how great it was back then in black and white!
By Lakota12
@Lakota12 (42600)
United States
March 12, 2007 12:51am CST
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!
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 $49 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?
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
2 people like this
6 responses
@whiteheather39 (24403)
• United States
13 Mar 07
You're right it was great and so much simpler than today. Thanks for a good posting.
@polachicago (18716)
• United States
12 Mar 07
Oh, Lacota, it is so funny and so true. Time was different and much better. Should we go back in time and do it again?
@Lakota12 (42600)
• United States
12 Mar 07
Some times I think so would probably be better for kids as they would have to get out toplay instead of doing playstation I know I hated it when My grandson stayed with us for a year he never wanted oiut side but it was a good thing to ground him off of
@momknows (284)
• United States
12 Mar 07
Oh how true! I'm a little younger then the poem but not much. It was alot nicer when you worried and cared about the people next to you instead of all this me, myself, and I attitude that we're seeing now. What happened to America and when are we goina wisen up???
@tigerdragon (4297)
• Philippines
12 Mar 07
lovely poem , indeed! you transported us back in time! thank you. ah, did you write this? if not, who wrote it? it is wonderful.looking forward for more heartwarming notes from you!
@howard96h (11640)
• New York, New York
12 Mar 07
Thanks for the memories! You really brought me back in time.