The Good Old Days?

The Good Old Days?

Often when cruising the web and reading blogs and what-not, I will come across a lamentation by a well-intentioned individual about how much they miss “the good old days.” Invariably, these nostalgic trips down memory lane will include recollections about how they used to swim in stock tanks and their mom and dad used to beat their ass “real good” and how they used to drink out of water hoses and, by golly, they “ain't dead yet!”

I read these things, and I wonder: just what “good old days” are they talking about? My personal “good old days” would have been in the fifties and early sixties, I guess, although I'm not sure what the criteria is for bona-fide 'good old day' qualification. My assumption is that they are talking about their childhood and school days, given the things they usually talk about. With that in mind, please bear with me while I relate my memories of that particular time.

To begin with, we had no phone, no television, no car, and yes; no air conditioning either. We lived in a three room apartment (luckily I was an only child), the three rooms consisting of one large room that served as a dining room, bedroom, and living room combined; a kitchen, and one small, small bathroom. I slept on one end of the big room, and my mom and dad slept on the other end.

Our apartment was one of four in the main house owned by the landlady and was the biggest next to her own living quarters. It was our good fortune that our front door opened up into the hallway that split the house, where there was a phone located that we could use for important stuff (five minute limit, please, the sign said), and at the other end of the hallway was a bathroom big enough to hold a tub so that you could bathe if no one else was using it at your needed time. It was used by everyone else living in the main house, you understand.

One nice thing it did have was an ample yard to play in (they used to build houses that way; at least in Texas they did) with a church next door that had a nice yard as well. Way in the back of the property was a huge vacant lot that was kept mostly mowed most of the time. The yards and that lot were the scene of many an enjoyable pick-up football game for my friends and I; you needed really nice grass to play football on, you see. And you really needed a big lot to fly kites in too, seeing as how playing football and flying kites were just about our only activities.

The school was really convenient for me as well, it was only about a three block walk, although it sometimes seemed longer; especially when it was raining or sleeting. I suppose that walking to school in all kinds of weather was good for me though, but I'm at a loss to understand how that could possibly be. Maybe the benefit was that the snot kept my nose warm so that it didn't fall off, I don't know...

Back in those days, I only had one friend that had a TV; it was black-and-white of course (“colored TV” hadn't been invented yet) and you could get three channels on it. I would go over my friends house and we would watch baseball and football games on it during the day, our only problem being that usually the channel that was carrying the game would be the one that had the most snow and the grainiest picture. But, if you kept the audio portion turned up, you usually didn't miss too much of the game; the announcers knew about the visual problems and would broadcast the game pretty much like a radio announcer would. These moments were the only one's we were allowed on the television; once the father came home, the kids were done with the TV for the rest of the day.

Drink from a water hose? Yeah, all of us kids did that from time to time, although we much preferred drinking it out of the faucet instead of the hose. The water that came out of the hose tasted like rubber, you see; the water from the tap only tasted like iron or rust, which was much preferred to the hose water.

Depending on where you lived in our fair state, your water supply either came from a reservoir, a well, a spring, or any combination of the three. In the little town I was raised in, our water came from a muddy lake about three miles out of town. I suppose it was filtered and treated somewhere; however, where that facility might have been is still a mystery to me until this day, because I never saw anything in the entire town that even remotely resembled a water treatment facility. I'm sure it was treated somewhere, though, because in addition to the iron and rust you could taste chlorine as well. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I didn't die from drinking the water (at least, not yet), but if anybody did die from it, we had no way of knowing if the water was at fault, or not.

One thing is for sure, a doctor back in those days would have never been able to give you that information, and I'm pretty sure the doctors nowadays couldn't either. Depending on which doctor you talk to, they will all come up with reasons for your death, but unless you are shot point-blank in the head with a .45, there is apt to be no consensus.

Yes, doctors used to make house calls back then, or at least some of them did. The one that my mother always called to come and “cure” me, would invariably shine lights in my eyes and stick wooden paddles in my mouth and rub me all over the chest and back with a cold stethoscope, before announcing that my mother should give me a couple of aspirin and keep me in bed for the rest of the day. He was a dependable guy, though; you could always count on getting his bill in the mail a week or so later. My parents choices were simple; they could either pay the bill, or the doctor would never show up at the house again.

My father always found this quite amusing when he was attempting to cover the house hold expenses; he would always say that we “might as well have called a medicine man and given him some money.” My father, needless to say, didn't have a lot of faith in doctors...

Time moved on from that point; I grew older and went to high school and all that, and eventually started going to a REAL clinic and sitting in a REAL HARD CHAIR waiting to see a doctor. When I finally would get to see a doctor, he would basically tell me the same thing that the house-call doc used to tell my mother and send me home, with an admonition to “stop at the counter” and pay my bill on the way out.

The day I graduated from high school, we still had no television, no car, and no A/C; although our abode had improved somewhat. We still rented (from the same lady), but now we lived in a four room cottage, instead of a three room flat.

Ah, memories...I think about all that, and still I wonder: Just when were these “good old days” that everyone talks about?