Back in Their Day... - Grandparents.com

Asking your grandkids about the old days makes them into historical revisionists

Remember the TV show Kids Say the Darndest Things? If they ever revive it, they should consider changing the cast to grandkids, since what they say about their grandparents makes for quite the history lesson.

It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve told them what life was like when you were their age: Very little has sunk in. Or, rather, some of it was absorbed, but then it got mixed up with details from SpongeBob SquarePants, “Harry Potter” and every single American Girls book. The resulting mishmash goes something like this:

“What did your grandpa eat as a kid?” I asked 8-year-old Elmy.

“Frosted Flakes,” she replied. “But back then it was a different animal on the box.”

Nine-year-old Tenzin said his grandparents preferred a different delicacy. “Back then they used to eat grease.”

Once in a while, he added, they’d make hamburgers the old-fashioned way, “out of wood and little pieces of cut-up worms.”

At the movie theater, “they’d get popcorn, but it was very lowly,” 11-year-old Sophia informed me. “There was no extra butter.”

Moreover, she said, the movies themselves appeared on screen only thanks to the efforts of a guy in the back who cranked the projector by hand the whole time.

“Didn’t that get a little tiring?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “that was what he was getting paid to do.”

These films, said a sixth-grader named Dana, were called “movie scrolls.”

I’ll say this for the kids: They had a pretty good idea that the movie theater, not TV, dominated the youth of most of their grandparents. But it was still hard for them to understand the exact parameters of early technology, as I learned when I asked, “Did your grandparents use a phone?”

“No!” said one first-grader. “They used shells.”

His classmate shook his head at the boy’s complete lack of knowledge. “That was just for underwater,” he boasted.

With fewer phones available, one kid noted, grandparents had no choice but to text-message.

Other grandchildren knew all about telephone party lines. And speaking of parties – they also knew how their grandparents got down.

“They’d dance and sing and talk and eat,” said my own 9-year-old, Izzy, about his 83-year-old grandma’s party days, circa 1942.

What kind of dancing?

“The waltz,” he said.

Smart boy! And what would they sing?

“Really old songs.”

At the parties, added Elmy, “They drank wine, liquor and vodka because I’m not sure if they had lattes.”

The kids were almost painfully aware that on non-party days their grandparents knew how to amuse themselves with next to nothing, by jumping rope or playing board games or using whatever was available to them.

“They’d make dolls out of cut-up pieces of animal skin,” said fourth-grader Emma.

“They got some hay and made a ball out of it,” said fifth-grader Julian. (Of course, that could possibly be true, since his grandparents grew up in Oklahoma.)

“They’d play games with just their bodies, like tag,” said Melissa, 9, “as opposed to using chalk, because chalk wasn’t used to write on things yet.”

If they had to run an errand, they’d walk (or ride a horse) to the grocery store. “But it wasn’t a real store, like Trader Joe’s,” said Elmy. “It was probably these little carts with bottles of milk and people, like, folk dancing.”

Ah, yes, the folk-dancing milk carts of the ’40s! “If I Were a Rich Man” comes to mind.

As for solid food, “they had animals, and when they got old, they ate them,” said a girl named Elizabeth, whose grandparents grew up in New York City, a tougher town than I thought.

Unfortunately, said 11-year-old J.T., back then the microwaves “weren’t that efficient.” And the beds? “They probably slept on cots.”

He added, after a pause, “I still don’t know what a cot is.”

That’s OK. He had a lot of other great info, including the fact that TV was neither color nor hi-def back then, and the computers “weren’t the greatest.” And how did he glean such detailed knowledge about life in his grandparents’ day?

Speaking for perhaps his entire generation, J.T. replied that it was easy. “We studied colonial times back in the fourth grade.”