Tell me 'bout the Good old Days...are there stories you'd share with grand kids?

Marie5656

Marie5656

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Batavia, NY
This song by the Judds got me wondering about the "good old days". Were they as good as we like to remember? Or are they clouded by not wanting to remember the bad stuff? I know I am on the younger end of the spectrum here, MY good old days contained the Viet Nam War, recession, assassinations. But happy stuff too.

 

Great song.My good old days were in the 50's. I don't think they were clouded mainly because serious matters weren't discussed when the kids were around. I was surrounded with a close knit family who worked hard but enjoyed life. There seemed to be more time back then and death of loved ones only came years later after I was grown.
 
From my perspective as a child, the good old days were pretty good but I wasn't the one concerned with keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table.

These days I spend more time telling my peers about the good old days than I do the younger generation but if the kids ask I would be happy to discuss my day to day life and see how it compares to theirs.

I remember the good and the bad times in my family but I choose to focus on the good. I would share the bad times with young people if I thought that sharing those times would be of some benefit to them. I intentionally hold back on some of the stories about members of my family that have mellowed and improved over the years. I believe that it is important to help children and grandchildren see these people in today's more positive light than I may remember from years ago.
 

Aunt Bea said:
From my perspective as a child, the good old days were pretty good but I wasn't the one concerned with keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table.

These days I spend more time telling my peers about the good old days than I do the younger generation but if the kids ask I would be happy to discuss my day to day life and see how it compares to theirs.

I remember the good and the bad times in my family but I choose to focus on the good. I would share the bad times with young people if I thought that sharing those times would be of some benefit to them. I intentionally hold back on some of the stories about members of my family that have mellowed and improved over the years. I believe that it is important to help children and grandchildren see these people in today's more positive light than I may remember from years ago.
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Ditto....My gkids are not interested in old folk's stories... (n) (n)
 
In so many ways I believe the Good old days were much better than life for children today. Growing up most Mom's stayed at home and were always there for their children. The worse things we had to worry about was an atomic bomb, all we had to do to protect ourselves was get under a wooden school desk. The bad times when I was young was my older brother getting drafted during the Korean war and then of course the Viet Nam war. We didn't have to worry about mass shootings in school ,the movies, the Mall etc. I wish things for children were much safer today.
 
IMHO the best parts of the good old days were more freedom and less adult interference for kids.

Those days weren't so wonderful if you were poor or female. Also if you were in the non-majority race, color, creed, or body size. People did figure out their sexual orientation back then, but many weren't free to express it. The US (and many other countries) fought idiotic unnecessary wars that cost us mightily. Western countries incessantly stuck our political and military noses where they didn't belong, proclaiming one agenda but truly motivated by another. Children were often beaten or sexually abused to within an inch of their lives with no consequences to the offending adults.

When I talk to my kids about "the good old days" it's either to relate a personal amusing anecdote or as a warning about how terrible things were for many in the US and the rest of the world, and could easily become once again. Wealthy white men excepted, as always.
 
My good old days were back when decent, honest, reasonably intelligent people who were willing to work hard could have a simple but good life. I was born when Roosevelt was in office and vividly remember Pearl Harbor. My grandchildren listen but think its fairy tales.
 
I would have to think long and hard before I would call the 50's "the good old days." I don't miss:

Summers on the end of a hoe in West Texas where the temps were routinely above 100F.
Fall meant dragging a cotton sack.
Living with alcoholic parents who were simply out of control.

As soon as I graduated from HS, I split and joined the Navy which was a piece of cake.
Now the 60's and 70's were great.
 
My "good old days" were prior to me being sent away at not quite 7 years of age to boarding school when I lost my father. I can just remember things I did before my childhood came to a sudden halt. I was happy living with my mother and father and big brother in our newly built fibro home on the outskirts of Sydney. My father was a schoolteacher so we were only just comfortably off.. but he made the most of what he had and we never went short. We often piled into his old car and drove to some scenic spot in the nearby national park for a picnic. Or ditto for a day at the beach. We did most things other families did. Then my world crumbled when my father died suddenly and my brother and I were shipped off to school.
 
Pecos said:
Fall meant dragging a cotton sack.
Living with alcoholic parents who were simply out of control.

Roy Clark's "I never picked cotton," lacks meaning unless you've done it.

Do you remember length of adult males cotton sack I know it was over 6 feet-what 8,10,...
Wrong era Pecos, now the Nebraska Aquifer is in jeopardy due to Kansas, Oklahoma and Tx. Tx being almost exclusively cotton farmers.
They tell me, '...it a white 40 miles in cotton balls bloom.' Don't know haven't been there in decades, lots of decades.

My ages up to 17-18, are censored; however, 1957-58, met a girl (there's always a girl or boy lodged in unreachable areas, can never be edited or altered. ) I didn't have enough brains to realize what she represented. I suppose we all were in that stage at least, once in our lives.
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I think that the cotton sacks we used were at least 10 feet long. It take a lot of cotton to fill one of those bags up to where it weighed 60 or 70 LBS. Farmers would often monitor you when dumped them into the trailer just to make sure you hadn't slipped any dirt clods in there to make it heavier. At 2 cents a pound for regular cotton and 3 cents a pound for pima, I am sure that some workers were tempted.
 
Pappy, I have been there. My grandparents had a cistern fed from water runoff, and one of those old hand pumps brought the water up. And the dipper, I had many a drink from it.
When you use the term "prime the pump" these day, no one knows what your are talking about.
 
When I was a kid we had a friend that lived in an old farmhouse without modern conveniences.

In the winter he used to close off the house and live in the large kitchen at the back of the house with a cast-iron wood-burning range for heat and cooking. The fascinating thing for me when we went to visit was the cast iron wall mounted sink that had water piped to it from a spring near the house. The sink had a conventional faucet but the water ran 24/7 into an old galvanized bucket with the overflow going down the drain and out into the yard. When the man's dog got thirsty he would jump up on an old day bed next to the sink and take a drink out of the bucket, when the old man got thirsty or needed water for cooking he would take a dipper from the same pail. I suppose it was not a big deal between two old friends but it did fascinate me.
 
I’ve told this true story on here before, but some of you may have missed it. I have a journal of things that happened in my childhood to pass down to my kids. This is just one of them:


When my family first moved into the old house on the hill, indoor plumbing was still not installed, so we used the outhouse located about halfway between the road and barn. My grandparents lived with us for a while amd Grandpa always have goats. Two females, Josie and Rags, and one Billy named Bachalor Button. Old Bach was a miserable, ugly and down right pain in the rear.
I was scared to death of him because he loved to butt people and it hurt. He would butt so hard he would knock the side of the barn off and get out. The old outhouse was my safe house. I would get off the school bus and look around to see if Bach had gotten out. Sure enough, here he comes with fire in his eyes. I could not make it to the house, but I could reach the outhouse just in time. I would yell my head off until my Grandpa came out and put the demon back in the barn. He was the only one that wasn't afraid of Bach. As I look back on this, I bet I would still be afraid of that dumb goat, only now there would be no safe outhouse to hid in.
 

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