A Friday Night's Amusement

I am too tired to think clearly enough to write something thoughtful or inspiring.  But I am itching to do something.  So I am challenging you to check the <AGE BAROMETER>.  It's easy, just add up the number of things from the list below that you remember.  (Not that you heard of, that you remember.)  I'll supply the key to the barometer at the end, and even reveal to you my own measure.

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed bottles
5. Coffee shops with table side jukeboxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive - 6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with levers
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulbs
20. Beanie and Cecil
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

 

Got your total items remembered?  Okay, here's the key:

If you remembered 0-5 You're still young.

If you remembered 6-10 You are getting older.

If you remembered 11-15 Don't tell your age.

If you remembered 16-25 You're older than dirt!

Me?  Well, I shouldn't tell my age.  I had plastic soda candies and pretend cigarette candy when I was a child.  Bought Cokes in glass bottles out of machines.  Drank 'em and took the bottles to the grocery store to turn in for a refund.  (Even put bags of salted peanuts down in many of those cokes.  Yum!)  Don't know why they don't still give you the little table top juke boxes.  I  loved flipping the pages and selecting songs.  Waiting for "mine" to come over the speakers next.  I had a party line until they did away with party lines entirely in my area.  Our rate stayed locked in at that party line rate, too.  Bell Telephone thought that it wasn't our fault they weren't providing that service any more.  So we were the only ones on a three party line for years, until we moved about 8 years ago.  P.F. Flyers where good wearing, washing, playing, jumping shoes.  But you could run faster than the wind itself when they were on your feet!  The first telephone number I can recall memorizing started with the prefix, Evergreen.  Remember 45's, heck, I still have almost 300 of them!  Still in their original paper covers. Some of the very best of the 70's for the most part....but some go back much farther.  Only one with a scratch that hangs up is Yo-Yo by the Osmonds.  Now if I could only get them all on cassette or CD?  S&H green stamps, oh yeah.  And Piggly Wiggly.   There was another, too.  I licked a many of them.  My Aunt Billie would save hers up for me to lick for her and reward me with a Hershey bar and a Coke in a bottle.  My first and only hi-fi, me and Mama went to the drug store and bought two albums for when I first got it.  One was Elvis' Flaming Star.  The other we thought was Glen Cambell's greatest hits, but turned out to be only an instrumental, orchestrated version.  Shows how green we were!  I still have a full set of fully functioning metal ice trays with handles.  They are Frigidaire brand.  I thought I was so grownyfied and special when I got to help the church secretary run off papers on the mimeograph machine as a pre teen.  I still remember the wonderful way the pages smelt when you got them.  And sometimes they'd still be slightly damp.  We had the four blue bulbs in a square that would rotate on top of our camera.  They looked real neat once they popped.  I went to drive in theatre as late as my Senior year in High School.  Show Time in Beaumont, TX operated lot longer than most of them did.  Now I think that field is a shooting range.  And that is the fourteen things that I clearly remember from the list.  And that's why I'm not telling anyone I am 45.  ;o) 

Have a wonderful weekend, ya'll!

Barbara