A few years ago a person named "Anonymous" sent a story to the newspaper. I saved it and will share it here. My additions are in italics.
"Hey Pops," one of the 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 Levi's, set foot on 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." There was layaway, which KMart still uses. Lay away an item or items, pay a few dollars every two weeks until it's paid for and take the merchandise home. The neighborhood grocer and butcher ran tabs. They kept notepads with tallies for customers. Granny would pay her "tab" once a month, usually when she got her Social Security check.
"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). Gramma never let me have a bicycle. I might get hit by a car if she ever let me ride it in the street, which wasn't likely. I had to learn on a neighbor boy's bike. He got one for Christmas and I was the first one to crash it into a lamp post. - because I didn't know it had brakes!
"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."
Gramma did have a TV in 1949. Wrestling was big on TV in those days, too. In fact, I think it was on every night of the week, on each of the three channels - or at least it seemed so. Gramma was big on wrestling. She loved Gorgeous George and hated Red Berry. She was so into the matches that she would hit the TV with her cane if the bad guys, like Red, hurt her favorites, like Gorgeous. She yelled and cussed 'em out. We told her it was all fake, but she chose to have fun her way, and continued to believe it was real.
"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." Boy, I'm really old. I was in college before I had my first taste of pizza!
"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.'" Gramma had a car, a big, black Studebaker, when I was little in the 1930s. She called it a machine, too. She drove at the breakneck speed of 45 miles an hour on the highway. There were no freeways in Los Angeles back then. Just going to the beach took hours, unless you took the "red car," a streetcar that went the length of Vermont, the longest street in L.A., all the way to the beach. Gramma always drove with a cigarette hanging out of one side of her mouth, the ashes falling into her lap. However, she always had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth with ashes falling into her lap.
"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." We had a phone in the "breakfast nook," a small, sunlit room off the kitchen. The phone hung on the wall, a big, boxy instrument with rotary dial. There was a picture hanging over it, a photograph of a small boy, holding the receiver of an identical wall phone, with the caption, "Are you coming home soon, Daddy?" Our phone number was University 2640. I guess it was the University (UN) prefix because we were in the USC area. Later it was changed to Axminster (AX) 1-9668. I don't know why it was Axminster, but it was the number until we moved away when I was 21.
"Pizzas were not delivered to our home, but milk was." The milkman also brought eggs (which we never needed). Bread was delivered by the Helms Bakery. We put a card in the front window for the bread man to let him know if we needed anything. I loved to run out and get into the truck where there were trays and trays of bread, baked goods like cookies, doughnuts, Danish pastries, etc. It smelled scrumptious. I'm old enough to remember the icebox, not a refrigerator. We had to empty the pan under the icebox as the ice melted. Another treat was scraping up ice shavings from the back of the ice delivery truck on a hot day. The iceman had huge tongs with which he grabbed a big block of ice to bring into the kitchen and put into the icebox.
"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 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 favorites were the ones who seemed never to 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." The Hayes Office was the movie censorship organ. Bedroom scenes, even with married couples, showed twin beds. If two people even sat on the same bed, they had to have one foot on the floor so as not to be "suggestive." This carried over into early TV, which some younger readers might remember. Remember Lucy and Desi?
"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.
9/27/11
No comments:
Post a Comment