Older Than Dirt
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.
Nut 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?
An old Royal Crown Cola
bottle with a stopper with a bunch of holes in it.
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.