We who grew up in the 50's had the best life !

[Colonialgirl]

Remember when it took three minutes for the TV to warm up?

Nobody owned a purebred dog?

A quarter was a decent allowance?

You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?

Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?

You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time? And you didn't pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?

Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?

It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents?

They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed...and they did it!

When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady

No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked?

Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like, 'That cloud looks like a...'?

Playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?

Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?

And with all our progress, don't you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace, and share it with the children of today.

Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat! But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.

...as well as summers filled with bike rides, Hula Hoops, and visits to the pool, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.

Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say, 'Yeah, I remember that'?

I am sharing this with you today because it ended with a Double Dog Dare to pass it on. To remember what a Double Dog Dare is, read on. And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care.




Send this on to someone who can still remember Howdy Doody and The Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk.

Candy cigarettes

Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside.

Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles. Coffee shops with Table Side Jukeboxes. Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum.

Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.

Newsreels before the movie.

Telephone numbers with a word prefix...( Yukon 2-601). Party lines.

Peashooters.

Hi-Fi's & 45 RPM records.

78 RPM records!

Green Stamps.

Mimeograph paper.

The Fort Apache Play Set.

Do You Remember a Time When...



Decisions were made by going 'eeny-meeny-miney-moe'? Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, 'Do Over!'? 'Race issue' meant arguing about who ran the fastest?

Catching The Fireflies Could Happily Occupy An Entire Evening?

It wasn't odd to have two or three 'Best Friends'?

Having a Weapon in School meant being caught with a Slingshot?

Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures?

'Oly-oly-oxen-free' made perfect sense?

Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?

The Worst Embarrassment was being picked last for a team?

War was a card game?

Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?

Taking drugs meant orange - flavored chewable aspirin?

Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?

If you can remember most or all of these, Then You Have Lived!

Pass this on to anyone who may need a break from their 'Grown-Up' Life.

 

[Wyandot Jim]

Yep all of those and soooooooooooooo many many more.
Yes it was a great time to be a kid growing up.
But there are a lot of great things to do for the kids of today if they take advantage of it. I was a 50s kid but no way did I have the advantages that my Son, Daughter, Granddaughters and Grandson have had. The overall knowledge they all have is incredible.
Wifie is visiting Daughter and Granddaughters in VA. Now remember wife was a grade school teacher. She made the statement that she thinks the 1st and 2nd grade GDs know more than she does at 76 YO :wink: But here again one of their favorite things to do is read, which they both could do before 1st grade.
Bottom line is IMHO the best of times are the time you are in, but you have to work at it.

 

[Fox Mike]

Thanks Pam. Brings back many memories. Picking soda bottles out of the ditches to get the deposit. RC cola and a Moon pie. Peanuts in our Cokes. A $.25 block of ice, stuck on the front bumper, and taken to put in the ice box. Riding on running boards of my friends mom's 34 Ford (suicide doors). Driving without a license cause everybody did it and no one told the police (they were rarely seen except during the summer).

 

[caryc]

Thanks CG, I remember all of them. I also remember the glass milk bottles freezing and breaking if you left them outside your door too long. The 50's also had the best car models without a doubt. You could actually tell who made a car just by looking at it on the road.

Remember the little kits that let you "develop" your own little pictures by hold them up towards the sun? A little 25 cent balsa wood glider kit could keep a kid busy all day.

I remember the coal delivery truck pulling into the alley beside our house and running the coal down a shoot right into the basement window.

How about carbide Big Bang cannons? I remember those big milk dispensing machines. You put in your money and got a quart of milk. Of course it was in cartons by then.

I also remember saying the pledge of allegiance every morning at school. I'll bet that if you ask any kid today to repeat it, they could not.

Man, as Archie Bunker said, those were the days. !!!!

 

[bogus bill]

Been there. One room school. The old man teacher brought in his dads civil war rifle, demonstrated loading and shot it for us behind the school house. They said he was the oldest teacher in the state. We had a outhouse behind the school and a pot bellied stove. I found the picture from 1948 on the net. I am in it but they have my name mismarked. Front row, first boy standing by the three girls.

Sister and me

Grandpa and I having a smoke together. He ruined me.

 

[don44]

Those were truly.... "the good old days"!!!!

 

[powder smoke]

Remember my mom telling us the fish were biting because it was raining!
As I got older I figured that was a scam to get us out of the house! Schwinn Spit Fire
was my ride red and white one! Fawn memories I had fun as a kid!

 

[Fox Mike]

Cary. In the 50's I was one of the guys that put the milk bottles on your step. I delivered milk for Green Spring Dairy, door to door, in the Annapolis MD area.

 

[roashooter]

This post hits every check mark...of my growing up...thanks for the memories......

 

[COWTOWNER]

What a coincidence, just in our loca paper, was news,and a picture of the S & H Greenstamp warehouse/distribution center being demolished for some new and fancier building. Many, many memories of saving books of stamps and going with my mother, later with my wife for some item that would make life worth living. !!

Thanks

Mike

 

[mhblaw]

Been there, done that. Perfect! Thanks for putting this all together!

 

[caryc]

Remember when S&H Green stamps went out and Blue Chip stamps took over?
I remember that I just kept stuffing them into a drawer. Finally, I decided to put them all in books. I forget how many books I had but it was a good many. I looked in their catalog and there was nothing that I really wanted, so I settled on something that I could use. I traded in those stamps in on a very nice sewing machine. I still have that machine and use it once in a while.

Wasn't it Green stamps that had a Jaguar in there catalog? I wonder if there ever was any one that had enough books for that?

 

[pete44ru]

.

I'll NEVER forget when I walked with my $0.10 weekly allowance 4 miles to a theater to watch Saturday morning cartoons, and found out when I got there that the admission price had been raised to $0.25 ! ! :shock:

And, yes - once upon a time, I too had one of those Fort Apache toy sets...…… :roll:

I also had a clothes closet full of comic books that I wish I still had...………..


.

 

[Paul B]

Well, by 1950 I was 12. I can remember when there was no TV, at least not that most people could afford and there was no programming anyway AFAIK. We listened to stuff like Captain Midnight,Tom Mix (Mix being portrayed by an actor) Sky King, the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and on Saturdaays it was Smilin' Ed McConnell and his nemesis Froggie the Gremlin. I still have the statue of Froggies I bought all those years ago. No TV to dumb you down, Radio programs where you used your imagination on what the story told. hThere was Inner Sanctum, horror storied guaranteed to keep you awake that night. The real Dragnet. That took a couple of hours in the evening but most of the time we (GASP!) played in the street. Many Saturdays we'd get on our bikes and wouldn't get back home until after the street lights came on. We played in houses that were under construction on what was once an empty lot. We played copped & Robbers, Cowboys and Indians and War. WW2 had just ended in late 1945 so we killed the enemy that was left over. :shock: :lol: We kids not only had a life, we lived. We lived as free people should, not hamstrung and coddled by the damn nanny state. :x
Paul B.

 

[nvbirdman]

Ah yes, I remember those days well. Believe it or not, in those days our parents actually let us ride our bicycles without wearing a helmet.
Speaking of bikes, do you remember getting your pant leg caught in the chain because your bike didn't have a chain guard?

 

[caryc]

.

I'll NEVER forget when I walked with my $0.10 weekly allowance 4 miles to a theater to watch Saturday morning cartoons, and found out when I got there that the admission price had been raised to $0.25 ! ! :shock:

And, yes - once upon a time, I too had one of those Fort Apache toy sets...…… :roll:

I also had a clothes closet full of comic books that I wish I still had...………..
.

You should have hit your parents up for a cost of living raise.

Remember Cukla, Fran & Ollie? Anybody Remember Winky Dink? Or, how about that Saturday morning show with Andy (Jingles) Devine? He had Midnight the fiddle playing cat and Froggy the Gremlin. Remember "Plunk your magic twanger Froggy"?
Booiiiing!!!

Anybody remember throwing a burlap bag with a rock in it up by the streetlights to try to catch a bat? Bats used to flutter around the lights to catch bugs. We never caught one. The theory was that the bat would get his claws tangled up in the burlap. It's kind of funny though that our parents didn't tell us how dangerous bats were because of rabies back then.

 

[bogus bill]

I was raised during the war in that country general store in the pictures. My grandpa built it and mom bought him out at the start of the war. She pretty much ran the store alone and let me roam the country. These days she probably would have been reported and jailed. They did what they had to back then with most of the men overseas. I recall my sister going to live with a aunt for awhile on a farm whose husband was in the navy. There was a vacant lot across from the store and in summertime on friday night a old crippled man would set up a screen and projector. They would sit on the fenders of their cars or maybe a lawn chair and watch a free movie, usually some B grade western. Pass the hat for him. There was a mill pond across the highway from our store, a dam with a bridge over it and the creek (Out here they would call it a river) that ran behind our store. Our living quarters were up stairs over the store. Maybe the village had 50 or 70 people. (Auroraville wisconsin). On google earth I see our store now is made into a house. Across the road from it on the pond was/is a country tavern. It has a rock horse trough and a war memorial. About my first memory of my dad was right after the war. He was pumping gas and I was across the road playing on a arch over the horse trough. I fell off the top right into the ice cold water tank. It was fed by a artesian well and the water was colder than ice. Fortunately dad seen it happen, threw down the gas nozzle, ran across the road and pulled me out. I vividly still recall laying in the bottom of the tank froze in shock and seeing his hand come down through the water. I am sure I would have drowned had he not been there. I just looked on google earth, you can clearly see the tank etc.
God looked after most of us.
As the picture in my prior post shows I guess there was about 35 of us kids first through eighth grade. We had radio programs during the school day we had to listen to like "Ranger Mac" telling us about the birds and bee`s and a singing class taught by "Professor Gordon" that we had to sing to. The Brundage brothers in the back row of that picture drove a about 1930 chevy to school!

 

[Del J]

I think about those times often. Thanks for posting.

 

[Paul B]

Ah yes, I remember those days well. Believe it or not, in those days our parents actually let us ride our bicycles without wearing a helmet.
Speaking of bikes, do you remember getting your pant leg caught in the chain because your bike didn't have a chain guard?

More than once.
Paul B.

 

[Ale-8(1)]

Remember Cukla, Fran & Ollie? Anybody Remember Winky Dink? Or, how about that Saturday morning show with Andy (Jingles) Devine? He had Midnight the fiddle playing cat and Froggy the Gremlin. Remember "Plunk your magic twanger Froggy"?
Booiiiing!!!

Yep . . . and Captain Video, Rocket Rangers, and Space Patrol.

:wink: