The following evolved after I received a photo gallery of images from the late fifties and early sixties that was meant to stir up memories. It worked...
I never chewed BlackJack, Clove, or Beeman's gum, but I was a Teaberry girl from WAY back! Loved that pepsin flavor! I used to drop my 10-cents-a-week Brownie Scout dues on a twin pack of Twinkies, now and then, and remember roller-skating home over the seams in the poured, concrete sidewalks while swinging a half-gallon sized GLASS jug of milk in each hand. All this was accomplished in skates that clamped onto the hard-soled school shoes with a key, and had metal wheels and no braking system - except to crash into something - or someone - that was substantial enough to stop the momentum.
As I write this, I have my feet up on the original cherry-wood finished, formica-topped, plywood coffee table my mother "redeemed" with 40 books of green stamps that I, personally, helped lick and stick into the little 20 page booklets in rows of 10 X10. It is still very serviceable, and for something that cost us NOTHING - not entirely ugly. One of those family heirlooms that no one really wants, but somebody - inevitably - can use! Part of the family since I was probably about 9, after which I became far too sophisticated and world wise to consider licking trading stamps, the coffee table bears the chips, dents, and a motley assortment of super-glue and nail polish blobs - mostly cleaned off - that have come to it over the last half-century or so.
I had no experience with Howdy Doody, nor the Shadow - no TV came into the house until I was 12 and all three of us kids had gotten good at reading books. I was raised on the advice of Dr. Spock, and fed in the traditions of Adele Davis and Vermont Folk Medicine's Dr. Jarvis. My dad grew organic produce in our garden, and we all had homemade nighties on Christmas Eve every year from "Mrs. Santa".
When I was six, my baby sister got to wear the some of the first disposable diapers ever made, and the nearest chain hamburger joint was the Big Boy at least 30 minutes away.The two retired WACs who owned and ran Walnut Acres Natural Foods in Wilmot, NH supplied all the 12 grain cereal I could shovel in that was organic, and safe from the dreaded Strontium-90 radioactive fallout that lurked in bran! We practiced air-raid drills at school and crawled under our desks to be safe in case Russia dropped the "big one" on Center School.
We never went out to eat unless we were traveling. A family dinner "out" usually meant the gang was on the road to the lake house and had to stop, halfway, for lunch at the same diner we hit - once - every year. We are the grandparents of the children who are the age I was when all this seemed so normal. The planet is still spinning at the same rate - why did we have to speed up so much? Why does a fast food restaurant need to have an express window? I was raised at 33 1/3 rmp and accelerated to 45 in my teens. Like molasses in January by comparison to the speed at which so many operate now.
Whenever it is time to step back, and take a breath, and reclaim ourselves, it is to our island in the big lake that we go, where things were, and continue to be, happening to us at a more reasonable pace and, oh so very much more simply!
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