In My Days It Was Tough

Strutt’s…what can I say, I love to eat at Strutt’s. It’s always fun to go there with friends & just eat & goof off. We were there last night & started discussing what we could tell our children & grandchildren about our days growing up…you know like when your dad or granddad would say things like, “In our days life was tough…” & they’d go on to say things like, “We lived through the Great Depression when people struggled to survive”, “We walked five miles to & from school in the knee deep snow, up hills both ways”, “We played baseball with chert rocks, usin' sawmill slabs for bats”, “We had to play with homemade wooden toys, we didn’t have all these fancy store bought stuff”, “we didn’t get a lot for Christmas, all we got was a couple of oranges & an umbrella & we were mighty happy to get that”. See what I mean…what kind of tales, will my generation have to show our children how tough we had it. We talked about it & come up with a few, how about:



“In our days it was tough, you had to stick your finger in a whole in the phone, turn the dial & wait about four seconds, before you could dial another number. It took every bit of thirty seconds for me to dial up a friend.”

“In our days it was tough, we didn’t have remotes for our television…I was the remote & we only had two channels & “Lawrence Welk” or “Hee Haw” was usually on one of them at all times.”

“In our days it was tough, I had to ride the bus about 5 miles to school & if it snowed even an inch…school was closed.”

“In my days it was tough, we didn’t have these Playstation 3’s or X-Boxes, all we had was “Pong”, two sticks on the screen & one square ball, you played tennis (doubles or singles) or you didn’t play anything.”

“In my days it was tough, all we could have in a car was an 8 track player. No 6 CD changers, no repeat button for your favorite song. No…you listened to your favorite song & waited a week to hear it again.”

“In my days it was tough, we didn’t have I-pods, and if we wanted to carry music around with us…we had to memorize it.”

“In our days it was tough, we didn’t have ‘texting’, if you wanted to type your friend a message, you had to put it in an envelope, slap a stamp on it & throw it in the mailbox. You wouldn’t get a return message for about a week or more.”

“In our days it was tough, we didn’t have DVD players & a store that was filled with all the new releases for rent or a ‘Netflix’, we had a VCR that opened from the top with big ‘Flintstone’ sized VHS or Beta tapes that could only be rented at one single quick-rip mart in town & they only had two movies, ‘Gone with the Wind’ & ‘The Ten Commandments’ & if they weren’t returned on time…the cops would come to your house.”

“In our days it was tough, we didn’t have laptop computers, if we would’ve put a computer in our lap it would have paralyzed us from the waste down. In our days it was tough, we didn’t have Myspace, Facebook or Twitter…heck if you had a home computer…there might not be anyone else you knew that had one.”

“In our days it was tough, we didn’t get to sit inside all day & text & play video games…our moms ran us outside to play.”

Man, we sure did have it good. But we can’t let our kids know that.

Vern