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The Good Old Days.

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Walt Davies

Well-known Member
Let's see if anyone can come up with a very good reason to go back to them good OL! Days.

1. Lets see Black and white TV with more snow than picture.

2. 15 to 18 MPG on a good day. 8 MPG on my 46 Pontiac straight eight.

3. Vacuum wipers.

4. Outdoor Toilets.

5. Car heaters were an option that no one ever bought on a Chevy or Ford.

Walt
 
Well, the black and white fuzzy TV might be alright so my kids don't get entranced with all the destruction of family moral values, like husband and wives cheating on each other and multiple partners every other day.Sorry if I sound so serious but Ithink they could knock some of that crap out!
 
I can think of a lot of reasons to go back to those days. Life was slower. A lot less murder in the streets. You could take a man at his word. I bought a tractor on a handshake. Never heard of an outside toilet breaking down. We were hungry when we went to the table and tired when we went to bed. product recalls were rare. Didn't have to worry about being embarrased when we took the kids to the movie. I could go on and on.........rw
 
Telephones that kept you tied to a wall, that you had to crank,[Long and short cranks for your neighbors,in different series,or one long crank for the operator]----Real neighbors that would come out of the clear blue to help you load those last two loads of hay if it was threatening rain.--Some one tearing down an old shead.call all the neighbors over, ask bring a covered dish and some wieners. Besides making a hard days work disappear,the grown ups and kids alike all had fun. Useualy there was a hay ride involved also. I miss the good ole days.
 
Hey,that outdoor toilet,there was a 3 holer advertized in the Farmers Advance last week,all original,$1500.
 
Threshing day when all of the local farmers came to our place to thresh our wheat and oat. Later on went to the other farms to help them. Only one threshing machine in our end of the county. That old Huber was a great old tractor.
Family outings when we would pick and haul apples to the storage building. Like threshing, people from all over came to pick apples before the frost.
Barn dances when we actually had dances in the barns and the local square dance caller also played a violin
 
i'm 27 years old. i spend a lot of time at my grandma and grandpas house. they are 77 and 80 respectively and they seem to be stuck in the 50's. things are simple. we eat meals together. grow our own food in a big garden every year and can and freeze as much as we can. tv is hardly on other than the evening news and thats mostly for the weather report. i see nothing wrong with it and i think things would be better if more people my age were exposed to life like this. just my opinion.
 
I'm serious as a heart attack,find a community like that today and I'll sell everything I can't take with me and I'll be there in a heartbeat.
 
No running water. No electrcity untill 1947-48.No electric starter on the tractor.(F12 Farmall).Alot more hand labor.Cold house on winter mornings. Dont know if I would want to go back to all this or not.

steveormary
 
One thing you might want to put on the list Walt is the divorce rate in the old days and the divorce rate today. I don't think modern conveniences have made people happier. Just makes us greedier, more jaded, and mean to each other. Jeleousy and ifidelity run rampant in our good new days. At least in the old days you knew where you stand in the order of things. Now my 21 year old neighbor shows up on our trail ride on a $10,000 dollar snowmobile and he makes about 1/3 what I do when he is working. And he was just laid off, and his family has just gone bankrupt and had the house in foreclosure. Yet in the good new days he drives around like the big rich man on the block. That is why the good old days are better. Not a bunch of 10 cent millionares everywhere you looked.
 
I agree Walt "The Good Ole Days" weren't that good.Add to that jobs were very scarce and very low pay.And thank goodness for the higher divorce
rate or I'd still be married to #1 or one of us would be in jail and the other in the cemetery(LOL)
 
Hey there Walt;
If all I have heard is true,I believe
that the Amish do quite well without
all the,"modern" conviences. I think
I could do the same,I'm 75 I won't
last too much longer.
Bob
God Bless
 
The good ol days also weren't so darn litigation happy. Now a days we have to be protected from our selves. I have never stabbed myself with a pencil, gotten injured playing tag on the playground, playing red rover or a number of other things.

Now a days there is a 50 page manual (with 10 different languages) on how to use a can opener. 8 of those pages are warnings, dos and don'ts, the 9th is how to use it (but the words are confusing) and the 10th simply says made in China.

I miss the good ol days.
 
Yep! the neighbor kid came home and killed the whole family and threw them all down the well. Left that old house empty for years after that.
One neighbor hung himself in the attic after the crash of 29 no one lived in that big old house 50 or more years.
Great Old days were not a lot different than now remember the kid in the midwest who went on a killing spree.
Went to school in the dark morning and got home after dark just in time to do the chore that Dad had left for you.
Wood kitchen stove that did more burning of the food than cooking it, never have I ever forgot those awful pancakes that grandmother made with raw bacon inside.

Walt
 
Disn't have TV to start, rest sounds about like old home growing up. Had eletric start on H,M- regular and grandfather JD B hand start. Gas mileage on flathead Fords OK- gas was about a 10th of todays price, $35.00 and some paperwork could get a ounce of gold supposedly- gold coins and real silver dollars were around, old German/Austrian traditions of hard money gifts for certain occasions followed. Indoor plumbing came later. Fast food meant rabbit. Horse team still used on mower and wagons. Brothers and cousins made up haying crew for the neighborhood. Breakfast was fresh eggs, fresh or last nights hand squeezed milk, home grown potatos. School football coach liked to have us handmilkers go for opposition towny quaterback or runner- we grabbed anything and held firm grip, pulled them down. Front line sometimes cussed for picking up opposition and tossing like haybale. Couple people died Diabetes, Polio was still known- the vacinations were just starting. Couple of school kids died of now almost unknown sickness. Couple early marriages- the honeymmon came first, first kids 2 months premature but full formed was well known incident for young couples. Cancer diagnosis was usually when symptoms obvious and usually meant update will and arrange for coffin in a year or less. Somethings have gotten a bit better, some maybe worse. RN
 
Nancy, I think you named it. My dad homesteeded in 1911,he dided in 1950. the house did not have a lock on the door...never needed it. BTW,Until I took him to the hospital, he had slept off of the homesteed 3 nights only.
 
That how I grew up in Ohio. It changed during the 50's. When I came back from 6 yrs in the service it was all gone. What an utter disillusionment. Henry
 
For a couple of weeks,Thursday nights,on the channel right below RFD on Direct TV,there were documentaries on the Amish. Very interesting. They said only about ten percent were full time farmers now,but the Amish communities were growing faster than ever.Some had cottage industries,but the majority were working off the farm at 8 hour a day jobs. Even that community can't stop progress. Maybe we'll have to become seperatists and start our own. The outside world would do everything in its power to destroy us though I'm sure.
 
I'd rather live a [b:2da28ebf58]good[/b:2da28ebf58] life and die young of some disease that isn't a problem now than this living paycheck to paycheck and hoping that things fall into place eventually.

And NO, I don't own anything excessive like a $10k snowmobile, RV, quad, etc.
 
Depends on who you is and was....black people from the south like me..hates the good ol days with the good ol boys..white people loved them...
 
We have been through this several times recently. No way will I up for the so called "good ole days". They Suck with a severe Whooooooooooooshing noise.

Mark
 
I Just plain miss my Family from the old days, my mom especially, she was a Mountain raised women from Virginia and knew a lot, but I Didn't get to learn all the things i really needed for life. learned em the hard way. but I Done o.k. and appreciate the good as much as the bad. As far as the old ways, they are still good compared to the newer junk/lifestyles you get today. I Try to use the old methods of working with the help of modern tools. I Guess what I'm saying is..we should appreciate what we have right now, because I Have a bad feeling things are about to go down hill in the near future..Tom
 
We still have one of those outside toilets at our weekend/deer hunting cabin.We also have a fuzzy TV that can get 3 channels. :D
 
I talked to my 74 year old father about this. We both agreed that the old days sucked. I like working on my old tractors, but I wouldn't want to make my living with one.
 
I guess it depends on the time of the good old days. I'm 52 and grew up the (old) way at least for the 60's. We didn't have TV, had a big garden, a couple of milk cows that we raised calves with the extra milk. Old Farmall H. Did things the old way by hand. Hard work, good eats, went to bed at dark and up at daylight, did chores before breakfast. Home made bread, sweet blackberry jam, tree fresh peaches, strawberries. Swam in the creek, played in the fresh mowed meadows, hunted the woods. Life was good then and sounds good now. I know I have this computer but could probably give it up if I had to :) :wink: :wink: ....James
 

Bet I'm not the only one here who would have been dead by this age in the good old days. Coronary artery stents saved me two years ago and I'll bet others here are alive because of some medical advance made in the last few years.
 
OK, hope this post doesn't appear twice, for some reason.
The health care system was not so depressing & twisted in the old days. Remember, Doctors would make house calls?
Gas might have been 27 cents/gal.
Buffalo nickels were beautiful coins. Someone mentioned gold coins; that was before my time. Am glad to see bison on one or two of the new State quarters- something feels so right about that.
Good subject to think about now & then.
 
OK, hope this post doesn't appear twice, for some reason.
The health care system was not so depressing & twisted in the old days. Remember, Doctors would make house calls?
Gas might have been 27 cents/gal.
Buffalo nickels were beautiful coins. Someone mentioned gold coins; that was before my time. Am glad to see bison on one or two of the new State quarters- something feels so right about that.
Good subject to think about now & then.
 
Think of it this way. Would you rather raise your kids by the ways of the good old days or Now days. When I was 10 years old, I was exposed to hoeing tobacco and corn, cleaning the dairy barn, playing kick the can at night with a bunch of neighbor kids, spending lots of days in the mountains exploring and parents not even worrying about us, learning to drive the farm truck and tractors, eating hot lunches with the farmhands, going to the swimming hole in the creek on hot afternoons, riding a bicycle to little league ball practice with a car passing only once in a while, neighbors pitching in to help work, Listening to songs by Johnny Cash and Patsey Cline on the tube radio, watching 2 fuzzy channels on T V with only about 2 commercials in 30 minutes, and the list goes on and on and on.
Now what are many 10 year olds exposed to. Well for starters they can get on the internet and look at anything an everything they should not no matter how much their parents try to block. They hear about drugs at school and hear about even 4th and 5th graders playing the choking game. They can hear about all the nice prescription stuff that might be found in their parents medicine cabinet. They can hear about the nnalert and violence in some of the rap music and vidio games. And then, all they have to do is turn on the big screen T V and see more nnalert and violence even in the prime time hours. And then a commercial comes on. One comes to mind about a bunch of yuppies who have come together to play their guitars and sing while wearing their plaid shirts and fake cowboy hats and do some male bonding. Then they break out into song, in celebration of a little pill that is now on the market which allows them back in the ranks of those who are capable of normal bedroom activities, of which they had formerly been doing without. Now with this new V pill, they are so happy they laugh and sing about it. And yes, so many 10 year old across the country get to watch them celebrate.
 
Walt, When did young man in midwest go on a killing spree?

Only one flashlight and batteries were run down. Paul Harvey made good sense on radio in 1952. (before TV) Older brothers telling me to carry 2 five gallon of water, to equalize load. (I wasn't much bigger than the bucket')
Spark plug pump to air up tires
Led
 
How bout those vacuum wipers on cars back then.

Up behind someone (a retired farmer Ha! Ha!....I happen to be one so I can say this) on a two lane road (which was most of what existed).....wipers going as fast as they can; one per window pane....ok road clear...roll down the window, stick your left arm straight out (into the rain) to signal your left movement..... start your swing out into the oncoming lane that appeared to be clear of traffic......put the pedal on the metal....engine vacuum disappears.........and THE WIPERS QUIT!!!!!

Forget that.

Mark
 
I still cook my breakfast and dinner on a wood burning cook stove.If it runs hot close the draft or slide the pan over.WE have an electric range next to it.I may use it in the summer but it sits idle 9 months of the year.70 years old and have spent two winters in a house that didnt have wood heat.I keep a hand pump on the well April thru November and use when I want a cold drink of water.Works when the electric goes off.I have 150 acres of firewood,no gas,oil,propane,coal or kerosene on the land.Fuel oil is 3.80 kerosene 4.50.Gas 3.30 diesel 4.25.Looks to me like a lot of us will be forced back into the good old days,like it or not.I still keep a few cattle and hens.Some advances have been made but some new things are pure poison.No drugs around when I was a kid, didnt have any money to buy them.10 snowmobilers died here this winter.Atv s are chewing up farmers fields and making mudholes in brooks.I can make good buttermilk pan cakes on the wood range.Use real butter and maple syrup.Kept a Jersey milk cow for many years.Ill stay with the old ways.
 
I wasnt in a hurry.speed limit was 45,never passed anyone.I do remember buying a good running car with no rust for 50.00.Bought an acre of land on a tarred road for 300.00
 
I hear reports of people who go hungry when their electric can opener is useless during power outages.Every kid I knew could open a can with a Boy Scout pocket knife.My mother taught me to cook and use her Singer sewing machine at an early age.Dad taught me how to fix a car and how to buid a shed.Friends and I built a nice camp back in the woods when I was about 15.
 
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