The Mabley Archive: It's not easy being a parent

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.

Many of us, maybe most of us, have coped with this social dilemma.

Unmarried son or daughter comes home with his/her girlfriend/boyfriend for a short visit.

They assume they'll occupy the guest bedroom, inasmuch as they've been sharing one bedroom.

A common parental response: "Not in this house you don't.

"You can flip a coin to see who gets the bedroom and who sleeps on the couch in the living room.

"Or you might get married."

There was one plus in their visit. At least she wasn't pregnant. You thought.

And I guess some couples bow to the inevitable, no matter how much it conflicts with their own standards.

I was thinking about this little problem after rereading a piece I wrote in 1988.

"It was not the custom in the good old days for young people to live together before they got married," I wrote.

"It's common now, and a lot of parents who don't like the idea have had to go along with it or cope with a crisis in filial relations."

The changes from then to now are fascinating.

Then, fast food came from your kitchen, not from a nearby drive-in. Fast or slow, it was more nourishing and less greasy.

The air was dirtier, but water was cleaner. Air travel was fast, but train travel was fun.

Watching trains was fun. Hundreds of families would gather along the railroad tracks in the suburbs each evening to watch the Zephyr or the '400' race by.

The '400' was the North Western's pride and joy, running to Minneapolis in 400 minutes.

My kids, and many others, would put pennies on the track for the speeding train to flatten.

I grew up thinking there were only two kinds of soap - Ivory for bathing and washing hands, and Fels Naptha for the wash tub.

Milk came in glass bottles, left at the door by the milk man. If you didn't bring in the milk on cold days it froze and rose 2 or 3 or 4 inches out of the bottle.

Cream rose to the top of bottles of milk, and the frugal housewife would pour the cream into a separate pitcher.

I look at the complexities young people face today and am grateful for the simplicities we enjoyed - moral and material.

Fran and I set out on our honeymoon in the Smokies with 50 bucks in my pocket. We drove back seven days later with lovely memories and a nickel for a phone call in case of an emergency.

The only artificial stimulant in common use was beer, except during the Prohibition years. We heard about marijuana and cocaine and such, but people who used them were called Dope Fiends who laid in dark, smoky dens and snorted up or shot or whatever they did.

A young man's prowess in the back seat of an automobile invariably became magnified with each retelling to his buddies.

Young men have been known not only to exaggerate, but to lie. Who would admit defeat?

Comes to mind my early venture into back-seat land. I found that the young lady had armed herself with a rock, just in case.

If my intentions were less than honorable when we got in, they were after I found the rock.

Many of the blessings of our youth were negative, that is, the absence of nuclear bombs and AIDs.

We had no problems with malpractice insurance. Your doctor came to your home when you got sick, and you didn't sue him if you didn't get 100 percent better.

We paid $14 a day for a single room in Henrotin hospital when our first daughter was born. The doctor's bill was $150.

I'm not sure why we drove our cars without worrying about liability or accident insurance. Traffic was more dangerous then. I guess we just weren't such a litigious society until lawyers started pouring out of law schools after World War II.