LOVE IT WHEN Nancy and her friends celebrate holidays. There used to be a Big Holiday Book which featured Nancy, Sluggo, Aunt Fritzi, Philn Fumble and their friends celebrating all of the major holidays.
Back in the 70s, the school which my kids attended had a fair for the kids and my sons wanted to buy baseball cards with the money they had saved from their newspaper route. We talked them out of it, then moved from Virginia to Colorado. By the time we arrived in Colorado, we discovered that banks had discovered service charges. Their small accounts had been almost wiped out by the bank’s service charges. Somewhat later, we attended a Christmas fair at our local shopping center and they discovered that some of the baseball cards they had wanted to buy were selling for about $700 apiece! I gave up trying to convince my kids that putting money in the bank as a way to save money. The most recent CD I closed out was only making FIVE CENTS PER MONTH. Banks have changed – and not necessarily for the better!
I have heard that, about every ten years, most people find themselves sitting on a potential fortune, which they bypass because they don’t realize the value that they have. For me, it was the comic books which my mother threw out as soon as I left home – I had the original Wonder Woman – which sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I also had the first Lone Ranger ever published. Also Raggedy Amme and Raggedy Andy. Probably a lot of Pluggers wonder whatever became of those comics they had which later brought thousands of dollars.
They must have been living in or near a big city, which had television. We didm’t get televosopn until 1957. It was AFTER television was introduced that we learned you could buy toy guns made out of metal AND smokes which were already rolled. During the 50s, we played cowboys with pieces of wood which a creative relative had whittled into the shape of a gun. Likewise, nearly everyone we knew rolled their own smokes – something as high maintenance as a pre-rolled smoke like a cigar was definitely big city stuff.
Just love it when Nancy and her friends get together to talk about their hobbies. I remember trains. Used to be, if you were taking a long trip, you traveled on a bus or by train. When we traveled by train, each of us would wear two or three outfits – Jeans and a blouse, covered by a skirt and sweater. Two or three pairs of socks, etc. What we carried in our suitcases were snacks – canned salmon, mixed fruit, potted meat product, crackers, peanut butter, jelly, bread – stuff we didn’t need to cook or refrigerate. We knew that we couldn’t afford to pay for the meals which the train crew prepared in their kitchen. Last time I traveled by train, they wanted $7 for a hot dog – and that was LONG before inflation. Back in 1963, when I was first married, I seldom spent more than $7 for a week’s worth of groceries – and it took several trips from the car to bring all the groceries in to the house!
Love it when Nancy and Sluggo get time to chat with friends and talk about their favorite hobbies. They need to compare notes with Snoopy. I kind of remember that Snoopy has a pool table in the den!
They’re both reading a newspaper! I remember the olden days when everyone read newspapers and comic strips could talk about stuff like propaganda. Actually, back in the 70s, I worked for Voice of America in Washington D.C. We were in the editorial department. We had to put the news articles into perfect English so it would be easier for the translators to translate the articles. Some languages don’t have a way to show possession – so we couldn’t say My Mother’s House – we had to change everything to the phrases like the house of my mother.
My grandfather was born in 1890. We have a geography book which he used in third grade – in 1898. There were only 45 states – and many of them were only recently admitted to the Union. There were a bunch of little European “kingdoms” which no longer exist. I’ll bet if we saw the globe Nancy was trying to buy, we’d be amazed at how much the world has changed since buy in the 1950s.
I remember the olden days when neighbors did nice things for each other and Nancy and her friends got together for fun times together. Back in those days, every house in town had a covered front porch, so someone who had a hammock would have set it up on the porch – so they wouldn’t need to worry about rain. In those days, on a summer evening, the grown-ups would all gather up on the porches for after dinner coffee and chats – and the kids would ride bikes and trikes in the street in front of the houses. We lived in a small town – so we never worried about stuff like traffic. A lot of people these days never get to know their neighbors. Such a loss.
LOVE IT WHEN Nancy and her friends celebrate holidays. There used to be a Big Holiday Book which featured Nancy, Sluggo, Aunt Fritzi, Philn Fumble and their friends celebrating all of the major holidays.