THE GOOD(?) OLD(?) DAYS

The roof got weak over the Winter

I know that some of you are not old enough to appreciate this "Thought."  "But I digress!"
I was driving through town today with all four windows down.  It was quite a feeling.  I even succumbed to the temptation to rest my left elbow on the "sill" and put my hand up under the roof.  (See illustration)  It was then that I remembered hearing a cute little comment over the radio one day in the Spring of 19....???  The disc jockey said that he could tell that we'd had a rough Winter because all of a sudden he was starting to see so many drivers having to hold up the roof that was weakened by the savage cold and snow.  You see, that is a humorous comment to us oldies because we remember that the one way we could keep the inside temperature reasonable was to open the windows.  If cars had air conditioners then, we sure as heck didn't have one...and no one else that we knew had one.  As I progressed down the road I got to thinking about why so many people talk about the GOOD OLD DAYS.  The first reason that came to my mind was that it is from our youth that we mine the events that make up our humorous stories of today.  Think about it.  How many times did you go to bed trembling in fear that your parents would come to find out that you had sassed the kindergarten teacher?  I know that there are some of you out there who used to pick up cigarette butts from the gutter for your first few puffs in life.  What if your mother ever found out?  What if your older brother or sister ever "squealed?  How many of you remember how Camay hand soap tastes?  [I do] How many of you cut someone's clothes line on cabbage night and worried about getting caught for a month?  How many of you spread laundry detergent all over someone's lawn the following cabbage night and invited another month of high blood pressure?  How many of you had to sell the spare tire to buy gas and then sweat it out until you could buy it back without getting caught?  These were the GOOD old days?  How many of you had to ride a bicycle five miles [1 way] to the bakery to buy day old bread because you could get three loaves for $0.25?  How many of you had to peal boiled tomatoes for nearly a full day to prepared them to be preserved for the Winter?  ...Peaches and pears too.  Hey, now that was fun!  It was all the more fun since harvest season was when there was no more baseball season left to help us escape.
Finally, these were my last too thoughts as I was "bombing" around town:
Gas was $0.19 per gallon.
When he died in 1961, EFR Dion, the "rich one of the family" was making $150.00 per week as the superintendent of a machine shop, plus a lot more things that only he could do.  That's the kingly sum of $7,800.00 per year.  I saw his final check.
These are the kinds of things that you'll think about when you get to be my age.  The way I'm going, my final check will be -$100,000.00!
No wonder he rebelled when the daily paper went to $0.25 per week [6 days]