Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand.)
You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
"Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet."
Depending on the channel you tuned,
You got Rob and Laura - or Ward and June.
It felt so good. It felt so right.
Life looked better in black and white.
I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys,
Dennis the Menace, the Cleaver boys,
Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train,
Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane.
Father Knows Best, Patty Duke,
Rin Tin Tin and Lassie too,
Donna Reed on Thursday night! --
Life looked better in black and white.
I want to go back to black and white.
Everything always turned out right.
Simple people, simple lives.
Good guys always won the fights.
Now nothing is the way it seems,
In living color on the TV screen.
Too many murders, too many fights,
I want to go back to black and white.
In God they trusted, alone in bed, they
slept,
A promise made was a promise kept.
They never cussed or broke their vows.
They'd never make the network now.
But if I could, I'd rather be
In a TV town in '53.
It felt so good. It felt so right.
Life looked better in black and white.
I'd trade all the channels on the satellite,
If I could just turn back the clock tonight
To when everybody knew wrong from right.
Life was better in black and white!
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Another Goody For The Oldtimers
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs
and spread mayo on the same cutting
board with the same knife and no bleach,
but we didn't seem to
get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the
counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes,
too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped
in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not
in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember
getting ecoli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone
swimming in the lake instead of a pristine
pool (talk about boring), no beach closures
then.
The term cell phone would have conjured
up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager
was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent
injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only
worn in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air cushion soles and
built in light reflectors. I can't recall
any injuries but they must have happened
because they tell us how much safer we
are now..
Flunking gym was not an option...even for
stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder
than gym.
Speaking of school ,
we all sang the national anthem, and staying
in detention after school caught all sorts
of negative attention.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
What an archaic health system we had then.
Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat
and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish
something before I was allowed to be proud
of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we were without
computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box
or 270 digital TV cable stations.
Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and
sterilization kit when I got that bee sting?
I could have been killed!
We played 'king of the hill' on piles of
gravel left on vacant construction sites,
and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the
48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked
it better because it didn't sting like
iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.
Now it's a trip to the emergency room,
followed by a 10-day dose of a $149 bottle
of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the
attorney to sue the contractor for leaving
a horribly vicious pile of gravel where
it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house
either because if we did, we got our butt
spanked there and then we got butt spanked
again when we got home.
I recall Donny Reynolds from next door
coming over and doing his tricks on the
front stoop, just before he fell off. Little
did his Mom know that she could have owned
our house. Instead, she picked him up and
swatted him for being such a goof. It was
a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew
had ever been told that they were from
a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly
have known that?
We needed to get into group therapy and
anger management classes? We were obviously
so duped by so many societal ills, that
we didn't even notice that the entire country
wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA,
AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T- SORRY FOR WHAT YOU
MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING
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Pass this to someone (over age 40,
of course), and brighten their day
by helping them to remember that life's
most simple pleasures are very often
the best!
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