Personal History – Things I Believed When I Was Little

I stumbled across an internet post (was it on BuzzFeed?) in which people shared the crazy, impossible things they believed when they were kids. After all, some things just don’t make sense until someone explains. The anecdotes were roll-on-the-ground funny. So I decided to write up some of my own…

I used to think our neighbor’s house was painted BLACK inside. That’s how it looked from outside. (I was never invited in.) Finally one evening I glanced through a window and realized our neighbor had brightly colored wall paper and LIGHTS, just like us!

Once I heard my Dad greet the same neighbor by saying, “Hi, Oldtimer!” The only “timer” I knew anything about was that gadget in the kitchen that my Mom used to decide when food was fully cooked. I began to wonder about our neighbor. Did she TICK? Was she going to go PING? I watched. Nothing happened.

I was taken to the Yale University Museum to see the dinosaur exhibit when I was maybe three years old. For years after that, I assumed that dinosaurs had no skin or innards. Just bones. Scary! I might have been 10 before I understood about skeletons.

For several weeks in December, 1954, I believed the world was going to end. Seriously. We didn’t own a TV, but I watched a little at my Aunt Kay’s house. There was a program (early precursor to the Twilight Zone?) that showed an abandoned house with some weird “radiation” (like the sine wave on an oscilloscope) running through it. I thought it would happen at my house, come New Year’s Day, and that the vibrating wave was going to kill me! Why at New Years? No idea!

What about you? Any stories to share? I’ll probably think of more…

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