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, informed him, all the food was slow.

C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?

It as a place called 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 9. 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--I delivered a newspaper, 7 days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 6 AM every morning.

On Saturday, I had to collect the 49 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. 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

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.

Blondes

So a lawyer boarded an airplane in New Orleans with a box of frozen crabs and asked a blonde flight attendant to take care of them for him.

She took the box and promised to put it in the crew's refrigerator.

He advised her that he was holding her personally responsible for them staying frozen, mentioning in an arrogant manner that he was a lawyer, and threatened what would happen to her if she let them thaw out.

Shortly before landing in New York, she used the intercom to announce to the entire cabin, "Would the lawyer who gave me the crabs in New Orleans, please raise your hand?"

Not one hand went up .. so she took them home and ate them.

There are two lessons here:

1. Lawyers aren't as smart as they think they are.

2. Blondes aren't as dumb as most folks think.

Author unknown

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 table side 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 green stamps.

16. Hi-fi's.

17. Metal ice trays with lever.

18. Mimeograph paper.

19. Blue flashbulb.

20. Packard's.

21. Roller skate keys.

22. Cork popguns.

23. Drive-ins.

24. Studebakers.

25. Wash tub wringer.

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.

Author unknown

Black and White TV

I think you'll enjoy this. Whoever wrote it could have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a "T." Hope you enjoy it.

Black and White TV (Under age 50? You won't understand.) You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.

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. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, 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), no beach closures then.

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.

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. 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, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

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 (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) 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 there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall my friend from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, 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 ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA; AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!

Remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.

Author unknown

         

         
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