The Mabley Archive: What did you do before there was TV?

In 1988, when longtime Glenview resident Jack Mabley brought his column to the Daily Herald, he made a couple of requests: 1. Let him keep his ugly, old green chair. 2. Launch an edition for his hometown. He kept the chair. And now, more than a decade after his passing in 2006, his second request has been granted. This column is from Feb. 17, 1997.

We had just gotten into the age of television when my 13-year- old asked, "What did you do in the evening before television?"

"We read, believe it or not," I told her. "And we went to other people's houses, and they came to our house. We played cards sometimes. We talked. We built things, and women sewed and sometimes we stood around the piano and sang.

"We sat on the front porch, rocked in a rocker or swung in the swing. Houses had fine front porches, and we talked with neighbors walking by."

Answering the doorbell and being confronted by a Western Union messenger in his brown uniform was traumatic. It generally was accepted that telegrams only brought bad news, like Aunt Bella has died or that Aunt Bella would arrive at Union Station at 4:15 for a visit.

We had a lot of flat tires when driving, and we didn't call the motor club for help. When a tire went flat or blew, you stopped, jacked up the car, removed the wheel, pried the tire off the rim, took out the tube, got out your patching kit, put the sticky stuff on the leak, applied the patch, inserted the tube back in the tire, wrestled the tire back on the rim, put the wheel on the axle, tightened the nuts, got out of the hand pump, and pumped and pumped and pumped, dreading the sound of a hiss that told you the patch didn't hold.

Boys forever were building things, things considerably less sophisticated than the racks at Toys R Us. Usually, there was an unfinished house in the neighborhood with water in the basement. The big boxes in which the workmen mixed mortar made wonderful boats in flooded basements.

In the winter you could make a quick and workable pair of skis with barrel staves. Form didn't count in our ski meets. If you got from the top of the hill to the bottom without skinning an arm or ripping your britches, you were a successful skier.

I attended five public schools, all in what now is called the inner city. None of us even thought of hitting a teacher. First of all, we'd be belted right back. Also, we'd be kicked out of school.

Boys were not sissies. But in those days, a teacher was somebody in a world apart, somebody way up on another plateau whom you respected and feared.

Today, many kids evaluate their teachers and make it a primary objective to feel out any weaknesses. Teachers and students are chums, but pupils take a swing at teachers now and again - especially at some of my old schools. Kids today may learn better and faster when they apply themselves, but maybe our outlook was a little healthier.

We boys were students of all forms of transportation. The most spectacular event was the arrival of a big dirigible. Kids today are blasé about seeing advertising blimps over sporting events, but these little peanuts would fit into the gondola of the Graf Zeppelin or the Akron. I remember the oohs and ahhs as the huge bags came over the horizon and hovered majestically over the city.

One of the sights on the streets was old ladies tooling along at 15 miles an hour in their electric automobiles. I never saw an electric automobile driven by anyone but an upright old lady, and never saw one go faster than 15 miles an hour.

They were boxy, full-sized cars. In fact, they were much higher than passenger cars today. They were quiet and they didn't smell or pollute the air, and they had an air of tremendous dignity.