Older than dirt

[Buckrub]

THOUGHT YOU MIGHT ENJOY THIS:
'Someone 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. !
'Mom 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, never wore Levis, never set foot on a golf course, never 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 & 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 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 was 21 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 --my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which he got to keep 2 cents. He had to get up at 6AM every morning.
On Saturday, he had to collect the 42 cents from his customers. His favorite customers were the ones who gave him 50 cents and told him to keep the change. His 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. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

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?
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 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 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.
1.. Blackjack chewing gum
2.Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines on the telephone
8 Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11.. 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 3 channels [if you were fortunate])
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S& H greenstamps
16. Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. 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 16-25 = You' re older than dirt!

I might be older than dirt but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.


I could add a few to that list. I bet some of y'all could too.
Pepsodent toothpaste
Ipana toothpaste (Bucky Beaver)
Mrs. White's Bluing (Bluing made clothes white. Go figure)
Reddy Kilowatt
straight phone cords
"Central" phone operators (I was 13 before these left in Conway. My aunt was one)
Baby moons
3 on the column
Carrying guns to school (to go hunting afterwards)
Carbide lights
funeral home fans
croquet (found an old wooden set at the farm last week)
Games like Scrambola, Workup, Flies and Skinners
Baseball cards in bicycle spokes

Moon pie

[Captain]

That is good stuff.
And I'm with you one the older than dirt score.
Sure wish a lot of that stuff was still around.

[Buckrub]

I heard a speaker one time say that folks almost always remember only the good things about their past. I honestly don't know if that's true. But there is not a phrase for 'the bad old days'.

I can remember a FEW folks having crank start cars.........and cussing them. And heaters were optional, at one time (imagine today, which by the way it's snowing AGAIN). I remember ceiling fans, and I don't mean the ones in a box. I mean the louvered kind that are installed in the ceiling of a hallway, and you had to open the windows to turn it on, and it roared like a jet plane.......which was fine, we didn't have a TV anyway. I don't want to go back to those things.

But the culture, the ability for kids to play outside, and walk to school, and leaving your doors unlocked..........and all that went with that. I'd go back to all that in a heartbeat. I have always said I was born too late. I should have been born so that I died at an old age somewhere around 1965.

[Big Muddy]

Ditto, Cap....me, too!!!! ;)

[jb]

ya all that seems like yesterday. But some other things come to mind also. How about the small iron lung banks that you filled with dimes, nickles and pennies for polio, or the duck and cover drills in grade school. My house had a quarantine sigh placed on our front door when my sister came down with scarleteena.
We were pretty white up here, but in the early and mid 60's while in the Marines I did run into the whites only shit you southern boys grew up with, never saw stuff like that where I lived.
It's fun to remember the good stuff, but there was a lot of crap back then that we forget about..

[Thumper]

Dang ... mark me up for "older than dirt" ... NOTHING there I didn't experience or remember.

I still remember my mom using two wash tubs (one for soap, one for rinse) and a wash board to do laundry ... then it would get hung on the clothesline.
I remember buckets of water along the sidewalk with a dipper hanging on a nail in a tree/phone pole/whatever ... that was the public drinking fountain.
I do remember our first tv ... it was a repossession and dad bought it from the bank. Of course it was b&w and we only got one channel ... two (Orlando & Daytona) if we put plenty of tinfoil on the rabbit ears and had my little sister stand next to the tv touching one extension.
We had a milkman (plus cheese and eggs), a paperboy and a guy who would come around with a truck of veggies.
The mailman walked his route and put the mail through the door slot or into the mailbox on the front porch.
We NEVER locked our house ... even if we were out of town. Didn't matter, anyone with a "skeleton key" could'a opened it anyway.
On Halloween night, the big kids would go out on their own (me) and mom would walk the little kids around the neighborhood. She'd leave a bowl of candy on the front porch with a little sign that said, "Take One". There would actually still be candy in the bowl when they'd get back home.
The garbage man would actually walk into the back yard, behind the garage and carry the garbage cans to the street, dump them in the back of the truck and actually return the cans to the back yard.
I remember at my dad's gas station (everywhere actually) there were two public restrooms, one door said "whites" and the other said "colored". The (cold) water fountain was mounted to the side of the Coke machine (which cooled the water) and had a sign that said, "whites only".
Our local grocery store had double screened doors ... the push bar had a sign that said, "Merita Bread ... 2 loaves, 25-cents".
You'd go to the gas station for $2 of gas and they'd not only put gas in your tank, but sweep out the car, clean ALL the windows, check ALL the tire pressures (including spare) and top off if needed, check oil and water (top off if necessary) including the "water" in the battery.
My "good shoes" almost always had the front half of the sole loose and it would go flap, flap, flap as I walked.
I got excited as all get out the Christmas I received a TRANSISTOR radio! I thought that was the cats meow. One thing super cool about it (other than being portable) was I didn't have to wait for it to "warm up" when I turned it on!
If friends came to our house or if we went to their house ... we never knocked ... just walked on in.
I walked to school and back until I got a bicycle for Christmas (it came from the Firestone Tire store) and it was a thing of pride ... I'd wipe it down every evening and it always shined like a new penny.
We had ONE phone in the house it had a dial on it and weighed a ton ... then we got a fancy one to replace it. It hung on the kitchen wall and had a cord 10 miles long ... it was coiled, but always managed to tie itself into a bazillion knots. I never could figure out how that would happen. Still, the only phone in the house. (my grandmother had a party line)
We had a station wagon, never had a/c, but we'd be happy riding in it with 2 adults and 6 kids ... in FLORIDA!
When we got sick, the doctor would come to the house. I still remember our family doctor ... Dr. Coffin (I kid you not)
We never had a/c in the house (OR a color tv) until I had already left home. A window fan was the tits ... a box fan was the next best thing. My grandmother had the big attic fan ... we never had one.

Dang, I need to stop. I think I could go on forever! Bucky, like your aunt, my mom was a "Central Operator". ;)

[Captain]

Our first phone was a party line with 5 families.
Our first phone number was EX34566 and my cousins was EX35596
Anytime during the daytime if we needed the phone our Aunt Grace was ALWAYS on it and we would have to ask her would she get off the phone long enough for us to make a call. She lived about a quarter of a mile through the woods from us.
I shot a man off the porch of her house one night trying to breakin on her. I was 14 at the time.
Still got the the newspaper about the story.
Long ago.....

[HideHunter]

Wow.. I feel old.. But I feel a bit better because several of you are obviously also old.

[Buckrub]

My age falls squarely between that of dirt and baseball.

[Thumper]

Ha Cappy ... for some unexplained reason, I still remember our first phone number. NOBODY else in the family has a clue ... but I remember ours AND the grandparents (on both sides) phone numbers.

Ours started out at 6292 then went to 4-6292. Then they came out with prefixes and it became 42(GArden)4-6292.

I wonder who has that number now? Maybe I should call it some day just for shits & grins. ;)

Funny how the memory works. Half the time I can't remember what I had for breakfast, but I remember a dang phone number from when I had barely started walking!

[Buckrub]

161J

[BarryBobPosthole]

My mom and dad split up when I was 6, which was virtually unheard of in 1960. I changed schools from a two room schoolhouse in Boles, Arkansas where my classroom had kids from three grades in it and the whole class heard every grade's lessons. I got my first chaw in first grade there and promptly threw up my breakfast. The guy who gave it to me was named Edison Rose. He and his older brother were in my class. Later, in high school, my Uncle Huck was their Ag teacher. He said he started feeding his cows when it got cold enough for Edison and Everett to start wearing shoes to school.
We moved to Oklahoma when I was in third grade and the town I grew up in was almost exactly like Mayberry. Maybe a little darker though. The first house we lived in was near the tracks and a feed mill. Me and my buddy Danny Hutchison would hang out and talk with the hobos that stayed under the trestle. Hutch and I also used to hop on the train and ride it across town and jump off just before it sped up as it left town. This was in the third grade. And yes, I was a juvenile delinquent.

BKB

[Big Muddy]

We drew our water from a cistern....it was loaded with dissolved iron, and smelled like sulphur....it would stain our clothes....I joke about it, now, and tell people that I was 18 years old, before I found out that my fruit of the loom drawers didn't come from the store, already yellow and smelly.

And, seriously, I was about 12 years old, when I found out eggplant wasn't meat....my Mom could carve and cook it, just like a fried pork chop. ;)

And, our first party line phone # was 3901, then 4-3901, then 4041, then BIM-4041. ;)

[quercus alba]

bunch of curmudgeons. glad I'm young

[BarryBobPosthole]

Eddie, we had sulfur water in our well when we lived in Boles. It was so bad the water in the bathtub would make the soap cursle up like buttermilk. So in the summer, my uncle would come get my Dad and I and we bathed in the Fourche river about twice a week. One of the reasons it seems like that river is in my DNA I reckon.

BKB

[Thumper]

We had 5 kids in the family (later became 6) ... we'd fill the bathtub and take turns bathing, usually 2 at a time ... my 2 sisters, my twin brothers and me (not necessarily in that order as I was the oldest and rank had it's privileges). ;)

Once the last kid finished a bath, the water was drained.

[HideHunter]

Had an hour and half of chores morning and night - including milking a cow and 7 trips with 2 five gallon buckets of water from the spring to the hog house. Started baling hay and scooping corn for the neighbors when I was 12. Made a buck and a quarter an hour. When I was 13 I was offered a job at a filling station in town. Paid twice as much money and not 1/4 the work. What a racket. :) First year I rode my bicycle to work (6 miles of gravel). Next year I saved $40 and bought an Allstate Moped.. very possibly one of the most dependable "vehicles" I've owned to this day. I saw days at -20 it was the only thing on the farm that would start. ;)

I broke ponies for the neighbor down the road. When I could get a bridle on them and ride them to his place two days in a row - he paid me $25 - a princely sum in those days. ;) I was also a "market gunner". Parents paid me a quarter for a squirrel or rabbit. I had to buy my own shells. I could get .22s for 41 cents a box at the Railroad Salvage. Many (most) of our meals were fish or game I packed home. Mom raised a big garden and we occasionally butchered a hog. Mom was hell of a cook. Quite often - everything on the supper table (right down to the butter) was raised, shot or caught on the farm.

I wasn't "handed" much as a kid but we ate like royalty. ;)

[Fido]

Silvercup Bread, sponsered Hopalong Cassidy on Sunday TV!Book bags for school, Whistle orange pop, white buck shoes.