How many do you remember?

This ends with a “double dog dare”. If you remember what that means, you understand. If you don’t know what that means, read on and see what you have missed, and/or remember that the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and young enough not to care. How many do you remember?

Candy cigarettes, Wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside, Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles, Coffee shops with tableside juke boxes; Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum; Home milk delivery in glass bottles, with cardboard stoppers; Party lines; Newsreels before the movie; P.F. Flyers; Butch wax; Telephone numbers with a word prefix…(Drexel-5505); Peashooters; Howdy Doody; 78 RPM records; Green Stamps; Hi fi’s; Metal ice cube trays-with levers; Mimeograph paper; Blue Flash bulbs; Beanie and Cecil; Roller skate keys; Cork pop guns; Drive ins; Studebakers; Washtub wringers; The Fuller brush man; Reel- to- reel tape recorders Tinker toys; The Erector Set; The Fort Apache Play set; Lincoln Logs; 15-cent McDonald hamburgers; 5 cent packs of baseball cards with that awful slab of bubble gum; Penny candy; 35 cent gallon of gasoline.

A time when…Decisions were made by going “eeny- meeny- miney- mo”; mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, “Do over”; catching fireflies could happily occupy an entire evening; It wasn’t odd to have two or three “best friends”; The worst thing you catch from the opposite sex was “cooties”; Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot; A foot of snow was a dream come true; Saturday morning cartoons weren’t 30 minute ads for action figures; ”Oly-oly-oxen free” made perfect sense; Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles; The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team; War was a card game; Water balloons were the ultimate weapons; Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle; Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin.

If you can remember most or all of these, then you have lived! Show it to anyone who may need a break from their “grown up” life…I double dog dare ya!

Footnote: I hope you thoroughly enjoyed this article, although I cannot take credit for it. It was an excerpt from a local newsletter, and the author is unknown.