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.
,
When I was a kid there was a store called Gibson’s and it was “big” to us. Right near the front they had a booth selling popcorn and slurpee’s, no joke. The store had some of everything.
I remember their old fashion newspaper ads, all the products hand drawn (or seemigly).
Good points. Things have changed for the worse from yesteryear.
Baloney.
There never was some golden era where everything was perfect. You live in fantasyland as much as the liberals do.
We rode dutifully in the shopping cart or strolling behind close in tow. I remember being big enough to steer the cart and being entrusted to do so at the commissary.(The rear wheel steering could have led me to a career as a forklift operator)
At the end of the ordeal was a chance at some candy or some small toy if we had behaved. I never expected or demanded more.
We had a store in Pecos Texas called Wackers. It had a soda fountain and everything.
There was also a little corner store that sold the first ever slurpees...the old lady that owned it - who was always so good to us kids - disappeared one summer.
(Us kids had been moved out of state, so we were not “up” on all the happenings) anyway, we inquired about her, and found that she had been robbed, and killed, at gunpoint.
In RETROSPECT , I remember that being the moment I grew up. My childhood ended.
Baloney to you. Author is not talking of fantasy land of yesteryear. Rather the difference of kids raised yesteryear as to today.
You know better.
Did I say it was perfect?
NO. I did not. I spoke of a moment in my history.
If you have no such moments, don’t hate me for it.
I yelled at her, and she just glared back at me with a blank look on her face. Guess that's why they still have typhus and every other thing killing them off in the 3rd world. Now our government brings them here for us to pay for.
Things have changed in a way that the present generation can never know or understand. And that is the saddest thing of all.
i don’t see him anywhere saying yesterday was perfect. i believe that’s you reading that into this, not the author.
what i got from the account was the observation that between then and now, things have changed greatly, in general, for the worse.
and i would agree, and i see this change in just about every public place i visit.
Well written and well thought.
Thanks.
There never was some golden era where everything was perfect. You live in fantasyland as much as the liberals do.
Geez. There is always somebody that has to piss in the cornflakes.
And that is the difference right? It lies in what children expect.
The children of today expect that which they have not earned. The children of my era, strived to earn.
Earn respect.
Earn love.
Earn money.
Earn a place in community.
Earned through effort.
Not earned because we, were.............born.
And that is the difference right? It lies in what children expect.
The children of today expect that which they have not earned. The children of my era, strived to earn.
Earn respect.
Earn love.
Earn money.
Earn a place in community.
Earned through effort.
Not earned because we, were.............born.
Did you pull that candy off of the shelf and on to the floor?
Next time, regardless of the looks of ignorance - do so. This is OUR COUNTRY. Dag nabbit!
You know what?
There WAS a golden era.
Sorry you missed it.
Yep.
Nowadays, raising kids you have to cut thru alot of crap interference to deliver that message. My two youngest are 3 years apart and that gap was immense as far as outside influence- phones, TV, internet...
When I was young the outside world couldn’t pump too much into my head outside parental controls.
True story about Gibson’s. I once knew a guy who was in charge of 16 Gibson’s Discount Stores and he told me this story. Gibson’s slogan was “Where you always get the best for less”. My friend said at new store opening events Mr. Gibson always said a prayer. This day his prayer began:
“Lord, we want to thank you for allowing us to open up another Gibson’s, where you always get the best for less.”
By the way, I remember Sam Walton’s first Ben Franklin Five & Dime store in Newport, Arkansas. After chopping or picking cotton all week we’d go to Newport to buy groceries on Saturday afternoon. You could smell the popcorn from the machine in front of his store for blocks.
Oh darling, it is so hard to raise children in this age. But God will give you the tools and strength to do so..
If you are a Christian, and I can not believe otherwise here on FR, then you know as well as I, that your children, brought up in the way they should go, will be a blessing to future generations..!
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?
.
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.
I’m fond of asking badly behaving unattended children (or just undisciplined children), “Do you have parents?”
That usually gets their mommy or daddy interested (almost always mommy). I get a few FU’s, but I don’t really give a crap.
Oh, man...so you have noticed it, too!
I went shopping for one of my nieces at a Toys-R-Us that is located in a neighborhood outside of DC that celebrates its ethnic diversity. There were groups of “adults” standing at the ends of the aisles talking, while their kids were riding the bikes through the store and opening the packages to play with the toys. One of the workers told me that these families come every Saturday and Sunday. They get together for a gabfest while the kids run amok in the store. She said they never bought anything - they just hung out for a couple hours and then took the kids and headed home. I did notice that there were many customers in the store, but very few at the checkout lines. Also, it was difficult to find a boxed toy that wasn’t damaged or shopworn.
I don’t know if that Toys-R-Us is still in business. I can’t imagine that running a free Chuck E. Cheese is a business model that spells success.
In store looting.
The aggression I see in stores appalls me, true, but it’s the parents attacking the children. In front of a Wal Mart, a little 2 year old falls on the sidewalk and his drug addict father yells “folk you!” at him. I wanted to deck him but since I am small female, couldn’t. Starving babies (babies at the grocery store smell food and get hungry) are routinely ignored to howl as they ride around in their carseats in the grocery carts. Hungry kids asking for things and their “mothers” snarl “you better shut up” and other ugly things. What do you think will be the result?
It is the parents’ faults, they are all too interested in getting over, having daily sex, dressing like a “star” as you can tell by all the people teetering around on those incredibly stupid looking platform heels, sticking it to the man and other stupid, ridiculous motivations, rather than following the straight and narrow pathway of God. No wonder the kids are livid.
Not always but often my mother would let me pick out a “Little Golden Book” that were displayed on a rack near the check out – overtime I collected quite a few – wish I still had them.
But on this particular trip, I spied a toy I wanted and this grocery store did have a small “toy” section in one aisle and as you said, “Chinese toys" little puzzles, backscratchers - junk, mostly”, but there was something I very much wanted although I can’t now for the life of me remember what it was. Anyway, when I was told “no”, I threw a royal temper tantrum at the checkout. And that didn’t go so well with my dad.
I don’t recall my father spanking but maybe once or twice, but knew it was always a possibility if I really misbehaved. My temper tantrum didn’t last very long as all it took was a stern look from my dad and being told to knock it off or there would be a spanking when I got home. As it was, I did get sent to my room, told that there would be no more “Little Golden Books” or any other toys or desert or treats of any kind or TV for that matter until I understood why what I did was wrong, how my actions had consequences and after being banished to my room until dinner, had to apologize to my mother and on our next trip to that grocery store, had to apologize to the cashier who had witnessed my temper tantrum the previous week.
But even as a little kid, I understood it was wrong to open a package without paying for it first – that that was theft. And my parents would have never allowed such behavior and I understood this without having to be explicitly told so mostly because they didn’t behave that way themselves.
LOL, it’s the “starving babies” that we see everyday in the supermarkets that are the problem with America’s modern child rearing.
You have some very unique views of life in America and what is relevant to the original posters thread.
There’s still one in Weatherford. Does a lot of business.
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