I’ll just post a link to this YouTube.com video of Winchester Cathedral so it doesn’t compete with Classical Gas, previously posted. But this is another song I remember quite clearly as my mother and father worked with the radio on. The New Vaudeville Band released this song in 1966 (when I was 4) and it was on the charts for 19 weeks.

• 

  So How Old Am I?

  And yes, I am THAT old. I remember that all phones were black, had dials and most of us had party lines with up to eight lines. We knew to pick up the phone when there was one short and one long ring. Before you dialed, you had to listen if anyone was using the phone first. You could listen to someone else’s conversation but you had to be very quiet or you’d get caught. My family has had the same phone number for over fifty years now.

  We were only able to watch three channels on the television: local CKVR, CBC and CTV. I remember Charles Templeton and Pierre Burton on the radio station CFRB Toronto. We actually watched “Front Page Challenge , the Ed Sullivan Show, and Tommy Hunter” in black and white. My first typewriter was an ancient Smith-Corona circa 1930 something. I could still buy ribbon for it.

  Two of my public school teachers previously taught in a one room school house. Kids didn’t sniff glue, they ate it. I vividly remember kids chewing the wood in long splinters off of their pencils and making library paste and paper sandwiches to eat. Teachers dressed better than the kids, not like them. Speed limits on Ontario Highways was a blistering 60 mph and on the ‘400’ newly built between Barrie and Toronto, the posted speed was 70 mph. And I am bi-measurable as the metric system was not introduced until 1972 when I was 10 years old. I can think in imperial or metric. And speaking of 1972 I watched the last game of the Canada-Russia Summit Series live, with my classmates, during school hours.

  What else? I remember bags of potato chips were 15 cents. Pop was a quarter. Bazooka gum was 2 cents. The only time we ate lettuce was during the summer when it was fresh from the garden or at Christmas time. In fact, most of our vegetables were canned or frozen from the garden. I remember BPs, Red and Whites and milk delivered to my grandparent’s house in town. I remember when DDT was considered a boon to farmers (there’s a whole ‘nother story)  and real family farms. And I can remember listening to Winchester Cathedral on the radio.

  Yes, I’m that old.

  (Photo: stock.xchng patuska)

| | | | | |