Things They've Missed...

My boys have missed out on many of the joys we had when we were kids. Our culture has changed and; while some of the things are certainly for the better, many of the changes seemed to have merely caused our kids and all future generations to miss out on the fun.

For example; my boys have never known the fun of seeing the Milk Man. He came through our neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning when I was very young; collecting the empty milk bottles from our milk box and replacing them with full ones. Sometimes, Mom would leave a note in the box for him to also leave eggs or orange juice. Rarely - very rarely - Mom would have him leave chocolate milk.

We'd go out on the porch to pull the day's deliveries from the box; pull the foil cap off the bottle and use the milk on our morning cereal.

My boys have never seen a Milk Man...

We also used to have a produce cart that came through the neighborhood. You knew he was coming because you could hear his sing-song sales pitch as he came down the street - "Strawberries! Cherries! Waaaaaaaaaaaaatermelon!!"

He always had a wide assortment of fresh fruit and vegetables on his cart. We'd race down from the porch to catch him and watch as Mom selected her produce.

My boys have never seen the produce man...

We used buy pretzels once in a while from men on street corners selling Gus's Pretzels. (I suppose there still might be Gus's vendors on the streets around St. Louis, but we don't have anything like it in Wisconsin.) They would walk between the lanes of cars at the stoplights; loaded down with brown paper bags filled with warm, soft pretzels. The pretzels somehow tasted better coming from the street vendor.

My boys have never seen the pretzel vendor...

We used to walk the block to Bob's Corner Store on the corner of Tholozan and McCausland. It was a tiny store that carried a little bit of everything. Mom used to send us to the store with one dollar; with which we could buy a gallon of mile, a loaf of bread and maybe have a little something left over for some candy. Bob had a small butcher/deli counter where he would slice bologna and wrap it in white paper for the trip home. Bob was a great guy who knew all of the neighborhood kids. He gave Kim a bag of Circus Peanuts one time when he knew the Sauermans were coming for a visit. (Mom didn't believe Kim when she said he had given them to her and took her back to the store to make sure.)

Bob had lost his stomach to cancer so he had to eat lots of tiny meals. He was pretty much always snacking on something when you saw him.

My boys have never seen anything quite like Bob's Corner Store...

Newspapers used to be delivered through the streets of St. Louis by young men standing on the back deck of specially made trucks. They had stacks of newspapers in the bed of the truck and special balers that quickly wrapped and tied a string around the rolled up paper they would insert in the baler. They stood on the back of the truck; throwing the rolled up newspapers up in the yard or on the porch of their customers. Sometimes one of the guys would have to jump off the moving truck to fetch a paper that had landed in the bushes and re-toss it on the porch before running back to jump on the still moving truck.

My boys have never seen the paperboys wrap, tie and throw the newspapers from the back of a moving truck...

Trucks drove through the neighborhoods fogging for mosquitoes throughout the summer. You could hear the hiss of the fogger as it sprayed the next block. The telltale sound was merely a warning to race to your bike so you could ride through the fog as you followed the truck when it went past your house.

My boys have never ridden their bikes through the mosquito fog...
(Okay, that's probably a very good thing, but they've missed out on the fun.)

My boys have missed so much. I wonder if someday they will look back on things from their youth; sorry that their kids will never get to experience the joys of...