Get off my LAWN! "Grumpy Old Farts"

[Greywoulf]

That exchange rate lasted until '71. It was still 4 DM per 1 US$. Within a year, it had dropped to 2 DM/dollar. I went from 1000DM for my $250 pay to 500DM. That sucked. Bad.

"EINE bier bitter, Fraulein?" LOL!

 

[12BitSlab]

My elementary school had round buildings. 1st and 2nd grade in one. 3rd and 4th in another. 5th and 6th in a third. Each classroom was a truncated pie wedge. There was an internal circular hall. Each pair of classrooms shared one boy's and one girl's WC. There was a chair just outside the door to the interior hallway with a blue block (boys) and a red block (girls) on it. When you went to the terlet, you took the correct colored block so others would know the WC was occupied. Unfortunately, a boy once took the red block and, of course, failed to return it to the chair outside the door. Poor girl sitting next to me (this was 1st grade) was unable to hold it any longer and just let it go. I felt so sorry for her. The system failed her, and she was only 6.

If a student misbehaved, how did they stand in a corner?

 

[beans-on-toast]

My elementary school had round buildings. 1st and 2nd grade in one. 3rd and 4th in another. 5th and 6th in a third. Each classroom was a truncated pie wedge. There was an internal circular hall. Each pair of classrooms shared one boy's and one girl's WC. There was a chair just outside the door to the interior hallway with a blue block (boys) and a red block (girls) on it. When you went to the terlet, you took the correct colored block so others would know the WC was occupied. Unfortunately, a boy once took the red block and, of course, failed to return it to the chair outside the door. Poor girl sitting next to me (this was 1st grade) was unable to hold it any longer and just let it go. I felt so sorry for her. The system failed her, and she was only 6.

Many kids had embarrassing moments in school. Better to wet yourself than to be remembered as sister brown bottom.

I had to repeat the first grade. I wasn’t the only one. How do you fail at colouring? The penguins were tough on us.

 

[GwenOnBass]

Children are cruel enough to each other without teachers adding to the pot. My first German teacher was wack. My older sister's piano teacher was wack.

My graduate school advisor was wack, and he warned us up front. I have an explosive temper, and at least one of you in this room is going to be on the receiving end, he says. It's true, too, we learn, in this classroom of eight. Made up for it, in his way, I guess. At graduation he took us all out for lunch and told us you're all my colleagues now.

 

[beans-on-toast]

If a student misbehaved, how did they stand in a corner?

No messing around, corporal punishment would have been in order at my school. Then again when you got home. There was always some kid that made it their mission to tell.

 

[GwenOnBass]

Tattlers, and crybabies, and showoffs, and bullies ... same at any age

 

[Deleted member 268085]

Many kids had embarrassing moments in school. Better to wet yourself than to be remembered as sister brown bottom.

I had to repeat the first grade. I wasn’t the only one. How do you fail at colouring? The penguins were tough on us.

My brother went to a Catholic school for 1st grade since he was born in September and the public schools were going to make him wait. He did OK until he forgot to zip up after using the facilities. The penguin lost her mind. My parents were called in.

 

[Al Kraft]

Tattlers, and crybabies, and showoffs, and bullies ... same at any age

Truer words have never been spoken...or in this case written!

 

[markwrob]

Tattlers, and crybabies, and showoffs, and bullies ... same at any age

Why, that sounds like politicians! Oops, I better go hide.

 

[bobyoung53]

In the early grades you’d assemble outside the classroom in pairs for something called bathroom parade. Order was not defined by who had to go the most, it should have been. Girls in the front, boys in the back. The class would march in military fashion along the hall, down the massive staircase to the basement. We stopped at the girls washroom and dropped them off, then marched on to the boys. You went, even if you didn’t have to. I remember the up and down staircases. Going up the down staircase was the subject of a film in 1967.

Up the Down Staircase (film) - Wikipedia


Some schools had a boys and a girls entrance to the building. No fraternization policy.

They wouldn’t allow that today. A friend’s dad was a garbageman, it was his own truck. He also had a 40’s or 50’s tow truck for large vehicles. It had a huge boom in the back that would swing a bit when he went around corners. I remember it having a huge gear shift leaver. You really had to drive that truck. Sometimes he would pick us up and gave us a ride back to her house. It was something to be up there in that cab.

View attachment 4273972

 

[GwenOnBass]

Why, that sounds like politicians! Oops, I better go hide.

When your boss mentions over drinks after work she was a cheerleader, so much makes sense. When your project manager mentions over lunch he was a school bully, so much makes sense.

Edit: how do I respond? I played saxophone? Because that's what I did ...

 

[Charlie Tango]

When your boss mentions over drinks after work she was a cheerleader, so much makes sense. When your project manager mentions over lunch he was a school bully, so much makes sense.

Edit: how do I respond? I played saxophone? Because that's what I did ...

When your boss mentions that he used to collect empty soda bottles as a kid and still has them in milk crates in the basement, so much makes sense.

 

[bobyoung53]

No messing around, corporal punishment would have been in order at my school. Then again when you got home. There was always some kid that made it their mission to tell.

I was a little punk when I was a kid, I made my Junior High school principal so mad once by mouthing off that he lost it and punched me, I can remember the look of 'Oh no, what did I just do? My career is over!" in the poor guys eyes. I never told my parents about it, for one thing I knew I deserved it and secondly my father probably would have congratulated him. Not really.

 

[markwrob]

When your boss mentions over drinks after work she was a cheerleader, so much makes sense. When your project manager mentions over lunch he was a school bully, so much makes sense.

Edit: how do I respond? I played saxophone? Because that's what I did ...

Hm if you did, they might think, "piercing the calm and too sharp alotta the time, yeah makes lotsa sense".

Note, I also played saxes in school band, alto then tenor then bari by grade 10. Could read pretty well. Stopped taking band to make room for more math and physics. Oy vey!

 

[Charlie Tango]

Hm if you did, they might think, "piercing the calm and too sharp alotta the time, yeah makes lotsa sense".

Note, I also played saxes in school band, alto then tenor then bari by grade 10. Could read pretty well. Stopped taking band to make room for more math and physics. Oy vey!

My usual instrument in high school was bass clarinet, but I played tenor sax in marching band. Our rehearsal period was followed by lunch, but back in the 60s the fire houses would blow the air raid siren at noon. Very often we'd be marching down to the football field when the noon siren would go. The saxophone squad started playing with the siren as it slowly rose, then stayed at pitch forEVER, then slowly fell. It gave us great glee, for we were the saxophones. The director never even turned to look at us. Of course we would mimic the siren.

 

[the harp unstrung]

Yankees? -Nah, how about the NY Giants (baseball, not football) in the Polo Grounds!
Anyway, from where I lived in da Bronx I could (and sometimes did) walk to Yankee Stadium. A kid could get into the 'bleachers' then for 25 cents...
In NYC in the 40'-50's you had the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants for baseball, and for football the Polo Grounds Giants and a somewhat scorned Yankee Stadium team called the "Golden Falcons" (later, I think(?) to become the NY Jets). The resulting abundance of trash talk in the streets among us kid fans was nasty and wonderful....
Greywoulf

We walked down the hill that was Anderson Ave. to The Stadium, but I mostly stumbled and whined, and crawled back home while me Da carried my (no so) li’l sister...54 weeks younger than me; Irish Twins!

Me Da arrived in NYC in ‘48, and as he told me, he figured out pretty quickly that if he was gonna get along with his colleagues...paving streets over cobblestone...he’d better figure out how to Talk Baseball, so he went and found and bought a book entitled ‘The Rules Of Baseball’, and got to studying!

Man! I wish I knew where that book ended up!

Soon thereafter, he had an Important decision to make...
Willie, Mickey, or the Duke.

Knowing him, in my dotage I’m surprised that he went with Mickey...Willie was much more his style...but, we lived in The Bronx.

I remember Mickey as my hero; a first baseman who threw up on his shoes one Sunday afternoon as someone was singing the Anthem.

We moved up to the Mid-Hudson Valley in time for me to start 4th grade.

The train made The Stadium accessible, and we went down once or twice a summer.

Three Ring Pete kept us up on what was goin’ down!

When Me Da was murdered, I lost interest in Everything!

It wasn’t until my Bride n I moved North from Syracuse to the St. Lawrence River Valley that I started watching the CBC broadcast the Expos And the Blue Jays. Having been an AL guy all my life I was WOWED by the NL game, and fell Hard for the Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, Tim Rains Expos.

been a NL guy since 1978!

 

[Charlie Tango]

We walked down the hill that was Anderson Ave. to The Stadium, but I mostly stumbled and whined, and crawled back home while me Da carried my (no so) li’l sister...54 weeks younger than me; Irish Twins!

Me Da arrived in NYC in ‘48, and as he told me, he figured out pretty quickly that if he was gonna get along with his colleagues...paving streets over cobblestone...he’d better figure out how to Talk Baseball, so he went and found and bought a book entitled ‘The Rules Of Baseball’, and got to studying!

Man! I wish I knew where that book ended up!

Soon thereafter, he had an Important decision to make...
Willie, Mickey, or the Duke.

Knowing him, in my dotage I’m surprised that he went with Mickey...Willie was much more his style...but, we lived in The Bronx.

I remember Mickey as my hero; a first baseman who threw up on his shoes one Sunday afternoon as someone was singing the Anthem.

We moved up to the Mid-Hudson Valley in time for me to start 4th grade.

The train made The Stadium accessible, and we went down once or twice a summer.

Three Ring Pete kept us up on what was goin’ down!

When Me Da was murdered, I lost interest in Everything!

It wasn’t until my Bride n I moved North from Syracuse to the St. Lawrence River Valley that I started watching the CBC broadcast the Expos And the Blue Jays. Having been an AL guy all my life I was WOWED by the NL game, and fell Hard for the Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, Tim Rains Expos.

been a NL guy since 1978!

Much sympathy for your father's loss like.

 

[GwenOnBass]

We walked down the hill that was Anderson Ave. to The Stadium, but I mostly stumbled and whined, and crawled back home while me Da carried my (no so) li’l sister...54 weeks younger than me; Irish Twins!

Me Da arrived in NYC in ‘48, and as he told me, he figured out pretty quickly that if he was gonna get along with his colleagues...paving streets over cobblestone...he’d better figure out how to Talk Baseball, so he went and found and bought a book entitled ‘The Rules Of Baseball’, and got to studying!

Man! I wish I knew where that book ended up!

Soon thereafter, he had an Important decision to make...
Willie, Mickey, or the Duke.

Knowing him, in my dotage I’m surprised that he went with Mickey...Willie was much more his style...but, we lived in The Bronx.

I remember Mickey as my hero; a first baseman who threw up on his shoes one Sunday afternoon as someone was singing the Anthem.

We moved up to the Mid-Hudson Valley in time for me to start 4th grade.

The train made The Stadium accessible, and we went down once or twice a summer.

Three Ring Pete kept us up on what was goin’ down!

When Me Da was murdered, I lost interest in Everything!

It wasn’t until my Bride n I moved North from Syracuse to the St. Lawrence River Valley that I started watching the CBC broadcast the Expos And the Blue Jays. Having been an AL guy all my life I was WOWED by the NL game, and fell Hard for the Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, Tim Rains Expos.

been a NL guy since 1978!

Exactly what @Charlie Tango says like

 

[GwenOnBass]

Hm if you did, they might think, "piercing the calm and too sharp alotta the time, yeah makes lotsa sense".

Likely more accurate than I'm ready to 'fess to

 

[2tonic]

... "-Zwei biers bitter, fraulein?"

"EINE bier bitter, Fraulein?" LOL!

Don't you mean "bitte"?

....the penguins were tough on us.

1st grade, Catholic school.....Sister is discussing difference between soft and hard, asks if water coming out of the faucet is soft or hard. Calls on me, who having been the recipient of many blasts from the hose, courtesy of my older siblings, answers "It can be really hard, especially if it's in the eyes or up the nose". This is NOT the answer she was looking for, so I received her standard corporal punishment of 5 strokes of a wooden ruler on my open palm.

Except she applied her last stroke with a little too much vigor, which changed the angle of incidence, and......remember how wooden rulers had a small metal strip on one edge, so you could drag your pencil alongside it to draw a straight line?......you guessed it. She sliced my palm wide open.
Pain, but not much else.....at first.
Then the blood came....lots of it.
She was horrified.
The girls started gagging, the boys were more "wow, cool".
I could tell she felt terrible, but being the total sh!t I was, I wasn't going to let her off easy.
I looked back and forth between her eyes and my hand several times, then made a career decision, and wiped my hand on the front of my crisply starched white school uniform shirt. I thought she was going to pass out at this sacrilege.

Sent me to the nurses office, who wrapped my hand, and recommended stitches. Called my Mom to come get me, but I had a plan in progress, so I told Mom she could take me to the Doc's after school.
Went back to class, looking like I had a sucking chest wound (did I mention there was a lot of blood?) and made the penguin stare at it the rest of the day!

Epilogue: The next day the Mother Superior declared a moratorium on corporal punishment, and future discipline would be handled by a stern talking to from her.
Mates looked upon me as a hero, maybe even a Second Coming...."I suffer for all the children" etc., etc.

I thought it all hilarious, and noticed the girls looked at me differently somehow!

PS....my Mom failed to see the humor in the situation, especially after seeing my shirt, taking me for 17 stitches in my hand (owee, owee, owee) and hearing the reason for the episode.
Her subsequent visit to the school, and private conference with the MS, and the Sister in question, was the stuff legends are made from!!!
Still surprised we weren't excommunicated.