When I was a little boy...

Ethan, when I was a little boy in the fifties life was very different than it is now. I grew up before cell phones or Internet or voice mail... TV was even black & white until the 1960s. I have very fond memories of living in this house in Nashville, Tennessee catching lightening bugs at night in the summer and playing hide and seek in all the nearby yards just after dark... it was really fun:

We would get on our bikes and ride for miles all over the neighborhood which was called Belle Meade (named for this famous 19th century plantation house that was located just at the end of our street... former Vice President Al Gore lives in Belle Meade now):
We knew we had to be home by dark and since there was virtually no crime in the area our parents never worried about us being gone for hours. Your Mommy and Daddy will take good care of you but you won't have the freedom that I did growing up. I'm sorry that you will miss the sweet time of the 1950s.
Here are some the things we loved to do in our play time:

• We'd lie on our backs and watch the clouds float by and imagine what shapes they made.
• Popsicles came with two "sticks" so you could break the icy treat into two pieces and share it with a friend.

• Saturday morning was great fun because of all the TV shows we liked to watch: Fury, Sky King, Tom & Jerry, Mighty Mouse:

• Here's another black & white toothpaste ad staring Bucky Beaver... "brusha, brusha, brusha... here's the NEW Ipana for your teeeeeth:We didn't drink many Cokes back then... the popular drink was Kool-Aid... a pack was just 5 cents and made two quarts of great tasting "juice."
• Before we started liking girls, we would say that girls had "cooties" (little imaginary bugs) and we would fold a piece of paper into "cootie catchers" which were like a paper bird's beak to peck around and catch imaginary cooties:

• One of the things we'd do for fun was to spin around and around to get dizzy and laugh until we hurt when we couldn't keep our balance and would fall down.

• If we'd have to make a decision, we'd do "eeny-meeny-miney-mo:"
  

• When I was a little boy you could take a dollar bill (Silver Certificate) into a bank and they would give you a silver dollar... now it takes about 20 dollars (Federal Reserve Notes) to buy that same silver dollar.
• Your Mommy will stay home with you but when I was a little boy almost all my friends' Mommys stayed home to raise their children. Each family only had one car. Here is a picture of what one of ours looked like.
• We would take a clothes pin and attach a playing card to our bike spokes so the bike would sound like a motor cycle when we rode it down the street.

It was really fun being a little boy back then... I hope you enjoyed me telling you about it.
I love you, Ethan,
Granddaddy
PS. Call me sometime 931-598-9160