Back to the Past

Our simple rustic house

A recent online forum discussion with a 50's housewife triggered a bunch of random memories from my childhood growing up in the 1960s and '70s.  I decided to spare you my long list.  Instead I will itemize some memories of my older three sons (born 1985, 1987, 1989) growing up in Guatemala and Mexico that make them more like adults of an earlier generation:

• Easy Washer that we used in the early years to conserve water.  We could wash several loads of laundry with the same wash water, and spin in a separate tub.  Very time consuming to hand fill each cycle.

• Wearing clothes until they either looked or smelled dirty.  Only socks and underwear were thrown in the wash daily

• Weekly bath as children, sharing bath water, least dirty to most dirty, just like laundry

• "Homemade" haircuts most of the time

• Hanging clothes on clothesline their whole childhood (we still don't have a dryer)

• Owning only two pair of shoes at a time and mostly hand-me-down clothes

• Meals cooked from scratch, and every meal a family occasion

• Living on an unpaved road (see Paul Harvey, below)

• No TV reception

• Black rotary telephones that you actually had to dial

• Party lines (see related post about telephone service)

• Cloth diapers (not that they remember this!)

• Non-flush toilet

• Full service gas stations 

• No automatic dishwasher 

• Freely playing outside with the neighborhood kids without a lot of parental supervision (and without the option of computer games and other electronic entertainment)

• Moms in neighborhood were all stay-at-home moms

• No strict seat belt laws.  Riding in the back of pick-up trucks out in villages when necessary

• Listening to stories (old radio programs) on tape more than watching TV

• Hauling the garbage to the town dump in the back of our old Bronco

• Glass coke bottles just like I grew up with

• Doing extra chores would only earn the equivalent of $1 for an hour of work 

• Having the odd job of burying mangy stray dogs who wondered on our property and mysteriously died (ahem) in the night 

• Old fashioned typewriters actually still in use

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