My Bus Trips to See a Saturday Movie When I Was 12 yrs. Old

I'm 12 years old and it's Saturday morning.

I pick up the phone and call my two friends who happen to be brothers, David and Phil Vasser.

I say, I'm catching the next City bus and they answer that they will be waiting to catch it at their bus stop. They lived on Aberdeen St. and I lived on Hyacinth St. It was a quintessential neighborhood with tree lined streets and each home completely different than the other---No cookie cutter homes.

I'm but two houses down from the bus stop and they are about five blocks from me.

I see the bus coming. It's a red bus and it stops for me. I enter and deposit one shiny nickel into a contraption mounted to the right of the driver. It makes a whirring and clicking sound. If I would have put into it a dime, quarter or half dollar it would have whirred and clicked and given me the change back.
I don't mind confessing, I thought long and hard about how in the hell does it do that. To me it was magical.

With my nickle fare off I go and then five blocks down, David and Phil board.

We arrive to downtown and immediately go to one of the movie houses which I suppose we had agreed upon before. Generally it was a western where morality was taught to us. The good guys always came out on top.We generally had a chocolate candy bar of some kind while watching the movie.

After the movie, we would head to Sip and Nip Grille or Sitman's drugs. We would order a malted milk and a hamburger. Later we might stop by Dalton's Dept. store and stroll up to the shoe measuring device which is a large cabinet like structure where you stood up and pushed your feet into a slot and looked down and were able to see the bones in your feet and how they articulated with your shoes. Everything you viewed had an eerie green glow.

These were later outlawed. We probably received more Rems of radiation than the people around Chernobyl.We're still alive.

Houses were constantly being built in our area. We would climb up into the attic of a home that was 80% completed with the asbestos insulation blown into the attic. We would throw asbestos at each other. We're still alive. All pipes had asbestos wrapped around them. All ironing board covers were made with asbestos. Our parents lived.

All paint had lead in it. But, hell, we didn't eat it or chew on a window ledge. Who would do that? Well, I won't go there.

Mercury was a play thing. Kids would have it in school and we would shine dimes and nickles and dimes with it by rolling the coins in our hands with mercury. We're still alive. Today, if you break a thermometer in a school, they evacuate it and call
the EPA.

But, I digress. After we saw the movie, had the candy bar, ate our hamburger with a malted milk and bought our comic book and arrived home on the bus, we had twenty cents left over from a one dollar bill.

Bus--$10 round trip
Movie $.20
Hamburger $.25
Malted milk $.20
Comic book $.05

Till this day, I don't recall what I did with the $.20 I had left over.

All I know is that that one dollar bill had a some real purchasing power and value.

In most places today, you can't even buy a cup of coffee. You might as well use it for toilet paper.

Bob White

PS I really enjoyed my childhood even though my family relations were not exactly like Ozzie and Harriet.