- 26,086
OK, got to ask. What is Grit?
Show your age by posting a gadget kids today wouldn't understand
- Thread starter DayTimer
- Start date
- 26,086
3rd or 4th grade my mom got called to the school because me and a buddy had been selling lizards to kids that were to afraid to catch them. A couple complained to their mama's about us taking their lunch money. They weren't from our neighborhood.
Came across one of those old ads a few years ago. Cleaning out a warehouse. Wanted to run home and order one of each thing on the page.
Now that I've got a little money save up, I can afford anything on that page I want.
Damn shame they don't sell the good stuff anymore like they did when we were kids.
As for the x-ray glasses, they'd probably work great now ... with my cataracts.
- 7,078
I can no longer remember the specific details but it was a newspaper kids could sell. There used to be magazine ads for it. I don't know how one got the supplies of papers or their costs and selling prices.
You and I would have been hell together back then. Probably would have branched out into snakes and gators.
My momma spent almost as much time at the school house as I did. The other kids probably thought she was one of the teachers.
A weekly newspaper sold mainly in rural areas. That why Wino doesn't remember it. Him being out in Hollywood and all.
- Thread starter
- #97
- 5,945
Between those two creeks I mentioned was an old junk yard, abandoned sometime in the late 60's because the State of Pennsyltuckey was going to dam up those two creeks and create a big lake or "reservoir." The state officials made the junk yard owner sell his land to them. Then the Feds realized that the landfill that was sitting just south of the Skippack Creek was leaching toxic waste into the ground water. So the EPA told the state of PA that the reservoir idea was DOA. At least, that's how it was told to me.
By the time I was a kid in the 70's, that old junk yard had been taken back by nature, as nature does with such things once we humans are no longer around. Friend, it was the most magnificent set of woods a kid could have to play in! Most of the old cars were of course sold for scrap when the yard owner left the land, but not all of them. We would spend days crawling through brush and down trees to find one. And when we did, it could take us months to "clear" it of the brush and growth so we could use it as fort, or a getaway car, or fighter plane, or whatever prop we wanted it for in our imaginations.
Also left largely intact was the big home he and his family had lived in. Those walls have now been collapsed and bulldozed and the whole property between those two creeks has been more or less developed. But if those walls could talk! Whew! The rating that would get applied to that movie!
My brother and I and our friends would set out in the morning with a bag of sandwiches and another sack of tastycakes, and we wouldn't see hide nor hair of a parent until the sun started to glow at the horizon.
My dad and I always say to one another that he and I were raised in one world, and my kids in a whole other one.
I can't tell you that any of my kids were ever out of sight of some adult supervision for more than a few minutes. Usually because the adult went inside for veggie wraps and crudite.
I wouldn't trade my time growing up to grow up today.
Times, they have a changed.
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- Thread starter
- #98
- 5,945
I would never have had the patience as a kid to sit through a double feature of silent films, Louis. Good for you!
- 30,537
Once me and my brother ordered baby alligators. I think mom made us flush them down the toilet.
Anybody detassel corn?
Many times.
Always while my buddies were just outside playing. Not near as bad as shelling butter beans and peas though.
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