Posted on 02/15/2013 9:07:07 PM PST by KittenClaws
As I walked through the Supermarket today, I passed through the isle that was full of children's toys of all kinds. Little racing cars, coloring books, transformers, Barbie dolls and baby dolls, stuffed bears, plastic airplanes, little ponies, bouncing balls, basketballs and something called slime.
There were several children there, taking full advantage of the bounty as if it were provided for free. One opened a package of baubles that I could not identify while the other drooled on a basketball before throwing it in the general direction of the other child.
And my old mind could not help but drift back to my time as a child going to Dicks Supermarket with my mother.
Back then, the supermarket was a place where mothers bought food for the family. It was not Disneyland - not a place to play. But Dicks Supermarket did have toys! They were on a carousel, at the end of an aisle that was always a great discovery (toys!)
They were all "Chinese toys" little puzzles, backscratchers - junk, mostly. But my brother and I, always respectfully asked our mother, " may we go look at the toys?" She always said we could look, of course.
We were expected to view - not touch. You did not partake of that which you did not own. If we found something we could not live without, we grasped it in our hands and presented it to her for approval, hoping we had behaved well enough to deserve such a treat.
And thus, the point of this vanity.
There is a difference between the toy isle of today and the toy carousel of yesterday. Indeed,, between the children of today and of yesterday.
The carousel of yesterday said " we know you exist, here is a small amusement" and as children, we accepted that - we knew we were children.
The aisle of today says " your existence is important, therefore we must amuse you". The children of today say "damn straight, we are the end all be all, after all".
The parent of yesterday said " if you behave properly, I may buy you a treat. And we did our best to live up to that expectation.
The parent of today says " I do not expect you to behave, go play in the children's aisle and give me a break, break things if need be, but leave me alone." And the children of today...live up to that expectation.
,
Either you misunderstood my post or you addressed your post to me to the wrong person.
Sorry.
Meant for AlamKing
Sorry.
Meant for AlamKing
I am glad I wasn’t the only one who remembered!
His Gibson’s Discount Centers caught only and grew to more than 600 stores owned by his family and franchisees. The chain was second in size among discounters only to the S.S. Kresge Corp., which opened Kmart in 1962.
Is there no Wiki page for this chain? Someone should add it!
http://www.reporternews.com/news/2012/jul/11/gibsons-discount-center-was-big-deal-abilene/
Someone could use the info in this article to put a little Wiki page together
Great remembrance. Wish I knew how to cut and paste on this damn ipad.
I guess that is what this thread is about and should have been titled.
Remembrance
I was always picked last for sports such as baseball. Well, I totally sucked at baseball. I knew I sucked,so did those that didn’t pick me. Made me feel bad at the time, but, shit...I got over it. Learned to love who I was.
What about the kids today who are sheltered from fact?
Where the small girl with no sports talent gets a blue ribbon in baseball , does she expect a blue ribbon in everything...even if she can’t do...everything?
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Yeah bee ess, my 50 year old farmboy friend from Burr Oak KS told me that his mom left him with his brothers in the car at the grocery store and by the time she came out, they had destroyed the whole interior of the car, ripping fabric, pulling out stuffing and knobs. When she walked out of the store with the bags, she dropped them, got in the car and drove them all home. I said what did your dad do? He said he thought it was funny, went and traded in the car.
So don’t give me this well behaved line of caca.
You live in a fantasy land if you think that kids were king, and could act up in public in the past, they weren’t, and they couldn’t get away with it.
First off, 50 means that your friend was 10 years old in 1973 (or 1972), not exactly the era many have in mind when they are talking about the past in this context, and no one said that boys couldn’t raise cain and cause trouble and be rough in their own homes and car as you described, but they couldn’t get away with it in public.
oh uh huh, they were rigging up fireworks in their sister’s bedrooms to the light switch, shooting squirrels out their bedroom windows, putting entire volkswagen bugs on the fourth floor of the high school——it was just as bad if not worse, just sneakier
You are describing boy behavior which was well punished when they were caught, and I know very well having been the wildest guy in my class from elementary through high school who was not actually sent to reform school and/or permanently removed from school, but it was not the scenes we see today in public, the subject of this thread.
You are wrong if you think we could go into stores and do what we see today, I know I’m shocked at it, and at the arrogance and backsass, the plain hostility and aggression of children.
Did you grow up in the plains? I grew up in South Dakota and we had a Gibson's near us. My junior high language arts teacher was Mr. Gibson and he arranged to get a banner from the store that said, "Join The Gibson Train" or something to that effect. He hung it at the front of his classroom. This was back in the 70's.
Gibson’s Discount Stores (they reached something like 600) was first opened in Abilene Texas, they were all over Texas in the 60-70’s.
I think one still exists in Kerrville, at least using the name and stuff
I agree with many of the perceptions in your post.Our culture has become more sanguine, tolerant of bad manners. There must have been some breaking point when scores of yound parents decided they would no longer teach social graces and diplomacy. Was it Bill Clinton and Ms. Lewsinski?
Maybe there was a popular song, back when most the country heard the same top ten music, or a TV show or maybe a new way of dressing in public (pant’s on the ground, anyone?) .Could the erosion of civility have really been due to people like Madonna and rap music, or do these ‘artists just act as reflections of their public zeitgeist’, give the people what they financially support the most.
Hopefully, there will be a pendulum swing going back to more conservative restraint. One can still hope.
I haven’t thought about Gibson’s in years!
Great store back in the day.
That’s where I bought my $8 calculator watches
I put it mostly on TV, when I saw what was emerging in the 1970s, I kept thinking of the 10s of millions of the little 12-13-14-15 year olds and them sitting in front of the TV in the evening and the messages that were being sent to them.
Kids at those ages are in conflict and confused, they think that everyone else in the world is confident and full developed, not nearly as confused and unsure as themselves, kids are faking it at that age, and are desperately trying to learn how everyone else is doing it.
When each little kid watches a sitcom they forget their family and brothers and sisters sitting right beside them, TV creates a direct line between the screen and the child’s individual mind, those kids in Wichita, and Denver, and Boston, and Des Moines and Portland, and San Diego, and Miami are all looking at the TV characters who are their own age, or a couple of years ahead, and they are using them as role models and as insights into normality, and are mimicking what the TV makes appear normal.
TV gives the illusion that we are looking into the rest of the country’s lives, and families, and relationships, and what is the normal behavior in society.
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