Viewpoint: Remembering the good old days

I recently re-connected with my friend Marianne Taylor from the years we lived in Los Angeles in the 1950s.

 That’s the nice thing about friends: no matter how long it has been since you’ve been together you can pick up your conversation just as if there had not been an interruption of 10 or 15 years. We spoke on the phone for an hour and a half last week. It was wonderful.

Marianne and I met at church, and then started car-pooling when our children were school-age. Much of the conversation touched on church, children and grandchildren, our late husbands and our car-pooling days. We still vividly remembered the times the kids got sick in the car, sometimes setting off a chain reaction.

Two of her children live in New York and one lives on the West Coast. Marianne’s home is in Chappaqua, N.Y., the same town where former President Clinton lives. She and her family moved to New York in the early ’60s.


One of her sons was working across the street when the first plane flew into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

He lost five friends who worked for the same firm. Marianne said none of the family had any contact with him from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Sept. 11. As with the rest of us, it is a terrifying time she will never forget.

Although Marianne will celebrate her 80th birthday this year, she is still working.

I was amazed, particularly since she works until 9:30 at night.

She is obviously much more efficient than me. Many of my friends agree there was a time we were all quite well-organized and had a houseful of kids.

Those days we also entertained on a regular basis.

We didn’t have computers and cell phones and television taking up our time. It was a time before answering machines and being put on hold when we needed to call a utility company or an insurance office with a problem. I recently spent 45 minutes waiting for some help with a telephone bill.

In the old days planes took off and landed as advertised. We never checked flight schedules after making reservations.

Traveling was a relaxing experience. We dressed up for it. I wore a suit, hat and gloves when my husband and I left on our honeymoon in 1955. We looked forward to eating nice meals onboard and having luggage checked in without charge. The only thing women carried on board was their purse and make-up case. I haven’t seen one of those in years. There was ample leg room and no airport security requiring us to remove our shoes and belts or having everything X-rayed.

Every day I would look forward to receiving the mail. The mailbox was not stuffed with advertisements, organizations asking for money, and companies telling me I could be eligible to win a million dollars. It is tough these days to tell which part of our mail is legitimate, or just some company trying to get us to sign up for something in a sneaky way.

People regularly wrote letters and sent postcards when on vacation. In the summer I loved receiving postcards from family and friends. Not many people send postcards any more.

These days dozens of organizations mail out packets of address labels for each season of the year. I probably have enough labels right now to send a letter to each resident in the county.

As young mothers we weren’t constantly driving kids to activities. About the only time the kids got rides to school was the first day of school or when they were in kindergarten.

From about the third-grade up, if they didn’t ride the school bus, they rode their bikes to school. The hectic schedule of most young parents these days is incredible. 

Those were my “good old days,” but for young people these may be their “good old days.”