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. Boomers look back nostalgically at the days when a young lady called a carhop would take your order for a frosted mug of root beer and an order of fries. You’d give her two quarters and get change. Drive-in restaurants really … [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 usually 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 … [Read more...]

Looking back over the years, is there a single Boomer who didn’t have a strange – or let’s say “interesting” - relative or two. I sure did. One that comes immediately to mind was Uncle Sidney. Uncle Sidney was my grandmother’s (Mama Ida) younger brother. She was a Davis and had three sisters - Ann, Pearl and Topsy, and two brothers, Arthur and Sidney. The family lost their mother soon after Topsy, … [Read more...]

  The Fourth of July Week is typically known for fireworks and firework displays, but it is really sad to go to a firework’s stand in the city of Charlottesville, unless sparklers and smoke bombs are your thing. No more “O’er The Rockets Red Glare.” For the citizens of Thomas Jefferson’s fine town, it’s Psssst, Pffftt, Pshhhh! Oh, wow! But Boomers remember real fireworks, the kind … [Read more...]

  Today, if you’re driving through a neighborhood and spot a child riding a bicycle (wearing a helmet and knee pads of course), the mom or dad who are always with the child has a conniption fit to get the biker out of the road and behind a hedgerow as quickly as possible. They are seemingly afraid that the approaching motorist will chase down the child and run him over. It wasn’t always … [Read more...]

Every Boomer remembers that first bicycle. Next to turning 16 and getting a drivers license, the biggest day in the life of a youngster was getting a new bike. The reason bikes were so critical during the early Boomer years is because families generally had only one car, and the dads had them at work. That meant if you wanted to go some place, like baseball practice, the movies, or the swimming … [Read more...]

Picnic season has arrived. Families will be firing up the Weber Grills, friends might bring potato salad, some chips and a pie and there will be plenty of Citronella candles to keep the mosquitos at bay. But that’s not how picnics once were. Boomers remember church picnics as among the main events of the summer. What spreads they were! And if you happened to have family in North Carolina, you … [Read more...]