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How many of you turned on your furnace for the first time last Sunday and it smelled like a wet dog? The first taste of cold weather and the sunshine were welcome relief from the dreary rainy and overcast days that seemed to have plagued us for the past 5 weeks. For years my grandmother used to consult the Grier's Almanac she got every beginning of the new year from Dr. Ken Roberts at his Rexall Pharmacy. It was hung on a nail on the back of the kitchen door along with a calendar passed out free annually from Bailey and Barnes Furniture Store on Alabama Street. Where can you get the Grier's Almanac now? I loved the ads in the small pulp book for Dr. Hitchcock's Liver Powder, Black Draught, Cardui the women's tonic, and other products from the Chattanooga Medicine Company. There was a full page ad on how you could grow tomatoes the size of a Firestone tractor tire. The almanac also had an advertisement on how a person could get into the highly profitable poultry business by sending $5.00 to an address in Missouri and within a few weeks a box of baby chicks would be delivered by Postmaster Ralph Key or perhaps Lloyd Smith or one the dedicated postal employees from the Tallapoosa Post Office that was located on Alewine Street when I was a boy. My grandmother would get the almanac out when Guy Sharpe who was the dean of television weather forecasters in Atlanta would predict snow to see if indeed Mr. Sharpe's forecast was to have any validity. My Mamanier would never plant her garden until after Good Friday because the Grier's Almanac said so. I am a bit nostalgic for times gone by. Growing up in an era of no cable television, Iphones, texting, Internet, Blackberry smart phones, Xbox, Playstation 1, 2, or 3, Nintendo Wii, blu ray DVD players, satellite radio, and high definition television really wasn't so bad. To get a ball score back in the day you had to seek it out of the pages of morning Atlanta Constitution or afternoon edition of the Atlanta Journal or wait until Ed Thelenius gave them on television. Do you remember when Mr. Thelenius was the voice of the Georgia Bulldogs on radio before Larry Munson came to Athens from Nashville after a stint as voice of the Vanderbilt Commodores in 1965? Ed Thelenius was the original play by play voice of the Atlanta Falcons. Hal Strasberg who ran the National Department Store on Head Avenue had season tickets back when Tommy Nobis became the toast of Atlanta after being chosen the number one draft choice out of the University of Texas for the NFL's first southern franchise. Don't call me out and say the Miami Dolphins were because the Dolphins were in the American Football League then. The Tommy Nobis Center in Marietta has helped countless people over the decades. Today you are offered a bunch of different ESPN 24/7 sports channels on cable and satellite. Can you remember a time when you'd make a telephone call only to get a busy signal? None of had call waiting and we never had a phone that wasn't a rotary dail or one that wasn't black and weighed less than 50 pounds. Did you keep a pencil on a string near the phone like we did? How many of you remember when we had just four digits to dail to get someone on the phone in Tallapoosa. Can you recall when 574 was introduced as our prefix and phone numbers in Bremen had "Lenox 7" and then the four digits. Later we could dial 4 and then the four digit number. Remember when Tallapoosa was in the 404 area code and Georgia had only two area codes. Now there are nine of them. It was a long distance toll call to Cedartown, Bowdon, and Carrollton. Today Punk Ward who lives mere feet away from the Alabama state line can call Covington about 100 miles east for no charge. My grandmother thought you had to talk much louder when on a long distance call. "We can't talk but a minute, it is a long distance call and last month our phone bill was over $15.00", I would hear her shout into the phone to my Uncle Jack Meunier who lived in Hialeah, Florida. Do any of you remember party lines? Can you remember that the busiest pay phone in town was in front of Howard Bowman's store on Head Avenue? Another busy pay phone was in "Gentry's Recreation Center" or as it was better known as Fat Gentry's pool room. The only pay phone I've seeing lately in Tallapoosa is between the Piggly Wiggly and the CVS and I am told it doesn't work half the time. You can't make a pay phone call but you can use your lap-top computer for free at Jack's and at Papous Pizza. I think most of my communication is by email these days. When is the last time you even had to use a pay phone because the battery went dead on your cell phone? I remember that a call at a pay phone was five cents back then. You could also buy a small bottle of Coca-Cola for a nickel. You could get an Aristocrat ice cream nutty buddy for fudge bar for a dime. Milk in the lunch room at Tallapoosa school went for 3 cents. Bit-O Honey, Clark, Oh Henry, Chunky, Payday, Zero, Butterfinger, Hershey, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and Milky Way candy bars were five cents. You could also buy candy cigarettes. I never tried candy cigarettes for fear of being hooked on them. A small bag of Gordon's Potato Chips or Jake's Potato Chips were a great bargain at a five pennies. Do you remember Gordon's or Jake's chips? When is the last time you saw a jar of Bosco chocolate syrup? Do you remember your first Moon Pie? Can you remember penny candy? I recall when Double Bubble and Bazooka bubble gum, Atomic Fire Balls, wax lips, jaw breakers, and Lik-Em-Aid, Mary Janes, B B Bats, were popular with kids and you could get a bunch of candy for a quarter. Wrigley's Juicy Fruit, Double Mint, Blackjack, Clove, Beeman's, and Clark's Teaberry chewing gum sold for a nickel a pack. Chewing gum in class would get you in trouble with teachers at school.Mrs. Rambo promptly confiscated our sweet contraband almost on a daily basis. I remember in 6th grade when some mean boys gave James Brooks some Feen-A-Mint laxative gum that had been put in a Chiclets box. Feen-A-Mint was taken off the market because of suspected carcinogenic compounds. As I recall we didn't see James at school for about a week and when he returned he looked like a Biafran orphan. Can you believe that Halloween is only a week away? Time to carve the pumpkin for Jack O' Lanterns and go to Costco and buy a gross of Snicker's Bars and Tootsie Roll Pops in anticipation of the trick or treaters. Remember to pick up your trick or treater a flashlight before next Saturday. I went to a Halloween store in Marietta last weekend and a kid's Halloween costume cost as much now as a suit from Sewell's did back in the 60's. I decided that this year for Halloween I plan on dressing up as an chubby former disc jockey and now a 50ish college teacher who wears Hawaiian flowery shirts. It won't cost as much as a costume from Wal Mart or one of those Halloween stores that always crop up in vacant linen stores near a mall.