For the sake of old school values, let's not only stop time, let's go back:
If we had only known... we lived in the "best of times"!
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN...?
All the girls had ugly gym uniforms?
It took five minutes for the TV warm up?
Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school?
Nobody owned a purebred dog.
When a quarter was a decent allowance.
You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?
Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?
All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore high heels?
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.
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents.
They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed. . . and they did.
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.
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.
Roy and Dale and Trigger.
Candy cigarettes.
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside.
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles.
Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes.
Blackjack, Clove, and Teaberry chewing gum.
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.
P.F. Fliers.
Telephone numbers with a word prefix...(Raymond 4-601). Party lines.
Howdy Dowdy.
Hi-Fi's & 45 RPM records. 78 RPM records!
Green Stamps.
'Race issue' meant arguing about who ran the fastest?
The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was 'cooties'!
Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot?
Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures.
War was a card game?
Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin.
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon. As well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games, Hula Hoops, bowling and visits to the pool, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say,
'Yeah, I remember that'?
Basically we were in fear for our lives, but 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.
And with all our progress, don't you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time and savor it all over again? You just did. Share it with the children of today.
Pass this on to anyone who may need a break from their 'grown-up' life.
We double-dog-dare-ya!