when I was at Walmart the other day this lady in front of my had a carton of 6 bottles of strawberry pop. The sight of that took me back to my childhood.

I remember going into town(we lived in the country) to Glanzman's grocery store. This was late 50s early 60s. They had clothes for the farmers tractor parts boots groceries dry goods etc. I remember the only time I had pop was when we went to Glanzmans. You could choose between Strawberry or Grape or Orange Nehi or Root Beer or Coke. That was all there was. Candy was 5 cents. and I only got store bought candy when we went to town on a weekend.

I also remember our town of 400 had a bowling alley 2 gas stations(that only sold gas and oil) a library 2 churches and one tavern. A bank and a feed store.

My grandpa used to carry a little black snap coin purse and he would give us kids all a dime. I would walk all the kids up to the dairy queen for an ice cream cone.

I would love to hear all your rememberances from your growing up years. Especially those who grew up in other places than the US. My DH and I were talking about how much this world has changed. So it would be fun to reminisce here abit again. So jump in people!! Tell us your stories!

I was raised in St. Louis in the 40's and remember going to visit my aunt in the city and they would walk me and my sister down the street to the "confectionary" store - near as I can remember the name. We would be able to pick out a bunch of penny candy - seems like we both would come back with a whole paper sack of candy.

I remember my dad giving me two dollars every morning so I could go to the convenience store and get a Slushie and a small candy bar. :0D

I remember hearing how my grandparents would give my 9 year old dad money for Sunday school. He'd go buy a pop and hang out with the MP's at the gate instead. Back then, between wars, they had smokes in their holsters rather than weapons. He thought that was so cool. "Hey, are you gonna give the bad guys a hot foot or what?"

When I was a child we lived in Firebaugh Ca. back then it was a small farming community and everyone knew each other. If you were a child and you were seen goofing off or doing something you shouldn't be doing your parents would know about it before you got home. My favorite memory was that every summer there was a snow cone truck that Would drive around each neighbor hood and the snow cones were only a quarter each. There was always a long line of kids waiting for their turn. For a quarter you would get a great big snow cone and it tasted good not like the flavored ice in a cup you have to take out a loan to get these days.

My dad was in the Air Force and we traveled, a lot. We would go to visit family in their home town of Cullman every summer. We always managed to be there for the back to school clothes sales. My mother would put me in a changing room and I would try on every dress that might possibly fit me (we couldn't wear pants to school back in the dark ages). They would be on sale for $4 or less. Oh, how I hated those afternoons!

Then we would go to Kuhns Five and Dime. I would take my dollar and walk up and down isles and isles of toys, books, and candy. You could buy a coloring book, crayons and a small bag of candy for $1.

My granny lived in the city, Brooklyn NY I remember the house she lived in and owned. It had 3 apartments however her and my uncles lived in the entire house, she didn't rent the apartments. Now I was 8 when granny moved so it was before then but I don;t know how young I was. It was the summer and I was staying with my granny. There was no AC, was it invented then I am not sure anyway the windows were open and fans were on. I don't remember how long I stayed all I remember is the smell of the exhaust from thrucks that come down the street. On garbage days now if the windows are open and I smell the exhaust of the truck I am brought back in time to grannys. A kind of strange thing to remember but I remember it like it was yesterday.

1 more thing there was a man that walked the streets selling Good Humor ice cream from a push cart. I MISS MY GRANNY!!!!!!!!!!

I grew up in Florida on the west coast - and it was SAFE.. I'd ride a bike all over town... now there's a gazillion people there - even more during the winter and I'd no more let my kids or grandkids ride around there than the man in the moon.
I remember on Halloween people who didn't want to answer the door would put baskets of candy on the front steps and kids would take a piece or two and LEAVE THE REST for the next person.
I remember when you went to school and actually LEARNED something - and had to know it to graduate.
I remember hula hoops!
I remember roller skates that fastened on your shoes - that had soles - no 'sneakers' anywhere! 0h I've got a brand new pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new key (I still have my key!)
My grandmother had a plum tree and a HUGE pot-bellied stove (she lived in Indiana) and she loved auction sales and peach pie. We moved up there in my senior year (gag) and I took her to the auctions - it was her last summer - I'm eternally grateful that I did that....

I remember going to girl scout meetings and buying a candy bar on the way. My dad was in the army so I lived overseas until I was a teenager so it was safe to walk everywhere on base. I remember going to the movie and for less than a dollar, getting a ticket, a chocolate covered ice, and a popcorn. I remember going trickortreating and everyone answering the door and not turning out the lights, didn't have to worry about eating homemade popcorn balls or cookies. I remember my mom always being home when I got there and having three meals a day and learning responsibilities early. And my favorite memory is visiting Granddad because he always had a brand new pack of Wiggleys chewing gum for us. Too many wonderful memories. This brings back so much.

I remember when I was five my Mom and I moved back to Ohio, she was divorced from my Father (unheard of back then). We lived in a Boarding House and just had a bedroom and shared a bed, and I woke up one night when I was about 5 and she was handsewing a dress for me to wear the next day for the first day of school. Thought nothing of it back then, but when I got older I realized the sacrifices she had to make in order to raise me by herself. She worked at a drycleaning place and made $25 a week. Wow,,,,we've come a long way baby.!!!

My sweetest childhood memories were with family. I haven't any family now and memories are all I have. So this is truly right up my alley. Grandma on one side crocheted and grandma on the other side did a lot of hand stitching. Mom cooked and cleaned, non stop. So I would be in her way, she'd say go watch your grandma. One of them had me hold her yarn and Tell me yarns, lol. The other would allow me to 'load' her needles and give me pointers on P's and Q's. I loved helping them. Guess I didn't know that I was learning all the while But, I fetched and assisted...that is what I do now, part-time, I help elderly ladies.

I am so blessed, Ruth

Thanks Rhonda, for the stroll down memory lane.

mrspete (not a mrs anymore, just a habit of saying it)

I'm sure you are a blessing to them too! My first real job where I got paid was sitting with an elderly lady as her companion.
My first job not paid was pumping gas in my dad's service station. LOL but that was not for money! I think I was about 13 when I first learned to read a dipstick! LOL

I remember that too. My first job paid was when I was 5 and I got to iron my dad's boxer shorts, hankies and the pillowcases for 3 cents each. He was military and that's just how my mom did it. Also got allowance for doing chores.
Now the memories are flooding in. I don't know if this is good or bad. Sureal.....

I was real young during WWII and there was no candy or gum. I remember my first bubble gum. Someone heard there was some at a certain store and a neighbor man loaded up all the kids and we drove there and were each allowed to buy 2 pieces of bubble gum. We chewed that gum for weeks. This was after the war. Then we moved to Houston and they had a movie for kids on Saturday. I got a dime and walked to the movie and it was 9 cents so there was a penny left for a piece of gum.

I remember going with my Mom on the bus downtown to Tweedy Boulevard. I think it was in Compton CA, we lived in Lynwood. There was a store that had a big fabric departmetn in the back. I'd walk along side her and put out my hand and touch all the fabric as we went by. I must have bee 3 or 4. I still touch the fabric.

I also remember taking the street car with my Grandma who lived in LA. We'd go downtown to the May Co. a big department store where my Grandpa worked. He was a retired farmer from Illinois and went to work at the May Co when they moved to CA. He was 65 then and had to lie about his age in order to get the job. He worked there for at least 10 years.

Grandma and I would walk over to church during the week and we would pass a little butcher shop. They had chickens hanging in the window with their heads and feet still on. That facinated me.

Does any one remember the paper mache jack-o-lanterns in the dime stores at Halloween? I can still remeber the smell. I loved those things, still do

I had to iron everything from hankies to shirts but I never got paid for it! LOL I never got an allowance. Just had to do chores.

Late 1950s. There was a neighborhood grocery right next door to our house. They sold candy bars or sodas for a nickle. But even better was the penny candy. For a nickle you could get 5 pieces of candy.

OK
Little bottles of Coke
The little tiny flat blue bottles of 'perfume' from the dime store
The guy that pushed the ice cream cart
Paper kites
Red Rover
Saying the pledge at school outside around the flagpole when "Under God" was added
Wearing wool pants under your dress to keep warm walking to school
Going home for lunch from school
Not having anything and not knowing you didn't have it
The first day the TV showed up
Elvis on Ed Sullivan
Walking to the neighborhood little store - with an uneven wooden floor, windows and doors wide open, and Coke cooler that had water in it
I could keep going... LOL

I remember the town being so safe, you couldride your bike anywhere! We always played outside with our friends, even after dark, we'd play kick the can or hide and seek!
LOL, you could go to the store to buy cigarettes for your parents, no carding back then!

U coud paddle your kid and not be afraid of going to jail.

I always say that memories are the best thing you can have b/c you get to relive something whenever you want!
Friday nights my Mom made popcorn and gave us ginger ale. We watched The Life of Riley.
Staying overnight with my Gram was such a treat. She was really laid back and let me do "anything I wanted" just the opposite of Mom lol
Going to Old Forge on Sundays with the family on hot days. I grew up in Utica NY
Sitting on my Dad's lap.
My Mom's uncles had a grocery store and she shopped there every Friday. They always gave her a bag of penny candy for us. YUM
Every Sunday we went to Mass and then to get bread. It was the best Italian bread on earth, still warm and we kids would sit in the back seat, pulling pieces off. I can still taste it.
I'm sure we could all write a book!! Thanks, Rhonda!!!!!!!

Oh this is fun!

I was a child of the mid-60s to the early 70s. I lived in a very small town. I remember spending whole days outide entertaining ourselves. we played in thew woods and the cornfields. I always watched Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch when I came in early enough to see it.

I remember riding my boke with friends everywhere, all day long. the only rule was to be home before dark. No one was trying to accost kids back then.In fact, if it rained or got too windy, and adult would always pick up you and your friends, throw your bikes in the trunk, and drive you home!

We would ride our bikes out around Bass Lake, which was at least an hour away, and we would get an ice cream cone near the beach. I liked the Blue Moon flavor.

The back door was always oen, and we never locked the car. Everyone knew everyone else, and it took forever to get through the grocery store because my mom had to talk to everyone she saw.

Our kitchen was decorated in Harvest Gold and Avacado Grteen. My mon decorated the kitchen in Mushroom decor form Sears, and we also had flocked wall paper.

I had to wear either a dress or polyester dress pants to school, and the Gideons stood by the exit to the school every year, and handed out Bibles as we headed for the bus. (gasp!) We also prayed in school (gasp!)

I rode a bike with a banana seat and plastic flowers on the basket. Do they even make bikes with baskets now?

And yes, we got spanked when we did something really bad, and no one called child protective services on my parents because they spanked their kids too! :0)

I rememberd a story last night that I shared with my husband. When we were kids and all 11 cousins were at Grandma's house in the summer, there was no air conditioning. Grandma would get out a carton of ice cream and we would each get an ice cream cone. We were sent outside to eat it. Buster, the dog, would stand by the screen door wagging his tail and waiting patiently. After 11 ice cream cones, the ice cream box was empty and Grandma gave Buster the box. We all enjoyed the ice cream together, especially Buster!

Mary you just sparked another memory!! When the carton was empty my Mom would open it flat for our dog Pete!!! :D:D:D

Home made Ice Cream MMMMMMMMMM Remember how much fun it was to set on the Ice bucket while someone cranked? We go to our cabin we let all the kids do that. It’s a family tradition

my cat did a good job of cleaning the ice cream carton!!

I remember getting penny candy, does anyone remember Michigan Mints? THey were a hard candy, blue in color, a cube about 1", wrapped in cellophane.

I grew up on a farm and we grew most of our own vegetables, beef, pork, & chicken. My mama canned all kinds of stuff and even made lye soap. She went 15 miles to town once a week for the few groceries that we didn't raise.

I played outside all day, roaming the pastures and corn and cotton fields. I have a brother and a sister who are a number of years older than me, so I basically was by myself most of the time. But I had three dogs and a bunch of cats that followed me everywhere. Mama said it looked like a funeral procession to see me walking across an open field with single-file dogs and cats following behind! (lol!)

Dirt was my favorite toy. My kids laugh when I tell them that. But I could spend all day playing in the dirt. I had some tin cans and Mama gave me some cups, spoons, and and old flour sifter. I can't imagine how many tons of dirt I sifted with that thing!

A couple of miles away from us was a dying little town that still had a gas station, post office, and country store. At the store you could buy anything from canned goods to meat grinders to cattle feed. I remember playing on the big scale they used in the back room for weighing the feed. For a nickle I could get a small Coke or several pieces of candy. Occasionally, Mama would give me a quarter to buy a loaf of "light bread". She usually made all our bread, so bought bread was a treat. Now I'd practically kill for a loaf of her homemade bread or a pan of her dinner rolls!

I miss those simple times so much!

And that is why so many kids today are big mouth brats.

We lived in the city of Detroit until I was about ten.

Remember dimestores? There was a huge one near us that sold pretty much everything. Not like the dollar stores today, where things are all in bins and crammed together. The dimestore had grandeur: high ceilings, large glass windows in front, long glass counters with a salesperson behind each one, attractive displays of the merchandise. They sold jewelry, makeup, household items, toys, books, sewing supplies and patterns, school and office supplies, you name it. I loved looking at the long, colorful strips of suckers (lollipops) hanging from a hook, but as my mother would remind me, I didn't actually like eating them. But the colors were jewel tones and looked beautiful with the light streaming through them.

We moved a lot in those days. My parents had separated, and my mother had moved back to Detroit to be near her family. At first we lived with an aunt and uncle, then rented a room in a house, then moved from apartment to apartment, either because the next one was better or because a landlord had raised rent or refused to make repairs.

When we moved to the neighborhood with the dimestore, there was a beautiful old Gothic-looking red brick house next door to us. It was a huge place, the kind of place that could have been turned into apartments. Three days after we moved in, the wrecking crews came and tore it down to make way for a boxy late-'60s style apartment building with no character whatsoever. It about killed me to see this cool, fabulous house smashed apart. I was seven. I could do nothing to save it. We didn't have a camera, so I couldn't even get a photo of it.

It had once been a grand old neighborhood. Some of the old houses were still there, and a few old buildings with wonderful architecture. By the time we lived there, however, most of the old properties had been divided up into tiny lots with little auto-factory-worker houses. We moved away when I was about ten, and ten years after that, it had become slum. Horrific, what happened to Detroit.

I grew up in Brooklyn, and remember the Good Humor man, ours usually came daily in a small white truck. Treats were sometime things, a penny or two to buy candy on our way back to school after lunch at home, soda maybe once a week.

Kids played outdoors all the time, skating in the street as there were very few cars, going to the playground, up to Prospect Park by ourselves and having 'adventures'. In the summer we took the bus to Sunset Park to swin in the big pools and sometimes on the weekend our family would pack a huge lunch and go to Coney Island or Riess Park for a day at the beach. Remember those gallon thermos for our drinks? No matter how much ice we put in them our drinks were always luke warm. Sunday after dinner we went to the movies taking along all our younger brothers and sisters. Movie, cartoon, news reel and a chapter all on one small box of candy. Had to ration out the candy to the little kids or they would eat their's even before the movie started and then they would cry to go home. A big woman in a white uniform and a flashlight was the matron who walked up and down the aisles to make sure we kept quiet during the show. Just the thought of her makes me shiver even today. Ah, those were the good old days, LOL!
May in Jersey

PS. We also lived in the 3 story house, it was owned by my grandfather. We had a huge kitchen in the basement and occupied the first floor, the 2 other floors were rented to other families. We had use of the back yard and spent may days there playing and helping my grandfather with the garden and his fig tree. Fig tree was wrapped up every winter so the frost wouldn't kill it. Sweetest figs I even tasted. Everyone had clothes lines from their kitchen window to the pole in the back of the yard and laundy was hanging every day of the week except Sunday. My mother had a wringer washing machine in the storage section of the basement that she rolled over to the kitchen sink. One time she got her arm caught in the wringer and that was the end of wringers for her.

Forgot to say that the several "Remember when" topics are keeping me from my housework, on second thought that's not a bad idea, LOL! May in Jersey

Forgot to say how much I loved Woolworth's!!!!!!!! :D

Woolworth's, OMG, where else could you buy windmill cookies and a parakeet in the same store.

I remember walking to town with Grandma, proudly carrying the feed sack we had to match so I could have a new dress, and if she had the money (in the 1930s) she would take me to the little ice cream shop with the lovely white bent metal chairs and white tables. And the fancy ice cream!! All we had in the winter was snow ice cream, when it was too cold to really want it.

Going into town by myself for Grandma's cigarettes..old Blind Man Price could tell by the footsteps who it was coming into his store, and call me by name even before I would say a thing. At that time, way back then, kids were allowed to buy cigarettes for the adults in their familes if the shop keeper knew the older ones couldn't walk into town so easily. And that nice man always put a piece of penny candy in the sack with the cigarettes. (off the record, I've never smoked in all my life.) My one and only smoke was made from corn husks and dried corn silk...the experience cured me!!

going to the movies once a week was the big thing we got to do. We had to pay a quarter. At the cafe would bought a buger and fries and coke for .35 cent Remeber when you when out on Halloween the streets were filled with kids. You had to be fast because they ran out of candy. Wow the good old days.

I remember when I was 4 - yes FOUR - and my grandfather asked me to go to the grocery store 5 blocks away to get him a pack of camels and I could get myself an ice cream - he gave me 35 cents that covered it.....hard to believe - 4 years old - walking that far - and BUYING cigaretts for that amount!

Since we are in memory lane... Do you remember your first
job after high school? I came to Des Moines to work for Ma Bell.
Wore dresses with slips, hose & high heels, earrings & gloves
every day. NO AIR CONDITIONING in the building..Walked to work everyday... Hmm. maybe that explains bad knees now.
Wouldn't trade that experience for anything!
Carole

I certainly remember my first job. Went to work the week after graduation working as a secretary in a school of nursing for $1.00 an hour. That was good money back then.

I remember when I was a child, we lived in the country also. And I do mean country. We lived in Montevallo, AL before it was a college town, but we lived in a rural area. My mom canned all our vegetables and my dad raised chickens, pigs and cows for meat. Mom had a day she baked bread, pies and cookies for the rest of the week. She also had a wash day and an ironing day. Ironing was sure a chore back then because she ironed everything -- most of it was starched, too. I have lots of memories of that time. Then we moved to St. Louis, MO. We lived there for almost two years and my dad passed away, so Mom and I moved back to Alabama. I had three brothers and two sisters, (2 brothers have since passed away), they were all much older than I. The sister closest to me in age is 8 years older. We sure had some good times and times were tough a lot back then. I remember listening to the radio at night "Fibber McGee & Mollie", "Innersanctum" (spelling), and "George Burns and Gracie Allen." I remember when Elvis' "Love Me Tender" made #1 and all the others after and before that one.

So many memories! Like you said Carole, wouldn't trade these memories for anything.

I ws born and raised in a small town. Have 5 brothers and 2 sisters,(all living & well). Life wasn't easy, all the gardening, canning, , washing (old wringer) and ironing..We were poor but didn't know it. Always had what we needed but no frills. Spent
every Sunday afternoon visiting grandparents along with a
house full of cousins, aunts & uncles. Will celebrate my 50th
class reunion in May...Only had 21 in the class and hve lost 4 but the rest remain close friends...Rural Iowa was the best
place to live.