ended in 1975!

My other son-in-law—also Irish but from Longford—his folks only have had indoor plumbing for 20-odd years. Folks in the USA have no clue what goes on in other parts of the world and if our electricity was interrupted in the USA, at this very moment, it would be anarchy and mayhem as only a small percentage of Americans have a clue as to how to survive with bare necessities.

From this 68-year-old American native from Hawaii (Bob Uda):

I was born in 1942 in Hawaii and lived there for the first 20 years of my life.  We had the milkman, meat man, slop man, ice cream man, and malasada man come by weekly.  Additionally, we drank powdered milk.  Yuch!  We also used candles and a scrubbing board to wash clothes in addition to our old washing machine.  We had a cess pool, which we had to periodically pump out because it overflowed into the yard and street, but no sewer lines.

We listened to the radio until 1950 when we obtained our first B&W television set with lots of “snow” on the screen and an antenna on our roof.  We had a two-party phone and a six-digit phone number (I still remember it: 269-221).  We were barebacked and barefooted most of the time and wore shoes only when we absolutely had to—mostly to go to church.  We always used slippers or flip-flops.  We walked everywhere we went.

We did a lot of cast and pole fishing crabbing for seafood.  We went to the backwoods and fields to gather wild guava to make jam and jelly, mangoes to make mango seed, plums, breadfruit from breadfruit trees, and mountain apples.  We gathered coconuts, husked them, drank the coconut water, and ground up the white meat and made haupia (a Hawaiian pudding) and coconut cake.  We dried slices of beef to make beef jerky.  We built traps and caught wild mountain doves, which made delicious teriyaki dove roast meat along with our raised pigeons.  We also hunted doves using slingshots and BB and pellet guns.  We also gathered wild honey from wild beehives up in the hills.

We grew many fruit trees in our yard including banana, avocado, star fruit, guava, mango, papaya, lilikoi, and pomegranate.  We raised numerous animals in the back yard to slaughter, prepare, and eat including a cow, turkeys, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and pigeons.  Additionally, we always grew a garden, which included corn, squash, pumpkins, lettuce, string beans, parsley, bell and chili peppers, lima beans, radishes, strawberries, taro, and cabbage.

To us, freezing was the all-time low temperature in Hawaii of 57 degrees F!  Burrrr.  It was fun growing up in Hawaii during the 1940s and 1950s.  I left for college at the University of Oklahoma in 1960.

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