The following comments and quiz were sent to me by a reader, and they do bring back a few memories:

… THOUGHT YOU MIGHT ENJOY THIS …

Someone asked the other day, “What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?”

“We didn’t have fast food when I was growing up,” I informed him. “All the food was slow.”

“C’mon, seriously. Where did you eat?”

“It was a place called at home,” I explained. “Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.”

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn’t tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.

But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood…if I figured his system could have handled it:

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, never wore Levis, never set foot on a golf course, never traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears & Roebuck…either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds and only had one speed (slow). We didn’t have a television in our house until I was 19. It was, of course, black and white and the station went off the air at midnight after playing the national anthem and a poem about God. It came back on the air at about 6 a.m. and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on featuring local people.

I was 21 before I tasted my first pizza—it was called pizza pie. When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It’s still the best pizza I ever had.

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn’t know weren’t already using the line. Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys, and all boys delivered newspapers. My brother delivered a newspaper six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which he got to keep 2 cents. He had to get up at 6AM every morning. On Saturday, he had to collect the 42 cents from his customers. His favorite customers were the ones who gave him 50 cents and told him to keep the change. His least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least they did in the movies. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don’t blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Here are some MEMORIES from a friend :

My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother’s house (she died recently) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to ‘sprinkle’ clothes with because we didn’t have steam irons. Man, I am old.

How many do you remember?

• Headlights dimmer switches on the floor.
• Ignition switches on the dashboard.
• Heaters mounted on the inside of the firewall.
• Real ice boxes.
• Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
• Soldering irons you heat on a gasoline blowtorch.
• Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz :

Count all the ones that you remember, not the ones you were told about. (Ratings at the bottom.)

1.    Blackjack chewing gum

2.    Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water

3.    Candy cigarettes

4.    Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles

5.    Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes

6.    Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers

7.    Party lines on the telephone

8.    Newsreels before the movie

9.    P.F. Flyers

10. Butch wax

11. TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again in the morning (there were only 3 channels…if you were fortunate)

12. Peashooters

13. Howdy Doody

14. 45 RPM records (or even 78′s)

15. S&H greenstamps

16. Hi-fi’s

17. Metal ice trays with lever

18. Mimeograph paper

19. Blue flashbulbs

20. Packards

21. Roller skate keys

22. Cork popguns

23. Drive-ins

24. Studebakers

25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered   0-5 = You’re still young
If you remembered  6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don’t tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You’ re older than dirt!
I might be older than dirt but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.

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Well, there you have your quiz to determine if you’re “older than dirt.” To the younger generations these things probably sound pretty funny and meaningless, but they represent a time when life was simpler and kids had to use their minds and their imaginations instead of some electronic gadget to do their thinking for them.

Take a look at the quiz and let me know how old you think you are in relation to these items. I’ll be checking in from time-to-time, and will be back in full force before the end of the year.

The city is rapidly becoming a ghost town, with the population dropping from around 2 million people at its peak, to around ¾ of a million today.

However, earlier in the day I received an email with this movie trailer of a documentary film on the people of Detroit. That got me thinking about all the possibilities for new businesses—maybe even starting a whole new industry. Take a look at the trailer and tell me what you think.

(email subscribers can view on my blog)

When the full documentary film is released, I’ll let you know where you can view it, or obtain your own copy.

In the meantime, let your imagination run with the possibilities of remaking an entire city—and then let me know what you came up with.
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One of my favorite business bloggers, Miki Saxon, recently posted some interesting information as to why this is. Here is a portion of Miki’s post:

You know the old saying, ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t'; for kids it’s more like ‘damned when they do and damned when others don’t’.

Kids stand less chance of developing into strong, balanced, ethical adults now than in past decades; not just in the US, but globally—they are heading for mediocrity.

If you think I’m being overly pessimistic consider the following.

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default. …

“The new rule, suggested by “involved parents,” is a temporary measure that will be replaced by a pre-season skill assessment to make fair teams.”

Great lesson to teach our future leaders—don’t excel, don’t try too hard, don’t strive too much, don’t field a winning team and, whatever you do, don’t follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Magic Johnson, Dr. Jonas Salk or any of those who surpassed their peers by a wide margin.

Helicopter parents are nothing new, but their actions are getting more outlandish. And whoever said that life is fair?

Miki’s post also deals with some of the problems of our education system, so I encourage you to read her post in its entirety…you can access it here.

Does anyone agree, or do you think everything is just fine with the way we (the “Village”) are raising our younger generations…you know—the future Presidents and Prime Ministers of our nations?

Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter have yet to turn an actual profit…while 21 million individual small businesses—with no employees—contributes $1 Trillion annually to America’s Gross Domestic Product.

No special point here…just an interesting observation.

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One stark and sobering way to frame the [economic] crisis is this: if the United States government were to nationalize (in other words, steal) every penny of private wealth accumulated by America’s citizens since the nation’s founding 235 years ago, the government would remain totally bankrupt.

No bankrupt nation in history has ever defended or preserved the freedoms of its citizens. In fact, it has been the exact opposite: in desperation, bankrupt governments have routinely plundered their citizens’ wealth and imposed totalitarian controls. What will make things different for the United States, the largest debtor nation in all of recorded civilization?

Putting Fiscal Year 2009’s… $9 trillion deficit another way, 17% of America’s private wealth, accumulated over a period of 235 years, was wiped out by just one year’s worth of government deficit spending…”

Note: These statements are excerpts taken from an article by Stewart Dougherty who is a specialist in inferential analysis, the practice of identifying historic and contemporary patterns and then extrapolating their likely effects upon the future. Dougherty was educated at Tufts University (B.A., magna cum laude), and Harvard Business School (M.B.A. and an academic Fellow). You can read his article in its entirety here: http://bit.ly/8WGXBH