How times have changed in half a century

If you want to know the difference between life in America today and what it was in the middle of the last century, consider what follows. Listen to the music. Savor lyrics about attacking women, shooting policemen and creating mayhem against every level of society. Compare that to the silky tones of Nat "King" Cole's romantic ballads, the haunting pain of Sinatra singing saloon songs or the finger-snapping, hip-twitching, Rock 'N Roll of Elvis.

Drive into any highway service station. Once they were lighthouses for travelers in distress. Limp in with a flat tire and get it fixed. Anything more serious probably could be patched till you found a mechanic. Lost? The gas pump jockey could show you to your destination because he knew the area inside out and backwards. While your tank was being filled, pop the hood and have fluid levels and tire pressure checked before the windshield was cleaned.

Today the word service no longer applies. You can buy a hero sandwich, a quart of milk and a package of Ring Dings but aside from those, what you get is zero. Directions? You're stared at as though your head is screwed on sideways. Should English be spoken, "I haven't a clue" is the standard answer. If your gas tank is on the passenger's side, surly attendants refuse to walk around the car to get your order. Instead they stand like rude dummies across from you, waiting to have the window lowered or the door opened and if you have to do them manually, it's a major pain.

When was the last time you watched baseball at Shea Stadium or Yankee Stadium? The game is pastoral, without the limitations of a clock, filled with strategy. Between pitches and innings, there are pauses, time to discuss what happened and what's going on and what might happen next. Uh-uh. Not today. From the moment you enter the park till you stagger away, your senses are assaulted by pounding, deafening-music. The scoreboards are constantly flashing quizzes and various games to attract your attention. There is not a quiet instant to exchange conversation with your neighbors. Management must think that the seats are occupied by morons without the capacity to express a thought without being led by electronic guidance, accompanied by screaming sounds.

I don't remember Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson or Yogi Berra arrested on weapons charges. The same can be said about Dean Martin, Johnny Mathis and Perry Como. Ditto Paul Newman, Clark Gable and James Stewart. Current sports and show biz celebrities have among them actual thugs, who not only own guns but carry and fire them, ranging in results from misses and wounds to fatalities.

As far as the ladies are concerned, rate the beauty, class and dignity of Katharine Hepburn, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn to the semi-talented, semi-attractive present icons whose major gifts are glitz, cheapness and poor judgment, young ladies who don't know how to spell dignity. Personally, the greatest difference between life in America today and what it was in the middle of the last century, is when I smiled at a beautiful girl then, very often I was rewarded with a flirtatious response. Now I get a look that says, "Why is that old man staring at me?" Sid Tanenbaum is a lifelong resident of Passaic County. Reach him at yendisid@verizon.net

How did we grow old?

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have. As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. Our baby cribs were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or the BB gun was not available.

We were not ridiculed for this play, not thrown out of school, and didn't all grow up as mass murderers. Most of us grew up with guns in the house and rather than being taught to fear them, we were taught to handle and use them responsibly.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never over-weight; we were always outside playing. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment.

Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), the term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge (amazing we aren't all brain dead from that), and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for about the next two weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself, church was somewhere your friends went on Sunday too (except for the Murdocks down the street, but nobody trusted them anyway),

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger.

What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot. He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm. Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of over the counter mercurochrome and then we got butt-whooped. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got butt-whooped (physical abuse) there too... and then we got butt-whooped again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent. There was surely a Ho-Jo somewhere nearby that would have been safer.

Summers were spent behind the sickle lawnmower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents?

Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Johnny from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead she pick him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have know that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

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