How Do You Explain the 'Good Old Days' to the Kids?

[thedrifter]

Coutesty of Mark aka The Fontman

How Do You Explain the 'Good Old Days' to the Kids?
ChronWatch
Friday, July 01, 2005

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 on, 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.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

Ellie

[LivinSoFree]

Funny... everyone remembers "the good old days." No one stops and really thinks that maybe the "good old days" weren't really that good at all?

If you went to a bathroom, water fountain, bus, or any other public facility, you first had to decide between "white" and "colored." Don't even think about trying to have friends outside your race or especially about trying to date someone of a different hue.

Medical care was, by our standards today, medieval in comparison. How many polio victims exist in the United States today?

HUAC might knock on your door one day and ruin your life, if you became politically inconvenient or spoke too loudly in support of something that didn't flow with the American ideal of "mom and apple pie."

Everyone smoked. Even the doctors. No one really wondered if it was bad for you, until they all got lung cancer and died, decades later.

Spousal abuse rarely went reported, because it was considered "private buisness" within the family, and "none of our affair," to the neighbors who might've heard it or seen the bruises the next day.

The awareness of the surrounding world was limited to what you could get from one or two newspapers and the clips they showed before a movie... the idea of true geopolitical awareness, or even a basic appreciation for the wonders of this world we live in was a foreign thought to many, and college was "for rich folk."

I could go on, maybe I'm just a young guy waiting to get his comeuppance, but it seems to me that "the good old days" weren't so great as everyone seems to think they were.

[ivalis]

the patriot act, HUAC II.

[Joseph P Carey]

Originally posted by LivinSoFree
Funny... everyone remembers "the good old days." No one stops and really thinks that maybe the "good old days" weren't really that good at all?

If you went to a bathroom, water fountain, bus, or any other public facility, you first had to decide between "white" and "colored." Don't even think about trying to have friends outside your race or especially about trying to date someone of a different hue.

Medical care was, by our standards today, medieval in comparison. How many polio victims exist in the United States today?

HUAC might knock on your door one day and ruin your life, if you became politically inconvenient or spoke too loudly in support of something that didn't flow with the American ideal of "mom and apple pie."

Everyone smoked. Even the doctors. No one really wondered if it was bad for you, until they all got lung cancer and died, decades later.

Spousal abuse rarely went reported, because it was considered "private buisness" within the family, and "none of our affair," to the neighbors who might've heard it or seen the bruises the next day.

The awareness of the surrounding world was limited to what you could get from one or two newspapers and the clips they showed before a movie... the idea of true geopolitical awareness, or even a basic appreciation for the wonders of this world we live in was a foreign thought to many, and college was "for rich folk."

I could go on, maybe I'm just a young guy waiting to get his comeuppance, but it seems to me that "the good old days" weren't so great as everyone seems to think they were.

Sometime, even the paranoid is aware that people are really out to get him.

I don't know where you read this stuff junior, but I think you should know there were no secret police that hunted you down, if you did not agree with the government. As best I could tell, they only hunted you if you were for the government.

The Colored and white drinking fountains were a small area of the country, and many people just did not care who used the fountains. I grew up in the South! You must be reading Abby Hoffman's version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin!' Believe it or not we were integrated in the 50's and the 60's, and the places that fought integration the most were in the Blue States of Mass and NY. Welcome to the real world.

The House Unamerican Activities under McCarthy did not last that long, besides we were involved in a war with Communism at the time that lasted up to the fall of the Liberal Guiding Light in the USSR. Hell! The Liberal oppression by the minorities in this country has lasted longer than that. The well known 'feel guilty about everything' era it will be called. In truth, try listening to Bill Cosby sometimes, and forget Fonda, Kerry, Sharpton and others. Mr Cosby seems to have it right, and he is talking about it! He is trying to create a change in the way people think of themselves and their communities without the all inspired finger pointing and guilt trip Liberals.

I find it funny that people are telling us what horrible medical care system we had back then, when the basic thing was that we could afford it back then, and as the children of the Depression, who ate mush three times a day, and all of those greasy foods, and things like potatoes and Bacon and eggs, are living into their hundreds. It wasn't modern medicine that did this for them, because many can not afford it. It is the progression of time that did it and the bodies antibodies that are handed down from generations that are doing it.

If I remember most drugs will kill you eventually. Smoking was not the invention of my father, or even his father. Tobacco was a cash crop that kept the South alive for many a year before my generation even existed.

As far as spousal abuse goes, there was never a great deal of it. I saw recently on a TV news show where there were many folks taking their second vows as a married couple after 60 years of marriage. My parents were married for 54 years before my Dad died! As far as spousal abuse, the neighbors usually took care of things in their own way back then. A person's reputation was worth much more in those times. Who do you know that has lived together as a couple for any period of time today? Again, you slip back to your Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by the likes of Abby Hoffman and others. All the things that were not the norm, but portrayed as such.

As far as college went, it was not needed back then. The former head of Chrysler was an immigrant that never went to College, Lee Iaccoca, and he didn't find his way into jail the way the College crowd are doing today.

We all knew where every country was on the map of the world when I was a child. Today they don't even know what the names of the States in the Union are. The educational level has gone down so far that children can not make change without a calculator. They can not even break down a sentence, and as far as spelling goes and literacy, the numbers are terrible. In my school we had to answer questions in a formal essay answer on Term and weekly examination. There were no multiple choice questions. And, teachers had to know how to teach their subjects back then, or they were fired. That has long since said goodbye to the school systems of today. Our high School graduates were better than the College Grads of today.

So, before you start getting your information from the wrong source, you had better do a little background first. Today is not the greatest of times, not even close!

[Gy7ras]

Tell the kids when they get to your age they'll remember the good old days!