At my advanced age I can be one of these grandparents talking about "those good old days". But they weren't, you know. Those days gone by were simpler, I think, certainly less expensive, and kids didn't have so much "stuff". But nostalgia is funny, making things past seem better - more fun than they actually were - viewed now in retrospect.
Take the "graveyard phosphate" we kids enjoyed (before Coke and Pepsi and all the other drinks got so big). Saturday movie "matinees" actually started at 10 a.m. and lasted three hours minimum. We enjoyed a double feature, cartoon, comedy, coming attractions and newsreel - for a dime. After the show we trooped across the street to what I can only label as a "greasy spoon" diner, named the Coney Island, for a little repast. This included the "phosphate", a soda counter drink I haven't heard of in many years.For another dime the "soda jerk" squirted the phosphate into a large glass, then went down the line of flavor spigots, adding a squirt of each. Thus the facetious name "graveyard".
The 15-cent hot dogs there came with chili and onion bits slopped inside the bun. These, sometime later, would be called "chili dogs". Of course we had already had a nickel bag of hot-off-the-popper popcorn and a nickel candy bar or two during the movie, so the cash outlay mounted up to about 50 cents.
Extra nickels went into the mini-jukeboxes installed in each booth at the diner. The cacophony from each jukebox playing a different tune simultaneously was not a musical treat, but it was part of the Saturday habit. And a 50 cents outlay was well worth it to parents who then knew where we were and what we were doing the entire Saturday!
Black licorice "whips" were favorites at the penny-candy showcase. They are still around, but they're shorter and sell in packages for more serious money. Even priced at a penny, though, we often had to resort to a common substitute. We would haunt road construction sites and glom onto chunks of the road-covering tar to chew. It tasted terrible, but that wasn't the point. It was chewable and our parents hated for us to chew it. Especially when we let it get too dry and it bonded onto our teeth. It looked terrible and almost had to wear off. Sometimes, to keep us from chewing it, they'd give us a nickle for a package of Black Jack gum. Haven't seen that around in quite a spell either.
Other penny candies then popular were the mini-bottles made of wax that enclosed a few drops of a Kool-Aid-like drink, red-tipped white stick candies supposedly resembling cigarettes, and Red Hots, small red spicy chewables.The red coating, when wetted with spit, could be spread on the lips, so young girls loved to pretend it was something their mothers wouldn't allow, lipstick.
Another source of summer sustenance was the ice wagon. It was a horse-pulled wagon filled with huge ice chunks that the delivery man chipped to ordered sizes, hoisted with metal tongs onto a leather shoulder apron, and carried into kitchen "ice boxes" (later called Frigidaires by one progressive company). We would pick the wayward chips out of the wagon and suck them on especially hot days.
I mention Biscuit Soup on occasion when breakfasting out and it surprises me that waitresses have never heard of it. It was passed down to me from my grandmother to my mother to me. It was common during the '20s depression, as a way to use up days-old biscuits. Heat up a few cups of milk in a pan, with a couple spoonfuls of butter and a few shakes of salt and pepper in it, drop in a couple biscuits. In a couple minutes you have delectable biscuits awash in buttery milk. I still prepare it.
Back an era, nuts were not sold shelled and packaged as they are now. Mixed nuts, usually on holidays, were merely put out in bowls, along with a set of picks and a nutcracker, and eating them became a do-it-yourself chore. Brazil nuts or "niggertoes" (so called long before language niceties banned such a name) were.tough to crack, so the youngsters left those for the adults, which was perfectly fine with the adults who thought they went very well with the "home brew" that often came up from cellars for clan holiday get-togethers.
Every boy who got his first jackknife learned to play Mumbledepeg with it, usually from his dad. It then went with the boy wherever he went. The more blades it had, the more precious it was for bragging rights. The game consisted of placing the blade point onto various parts of the anatomy, holding the knife in place with a finger on the base of its upright handle, then whipping the hand forward and down so the knife would flip and stick into the lawn. Even with only two players the game could last an entire lazy afternoon since it started with flipoffs from the feet, then progressed to the knees, hips, fingers, elbows (it paid to be ambidextrous), shoulders, chin, nose, ears and (very carefully) the head. The better players always wanted to play the "miss and start over" rule.
Other "toys", I guess they could be called, were discarded pieces of neon tubing, which could often be found in trash bins behind sign shops. Straight pieces made great dried pea or spitwad shooters. Curved pieces took a lot more practice and skill.
Making darts was another skill we learned. We took a burned wooden matchstick (matches, for lighting wood stoves, sold in boxes), cut slits in an X across the non-lighting end with our jackknives, took a pair of pliers and forced the threading end of a needle into the other end of the stick, and tied it in place with a number of loops of thread around the stick where the needle was implanted. Then we cut two short strips of heavy paper to fit into the X slits, to serve as flight guides. An empty egg crate made a better, and safer, target than a playmate. We used to hunt flies with them, not too successfully. A dart with a couple inked hashmarks on it, though, was good for a week's bragging rights by its owner.
No comments:
Post a Comment