How old would you have to be?

[roster]

How old would someone be who could truthfully say all of the following:
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I was born before:

' television
' penicillin
' polio shots
' frozen foods
' Xerox
' contact lenses
' Frisbees and
' the pill




There were no:

' credit cards
' laser beams or
' ball-point pens




Man had not invented:

' pantyhose
' air conditioners
' dishwashers
' clothes dryers
' and the clothes were hung out to dry in the fresh air and
' man hadn't yet walked on the moon



Your Grandmother and I got married first, . . . and then lived together.

Every family had a father and a mother.

Until I was 25, I called every man older than me, 'Sir'.

And after I turned 25, I still called policemen and every man with a title, 'Sir.'

We were before gay-rights, computer- dating, dual careers, daycare centers, and group therapy.

Our lives were governed by the Ten Commandments, good judgment, and common sense.

We were taught to know the difference between right and wrong and to stand up and take responsibility for our actions.

Serving your country was a privilege; living in this country was a bigger privilege.

We thought fast food was what people ate during Lent.

Having a meaningful relationship meant getting along with your cousins.

Draft dodgers were people who closed their front doors when the evening breeze started.

Time-sharing meant time the family spent together in the evenings and weekends-not purchasing condominiums.



We never heard of FM radios, tape decks, CDs, electric typewriters, frozen yogurt, or guys wearing earrings.

We listened to the Big Bands, Jack Benny, and the President's speeches on our radios.

And I don't ever remember any kid blowing his brains out listening to Tommy Dorsey.

If you saw anything with 'Made in Japan ' on it, it was junk.

The term 'making out' referred to how you did on your school exam.

Pizza Hut, McDonald's, and instant coffee were unheard of.

We had 5 &10-cent stores where you could actually buy things for 5 and 10 cents.

Ice-cream cones, phone calls, rides on a streetcar, and a Pepsi were all a nickel.

And if you didn't want to splurge, you could spend your nickel on enough stamps to mail 1 letter and 2 postcards.

You could buy a new Chevy Coupe for $600, . . . but who could afford one?

Too bad, because gas was 11 cents a gallon.

In my day:

' 'grass' was mowed,
' 'coke' was a cold drink,
' 'pot' was something your mother cooked in and
' 'rock music' was your grandmother's lullaby.
' 'Aids' were helpers in the Principal's office,
' ' chip' meant a piece of wood,
' 'hardware' was found in a hardware store and
' 'software' wasn't even a word.



And we were the last generation to actually believe that a lady needed a husband to have a baby. No wonder people call us 'old and confused' and say there is a generation gap... and how old do you think this man is?

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I bet you have this old man in mind...you are in for a shock!

Read on to see -- pretty scary if you think about it and pretty sad at the same time.

This man would only be 59 years old.

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That has been passed around by email. Is it all true that none of those things existed 59 years ago? I thought air conditioning, TV and penicillin were older than that.

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A few things Rooster remembers about heating with coal:

-We had in one bedroom what was called a laundry heater - a small stove that burned coal.

-Pot belly stove: Take a spent .22 shell and coat it with pork fat. Stick it to the side of a hot pot belly stove. The heat will vaporize the pork fat and rotate the shell spinning it rapidly around the side of the stove. Sometimes the burning pork fat will whistle a little bit as it goes. Why didn't our parents beat us more often?

-There's a story from my first grade about the pot belly stove being kicked over and catching the room on fire. That one will have to wait for another day.

Here is something I miss and wonder about. On the farm, when we called the dogs, we would holler loudly and repeatedly something that sounded like, "Huyeah, Huyeah". My wife, who grew up in the suburbs, says she has never heard this and if I ever holler this in our high income neigborhood, she will beat me.

Did anyone else call the dogs like this? How do you spell it?

[Wulfman]

Hmmmmm.......

I think SOME of those things are older than that. But, from a commercial standpoint, maybe not. I'm approaching 61 and remember the days before we got televisions but I think "television" was actually invented a few years earlier......nobody had any sets to watch it, but I think the concept was there earlier.
I also question "frozen foods". There were refrigerators made back in the 30's that had freezers (albeit small) in them. But, yeah, for things like "frozen TV dinners".

Penicillin?.....not according to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin


Den

[carbonman]

Before we had a TV, we only had the radio.
I remember Saturday nights listening to Gun Smoke and the Grand Ole Opry.
We read books and played games.
I was 7 when we got a TV, 1958.

We didn't have a cloths dryer until I was in Jr. high...
the cloths were always hung out to dry.....except in the winter,
when they were hung in the basement.

I remember the first Golden Arches. $.15 hamburgers.
The 5&dime was called Woolworth's. It was a treat to go there for lunch.
Sit at the "lunch counter" and have egg salad sandwich and chips.

Everyone burned there paper garbage in the back yard barrel.
The can barrell was hauled to the local "dump" once a month.
What fun that was to go to the "dump" and "scrounge".
I brought a set of false teeth home one time and my mom just about fainted.

Ever had a Green River at the drug store soda counter??

I'll be 58 in March.

[freepostg]

I remember my Dad referring to a fridge as an "ice box" and the garbage can as an "ash can". He used to tell me about how they "took the clinkers" out of the furnace (coal) He was born in 1915....gone now. Gosh I wish i could live for just a week back then!

[bap40]

I remeber visiting my Grandparents in winter and going down into the basement with my Grandpa and watching him shovel coal into the furnace for the night.

Damn, getting old!

[LoQ]

My grandparents used coal, too, but they had no basement. Each fall they had a truck deliver a load of coal which was just dumped outside the house. From there it was brought into the house in a coal bucket. They had no furnace; instead they had a potbellied stove in the dining room, and they burned the coal in that. It was supposed to heat the whole house, ha, but I can recall standing in front of that stove with the side of me facing the stove just about to roast and the side of me facing away from the stove freezing cold. The only solution was constant rotation, which helped, but it was a miserable dance. Coal burns very hot.

They didn't have plumbing. They had a cistern for water with a hand-pump inside the house. I used to beg my mother to let me pump it, but I could never get the water to come out unless she primed it first for me. I wasn't strong enough to deliver enough force to the handle.

As a kid I always thought it was great to be there with my grandparents. When I look back on it now, I'm appalled at the near poverty of it. But it was clean and tidy, and fun for us kids.

[freepostg]

I just love these stories. I was told by my dad that ice was taken from the local inland lake in the winter and stored. A horse used to pull the delivery coach down the street to make deliveries throughout the year. What an experience. Then again, if you don't know any different, it was normalcy!

[rested gal]

I remeber visiting my Grandparents in winter and going down into the basement with my Grandpa and watching him shovel coal into the furnace for the night.

I remember that, too! Well, not your grandfather, but mine doing that.

But THIS is what's really hard to believe...that I really was born before pantyhose were invented!!!
How could that be???!!

[Georgio]

R.G. when did they invent pantyhose anyway? We had a coal furnace when I was a kid....I'm 2 months younger that Carbonman....!

The milk man used to leave your order at your back door.....a pint of cream and half gal of milk, or chocolate milk or whatever you wanted....

Looking at today's events, it's hard not to miss those simpler times....

[kopoloff]

Rooster - I'm not sure you're right with some of these items, and at the risk of being un PC, here's my comments


' air conditioners The British had slaves to wave fans
' dishwashers wives (still got one of these as a back up)
' clothes dryers open fires (ditto)
' and the clothes were hung out to dry in the fresh air do this to this day, although the bushfire smoke makes them a bit smelly.
' man hadn't yet walked on the moon have to think about this one

LOL


K

[roster]

[packitin]

deleted

[Paul56]

I remember going to school with the coal man's kids.

I remember when there was such a thing as milk delivery, we called him the milk man... and no I did not go to school with his kids.

[Bonnie]

I remember the "ragman". He used to come down the alley with a horse drawn cart shouting "rags!' (collecting them, not selling them ) Because I was such a horse nut I'd run out hoping to pet the horse.

We had trolley driven buses and I remember the driver getting out of the bus after going around the corner when the pole things came off the line, going behind the bus to guide them back onto the overhead lines.

And we also heated with coal. I remember my dad telling who was ever closeset to the "thing" on the wall to "check" the furnace. This meant turning something to do something but I really can't remember what it did. Anyone remember that?

[JimW203]

[quote="rooster"]How old would someone be who could truthfully say all of the following:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was born before:

' television
' penicillin
' polio shots
' frozen foods
' Xerox
' contact lenses
' Frisbees and
' the pill

This man would only be 59 years old.


The highlighted item shifts the equation by about two decades - Clarence Birdseye invented flash freezing of foods in 1923. The first packaged frozen foods were sold in 1930 under the name "Birds Eye Frosted Foods." No, I was not alive then and would not be for another eight years.

Jim Wingo