Close Your Eyes.wmv - YouTube

And here I am a year older. Thanks, that was a good Birthday present. Lotsa great memories from back in the day.

Playing baseball with a ball covered with friction tape
Hockey in the park without pads (or a helmet) - Even the goalie
Finding a red wagon load of Coke bottles and trading them in for candy - AND the whippin' that followed.

The new shoes thing got me though. We got a pair of leather shoes at the beginning of the school year and wore them until the beginning of the next school year. One pair of Red Ball Jets for the summer and my dad's old skates for the winter.
Still had a blast

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In dog years I'm dead.

Iron on knee patches on our dungarees to cover the holes from playing marbles everyday at recess. Going to a record hop (you know, those black round things with a hole in the center). The first time dad allowed us to borrow the family car to go on a date. Your steady girlfriend wearing your letter jacket and your ring around her neck. That first motor bike which mom hated. Having to write " I will not talk in class" about a bazillion times on the blackboard after school. One potato, two potato, three potato four........

Treasure the memories of these things. They defined who we were and who we still are.

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S&W Armorer
Lost in the 50s

My mother was convinced running through the sprinkler could cause polio. (Don't ask me WHY she believed that.) But what she didn't know about didn't hurt her. (or my butt)

I didn't know a baseball was white with red stitching until I was about ten. Good times. Joe

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Wisdom chases me; I'm faster

When we lived in Cedar Falls, our house was right on the edge of the 'burbs; abutted corn fields and empty lots as far as the eye could see.

Kids would go out and just... play. Explore. Build weed forts, have dirt-clod wars, play cowboys and indians or war, ride bikes, play tag, hide-and-seek, catch frogs/tadpoles/crawdads down by the creek, whatever. Only 'structure' to it was rules we invented ourselves.

Because it was possible (and perfectly safe) for my sister and I in our pre-teen years to get well out of eyesight playing, my parents bought a brass ship's bell & mounted it by the back porch door. When that bell rang, you had a very short count to get home for dinner.

Funny thing is, other parents took to using that bell (wrung by my mom) to que their kids to come home too... the standing rule for most kids was "When you hear the (insert family name)'s bell, you git on home for dinner!"

It was pretty funny; that bell get struck and you'd swear there was an air-raid on; the street would go from kid-cluttered to vacant in seconds!

Two words: school clothes. And God help you if you played in them and tore' em...

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I used to be disgusted..

The alley was the kid's playground and where the men of the neighborhood socialized after work and on weekends in their garages, that opened into the alley. Porches were large and close enough together people could have conversations with next door neighbors. Everybody had the ball game on the radio in the summer. You could walk down the street and not miss an inning.

Every family in the neighborhood knew every other family. I'd eat at a friend's house on a whim, or they at mine. We would have block parties and the whole street would turn out. You could leave your doors unlocked. The milkman would leave those glass gallon bottles of milk right at the house. The mailman would stop in for a coffee. If sick enough, the doctor came to the house! Boy do I miss those times.

Boy I can relate to all of the above! I am curios to find out how our children will relate to their upbringing when they are our age? And what the times will be like?

That was great. I like to start my days with a laugh and I like to end them with something like this. A great song and great memories to fall asleep to.

Guess I'll say good night and log off till tomorrow.

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Real men love cats!

The local barber shop was the community "man cave" where men gathered and discussed manly things, (sports, politics, cars). If someone had a plumbing, electrical, or auto problem, usually there was someone there who could offer advice or a fix. The radio had either the news or the ball game on. The daily newspaper, Sports Afield, Field and Stream, Popular Mechanics and the Police Gazette were available while you waited, as well as a pile of comic books for the kids. Male barbers wearing white smocks who could play a pair of scissors like a typewriter, (remember those?), a straight razor was a tool of the trade and a large bottle of Wildroot Cream Oil was always at hand. A poster on the wall with 6-8 choices for a haircut. No women, stylists, perms or blow dryers.

Boy does that bring a flood of pleasant memories, both that version and the original from 1956. I was in Jr. High (it was just called 8th grade back then and you didn't graduate from it, you just hopefully passed it.) Listening to it is also somewhat sad as I compare my youth to that of the youth of today. We had absolutely no restrictions on our freedom other than chores, homework and bed time. In the summer my mother didn't expect to see us until supper and god forbid that we were underfoot in the house during the day. It was simple and it was sweet and it is long gone.

Interesting reading these posts, seems like our generation no matter what part of the country we were raised in pretty much went through the same thing with the same values. Good times for sure! Great memories.

And was it just me, or did every issue of the Police Gazette from 1946 to 1955 have an article claiming Hitler (or Martin Bormann, but mostly Hitler) was alive and living in Argentina?

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Oh well, what the hell.

I remember the snow forts each block would build and the other blocks would try and bring it down while being bombed with a ton of snowballs while defending it. We decided "why wait for snow?" and tunneled a fort in my Dads garden. Boy was he surprised ( and just a little mad) when he was planting some tomatoes and suddenly dropped about two feet down into our 'boy cave'.
Great fun growing up then, for sure.

Anybody else remembe the sound of coal going down the coal scuttle into the coal cellar in the house. Our house in Connecticut was heated by a coal furnace in the cellar, and my father would bank the fire each night.

I don't even know how to bank a coal fire.

I remember burning the fall leaves in the street, and an old man pushing a big cart down the road...he was a knife sharpener and would call out as he walked, drumming up business. These days both those activities would get you a citation.

don't you just love progress? remember all of this. it was the best of times.

Oh my yes, excellent!

At 67 I'm old enough to remember all of those things and I really enjoyed the trip back. Thanks for posting!

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Old Cop
LEO (Ret.)

I'm glad I lived in those times too. Remember the door to door Fuller Brush Man? He'd come in and open up that case and I'd stare in it fascinated by all the different contraptions. I also remember getting the chicken pox and the Dr. coming to the house. Those days are all long gone.

I remember it well, and I do know how to bank a coal fire in a furnace.

Also remember rag-and-junk men and guys selling produce, with mule-drawn carts, moving through alleys. Remember alleys? Not too many left anymore except in old parts of a city.

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Oh well, what the hell.

Watched it all and enjoyed it. Man just think of how it used to be. Good times. We never went in at the first of a picture show. If we went in about half way thru we would watch the Movietone news and comedys and watch the first half or maybe the whole show again.

I drank Koolade till after I was married and wife converted me partially to tea.

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James
On the Llano Estacado

Don't recall. I was into the comic books as a kid. Field & Stream or True magazine when I got older.

I remember each and every one of those; but, a question!

What is the Saturday morning cartoons they spoke of on TV??

My Saturday morning cartoons were at the movie house in town! We got the previews, newsreel, serial - oohhh, about a half hour of cartoons, and a double feature western movie. FOR A DIME..

That was all way before we ever heard of TV. Now, I'm OLD!!

We had a coal furnace a one pipe hot air system, no heat on the second floor, in the winter you didn't waste any time getting downstairs, we also had a wood stove in the kitchen,and we didn't have town water and living on the ocean, well water was brackish, we collected the rain water from the roof of the house and garage into a tank in the ground and my father would bring in water in gal jugs from his store for drinking. We didn't have a dial phone you just told the operator who you wanted to talk to or tell her the number. We were the first ones in the area to get a TV, my friends and I, after school would go to my house and turn it on and sit there looking at the test pattern, I watch my grand kids today and I feel sorry for them, we had two of them spend the summer with us this year, two girls and all they wanted to do was play with their phones, I was glad when it was time for them to go home, never again.