Posted on 07/31/2017 5:36:51 AM PDT by sodpoodle
I think you'll enjoy this. Whoever wrote it could have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a 'T.'
Black and White
Black and White
(Under age 45? You won't understand)
------------------------------------------------ You could hardly see for all the snow,
----------------------------------------- Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
------------------------------------- 'Good Night, David.
Good Night, Chet.'
--------------------------------------------
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
----------------------------------------------------
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice- pack coolers, but I can't remember getting E.coli.
-----------------------------------------------------
Almost all of us would
Have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
Flunking gym was not an option... Even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations
Oh yeah... And where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.
Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $99 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either; because if we did we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.
I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off.
Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house.
Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a jerk. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.
How could we possibly have known that?
We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes.
We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA; AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!
Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.
We had a culture. We chose not to promote and defend it.
I remember getting our first TV...Black and white (there was no color then...)
Watched the 1956 World Series (Yankees/Dodgers)...That’s why my dad bought the set....
Anybody ever make a “spoke gun”???
Take a bicycle spoke, bend it so you had a handle the “barrel” was the female end that screwed to the rim...
Break off about three strike anywhere match tips in the hollow “barrel”...Poke a BB in and hold a match under the barrel...
It would shoot a red hot BB about 25 to 30 yards...
They were shown on TV in the 50s and 60s when I watched them, but they were filmed in the late 20s and 30s. So.... I bow in respect to my elders.
When those little white balls got old we would cut them in half, and use them to play a type of half-ball stick ball sometimes. (It was easy to pitch a "curve ball" with those half balls!)
Hose ball used small (maybe 4-inch or 5-inch sections) of those old, hard, rubber hoses, and an old broomstick (as in stick ball). Some guys could pitch with the hose flipping in end-over-end, and it was usually difficult to hit them that way very good, but if you hit a line drive, and a person caught it in their face, rather than in their hands, it would really hurt!
I grew up in Kensington. What was your neighborhood. And...Yes, I remember the pimple ball games.
Northeast Philly. When I first got some jobs there (when I was a lot younger), I always rode the El past K & A to downtown. I bet you took the El a lot too, right?
This is my ‘era’, but they didn’t play this game in my neighborhood. I was curious, and found this:
| "Growing up in South Philly Italian Style….Pimple Ball" "The Pimple Ball is back and for sale" "The Pimple Ball Is Back….Have A Ball Like Back In The Day!"  |
Now that I think about it, that life was a sort of poetry.
The poetry of common farm life.
It is a pity we never get to live in the world we grow up in.
we netted live little minnows below our house in the "crik" which was right below a huge dump, now called landfill, and no doubt all of us got dioxin and every other chemical absorbed into us....
maybe we're "odd" but we're still alive...60's and 70's.
It exists forever in mind and memory. For me, memories often feel much more ‘real’ than the experience was to start with. And with hindsight, you appreciate more.
Somehow those balls seem familiar; maybe the kids in the District played it, but we were out in the ‘burbs.
And needed it.
ping!
Yes, I did.
“And with hindsight, you appreciate more.”
You ain’t just whistling Dixie!!
I had some relatives a long time ago in Germantown. They lived on the Germantown section of "Beechwood Street", but they've long since moved too. (I think it's pretty rough around there now.)
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