Whatever Happened to the Good Ole Days?

By Ron Lizotte

The late 50s and early 60s were filled with friendship, trust and honesty in nearly every community. Unlike today, those were the days when you’d drive by a playground at 9:30 AM and see kids choosing sides to play a sandlot game. I remember it well, growing up in a small city in Central Massachusetts. Do you?

Sometimes, sides were determined by using hand-upon-hand on an upright taped bat. Or teams were picked by two designated captains simply laying one of two fingers out in an odds-even manor. Oh the “good ole days.”

Most of us surviving those days were bred by smokers or even drinkers while carrying us. They even took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing and canned tuna, and never got tested for diabetes. Those were the years when you experienced babies’ cribs laced with bright colored lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets.

We rode bikes without a helmet, rode in cars with neither seat belts nor air bags, or in the back of a pickup truck for a treat. And in the “good ole days,” hitchhiking was never feared!

We drank water from the garden hose and never thought of drinking bottled water. We shared a soft drink with four buddies and no one actually died from it. We ate cupcakes and white bread and real butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it and never became overweight because we were always outside playing, leaving home in the morning, returning home before the street lights came on. Oh, those “good ole days,” where have they gone?

Some kids spent endless hours building “go-carts” out of scraps, and when they tested them, they realized they had forgotten the brakes… but hitting the bushes a few times solved that problem! In the “good ole days,” we had no playstations, Nintendos, X-Boxes or any kind of videos. We didn’t have 99 channels on TV, no videotaped movies, no surround-sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet Chat Rooms. We just had FRIENDS!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits resulting from these accidents. We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms didn’t live in us forever. Oh, yes… the “good ole days.”

Ron Lizotte writes the featured column “Sports Rap” for the South Jersey Deviler and, yes, he is Ken’s older brother!

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