Hard Luck Stories of Another Generation

When I was a kid, my dad and granddad had no shortage of stories about the old days. I hesitate to use the phrase “good old days” because many of these stories were filled with the perils of poverty starring kids who didn’t have it nearly as good as my brother and I.

Introduced in the late 1960s, Gatorade originally came in a glass bottle and in your choice of flavors...as long as your choice was “lemon-lime.”

I remember one classic story my dad told us about a kid in his elementary school who was poorer than most. The boy’s father forbade him to use the classroom pencil sharpener, saying “those things don’t do anything but eat up your pencil so’s you have to buy a new one.” Every weekend the dad would unfold his trusty jackknife and gently whittle a new point on the kid’s pencil, once again warning him to stay away from the evil hand-crank pencil sharpener. Of course, by Friday the kid would be a total nutcase trying to write his assignments and finish his tests with a pencil that was mostly splinters of wood at the tip.

I once dated a woman whose father was always dusting off his hard luck stories and proudly presenting them to anyone within earshot. His favorites included “The Poor Kids’ Christmas” in which he and his twelve brothers, if they were good, got a sack of oranges and a box of soft sugar peppermint sticks as their sole holiday gifts. Apparently it was the best day of the year for the boys as they were allowed to suck the orange juice through the peppermint sticks for a few minutes before they had to go barefoot into the December snow and milk the cows.

His other favorite hard luck story (and the one I actually believed), was titled “The Poor Boy’s Hand-Warmer/Lunch.” In this story, the boy’s mother woke up early every day during the winter and put a potato in the wood-burning stove. This magical tuber served two purposes: The boy would put it in the pocket of his thin cotton winter jacket to keep his hands warm during the three-mile trek to school. Then, at lunch, it would be his lunch.

Ordinarily, a baked potato for lunch sounds like a real treat. Once you subtract the butter, sour cream, chives, cheese and bacon bits, however, it loses some of its appeal (but none of its peel!). Especially if your classmates are eating fancy bologna sandwiches made with store-bought bread and are calling you “Tater-Head.”

I sometimes wonder what kind of hard-luck stories I’ll be equipped to pass onto younger generations. I’m afraid they might be a little lame compared to my predecessors’ tales of woe.

My stories might sound something like, “When I was a kid, we only had one kind of Gatorade…and it was the one that was the color of alligator pee! We didn’t have any fancy-schmancy hyphenated flavors like kiwi-raspberry, or tangerine-melon. We had one flavor of Gatorade and it tasted kind of like salty lemonade. And we were grateful for it.”

Another of my generation’s hard-luck stories might go: “You might not believe this but when I was a kid we only had three television channels, four at best if you were lucky enough to pick up a PBS station with the UHF antennae. And when we did want to change channels, we had to get up off of the couch and walk all the way across the living room, put our hands on a big knob on the TV and turn it. Manually. Actually it was a good thing that we had to go over to the television to turn the channel, because once you did, you probably were going to have to fiddle with the antennae again anyway.”

Currently I’m working on a scary story to tell youngsters about having to make a telephone call from a smelly downtown phone booth.

As I reflect on my lack of horrific hard-luck stories this Memorial Day, I want to thank the generations of military men and women who made it possible for me to live in the comfort of 21st century America. We should not forget that we still have thousands of military personnel in harm’s way, and unlike our stateside grandparents during World War II, we are rarely asked to make any sacrifices during our time of war. All our government asks of us is that we support the war and continue to bankroll it with our tax dollars. Other than that, I get the distinct impression that our leaders prefer that we don’t think about it at all.