This began with an email from Sue Behrens, a
Madison mom and activist, called
Older than Dirt, and the Older than Dirt Quiz (see
the original)
Joanie Olin:
Well I'm older than dirt for sure, but at least there were seven or eight
items I didn't know.
Man--those really WERE the good old days, and little reminders like this
bring it all back. I can practically taste the blueberry popsickle I would
get on a hot (and I mean really hot, in louisville) day, and the dirt we
generally all played on in each others' yards because we were always
relegated to the outdoors so there wasn't much grass left. It reminds me
of the evenings spent trying to catch "lightning bugs," not fireflies, to
put either on our fingers as rings--despite the dismemberment of the poor
bug, and playing hide and seek until way after dark because all our
parents were on their respective porches trying to cool off.
It
brings back the smell of popcorn that you enjoyed every time you entered a
JCPenny store (or was that
Sears?). And I can't help but recall the time my mother accepted
a case of chicken pot pies from a
swanson salesman in
exchange for our gastronomical reports.
Obviously I could go on and on. Thanks for disrupting, even for a brief
moment, all the sour, sad news we are plagued with these days for a trip
back to pleasantville.
Joanne McCarthy
Absolutely
and I remember hula hoops and curlers with pink sponge in them. I even
remember pincurls all over your head to sleep in. I remember the pile of
damp clothes in the "icebox" before the sprinkle coke bottle was used on
them. I remember papers with candy drops on them and my grandfathers
grocery store that they lived "upstairs" from and how he would go down to
open up on Christmas eve if a mother called who ran out of milk of
something essential. Of course that was never diapers because they were
all cloth and were washed twice a week in dreft and hung on the line to
dry. We are really old. I remember carbon paper and mimeograph machines.
I'll stop
now--this summer lets all catch some fireflys in a jar with a metal lid
that we've punched holes in with a can opener.
Pat Horn
On that summer
evening, let's play Hide and Go Seek and Kick the Can until our Moms yell
for us to come inside. I remember how I was so hot and sweaty when I
stopped running that I had a chill. Or let's play stick ball or box ball
in the middle of the street. When a car comes we'll yell "Car, Car Stick
Your Head in the jelly Jar". We did all this without a playgroup, kids
our own age or are parents arranging a play date. Remember jelly jars?
Do you remember Chinese Jumprope? Remember walking to school with the
neighborhood kids including kindergarteners and stopping for ice cream
cones with jimmies on the way home from school only on Fridays.
Linda Faletto
I
still use pink sponge curlers. I also remember vending machines
outside the dairy that dispensed milk when the dairy was closed. Is that
universal or just another oddity from the little town I was brought up in?
Barry Burd & Harriet Ritter
1. Pogo sticks, stilts.
2. Remember getting a long distance call ? Everything stopped and
the person RAN to the phone – every second
counted because long distance was expensive..
3. Remember your postal zone? Mine was Akron, 2, Ohio. This later
became the last 2 digits of the zip code.
4. 3 cent stamps
5 tax stamps (Ohio)
6. Buying some sort of stamp at school to stick in a book – seems
like it was a leftover from WWII, even tho this
was the mid-50s. Savings stamps?
7. glass milk bottles, even the little ones in school
8. walking home for lunch
9. Dials on phones
10. Hide and go Seek: After the seeker counts:“Apples peaches pumpkin pie
– who’s not ready, holler ‘I’” At the
end: “Olly Olly In Free”
11.‘Poision’ with bottle caps – make a ring of bottle caps with ‘zones’ –
in the middle was a chalk skull and
crossbones. If you flipped your bottlecap and hit the skull
and crossbones, you were ‘poisioned’.
12. Chatty Cathy, the amazing talking doll.
13. A package of Hostess Cupcakes (2) for 12 cents.
Chris Ritter (Harriet’s Cousin):
So, whaddaya expect from someone who lost all his
hair over 30 years ago?
"Older than dirt," I guess. Or even older, 'cause here's some more:
26. The (black & white) TV repairman, who had a big flip-open case filled
with vacuum tubes
27. Mail before zip codes
28. The elementary school milk machine: 5 cents/half-pint
29. Drive-in *movies*
30. "Bryyylcreeeeam, a little dab'll do ya"
31. Getting spanked in the principal's office if you misbehaved
32. Fallout shelters
33. Summer pool closings due to fear of polio
34. Packards & Studebakers?--Ha, remember the Henry J?
35. Computers, the names of which ended in -iac and which were bigger than
cars, run by guys who really did use
plastic pocket
protectors, and there were about three of them. That's 3, total, in
existence, period.
36. Ladies (e.g., our mothers) who wore girdles
37. Men (e.g., our fathers) who wore fedoras
38. Forget 45s--how 'bout 78s?
39. The ultimate shopping experience: the 10 lb. Sears catalog
40. AT&T, when you actually could make use of the second T
Donna Lee Gennaro
Forget the little
pink rollers. (Linda Faletto) I used to roll my hair in cans.
How about am transistor radios??
Peg Houle
OK, I'll
add on. Who remembers making gum wrapper chains? Mitch Miller and follow
the bouncing ball as we sang along (this was the precursor to Karaoke, I
think). My 9 yr old wants to take the quiz - he's still laughing because
I scored "older than dirt." ha ha ha
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Donna
Lee
speaking of
chains what about going around collecting tab tops and making chains out
of those.
Connie
Bizer
This was fun, I
only had the chance to open this this morning -
Grownups
dressed up - even when they went shopping. I remember my mother taking
the bus to shop in downtown
Newark -in both cold and
hot weather- she would wear a dress, stockings, high heels, girdle,
gloves, and a hat. She used to shop in a store that had two French
poodles running around, shop keepers that actually knew the products, her
name (called her
Mrs.
Mantlik) and helped you
individually. The dressing rooms had little paper cups on which one would
have to press their lips, to remove their (usually red) lipstick before
they tried on the clothes.
I remember
one time being bored and accidentally removed the hand from a mannequin.
I was horrified. I remember the fear shooting up my spine like hot
lightening -I honestly thought they would arrest me (I was about 4)
I remember I thought about hiding it - I was so mortified I remember that
to this day. I can't remember what I did with the damn thing.
In those days
children were seen, not heard and we had to behave - or else you
eventually got spanked.
Remember the
hats and hat pins? The gloves. The big swishy dresses.
My mom
did the cha-cha-cha at a Catholic school fundraiser with a very dishy
young priest (we were all in love with him) her dress was black - form
fitting on top - with a big and foofy skirt. I counted the layers of
crinoline (sp?) - about 50!
My
grandmother's whale-bone girdle that laced in the back.
I remember
that (at least in my neighborhood - in predominately Italian-American
community) Grandmothers had grey hair, wore their hair in a bun, always
wore house dresses and aprons and could usually be found in the kitchen
with several pots steaming on the stoves.
Homes always
smelled delicious, like someone was cooking -but also smelled of cigarette
smoke. All the men smoked in our house - my mother, aunts, grandmother did
not -were forbidden - my grandfather was patriarch and he thought women
who smoked had loose morals.
Aunt
Virginia and
Aunt Connie
were my mother's friends. They would come over sometimes at night with
their husbands and the grown-ups drank Manhattans and smoked like
chimneys.
I will end
with- I remember an Italian store on the corner of Bloomfield Ave. in
Newark that had sawdust on the floor and provolone hanging from the
ceiling.
This began with the following email from
Sue Behrens, a Madison mom and activist:
Older than Dirt, and the Older than Dirt Quiz:
"Hey Mom," 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, 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 upon 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?
MEMORIES from a friend:
My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and
he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a
stopper with a bunch of holes in it. I knew immediately what it was, but
my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt
shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the
ironing board to "sprinkle" clothes with because we didn't have steam
irons. Man, I am old.
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.
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 tableside juke boxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
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. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers
If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
f you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,
f you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!
I might be older than dirt but those memories are the best part
of my life.
Don't forget to pass this along!!
There's always room for more!!
Return to top
