The Good Old Days

[Stormy]

Just how good were the “good old days?” Folks on the western frontier led a hardscrabble life. They were wan with fever, gaunt, scrawny and peaked. Their children were sickly and fretful. Vegetables didn’t play a big part in their diet. They dwelt in primitive surroundings with lice, fleas and bedbugs.

People settled close to streams and were besieged by flies and gnats by day and mosquitoes by night.

Folks didn’t know about such things as spreading germs back then. Families ate by common platter and drank from common tin cups. Indigestion and dysentery was a common occurrence.

Men bellied up to the bar and wiped beer foam from their mustaches with a common towel.

Dental hygiene was non-existent. People brushed their teeth seldom if ever. At public eating places and stagecoach stations a community tooth brush, made from the bristle hair of some animal, would be shared by anybody who felt compelled to clean their teeth.

Rolls of toilet paper we’re familiar with today didn’t come along until about 1880. Before that it was grass, corn cobs and other similar things.

Shampoo didn’t come into use until the 1920s and soap was very hard on a woman’s hair so they washed their tresses only about once a month.

All this begs the question;' were the “good old days” really that good?

[DashRiprock]

Stormy, the past days are always seen though rose colored glasses, I guess. Good point/post.

[Koach]

When you look more closely at "the good all days" they sound pretty horrible. 

[Stormy]

Well, to me "The Good Old Days" were the late 40s, 50s and early 60s, I can't recall anything before 1946 when my Dad came home from Germany. then most of the 60s I was in the Navy, as I look back at the Navy, it wasn't so bad. But it was no picnic, after 1969 it seems like everything is worse every year.

[Nan]

For me the good old days would be the days of my youth and growing up so differently from today.  To my grandparents, those days when I was growing up were probably the bad old days and frowned upon by the older generation.   And so are the days of our lives