From Here & Back Again
By Jim Coufal
(Cazenovia, NY) Older generations look back and tend to think the younger generation is going to hell. It seems like we would have been burning if that was true. We don’t look at statistics or other empirical data, we just think of the “good old days,” whether they really were or not.
What follows is some random nostalgia, made without any judgments. It’s my nostalgia and I recognize everyone’s will not be the same. You’ll have to forgive me for the “when I was a kid,” which I use because it is the easiest way to say it.
When I was a kid, our moments of free time were outside, which we dashed to meet with great energy. If we left to go outside in the morning, we might be out of the house until dusk, and sometimes later. Maybe we’d have made a quick stop for lunch or caught a sandwich at a friend’s house. Our whole life was a play date.
Our earliest athletics were kick-the-can or dodge ball or kick ball or hide-and-seek, the latter sometimes turning into flashlight tag. These were played in the road in front of your house or in an empty lot. I lived at a time when the community raised the children. If you got a cut, you didn’t need to run home, you asked a neighborhood mom for a Band-Aid, and she took care of you. Girls and boys all joined in. The girls were mysterious creatures then.
That has never changed.
When you finished the day, you looked at your ankles and there would be a pound of dirt on each one. After your bath, it was a mark of honor to have a two-inch wide bathtub ring, and you would get the cleanser and sponge and clean it up. The wash cloth was already as dirty as it would get from having scrubbed your ankles.
When I was a kid, there was no Little League or Pop Warner League or cheerleaders.. We organized our own “pick-up” games. For baseball, most everybody had a glove, someone had a bat, we played in sneakers, no spikes, and we played without an umpire. We’d argue about balls and strikes or base outs, but without fights, coming to some kind of gentlemen’s agreement, almost intuitively.
If you wanted an “away game” you’d call some friends from another neighborhood and arrange it. No parents involve: you’d ride your bike or take a public bus.
Football was played without helmet or pads, and I didn’t know what a jock strap was until I played high school football. No touch games, we played tackle, and somehow there were no concussions or torn ACL’s, but there were a lot of sore shoulders and bruised thighs.
Until you got to be one of them, you competed with the “big kids” for the one athletic field, and you always lost. So we’d find an empty lot, get permission and build our own field, with bumps and dips and many places to trip or have a ball take a crazy bounce.
When I was a kid, there were relatively few choices of a cold breakfast cereal; Wheaties, Cheerios, Corn Flakes, Bran Flakes (the latter – YUCK – for old people), and a few others. They were unsweetened, so you piled your own sugar on them and got scolded for using too much.
When I was a kid, there were two newspapers a day delivered to the house: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I gravitated to the sports section and the funny papers, as we called them then, but I also read the news and other sections.
Before television, there was radio for news, but more for our evening’s entertainment. We’d gather around the radio with a bowl of popcorn popped in a pan with butter to listen to The Great Gildersleeve, Fibber McGee and Molly, the Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, a baseball game or a boxing match. It all played in the theater of the mind.
Then television came as a little black-and-white screen that came on in the morning and went off in the evening to the sound of the National Anthem. Otherwise it sat quietly displaying a “test-pattern.” Sometimes we’d sit and watch the test pattern, waiting for a program to come on.
TV coverage of sports and other events was just getting started, and variety shows, sit-coms and others were broadcast live, so you often got more than you bargained for, especially with Tim Conway. The Ed Sullivan Show, the Milton Berle Show, the Red Skelton Show and others were not to be missed.
Speaking of home delivery, milk was also brought to your “milk-box,” which was just big enough that, in my early years, I could slither through it if the house door was locked. The cream on top of the milk was for the adults’ coffee, unless I got to it first and used it on my cereal. Me bad, but it good.
My older brother (much older) had a coupe with a rumble seat. It was a thrill to be chosen to ride the rumble. Our sedans had front and back doors that opened in the opposite direction of one another, and the front windows had “window-vents,” which was our earliest air conditioning. I remember the transition cars went through from all being stick-shift to having the option of automatic-shift. Wow, what was the world coming to?
For trash removal we had an old, grizzly-bearded, sloe-eyed man driving a horse pulled wagon, making the plaintive call, “Rags, rags,” except in his case it came out “Rachs, Rachs.” It was wartime, and the cloth was recycled, although we didn’t know that word then. Two-bits for a pile of old rags seemed like a fortune, and if we were good, Mom or Dad would let us have it. We kids also collected milkweed pods for the kapok as more of the wartime effort.
Alzheimer’s disease, HIV, Lyme disease and others weren’t a problem, if even known, but measles, mumps, rheumatic fever and especially polio were scourges. When one was cured, we thought all our troubles were over.
When I started this, I expected to cover high school and college years, too, but kid-hood just kept popping up; maybe another time.
It’s not for me to make judgments as to whether things were good or better then, I leave that to you. All I can say is that’s some of the ways I remember my childhood. And if you ask why I wrote it, the best I can say is that I had an itch.
Jim Coufal of Cazenovia is a part-time philosopher and full-time observer of global trends. He can be reached at madnews@m3pmedia.com.