TODO YOU REMEMBER
WHEN...?
The girls had ugly gym uniforms, with tucked pants that ballooned out.
Chewing gum, passing notes, and
talking in class were the worst offenses in school.
All our male teachers wore neckties and female teachers wore high heels.
Handouts on mimeographed paper that we always sniffed before reading.
Making cootie-catchers.
Mr. Stopp.
Miss Moyer.
When girls grew up, their career options were mostly a choice of being a
wife/mother,
secretary, teacher, nurse, or librarian.
The hall to the cafeteria was lined with photographs of sports teams from long ago.
Girls put on nylons that came in two pieces and had seams in the
back. Then there were
those awful garter
belts.
Poodle skirts with chains.
Collars pulled up.
Dog collars around ankles.
White bucks.
High thick socks reaching almost to hems of pencil-slim skirts.
Baby doll pajamas.
Peter Pan collars.
Small scarves tied around necks.
Peg pants.
Mamie Eisenhower bangs.
Finger waves.
Pony tails.
Slicked back duck tails (DTs).
Strapless prom dresses made of netting.
Crinolines. Lots and lots of crinolines.
Spray earrings. Not many girls had
pierced ears. TOP
Hanging the laundry outside to dry.
It took five minutes for the TV warm up—if we had a TV.
We read books about sleuths Nancy
Drew and the Hardy Boys.
We pulled our chairs around the radio on weekends and listened to The Shadow,
The Green Hornet, Jack Benny, Our
Remember Queen
for a Day?
Sending in song requests
to WAMS?
Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school.
A quarter was a decent allowance.
Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because
no one
had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger.
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.
Telephone numbers with a word prefix... (Gilbert, Colony, etc.). Party lines.
Buying the latest hits on 45 RPM records, and hardly listening to Side 2.
Hi-Fi's and the first 33 1/3 rpm records.
Green Stamps.
Metal ice cubes trays with levers.
Our
first frozen
food.
TOP
A ‘57 Chevy was everyone's dream car... to cruise, peel out, lay rubber
or watch
submarine races. Then there were
those Hudsons and Studebakers.
We got our windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without
asking, all for
free, every time. And we didn't
pay for air. And we got trading stamps
or a set of
glasses to boot.
Kids who lived in Kennett walked home in the dark after the Friday night
movies and
were safe.
Cutting through neighbors’ yards without worrying about being scolded.
The Kennett Kandy Kitchen had a jukebox.
Newsreels before the movie. Saturday matinees.
Roller-skate keys. Skates that clamped onto the soles of our shoes.
Ice skating on the pond by the school.
Drive-in movies.
Cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle.
Decisions made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-moe.”
Catching the fireflies in a glass
jar.
Kool-Aid powder.
Candy cigarettes.
Wax Coke-shaped bottles.
Wax lips with colored sugar water inside.
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles.
Blackjack, Clove, and Teaberry chewing gum.
5-cent packs of baseball cards with that pink slab of bubble gum.
Jiffy Pop popcorn held over the stove burner.
Hardly any snack foods, other than Ritz Crackers, pretzels, potato chips,
French fries, candy bars.
Banana splits at the Homerette.
Ice cream cones at the Tasty Freeze or Twin Kiss.
Submarines from Sammy’s Sub Shop.
Picking up pizzas from the Pizzaria.
Those milkshakes at the Greenhill Drive-In that were so thick, we could
turn them upside
down and the straw stayed in. TOP
Barbara Gray would bring packs of chewing gum from her family’s store,
and hand them
out to classmates.
Margaret Farquhar Walker is cursed with still remembering the 23 personal
pronouns that
we had to memorize in Mrs. Bevins’ fifth grade English class (I,
my, mine, me, we, our, ours,
us, he, his, him, she, her, hers, it, its, you,
your, yours, they, their, theirs, them).
Why on
earth did we have to memorize these? More to the point, why does Margaret still
remember
them? Margaret also remembers that Ruthie had a horse named "Rocket!"
TOP