Supermarket
Baugh
1965/1970
Submitter: While I give this cute book props for having a diverse cast of kids, the book is rather old, and the spine is gone. Time to find something new.
Holly: It’s definitely old! 19 cents a pound for whatever it is those kids are looking at (3rd picture below)? Are those coconuts??
Yes, props for the diverse cast! But it does show its age, as you described–plus, no helmet on the bike-riding kid would be a problem now.
Wow, to think I remember a time when you would send children to the store by themselves to pick up something (me being the child sent on the errand).
And, that local grocery store might even have offered credit accounts. I could be sent to fetch something and it would be added to my parents’ monthly bill, so I did not have to deal with money.
… I still remember mis-hearing my mother’s instructions and getting the wrong thing, one time. (Regular Bon-Ami instead of “Jet” Bon-Ami.)
Unaccompanied children on a boulevard with a bike? That should go over real well with Millennial parents.
And nosy boomers.
Boomer parents invented the streetlights curfew. I’m Generation X, the children of the early Boomer parents. Where we were from the last school bell to the moment the street lights came on was of no particular interest to our parents, as long as we didn’t take candy from strangers, or forget to watch for cars while we played in the street. Anyone else remember playing 4-Square?
Excellent only if Grandma and Grandpa want to show the kids what it was like in their day. Not so good for a public library.
Huh. Allowing for inflation and such, coconuts are about the same price now. But the 19c might be for whatever it is closest to the camera (beets? rodents?).
I cringed seeing those kids on that busy street next to three lanes of traffic!
This book was published before my time, but not by much. It is making me nostalgic for my childhood when we went everywhere on our bikes, including a couple of towns over, and shopped, ate ice cream, went swimming, etc. It definitely wasn’t the Good Old Days, as crime was a fair bit higher than it is now, and more families would be upset about these mixed-race groups, but there were good things.
But if a kid were to pick this up today, they would probably be very confused and wondering where the adults were.
The 19 cents a pound vegetable the kids are looking at appears to be cabbage. If memory serves, that would have been a reasonable price at the time.
I remember being sent to the grocery for odds and ends in the 1950 when I was about the age of these kids. I was even able to buy a (gasp) quart of beer for my father.
The “g*riatr*c arts” group on the earlier post could have a read-a-long and take hours over each page. I bet at least one of them lived on Gresp Drive in page 7.