You Say Tomato, We Say...

We didn’t go to the movies in 1955. We went to the picture show. ’Course, that was if we could rustle up 15 cents apiece and Daddy didn’t need us for the afternoon. We’d make a beeline for the old Park Theatre. It was only a little over a mile to town. We ran most all the way…about as excited as we could get.

You never hear it called picture show anymore. And I don’t know how that term came into being. But it makes perfect sense to me, then and now. We didn’t have a TV. Entertainment was as scarce as hen’s teeth out at the end of Stonewall Street. And the Park Theatre put the pictures right up front on the big screen for the whole world to see.

We saw moving pictures of cowboys in white hats running bad guys right off the screen. We were mesmerized by Tarzan swinging through the jungle on oversized grapevines. Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara showed up in living color “for goodness sakes.” (See how I cleverly threw in another old term we don’t hear today.)

Ben Johnson, a genuine cowboy actor, was in a film with a bunch of modern-day teenagers in the early 1970’s. It was entitled “The Last Picture Show.” That might have been figurative and literal….

The 15 cents admission money was “burning a hole in our pockets” until we could unload it into Mr. Clericuzio’s hand at the ticket window. Nobody talks about money setting your pants on fire today. They don’t seem to remember when a little pocket change was a whole lot of cash just waiting to buy you something extra special! It’s another term that has gone the way of the dodo bird, passenger pigeon, and Tasmanian tiger.

If you never went to a picture show, you probably have no idea what “turning the antenna” or “hand me the encyclopedia” is all about. Gosh, I hope you haven’t missed the thrill of shoving a tape into an “8-track cassette player” and hearing George Jones wail away on “Why Baby, Why Baby, Why Baby Why….”

About every small grocery store in town kept a “ticket book” for each of its regular customers. They were conventionally stored in a shoe box right up by the cash register. Mom would buy whatever she needed and Mr. Kennon wrote it down in our book. Dad would go by sometime close to the end of the month and settle up.

I think about that outdated purchase and pay-when-you-can ticket book arrangement every time some clerk asks for my credit card today before I can even figure out what I want to buy. Bill Argo would fill your car up with good Gulf gas, check the oil, wipe off your windshield, check the air in each tire, and give you a weather report BEFORE he ever got around to the money part.

Different era, different thought process, different nomenclature.

I hardly ever see freshly washed clothes tied out in the yard anymore. Most every house had an all-purpose clothesline back in the day. When Mom didn’t have work shirts and underwear flopping in the breeze, we’d clothespin an empty box of matches on one of the lines and shoot at it with a BB gun. If we were trying to keep the dogs close to the house, we tied the end of their lead rope around one of the clotheslines. They could run up and down, get plenty of exercise, but didn’t chase any wild critters that might wander near the backyard.

Kids today wouldn’t have no idea of bringing an old coffee grinder or a single tree harness to “Show and Tell” day at school. I’ve seen rabbit’s feet exhibited. Rollin Trull brought in a Civil War pistol once. And Jane Hill had a giant tooth she swore came out of an elephant’s mouth.

I remember when a rake was a bad boy in the community. “Hoe your own row” was another old term that could be taken literally or figuratively. And thank the good Lord above, I believe that awful, real, old-timey, Niagara starch (all we have today is the watered-down spay stuff) that would “wear like iron” is now sleeping with the extinct birds and the Tasmanian tiger.

I could go on but you get the idea. We’ve lost some great terminology over the years. And, of course, new ones have been added. We’d never heard of AI back then. Or social media, Snapchat, Rocky Balboa, microwave ovens, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays….

There is one more old one I’d almost forgotten. When Leon rode that big horse that belonged to Nicky Joe Stafford’s grandfather out of the Western Auto Store, after shopping for some fishing corks that were way up on the top shelf, Mrs. Ethel Mitchum, who happened to be coming out of the drugstore next door and had to leap out of the way, threw up both hands and declared, “Well, want that knock your hat in the creek!”

Respectfully,
Kes