Mature Life Features

. . . at Chandler Center of the Arts

Friday evening

featuring rowdy renditions of

Scottish and Irish tunes

as well as rock ‘n’ roll.

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How Good Were

‘The ‘Good ‘Ol Days’?

By Tom Morrow, Mature Life Features

In today’s fast-paced life, many older folk long for the way things used to be. It seemed like time was slower paced when they were growing up. Well, maybe.

Life was less complicated back in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. As a youngster, the only real worry I had was “the bomb” and “polio.” My part of the world was southern Iowa, where television was something you read about in the newspapers.

We didn’t get a TV set until 1953. The screen was snowy and the nearest station was in Ames some 130 miles away. Des Moines, the state capital, didn’t have a station until 1956. For us kids, radio and the movie theater were the only sources of entertainment.

Most of the movies were not first-run but radio had some really great programs to get our minds working. We were glued to early morning news reports hoping for announcements of snow storms that closed school and offered us a day of freedom from classroom drudgery.

Back then, telephone party lines were commonplace. There was plenty of coal and coal oil for heating in winter but there was no air conditioning in the summer. Some of us had the luxury of an indoor toilet.

For cars, new tires were relatively expensive but used re-treads were available for about half the price. You had to watch where you drove because pot holes and the like could actually break a tire. The new tubeless tires were especially prone to breakage and inner-tube tires were pretty common up into the ‘60s.

During high school, I had an after-school job at a Conoco service station and I learned prying a tire off of a wheel was no easy feat. And remember this? When a customer drove up for gasoline, we had to wash his or her windshield, check the oil and tire pressure and, in the station where I worked, whisk-broom the floor mats. A lot of work for a few gallons of gas at 29 cents per, but the station owner didn’t care because I was working for him at 50 cents an hour.   

Radio programming after school and Saturday morning was for us kids. We rushed home from school to hear the latest adventures of “Straight Arrow,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” “Sky King,” and others. They were 15-minute serialized programs and every bit as exciting as the soap operas Mom had been listening a couple of hours earlier.

A number of those after-school radio programs made it to Saturday mornings with expanded 30-minute presentations.

We were given special privileges if we became club members. We got secret decoder rings if we eat two boxes of breakfast food and sent the box tops along with a dime to complete the transaction.

More sophisticated programming such as “Dragnet,” “Johnny Dollar,” “Sam Spade,” “The Whistler,” “You Bet Your Life” and the Bob Hope’s, Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny and Groucho Marx shows were top listening fare. Later we shared the night with Mom and Dad listening to after news commentary by H.V. Kaltenborn.

At the movies, our appetites for cowboy shoot-em-up westerns were fed old (and I mean really old) films from the ‘30s starring the likes of Hoot Gibson, Buck Jones, Harry Carey, Tom Mix, and early John Wayne as “Singing Sandy” or one of the “Three Mesquiteers.”

Red Ryder and the Durango Kid were featured Friday and Saturday nights at the Lyric Theater. Red was played by “Wild Bill” Elliott and the Durango Kid, who always seemed to have his great white stallion close by in a cave for quick retrieval to chase the bad guys, was played by Charles Starrett.