VISITING AUTHOR-ARTICLE

JANUARY 2010

 It's Official

I May Be Older Than Dirt

By Joseph Stein

President, American Aid Society, Chicago 

Forwarded by American Aid Society, Chicago

          WHAT A NOSTALGIC TRIP! I hope that you enjoy this, and, if you're too young to remember, ask someone who is in their 60s to explain. Who knows? You might develop a whole new friendship.

          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, 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 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 19.   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 6AM and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people.

          I was 21 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 6AM 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?