A tribute for the generation of the 50’s – 70s

Those of us who were children in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s probably shouldn’t have survived.

Our cribs were painted with a high gloss lead based oil paint. The floors had mosaics that cut your bones and the bedrooms had wooden floors that were polished with parquet, with somewhat heavy parquet boards and every now and then thorns were nailed to our bare feet.
Childhood illnesses were rampant. Every now and then a friend or classmate got measles, mumps, bruises, chicken pox.

We had no safety caps on the medicine bottles, no caps on the sockets in the room, those dark ones made of Bakelite.

We warmed ourselves with wood stoves or with… coal, or with oil heaters. Where to find a radiator then.

He had a telephone either in some booth of OTE with a coin-operated machine with those engraved tokens, or in the kiosk in the neighborhood, which had our magazines Mikros Heroas and Mikros Serifis, and even Romanzo, Pantheon, Domino, hung on pegs. the Vendetta, the First, the Forward.

I still ask for the almond ION chocolate of the thaler, or the first MELO wafers with the cards with the costumes and the flags of the countries of the world, I still remember the Rooster Lollipop, the cotton candy in the amusement parks, the freshly baked popcorn, the candies of milk wrapped in gold paper, the crimson charleston candies, the apricot skin pastille, the original pastel, and the white mandolato. I still remember the taste of the corn and the chestnuts and I get excited when I see chestnuts, few more and corns at a fair. The original doner skewers and the overcooked pita and red pepper are gone.

The gray American huge taxis with the seats that fell from the backs of the front seats, circled or crashed in the squares. And the pirates, “a little Constitution” cut their daily wages.

Who would have a car then? The lucky few bought VW scarabs, or used Consoul Cortina, Hansa, Wartburg, FIAT 1100, Opel Olympia. You remember the Anglia, the Peugeot 403, the Renault 10 or the Simca 1000, with their non-existent radiators and skinny tyres.

The milkman brought us milk either in glass bottles with aluminum lids or he emptied it from large jugs into the pot at the front door. The quilt makers, the chair makers, the iron makers, the sharpeners and the cobblers had a lot of work. On the main avenue a multitude of chandlers with well-polished cases and glittering awaited a customer.

And in some corner in a little 2X2 room was the cobbler’s kingdom with that weird little guy who would turn the shoe upside down and glue it and nail it with those broad-headed black nails and smell of gasoline
On the corner of the street an EVGA that sold milk, yogurts and ice creams in coolers with black velvet lids, and in one corner metal boxes with glass tops and inside cookies filled with cream flavored vanilla chocolate strawberry and banana and Boussiu cookies if I remember wrapped in translucent paper. The columns of ice brought by the ice-seller on his tricycle and carried by that strange hook-tool were slowly melting on the head-stairs. And the faucet of the refrigerator had a white tulip wrapped around its mouth as a filter. Where electric refrigerators. Later I remember something PIZZOS IZOLA and KELVINEITOR. The coffee in the cafes was only Greek, Turkish then. There was no nes, no frappe, no cappuccino, no espresso, no French filter. Only in any pastry shop did you find French, and of course you paid dearly for it.

The first coffee makers were glass jugs filled with water on the fire, with a special metal filter that the liquefied steam fell on the coffee and dropped it into the water and the cycle continued until the content was exhausted.
Saturday night in our little ones, a movie theater during the great period of Greek cinema and in the evening a tavern with steak for kids and a sip of beer that our mother secretly gave us because “the child shouldn’t drink”.