After a Computer crash and the demise of civilization, it was learned
Jim Wilkins wrote on Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:09:41 -0800
(PST) in rec.crafts.metalworking :
On Dec 8, 2:28 pm, pyotr filipivich wrote:
...
Used to listen to WABC out of New York when I lived in Boston. The
Jean Shepard show. One night, he's reading the Cremation of Sam Magee
when I tune in. Gets tot he climactic ending, and shrieks! I shut off
the radio. Oops, now I don't know how it ends. Next day, I cop to my
Dad what I was doing, and he pulls the book off the shelf "The Collected
Poems of Robert Service." I still have that book.
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s
--
pyotr filipivich
Old farts these days - no like when I was a boy. We used to
have us Real Geezers in those days. Now, they'll let anybody
with a little gray hair be an old fart.

OK, what are the requirements? I have the scruffy beard and the 1990
pickup truck and the basement full of strange old machinery but don't
really have the performance perfected yet.

I suspect it is like owning a yacht: if you have to ask, then you
aren't.
I mean, I remember a time when 50 was old - when 40 was old! But
not any more! Now you've got people in their fifties acting like
they're still youngsters, and I tell you, it just isn't right. Not like
the old days, we used to have standards, and old folks were _old_! None
of this "he's sixty years 'young'." Ha! he's sixty years old and
refusing to grow up! is what it is. (Yeah, yeah, you're only young
once, but you can be immature forever!)
Feh, when my Dad was facing his sixtieth birthday, he said to me
"Fifty nine is a good age, sixty just sounds 'old'."
Of course he's up dated that every ten years. When he turned 80, he
was saying this at the party and I told him "Feh! 80 is a good age, you
want old, I'll tell you old - staring fifty in the face!" (No wonder I
grew a beard.)

So, geezer is when you're older than those "young punks" being
elected to whatever office.

I am remembering a story of a young 2LT in the USMC, a mustang, from
the early days of WW2. He's assigned to a unit as the armourer, and
needs to go draw weapons. He wants to bring along Sgt who also was a
"China Marine" (meaning one of those assigned to the US detachment in
Shanghai/Peping before WW2). He's on the horn with a gunnery sergeant,
saying he wants Zimmerman "he knows weapons", "And with all due
respect" says the Gunny "you China Marines stick together." To which
the 2LT, still in his early twenties, replies "Some day, Gunny, I'll
have to tell you what it was like in the Old Corps!" The Gunny laughs,
they both know that the odds are, that Gunny may have kids the LT's age.

So yeah, "geezers these days, not like when I was a boy!" When I
was a kid, we had real characters; now they'll let anyone with grey hair
be an old geezer. Like me.


So, does that answer your question, bubbe?

tschus
pyotr
--
pyotr filipivich
"With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."