If you really want to set me off, start pining for the ‘good old days.’ I run into more and more people lately who seem to think that there was some golden age ‘way back when,’ during which time everything was just oh so perfect, and all of our problems could be solved if only we could return to this more innocent time.
Well, friends, I was born seventy-six plus years ago, which means that I was born and grew into my teens before over ninety percent of you were born, so that qualifies me as someone who remembers the ‘good old days.’
Let me tell you what the ‘good old days’ were really like.
Until 1957, I lived in a house that had no running water or indoor toilet facilities. We obtained our water from a well in our backyard and the ‘facilities’ were in a small, one-hold privy some fifty yards from the back porch. Given the number of poisonous snakes, spiders, and scorpions living in the area of the country where I grew up, during warm weather it was not advisable to have to ‘go’ after dark.
Even during daylight hours you never knew what was lurking in the old ‘outhouse.’ Actually, it wasn’t all that safe inside the house. When I was ten, I stepped on a scorpion on my way to the kitchen one morning. My foot was so swollen I couldn’t wear shoes for a week.
And, speaking of getting sick, our little town had one doctor. He made house calls, but you might have to wait a few hours for him to show up. The nearest thing approaching a hospital was a clinic in the county seat ten miles away. Of course, my family didn’t own a car, so you had to find someone who did if you had to go there.
Oh, did I mention, we didn’t get a telephone (a party line that we shared with fifteen other families) until 1960? So, if you had to get to the hospital in the middle of the night—good luck. When I was young I remember that most children were born at home, and forget the epidurals for the pain, just bite down on this folded rag.
Do you like your entertainment options these days? Your DVRs, CD players, streaming services and hundreds of cable channels to choose from – oh, and don’t let me forget music streaming services.
When I was a boy, we had vacuum tube radios with a limited selection of stations and an old, small-screen black and white television that picked up three channels, provided the wind hadn’t knocked your antenna out of kilter, forcing someone to have to climb up on the roof and readjust it.
If you want to know something these days, you just Google it, right? Home computers didn’t exist in the ‘good old days.’ For a school science project in 1961, I build an analog computer. A clunky think that worked by moving little pins from one slot to another.
If you wanted information, you went to the library, provided your little town had one—ours didn’t, so that meant a thirty-mile trip to a larger town that did have a library, keeping your fingers crossed all the way that they would have the book you needed.
When you’re tired of cooking at home, even though fast food is not the healthiest option, regardless of where you live you have dozens of dining options. Until I graduated from high school in 1962, the only dining out options in my home town were the greasy hamburgers at the truck stop café on the edge of town and the Dairy Queen in town.
The only thing good about either was that you could buy a burger and greasy fries for a quarter and your drink was six cents. Sounds cheap, doesn’t it. I remember the average wage being a dollar an hour. I worked during high school, a night job that sometimes earned a bit more than the dollar an hour—on a real long and arduous night I could earn fifteen dollars. Nowadays only in the poorest countries would you find anyone working for such a paltry amount.
Are you still longing for the ‘good old days’? Did you pay attention to anything I just said? – NWI
