My Three Sons
I Love Lucy
The Twilight Zone
The Ed Sullivan Show

And it took five minutes for the TV to warm up.

Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school.
And everybody was always dressed up on television and in the movies.

Did he love her or leave her?

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.

All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers
had their hair done every day and wore high heels.

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!

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 …"

And 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?

When being sent to the principal's office was nothing
compared to the fate that awaited the student at home.

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.

Can you still remember Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and
Hardy, Howdy Dowdy and the Peanut Gallery, The Lone Ranger,
The Shadow Knows, Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk?

As well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games, Hula Hoops,
bowling 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?"

We are sharing this with you today because of 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.

How many of these do you remember?

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
P. F. Fliers

Telephone numbers with a word prefix ...
HEmstead 7-1538, and party lines

Peashooters
Howdy Dowdy

45 and 33-1/3 RPM records

S&H meant Green Stamps,
not Shipping and Handling



Dancing to the Hi-Fi

Metal ice cube trays, with levers
Mimeograph paper
Beanie and Cecil

Roller-skate keys
Cork popguns
Drive-Ins

The Studebaker

Washtub wringers
The Fuller Brush man
Reel-To-Reel tape recorders

Tinker Toys

Erector sets
The Fort Apache play set
Lincoln Logs

The 15 cent McDonald hamburger

5 cent packs of baseball cards
with that awful pink slab of bubble gum
Penny candy
35 cent a gallon gasoline

Jiffy Pop popcorn

And do you remember the 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 fireflies could happily occupy an entire evening?

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

The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was "cooties"?

Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot?

A foot of snow was a dream come true?

 

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 the 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?

Airline stewardesses in miniskirts?

Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?

If you can remember most or all of these, then you've really lived.

And we 'double-dog-dare you' to pass it on! --

Ever done a Wild Thing?

I took my Dad to the mall the other day to buy some new shoes (he is 66). We decided to grab a bite at the food court. I noticed he was watching a teenager sitting next to him.

The teenager had spiked hair in all different colours - green, red, orange, and blue. My Dad kept staring at her. The teenager kept looking and would find my Dad staring every time.

When the teenager had had enough, she sarcastically asked: “What's the matter old man, never done anything wild in your life?”

Knowing my Dad, I quickly swallowed my food so that I would not choke on his response; I knew he would have a good one!

In classic style he responded without batting an eyelid, “Got stoned once and screwed a peacock. I was just wondering if you were my daughter." --

Guilty Displeasures
by Kat Kinsman

"No matter how beautiful its carmine and orange stalks,
the sight of a bunch of chard in my organic
bag always makes my heart sink."
Nigel Slater - The Kitchen Diaries

A boyfriend once told me that if I ever wanted to make him cry, I could serve him scrambled eggs on a Wednesday night in the winter. I had no particular interest in making him cry (though that changed later on ...), of course, but I asked him why. He wasn't especially keen to elaborate, but it had something to do with childhood, and his mother having choir practice, and his now-estranged father taking over kitchen duties the only way he knew how.

My best friend's husband is only now, at 35, accepting small wisps of mayo on his sandwiches after an incident 25 years ago involving his older, stronger brother, a spatula, and a family-sized jar of Hellmann's.

My own grandfather, the child of immigrants who settled in a small Pennsylvania town, refused garlic for the first several decades of his life for fear of, in his words, "smelling Italian". It breaks my heart to know that, and it absolutely underscores the massive emotional impact that certain foods can have on us. Food is uniquely powerful in that besides our multi-sensory involvement with it, it also becomes part of us.

While other aesthetic details -- songs, smells, etc., may imprint themselves on our memories of situations both joyful and otherwise, they're not as likely to, well, make you feel like you're gonna hurl. It goes deeper than an aversion to taste or scent or mouth-feel. Food certainly warms the soul, but it can also make it heave.

My trigger food? Tuna-noodle casserole. And no, I don't wanna talk about it. --

       

Remember Carol Burnett?