Growing up in the fiftees. Remember, this should be in the Lounge.
I decided to write this because this morning we face timed our Grand Daughter who has just about anything you can imagine and is bored out of her head.
Because of Covid they had to leave their apartment in the West Village in Manhattan and go to their other home on a mountain in Vermont where they have a small pool, pool table, ping pong table, Pin Ball machine, trampoline, ATVs, (along with hundreds of acres of woods with trails) snowmobiles, A swimming pond, rope swing etc.
Anyway:
I never thought we were poor, I grew up in Queens New York but I was born in Brooklyn near Coney Island.
In those days we didn't get allowances, had no computers, cell phones, tablets or just about anything else. We also played outside no matter what the weather was like because "if" you had a TV, it was tiny and of course black and white. There was one or two shows on like The Ed Sullivan show which was a variety show where they would get "talented" people that would sing, dance or balance dishes on their nose. :oops:
There was sort of "Color" TV but that was a curved piece of glass that you would hang in front of the black and white TV. It was tinted blue near the top and green near the bottom so if you were watching a scene which was in a grassy field, it looked really cool, but any other scene just looked ridiculous.
We didn't have one of those but if you did, I would imagine you would keep watching "The Sound of Music" which had a lot of singing out in the grass.
I do remember seeing Elvis Presley on there in his first public appearance. That was the extent of our indoor entertainment and remember, there was no air conditioning.
My "Fish Tank" was the bottom of a wine barrel or an enameled basin which I kept turtles, tadpoles, minnows, and newts that I would catch in streams.
There were no fish stores but there were toy stores and fish would be sold there and called "Toy Fish". They had guppies, molly's, swordtails and little else. Occasionally they would have a crawfish. Eventually dry food was sold by Wardley and were dried flies and ants. . :confused:
One day I heard my Mother scream, I ran there and saw here standing holding a broom. My crawfish got out and was walking across the kitchen floor. She thought it was a mouse and squashed it. o_O
My Dad had a fish small fish
market in Jackson Heights and my Mom didn't drive. She would wait with me for the bus and then tell the bus driver to let me off in front of my Dad's fish
market which was about a 45 minute bus ride. I would go by myself and sit behind the driver when I was probably 5 or 6 years old and the driver would stop the bus in front of the store (which was not even on a bus stop) and watch me go in. (Today, they would put your Mother in jail) Remember cell phones were decades away.
The fish and meat stores in those days had a thick layer of sawdust on the floor and at night they would sweep it up and put on new sawdust. It would collect the fish scales and guts.
(Today, because of lawyers, you can't do that)
I would pile up the sawdust and make a fort. Then I would take live blue claw crabs and live lobsters and put them down and try to make them fight. Lobsters can't really walk out of water but crabs run fast. I had a toy metal cannon and I would shoot tooth picks at the poor crabs.
(there was no plastic and toys were metal)
I would also lay some dead sardines in there for effect.
I had other toys in the fish store like rubber bands and I would shoot flies. I would feed the flies to my newts and turtles. Sometimes my Dad would give me a piece of wood, a hammer and nails and I would spend hours banging in the nails and pulling them out.
Occasionally I would ask my dad for a nickel. He would always give it to me but I had to work for it like maybe shine his shoes which entailed about 30 minutes of removing large fish scales, then shining them. After he inspected them I would take that nickel to the toy store on the corner next to the firehouse and buy some gum or caps that I used to "shoot off' with a rock.
I walked to school which was only about 5 blocks away and when my shoes would get holes in them, I would get linoleum (which was flooring) from abandoned buildings and houses and put pieces of that in my shoes. When it wore out, I would get another piece.
(My Daughter doesn't believe we did that, but it was common practice)
Someone gave me a baby chicken and in a few weeks it grew to full size. Once, the thing followed me to school and the Principal had to call my Mother to come and pick it up.
Another thing I remember about grammar school. The teacher once called my Mother to school and told her I couldn't read and they were going to leave me back. I was a prolific reader and my Mother knew it so she took me and the Encyclopedia (big history text book like Google but you couldn't update it) to school.
The teacher and Principal were there and my Mother told me to open the book to any page and read it. I opened the book and started to read about President Eisenhower, (who was the President at the time)
The teacher asked my why I wouldn't read in school. I said those kids books were silly.
After that, they made me a reading tutor for kids who couldn't read.
Linoleum was a great find because we also used it in our "Zip" guns which was a piece of wood with nail in one end and a clothes pin in the other end. You stretched a rubber band from the nail to the clothespin and put a piece of linoleum in the rubber band. When you pushed on the clothes pin to open it, the linoleum would fly maybe 50'.
We had a large group of friends and once we dug an underground fort in an empty lot. It was probably 5' deep and topped with logs, then trees grew on it.
It filled with rain water and we forgot about it for many years. We remembered it when they were building a Supermarket there and a bulldozer backed over it and fell in. They had to get a crane to get it out.
We always had money because we were street smart. Main Street was about two or three miles away and we would take bubble gum, a sting and fishing sinker. You lower the weight through the subway grates down about 12' to pick up coins.
Those grates were to supply air to the trains below and they were usually on bus stops. The bus fare was 15 cents so people used to drop money there.
You could make a couple of bucks in an hour and the movies were only 75cents.
After we would collect all the change we would pick up empty bottles at horseshoe courts and take them back to the stores for the two cents.
I will finish this later.
