Posted on 12/28/2018 10:42:48 AM PST by sodpoodle
Remember 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 'at 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, or sneakers , 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 11.
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 19 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 -- my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which he got to keep 2 cents. He had to get up at 6 AM every morning.
On Saturday, he had to collect the 42 cents from his customers. His favorite customers were the ones who gave him 50 cents and told him to keep the change. His 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 Cola bottle. 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.
How many do you remember?
Head lights dimmer switches on the floor.
Ignition switches on the dashboard.
Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall.
Real ice boxes.
Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.
Older Than Dirt Quiz :
Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about. Ratings at the bottom.
1. Blackjack chewing gum 2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water 3. Candy cigarettes 4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles 5. Coffee shops or diners with table side jukeboxes 6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers 7. Party lines on the telephone 8 Newsreels before the movie 9. P.F. Flyers 10. Butch wax (that was our hair product) 11. TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again in the morning. (there were only 3 channels... [if you were fortunate ) 12. Peashooters 13. Howdy Doody 14. 45 RPM records 15.S&H green stamps 16. Hi-fi's 17. Metal ice trays with lever 18. Mimeograph paper 19. Blue flashbulb 20. Packards 21. Roller skate keys 22. Cork popguns 23. Drive-ins 24. Studebakers 25. Wash tub wringers
If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age, If you remembered 16-25 = You' re older than dirt!
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 really good
O L D FRIENDS
I put a new racing one of those in too.
And then there was the aluminum Edelbrock intake manifold and some cool brand headers. I really screwed a great car up. 383 magnum Special Edition, leather seats too.
Oh, also threw an overdrive unit on it.
LOL!
Nice.
Trying to gauge your feeeeeeeelings about this post.....
The puns distribute themselves.
Razor blade slots in the metal vanity cabinet built into the bathroom wall.
I’m older than dirt. And there was another name for peashooters.
I guess how you use it is your business. Just clean up afterward.
Ironing was for girls. Boys did the soldering, learned to hand set rivets, bend sheet metal and iron, and spot weld. In those days, teachers and administrators could tell boys from girls.
I remember my first pizza. At the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. It was a good-bye party for our junior high classmates because the next year Dallas ISD in all their brilliance (not) were starting busing so we wouldn’t see anyone again.
We moved so didn’t see another pizza place for about 5 or 6 years.
And the rag man had a horse, too.
It was probably a nag, but to me at 5, that horse was a golden palomino!
Im not yet older than dirt but we did live way out and things came to the south later. We had good lives and a good country back then. Older than dirt or lived way down a dirt road.
Get a variable in line booster between the set and the antenna. Then you can use that to boost the signal if it is weak. Or wiggle the rabbit ears like we did in the 60's.
We still have “slow food” at home the vast majority of the time. Slow food tonight is pork chops, squash and carrots.
I remember when I moved too far from home and had to buy meat in the grocery store. Very weird feeling.
It was “Designing Women” that had about the first curse words. Or at least for some reason had to have several per episode.
Not a Ford?
the story of my first pizza
PIZZA PIE AT PIZZA PAUL’S
By Frank R
10/07/2012
It was the early Sixties in Rockdale County (Georgia).
A new phenomenon called, “McDonald’s Hamburgers” had just opened on Candler Road, in Decatur, introducing the new concept of “fast food”.
Fifteen-cent Hamburgers, fries, sodas, and fried apple pies comprised the entire menu.
There was no inside seating then, you ordered at the window, and ate in your car, usually backed into the parking spaces to watch the “cool guys” orbit the parking lot in their “hotrods”, most of which were usually the freshly-washed family car. Maybe it’s just me, but there was something intrinsically asinine about trying to look “cool”, while revving the engine in your Dad’s six cylinder Studebaker.
But I digress...
Just hatching down the street from the new “Golden Arches”, another fast- food-to-be at a small, Italian cafe’, called “Pizza Paul’s”, was emerging.
The crux of my story actually begins there; it was a cold, Saturday night over 50 years ago. Me - and three other great pretenders, (whose names escape me now) - decided to tear ourselves away from the McDonalds sideshow in search for something new. Someone in the back seat yelled out, “Pizza Paul’s”. Frankly, I didn’t have any idea where it was, and no much of a clue about this pizza thing, having only read about it in comic books.
My first impression of the little pizzeria was frankly, “What a dump!”! But, it was a cold night, and the restaurant was warm inside.
The scattered array of small tables and booths along the windows were adorned with red-checkered oilcloth, a scene straight out of an Italian travel brochure. The only tabletop accouterments were the usual salt and pepper shakers, and a wax-covered fiasco, serving as a candle holder. Rivulets of multi-colored wax, accumulated over time from melting candles, covered the recycled Chianti bottles from the neck down.
A strange odor - strange to me, anyway - permeated the warm air, which led me to surmise that something had likely spoiled back in the kitchen, or, someone forgot to take out the trash. I later learned that the scent was a kind of cheese called, “mozzarella”.
“Mozzarella”?
Now, that was never mentioned in any of those comic books!
No sooner than we seated ourselves in one of the dark stained booths, than a perky waitress, with long black hair, quickly appeared with a twinkle in her eye, and a smile on her lips. I thought, “She’s obviously Italian...probably named, ‘Maria’, or Gabriella...”. But, my smug deduction proved to be elementary when I finally noticed nametag pinned on her apron. It read simply, “Wanda”.
In her best, native Georgia accent, Wanda asked, “Wha’ch’all havin’ toniite?”.
Without consulting the menu, my companions quickly asked her to bring a large, “pepperoni pizza”, a pitcher of “Pepsi, and four glasses. I was beginning to suspect that this was not my friends’ first foray into the world of pizza.
And, my ongoing ignorance of this new cuisine was even further exposed, with the advent of strange, new words, like...”pepperoni”.
In the midst of the confusion, I suddenly remembered that I was starving.
To distract myself from the hunger pangs, I tried concentrating on the room, trying to get some feel of things to come, food-wise, that is.
As the folks at the next table were being served their pizza, my first thought was that someone at their table had been terribly ill. The very sight of that blob of mozza-whatever-it-was soundly reinforced my determination to fast for the remainder of the evening.
Then, Wanda returned, plopped a similar concoction right in the middle of our table, and exclaimed, “Thar’s y’alls pizza, boys...”.
Wow!
I guesstimated that thing to be at least 24-inches in diameter, with no discernible shape, whatsoever. The rising heat seemed to steer that mozzarella smell right to my nose. Alarms in my head were telling me, “Bolt for the door - and some fresh air!”. But, I was hopelessly pinned against the back wall of that booth, and could not move. Resigning myself to being trapped, I staked out an observation point at the outermost perimeter of that “pizza-pie” to observe the others as they helped themselves, slice-by-slice, to that pizza.
While I was mesmerized by the slinking contrails of semi-melted cheese that dutifully followed each piece to its assigned plate, I had another defining pizza-moment when I became aware of red substance, oozing from between the cheese, and the crust.
Yes, I did ask.
“It’s “pizza sauce” the motley crew explained.
“Oh, really?” Sorry, but being under the influence of that stark odor, it was the snappiest comeback I could come up with, at the time.
The others in that booth seemed to be enjoying this new food, and there was very little conversation as they ate their fill.
Meanwhile, I was still starving.
I realized finally that if I didn’t at least try it, they would never let up, and I would be razzed until Elvis switched to Opera, not to mention being forever branded as, “un-cool”.
As my still-immature powers of reason began to etch away at my adolescent obstinacy, finally said to myself, “What the heck...”; I mean, I still had Pepsi to use as an “antidote”, right?
Yes, I caved completely! It was the night I gave up my pizzaginity.
Glaring eyes tracked my every move as I unfurled my knife from the red napkin and slowly sawed off just the very tip of one of the remaining slices. The pure silence of that moment would have caused the casual bystander to think I was about to divulge the actual location of the “Lost Dutchman Gold Mine”, or, at least tell what “E. F. Hutton” really said.
Finally, into my mouth with that tiny morsel, and I began to slowly chew.
Now, I didn’t let on, but secretly I was discovering that this “mozzarella” cheese was not bad at all, in fact, it was both good, and chewy!
That funny, red sauce wasn’t bad either, but I was still hadn’t completely warmed up to the pepperoni thingies.
As I continued to chew, my taste buds were waxing Italian, dancing the Tarantella along the length my tongue.
As Sheriff Andy Taylor would say, “It was gooooooood!”
Now, mind you, I had intentionally dragged out the big moment, depriving the frothing scoundrels at my booth of any instant satisfaction to my reaction.
Suddenly, the chewing stopped, and, I swallowed.
In the stillness of my dramatic pause, you could almost hear the candle wax melting down the side of the fiasco.
Then, in the best “nonchalant” that I could muster, I said, “Aww, it’s alright...I guess.”.
The three stooges literally erupted, nearly falling out of the booth, tears running down their cheeks from laughing, and all three pointing their index fingers in my direction.
At that point, none of the heckling mattered, for I had soundly conquered my fear of this new-fangled food. No longer could it be said that I was “un-cool” (at least when it came to eating “pizza-pie”).
I shoveled what was left of that “pizza pie” into my mouth like Ruel Barnette (local railroad engineer)stoking the firebox on the “Dinky” (locomotive on local railroad), climbing golf-course hill.
We finally departed from that little pizza parlor - full and satisfied, Ironically, we then headed back to McDonalds, to cruise the parking lot. After all, I didn’t spend the better part of that morning washing Dad’s car for nothing.
EPILOGUE
Since that memorable night of pizza-discovery in 1963, I’ve probably had hundreds - maybe even a thousands of them (a fact to wit my waistline can roundly attest).
I’ve had great pizza from as far west as Denver, up North in New York and Maine, and even in Europe, cooked by real Italians. But, never have I tasted any pizza that was quite as good as that very first “pizza pie”, at “Pizza Paul’s”.
I don’t think I ever will.
THE END
We were too poor for home milk delivery. Had powdered milk until high school. Foul stuff. Then, we either had milk straight from the cow or bought Lucerine brand for 49 cents a quart at the store. Straight from the cow was sooooo much better.
Classmates who had home delivery got into the movies for free with the milk tops.
I can count the movies I went to before high school on one hand. Mother let me go see “Billy Jack” because she didn’t know about ratings.
Obviously fake. She doesn't even look Asian. (Notice the heat discoloration under her fingers). But that's one of the fancy plug in ones. They didn't teach us how to use them. We were sealing up metal joints, as I recall. Paint on the flux, apply the hot iron, then let it draw the solder.
I ate my piazzas with cheese only for years because . . . mushrooms?
A friend had an old Buick (?) that would shoot out ice pellets from the a/c vents. You didn’t want to sit by the rear doors because of that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.