the world

I used to believe that you had to get dressed up to go to a casino in Las Vegas.

When I was a kid in the late 70s my family took a trip to Washington, DC, and we toured the White House. I kept trying to look around corners while standing in line (ultimately to be yanked back in) because I thought that since it was the president's house, someone would come out to greet us. Even Amy Carter would have been great. After all, whenever people would come to OUR house, my mom and dad would have me come out from wherever I was to say hello to our company.

I was born in 1971. I don't remember Nixon resigning. I do remember Carter being elected president. All my memories of Gerald Ford, however, have somehow morphed into Chevy Chase falling off the podium on 'Saturday Night Live.'

as a child I beleived that if you had "united" in the name of your country you couldn't be involved in a war.... where I got this from I'll never know... but I recall watching the news with my parents and there was a foreign country with "united" in its name (no clue now which one) and I remember smuggly saying well they are united so they can't go to war. My parents swiftly corrected me and through the entire 80's I rarely slept the night thru due to thinking we'd launch into a nuclear war at any moment. ignorance is truly bliss i suppose....

When we were kids, my mom and I convinced my cousin that the birds in the Tiki Room at Disneyland were actually real instead of mechanical.

When I was a kid, I thought that libraries got all their funding from overdue fines. We had a pretty lousy branch library, so I would hold onto books long after I'd read them so I'd have to pay an extra nickel or dime and maybe they'd be able to buy more books.

When I was very little I used to believe that when someone was running for president, the two people running were at one side of the basketball court and raced to the other side and the winner of the race became president.

I thought that the vault in a bank was the place where all the cash was placed, not the safety deposit boxes. I never understood when I saw that the tellers had cash in their cash drawers, and when I deposited money the tellers would not take the cash into the vault.

Watching movies about bank robberies where the main goal of the robbers is to get into the vault confused me.

I used to be very concerned about the CN Tower in Toronto. I was quite worried that it would fall one day, and even more worried that when it did snap off at the base and topple over, it was SO tall that the top could land right on me, in my backyard, 7 kilometers away.

When I was little in the 70's the issue of Quebec Separatism was big in the news. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how all those french people were going to physically separate their province from the rest of canada. Then I figured they were probably all just going to move to France. Much easier!

I believed that store proprietors personally owned everything in the store, and they could decide to charge whatever prices they wanted. Therefore if some item was very expensive, the storekeeper was obviously just being mean and greedy (especially if there were a lot of the thing in stock).

I told my mother that when I grew up, I would have a store that charged very low prices for everything (like a penny for a vacuum cleaner) so that everyone could afford what they needed. That's when she explained to me how stores' inventory really works, but I still didn't quite understand.

Pre school I used to believe that giving too much money in a shop resulted in receiving change. OK except that I also
thought that giving too little also resulted in receiving the difference in change!

i used to think in golf you needed the highest score to win until some guy told me that it was the lowest score who won. i thought i had always won when me and my family used to play putt putt. i was like 7 or 8.

Watching the news, during the 70's, my dad would always say, among other things, "goddamn communists!". I asked him what a communist was and he told me they think everyone should make the same wages and nobody can get rich. I couldn't see what the problem was.

I was 6 when JFK Sr. was killed. I thought the President lived under the dome of the capitol building. Sitting there in the center his President chair. Nothing else in the room. I couldnt understand how oswald got past the guards, climbed up the outside of the building, thru the large arched glassless windows and shot the President.

When I was 6 , used to believe that nothing had a price. I thought money equaled money and it didnt matter how much you gave. (at least thats what i was taught in church). So when I took a Taxi home one day from school, I paid the man a nickel from my little coin purse, thanked him for the ride and went about my business. The man waved as if I did the right thing and drove away. Never did it cross my mind that the man was being generous and thought of my actions a cute specticle.