I saw a penny in the parking lot last week and stopped and picked it up. Most people won’t. A penny is looked upon as a nuisance coin. People drop excess pennies in a dish beside the cash register these days rather than fool with them. Afterall, there is not much you can do with a single penny. Boomers, though, can remember back when a mere penny bought tons of pure joy. Those were the days of … [Read more...]

How do young people meet these days? Kids don’t have weekend dances. There are there no more drive-in movies and there are no drive-in restaurants to speak of. The malls are dead zones. And young people would practically need a second mortgage to pay for a movie date – when there are movies.  But Baby Boomers look back nostalgically at the days when a young lady called a carhop would take your … [Read more...]

There were real, honest-to-goodness service stations in Lewisburg, WV when I was a boy. Not only did they pump gasoline, they offered genuine service. As I recall, we had just two gas stations there in the 1950’s, an Esso station on Washington Street, down and across from the post office, and another at the corner of  Church Street and Washington. The second station sold Pure Oil if memory serves, … [Read more...]

  There is a school yard behind our house and several acres of open fields. Occasionally, we’ll see some folks tossing frisbees to their dogs, but rarely do we see kids out playing – and there is an actual baseball field behind the school, and unless parents have organized a tee ball event, it sits dormant. I would have killed for either field. Come summertime, we played baseball and … [Read more...]

I saw a picture of a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper recently that took me back to the 1950’s and brown bag lunches. As an elementary student, sometimes I ate in the cafeteria, assuming someone had an available quarter, but often Mom would pack my lunch – a cookie, an apple and a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. I remember watching the early commercials of Reynolds’s Waxed Paper when the … [Read more...]

Tomorrow is Fourth of July and there will be fireworks – serious fireworks, but you’re not supposed to have any in Virginia. That’s because our state would trust you with a 3,000 pound Ferrari that will do 250 miles an hour in about 10 seconds, but they think you might hurt yourself with a bottle rocket. So we can buy things that smoke and sizzle but nothing that leaves the ground. If it’s fun, … [Read more...]

I can’t tell you how many five dollar checks I wrote during my years at UNC.  All told, they might have stacked three feet high. Writing small checks was simply a way of life in the sixties. For one, we didn’t have charge cards. There were a few gasoline charge cards around, but VISA had yet to make an appearance, so if we needed money, we wrote checks. I can recall writing one-dollar checks … [Read more...]

Chicken is good. Hambone is sweet. Possum meat is mighty, mighty fine. But give me, oh give me, I really wish you would That watermelon hanging on the vine   My Daddy used to sing that song when I was a boy. I don’t know if it was an actual, recorded song, or something he just made up, but he sang it frequently around the house, particularly in summer and particularly … [Read more...]

In 1955, Lewisburg, WV was a painted city by Norman Rockwell, or could have been. Main Street was pretty much it – three blocks or so with a half dozen businesses per block. There were the usual stores – a five and dime, a barbershop, a bank, a savings and loan, some clothing stores, a jewelry store, two pharmacies, a couple small department stores, a record shop, a doughnut shop and Zelda’s … [Read more...]