A Walk Down Memory Lane by Gerri Brousseau

I have been giving a lot of thought to the way things were when I was a kid. It was a different life, a simpler time. Stamps were five cents and gas was under fifty cents per gallon. We had a telephone with a dial. It wasn’t cordless and there was no such thing as a cell phone. We had a black and white television with a round screen and it had rabbit ears. We only got three channels and you had to get up to change them. There was no such thing as cable TV. There were no computers, no video games, no microwave, no CD’s, and no DVD’s. I had a record player that played vinyl record albums. I walked to school. There were no buses. I wore dresses to school every day even in grammar school. I remember the boys in my class had to wear shirts and ties to school. No one wore jeans, not even after school.

After school, I walked home from school, and after a snack, I did my homework. Only when my homework was finished and before dinner, I was allowed to go outside to play. All the neighborhood kids would meet and we played games such as tag, hide and seek or baseball, and in winter we built snowmen, went ice skating or went sledding. Child obesity was unheard of.  When it was dinnertime, my mother would call for me from the back window, and I headed home. We walked everywhere, and our parents felt safe in letting us do it.

Every night I sat at the table with my family to eat dinner together. There was no TV in the kitchen. We actually had conversations about the events of our day. We went on a lot of picnics and fishing trips. We never had the money to take fancy vacations, like going to Disneyland (although we live on the east coast, Disneyworld did not exist at that time).

My parents worked hard and now that I’m an adult I realize that they were struggling financially, but I never realized it at the time. We always had food on the table and a roof over our head. We were happy and we laughed a lot. Life was simple then. It was a slower pace.

I remember buying baseball cards and pinning them to the spokes of our bikes because it made a really cool noise.  I remember bazooka bubble gum and penny candy that really only cost a penny. I remember getting our first color TV, our first phone with push buttons, getting a washing machine that didn’t have a wringer, having a car stereo that played 8-track tapes, I remember when The Beatles came over from England, and sadly, I remember the day President Kennedy was killed. I know, I’m dating myself here, but thinking back I realize those were happy days when someone else carried all the responsibility and carried it with a smile.

Now at the beginning of a new year as I set my goals to move forward in 2013, I reflect on my past and remember so many things with fondness.

I hope my little walk down memory lane gave you a smile and made you think about your childhood. Please share with us some of your most fond childhood memories.

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