When I Was A Kid......

When I was a kid we did not have cell phones, Blackberries (except from a vegetable wagon), or access to the internet. Indeed, there was no internet. All you could get was a black (the only color) dial phone. We had a party line. That meant that two or more families had to share the same phone line. Sometimes, during an emergency, the party who was already on the line would refuse to surrender the line for the emergency and someone would die as a result. That led to banner headlines in the tabloids and, of course, new laws passed by the legislature. I suspect that many of these same laws are still on the books even though their original purpose no longer exists.

You had to use an operator for long distance calls (that was anywhere outside of New Jersey) and from time-to-time you would hear an operator eavesdropping on your call. If you wanted to call someone outside of your home, you had to use a pay phone and you had better have had the right change or your call would not be processed. It was a lot of trouble but, on the other hand, we didn’t have to listen to cell phones going off in restaurants, church, or public transportation. We didn’t see people with their cell phones welded to their ears every waking hour either. I sometimes wonder why some of these people seem to think that I am interested in their conversation?

When I went to the movies the theaters always had a double feature (that’s two full-length movies), three cartoons, a newsreel, and sometimes a “short” subject (i.e., a one-reeler such as The Three Stooges) and/or a serial such as Buck Rogers with his flying vacuum cleaners belching smoke (no environmentalists in those days.) The cost? Twenty-five cents, one-fourth of a dollar and we were outraged when the prices were raised to fifty cents. What did we know? On the other hand we used to watch movies like The Best Years of Our Lives, Robin Hood, Rear Window, and yes, even Psycho. We were never drenched in blood and gore because, in those days, the media used to allow us to use our imaginations rather than show us every little detail. We knew Janet Leigh was being stabbed in Psycho even though Hitchcock never once allowed the audience to see her actually being stabbed.

I remember a five cent bus ride, a five cent bottle of coca cola, a ten cent ice cream cone and gasoline for 17 cents a gallon. We could board an airline without being forced to strip down to our skivvies and Congress had to declare war before sending the President could send men into battle.

If you stole something you went to jail and if you killed someone deliberately you were executed. A child molester would never see the light of day again and, if the people in the neighborhood caught up with him first, he had no reason to worry about jail.

We opened up doors for women and said words like “Hello,” “Please,” and “Thank You.” Nobody ever thought that was unusual then. We had horse-drawn fruit and vegetable carts surrounded by swarms of flies. On the other hand, those same fruits and vegetables were not genetic lab recreations of nature or covered with pesticides. Our meat came from animals that had never eaten food laced with antibiotics and our fish did not have mercury.

I hope that all of this has not upset you too much but if it helps, I could tell you a lot more.