Luckily, I was raised before Koolaid [[ughh! coloured sugarwater! Yeccccch!), and we could afford real fruit juice and V-8. I was one of those weird kids that liked vegetables and fruit. Actually, I had a ridiculously high metabolism, and ate about as much as 10 adult football linemen. I ate everything in sight, like a locust in a frenzy. Although I brought a large sack lunch to school, I also would sneek a tray and silverware from the cafeteria, and eat all the vegetables for the kids who didn't like them, so they would qualify to get their cookies.
On days when there was no hockey practise right after school, I'd sprint home, dash into the house and grab a quick snack, eating like a ravenous wolf, and then conveniently join a neighbour friend just as he was arriving home, and his mother would invite me in to join him in his snacking. I'd alternate neighbour friends each available day.
To this day, my metabolism is still working well, although, I only eat about 4 times the average 30-year old adult male, now. But, somehow, I still burn it off. Maybe it's fear of being audited?
Our basement was no "love palace". Not only did we have no carpeting down there, we had no TV, no games, no bar, no sofa, and no other furniture other than stored folding chairs and tables. We only had a coal bin, furnace, extra refrigerator, large freezer and a washing machine. We did store a lot of food down there. We did get the ice cream for "The Great Ice Cream Eating Championship" from the big freezer, on a day after school, when no adults were home. But, we took it into the kitchen to eat it, in comfort, rather than in that cold, drab, dusty cellar.
Right after WWII, no one in our neighbourhood had the money to make their cellar into a luxurious family room. When I became a late teenager, after we moved to the Chicago suburbs, most of our neighbours had them, but we never did. We had a big house [[actually a duplex, with big houses above each other, and we made it into one, by putting an inside stairway to the upstairs house). My grandparents and an uncle and aunt and cousins were downstairs, and my parents and siblings and a few cousins were upstairs. My grandparents ran a restaurant, so they also had an elaborate bar and professional kitchen, at home. There was a gaming room, downstairs, with a pool table, large pinball machine, large TV [[after they came into being), radio console/record player and film screen for showing 8MM home movies. So, we didn't need all that in our cellar. We didn't get TVs in homes on The Canadian Plains until 1955. We were one of the first on our street to get one.
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