The past in black and white

R

revmic

Joined
Oct 30, 1999
Messages
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Thought some of you guys would enjoy this. Knife content is nil with the exception of our memories when no day went by without some recourse to the Case or the Barlow or the Kabar....

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PAST IN BLACK & WHITE

Whoever wrote this must have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a T.


Black and White
(Under age 40? 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 &nb sp;wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack 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 butt spanked again when we got home.



I recall Donny Reynolds 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
 
You forgot when you turned on the tv, it took a mnute for the tubes to warm up.

A real soda fountain Coke was mixed up on the spot with Coke syrup and soda.

Toys were made out of cast metal, not plastic.

There would be a Daisy Red Ryder under the Christmas tree when you got to "that age".

Winter clothes were made out of wool. Period. There was no such thing as micro fibers or synthetic.

When you got a cold, mom or grandmom made a mustard plaster to go on your chest, and dad gave you a warm whiskey toddy. You really did feel better in the morning.

Bicycles had one speed and baloon tires.

Every boy old enough to wear long pants had a pocket knife.
 
revmic said:
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
Click to expand...

Most people tell me that I was born 50 years to late, and I feel the same way.
Thanks for this great post.

@ jackknife: I bet we could go on like this for quite a while:
DE razors, (I use one)
old, non tactical, guns,
...
​

I think I would have enjoyed living in that era.
 
In those days if you had a problem [dyslexia, hyperacivity etc ] all it meant was that you had to work twice as hard to compensate for it ! Today they are all labeled and used as an excuse .When labeled as a 'condition' it's then not the child's, parents , or teachers fault and the child will be told he'll never succeed....
 
stockman242 said:
Most people tell me that I was born 50 years to late, and I feel the same way.
Thanks for this great post.

@ jackknife: I bet we could go on like this for quite a while:
DE razors, (I use one)
old, non tactical, guns,
...
​

I think I would have enjoyed living in that era.
Click to expand...

I enjoyed it and miss it very much. It was a less complicated time, yet the country achieved much.

People watched out for one another. If you were 12 years old and walking home from school on a cold raining day, a car would stop and somebody would yell "Hey kid, your gonna catch your death of cold. Get in here and I'll drive ya home." It wasn't some pervert, just a good person driving a wet cold kid home.

And if you had a difference with someone at school, you didn't bring a gun along and shoot anyone. You and the other person went behind the gym and had it out. Even if you lost and had a bloody nose, you managed to give the other guy a fat lip so in the end you both shook hands and had some respect for each other. That was the end of it.

Doctors still made house calls. They weren't the rich shites they are today with out of control medical costs. If one of us was too sick to go to school, mom would call the doctor and he'd stop by after his morning rounds and have a look at ya. I recall mom paying the 10 dollars for the house call. Doctors cared about the patients.

Life in America was still cheap enough that most mothers did not have to work. Moms were there when you got home from school. Yet most dad's could afford a new car every 5 years, move to a house in one of those new things called suburban developments. Life was like the Cleaver family, or the Nelsons. One bread winner in the family was enough to live comfortably

Guns. Things were still simple. There were three kinds of guns around in those days. A .22 was owned by most kids and more than a few dad's. If one was concerned about home defence, a .38 revolver was in dad's drawer, either Colt or Smith and Wesson. If dad hunted, there was either a 12 gauge shotgun or a 30-30 rifle in the closet. Somehow people got by without all those fancy auto's and new cat'ridges they have now.

Double edge razor blades. Yeah they were great. If they started to get a bit dull, you put them in a coffee cup and ran them back and forth inside the ceramic cup and they were good for several more shaves.

The mom's would drop us kids off at the movie for the Saturday matinee, and a buck would get us in, with soda and popcorn enough to see the main feature three times. In those days you could stay in the theater and just keep seeing the movie over for no extra cost. By the time we saw Burt Lanchaster and Kirk Douglas shoot it out with the bad guys at the Okay Coral for the third time, we had the dialgue memorized.

Somehow we got by without cell phones, computers, and political correctness, but maanaged to build the first nuclear submarine, and send it under the ice caps to make history.

Yeah, it was a good era to live in.
 
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