It’s a Friday night and time to cruise and see and be seen around town. Gas is a tad salty, all of 35 cents a gallon, but you gotta cruise or your just not in. Back in the early ‘50s that was the Friday and Saturday evening event for teenagers of Rush County. If you lived in Milroy you cruised Rushville or some other small local community, but you cruised. If you were affluent you could take your date and some others, if you so desired, to the local drive-in theater. And there were several around.

Drive-in movies were at Shelbyville (they had two), Connersville, one just below Milroy in Decatur county, one at 9 and 52 just past Morristown, and up at New Castle just off 40. The one near New Castle is still there, as is the one in Shelbyville, but it is smaller and not all that much of a draw anymore. They even had heaters so you could go watch the movie from your car when it was cool out. Put your buddies in the trunk, get in and let them out. Take a big bag of popcorn with you and save the cost of buying it there. Take a soft drink or two with you and save even more. Oh yes, it was fun and rather inexpensive.

In the fall, when basketball was in bloom, you went to Rushville for the tournaments. Rushville had their own Sectional back then. And it was a weekend of fun and partisan bickering in town. All the small schools in the county came in and vied for the Sectional title, and to beat those big bad bullies of Rushville. Go to the game, hit the Greeks afterward and celebrate or drown your sorrows in a homemade soda or shake. Most all schools had basketball teams. May not have football or anything else, maybe baseball, but basketball most defiantly.

If you were lucky enough to have a car you took care of it yourself. You changed the oil in it. Much less expensive that way. You scrimped and saved for gas. I lived in San Diego when I turned 16 and was turned loose on humanity. I had a job that paid $5 a day minus taxes and other things. That $5 gave me enough to keep gas in the car, pay for lunch at school, and still have some left for dates and other things I might want to do when not at school or working. It seemed that for high schoolers the $5 a day rate was about average and readily available. I worked at two jobs while in school. My first was delivering paint and telegrams for a store in Pacific Beach. The second, when I was a junior in high school, was at a stationary store in the Green Dragon Village in La Jolla. I cleaned up after closing and packaged and mailed items that had been purchased but not taken with the customer.

That second job was one of the easiest ones I ever had. I had my own little space around back of the store to package and get ready to mail the small items, and a few big ones, that were sold during the day. The place where I worked sold silly items, things not necessarily required but expensive and nice. And I often wondered just why it was considered a stationary shop. They did, however, have stationary and other items for homes and offices (but nothing large or usually required to do work).

I remember packaging items for Walter Cronkite, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and others who were, in my young mind, celebrities. People came in and browsed a lot at that store. There were three gals and one guy who was the manager. They took care of the inside and I took care of the outside. It was fun, not overly difficult and not at all hard. It was no doubt the cream of jobs for high schoolers. I really don’t remember how I managed to get that job but it was a good one, at least in my mind.

McDonald’s originated in San Diego and they sold hamburgers for a quarter a sandwich. They also had only drive-in or take out. You ate at tables out front of the store and ordered at windows either at the drive-in or out front, no inside dining. The menu was limited: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, shakes, soft drinks and that was about it. You could get a couple of cheeseburgers, a Coke and fries for about a buck and three quarters. Today the sandwich itself is more than that. I remember hearing that you could get a McDonald’s franchise for $10,000 back then. And that was a fortune for the time. Never in my wildest imagination would I ever think that one of those would be in Rushville, nor that it would be a gold mine wherever it was built.

Things change, they must. Some change is for the good; a lot, seems to me, is for the worse. I miss the service one used to get almost everywhere. The kindness of almost everyone, no matter where they may be. I miss the honesty of the people you met, even if you didn’t know them. And most of all I miss the laid back, slow pace of living of my teenage years.

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