Are You Older than Dirt?

OLDER THAN DIRT

‘Hey Dad,’ one of my kids asked the other day, ‘What was your
favourite 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, travelled out of the country or had a credit card. In
their later years they had something called a store card. The card
was good only at Farmers (now Myers).

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, but my grandparents had one before that. It
was, of course, black and white, but they bought a piece of coloured
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 13 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.

We didn’t have a car until I was 15. Before that, the only car in our family was my grandfather’s Ford. He called it a ‘machine.’


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 at 4 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 on 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 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 tomato sauce 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.

Older Than Dirt Quiz:

How many do you remember?
Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about.
Ratings at the bottom.

1. Choo Choo bar
2. Drive ins
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soft drink machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or milk bars with table side juke boxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with foil
Stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. Packards
10. Blue flashbulb
11. Telephone numbers with 2 letters and 4 numbers
12. Peashooters
13. Wash tub wringer
14. 78 RPM records
15. Metal ice trays with lever
16. Studebakers
17. Cracker night
18. Using hand signals for cars without turn signals
19. Bread delivered by horse and cart
20. Head lights dimmer switches on the floor
21. Ignition switches on the dashboard
22. Heaters mounted on the inside of the wall
23. Real ice boxes
24. Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards
25. Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner

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 the best part of
my life.

Don’t forget to pass this along!!
Especially to all your really OLD friends..

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