Mooney
I never actually saw two kids sharing a single ice cream soda with two straws while gazing lovingly at one another.
That scene, I think, was more a creation of magazine cover illustrators than a representation of real life back around 1950. It looked nice, and people still get a chuckle out of it.
But the phenomenon it represented – teens having a good time at a drugstore soda fountain – was quite real, and it remains a sort of logo of a vanished era.
On the other hand, young guys really did deliver newspapers in the late afternoons. Groups of them would cluster at assigned intersections to wait for the truck to drop off bundles.
Then they’d load up big canvas shoulder bags and trudge off to toss folded editions onto their customers’ porches. Contrary to those same magazine illustrators showing homeowners fishing their papers out of the bushes, the kids generally hit the mark – right outside the front door.
Our communities were true beehives of activity after the school day had ended and the days lengthened into spring.
If you wanted (and it was OK with mom and dad), you could stop for a while at an after-school dance club, put a nickel or two in the juke box and enjoy a few turns with your friends.
Social media being as yet inconceivable, you might prefer to hurry home where you could turn on your bedroom radio and wait to hear if the deejay was playing a special song request for someone you knew. Gotta keep up on the latest gossip.
Comic books were a big thing for after-school and weekend reading. Guys liked the war and sci-fi titles, while the girls swooned over 10-cent romance mags with loving couples embracing on the cover.
The comics did have an educational value, however. A line known as
“Classics Comics,” offering condensed pictorial versions of novels by the likes of Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad, enabled many a kid to beat the deadline for a book report and, at the same time, look like something other than a barbarian to the fearsome Miss Jones in English class.
Sometimes I wonder if any young folks actually play games after school these days. I don’t believe I’ve seen two guys shooting marbles or flipping baseball cards since about 1962. If a person encountered a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk today, they’d probably contact the district attorney’s office to see if a witchcraft group was going around putting its cabalistic symbols on public property.
Life wasn’t all fun and games, though. As kids got older, they were very likely to get after-school jobs. In high school, I had friends working in everything from a dress factory to a gas station.
Well, the pharmacies are no longer places where young folks congregate to meet one another while enjoying ice cream sodas, and the who’s-secretly-in-love-with-whom system of clues via disc jockeys has morphed into clicking keyboards.
Are we better off or worse off?
Well, who knows?
I guess we all just have to move with the times and accept change for what it is.
I have to admit, though, sometimes I wish I could still sashay into a pharmacy, enjoy a banana split and then pick up a 10-cent copy of “Incredible Science Fiction Comics” to take home for the rest of the evening.
What? They’re all sold out, and all that’s left is the latest issue of “Mushy Romance”?
Take me back to 2026 – now!
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Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history and genealogy writer. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.