When a quarter was a decent allowance, and made with real silver! You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny, and it was made with real copper! Looking to see if it was a 1943 steel penny!
At the service station, 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. Not to mention the prize in Cracker Jacks!
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant by your parents.
They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed...and they did it!
When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady.
No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked.
Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like, 'That cloud looks like a…’.
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.
While we were often in fear for our lives, 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.
As well as summers filled with bike rides, hula hoops, and visits to the pool, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
Doesn’t that feel good, just to go back and say, 'Yeah, I remember that’.
And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care.
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BONUS
