... Hula Hoops, eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar, candy cigarettes, wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside, soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles, coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes, Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum, home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, newsreels before the movie, P.F. Fliers, telephone numbers with a word prefix....(Raymond 4-601), party lines, peashooters, Howdy Dowdy, 45 RPM records, Green Stamps, Hi-Fi's, metal ice cubes trays with levers, mimeograph paper, Beanie and Cecil, roller-skate keys, cork pop guns, drive ins, Studebakers, washtub wringers, the Fuller Brush Man, Reel-To-Reel tape recorders, Tinkertoys, Erector Sets, the Fort Apache Play Set, Lincoln Logs, 15 cent McDonald hamburgers, 5 cent packs of baseball cards with that awful pink slab of bubble gum, penny candy, 35 cent a gallon gasoline and Jiffy Pop popcorn?   

Do you remember when all the girls had ugly gym uniforms? The Philco radio had a big eye? It took five minutes for the TV warm up? Nobody owned a purebred dog? A a quarter was a decent allowance? You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny? You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time?  And you didn't pay for air?  And, you got trading stamps to boot? Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?  When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady?  Playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?  Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger? Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like, "That cloud looks like a ...."

Were you alive when nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school?  They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed. . ..and they did?   All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore high heels?  When being sent to the principal's office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home? Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!   But we survived because their love was greater than the threat. 

How many of these do you remember?

Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures. "Oly-oly-oxen-free" made perfect sense. Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles. The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team. Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle. Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy, 
Howdy Dowdy and the Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk. 

If you recall none of them, you are no more than twenty.  It you recall half of them, you are about forty.  If you recall all of them, you are sixty or more.