Intergenerational Conversations

Middletown Library

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00:00-25:36

Conversation between grandparents and grandchildren reveal joys of childhood and the freedom they had.

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TitleIntergenerational Conversations

AuthorMiddletown Library

CategoryPodcast

Duration25:36

FormatAUDIO/X-WAVPACK

Bitrate1264.686 kbps

Size242.88MB

Uploaded29 Jul 2023

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Hi, I'm Porter, and my age is 10. Hi, I'm Eucelyn, and I am 12. And these are our grandparents, Nani and Joju. I'm Nani, and I'm 73 years old. And I'm Joju, which is Polish for grandfather, and I'm 76 years old. And today we're going to be talking about what's it like as a young child after coming home from school. Okay, I'd like to start. So I would come home from school, and I had a paper route. So the first thing I did when I got home from school is got into play clothes, and I would deliver my papers. I started with 10 customers, and I ended up with 146 by the time I was done. I'd come back from my paper route, and then it would be time for supper. After supper, I had to do my homework. That was the most important thing. I did my homework. And then my dad had a print shop in the basement of the house as a part-time job. So I was a printer's helper. I would help my dad with the printing jobs he had. Okay. I'm thinking about when I was maybe in first to, like, fourth grade, so I was kind of a younger child. I remember coming home from school, and I had two sisters and a brother. And my older sister was in an upper grade, so she came home a little bit earlier than us, so she was there. And sometimes my mom worked, and sometimes she didn't work, so depending, she might be home. But generally, we always changed our clothes, first thing, because back when I was a little girl, they didn't have permanent press, and we had just a washing machine that my mother had to wring the clothes out and then hang them out on the line. So having a clean dress was important, so we didn't get to play in our school clothes, so we would get to change it. And anything that we wore to school had to be ironed. You know what ironing is, right? Yeah. And every dress had to be ironed. So after school, you changed your clothes, you hung up your dress, and this will be surprising to you, the girls had to wear dresses in those days. They couldn't wear pants. So you had to hang up your dress. Right. That's a surprise, right? Didn't someone, like, change your backpack? They changed it in the late 60s, I think. Yeah. You had to wear a dress, you had to hang it up, and then you'd get a new play clothes, and we'd just go out. And I was really lucky when I was a little girl that I had my brother's assistance. I was the youngest of four. My brother was less than two years older than me, and he's like my buddy. So I hung out with him a lot, and we'd just go out to play. And we'd play and play and play and play until we heard the bell. My mother had, like, a cowbell by the door, and she'd whack the cowbell, ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling. And we could be far away because we had a lot of land. We had, I think, like 13 acres. We could be right behind the house, we could be way, way out in the fields, or we could be way, way deep in the woods. But we could hear the cowbell out there. If we wanted to go up the street and play with other kids, we would have to tell her where we were going. So generally, we built a lot of stuff. We just did a lot of outdoor stuff, like baseball. In the spring, we'd always be down by the pond, and we'd be getting turtles and watching for snakes and picking up snakes and playing with them. We were real nature kids, real natural kids. How about you, Margie? So I'm going to start with Ethan because he's the oldest and youngest. Okay. Okay. So if we're doing first to fourth grade, it would probably be, I got home and I probably would go, I would, I had like, I'd probably go on my iPad. Or we'd like share an iPad then, or it was like our mom's iPad. So we'd go, we'd probably watch like YouTube or something. But sometimes we'd go play with like our toys, like our dolls and stuff. I never remember ever like being sunny when we got home. I don't think we did much. It was mainly for weekends. And then now I usually come home. I will like put on some music or sometimes like watch a video while I like crochet or, you know, I cook or like whatever I want to do. Yeah. So what I do when I come home. So mainly when I was younger, I would mostly just come home, see if anyone's home. He's my friend and he lives like a block away from me. And if he wasn't home, so it depends on the day. Because it feels like, like if my dad was off work and it was like close to the end of the year, we'd go in the pool. But if it's like cold out, I'd usually stay inside and play with my toys. Yeah. And between those ages, dad, he would only come home for like the weekends because he was going between Washington, D.C. for work. So mom would usually just go to the iPad to try to get us off her hands once we came home from school. But we also had after school programs. So like you said, we'd probably come home, have like an hour and do that stuff. And then we would have dinner because we had like after school programs. So kind of like your iPad, if it was a lousy day, I mean really bad because we kind of went out if it was raining a little bit and we definitely were out if it was snowing. So it really had to be like a torrential rainy day or a bitter, bitter cold day. We pretty much went out on the bitter cold days, too. We really liked being outdoors. Right. But if it was a rainy day or a lousy day, I would probably come home from school and there was this TV show on after school, like on YouTube, called Art Leap Letter. And he had this section at the end of his show, I think, called Kids Say the Dumbest Things. And he would have like three-year-olds and four-year-olds and he would ask them really deep questions that he would come up with incredibly silly answers. Yeah. Because three or four-year-olds have a certain perception of the world. You can find it on YouTube today, Kids Say the Dumbest Things. But so I would always watch that. And then I would probably go up to my room and I didn't have a lot of toys. We didn't have a lot of toy pictures that day. Because why? I had three books and they were handed down from our brothers and sisters. So we didn't have a lot of books. And I didn't have a lot of toys. I loved it. I used to do paper dolls and design our own outfits and do a lot of coloring and crafts, a lot of crafts. I used to take like clay foam, like you know the foam? It's not like styrofoam, but like soft ones that you can bend and like for crafts and stuff. I used to take that and I would just cut out certain parts and that's when I wanted to get the hot glue gun out and glue it together and then put it on my toys and stuff. I used to do that all the time. That was like my favorite thing. But it was usually the same thing, just a different color every time. There's one more thing I would do. Probably my whole age, like even in kindergarten. I would always take my mom to come over to your house just so I could play. Because usually it was boring when I got up in the upper grades. Because Ethan wanted to crochet more, which is good, but we didn't really do the fun go-outside thing. And then also we would go play on the swings and yeah. I want to ask Javier, because he was talking more about when he was maybe 10 years old and up. What did you do when you were like first, second, third, fourth grade before you got a paper doll? Because you didn't play paper dolls. My paper started in second grade. Oh, okay. Because my cousin was going to the priesthood. So Father Tony ended up having these paid customers that he did as a favor to go pick the newspaper up. So I took the route up and slowly built it up. But another thing, I like trains. I'm HO trains. So my hobbies were HO trains and stamp collecting, which has not gotten very much today. And I learned a lot about the world and about the United States and about history through stamps. Stamps would come out with these commemorative issues. And when you get a commemorative stamp, you say, oh, this is what we'll commemorate. And you learn about that. That was a nice thing to do. Yeah, okay. Alright, let's do a new question. How about, what was it like during the summertime when you were young children? I loved to bike ride. I had a bicycle. And we would go out on adventure trips. And then we had a very, very nice Fourth of July celebration. It was a big family celebration. And you could see the fireworks at Zahn Park from our backyard. So we would spend our family celebration viewing the fireworks at Zahn Park. But my grandmother lived next door. And we grew all the vegetables that the family ate all year round. So rather than go to the beach in August, I would be in my grandmother's basement. She would have a cold stove going because we were canning tomatoes, peaches, plums, green beans, and other good vegetables. So my stories are similar to Juju. We had a garden, a huge garden. And we also had blueberries, grapes, and a lot of other things growing on our property. And so my mother actually did all the canning. I don't remember getting involved in it. She would really work hard canning things. And those things would be all at the bottom of the stairs so that in the winter we could get out and get a can of this or a can of that, which would take us mostly through the winter. And she made pickles like these. But I think on an average day we'd just go out to play. And we had three or four ponds in our back yard, which we did not go into because they were full of reptiles and canapes and things like that. But there was like a brook. It was bigger than a brook. It was a small river. And we would go down and play in the river sometimes and make rafts. We'd find old wood and we'd build rafts and we'd go on the river. And every afternoon afternoon my mother had all her chores, her gardening chores and her laundry chores and all that done. I think just about every hot afternoon, probably at least three or four days a week, we'd drive about five miles away where there was a pond that had a sandy beach. And we'd go swimming. We'd swim and swim and swim and have a good time. And like Josh just said, my childhood in some ways were similar. Once I had a bike, and I don't think I got a bike until second grade because I had to wait until my brother's research was finished for it. Then we would go off on bike adventures. And sometimes I don't think my mother knew where we went because we were like gone. And when I was in fourth grade, we rode the bike unbeknownst to my mom, because just all of my big brothers and sisters who seemed to be knowing what they were doing. Twenty-eight miles away, we went to the beach and we drove our bikes down. And then they called up my mother from a take-up phone and said, we're in Nantasket. Can you come get us? She had no idea. We just got on the bikes and didn't stop. And I just followed my brothers and sisters. So that was our biggest adventure, which we never did again. Well, usually in the summer, we always go on adventures. I go in the pool almost like once or twice a day because it's a lot of fun. We usually go to the ocean. We go to the beach a lot. I think almost every day or every other day, Dad will just drive by in his new car. I don't know if that was a thing. It probably was. I don't know. He'd drive by all the beaches and just see which one looks the best for whatever we want to do that day. If we want to go snorkeling or boogie boarding or just swimming. That's just what we do a lot every day. But in the downtime of the summer, I'll usually crochet. But if I'm too tired that day, I'm not really one to take naps. But I would probably just lay down in my bed and watch maybe a movie or a video on YouTube or something. How about your plants? Oh, yeah. I love to take care of all my plants. That's mainly what I do. I still need more plants, though, because the summers are so long. I'm not complaining about them being too long. But it's just like I need to have more plants to take care of. Yeah, so what I would usually do is in the summer, I would go in the pool. I would go in the pool and I would go to the beach and play. Yeah. I would go. Yeah. Yeah. So we would, well, we just started this like two years ago. Ethan was the first one, but we worked first. She was way better at it and my dad was way better at it. And just like two days ago, I went to the beach and I actually like did it. Sometimes I would go to the pond if we went to New Hampshire. And what we would do at the lake, if the pond was all right at the lake, is there's just a tadpole. But the main thing, we would just swim around. And this year, when we went there, there were millions of just these tiny frogs. Probably bigger than... They were going crazy for the frogs. Probably bigger than an average 10-year-old. Like if you stepped off like the main like little path down to the river, then all of a sudden the ground would just start moving. Like it would jump away from you. Like there were so many frogs. And I would also go play with my friend. He has a trampoline and... Yeah, we would do that. In the neighborhood? Yeah, yeah. And I think there's one more thing. Oh, right. We used to have something called the Shark Park. It was basically a giant inflatable park that had a little kiddie pool and had a trampoline and a tunnel and then a rock wall that led to the slide. We would love to play on it. We do have a swim set in the front and back. But if it's just like a stormy, cloudy day, I would just go in my room and play my G.I. Joe's, which is in my TV. Okay, so the next question is, what was the coolest thing you saw somebody do or somebody had that was just like so cool? It was like, but now it doesn't really matter. Okay, in my case, there was a young boy about my age that lived in the neighborhood, but his family was wealthy. And they had a color television. It's like the first one in the town. And it was like, wow, color TV. I can't believe you said that, because that was my first reaction, too. I think we got our first black and white TV, which you have to understand was tiny. It was probably like 12 by 12 inches. Oh, wow. And that's about what size they came in. They came in a little bit bigger than me. Like as big as your purse, kind of? Like the size of an iPad. That's how big they were. And they got a little bit bigger later. But when I was like five or six years old, when we got our first black and white TV, my mother had a friend that had a little girl my age. And I would go there and play sometimes when my mother worked, because my brothers and sisters were all in school. So I must have been five. And I got there, and she had a color TV. And I was just mesmerized by the color TV. But we just got in the black and white. So same thing with me. It was like unbelievable innovation. Do you remember how much it cost? Oh, I wouldn't have asked. I was five years old. Oh, yeah. How much did that cost? Oh, no. Like how much a black and white TV cost? I'm sure they were very expensive. I would bet that, you know, black and white TVs back then were a huge luxury. A huge luxury. A lot of families, I think they might have come back. I was in the late 40s, but most families didn't get them. Most average families, not wealthy families, didn't get them until the mid-50s. When did you get your first one? When your mom was born, which is 1973. We paid, because we were going to stay home a lot, we paid $500 for a color TV. $500 in 1973. Wow. In 1973, a new car was $2,000. So, one quarter of the price of a new car is what a color TV costs. Oh, my gosh. So, right now, I think a new car could be, if you get a truck or a big car, it can be, I think, $50,000. I agree. Wow. Okay. So, that means a TV would be $12,500 if it was one quarter of the price of a car. That's crazy. Oh, my gosh. Right. So, they were very expensive. They were very, you didn't get one when they first came out. Nobody got any when they first came out, which you were very wealthy. I think right now, this is not mixing that into video games, but right now, it's always having the newest with everything, because, you know, there's like having the newest version of gaming stations, like PS5s and Nintendos, which you want to have the newest, and all the games on those. Another thing that is really big, but I don't even know if it matters at all, is having new versions of phones. So, they're always trying to come up with new versions to make better sales, like Apple is, but it's literally like, if you look at the behind it, like slow, better Wi-Fi or something, or a little bit more storage, but it matters so much just to have, instead of having the 13, having the 14. Even though they come out with a new one every like six months. So, it's like a status scramble? Yeah, every like six months. Like, you're cool if you get the latest. Yeah, and also having the most things, like having really expensive headphones, or having, you know, like an expensive watch. Another thing is, you know, I don't know what they are, but like Apple made some really weird goggles things, they're like, I don't know, they're like from VR. VR headset. They're supposed to be like cool goggles that you can see through. Like a VR headset? Yeah, and they're like $2,000, but I know everybody just wants to get them. Are you one of those everybody's? Oh no, I could never. I know. Another thing is weird stashes, because Nike shoes are the biggest thing. If you get like a new $2,000 Nike or Jordans, if you look at it, it's like, you know, oh yeah, I got those. And then the second somebody creases the front or gets a little dirt on them, they like throw them away. They're worthless then. I like the 1950s better. Yeah. Wait, what was the question again? What was the coolest thing? Oh, what was the coolest thing I ever saw? So, in the Lego, more in the Lego history, numerous things, not just cool, older things is cooler. Is that the coolest thing you ever saw? It's like, what is coolest? No, what would be coolest? That's how he's interpreting it. Oh, okay. Okay? No, no, pull it out straight. What is the coolest, oldest thing you've ever seen? Okay, so basically it was, so Lego means the first, right when Venture D.C., the Star Wars, and Attack of the Clones came out, they made these clone troopers that printed all of Lego. It would have a black face and a molded helmet with no black eye goggles on it. So it would be like all blue and like barely any printing on the legs. Like, they would only print the chest and the arms. And like, it looks like you two did that. Wow. The printing's like, one side of the helmet will be a little bigger than the other. Wow. And basically, like, only ten of those clone troopers, Phase II, if you know what a Phase II is, you'll understand, but basically it's a better version of the original. Like, just two of them is like $30. And now there's four of them now, and it's like my pride and joy. I love them. Cool. So podcasting, what did you think of the experience? I learned it's like a lot different. Because like now, like my grandma one day, she just kind of, she biked like 28 miles to a random beach and like barely even knew where she was. But like nowadays I get in so much trouble and it's like really not safe. Because, you know, it's like everything is like big roads and highways and lots of cars. Yeah, what I learned is that basically when you were a kid then, like you would have a job just to earn money. Like how my grandpa had a job for, Joju had a job for the paper route and he would, how much did you earn? $3 a week. $3 a week. Things are so much different. Do you think that they were better when you were young, Joju? Yes, I do. Because of the freedom. You didn't have as many concerns about don't do this because, be cautious because you just live life. Yeah, I agree with that. Right, but you miss the days of freedom. Yeah. You feel like there's a lot to do as a kid. A lot to learn, a lot to, you go to these classes, maybe you have activities after school that you have to do. Whereas your Joju, basically school's out and he got to do whatever he wanted. And in the winter, when we would walk to school, the bakery truck from Stanicky's Bakery would stop and pick us up if it was really cold. And we'd stand in the back of the truck with the bread racks. We wouldn't do that today. Yeah, there's like, it's more dangerous now to get in it. Than rules. Yeah. Well, I've enjoyed having you here on this intergenerational podcast. I think we've learned so much from you and I think as we bring this podcast to the world, people will really enjoy your stories. Thank you. And thank you for providing this opportunity for us. Thank you.