10 More Days before I leave for Wisconsin and "The Lake"

Today is Memorial Day. Someone in our neighborhood has placed small flags on each of our front lawns. Memorial Day is the day to remember those who have served and those who have died for our country. I also spend this day remembering relatives. Not just those who have died but also those who remain. Lately, I've been going through old pictures that I took of my children as they grew. I came across pictures of them sitting and playing with their grandparents. Some of the pictures were those of my children sitting with their great-grandparents. Those great-grandparents, no longer with us, had a profound affect on those who remain. My children may no longer recall those past events, but good or bad, those events all served to shape us into that which we eventually became. My parents, my children's grandparents, got married on Memorial Day. Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad! I remembered. My son was born on Memorial Day. Happy Birthday honey! I'll never forget that day. We were all so surprised. You were supposed to be a girl. That beautiful full head of hair was followed by a set of plumbing that we hadn't expected. If only I could show you a picture of the look on your father's face at that moment. I have an equal amount of memories for the births of each of my children and today is Memorial Day. I can take out all the old pictures and the past memories that have no pictures and remember. Today is Memorial Day, a day for memories.

*****

A friend of mine sent me this "funny"which I thought I'd share.


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.

*****


Much of the above "funny" fit the family that I grew up in. We did have a car...at least by the time I came along. We had one black and white TV but only 4 channels. My grandparents had a color TV long before we did but my grandmother hated the color and would make my grandfather turn it back to black and white. The colors were never as good as her imagination. I took the following "Test" and discovered that I was "Older than Dirt". However, I prefer to say that I have a wealth of experience.

How many do you remember?

~Head lights dimmer switches on the floor. (I still have a hard time adjusting to having the brights on that little handle by the steering column)

~Ignition switches on the dashboard. (My mother's first car. The car that I used to drive to school, the few times that I was allowed to drive to school. The Corvair. I loved that car. Leaves in the fall would come blowing at you from the vents.)

~Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall. (We had radiators. They were very hot. Don't touch!)

~Real ice boxes. (My parents had a few tales to tell us about these. We had a genuine gas-powered refrigerator. But we used blocks of ice when we went camping in and "ice box".)

~Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards. (Who had money for pant leg clips? You just had to be a little more careful the next time.)

~Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner. (Sorry, I'm sure they were around but I was a girl and girls weren't taught that sort of thing. I did get to watch my Dad teach my brother how to use a hammer and a saw. It's amazing how much you can pick up from watching.)

~Using hand signals for cars without turn signals. (That was in the Driver's Education book and it was taken very seriously. Now it's in the book and many don't understand why but many don't understand why the car had turn signals in the first place. They never use them.)

The above was just a preparation for "The Test". Count how many of the following that you actually remember, not the one's that someone just told you about. The ratings are on the bottom.

1. Blackjack chewing gum (Hated the stuff so I never bought it. I prefered the bubblegum with that cartoon that I never understood.)
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water (Ben Franklin's or Clancy's Drug Store)
3. Candy cigarettes( Ben Franklin's or Clancy's Drug Store)
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed bottles (Our church had one of these. Coke always seemed to taste better from those glass bottles)
5. Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes (Clancy's Drug Store had tables with those jukeboxes, and they worked too.)
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers (We didn't have the milkman come to our house but I remember that some of our neighbors did. The milkman would always stop and talk to me when I'd ride my bike around the block)
7. Party lines (We didn't have one but they still existed when we first moved to Arizona because we were given one by mistake and we had a heck of time getting the phone company to fix it. I never knew who'd be on the phone.)
8. Newsreels before the movie (I probably shouldn't count this one because I just remember the cartoon shorts before the movies. I miss those cartoon shorts)
9. P.F. Flyers (?)
10. Butch wax ( I know what it is but never knew anyone who used it)
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive-6933) (I remember memorizing ours as Walnut 6-3008..the church was Walnut 6-3808 so we got a lot of calls for the pastor by mistake)
12. Peashooters (I remember these but we couldn't have one. "You'll shoot your eye out". We had cap guns.)
13. Howdy Doody (It's Howdy Doody Time. I actually preferred Romper Room)
14. 45 RPM records (I still have all mine. I have a fine collection of 78's too.)
15. S&H Green Stamps (My mom used to have shoe boxes full of these. I remember helping to paste them into the little books)
16. Hi-fi's (We kept ours on a stand in the dining room when I was growing up but only my parent's were allowed to touch it)
17. Metal ice trays with lever (I think my sister still has those trays. That lever was supposed to help you get the ice out of the tray but it didn't work all that well)
18. Mimeograph paper (I used to teach. We had a mimeograph machine and I had to know how to use it. Ahhh the smell of freshly mimeographed papers!)
19. Blue flashbulb (I wonder if my Dad still has some of those bulbs in a box somewhere. I remember the multitude of spots that would appear in your vision when that bulb would go off. And those bulbs were hot right after they'd go off. "Don't touch, you'll burn your fingers!"....I remember burning my fingers.)
20. Packards (no...we had a Chevy station wagon with genuine textured vinyl seats which would leave an imprint on you legs)
21. Roller skate keys (four wheels and a key so you could adjust the size to fit your shoes)
22. Cork popguns (nope...my brother did have a popgun but no cork.)
23. Drive-ins (I remember sitting in the hot car on a summer night watching Bambi. Poor Bambi)
24. Studebakers (see #20)
25. Wash tub wringers (My grandparents had one of these in their basement but I never actually saw them use it)

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 16-25 = You're older than dirt!


I hope everyone has a least a few good memories today. I know that I do. Happy Memorial Day!