SLOW FOOD

I received this list of "When I was a young one growing up..." and I decided that the person who generated it had left out some items that are dear to me.  I have written about them here and there in the blogs that I maintain, but I decided that since my brain was already on the train because of the email, that I would send the entire "meal" to you all.

NOTICE:

There are many of you who are reading this who were not born and brought up in the USA.  If you want to share your dearest nostalgia filled memories, send them and we will all enjoy them on this blog.

SLOW FOOD

'Someone 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 Home,'' I explained. !

'Mom cooked every day and when Dad 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, never wore Levis, never set foot on a golf course, never 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 & Roebuck.

Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

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)

We didn't have a television in our house until I was 9.

It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, 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 was 21 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.

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.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home but milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers-- I delivered a newspaper, 7 days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at6AM every morning.

On Saturday, I had to collect the 49 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

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 from a friend :

My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Colabottle. 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 ...

I might be older than dirt but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!

Especially to all your reallyOLD friends

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but, I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God. - Abraham Lincoln

That's the email.  Since I do not have any REALLY OLD friends I am sending this to all my readers, young and not so young.  

What follows is real life.  I did not make any of this up.  I couldn't...my brothers and sister are watching me! :-)

​My response to the email.

I am not going to forward this before adding my own non anonymous and very real memories about growing up​.  They came to me as I was going down the list above.

I shared a room with my brother.  When boy #3 came along we made room for him.

I was 12 before my parents relented and allowed us to have a radio in our room.  9:00 PM curfew on it. no weekend exceptions except for the Joe Louis /Jersey Joe Walcott fight.

No, it didn't have FM - that wasn't invented yet.

I went to school on the city bus, got there for the 8:00 AM start and didn't get out until 3:30.  

When I or anyone else misbehaved, we got whacked with the ruler.

If you didn't have passing grades, you were held back.

I remember that when I got to be in the 6th grade, at the end of the year, the 6th, 7th graders helped to clean the school to put it in "moth balls" for the Summer.  I was a member of the volunteers who reported one week early to get it out of "moth balls" for the September opening.

Hey, I even remember that the comedians on the radio never got beeped!

I was forbidden to listen to Bob Hope because he was too racy.

I was in 2nd year high school before we got a television. (Now it's been 5 years since we have a television in the house!)

I saw two movies before I was 12, "Dumbo" and "The Song of the South."  Miraculously, both were in Technicolor...Yep, Technicolor...they don't call it that any more.

We had to obey the air raid sirens and shut off all the lights or risk getting a citation from the air raid warden for violating national security.

Every home had a clothes line...the sun dried scent came from God, not out of a box.

If you had a back yard it had a Victory Garden where you worked with your parents to make the garden produce your vegetables.

I played baseball in the summer time.  I walked to the play ground and back home.

I got my first two wheeler bicycle at age 13.  When I got old enough, 15 or 16 I guess, I could pedal my way to the "away" games at fields up to 5 miles away.  (Al, for us that was Woodlawn, Center, and in my case, Fairview.)

I also remember the country going crazy on August 15, the day we were finally not killing nor getting killed any more in World War II.

Talking about that, what ever happened to the "Draft."  

I remember when all airplanes had propellers and all train engines ran on steam.

I'm so old, I remember the way the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series.  It was an October day, not November.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  But, in fact, at my age, even yesterday is getting pretty fuzzy.

There were only 16 major league teams then.  The Boston Braves were my favorites.  They only played 154 games per season.
My favorite professional ball players were Birdie Tebbetts and Bobby Doerr even though they played for the Red Sox.
Ted Williams was a bum, as far as I was concerned.  We didn't go to Boston often.  It was a nearly three hour drive to cover the 105 miles.
Professional football was not a significant attraction. Boston had a team.  I think it was the Redskins.  As I remember it, they were bad and weren't making any money.

I remember when Dick Tracy had a wrist radio connected to the Chief.  In fact, I remember when "Peanuts" was just being published and "Snoopy" walked on all four legs.

I remember when the daily newspaper went from 15 cents to 25 cents for 6 days and my father stopped delivery he was so mad.  The humorous part of all this is that he could only hold out for one week!

I was 11 years old on the night when our youngest sibling was born and none of us even knew that Mom was in the "family way."

Let me put a final period to this by saying that we old people don't talk about the "Bad Things" we did because we know that it would only make you young people laugh that we could even think that what we did was actually bad.

With memories like that, I can go happily to my eternal rest, so don't "Cry at my Funeral."

WHAT'S THE PASSWORD?

I remember the first password I ever had to remember:  "Tu pues, poireau."  I had to use it when I wanted to get into a conversation with a "gang" we had when I was in about the 4th or 5th grade.  That was in the days when boys and girls did not mingle on the school grounds.  Actually, when I first went to school, the girls had the sweetheart part of the outside portion.  They were on the street side which, even in those days was paved.  No lie.  The streets were, for the most part, paved when I started school.  There were even sidewalks and closed drainage.  I know, I was spoiled.  That's OK, I'll take it.  We didn't get a radio in our bedroom until we were about 11 or so.  Anyway, back to the password stuff.
Some guys from the Lyman Street section of the "Flats" section of Holyoke used to hang around in one of the corners of the school yard.  This was before the school yard was paved over with asphalt.  All we did was talk because the nuns didn't want us running around and raising dust.  You know how women are.  Especially older, unmarried women.  Now you follow me, I can tell.  So, some of us who did not raise any dust figured, (I think we figured) in our own innocent way that we were raising Hell instead.  Actually, we weren't, except in our shrivelled pea brains.  So, there was this "gang."  I couldn't belong because I lived in South Hadley, way across the river.  But since I had the good fortune of having beat up a guy once, and one of these boys new it, they figured that I could talk to them now and again when they got bored with themselves and had to change the subject.  So they gave me a password.  I don't know why I still remember it.  I never had to use it because the leader couldn't remember what it was that he told me.  I think that he regretted giving it to me because it means, "You stink, idiot" and that made it sound that I was sassing him when I got to the gang for my three minutes of fame.  So anyway, now I got this 24 carat password in a foreign language that I can't use because it doesn't have enough upper case letters mixed in with the lower case on the left of the special character that comes before the underscore that leads to my maternal grandmother's maiden name (all lower case for security reasons) that comes just before  the foul word in a foreign language that doesn't have the verb "to be" and is, therefore, totally unintelligible even to the people who speak it.  So it is really a perfect language for USA passwords.  Except that the Voice from the Kitchen doesn't like it when I have passwords that are foul language in her mother tongue.  Sheeesh, and you think you have problems?
So, for an old man like I am, the password problem in the 21st century is real.  I've tried a lot of ways to remember them all, but that doesn't work.  I've tried writing them down, but then I can't remember where I put the paper.  When I don't use paper, I can't remember where I hid them on my computer.  Therefore I have the problem solved.  I use the lover's phrase that my spouse loves most for everything I have to make secure with a password.
That doesn't solve the mystery of why I can remember a silly password that had no real use from when I was maybe 10 and now I can't remember a password that I composed myself to get into my bank account just 30 minutes ago.  Sometimes I think that it would be smart to get one branded on my left buttock.  Then, I could read it in the mirror, if I had remembered to tell the cowpoke to do it backwards because of the mirror...Oh, boy, I can tell that this is way too complicated already.  I think I'll just stick with A1b2C3Dion@1hartfordSTbehindthe broadleafmapletreethatthebusjustnarrowlymissedat+/-4PMonaThursdayin1943Ithinkitwas
That otta fool 'em!  I bet it even fools you.

HELLO? IS ANYONE THERE?

BELIEVE IT OR NOT A REAL PERSON DOES THIS
Click on the purple underline to see more of this.

This is an interesting question, or thought, I guess.  I have had it for a long time.  As I was growing older I thought that I would solve the feeling and the mystery, but I haven't.  I have for years wondered how it feels to do something and not have any immediate feed back.  Like I'm doing now.  Some how, I know that a human being is going to come in contact with this page.   I never thought that I could get faithful or loyal to an audience that is mostly unknown to me.  There only 100 of you out there who get "pinged" for this production.   I have another one that has about 300.  So here I am wondering what is out there.  I sit here at home and produce something that I think is worth consuming, but I never know what the reaction is.  

This started for me when I asked EFR Dion if the people on the radio felt strange because they were all alone in the room.  He said that he thought that maybe they did, but he doubted it.  He said that they were sure that someone was listening and that they were projecting their thoughts and their souls to the people listening.  I didn't have the slightest idea what he was saying, but hey, I was just a young boy, so I made myself comfortable with myself and went on my way.
Then one day,  my brother was a radio personality.  I asked him how it felt.  He just said that you get used to it.  That's true.  I know it now.  But I am still intrigued by the people on television.  That must be weird.  Imagine, they know that they can be seen, but all they get to see is their notes and the microphone.  Yikes.  That has to be strange.  At least, I can't see you and you can't see me.  The feeling that I get that is the most puzzling is that I do a lot of this as an autobiography for my children.   I am an old man.  Yet, I somehow have got accustomed to writing my autobiography in public, so to speak, and I don't even have a pencil and paper to do it with.   Besides, it will never see the light of day on paper.  I think that I can also guarantee that the very ones for whom it is intended won't read one single syllable.
This is getting long, so I'll pipe down now.  But I have to say that this is rather limiting.  I can only be a part of myself here.  There are a couple of other parts that I maintain in other corners of the Internet.  Pretty strange stuff.  If you wonder what I'm talking about, click on some of the stuff over there by your right.  I just got something off my chest about Justin Bieber.  It's on the link that says something about the nasty part of me.  And you saw some of that the other day about the Guts and stuff...I get like that some times.  Talk about guts and balls.  After I turned on those birds, they all disappeared.  See what I mean?  There's no one out there...'cept you 'n me!
Ok, now I am going to leave you with the 5th day of our continuing Christmas card.  The first stop,  Beit She'an is going to be known only to you Bible nerds.  But everyone can enjoy it, because now Mary and Joseph are finally on the road.  I still can't figure out why she's traveling in her state in the first place.
Love ya's all.