A walk down memory lane.....

Yep, I was there in the 50's. Produce in the grocery store was RIPE. Chiquita was the worst thing that ever happend to the fruit and vegetable industry.

Our phone ring was two shorts and a long ring. Our telephone operator's name (believe it or not) was Sarah.

The front door and back door also had a screen door, aluminum doors did not come along until the 60's. We had storm screens on the windows in the spring.

There were no hydraulic lifts at the gas stations but there was a two metal track ramp that you drove the car upon that was about 4 or 5 foot off the ground. Gas was 11 cents per gallon in the late 50's.

Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison, Neil Sedaka, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Big Bopper, the Everly Brothers. Dances were caller "Bops". "Live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory", "honey comb", "your cheatin' heart", "hot rod Lincoln".

Whenever a neighbor cleared pasture of trees, the trees were piled up into one huge pile and all the neighbors came from miles around and had a weiner roast.

In the fall we were allowed to take off from school to pick cotton or pick pecans.

Everyone hunted quail, rabitts, squirrels, deer. And i mean "everyone". You could hunt anywhere. The land owners did not mind (everyone knew the difference between a cow and a quail!). I was given my own 410 shotgun whenever I was 5 years old (I still have it). I was allowed to hunt alone at age 6.

Coka Cola was sold from a red Coke dispenser that had a handle on the outside and the pop bottles were very thick. You could make quite a bit of cash as a kid by picking up the empties along side of the road (2 cent deposit/return). Mom & Pop grocery stores and the owners lived in the back or above.

People littered along side the highway like crazy. Toss out big sacks of trash, everywhere.

Kids NEVER called an adult by their first name. It was always "Mr." or "Mrs."

A man never went into a friend's house if only his friend's wife was home. Never!
People were married forever. Divorced people were avoided. You never dated a girl or boy from a divorced family.

People played dominos.
Coffee was the social drink.

Beer joints had a very huge pile of empty beer cans our back. The pile was most usually higher than the ridge of the roof of the joint.

Football was brutal! At the end of each football game that was televised, the crowds descended upon the football field and fought, brawled, tore down the goalposts, and hurt as many of the other spectators as possible. Professional football players would break out into a fight many times during each game. It made hockey look tame. These were the Lions, Packers, Bears, etc.

Men changed the oil in their own cars. Tuned up their own cars.

To get good TV reception you must go outside with a pipe wrench and turn the antenae toward the direction of the station in some big town.

Weather men were a joke. Whenever a tornado came along, you went to the cellar.

Young drivers put "baby moon" hubcaps and curb feelers on their cars.

All boys had a BB gun and a sling shot.

Howdy Doody, Pinky Lee, The Mickey Mouse Club, Gunsmoke, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy. L'il Abner, Red Rider.

I was James Dean!

The most common proposal of marriage was "Your WHAT?!?". If a gal got pregnant, she was not allowed to go to high school any longer. Married girls were not allowed to continue to go to high school.

pinedust wrote:

The Viking wrote: Or one of our favotires was to call people and tell them we were with the phone company and there were problems with the lines so we would ask them to blow real hard into the phone. When they did, we said, 'Thanks, it should work now, you just blew all the bird sh*t off the wires' and then die laughing and hang up.

rofllol rofllol You really did that?

I remember Blue Chip Stamps, S&H Green stamps, gas wars, nickel ice cream cones at Thrifty, $1 fishing reals at Longs Drugs (both of those may have been a California thing), 3 plays for a quarter pinball, rotary phones, listening to Giants baseball games on a crystal radio from a kit, playing cards and a clothes pin in the spokes of my sting ray, playing doctor, writing everything down that happened on Gunsmoke when my dad had to work late, way too much poison oak, small town parades where people carried little American flags, lemon-aid and kool-aid stands, mean dogs, Lincoln Logs, going for rides in the car to "look at the hippies", building tree houses, playing baseball in the street and never keeping score, and whole sacks of candy for 35 cents.

Yes, it was our favorite one to do. And Thanks for all the extra memories you just added. I love that list. Really takes me back.

Major Bean are you my country cousin?

I remember having a balsa wood plane with a rubber band and propellor. I think it was called Little Dipper and cost 49 cents. You wind up the propeller and lot and then launch the plane and it flew around on its own. I think I had every one of these at one time or another.



I remember when we'd get heavy rain during the summer in Dallas all the neighborhood kids would put on their swim trunks and play in the street and lay down in the gutters as the rainwater rushed by them.

We'd stay out and play into the dark in the summer and come home when our mothers would go out on the porch and yell our names down the street.

I remember catching fireflies in a jar and mashing the firefly tails onto our hands to make then glow in the dark for a little while.

My Mother never knew where we were, they mounted a big dinner bell, and rang it for us to come home, even the dog answered.

LOL, I remember those balsa wood planes, on the tail it said "Bend Oregon", I wondered what the oregon was and why should I bend it to make it fly better.

major bean wrote: Yep, I was there in the 50's. Produce in the grocery store was RIPE. Chiquita was the worst thing that ever happend to the fruit and vegetable industry.

Our phone ring was two shorts and a long ring. Our telephone operator's name (believe it or not) was Sarah.

The front door and back door also had a screen door, aluminum doors did not come along until the 60's. We had storm screens on the windows in the spring.

There were no hydraulic lifts at the gas stations but there was a two metal track ramp that you drove the car upon that was about 4 or 5 foot off the ground. Gas was 11 cents per gallon in the late 50's.

Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Roy Orbison, Neil Sedaka, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Big Bopper, the Everly Brothers. Dances were caller "Bops". "Live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory", "honey comb", "your cheatin' heart", "hot rod Lincoln".

Whenever a neighbor cleared pasture of trees, the trees were piled up into one huge pile and all the neighbors came from miles around and had a weiner roast.

In the fall we were allowed to take off from school to pick cotton or pick pecans.

Everyone hunted quail, rabitts, squirrels, deer. And i mean "everyone". You could hunt anywhere. The land owners did not mind (everyone knew the difference between a cow and a quail!). I was given my own 410 shotgun whenever I was 5 years old (I still have it). I was allowed to hunt alone at age 6.

Coka Cola was sold from a red Coke dispenser that had a handle on the outside and the pop bottles were very thick. You could make quite a bit of cash as a kid by picking up the empties along side of the road (2 cent deposit/return). Mom & Pop grocery stores and the owners lived in the back or above.

People littered along side the highway like crazy. Toss out big sacks of trash, everywhere.

Kids NEVER called an adult by their first name. It was always "Mr." or "Mrs."

A man never went into a friend's house if only his friend's wife was home. Never!
People were married forever. Divorced people were avoided. You never dated a girl or boy from a divorced family.

People played dominos.
Coffee was the social drink.

Beer joints had a very huge pile of empty beer cans our back. The pile was most usually higher than the ridge of the roof of the joint.

Football was brutal! At the end of each football game that was televised, the crowds descended upon the football field and fought, brawled, tore down the goalposts, and hurt as many of the other spectators as possible. Professional football players would break out into a fight many times during each game. It made hockey look tame. These were the Lions, Packers, Bears, etc.

Men changed the oil in their own cars. Tuned up their own cars.

To get good TV reception you must go outside with a pipe wrench and turn the antenae toward the direction of the station in some big town.

Weather men were a joke. Whenever a tornado came along, you went to the cellar.

Young drivers put "baby moon" hubcaps and curb feelers on their cars.

All boys had a BB gun and a sling shot.

Howdy Doody, Pinky Lee, The Mickey Mouse Club, Gunsmoke, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy. L'il Abner, Red Rider.

I was James Dean!

The most common proposal of marriage was "Your WHAT?!?". If a gal got pregnant, she was not allowed to go to high school any longer. Married girls were not allowed to continue to go to high school.

LMAO at the marriage proposal. Those are some great ones! Many a little before my time but most were still the same in my small town.

We learned to drive at 8 so we could get to the field.

We would be driving tractors and working the fields for 8-10 hours a day in the summer and no one called child services on our parents.

At different times throughout the summer, we would all as a family take a day or two to pick all the vegetables out of the garden and can them. We had a basement full of fresh veggies that we canned that would get us through the winter.

We would have lunch brought to us by our mom right at noon.

If we knew we would be close enough to the house, we would plan on driving home for all of us to sit and eat together from 12-1.

When we wern't working in the summer, we would drive to grandma and grandpa's house a few miles down the road where we could all sit and talk while they had their daily morning coffee break around 10 and we would get cookies.

And like you said, we all had guns and hunted from a very young age.

All Pickups had gun racks in the back window, with at least a rifle and a shotgun. I can't even imagine how many times you would get stopped between here and Denver if you had those in your back windows today.

We use to trap and hunt any animal we could and sell the furs to make enough extra money that the farm couldn't provide.

We use to know all of our neighbors for 10 miles around at least.

There was so much more people did as families back then. Technology has really distanced the personal contact that families use to have.

lol I forgot all about driving tractors at a young age, but I was 10, not 8.
I did get a Winchester 30-30 and and 12 Gauge for my 12th birthday. That was the minimum age for hunting, but it was also the year you had to have a license to fish.

I lived outside of Craig in the 70's. My brother and I played all day all over the place. There is nothing like being a kid in the mountains. My fondest memories were of catching frogs all day at the pond and fishing. My kids remember the camping trips they had as kids. We camped about 2 months a year and that is what kept them grounded. Video games have changed that. Technology can be good and bad.

Geez, all my mom would let me have at that age was a BB gun.