Gone But Not Forgotten

So much has changed in my lifetime, it has been amazing to watch. For instance, one of my first memories was standing in front of our new television set, probably about 1956, watching the Ed Sullivan Show, Walt Disney, etc. And even though I don't remember the radio being the primary mode of communication for the average household, that was most certainly the case immediately prior to the introduction of the television. In fact the genesis of many tv programs were the radio version of those same programs.

Another one of my early memories is standing in line to get vaccinated for polio and this photo captures the experience perfectly. There were a number of diseases we had to be vaccinated for in grade school, we didn't have the infant vaccinations then they have now. Needless to say, when I was little I knew of a number of people who suffered from these same diseases.

Then there was our rotary dial phone. It was the classic black phone, who could have guessed we had cell phones or even iPhones in our future. But the really interesting phone memory I have is my Grandma's phone in Amity. It hung on the wall and she was too short to speak into the mouthpiece so she had to shout. But before she actually talked on the phone, she had to wait for it to ring a certain way because she was on a party line so some of the calls that came through her phone were actually for her neighbor.

We never actually lived on a farm but both my grandparents and my aunt and uncle all did. We got out milk from my grandfather in a glass, gallon jar. Before we could use it, we had to skim the cream off the top. Talk about butterfat! It was really hard to get used to margarine, 2% milk or reduced fat anything when we had truly been raised with the real thing. It's amazing I didn't weigh 3 tons as a kid but I know I never stopped moving so I'm sure that helped.


The "Wish Book" or catalog played a huge part in our lives. My sister and I would sit behind my grandparents' wood stove and go through the new one page by page identifying everything we liked on our respective pages as we went. When that new catalog arrived (Montgomery Ward, Sears and/or J.C. Penny's) it was good for hours and hours of entertainment for us.

I guess that's enough of a walk down memory lane for the time being.