THE WAY WE WERE

the other day my nephew dan brings me a can of 'throwback' pepsi which proudly proclaims that they are using 'real' sugar and the original recipe for a limited time. ice cold, it was aces in flavor and got me to thinking about when i was a kid:

my dad was a milk man who left the house every day about 0400 and got home in the early afternoon. i had no clue how hard he worked but i was very much aware that we were the first kids on the block to get egg nog at thanksgiving and strawberry milk on a hot summer day. the milk was in glass bottles and had a cardboard stopper with a little tab that you pulled to open. HOWEVER, more often than not, that damn thing ripped off when you pulled it and you were forced to open the stopper with a fork or knife, which shredded it permanently and totally pissed off your parents because the bottle could never be closed again. many times a piece of paper and a rubber band served as the cover.

television was a snap with 2-5-7-9 your only choices and all in black & white. there were no remotes and spinning the channel dial would always get a reaction out of my dad with his most popular phrase "do you think i'm made of money, buster?" i'd race home from school to call 'dibs' on the tv and watch the mickey mouse club until my sister pat muscled me out of the way to watch american bandstand at 4 o'clock. worse than that, i had to watch her dance to the tunes for the next half hour and a war was always guaranteed if she tried to make me dance with her.
my mother watched lawrence welk every saturday and god help you if you screwed up that hour because that would mean no gunsmoke at 9:00 and early bedtime.

sports captured my attention at an early age and i watched the blackhawks every saturday night when they played out of town and lloyd pettit was the announcer with "shot and a goal!" being his catch phrase. today, you might see his name on an ice arena just off the tollway as you near milwaukee. both the cubs and white sox were broadcast on channel 9 and jack brickhouse was the announcer for both teams. the cubs only played day games and going to a friday night game at comiskey park was big time fun. basketball and soccer were non-existent and the bears never broadcast a home game on local tv so you had to listen to brickhouse (yep, he did everything) and irv kupcinet on wgn radio.

my mother or father cooked every meal and the almost nightly question of 'what's for dinner?' was often answered "leftovers.' according to my brother in law roy.....if it was in the
refrigerator and not green or moving, it got eaten on leftover night. tupperware was non-existent in our house and for some reason, my mother thought that 'tin foil' kept everything fresh. it didn't. my father thought the shiny side of tin foil had to be on the outside for it to perform properly. he was wrong. he also thought tin foil protected a roast from drying out in the oven....... but not when you cook it at 475 for 5 hours, dad.

i polished my shoes every saturday and had assigned chores the same day. during the week, homework was supposed to be done before going out to play after school. this was the rule most often broken. you changed clothes as soon as you got home from school and switched into jeans that probably had more patches than a pirate. only girls wore shorts, even in the summer.
t-shirts had no reference to sex, drugs or rock n roll. maybe a picture of a deer with 'boulder junction, wisconsin' written underneath it.

telephones were all rotary dialed and you stretched the cord to the laundry room for a 'private' conversation. NO ONE was allowed to use the phone after 9:00. doctors made house calls and the dentist really hurt. teachers smacked you if you were bad and so did the parents of my friends. i can't count the number of times mr. cervone smacked me and his son jim in the back of the head and told us to knock it off.

my buddy is on the phone and is cracking me up with his stories so we'll do some of those next time. stay warm. HEY! if you've got some childhood memories, share them and i'll put them in the next blog and no, i won't use your name. thanks.