Good Ole Days Index

I am SO thankful my Mom & Dad let me be a KID! I always wondered where my VIVID imagination came from! Look at all these wonderful memories we have! Wish our kids could have the same ones! Living like we did, basically all people over 25 should, by all rights, be dead.

According to today's bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 50's, 60's and 70's probably shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention the risks we took jumping homemade ramps & curbs).

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. We even drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors! We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this. We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms. We had friends! We went outside and found them. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home, knocked and just walked on in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Back then if you got in trouble, you would give you a "whippin", and no one called Child Protective Services on your parents for "child abuse", Imagine that!

Our generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all!

1. Head lights dimmer switches on the floor.

2. Ignition switches on the dashboard.

3. Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall.

4. Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.

5. Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

6. Blackjack or Cloves chewing gum.

7. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water.

8. Candy cigarettes.

9. Soda pop machines that dispensed bottles.

10. Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes,

11. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.

12. Party lines telephones.

13. Newsreels before the movie.

14. Butch hair wax.

15. Telephone numbers with a word prefix

like (Plaza-6933).

16. Peashooters.

17. Howdy Doody.

18. 45 RPM records.

19. S&H Green Stamps.

20. Hi-fi's.

21. Metal ice trays with levers to pop out the cubes.

22. the Packard or Studebaker automobile.

23. Roller skate keys.

24. Drive-In Movies.

25 Real Ice Boxes.

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 have enriched my life.