The butcher had dried beef roasts that we could buy
slices of and eat that on slices of cheddar on the way
home from school.
He’d actually give us leg bones from cattle to give
to our dog for free. But that was 40 years ago…..
When I was a boy the people who worked at the corner drug store knew my name, and that of every member of my family.
…and they all spoke English.
50 years ago…..
….and there were no microwaves, cell phones, pagers, cable tv, vcr’s, cd’s, personal computers, and the only TV advertisements were that of Tom La Brie’s Night Comfort Theater until the transmission station signed off after playing the National Anthem and a touching recitation of “High Flight”.
Back when America was AMERICA.
I could walk to school by myself when in Kindergarten (1958) thru Cannon Hill Park and stop at the pond (I loved caching pollywogs in the Spring and taking them home with me) and check things out and not have my parents worry about me. Also, no seat belts, car seats, bike helmets, real kid killers like push merry go rounds on playgrounds, monkee bars, etc. etc. and I still managed to make it to 64 so far. My grandkids will never no how much fun we had and may not believe all of my stories.
Geoff — maybe that’s why kids tend towards sickliness today. We got to live in the woods, dig holes, hide in the dirt, make things with mud, climb trees, eat unknown stuff, mess around in the polliwog pond full of cattle, etc.
We were germ-proofed. We had immunity to a ton of stuff.
Used to be, mom would send us to the store for milk, bread, and a pack of Winston’s.
When we were kids we used to go up to the local market to get wood for little projects.
The peaches and apples came in crates made of wood that they would stack up behind the market. We’d ask if we could have a few and the owner always said yes. Nice old Italian guy.
Remember when going to McDonald’s was a treat- AND it tasted so delicious.
**TSUNAMI**
**”…and they all spoke English.”**
¡qué! no entiendo “English”
Back then the freaks and criminals didn’t preen and parade, they just stayed home.
Policemen didn’t need therapy or rehab neither
When I was a kid my mother would send me down to the corner drugstore to buy a bottle of Paregoric (look it up) if someone in the family had a stomachache. DEA agents would be foaming at the mouth today. If you could even buy it in the U.S. anymore, that is.
🙂
Mom could rub whiskey on the gums of a teething baby without going to jail.
Oh, (Vietvet) Paregoric mixed with Pepto-Bismol was SOP for tummy aches.
izlamo delenda est …
@Vietvet: “buy a bottle of Paregoric”
Wow. Memory lane now. Mom would give that to me. I didn’t realize until years later why I passed out after a dose of that stuff.
Later in life too I discovered why I felt so trippy after she gave me a dose of Formula 44. That dextromethorphan is powerful stuff to a kid. Well, to adults too, if you drink enough of it.
I remember Mom giving me a quarter so I could ride my bike to the station and get a gallon of gas for the new power mower that replaced to the old manual push one.
I would also have to bring her back the change.
At age four, my Mom would send me two blocks to the corner store with 5 cents to buy a loaf of bread. I thought all little kids did that.
I remember Saturday Matinees. For a dine, you got in the movie, could buy a bag of popcorn or an ‘all day sucker’ and see a. Action, serial chapter and two movies. San Marcos, TX, about 1953 or so. So nice. And you could walk from home, across town, to get there.
‘DIME’ & ‘a CARTOON.’
Had our shotguns in the car at the high school parking lot ready for pheasant hunting after school.
Back in the day snowflakes were pretty little crystals of ice.
Ah, the good old days. When I was a kid mowing yards in southeast Texas, I’d tie the mower to the my bike and would be hanging on to a glass jug with an extra gallon of gasoline heading for the next job. You just don’t see that anymore, probably for good reason.
@flip: Standard dose for a bellyache (as dispensed by my Mom) was was 2 or 3 drops of Paregoric on a tablespoonful of honey, no more than that. The honey was so that you could stand to swallow it. That stuff defined the word “nasty”. I can’t imagine anyone drinking it for fun.
Free pay phone use – at the end of a movie at the local theater, I would call home and let it ring twice then hang up. Mom got the brat signal and knew the movie was over to come pick us up. This worked for any prearranged event.
That saved dime = a 16oz Dr pepper.
True story – when I was about 10 or 12 in the early 60’s my mother occasionally would send my sister & I to the bank about 2 blocks away with the MORTGAGE PAYMENT!!! She had my 3 younger brothers at home, no car, the bank was closed when my dad got home & it wasn’t open on weekends. The mortgage only amounted to about $75/mo. But that’s the kind of neighborhood it was. They still live there, but I won’t even walk to the mailbox in that area let alone carry money. Sad, but they’re not ready to give up the house.
In Southeast Texas, us kids would play baseball until it got too hot, then we’d scatter to look for five empty Coke bottles (in the South, all empty soda bottles were “Coke” bottles) in the ditches along the road so we could meet up at the store and redeem them for a dime and purchase our own bottle of Coke.
10 years old and 10 cents for a roll of caps. Now you can’t even buy a cap gun. BB’s easy.
22 cal bullets on up in plain sight at the DRUGSTORE! No problem.
3 pounds of hamburger 26 cents a pound and the butcher ground it right there.
I deposited my parents checks at the bank without any i.d. before I could drive.
The last generation you could trust.
Five cents a roll when I was a kid, but I’m older than you.
You could buy a single-shot cap pistol for a quarter – the ones that would shoot a roll of caps were a couple of bucks, as I recall, but they came with a belt and holster.
“I deposited my parents checks at the bank without any i.d.”
Nothing’s changed on that point.
I and my son deposit thousands every month and have never needed an ID one single time.
@ Hambone
A dime for a returned bottle?!! What, was your childhood in the 80’s?
I, too, collected bottled to get drinks or play pinball at the Five & Dime Wooolworths, but they were 3 cents a bottle at first.
I remember the day when my stock value rose from 3 to 5 cents per share when they raised the price of deposits. I had at least 40 bottles in the garage that day.
———
As for guns and ammo, I haven’t heard anything beat my Dad buying a .22 rifle at Montgomery Wards when he was 13. That would be back in the 30s.
Walked in. Bought the rifle. Bought a box of ammo. Walked out. Started having fun that day.
——
I remember laughing at the old geezers that answered the phone “Hello, It’s your nickle, Shoot!”
Everyone knew a phone call was at least a dime. What old people from another time!!
Clarification: Five cents a box. Each box contained a long roll of caps which were perforated so you could break it down into five rolls, each one fitting into a standard repeating cap gun of that time. Bottom line: one cent a roll cost.
However, they went pretty fast when you were playing cowboys and Ind- er, I mean – native Americans.
🙂
@Dadof4: I’ll see your 3 cent bottle deposits and raise you the two cents that we got for them. Plus we had a beer joint on the corner that (for a while) would actually pay the same for beer bottles, which we could scrounge from underneath many neighborhood houses where the drunks would pitch them when they were empty. We sold them so many they eventually quit buying them, but it was good while it lasted.
Cokes were a nickel a bottle, but eventually went up to six cents, at which point we kids switched over to RC Cola,
which was not quite as good but still only cost a nickel, plus you got 10 ounces, rather than the six with Coke.
Dump a 5 cent packet of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts in the bottle, and you almost had lunch.
Happy times…
The best part of the story about Kindergarten was that it was in the basement of the same house (a huge older house that was big enough for 9 kids) that my future wife grew up in when they moved there in the mid 60’s. She was surprised when I told her that when we first met in 1976. And her family also lived just up the street from us in 1964, I didn’t know her then but my youngest brother was friends with her brother Mark since they’re both the same age.
The butcher had dried beef roasts that we could buy
slices of and eat that on slices of cheddar on the way
home from school.
He’d actually give us leg bones from cattle to give
to our dog for free. But that was 40 years ago…..
When I was a boy the people who worked at the corner drug store knew my name, and that of every member of my family.
…and they all spoke English.
50 years ago…..
….and there were no microwaves, cell phones, pagers, cable tv, vcr’s, cd’s, personal computers, and the only TV advertisements were that of Tom La Brie’s Night Comfort Theater until the transmission station signed off after playing the National Anthem and a touching recitation of “High Flight”.
Back when America was AMERICA.
I could walk to school by myself when in Kindergarten (1958) thru Cannon Hill Park and stop at the pond (I loved caching pollywogs in the Spring and taking them home with me) and check things out and not have my parents worry about me. Also, no seat belts, car seats, bike helmets, real kid killers like push merry go rounds on playgrounds, monkee bars, etc. etc. and I still managed to make it to 64 so far. My grandkids will never no how much fun we had and may not believe all of my stories.
Geoff — maybe that’s why kids tend towards sickliness today. We got to live in the woods, dig holes, hide in the dirt, make things with mud, climb trees, eat unknown stuff, mess around in the polliwog pond full of cattle, etc.
We were germ-proofed. We had immunity to a ton of stuff.
Used to be, mom would send us to the store for milk, bread, and a pack of Winston’s.
When we were kids we used to go up to the local market to get wood for little projects.
The peaches and apples came in crates made of wood that they would stack up behind the market. We’d ask if we could have a few and the owner always said yes. Nice old Italian guy.
Remember when going to McDonald’s was a treat- AND it tasted so delicious.
**TSUNAMI**
**”…and they all spoke English.”**
¡qué! no entiendo “English”
Back then the freaks and criminals didn’t preen and parade, they just stayed home.
Policemen didn’t need therapy or rehab neither
When I was a kid my mother would send me down to the corner drugstore to buy a bottle of Paregoric (look it up) if someone in the family had a stomachache. DEA agents would be foaming at the mouth today. If you could even buy it in the U.S. anymore, that is.
🙂
Mom could rub whiskey on the gums of a teething baby without going to jail.
Oh, (Vietvet) Paregoric mixed with Pepto-Bismol was SOP for tummy aches.
izlamo delenda est …
@Vietvet: “buy a bottle of Paregoric”
Wow. Memory lane now. Mom would give that to me. I didn’t realize until years later why I passed out after a dose of that stuff.
Later in life too I discovered why I felt so trippy after she gave me a dose of Formula 44. That dextromethorphan is powerful stuff to a kid. Well, to adults too, if you drink enough of it.
I remember Mom giving me a quarter so I could ride my bike to the station and get a gallon of gas for the new power mower that replaced to the old manual push one.
I would also have to bring her back the change.
At age four, my Mom would send me two blocks to the corner store with 5 cents to buy a loaf of bread. I thought all little kids did that.
I remember Saturday Matinees. For a dine, you got in the movie, could buy a bag of popcorn or an ‘all day sucker’ and see a. Action, serial chapter and two movies. San Marcos, TX, about 1953 or so. So nice. And you could walk from home, across town, to get there.
‘DIME’ & ‘a CARTOON.’
Had our shotguns in the car at the high school parking lot ready for pheasant hunting after school.
Back in the day snowflakes were pretty little crystals of ice.
Ah, the good old days. When I was a kid mowing yards in southeast Texas, I’d tie the mower to the my bike and would be hanging on to a glass jug with an extra gallon of gasoline heading for the next job. You just don’t see that anymore, probably for good reason.
@flip: Standard dose for a bellyache (as dispensed by my Mom) was was 2 or 3 drops of Paregoric on a tablespoonful of honey, no more than that. The honey was so that you could stand to swallow it. That stuff defined the word “nasty”. I can’t imagine anyone drinking it for fun.
Free pay phone use – at the end of a movie at the local theater, I would call home and let it ring twice then hang up. Mom got the brat signal and knew the movie was over to come pick us up. This worked for any prearranged event.
That saved dime = a 16oz Dr pepper.
True story – when I was about 10 or 12 in the early 60’s my mother occasionally would send my sister & I to the bank about 2 blocks away with the MORTGAGE PAYMENT!!! She had my 3 younger brothers at home, no car, the bank was closed when my dad got home & it wasn’t open on weekends. The mortgage only amounted to about $75/mo. But that’s the kind of neighborhood it was. They still live there, but I won’t even walk to the mailbox in that area let alone carry money. Sad, but they’re not ready to give up the house.
In Southeast Texas, us kids would play baseball until it got too hot, then we’d scatter to look for five empty Coke bottles (in the South, all empty soda bottles were “Coke” bottles) in the ditches along the road so we could meet up at the store and redeem them for a dime and purchase our own bottle of Coke.
10 years old and 10 cents for a roll of caps. Now you can’t even buy a cap gun. BB’s easy.
22 cal bullets on up in plain sight at the DRUGSTORE! No problem.
3 pounds of hamburger 26 cents a pound and the butcher ground it right there.
I deposited my parents checks at the bank without any i.d. before I could drive.
The last generation you could trust.
Five cents a roll when I was a kid, but I’m older than you.
You could buy a single-shot cap pistol for a quarter – the ones that would shoot a roll of caps were a couple of bucks, as I recall, but they came with a belt and holster.
“I deposited my parents checks at the bank without any i.d.”
Nothing’s changed on that point.
I and my son deposit thousands every month and have never needed an ID one single time.
@ Hambone
A dime for a returned bottle?!! What, was your childhood in the 80’s?
I, too, collected bottled to get drinks or play pinball at the Five & Dime Wooolworths, but they were 3 cents a bottle at first.
I remember the day when my stock value rose from 3 to 5 cents per share when they raised the price of deposits. I had at least 40 bottles in the garage that day.
———
As for guns and ammo, I haven’t heard anything beat my Dad buying a .22 rifle at Montgomery Wards when he was 13. That would be back in the 30s.
Walked in. Bought the rifle. Bought a box of ammo. Walked out. Started having fun that day.
——
I remember laughing at the old geezers that answered the phone “Hello, It’s your nickle, Shoot!”
Everyone knew a phone call was at least a dime. What old people from another time!!
Clarification: Five cents a box. Each box contained a long roll of caps which were perforated so you could break it down into five rolls, each one fitting into a standard repeating cap gun of that time. Bottom line: one cent a roll cost.
However, they went pretty fast when you were playing cowboys and Ind- er, I mean – native Americans.
🙂
@Dadof4: I’ll see your 3 cent bottle deposits and raise you the two cents that we got for them. Plus we had a beer joint on the corner that (for a while) would actually pay the same for beer bottles, which we could scrounge from underneath many neighborhood houses where the drunks would pitch them when they were empty. We sold them so many they eventually quit buying them, but it was good while it lasted.
Cokes were a nickel a bottle, but eventually went up to six cents, at which point we kids switched over to RC Cola,
which was not quite as good but still only cost a nickel, plus you got 10 ounces, rather than the six with Coke.
Dump a 5 cent packet of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts in the bottle, and you almost had lunch.
Happy times…
The best part of the story about Kindergarten was that it was in the basement of the same house (a huge older house that was big enough for 9 kids) that my future wife grew up in when they moved there in the mid 60’s. She was surprised when I told her that when we first met in 1976. And her family also lived just up the street from us in 1964, I didn’t know her then but my youngest brother was friends with her brother Mark since they’re both the same age.