Remember When
The following is an excerpt from an email thread that was discussing "the good old days," and I thought it was pretty neat. Admittedly, some of it won't pertain to the younger folks out there, but the older ones should be able to identify. It does seem that we are being a little overprotective of kids these days...
My Mom used to.....
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).
The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE...and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell
us how much safer we are now.
Flunking gym was not an option...even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative
attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. I can't understand it.
Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then.
Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.
I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot?
He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder
alarm.
Oh yeah...and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked (physical abuse) here too... and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.
Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee.
Kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.
Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations.
I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the f amily tent.
Summers were spent behind the push lawn mower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 (I was in my 20's before I used one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive). How sick were my parents?
Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Billy from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front porch just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes?
We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we survive?
Do you remember a time when...
Decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-moe"?
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, "Do Over!"?
"Race issue" meant arguing about who ran the fastest?
Catching the fireflies could happily occupy an entire evening?
It wasn't odd to have two or three "Best Friends"?
The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was "cooties"?
Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot?
A foot of snow was a dream come true?
Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures?
"Home free all!" made perfect sense?
Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?
Rolling down a grass covered hill at the park was the best!
War was a card game?
Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?
Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin?
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?
You went 'Trick or Treating" without your parents and people gave you apples with nickels in them? And you weren't afraid to eat the apples?
How many do you remember?
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN...?
All the girls had ugly gym uniforms?
It took five minutes for the TV warm up?
Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school?
Nobody owned a purebred dog?
When a quarter was a decent allowance?
You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?
Nylons came in two pieces?
All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had
their hair done every day and wore high heels? (except the nuns, of course!)
You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped
without asking, all for free, every time?
And you didn't pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?
Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes, or towels hidden inside the box?
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner
at a real restaurant with your parents?
Schools threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed. . and they did?
When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise,
peel out, lay rubber, or watch submarine races.
People went "steady"?
No one ever asked where the car keys were
because they were always in the car,
in the ignition, and the doors were never locked?
Lying on your back in the grass with your friends
and saying things like, "That cloud looks like a... "
and playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?
Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals
because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?
And with all our progress, don't you just wish, just once,
you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace,
and share it with the children of today?
When being sent to the principal's office was nothing
compared to the fate that awaited the student at home?
Basically we were in fear for our lives,
but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, or gangs.
Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!
But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.
Send this on to someone who can still remember
Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy,
the Lone Ranger, Winkie Dink,
Nellie Bell , Roy and Dale, Trigger, and Buttermilk.
As well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games,
roller skating, gutter ball, and visits to the pool,
Drinking Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say, "Yeah, I remember that"?
I am sharing this with you today
because it ended with a double dog dare to pass it on.
To remember what a double dog dare is, read on.
And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between
old enough to know better and too young to care.
How many of these do you remember?
Candy cigarettes
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
Blackjack, Clove, and Teaberry chewing gum
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
Newsreels before the movie
P.F. Fliers
Telephone numbers with a word prefix...(Federal 9-2399).
Party lines
Peashooters
Howdy Dowdy
45 RPM records
Green Stamps
Hi-Fi's
Metal ice cubes trays with levers
Mimeograph paper
Beanie and Cecil
Roller-skate keys
Cork pop guns
Drive ins
Studebakers
Washtub wringers
The Fuller Brush Man
Reel-To-Reel tape recorders
Tinkertoys
Erector Sets
The Fort Apache Play Set
Lincoln Logs
5 cent packs of baseball cards -
with that awful pink slab of bubble gum
Penny candy
Some of that is way past my age, but you get the idea....
My Mom used to.....
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).
The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE...and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell
us how much safer we are now.
Flunking gym was not an option...even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative
attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. I can't understand it.
Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then.
Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.
I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot?
He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder
alarm.
Oh yeah...and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked (physical abuse) here too... and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.
Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee.
Kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.
Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations.
I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the f amily tent.
Summers were spent behind the push lawn mower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 (I was in my 20's before I used one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive). How sick were my parents?
Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Billy from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front porch just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes?
We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we survive?
Do you remember a time when...
Decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-moe"?
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, "Do Over!"?
"Race issue" meant arguing about who ran the fastest?
Catching the fireflies could happily occupy an entire evening?
It wasn't odd to have two or three "Best Friends"?
The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was "cooties"?
Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot?
A foot of snow was a dream come true?
Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures?
"Home free all!" made perfect sense?
Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?
Rolling down a grass covered hill at the park was the best!
War was a card game?
Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?
Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin?
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?
You went 'Trick or Treating" without your parents and people gave you apples with nickels in them? And you weren't afraid to eat the apples?
How many do you remember?
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN...?
All the girls had ugly gym uniforms?
It took five minutes for the TV warm up?
Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school?
Nobody owned a purebred dog?
When a quarter was a decent allowance?
You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?
Nylons came in two pieces?
All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had
their hair done every day and wore high heels? (except the nuns, of course!)
You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped
without asking, all for free, every time?
And you didn't pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?
Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes, or towels hidden inside the box?
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner
at a real restaurant with your parents?
Schools threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed. . and they did?
When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise,
peel out, lay rubber, or watch submarine races.
People went "steady"?
No one ever asked where the car keys were
because they were always in the car,
in the ignition, and the doors were never locked?
Lying on your back in the grass with your friends
and saying things like, "That cloud looks like a... "
and playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?
Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals
because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?
And with all our progress, don't you just wish, just once,
you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace,
and share it with the children of today?
When being sent to the principal's office was nothing
compared to the fate that awaited the student at home?
Basically we were in fear for our lives,
but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, or gangs.
Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!
But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.
Send this on to someone who can still remember
Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy,
the Lone Ranger, Winkie Dink,
Nellie Bell , Roy and Dale, Trigger, and Buttermilk.
As well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games,
roller skating, gutter ball, and visits to the pool,
Drinking Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say, "Yeah, I remember that"?
I am sharing this with you today
because it ended with a double dog dare to pass it on.
To remember what a double dog dare is, read on.
And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between
old enough to know better and too young to care.
How many of these do you remember?
Candy cigarettes
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
Blackjack, Clove, and Teaberry chewing gum
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
Newsreels before the movie
P.F. Fliers
Telephone numbers with a word prefix...(Federal 9-2399).
Party lines
Peashooters
Howdy Dowdy
45 RPM records
Green Stamps
Hi-Fi's
Metal ice cubes trays with levers
Mimeograph paper
Beanie and Cecil
Roller-skate keys
Cork pop guns
Drive ins
Studebakers
Washtub wringers
The Fuller Brush Man
Reel-To-Reel tape recorders
Tinkertoys
Erector Sets
The Fort Apache Play Set
Lincoln Logs
5 cent packs of baseball cards -
with that awful pink slab of bubble gum
Penny candy
Some of that is way past my age, but you get the idea....
posted by Red Flannel at 11:49 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home