Your old if...

OLDER THAN DIRT, HUH?

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 Simpsons or Eatons.
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.

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?

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.


Candy cigarettes
Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
Party lines
Newsreels before the movie
Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive-6933)
Peashooters
Howdy Doody
78 RPM records
45 RPM records
Hi-fi's
Metal ice trays with lever
Mimeograph paper
Blue flashbulb
Packards
Roller skate keys
Cork popguns
Drive-ins
Studebakers
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 16-20 = You're older than dirt!

Oopps, I remember them all, except in my home town the phone numbers were real short. My Dads sporting Goods stores phone number was 131-J. Dial phones were only in the movies until 1956. We had to wait for the line to clear and tell the operator the number. Usulla it went like this, "Hi Bertie, get me my dads store." "This is Ty." "Oh hi Ty, how's your Mom?" (Bertie was a gossip, so we lied to her a lot.)We didn't get TV in the valley due to the mountains blocking the signal, (except in Lower Valley) until 1954. Even then we had an antennae that was 20 feet above the roof. Six support wires to hold it up. Three, countem, three channels, all out of Reno and they all went off the air at 10PM at first, later at midnight.
When the milk man delivered the milk in the winter, the milk would freeze and the cream would expand and push the paper lid off and the the cream would stick out. Mom cut this cream, sliced actually, with a butter knife and placed it in the coffee creamer. When I was 14, I actually worked for the milkman (Andy)making deliveries at four in the morning. We just walked into homes, put the milk in the "ice box" and picked up the empties. We also picked up the envelope with the payments in it. We very seldom left the milk outside. Too hot in the summer. I remember once I made the roller skates so tight on my shoes, it made the soles rip off. Boy was my Dad mad. The cobbler across the street resewed them . Remember the local cobbler?? Or how about the OK Rubber Welders where you got your retread tires???

Well I am not old by any means..but I do here the hard-up stories of my Dads youth...

you may be able to relate to some of these...I am sure it is universal

Some classics lines from my old man....

When I was a kid I had to walk 15 miles school backwards in a blizzard, we couldn't afford shoes so had to wrap barbed wire around your feet for traction. It was uphill both ways and the wind was always blowing at you.

We were so poor that we had to eat dirt for dinner and if we were good we didnt have to have desert.

etc etc.....I am sure there are more like that around too.

I was so poor when I was a kid a Korean family wanted to adopt me.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-13-04 AT 07:36 PM (CDT)
 
we were so poor a friend saw my mum kicking a can down the street and asked " what you doing?? "

Mum said " Moving "

WF,

You could have gone all year without posting this. I remember everything except the roller skate key. As I've never had roller skates or done any of that type of skating, I still don't know what that item is!

Wish I had never used the roller skate key. I would have less scars on my knees if I had stayed off the skates entirely.

Before we had the name with the numbers for the phone we had just numbers. And the phone was shaped more like a candlestick.

How about suicide doors and Schwinn Black Phantoms?

Hmm, no skates. You must have made old Santa mad. I guess then the song that began,"Oh, you can't roller skate in a buffalo herd" makes no sense what so ever to you. Me neither, and we sang it around the campfire in Boy Scout camp. That and other equally stupid songs. I prefer the ones I learned in the Navy, but not on here. Ha.

OS,

I don't remember party lines. Roller skate keys I remember fondly. Must have had 20 pair of skates that we wore out the wheels on, on the streets of NYC playing cops and robbers. It was a tool for tightening down the front clamps on roller skates to the front of your shoes. Yes shoes, we only wore sneakers when we played handball in the playground. Yes, concrete surfaced playground, big heavy, steel swings, teeter-totters that three of ya’ could launch a 150 lb. kid about 20 feet thru the air… and no one ever got hurt or sued the city. Only took some time out for a few games of two-sewer stickball or kick the can. Those were the days.

Jerry

Our first phone here was one of those old GI crank type phones that were connected to the four homes in our area that were outside the range of adult's yells. The first one connected to the town's system was a five party line that remained that way until we moved in 1964.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-18-04 AT 07:57 AM (CDT)
 
I still have a crank phone hanging on the wall in my den. It came from a company operation that closed just after WW-II. The grandkids like to turn the crank to make the bell ring and pretend to call someone.

Tom - Duluth,MN

LAST EDITED ON Jan-18-04 AT 01:08 PM (CDT)
 
Back in the early 50's, in Unionville, Nevada, my grandfather had a summer cottage up there and his phone was an old crank phone. His "number" was two longs and one short!! To get an outside line, you had to call the operator and she would call back with the party you wanted to talk to. You couldn't call direct except in the actual valley. Mrs. Ernst, the old lady we got our fresh milk from,(quite litterally from her big fat cow) still in the pail, her number was two shorts and a long. Funny how all this comes back after 50 + years.