Someone asked him '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?'
'We ate at a place called 'at 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 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, travelled 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 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 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.
There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.
Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it? And that was barely Sixty years ago.
MORE MEMORIES...
My friend said that while cleaning out his grandmother's house (she died recently) his dad found an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. He knew immediately what it was, but his daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. He said: "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 of you reading this actually do remember any of the following?
Car head lights dimmer switches on the floor....and ignition switches on the dashboard.....?
Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.......?
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner......?
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals......?
And there's more.....
Candy cigarettes....Coffee shops with tableside juke boxes..... Home milk delivery in glass bottles............ Newsreels before the movie....... 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 1 or 2 channels [if you were fortunate])..... Peashooters from straws.........45 RPM records.......... Hi-fi's......... Metal ice trays with lever......... Blue flashbulb....... Cork popguns........... Wash tub wringers........!
