Happy Grandparents Day!
Grandparents' Day wasn't introduced until the late 1970s, so there are no old time radio shows relating to this special day. But here's a poem to take you back to 1953, and a poignant reminder of the passing of time.
Black & White
(if you're under age 40 you may not understand!)
You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they'd go,
Pull up a chair to the TV set, "Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet."
Depending on the channel you tuned, You got Rob and Laura - or Ward and June.
It felt so good. It felt so right. Life looked better in black and white.
I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys, Dennis the Menace, The Cleaver Boys,
Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane.
Father Knows Best, Patty Duke, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie too,
Donna Reed on Thursday night... Life looked better in black and white.
I want to go back to black and white. Everything always turned out right.
Simple people, simple lives. Good guys always won the fights.
Now nothing is the way it seems, In living color on the TV screen.
Too many murders, too many fights, I want to go back to black and white.
In God they trusted, alone in bed, they slept. A promise made was a promise kept.
They never cussed or broke their vows. They'd never make the network now.
But if I could I'd rather be, In TV town in '53.
It felt so good. It felt so right. Life looked better in black and white.
I'd trade all the channels on the satellite, If I could just turn back the clock tonight,
To when everybody knew wrong from right.
Life was better in black and white.
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I first posted that poem on RUSC on Grandparent's Day in 2014, and one of our long time friends of RUSC, Grandpa Chet, posted this comment which seems even more relevant now than it did even then:-
Ned, this needs to be seen and read by so many young (TOO young) people who follow my Facebook page. May I please run it there, with all proper credit to you? Certainly, things were not as simple as the poem claims - but the poem isn't about facts. It's about feelings and about hopes. There was instituted racism then? There are divisions even now. But then, our heroes were showing us that we were all brothers. Stronger lessons on "all men are brothers" were demonstrated by Tonto and the Lone Ranger than in all the "relevant" movies, television, and prose of the past 40 years. There was a Cold War then? There are worse now, and America is no longer the strong protector that it once was. There were crooked politicians and corruption then? Yes - but are we really going to compare then vs now when it comes to corruption? It's not that life was so much better in every day. It's that we knew, positively knew, that we could make things better - and that including making ourselves better. We were taught to "reach the unreachable star" and we did our best. We grew up thinking it was GREAT to be different. Today, those who should be leaders are dystopians. They tell our children and our children's children to give up. They tell us that our differences separate us, and make our brothers and sisters into our enemies. 1953 didn't include Rob & Laura, or many of the people mentioned in the poem. It didn't even include me (That would have to wait until 1954!) but it lasted at least another decade, and it was us. We didn't give up then. Let's not give up now.
P.S. Remember, age is nothing but a number, and the best tunes are played on the oldest of fiddles. Enjoy!