Sweeter Times?

Remember penny candy? Or 25 cent hamburgers? Or pinball machines? If you do, welcome to Geezerworld. I remember all of them. Now some would say that dates me, and I suppose it does…but is it such a bad thing to be dated? I remember a time when I really wanted to be dated, but the girls apparently had no such mutual feelings…

Anyway, when I was 13 or 14 or so there was a place called Jack’s Hamburger Stand, and there was a magnet inside that building that pulled all of us guys to it immediately after school. (I think the magnet actually worked on the change in our pockets, because when we got out of there most of us didn’t have any left.) You could get a hamburger for a quarter, or a hot dog for a dime. The hamburgers were really big when Jack put them on the grill, and really tiny when he put them in the bun and handed them to you. No, they weren’t “sliders”. You pay more for them, and they’re supposed to be small.

So we’d sit at a long counter, eat hamburgers (or on days when the money was tight, hot dogs) and then head for the “Back Room”. This was where the pinball machines lived. They sat along the dim back wall, with bells, lights, loud clacking sounds, and robbed you of all your money a nickel at a time. Some of the guys could take a single nickel into the Back Room, and play pinball all afternoon. I was not one of them, but I could play for about an hour on a good day.

During the course of that hour, we’d review last night’s episode of Superman, talk about the new movies that were playing (everybody was real excited about one called “Them”: The poster had a picture of a Giant Ant on it. Wow.), and rehash the day at school, provided something interesting like a fight or unscheduled fire drill had happened.

After Jack’s, it was home, via the little stores and shops that lined the street, and with the pennies we had left…the purchase of a final treat or two: strips of paper with candy “dots” in neat rows all the way down, “root beer barrels”, “Double Bubble” bubble gum (with a free comic on wax paper inside), and a million similar varieties of sugar that no doubt made us all hyperactive and worse. The cure for that affliction in those days was bed without TV, so many of us learned to control it at a young age. No drugs, No psychologists.

As we got a little older we graduated from Jack’s to the Pool Hall (an absolutely Forbidden den of iniquity located upstairs above Woolworth’s), and from there it was a fast slide down the road to Perdition during our High School years, and then College for some , the Army for most, the Mill for others…and College and the Mill for many of us.

Then, on to real life, jobs, worries, kids, etc. etc., and now, finally to a new place, where I can look back and actually remember some of those old, young days.

I know, things seem rosier from the distance of years, and the varnish gets thicker the longer you live. Still, it seems things were a lot more fun when they weren’t so convenient. When we actually had to go out and walk in the fresh air for a while to find entertainment. When being sent to your room was actually a punishment, and not doing your homework wasn’t an option.

Oh, well. The old guy’s just ranting again.

Blog at ya later,
-Geezerguy