Grumpa Joe's Place

HOW’S THIS FOR NOSTALGIA?

It took three minutes for the TV to warm up

   
Nobody owned a purebred dog

When a quarter was a decent allowance? And made with real Silver!

You’d reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?  Made with real copper! Looking to see if it was a 1943 copper penny!

Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?

And the ad photo was considered risqué.

You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time
And you didn’t pay for air And, you got trading stamps to boot

and gas was eighteen cents a gallon.

Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?

Not to mention Cracker Jacks!

It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents. 

I treated my parents to their first restaurant meal at my college graduation. My Mom’s reaction? “I could have fed the family for the whole month for what you just paid for lunch.”

They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed…and they did it!

That was a sure cure for Attention Deficit Disorder.

When a 57 Chevy was everyone’s dream car…
to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady

It still is.

No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the

ignition, and the doors were never locked?

Definitely not recommended today. Nine out of ten cars stolen in Frankfort, IL are left unlocked in the drive with the keys in them.

Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like,

‘That cloud looks like a…’?

Playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?

Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had

yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?

And with all our progress, don’t you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time

and savor the slower pace, and share it with the children of today.

When being sent to the principal’s office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the

student at home?

Today, the neighbors will report you to DCFS for spanking your kid.

Basically, we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn’t because of drive-by shootings,

drugs, gangs, etc Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!

But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.

   
as well as summers filled with bike rides, Hula hoops, and visits to the pool, and

eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
   

Didn’t that feel good, just to go back and say,
‘Yeah, I remember that’?

   
I am sharing this with you today because it ended with a Double Dog Dare to pass it on. To remember what a Double Dog Dare is, read on. And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care.

Send this on to someone who can still remember Howdy Doody and The Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow knows, Nellie Bell , Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk.

Candy cigarettes

Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside.

Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles.
Coffee shops with Table Side Jukeboxes.
Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum.

Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.

Newsreels before the movie.

   
Telephone numbers with a word prefix…( Yukon 2-601).   Or, some of us remember when there were just 4 numbers with no word prefix at all.  And, nearly everyone had a party line.

Peashooters

Hi-Fi’s & 45 RPM records.

78 RPM records!

S&H Green Stamps.

Mimeograph paper.

The Fort Apache Play Set.  

Do You Remember a Time When…

Decisions were made by going ‘eeny-meeny-miney-moe’?  
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, ‘Do Over!’?  
‘Race issue’ meant arguing about who ran the fastest?  

Catching The Fireflies Could Happily Occupy An Entire Evening?  

It wasn’t odd to have two or three ‘Best Friends’?  

Having a Weapon in School meant being caught with a Slingshot? 

Except it wasn’t a polished wood model like the one shown. It was home made out of a tree branch and a slice of rubber from a car inner tube.  

Saturday morning cartoons weren’t 30-minute commercials for action figures?

‘Oly-oly-oxen-free’ made perfect sense?

Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?  

The Worst Embarrassment was being picked last for a team?

Uniforms were for sissies.   

   
War was a card game?

Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?  

Taking drugs meant orange – flavored chewable aspirin?

Milligrams were still a European term.   

Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?  

If you can remember most or all of these, Then You Have Lived!!!!!!!  
   
Pass this on to anyone who may need a break

from their ‘Grown-Up’ Life.

I Double-Dog-Dare-Ya!