Happy birthday Nick,

I can remember all of the things that you talked about and a whole lot more, because i'm a little bit older than you, and oldies are supposed to be wiser, but i can tell you, that is not, how it happens.:)

Hugs Roo

ROO

You didn't have a green bag thing, but you did have:

An elephant that mowed your grass
A bird that chiseled out life like engravings
A dinosaur to move those heavy boulders down at mr. slates
A car, that after you pushed with your feet for a few yards, could go 55mph and use no gas

Boy did you have it easy.

K.T. Leone

LOLING ALL OVER THE PLACE

I wish I was 51 again :) I'll be 72 next month and I can hardly believe it either.

Actually most of the 'green' things in your post we still do. Our milk still comes in bottles, though when I was young Miss Wright delivered it in a pony and trap and ladelled it out into a jug from her milk churn. Even when the Co-op took over the milk float was intelligent and didn't need driving because the horse knew where to stop.

Our lawn mower is human powered. We cycle, walk or use the bus where practical and our car does fewer than 3000 miles/year. (my cycle commute, when I worked, was about 5000 miles/year).

Never owned a TV since we got married in 1967 despite my being brought up in the TV trade (perhaps 'because' being brought up in the TV trade) There was no TV where we lived until I was 9 anyway. btw you'd be surprised how many things used to be plugged into that one power socket (and the light socket) at the time you were born. We used to sell a lot of multiplug power adaptors :)

Most important, we don't waste food. Everything edible that comes into the house, we eat. I suppose the fact we were brought up during the war and remember the post-war rationing is a big factor there.

You're right, Nick. We didn't have the 'green' thing back then mainly because we didn't have a lot of the energy using opportunities there are now. Thanks for the interesting post.

Robi

Happy, Happy Birthday, and many more. I share the date of your birth, as did my now deceased little sister who was stil 6 years older than you. I am as old as the hills compared to you, at 69, though I don't feel a day over 110. Not true, more like I feel as young as you at least. Life is good, and I am living proof that you can survive and thrive. I found your admission that you didn't expect to live to be 21 interesting, because I felt the same -- exactly. I expected that I would end everything rather than live on, especially at about 16-17. Then things got better.

As far as me, well I was around when many of those things in your blog were current. Dish towels were emptied flour bags, washed in a hand agitator machine (one of my jobs when I was 5), and hung on a line with the rest of the clothes. When I was real little, tops and shirts were made of the flour sacks (during WWII and before), and they had pretty patterns on them for that purpose. I used to wear the dish towels then by wrapping them around my waist and pretend they were skirts, and wore a plain one for "hair", as I played with my one and only baby doll.

We milked a cow named Jersey (yeah I know, not very imaginative, because thats what breed whe was), made our own batter from the milk fat skimmed off, and gathered our own eggs from our chickens(one of my little jobs) and sometimes ate our own chickens, shared in pork bought along with relatives who raised the piglets, smoked our own bacon, chops, and hams in a "smoke house", gathered veggies fresh from our garden, and the residual was canned for the winter and stored below ground in our root cellar/tornado shelter. A little later I worked in a grocery store...we packed groceries in boxes left from canned goods being shipped in to the store, and paper bags that were used as trash liners at home. The butcher custom cut meat at no charge, trimmed the fat well. Milk was delivered in glass bottles to the door after 1950 in our town. When you emptied the bottles, your washed them, put them out on the porch and the next day they were replaced by full ones.

We didn't have humongus trash dumps built up hundreds of feet high with flare pipes burning off the methane from the decomposing, buried trash that can't be burned anymore. Bad for the environment you know, but burning off methane isn't?. Rather we had burn barrels that were dumped once a week into a 4 ft. deep pit that was covered over by dozer when it was nearly full, and when the area was full of pits, a truck brought in other dirt and the area was built up by 3 ft. Now vegetation thrives there, and cows graze, with nothing leaching into the water. Table scraps and peels from preparing food were saved for the day, then taken to hog pens and fed to the pigs.

When I was very young (up to about 10), the ice man came every two days to replenish the ice in the ICE BOX to keep things cool--how many of you still call a 'fridge by that name. The meat scraps were fed to the family dogs as delicacies, but these were large dogs that worked, not tiny lap dogs who's primary job seems to be to make yapping noise.

We had phones that were run by a couple of operators who connected you to your number, and in an emergency she could ring every phone in town, which they did when a tornado was closing in at about 1948. Then the town got rotary phone dialing about 1955.

Yeah we recycled papers, boxes, glass of all kinds, and metals that are usually tossed in a gully now days. We recycled at first for the war effort, then well into the early 1960s as a good thing to do. I think of that date as when the throw away generation really started with "disposable" coke bottles.

We also recycled clothes in good shape as hand-me-downs within and between families, patched holes in pants, shirts and the toes of socks, bought shoes when they began to come apart but the worn soles were resoled as long as the upper leather was still good.

But we weren't very green were we?

CaroL

Lets not forget that you actually knew your neighboors. Nowadays the neighboor right next door 15 feet away is a total stranger.

Lets not forget that the cars of your youth hit each other at speed and not only did the occupants walk out of the vehicle after a crash but they drove away as well.

Lets not forget that the trees we planted in our youth can now be cut down and used for a chord of firewood.

Lets not forget that we 'old people' wasted so much resources burning wood to heat our homes, which btw is still really good exercise, instead of natural gas/heating oil/ coal.

I myself still out of habit recycle metal scraps, old electronics(i have a box of vacuum tubes and two turntables) wood is put aside so is cardboard which I burn in my recycled waterheater now incinerator. The ash makes a fine mix for putting into my flowerbeds.

My new snowblower is a 1969 model single stage. The motor needed a few small gaskets and a bit of manual labour. But our society says that I should have bought a new $400 dollar unit that isn't half as strongly built because it would have saved me the $50.00 I spent on parts.

So happy birthday and I share many of your memories you ole fart.