It didn’t seem possible, but the fortieth reunion for the Class of 1963 of Salem High School in Salem, New Jersey acutally happened. As promised in the prior story, I have used OCR scanning to capture the "Remember When" snippets that were part of the program bulletin. Nothing about WiFi or blogging but I hope some of the patrickWeb readers are old enough to enjoy reading this. Here is a sample.

Remember when…

• All the girls had ugly gym uniforms?
• It took five minutes for the TV to warm up?
• Nearly everyone’s Mom was at home when the kids got home from school?
• Nobody owned a purebred dog?
• When a quarter was a decent allowance?
• You’d reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?
• Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?
• All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore high heels?
• You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time? And you didn’t pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?
• Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?
• It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents?
• They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed and they did?
• When a 57 Chevy was everyone’s dream car…to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady?
• No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked?
• Playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?
• Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?
• And with all our progress ……….. don’t you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace ………… and share it with the children of today?
• When being sent to the principal’s office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home? Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn’t because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat! But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.

Who can still remember:

Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy, Howdy Dowdy and the Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Bell , Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk. As well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games, bowling and visits to the pool, …. and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar. Didn’t that feel good, just to go back and say, “Yeah, I remember that”?

And remember that:

The perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care.

How many of these do you remember?

• Candy cigarettes
• Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside
• Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
• Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
• Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum
• Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
• Party lines
• Newsreels before the movie
• P.F. Fliers
• Telephone numbers with a word prefix …. (Raymond 4-6Q1)
• Peashooters
• Howdy Dowdy
• 45 RPM records
• Green Stamps
• Hi-Fi’s
• Metal ice cubes trays with levers
• Mimeograph paper
• Beanie and Cecil
• Roller-skate keys
• Cork pop guns
• Drive In’s
• Studebnkers
• Washtub wringers
• The Fuller Brush Man
• Reel-To-Reel tape recorders
• Tinkertoys
• Erector Sets
• The Fort Apache Play Set
• Lincoln Logs
• 15 cent McDonald hamburgers
• 5 cent packs of baseball cards …. with that awful pink slab of bubble gum
• Penny candy
• 35 cent a gallon gasoline
• Jiffy Pop popcorn

Do you remember a time when……

• Decisions were made by going “eeny-meeny-miney-moe”?
• Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, “Do Over!”?
• “Race issue” meant arguing about who ran the fastest?
• Catching the fireflies could happily occupy an entire evening?
• It wasn’t odd to have two or three “Best Friends”?
• The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was “cooties”?
• Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot?
• A foot of snow was a dream come true?
• Saturday morning cartoons weren’t 30-minute commercials for action figures?
• “Oly-oly-oxen-free” made perfect sense?
• Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?
• The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team?
• War was a card game?
• Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?
• Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin?
• Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?
• What a double-dog-dare-ya meant?

If you can remember most or all of these, then you have lived!! (A LONG TIME!)

• Photo Gallery
• Salem High School – 40th Reunion