Getting ready for Robbers

James Spader was on Seth Meyers tonight, reminiscing about his childhood.  He talked particularly about a game he and his buddy played when they had sleepovers.  It was called "Getting Ready for Robbers" and involved gathering all of the "fire power" they had (everything from sling shots to BB guns) and gather them around, in, and under their beds so they would be ready if any robbers should come into the house.

I was born in 1943  We bombed Hiroshima in 1945 and the Soviet Union tested its first atom bomb in 1949, so I grew up a kid of the nuclear age.  These were the years when schools held "duck and cover drills"

Training kids to assume this position in the event of a threat of a bomb headed our way was supposed to protect us from the effects.  (Anybody ever see photos from Hiroshima or Nagasaki?)

Some folks built bomb shelters in their back yards, supplying them with supplies to last them for XX weeks/months.  I remember seeing TV dramas about the problems of panicked, unprepared neighbors trying to get into someone else's bomb shelter, which had only enough room and enough food for one family.

So at all ages we were thinking about the threat of an atomic bomb from Russia.

Somehow I got it into my head that if the Russians attacked, they would torture me.  I didn't know why people were tortured, or if they tortured kids, but I was going to be ready.  For some reason I decided that what they would do was to dunk me in scalding water and then freezing water.  So whenever I took a bath (we did not have a shower), I got the water as hot as I could stand it and then let it out and followed with cold water.

The Russians never bombed us (yet) and so my prepared body never had to deal with Russian scalding.  I suspect there are lots of bomb shelters that were turned into wine cellars and I don't think any kids today have heard of duck-and-cover.

I wonder how long before things get so hot with N. Korea that we have to start thinking in those terms again...

Speaking of the Provocateur-in-Chief, whaddya think of this glorious military parade he wants to have for himself "like the one in France."  We have a national debt of nearly $20 trillion, people can't afford health care, he has shut school lunch programs, meals on wheels, and other food programs for those who can't afford good food but we can afford a big military parade, which will cost millions of dollars and tear up Pennsylvania Avenue, which will have to be re-paved, just to assuage his emperor complex.

Can no one rein in this megalomaniac?  Apparently not...and those who might possibly be in a position to do so are just fired.  Where does it stop?

I was doing some organizing of my files today, trying to delete a lot of files that were saved in the early 2000s.  I came across this one about "nostalgia" and things to be nostalgic about and I thought I would comment on a few of them.

Slide Rules and Adding Machines. -- The slide rule makes as much sense to me as the computer does to my other.  Thank god computers came along and I can add 2 and 2 on my calculator app.  As for adding machines, I could use one, but rarely did.  Again, thank goodness for computers.

Mimeograph machines, Carbon Paper in Typewriters, and Hand-written Letters. -- there was a time when I was queen of the Mimeograph (and also the ditto--remember ditto machines?)  I knew all the quirks and could fix a machine most of the time.  Lord, I'm glad that we are beyond carbon paper.  Correcting 5 copies of something was a  real pain!  We have it SO much easier today!

As for hand-written letters, while I prefer typing, I have been known to, from time to time, hand write a letter, so that art is not completely dead here.

Cars with No Seat Belts. -- In these days when Walt won't even back out of the driveway until everyone is buckled in, it seems difficult to remember when we had no seatbelts and often had seven or more kids rolling around loose in the back of our car.  I look at our grandkids' child seats and remember when we drove to Colorado with all five kids, David just a few months old and lying in an open basket.  He was so bored on that trip that he learned to stand up by the time we got home, months before he would have otherwise.

Telephone dials -- We still seem to make dialing gestures in the air when telling someone we'll call them, but do today's kids even know what the telephones we grew up with look like?  And how about party lines?  I still remember that we had one when I was in grammar school and I got caught listening in on someone else's phone call.

Prices.   There is no way to even begin to compare prices when I was growing up to prices today.  Movies were 25 cents and you got a double feature, plus cartoons, and popcorn was 10 cents.  Candy was 5 cents unless you wanted on of the "fancy" candies, which were 10 cents.  Even as short a time ago as when our kids were babies (50+ years ago), if I spent $20 in a week for groceries, that was a HUGE amount and Walt would take exception to my extravagance.  Now I pay over $100 for just the two of us.

Silver Dollars.  I don't know if they are still in circulation outside of Reno, but I found a whole bunch of them when cleaning out my mother's things.  I still have them and haven't figured out what to do with them.