Terry's 3M's
Meditations, Mutterings, Madness
Most of the pay phones in town are now 35 cents. I don't know if other areas are seeing an increase of the cost of a phone call or not. But, the rise in price has caused me to think about all the changes that have happened in my lifetime.
I am not all that ancient. Yet, there have been so many changes that the kids are astonished that what they take for granted was not a part of my childhood.
When I was in grade school, a stamp cost 4 cents, chicken was 19 cents a lb, and soda came in glass bottles.
There was a great drink for kids called Fizzies. Fizzies came in tablet form. You took a glass of water, plopped in a Fizzie and voilá, instant soda! Worked on the same principle as Alka-Seltzer and came in different flavors. Rootbeer and orange were my favorite flavors. Fizzies went out of existence when the government decided to ban cyclimates.
Does anyone remember spoolies? They were popular sometime in the mid-fifties. Little rubber spools that you could wrap your hair in; they folded onto themselves to form little buttons. Put them in your hair at night and wake up with a head full of curls!
Speaking of curling hair, I see that they still sell foam rubber and those hard plastic curlers and the brush curlers encased in flexible metal. Torture devices! I'm not sure who buys them anymore. I remember sleeping on them in order to get my hair to flip up like the most popular girl singers of the day. I was so happy that they had invented electric rollers by the time I was a junior in high school!
Pantyhose! It was hard to get used to those! I could buy stockings at 3 or 4 pairs for a dollar. Then, when you got a run, you only had to toss one out--not the whole pair. But, I was glad to get rid of the girdles!
On a more historical note--I was 16 when men walked on the moon for the first time.
Seat belts, transistor radios to boom boxes, cassette and 8 track players, color tv, VCR's, PC's. Yes, we've come a long way in the last 40 years.
When transistor radios first came out, they were big compared to the ones today. Thirty-five years after the fact, Pa (my Uncle Frank who became my step-father--yes, my mother divorced my dad and married his brother) was still bemoaning the fact that I dropped his first transistor radio and cracked the case when I was 4 years old! He claimed it would have been worth something as an antique.
Well, I've traveled down Memory Lane enough for one night. Good night, Folks!
for the border background.