Do you remember when...

All the girls had ugly gym uniforms?

It took five minutes for the TV warm up?

Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school? Nobody owned a purebred dog?

When a quarter was a decent allowance?

You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?

Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?

All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore high heels?

You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking,
all for free, every time?

And you didn't pay for air?

And, you got trading stamps to boot?

Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?

It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents?

They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed . . .and they did?

When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car... to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady?

Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like, "That cloud looks like a..."

and playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?

Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?

And with all our progress, don't you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace, and share it with the children of today?

When being sent to the principal's office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home?

Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc.

Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat! But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.

Send this on to someone who can still remember Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy, Howdy Dowdy and the Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk. As well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games, Hula Hoops, bowling and visits to the pool, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar. Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say, "Yeah, I remember that"? I am sharing this with you today because it ended with a double dog dare to pass it on. To remember what a double dog dare is, read on.

And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care. Candy cigarettes, Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside, Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles, Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes Blackjack, Clove, and Teaberry chewing gum, Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, Newsreels before the movie, P.F. Fliers,

Telephone numbers with a word prefix....(Raymond 4-601). Party lines, 45 RPM records, Green Stamps, Hi-Fi's, Metal ice cubes trays with levers, Mimeograph paper, Beanie and Cecil Roller-skate keys, Cork pop guns, Drive ins, The Fuller Brush Man, Reel-To-Reel tape recorders, Tinkertoys, Erector Sets, 15 cent McDonald hamburgers, 5 cent packs of baseball cards - with that awful pink slab of bubble gum, Penny candy, 35 cent a gallon gasoline, Jiffy Pop popcorn? The worst thing you could 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 commercials for action figures? 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? Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle? Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin? Water balloons were the ultimate weapon? If you can remember most or all of these, then you have lived!!!!!!! Pass this on to anyone who may need a break from their "grown-up" life . . . I double-dog-dare-ya!

Submitted by Bob B., July 2003