Something To Do

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Think for a minute about your first recollections. Compare what you remember with the ordinary things you see today.

On this one I have somewhat of an advantage...I'm 77 years old.

 

[Truthmatters]

My memory starts in the early sixties.

Things have changed but not as much as I bet you can remember

 

[Cammmpbell]

My memory starts in the early sixties.

Things have changed but not as much as I bet you can remember

My first recollections were of rusty farm implements, outdoor toilets, coal oil lamps, model A Fords, $0.10 a gallon gasoline, door to door beggers, unemployed men who would have given anything for a job to feed their families, county poor farms...etc.

I have seen this country take advantage of it's middle class and now it is cruelly ridding itself of it.

The rich and powerful have taken our country and if something isn't done soon...I don't know what the future holds...for any of us.

 

[Old Rocks]

My memories start about '46-47. Since most of the time in my youth we lived in very rural communities, my memories include many things that most in my generation did not see. As my interests outside of my jobs were in the outdoors, I have seen much of the changes that the scientists have recorded. Glacial retreat in the Rockies, Cascades, Sierra Nevadas, and the ealier springs and later falls in the Blues.

 

[Big Black Dog]

They say that when you get old, memory is the first thing that you loose. I forget what they said was second.

 

[Sherry]

I loved the street lights with a bluish hue, rather than the modern day pinkish hue.

 

[Chris]

I loved the street lights with a bluish hue, rather than the modern day pinkish hue.

Thanks.

I had forgotten about that.

 

[editec]

My first hazy memories were a view from a crib sometime in the very early 50s.

Post about '54 I have very vivid memories of living on a farm in PA. My early childhood wasn't much different than the childhood that a kid might have had back in the 1850s. We had no TV, I don't even think we had a radio.

Hell I didn't even see a moving picture (TV or movie) until about 55.

Changes?

Oh yeah! I often feel like a TIME TRAVELER, to be honest.

 

[AVG-JOE]

My memory starts November 22, 1963.

I can still see in my mind the brown radio we were listening to when my mother stopped ironing and sat down.

 

[AVG-JOE]

My first hazy memories were a view from a crib sometime in the very early 50s.

"First thing I remember I was lying in my bed...."
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57RIlznOpDM]Paul Simon - Late in the Evening + lyrics - YouTube[/ame]

 

[marksmitths]

when we get older time by time, the only thing which come with us is memory of the past. when we had dome something special for someone.

 

[wirebender]

My earliest solid memories are from the late 40's. Thinking back I remember bread being made every day. Biscuits and the were all the size of a mason jar lid because that is what they were cut with. When the circus came to town, it involved a parade. Lunch tickets at school, mother may I, red light - green light. Getting a bag full of candy at Gene Knighton's store in exchange for a crate of bottles. The milk man coming round to pick up the empty bottles and put 3 new bottles on the porch and all the trouble I got in for drinking the cream off the top. Half a dozen people sitting on the porch on saturday afternoon listening to the baseball game on the radio. Later in the evening there was Amos and Andy and Boston Blackie.

Saturday morning cartoons that were actually created by artists, the Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, The Cisco Kid, The Lone Ranger, and Tarzan. Saturday matinees at the movies for a nickle and a real ice cream soda on the way home. Shock Theater with movies featuring Borris Carloff and Lon Chaney, and Bela Lugosi.

Pea shooters, sling shots, BB guns, lightning bugs in a jar, cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, seeing the stars from your back yard because streetlights were only on the corners and then only if you lived in a nice neighborhood. Roller skates with a key that attached to your shoes (and the associated blisters), being tired from just playing.

3 or 4 chanels on the TV and you had to get up and walk across the room and change the channel with your hands and maybe have to go outside and turn the antenna too, only poor kids wore jeans to school, and speaking of school, actually learning to use your brain to pass the test rather than simply studying for the test. Lining up for your polio vaccine and smallpox innoculation. Kids today don't even have a scar on their left upper arm.

All dogs except hunting dogs were mutts, getting your windshield cleaned and your oil and air pressure checked while someone pumped gas in your car and actually talked to you about what was going on around town, S&H Greenstamps from the grocery store and the book full of the greatest stuff in the world that you could get for them, glassware, or towels from a box of detergent, Funk & Waganals encyclopedias from the grocery store (a new letter every month).

Your neighbors were as likely to tan your butt as your parents and when they did, they called your parents and you got another licking when you got home, when the threat to hold you back a grade wasn't just an empty threat, saying the Pledge of Allegience every morning at school and it actually meaning something to you, mom giving sandwiches and water to hobos.

eeny-meeny-miney-mo, and the worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was cooties. Double dog dares, being imortal, olly olly oxen free actually made sense, war was a card game and water balloons were superweapons. Spinning around till you fell down was how you acheved an "altered state".

Baseball cards (which would now be worth a fortune) in the spokes of your bicycle, sneakers that could actually make you run faster and jump higher and you got a secret decoder ring to boot. Sitting on an ice cream freezer for what seemed like hours while your grand dad cranked but it was worth it because that peach or strawberry ice cream was ooooooooo so good, and grand dad saying pull my finger and you pulled it like you had 1000 times before because it was funny every time.

Made in Japan meant junk. 5 & 10 cent stores where you could actually buy things for 5 & 10 cents, cherry bombs, ash cans, and M-80s that would take a mail box right off the post or your hand right off your wrist if you weren't careful.

Cigarettes were glamorous, grass was what we mowed (with a push mower) every saturday, pot was what you cooked in and coke was something you drank if you were lucky enough to have a nickle to buy one with.

Funny how memory goes. Push one button and half a dozen lights come on that you really weren't expecting. I imagine that those of us over 50 could fill volumes with two or three word descriptions that entire generations would remember perfectly and could talk about for hours.