My grandpa sent me this -older than dirt

erub

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2000
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If repost, I search, so STFU

Lightning Bugs/Older'n Dirt!!

"Hey Dad," one of my kids 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. "Grandma cooked every day and when Grandpa 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, wore Levis, set foot on a golf course, 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 atSears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears AND Roebuck. Either way, there is no R! oebuck 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 14, It was, of course, black and white, but they bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue, like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like grass. The middle third was red. It was perfect for programs that had scenes of fire trucks riding across someone's lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look larger.

I was 17 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called "pizza pie." When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and tongue and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too.


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. I delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at4 AM every morning. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home o n collection ! day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. Touching someone else's tongue with yours was called French kissing and they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what they did in French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories wi! th 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 tableside jukeboxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9 . P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
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 thebestpart of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!
Especially to all your reallyOLDfriends....
 

Kwaipie

Golden Member
Nov 30, 2005
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Peashooters (really just a big straw) came with a bag of dried peas, you'd stick the straw into the bag and suck up a pea to shoot. Lots of times, you'd such too hard and swallow the damned pea.
 

MichaelD

Lifer
Jan 16, 2001
31,529
3
76
I remember 11 of them. :eek: I'm not "that old". Under 40 = "not that old"

I grew up in NYC too; not some bumpin farm in the middle of nowhere.

We had our milk delivered until I was about 7 or 8 years old. We had the metal icetrays with the lever. I ESPECIALLY remember those damn blue dot flashbulbs...never seen anything so bright since...not even the sun.

During the holiday parties, my evil cousin and i would wait until some adult took the 4-sided bulb (it was square with 1 bulb on each side...it turned!) out b/c it was used up. We'd then swipe it and smash it outside or blow it up with firecrackers.
 

AStar617

Diamond Member
Sep 29, 2002
4,983
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7, at age 25. I'm "getting older". :)

Also OP, your declaration of shens has been overruled. I've known of the bootleg "color tv" for years. According to my father, my grandfather's house was the first in their neighborhood with "color tv". The entire neighborhood would come for hours to the house to watch in awe the same shows everyone else got, except with Blue heads, Red chests, and Green feet. :confused:
 

mugs

Lifer
Apr 29, 2003
48,924
45
91
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 tableside jukeboxes
14. 45 RPM records
16 Hi-fi's
18. Mimeograph paper
23. Drive-ins

Edit:
Actually I think it was a ditto machine that I remember, not mimeograph. My school had one. Most teachers used the photocopier, but one guy always gave us stuff printed in purple.
 

preslove

Lifer
Sep 10, 2003
16,755
63
91
1. Blackjack chewing gum
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
14. 45 RPM records
22. Cork popguns

I remember all of them from about the age of 6 or 7 and before. Though the glass bottles were from the convenience store, I think, and not machines. I had a small 45 rpm record player and a couple records. 1 was the rolling stones, I can't get no (& something else on the other side), & another went with a star wars book I had that went through "A New Hope's" story line.
 

lupi

Lifer
Apr 8, 2001
32,539
260
126
I remember most of them. Mainly because both of my grandparents had really large families and kept everything they had bought. (At least until they finally had portions of the house cleaned out for them)
 

lupi

Lifer
Apr 8, 2001
32,539
260
126
Actually I think it was a ditto machine that I remember, not mimeograph. My school had one. Most teachers used the photocopier, but one guy always gave us stuff printed in purple.


I remember still getting those through high school. The school system had a dedicated photocopy place but for on demand stuff the teacher would go make a trip to the copy room during the day and come back with the purple copies.
 

Chiller2

Senior member
Aug 19, 2005
286
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0
He wasn't kidding about the plastic on the TV but it wasn't popular. Heck I remember some of the first video games back before there was colored graphics did the same thing.
 

Paperdoc

Platinum Member
Aug 17, 2006
2,285
265
126
24 out of 25!
Missed #9 - PF Flyer. Was that a wooden sled with runners? I do remember a 4-wheel wagon called the Radio Flyer.
#4 Pop machines - first one I saw sold 7 oz bottles of Coke for 7¢ - nickel + 2 pennies.
#8 Newsreels before, yes. And how about the 15-week serial aventure shows they ran AFTER the Saturday afternoon feature, to keep you coming back next week?
#12 Peashooter - we made our own starting with a wooden clothespin. You could cut some new notches in one piece of wood and re-assemble it so the spring was used to shoot the pea.
#14 45's Yeah, and 78 rpm records at 10" diameter, plus some of those at 12". And 33-1/3 rpm disks at both those diameters. How about 16 -2/3 rpm disks?
#18 mimeograph paper, and lots of other copy systems. Oldest I recall was a hectograph - a sheet of geletaine, and you wrote the original on paper with a special purple indellible pencil, then pushed it down on the damp geletaine to leave some "ink" on its surface. Remove the original, then push a fresh paper on to transfer the image back to the new sheet. Make many copies from one master. Then came Gestetner systems - used a long waxy master and the system used black oil-based ink to make hundreds of copies; you could save the master and re-use later. Then Ditto - also known as spirit duplicator - made masters using a purple waxy material that transferred to the final copy using a little methanol. Could be done with other colors, and could save masters for re-use. Then I remember an early Kodak Verifax copier system that actually was based on photography and contact printing. You made a negative master of the original, then used it to make contact prints (up to 4 or 6 per master) on photo paper.