By Staff
I remember back in the '30s we kids used to wear snow pants in the winter.
I remember mine were extra heavy, went over your regular pants and were held up with suspenders.
My wife says some girls wore them under their skirts.
In our old coal-burning days remember how we used to have "clinkers" to remove?
We used to get our old coal stove fire started by crumpling up old newspapers (probably the Daily News), then laying a lot of dry kindling sticks on top and after it got a good start burning after it was lit by one of those big farmer matches, you added a few lumps of coal and you were now in business.
A picture in a magazine showed a pole with a hoop on the end that had a note clipped to the hoop.
These were called "message hogs" and were used by the telegraph operators at the train stations to hold up as the train went by for the engineer to catch with his arm, take the note and throw down the hoop.
As a kid, I saw this done by Merle Loehr, who used to be the station operator at the depot.
Another thing I can recall, years ago our old mailman Ray Schryer used to make his twice-a-day mail delivery that was carried by a big, heavy, leather mail bag.
Our daily mail delivery is now made by Bob Boles, who has two canvas bags criss-crossed over his shoulders.
I'm sure the mail carried by Bob nowadays weighs many times more than when Ray Schryer did it back in the 1930s due to the junk mail, catalogs (my wife gets more than her share) and magazines.
The other day one of my readers, I think his name is Jim Kaniuga, stopped by to show me a 1950 Lyle's Dairy calendar.
One of my boyhood friends, Eugene Biek, had one of his first jobs at Lyle's Dairy over on N. Front where Nate's Wines used to be.
You know, I bet Gene Biek ate more ice cream than he ever packed in a carton. Ha ha.
Looking back, I don't remember my father ever being in the hospital for a stay in his 71 years of life. I wonder how many 71-year-olds can say that.
I seems like years ago in the summer we used to have lots of houseflies in the house.
Something my mother used to say when she would swat a fly was, "If you kill one fly, three will come to the funeral."
Another thing gone by the way is a paper boy with his canvas bag full of papers.
Remember in the old days when one of us kids would find something, he would say, "Dibs," which meant it was his.
Back in the '30s a dangerous thing we kids used to do in the winter was to grab the big back bumper of a car that was stopped at a corner stop sign.
We did this on one of the less-traveled streets in town.
We would slide down the snow-covered street on our shoes or boots until the car came to a stop at the next stop street and then let go.
This was a dangerous endeavor, but none of us kids ever got hurt.
Isn't the saying, "God looks after fools and kids?"