Remember When

I have noticed many recent Facebook posts featuring pictures of objects that are familiar to those of us of a certain age, like skate keys, Princess phones and juke boxes.  This trend got me thinking – reminiscing, really – about things I can remember from when I was young.  Most are not objects, but memories, and I'll bet many of you have similar ones.

I remember when...

…I related the cost of everything to the 50 cents an hour I earned by babysitting.  A record album (remember them?) cost $4, or 8 hours of babysitting.  My first suede jacket – actually, the first item of clothing I ever bought for myself – cost me 74 hours of hard labor.  I still have it.  I can't fit into it, of course – I think I was 13 or 14 when I bought it at Klein's in Woodbridge – but I keep it for nostalgia’s sake.

…I would go to the movies (the Cort Theater in Somerville, NJ) with $1 in my pocket (from two hours of babysitting, of course).  The movies, mostly double features and occasionally a triple feature, were 35 cents, popcorn was 25 cents and a soda cost a dime.  That left enough money for a stop at Wald Drugs where you could get six candies for 25 cents.   We would buy candy cigarettes, Hershey bars, lollypops, Bonamo’s Turkish Taffy, button candies that you ate off the paper and maybe a box of Juicy Fruits.  Hmmm, I think my weight problem can be traced back to my love of movies.

…there were seven TV stations - Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13.  Since the knob was always broken on our Stromberg Carlson black and white console, we had to change the channels with a pair of pliers.  I grew up thinking that tool was made just for that purpose.  Oh, and kids served as the remote.  When Mom or Dad wanted the channel changed, my sister or I had to get up and do it.  Of course we all had to watch the same thing, since there was only one TV in the house, and Mom and Dad had a little more influence on the decision than either my sister or I had.  Luckily, Mom loved “I Love Lucy,” so I grew up watching and loving Lucy, too.

…the Million Dollar Movie would air every night for a week on channel 9.  The theme song was the theme to “Gone With the Wind,” which I didn’t know until many years later, when I saw GWTW in a huge theater in Woodbridge, NJ.  Hey, that’s the Million Dollar Movie theme, I remember thinking.

…I got my first transistor radio.  It was a pink Sears Silvertone that cost about $25 dollars and it was my birthday gift when I turned 12.  The Four Seasons' "Sherry Baby" was the number one hit at the time and is still a favorite of mine.  Up until that time we had no functioning radio in the house, so how I grew up knowing so many songs is a mystery even to me.

…there were no organized playdates for kids.  When we got bored and told my mother we had nothing to do, we were told (in no uncertain terms) to "Go out and play."  If we protested, "But I don't have anyone to play with," my mother's response was, "Find someone."  No further instruction was needed.

…you left the house for the day to “go out and play” with someone and stayed out all day.  There was no need to call home.  My friends Stevie and Karen Rice knew they better get home when their mother whistled loudly for them to come in, and they scrambled back right away.  No cell phones, no texts and no worries.  The kids were out there somewhere, and they'd eventually find their way home. 

…to be occupied, all you needed was a ball or a set of jacks or even a coin.  We would be outside for hours, jumping rope, riding bikes, playing catch, hitting a coin with the ball or playing jacks.  Low tech, inexpensive, fun games, with no batteries required!  If we were stuck inside on a rainy day, there would be Monopoly marathons, or we’d use Silly Putty to copy the comics from the newspaper.  Play Doh was a little after my time, along with Sesame Street and After School Specials.

…the Princess phone was introduced.  Wow, that was a really cool thing, and only a few kids actually had "extensions" in their rooms.  Eventually, I got one, in a shade of red, that I think had pushbuttons instead of a dial.  High tech!  Kids today don’t even know how to use a phone with a dial because they have never seen one.

…phone numbers began with “exchanges” that were words.  If you lived in Somerville, you were “Randolph 2” or “Randolph 5,” later abbreviated as RA 2 or RA 5.  And there were only two area codes when they first came on the scene.  I am still a 908 girl. 

…we would leave the house for the day and never lock the door.  If we went away for a week at my great-aunt's shore house, we locked it then, but otherwise, it stayed unlocked.  I never felt unsafe, either.

…we were taught how to use the card catalog in the library.  I was thrilled to have access to the Encyclopedia Britannica, World Almanac or World Book.  There was so much information, all right there at my fingertips.

…I went to my first Yankee game.  It was 1959, the Yankees were honoring Yogi Berra, and my father and I (along with his friend and his son) sat out in the bleachers.  In front of us stretched the vast expanse of grass that was the outfield at Yankee Stadium, whose sheer size seemed impossible for 3 people to patrol.  One of them was Mickey Mantle.  I have rarely had a such a feeling of joy and wonder since seeing that cathedral of competition. 

…I thought Italian food was spaghetti and meatballs.  I never even heard of lasagne, ziti or chicken parm until I went to college.  No wonder I loved going to Andrea Lucibello's house so much.  Her mother made the best chicken parm ever. 

…there were two brands of sneakers – PF Flyers and Keds.  My father sold shoes for a living and swore by the arch support in Keds, so, despite the claim that PF Flyers could make you "run faster and jump higher," we were Keds kids.

…there were two brands of chocolates – Nestle's and Hershey.  I know there are many more and better brands now, but give me a Nestle bar or some Hershey Kisses and I am a happy girl.

…there were two brands of dungarees (not jeans) – Wranglers and Levis.  This was before the age of the GAP and before Brooke Shields declared that nothing came between her and her Calvins.   Life was infinitely less confusing when you didn’t have to decide between bootcut, straight leg, mid-rise, etc.

…we would take our lunch to school in a paper bag or in a lunch box with the Lennon Sisters or Wyatt Earp on it, unless it was a generic plaid design.

…we used paper bags to make book covers for our school books.  You could look in the front of the book and see a litany of names of students who had used that book before it was passed down to you.

…we played paper dolls (not "with" paper dolls; we played "paper dolls").  You'd cut the glamorous clothing off the sheets (some were perforated) and put them on the dolls.  I had a Dinah Shore-George Montgomery set that I loved.  After all, Dinah Shore was in my living room every week, so the least I could do was dress her.

…the “Wizard of Oz” aired once a year on TV, and you had better be on your best behavior or the threat of missing it loomed large. 

…banking in school.  The kids who were good in math were selected to be the "bankers" each week, to collect the dimes or quarters their classmates brought in and log them in their bankbooks.  If someone brought in a dollar for their bankbook, I knew they had to be rich.  I was good in math back in those days. 

…when we would run out of milk – which seemed to occur often – we would stop at a milk machine and buy a gallon to tide us over until the milk man came with our delivery.  The milk box – always used as a handy seat on the front porch – was where the milk was left, and we didn't worry about it going bad or being stolen.  There was also the Duggan man, delivering bread and death-defyingly sweet cupcakes, the egg lady, the fruit and vegetable guy, the Charles Chips guy, and the man who went around the neighborhoods offering to sharpen your knives. 

…stores were open only during the day, not at all in the evenings, and closed on Sundays –  my father's only day off from the shoe store where he worked.  To this day, my sister and I can't bring ourselves to shop on Labor Day without feeling guilty since Dad insisted that was a day when everyone – at least in retail – should be off.

…we had a Brownie camera.  Luckily for our family, I loved taking pictures even then, or we'd have no shots of my sister at all!  They were square, black and white pictures and when you would go to pick them up at Ostro's in Somerville, it was always a thrill to see how they came out.

…in high school, senior year, I'd eat lunch every day in downtown Somerville at Febo's with Cathy Cozzolongo and Ronni Katz.  I'd order a roast beef sandwich on rye, lettuce, no tomato or mayo, and a Coke.  It think it cost me 87 cents or some absurdly small amount.  We had about 45 minutes to get to Main Street, order, eat and get back to good old Somerville High School. 

…when there was a fire in my hometown, a loud horn would blow to let residents know where it was located.  We had a card on the refrigerator with a code on it:  3 blasts followed by 2 blasts followed by 3 blasts meant High Street and Bridge, for example (not accurate, I am sure).  Conversation in our house would come to a halt so we could count the whistles and run to check the card.  And at 1 PM every day, the same horn would blow.  We called it –quite naturally – the 1:00 whistle.  You did not want to be walking in front of the firehouse where the sound emanated when that blast went off.  Scared me to death more than once!

…we had to wear these incredibly dorky one-piece uniforms with snaps to gym class in high school, and the mean gym teacher cared less about our fitness level than she did about whether the damn thing had been washed and ironed – ironed!  I mean, you're about to do gym things, which only wrinkle this mini-jump suit anyway, so what's the big deal about ironing it, I wondered even then.  Not ironing your gym suit was considered an offense not quite on the order of chewing gum in class – punishable by the death penalty, I think – but close enough.

…speaking of ironing, you could open our refrigerator and find Dad’s shirts neatly rolled up on a shelf.  My mother would sprinkle them with water stored in a Coke bottle with a sprinkler top and put them in the refrigerator until she was ready to iron them.  This was before permanent press, and this technique allegedly kept the shirts from wrinkling excessively.  It was just odd to me to open the fridge for a drink and find Borscht and Dad’s shirts on the shelf. 

…the kids in your class were named Susie, Judy, Barbara and Linda, unless you went to Catholic school, where they were named Mary, Mary Margaret, Mary Grace, Mary Ann, etc.  The boys were Bobby and Billy and Joey and John.  There wasn't a single Emma, Madison, Brittany, Austin, Tyler or Collin anywhere to be found. 

…I remember when I thought the people who reminisced were really OLD.  Now I know that can’t possibly be true.