The following contribution was made by a very good high school friend, Mr. Tommy Rutledge. We lived most of it. The author of this valuable, thoughtful reflection is unknown.
This sounds very familiar!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WHERE DID YOU EAT AS A CHILD?
"Hey Dad," one of my kids asked the other
day, "what was your favorite
fast food when you were growing up?"
"We didn't have fast food when I was growing
up," I informed him. "All
the food was slow."
"C'mon, seriously. Where did you
eat?"
"It was a place called 'at home,'" I
explained.
"Grandma Stewart cooked every day and when
Grandpa Stewart got home
from work, we sat down together at the dining room table,
and if I didn't
like
what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there
until I did like
it."
By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was
afraid he was going
to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him
the part about how
I
had to have permission to leave the table.
But here are some other things I would have told him
about my
childhood
if I figured his system could have handled it.
My parents never owned their own house, wore Levis,
set foot on a golf
course, traveled out of the country or had a credit
card. In their
later
years they had something called a revolving charge
card. The card was
good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears
AND Roebuck. Either way,
there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.
My parents never drove me to soccer practice.
This was mostly because
we never had heard of soccer. But also because we
didn't have a car.
We didn't have a television in our house until I was
11, but my
grandparents had one before that. It was, of course, black and
white, but they
bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen.
The top third was blue,
like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like grass.
The middle third
was red. It was perfect for programs that had
scenes of fire trucks riding
across someone's lawn on a sunny day.
It was 13 before I tasted my first pizza. It was a Luigi's Pizza on the West side of Cleveland and my friend, Ronnie, took me there to try what he said was "pizza pie." When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still the best pizza I ever had.
We didn't have a car until I was 15. Before that, the only car in our family was my grandfather's Plymouth. He called it a "machine."
I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.
Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was. All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered the Cleveland "News" six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.
Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. Touching someone else's tongue with yours was called French kissing and they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what they did in French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.
If you grew up in a generation before there was fast
food, you may
want
to share some of these memories with your children or
grandchildren. Just
don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.
