I Was Thinking... Remember When?

You can usually tell how old someone is by the things they reference when they start a sentence with, “remember when.” Every generation seems to reflect back on earlier times and think that life was better back then.
To my parents, the Big Bands were the greatest kind of music, and they thought the advent of Rock and Roll was leading to the ruination of society. When the British invasion occurred, they were certain there was no hope for the nation’s youth.
Today, while I don’t recognize any of the bands that are winning a Grammy, my Sirius radio stations are regularly tuned to the hits of the 50s and 60s. But music is only one of the things that separate the generations as to what they remember as the good old days.
Members of my generation often criticize how children play today. They feel the sports are overly organized and structured by adults.
“I remember when we just got together and played.” We relate tales of baseball games played in a vacant lot with a rock being first base, a piece of shingle being second and having only one bat that was used by both teams. We didn’t have fancy uniforms or get any trophies, we just played. We had to shovel off a frozen pond to play hockey and the goals were made out of boards we laid on the ice. Maybe one kid brought an actual puck, but some of us had made our own hockey sticks with what we could find laying around home. Boy, those were the days.
Today we hear about helicopter parents who are afraid to let their children out of their sight. They even attend the child’s football, hockey, basketball, or gymnastics practices. Each child must have a cell phone so the parents can be in constant contact with their little progeny in case something might happen.
However, we tell accounts of hopping on our bikes after breakfast and not returning home until supper. Yes, we called it supper not dinner. If we sat around the house too much in the summer, mom would shoo us out the door and tell us to go play. She didn’t say where or with who or how far away we could wander.
Of course, things were different then and the Jacob Wetterling incident changed things for a lot of parents and kids.
A good gauge of which generations you were a part of has to do with the prices of things. My mother talked about getting a raise when she worked as a young woman in the local paper mill. Her hourly wage went from 65? an hour to 70?. My dad talked about buying a new car for $800 and their first house cost nearly $12,000. My earliest wage was $1.45 an hour. When we were first married and paid $145 a month for our apartment rent, I couldn’t imagine we’d ever be able to afford some of those new houses selling for almost $38,000. We also bought our first new car for under $3,000.
Other prices are good demonstrators of generational differences. If you remember 15? hamburgers at McDonald, nickel candy bars, and a bottle of pop for a dime, you are close to my age. I could get a good-sized ice cream cone for a nickel, a hot dog for a dime, and could go to a movie for 50?. I could take a girl on a date which included going to a movie and then out for burgers for under $10 even if we had popcorn at the movie and a chocolate shake with the burgers. If I was low on gas, I could probably fill it up for under $5.00.
For those of us who are sports fans, our “remember when” times relate to the heroes of our youth. They had colorful names like Stan “the Man” Musial, Yogi Berra, or Hammering Hank Aaron. They were our heroes because they were OUR players, Musial was a Cardinal, Berra a Yankee, Aaron a Brave, Willie Mays a Giant, Al Kaline a Tiger, Koufax a Dodger, and Killebrew a Twin. We could tell you their number, the position they played, their stats and probably had their baseball card as well. We never even wondered how much they got paid or if they were taking steroids.
Oh, those were the days.
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