My new memoir WOODEN & ME is also available here at Amazon

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Hung Up On Saving a Sweet Dime

Anyone with a Facebook page or their own blog will find this hard to believe, but in the 1960s there were no personal computers. Also no VCRs, much less DVDs or DVRs. No microwave ovens or cell phones.

Largely no parental supervision, either.

Indeed, The Sixties seems a prehistoric era. We “dialed” numbers on rotary phones, listened to “records” and newfangled “eight-track” tapes, and if your car broke down or ran out of gas you had to find a telephone booth (Google it) which cost a dime to make a local call.

Usually a dime. My oldest brother discovered that if you hung up a payphone the very millisecond someone answered on the other end, the automated switchboard perceived the call had not gone through and your dime would drop into the change slot.

Hence, Oldest Brother told Mom that when she answered the phone and no one was there, it meant he needed to be picked up from school, football practice or a friend’s house.

One problem. This required Mom to know where Oldest Brother was. In The Sixties, 99.2 percent of parents did not concern themselves with such trivial matters as knowing the whereabouts of their children between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

My two older brothers and I could go next door to use power tools unsupervised, ride our bikes without helmets across town to the comic book store, or hop on a boxcar with hobos and so long as we were home by eight o’clock there would be no questions asked. Most likely, we would not have even been noticed missing.

Frequently as not, when Oldest Brother phoned home and quickly hung up Mom went to the wrong place to pick him up. She would waste a dollar of gasoline driving around town to find Oldest Brother, who was thrilled to have saved a dime.

More than once Mom went to the right place to get Oldest Brother only to learn had not called for a ride home yet – his “secret code” had been a wrong number hang-up. Amazingly, these miscommunications never seemed to ruffle Mom.

Even running out of gas, in a downpour, did not get Mom steamed up. It helped that the faux-wood-paneled station wagon sputtered dead at an intersection with gas stations on three of the four corners. An attendant across the street saw Mom wave in distress out the driver’s window and came running through the rain to the rescue with a gas can.

Amazingly, Mom happily escaped this “I Love Lucy”-like madcap situation without even getting wet. She made us three boys in the backseat swear to secrecy because Pop was forever admonishing her for acting as though “E” on the gas gauge stood for “Enough.”

As you might imagine, the moment Pop came home from work that evening we rushed to tell him all about our adventure; he just shook his head because he knew Mom had not learned her lesson.

Back to Oldest Brother’s hang-up ploy. The biggest problem came after he taught Middle Brother and me how to turn the payphone into a slot machine with a dime payout. Now Mom had no idea who had hung up on her, much less where we were.

All this hassle to save a dime might seem nuts, but back then ten cents bought a Snickers, or a six-pack of mini-Coke bottles made out of paraffin and filled with colored sugar water, or a roll of chalky Necco Wafers, or ten Pixie Stix paper straws filled with granulated sugar flavored grape, lemon-lime or cherry.

So when the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently recommended that no more than 10 percent of daily calories – roughly 12 teaspoons – should come from added sugar, I had to shake my head. In The Sixties, only 10 percent of a kid’s calories didn’t come from sugar.

Today, Americans gulp down an average of 22 teaspoons of added sugar daily, nearly twofold the new recommendation – or about the amount my brothers and I ate between calling home and when Mom finally picked us up.

To be continued next Saturday…

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon