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Older Than Dirt


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for the youngsters.....

We're older than dirt!!

Someone asked the other day,,

'What was your favourite 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!

'Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, & 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.

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 on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card.

My parents never drove me to school. 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 16. It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at 11, after playing the national anthem and a poem about God. It came back on the air at about 6 a.m. and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people...

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone was on a party line and attached to the wall. 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 homes... But milk was & so was bread.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers six days a week.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies! There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

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:

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.
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. Candy cigarettes
2. Coffee shops with table side juke boxes
3. Home milk delivery in glass bottles
4. Party lines on the telephones
5. Newsreels before the movie
6. TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again in the morning. (there were only 3 channels!![ if you were fortunate])
7. Peashooters
8. Howdy Doody
9. 45 RPM records

10. 78 rpm records
11.Hi-fi records 33 1/3 rpm
12. Metal ice trays with lever
13. Blue flashbulb
14. Cork popguns
15. Studebakers
16. Wash tub wringers
<>
If you remembered 0-3 = You're still young
If you remembered 3-6 = You are getting older
If you remembered 7-10 = Don't tell your age, &
If you remembered 11-16
=

You're older than dirt !!!

********

We might be older than dirt but those memories are some of the best parts of our lives….

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All 16 too, Greg. And who remembers "bluing" in the laundry room, saddle shoes, Brylcreem-a-little-dab'll-doya, Burma-Shave and the highway signs, Life With Riley, Abbott & Costello, the Edsel, foolscap, eberhard faber pencils, inkwells, kneesocks, coonskin hats, Dinky Toys, the iceman and the kitchen icebox, sawdust trucks for hog fuel, I Love Lucy, Perry Como, Toby jugs, rocking chairs, the family bible (with family history), the Kodak Brownie, the Edison machine, Vancouver's Inter-urban tram along Kingsway, spinning tops, kaleidoscopes, the family piano, picket fences, inner tubes for summer swimming, television aerials, bakelite switches, department store sidewalk elevators for receiving, zoot suits & seersuckers, The Shadow, Pan American Clippers, War Bonds, tie clips, beanies, white gloves, store clerks who actually knew everything about what they sold, the gold watch & pensions, fedoras (and who wore them), silk stockings that ran and that were repaired with nail polish, licorice cigars with red candy beads on the end, two-for-one-cent candy, (jawbreakers), five-and-dime stores, bamboo fishing rods, monocles, black hats with veils, pen nibs, Bogart, riding a bike to school, strap-on steel roller skates, Raleigh, with 3-speed Sturmey-Archer gears, teacher's red pencil, the MacLean Method of Writing, Dick and Jane, dirt roads oiled in summer, Keds running shoes, mustard plasters, iron lungs, Lucky Strikes, Joseph McCarthy, Eisenhower, Suez, Viewmaster, Dukane, Los Angeles without freeways, the idea of "foreign lands", radio tubes, clocks in cars that never worked, whitewalls, gas @ 18¢/Imp.gal, cigar store Indians, hot water bottles, the jacknife every kid had, whittling something, Lux soap, the mechanical turn signals on '49 Austins, 2-room all-grade schools, corduroys, Steve Reeves, living room ashtrays on stands with aluminum airplanes, bankers hours, quiet Sundays...

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Pop machines that looked like a chest freezer. The pop bottles were held in by their neck between rails and you slid the one you liked to a mechanism that when you inserted a dime would allow you to pull the pop straight up and out.

249116.jpg

No dime? no problem....just carry a bottle opener and a straw....open the lid, snap off a top, insert the straw and drink fast !!!!

((Those machines lasted about 6 months, outside stores, before they were all removed))

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Kip, I had forgotten about those pop machines, thanks- travelling through the U.S. on holidays we'd stop at a gas station (where one couldn't pump one's own gas and the attendant was in uniform), I can still remember the coke machine, having to slide the bottle along, pay the dime and work the flipper that kept the bottle...I can smell the machine, the hot day, hot radiators and sage brush. We had an air conditioner in, or rather, attached to the '51 Buick Roadmaster - filled it with water, hung it outside on one of the windows and gave the cord a pull - it supplied enough cool air by evaporation from the rolled cloth for comfort, (the windshield wipers were pneumatically-driven and whenever the accelerator pedal was pushed down, they quit...

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Ah the pneumatically-driven wipers, worked really good except on the west coast when climbing a hill during the infrequent ( :Grin-Nod: ) downpours

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.... "bluing" in the laundry room, saddle shoes, Brylcreem and the highway signs, Life With Riley, Abbott & Costello, the Edsel, foolscap, eberhard faber pencils, inkwells, kneesocks, coonskin hats ....

OK, Don, right backatya ;) (courtesy of Billy Joel)

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television

North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom

Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye

Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen

Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

(Chorus)

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev

Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron

Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock

Einstein,James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team

Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev

Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez

(Chorus)

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac

Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball

Starkweather, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide...

Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia

Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy

Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

(Chorus)

Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land

Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania

Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician Sex

J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say

(Chorus)

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline

Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide

Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law

Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can't take it anymore

... We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

But when we are gone

It will still burn on and on and on and on

And on and on and on and on...

Cheers IFG :b:

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How about collecting pictures of movie stars from the inside of the lid to "Dixie Cups"?

http://www.go-star.com/antiquing/dixiecup.htm

When I was a small kid we would get our milk delivery and the horse would stop in front of our house. As kids we could sit on the step at the back of the wagon while the horse on his own walked up a couple of houses to where the milk man would replace the empty bottle he had picked up with full ones to deliver. The horse knew the route as well as he did.

My initial goal in life was top be a garbage collector as he had two horses whereas the milk man, the bread man and the ice man, (blocks of ice for the ice box as refrigerators were just starting to become the norm), only had one. As always, the more horses the better. :)

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Hockey coins - too funny. I think they came in boxes of Shirriff Pudding ... our family ate more Shirriff pudding than you can imagine so I could finish my hockey coin collection. And what about the "Weekend Magazine" that came in most newspapers - which had full page pictures of, in our case, the Maple Leaf players each week. That's why my favourite Leaf in those days was Billy Harris - and I always wondered how Al Arbour could play hockey behind those glasses ... Did anyone else listen to hockey games on Chrystal radios? And you talk about the milk man, bread man, ice man, we had an egg man ...

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300px-Keens-1992-113g-tin-front-10439CBB

How many remember what this was used for with respect to medical issues????

Many times I was subjected to the "old-mustard-plaster" if inflicted with a bad cold or chest congestion.

My mother made a paste with this stuff and God knows what else, sandwiched it between two pieces of Kraft paper and placed on my chest...Yikes, could it get hot !!!! Made you sweat, broke up the congestion and was probably the precursor to Vicks Vapor-rub.

You young n's have it so easy :biggrin1:

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Kip, I was treated with a few mustard plasters in my day too. You're right, man was it hot but also quite effective.

You'd probably be accused of child abuse for using it today.

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