The Olden Days - an Interesting Trip for Me

I was cruising Pinterest yesterday (instead of working) and found some pins of photos from when I was growing up. I wonder how many of you know about the way we used to live. I thought it would be fun to show you some things. This is probably the thing that impacted me the most:

What are those poor little children doing, you ask? They are participating in a bomb drill. We had these drills weekly in case someone bombed the USA. We also had to wear dog tags. My teacher said the dog tags were in case the bomb dropped while we were in school and we were all killed. The dog tags would let everyone know who we were. I remember that I got in trouble and got my hand spanked with a ruler for asking the question, "if there is a bomb, how will my wooden desk protect me".

We said the Pledge of Allegiance every day. That may be why all the "gray hairs" of today are so patriotic. Note that the girls all wore dresses to school each day. No "boy" clothes for us! We were little ladies!

 OMG-what is this, you ask! Yes, babies drank beer. It sure made it easy to put us down for a nap! And Heineken still has a lot of their little customers. Look at that innocent little lamb peeking out from behind the beer bottle. We also had these:

Just like Dad's! I used to take these to school. We all "smoked" them on the play ground. Here's what it cost to live back then:

I was 10 in 1957. I think that these prices are a little high for 1957. They were still pretty much like that when I was in my teens. In fact, gas actually went down because the US was drilling its own oil and refining it too. No foreign oil dependence then. Just rampant capitalism and prosperity. McDonald's opened its first restaurants:

Social Security was new and voluntary. The government promised that they would never, ever, ever touch the money that you (and your employer) paid into Social Security. A good lesson in trusting your government with new, big programs. Look at that big arm handing you a check!

We had one television station. It came on the air at 3PM and went off the air at 10:00 PM. The rest of the time this is what you would see:

My Grandfather had the first tv in the neighborhood. All the neighbors would come over to watch it. They would bring food and we had big glasses of tea and it was an event. We did the washing with one of these:

Notice the dress and heels. Women actually dressed up, even if they stayed home everyday as a "housewife" which is what we were expected to do. No clothes dryers though. We all did this:

Even if the weather was freezing, we hung clothes outside. I remember bringing in clothes that were frozen stiff. We had to lay them over the floor furnace (no central heat) to thaw them out. Wow, I just realized what a long post this is. I could go on and on. If you've made it this far in this long post, have a happy weekend. Cheery wave from Bev (the old Fogey)