BellaOnline Forums News and Politics Senior Issues Remember when....?

OMGosh, you never heard of Watkins or Fuller Brush? Wow! Watkins was spices, liniments, ointments, flavors (Vanilla and such), etc.

Fuller Brush started out as household brushes and expanded a little. Everyone in our community just had to have a Fuller Brush or two for cleaning and if you did not have Watkins Vanilla in your pantry you were considered not a very good cook.

My Grandmother's kitchen always smelled like cinnamon and vanilla, especially around Christmas time.

Hey - I'm not a senior and I have Watkins products in my house. They're still offering some of the best tasting spices out there.

I know! Watkins is fantastic. I do not use any other brand of vanilla and I love their herbs and spices!

I also like their Petro-Carbo Salve and Liniment.

I remember, vaguely, Jewel T, but I don't think my mom bought any - not sure about my grandparents, who lived 500 miles away when I was growing up....
Not much door-to-door stuff happening any more, people are leery of opening the door to strangers.
I think there are still pockets in the USA that have milk delivery - the fudgsicles of my childhood had wooden sticks though...

Ours were wooden at one time too then they came out with the plastic sticks that had diamond shape holes in them I believe, and you could put them together and build with them. They were fun.

Remember putting baseball cards on the spokes of the wheels of your bike and that was before we knew they were going to be worth money someday. lol.

Oh, and how we gloried in the noise the cards made on the wheels! ROFL

Ya! the cards on the wheels! So fun.

Remember the soda fountains in the drug stores? The 'soda jerks' were always tall, skinny and shy (in our area anyway). We had so much fun at the soda fountains.

And stores had roll up canvas awnings, usually striped. They would roll them down every morning then roll them up when the store closed for the night.

Drumsticks (the ice cream in a pointed cone, topped with choclate and sprinkled with nuts) were much bigger and better tasting back then.

Mr. Goodbar candy bars. Mike and Ike (can you still get them?) And a nickel would buy you a bag of penny candy.

Did anyone ever have the 'rock candy'? They looked just like small rocks. One day my mother pretended she was picking up rocks to put in a brown bag and brought them back to the car for us kids and said, here, I could not get you candies, so chew on these rocks! We really thought they were rocks till my smart older brother decided to take a bite. They were so good!

And 'chicken bones' - candies coated in some kind of crushed nut coating, mm mm mmmm!

Yep you can still get Mr. Goodbar and Mike and Ike candy.

Remember the NECO wafers candies? I used to eat rock candy too and the other instant sugar rush candies were the Pixie sticks. They looked like straws and were filled with colored sugar.

Oh ya! I remember Pixie sticks and NECO.

Root beer floats! They just do not taste the same anymore.

Tipping over outhouses! My brothers one Halloween put an outhouse on top of a telephone pole - don't ask! I do not know how they did it. There were a lot of boys in that group that night.

Trick or Treating with pillow cases instead of a little plastic pumpkin.

Sock Hops! I met my very first boyfriend at a Sock Hop when I was just 13.

Oh yeah, I have to brag a bit. I can't believe I forgot this. Our family was one of nine families to be the first ever to have Bubble Yum bubble gum. My father drove a garbage truck that dumped the big dumpsters back in 1976 and one of the drivers had a run to the Beech Nut plant in New York. Beech Nut or Wrigley, I don't remember who made it.

Well, they just developed this bubble gum and they gave a bunch of cases to the driver and told him to pass it out and try the gum and see how it was. We got like nine cases of it and I took it into school and sold it for a quarter a pack. A few months later it came out in the stores and was selling for fifteen cents a pack. My friends were mad at me lol. So that is my brush with fame when I was a kid. The first one in my town to have Bubble Yum bubble gum.