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Turning Back The Clock

by Kenneth J McCormick

Turning Back The Clock
By
Kenneth J. McCormick
Http://aboutfacts.net


I had two different topics in mind today. One was to talk about how different things are now from 60 years ago and the other was to write about Jupiter and its moons. I decided on the first topic, so I guess you know what the next topic will be. You could say that I am giving you a glimpse into the future. I was just looking at something on tv and I began to think about how different things were when I was a kid. I remember when cars were scarce in my neighborhood, but my uncle had one. It was a Chevrolet, or Chevy as we used to call them. It weighed about 3,700 pounds and in those days it was considered a light car.His father used to tell him "now remember don't go to fast, you have a very light car". I guess it was considered light when you compared it to those big old Buicks or Oldsmobiles. I remember my uncle pulling into the gas station with it and telling the attendant to give him $2.00 worth of gas. For this he got a little over 6 gallons. Sounds great doesn't it? It was, except for the fact that the car only got about 8 miles per gallon. I am talking about the period of time right after World War II. I was very young at the time.

You could get a hamburger in a drug store, because most of them had a soda fountain. They would sell sandwiches, milk shakes and ice cream. You couldn't get anything at McDonalds or Burger King, because they didn't exist in Brooklyn at the time. The franchises of the day were Nedicks. This was a place that sold a great orange drink and a bad hot dog, among other things. For some reason the orange drink, which was non carbonated, was extremely delicious and it was sometimes so cold that it hurt your throat when it was swallowed. Sometimes you would find a pretzel vendor outside of these places with a basket of heavily salted big soft pretzels. Hey, they went great with the drink. A little later Chuck Full Of Nuts opened some Nathan type restaurants, they lasted for awhile, but seemed to fade away, at least in my old neighborhood. Then Carvel came along and was all the rage for a few years. They actually had lines in the summer in the ones in Queens. The one place that we all really LOVED to eat at was Nathan's of Coney Island. Yes, in those days there was only one Nathans. The hot dogs were great and there was always large pots of boiling corn on the cob, just waiting to be emptied by the ravenous crowds. Their french fries were the greatest that I have ever had. Those of you that have eaten at a modern Nathans have only experienced a shadow of what they were and how the food tasted.

For awhile, after the second world war, things were relatively quiet. The war had ended and no one was worried about being attacked, but that didn't last long. Once the Soviets got the Atomic bomb we had to practice something called duck and cover in our school classes. As if ducking under a desk would protect anyone from a nuclear weapon. I think that anyone today would laugh at this concept. It was done more to make us think that there was hope that we could survive, than any other reason. The big nuclear waste disposal problem didn't exist yet, since no one had reactors except for a few owned by the government. The thought of terrorists getting a nuclear bomb didn't even exist in those days. We were only worried about having the Soviets drop one on us and I am sure they worried about the same thing. No one had portable radios until I was about 12 years old and these were a tube affair with a big battery that didn't last long and was quite expensive for the time.

Needless to say, there was no way to record any video from your tv and moving pictures of any kind had to be made with a movie camera, which no one that I knew could afford. If you owned a movie camera, you would have needed a projector to show your movies on after they were developed. Somehow we had gotten a projector and 2 film shorts. I think they were Laurel and Hardy. The projector would get very hot and had no sound playback. It didn't matter, because the films we had were silent ones. If you wanted to listen to music, when I was a kid, you could either turn on the radio, or get out the victrola If you did that, you had to crank it up. A needle that looked like a short straight pin was set down on the record and you played it. Hopefully it would finish before you had to crank the machine again. Some of these big 78 rpm records were very strange, especially the older ones. We had records that had only one side with groves on it and even a square record. They felt like they were made out of hardened shellac and would shatter if dropped. I bet some of these are worth a few bucks today.

The first tv that I ever saw was a 1949 model. It had a tiny screen and was of course, black and white. We all used to line up chairs and sit and look at it. The first show that I remember seeing was the Milton Berle show. He was a famous comedian of the time. We also used to watch the Friday night fights. I remember showing a picture of one of these old tvs to my grandson. Guess what he said to me? It was, "grandpa, what are those things on the tv?" For a second I didn't understand what he was talking about, then I figured it out. He was talking about the knobs on the tv, because tvs today don't have any. Until that moment I never realized that someone from today wouldn't know what the volume knobs and the channel switcher were. Wow I really felt old at that moment. It was funny, in those days you never bought anything Japanese, because it was junk. Today all the American electronics brands have been bought by mostly Asian companies. They are still there, mocking us.

No movie house would ever have shown only one film in those days. All theatres had double features and it cost about 25 cents in the daytime to go to the movies. There were also movie houses that showed older movies and for a cheaper price you could see more movies. An example of this was the old Empire theatre. I think it was 15 cents and you saw 3 movies and a short. Even better was the Monroe theatre. On Saturday it showed 3 movies and 21 cartoons for only 10 cents and had 2 cent candy bars. Your parents would love when you went there, because it was cheap and you were there all day. When kids went to the movies in the old days, it wasn't like now. There was usually a matron that ruled over the children's section. They sort of reminded you of those old war movies where there was a large Nazi woman soldier pictured. Boy some of them were tough and many a kid was tossed out. Sometimes the kids would get the better of the matrons and you would see huge three hundred pound matrons running down the isles after kids, who were taunting them. Not me of course, I was a good boy!

Today you see kids that skitch when it snows. Skitching is when a kid grabs your back bumper and lets your car drag him along while his feet glide over the surface of the snow. In my day kids used to climb on the back of a trolley car. They didn't go very fast and you could get a free ride. There was a down side to that however. If the conductor saw you, he would chase you and you didn't want to get caught because the police would hit you. Can you imagine that today, there would be a ton of law suits. In those days the people felt that you got what you deserved and getting hit would teach you a lesson. If you played hookey from school, they would actually send a truant officer out to find you. Wow have things changed.

Lastly, people's idea of a fancy meal was to go into one of the big department stores and eat in the restaurant that was inside. They usually had a restaurant that had white table cloths and fancy waiters. I don't remember the food being very special, but I do remember my grandparents thinking that this was the greatest. If they were alive today, they would be shocked by the amount and variety of restaurants available to everyone.

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