Some Sunday Nostalgia.....

Well Sir...this be a long one...so grab a cup of Joe, sit back, and I think y'all will enjoy it....

...this here first photygraff was inspired by "the Gunny" over at Shooting the Messenger after he posted it t'other day....

LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE

Black and White

Under age 50? You won't understand! You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.

Pull a chair up to the TV set, "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 $89 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 butt spanked again when we got home. I recall the kid 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.

Well Sir....I received the above discertation frum my good old amiga Sue Gertson frum down in Eagle Lake, Texas....and then I sent it to a few friends and other bloggers...and I think y'all might enjoy their responses as well....

FROM Mr. FISH:

Our first television as a kid was one of those huge console pieces of furniture with a nine or ten inch round screen. They cost about half the price of a new car back then, and we could get one channel. It did require an outside antenna taller than the house. Originally programming came on some time early afternoon (cartoons for kids) and went off around ten at night. Of course it came on a half hour early with a test pattern so you could adjust the picture for maximum clarity.

The news program was fifteen minutes. There would be the reporter sitting in front of the camera reading the news to you. You actually got fifteen minutes of news back then too. If you clock the half hour news programs today, once you've deducted the commercial time, weather and sports time, you have seven to eight minutes of news, about half what we used to get in fifteen minutes.

I don't know how many times over the years living in Vegas I heard teenagers say there was nothing for them to do in that town, that it was an adult entertainment town. There are thousands of swimming pools, parks all over town, ball fields, basketball courts, tennis, golf courses, movie theaters by the score, roller and ice skating rinks, arcades, bike paths, skate board rinks, teen centers, billiards, roller coasters and water parks, the Circus Circus midway, shooting ranges and so on ad nauseum. In the winter there is snow skiing on Mt. Charleston just a half hour outside of town. We didn't have any of that in the little town of my childhood but I don't remember a moment being bored. There was never enough hours in the day to get it all in. We invented games, built toys, romped in the woods and learned to swim in the creek, played baseball in the street, hide and seek and skated on the sidewalks with ironed wheel skates.

If you got in trouble in school, you were in trouble at home. The school didn't get sued for swatting your backsides with a paddle, you just got it again when you got home (if you're parents found out). You minded adults. If I was walking along the street and an old lady hollered out the door for me to come help, I went in and helped even if I didn't know just who she was. She knew my parents, and if I refused or smarted off it would make it home before I did. Neighbors helped neighbors. An old lady on our block heated with coal. Mom told me to go over there after school every day and bust up coal, fill the coal bucket, and put it in by her stove for her. Every day she tried to give me a quarter and every day I turned it down. Mom hadn't said anything about my taking money for this, so I knew if I did I would wind up having to "march right back over there and give her that money back".

But then dad graduated high school the same year the stock market crashed. He couldn't afford to get married until he was 25 and mom was 22. They lived through the depression, and the Second World War, and they understood values, both financial and societal. They taught us. Today's kids are spoiled, given too much, have experienced no hardships, and have the attitude the world owes them a living. They all need to be put in something like the Peace Corps or military and allowed to see what most of the rest of the world is like.

AND FRUM MISHA (in his usual inimitable style) AT THE ANTI-IDIOTARIAN ROTTWEILER:

Ain’t that the truth?

What I wouldn’t give to be able to turn back the clock and be permanently rid of the perpetually indignant, the grief merchants, the ambulance chasers and assorted other useless life forms that never contributed anything useful to society.

...and my response to them was:

I can remember when a "Test Pattern" (with an Indian) used to be on the TV all day long until 7:00 PM...then "The Lone Ranger" came on. We had the only TV in our neighborhood so our living room used to be full at about 6:45.....Mom served snacks....

Hope some of ya out there enjoyed this nostalgic journey......

Ah...the late 40's and 50's....unfortunately this Country will never see that innocence agin.....Cookie...