Grow up in Whitinsville
Posted Monday, March 25, 2019 01:05 PM

I put this together for memory purposes,  The More I got into it the more great memories came back.  I hope it is the same for you.

Growing up in Northbridge we had a good life and we never had to worry or have fear...all of that lifestyle. Mom cooked and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table. I had to have permission to leave the table, and sit there until I ate everthing on my plate.


We never traveled on an airplane, or out of the country, or had a credit card. They had something called a revolving charge card. Good only at Sears & Roebuck.  My parents never drove me to soccer practice, or to school. This was mostly because we only had one car and Dad drove it to work.  We never heard of soccer. 


I had a used bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow) and inserted baseball cards, or balloons, in the spokes to make it go faster.  I would fall off the bike or crash and Mom would put mercuricrome on the wounds and I would go back out again.  No doctors visits unless it was a broken something or another.  No helmets.


We didn't have a television in our house until I was 10.  It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight. TV test patterns that came on at night.      
There was only one phone in the house it was on a party line from the neighborhood. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure no one was already using the line.  (You would listen to the conversation before saying excuse me.)  Phone numbers began with letters and four numbers.  Area codes did not exist until 1951.  We actually talked to people.    

                             
Milk was delivered outside the front door at 5:00AM in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.  It was not pasterized and had to be shaken to mix the cream with the rest of the bottle.   In Winter we had instant Ice Cream because the cream would freeze and pop the cardboard top and the rest of the bottle became non-fat milk


We wore P.F. Flyers and Buster Brown Shoes, poodle skirts, and jeans with cuffs.
We had Butch wax , Wildroot, and Brylcreem (that was our hair products). 
We had 45 RPM records players that was Hi Fidelity, and without head phones.    

 
In summer we woulld leave the house at 8-ish, return for lunch, go out again and back home for dinner.  After dinner we play kick the can, and home before it got dark. We go to the pond and swim without sun tan lotion, we go to to the playground and organized the neighborhood kids into some game be it baseball, dodgeball, red rover, hide and seek, cowboys and indians, four squares, or hop scrotch. We would get frog eggs and watch the polliwogs grow up.
Lincoln logs, tinker toys, Ft. Apache, Monopoly, Sorry, pick up sticks, erector sets, and chemistry sets for rainy days.


We had our gangs like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Brownies, and Sea Scouts.


 We had expressions like: Jalopy; Hunky Dory, Don't touch that dial, You sound like a broken record, Hung out to dry, Heavens to Betsy! Gee whillikers! Jumping Jehoshaphat, lots of moxie, Knuckle sandwich, straighten up and fly right, Holy Moley, in like Flynn, living the life of Riley,  knucklehead, nincompoop, Not for all the tea in China! Oh, my aching back!  Kilroy was here, “Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle! “This is a fine kettle of fish!”, Pshaw, The milkman did it, Hey! It's your nickel, Knee high to a grasshopper, Well, Fiddlesticks!,  Going like sixty,   I'll see you in the funny papers, Cowabunga, Don't take any wooden nickels, Wake up and smell the roses, More ____ then  Carter's has liver pills, See ya later, alligator! After while crocodile, Okidoki, That's enough for Cox's army.   Double-Dog-Dare-Ya! 'Oly-oly-oxen-free', do over, all made perfect sense!