A Scattering of Thoughts......: The Good Ole Days....

1921 Stanley Steam Car 7 Seater Tourer, Wellington Fair 2006

I often wonder about the good old days and wonder whether they really were so good or perhaps my memories of them are the only good thing lol. When I was a kid, our family had a small car that was comfortable and got us from A to B safely. We often went for rides, not to go to anyplace in particular, but just for a “Sunday ride”. We would end up out on a country road buying fruit or veggies from a farm gate and leaving the money in an honesty box. Cars didn’t have automatic transmission or air conditioning in the good old days. We rolled down the windows and let the wind keep us cool. We sang songs as we rode along and took a packed lunch as there was no such thing as a car stereo or Maccas back then.
Of course houses didn’t have air conditioning either in the good old days. Most homes had either a ceiling fan or an electric fan and I can remember my mother darkening the house before the mid day heat during Summer, in an attempt to keep the heat out.

1935 Bus Wellington Fair 2006

When advancement came to suburbia everyone went to the stores to check out “evaporated coolers”. They had to be filled with water but were considered state of the art in cooling back then. I later remember accompanying my mother to a store called Walton's, as a child. She had read an advertisement in the newspaper announcing that people could now have “air conditioning” in their homes. My mother didn’t believe it and went to see it with her own eyes. Sure as eggs it was there, surrounded by many people who were equally in awe.
I remember going to the movies in the good old days. The local cinemas hosted a short feature, a cartoon, the coming attractions and then intermission. When you returned from internission the main movie commenced. This occupied children all of Staurday afternoon for the total cost of 20 cents. For another 20 cents you could get some popcorn and a drink as well.
1947 Chrysler Windsor Wellington Fair 2006

I spent many good evenings reading books instead of watching DVDs or X-Box games. I can remember one year, when our family purchased a small collection of classic books for us to read. My Grandmother read to us each evening until we could efficiently read them ourselves. They were books like Anne of Green Gables, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi, The Wind in the Willows and other stories. Of course, it was around this time that television changed the world. It had been around for quite a fair while however the children in our family had been restricted to an appropriate amount of viewing time each evening. The pictures were in black and white but no one ever worried about that as we didn’t know any different. I can also remember seeing the first steps on the moon in black and white from my third grade classroom. REO Pickup 1930, Wellington Fair 2006

Some years later the wonder of coloured television came to family homes. It was a while before our family bought one. In the meantime, I continued to watch Flipper, Phantom Agents and Thunderbirds on black and white TV. Additionally, television had only a few channels, much to my children’s horror , there was no cable television then. Their first response was to question why we did not have cable lol. I remember my mother’s pride in finishing a new curtains on her sewing machine; decades later that pride was equaled by my sister whose brand new curtains had just been purchased. There were four of us children and we took turns in washing and drying up each evening; my nieces and nephews fight over who has to empty the dishwasher. My father cut the edges of our lawns with gardening shears, decades later my brother did the edges of his garden with a whipper-snipper, and nowadays my neighbour has a lawn mowing man lol. Potatoes, Carrots and peas were peeled, cut or shelled by hand; nowadays veggies are purchased frozen and placed in the microwave. Banking was undertaken at the bank with a “human” teller, deposits and withdrawals were written on paper and bank books recorded how much one had accumulated in their account. As kids we swam at the local swimming pool; only the rich had an in-ground pool in their backyard. To be honest, I never knew anyone who had an in-ground pool in their back yard back in the good old days. We rode in cars without seat belts, enjoyed homemade cakes, red skins, cobbers and homemade lemonade but we were never overweight as we played outside kicking around a football and chasing other kids. We had no mobile phones, X-boxes, computers or cable TV because we were too busy playing with neighbours at the local park, it was safer back then. In the good old days when we got into trouble we received a “hiding” from Mum and Dad and learned to take our “medicine like a man”, no one reported you to DOCs for discipling your child. We drank water from the garden hose and not from bottles; we studied our times-tables for school because a calculator had not been invented yet and we never back-chatted or showed disrespect to our elders. 1929 REO Flying Cloud, Wellington Fair 2006

Life was simple and more basic in years past, but life was harder in different ways too. Some how all these years later, life has become complicated, complex and unsafe. I wonder what kids nowadays will remember as being the good old days. I really don’t know how we made it though that era and are still alive to talk about it lol. Funny enough though, all of my memories of the good old days are warm, happy and loving memories. Do you remember the good old days?