How old would y’all say Gramma’s supposed to be? Because horrifyingly enough she can’t be a whole lot older than I am, and the things she says don’t reflect the world of my youth.
I think a lot of cartoonists (and other writers) have a fixed mental image of grandparents being of the same generation as their own grandparents, forgetting that time has passed: today’s grandparents came of age in the 1950s, 60s, or even 70s, not the 20s, 30s or 40s.
Comics I Don't Understand 
This is the Classic edition, so she would have been a kid in the 30s or 40s. Seeing these old strips, it’s amazing how much the character changed. She’s nothing like the freewheeling, spirited woman of the later years. The only other character to change really is Max, who finally learned to talk (and maybe Phil, who showed up a lot earlier than I thought and may or may not have become black).
I don’t follow Stone Soup, but her website says that Jan Eliot was born in 1950, has two daughters and is already a grandparent herself. Perhaps the strip relates to her own grumpiness at not being allowed to play basketball when she was young. I’m pretty sure a girl of her generation would have landed (willing or not) in a high-school “home-economics” class.
That’s my mother’s generation, but my family wasn’t rich enough to act like that. Mom was of the “run through the Irish neighborhood to get back to her home in the Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn because the Irish kids wanted to beat her up” demographic.
Yeah, this Stone Soup is from the 20th Century, so it’s plausible Gram could have been born in the 40s.
It’s also possible that Gramma had encountered this attitude constantly enough from the previous generation when she was herself a little girl that she’s subconsciously come to revise her personal history to think it was “still that way for her back then.” Stockholm Syndrome of a sort.
Or that she just got carried away with instinctive scolding, and went with the first cliches that came to mind.
(Of course, when she was a girl, maybe she DID have to walk miles to school each day, through the snow, uphill both ways. It was a different world then, you know. And if you don’t know, pull up a chair and she’ll tell you about it.)
During my grade school years we had “school clothes” and had to change when we got home. Still, at recess we’d beat the crap out of those “school” clothes.
I think Kilby’s got it. When I was in high school, I wanted to take shop instead of home ec, but wasn’t allowed. We had to wear dresses to school. And we were always told to ‘act like a lady’.
I have more of a problem with the 5th panel where she says, “we got next.” That sentence makes no sense to me.
Probably needs a Hey Geezers! tag.
Next game.
In addition to the points others have already made, when someone says “In my day. . .” it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually describing how things were in their day. It’s often some idealized version of their day, in which everyone behaved properly. So I could see even a grandmother who grew up in the 60’s saying something like this.
When I first went to school in USA, Midwest winter, my Mom sent me to school with pants underneath my dress/skirt ’cause I had to walk a mile (seriously and for real, four times a day). She was reprimanded for this, but carried the day somehow, altho I don’t know the particulars. When I see how students dress these days, I have to laff at me and my pants under the dress/skirt (which were embarrassing for me to take off, but better than frostbitten legs).
Ah, that is correct: two Stone Soups today, and this one was the “classic.”
I stand by my premise that comic strip writers tend to treat grandmothers as being of their own grandmothers’ generation, but this particular comic is not necessarily an example of this.
And DemetriosX is quite correct that Gramma morphed into Evie around the same time Phil turned black (which I imagine must have been a really weird time for the Val).
Bookworm, “We got next” as in “It’s our turn to play the next game.”
I can’t speak for now, but that was the popular verbal shorthand back in the day.
Duh, thanks, Brian in STL.
In my day we didn’t sit around throwing shade at cartoonists and psychoanalyzing their cartoon characters. No, we enjoyed our Peanuts and our Grin and Bear It and our Li’l Abner, took our lumps with Nancy and Sluggo and followed along with The Phantom from week to week without worrying about the time continuum, experienced the culture down the street with Gordo, tripped out with Odds Bodkins, and then we moved on. On Sundays we were treated to color panels in reward for our loyalty through the monochrome weekdays. That’s how it was and we liked it that way!
Bill – I’ve had the same complaint about parents in comics – the cartoonists tend to make the parent characters their own generation, even when time has moved on to the point where they’re grandparents… Zits is particularly annoying for me on that front…when it started, I was just a bit older than Jeremy (probably about Chad’s age), so it made sense that Walt and Connie would have the same cultural touchstones as my parents. 20 years later, Walt and Connie should be roughly contemporary to me…but still talk like they grew up along side my parents.
Well, in Gramma’s day, meaning right now, grandmothers don’t go off to Africa to build houses and marry someone she meets there, or whatever it is she did.
Girls were suppose to take girl’s classes – with girl’s sports in gym class. Girls were not suppose to do boys’ things.
There was an exhibition at the Smithsonian around the 1980s on life after the (American) Revolution and in the little presentation before one went into the exhibition one introduced to a fictional couple of the period. It talked about what skills the husband had learned and then it said that wife had learned had learned different skills. Well, that was the idea, certainly into the 1950s and 60s – men learn certain things and women learn other things. Robert was amazed that I knew how to use tools, had helped my dad shovel snow, knew more about car engines than he did (and I did not know much – for some reason the fact that I could take the cover off the air filter, take the air filter out and shove a pencil into the carburetor when it stuck, impressed him) – but I had no brothers and someone had to help dad.
I had to wear a skirt and blouse or dress to school – slacks, especially jeans, were not allowed until the protests while I was in high school.
Unlike my niece and nephew I had to take home ec – and Robert had to take assorted workshops – niece and nephew had the chance to pick 3 or 4 different assorted things in junior high – cooking, sewing, woodworking, metal shop…
What I’ve wanted to know for some time is: what manner of inattention or malfeasance on the part of the generation that fought against school uniforms in the 60s and 70s allowed same to come back for their own kids?
It’s called a pendulum . . . things went to extremes and are now going the other way.
@DiB: It was sold as 1) anti-gang and 2) an equalizing thing to keep rich kids from flaunting their wealth through brand name fashion.
Age is an odd thing as time passes – it slips by. When “Frasier” was first on we were around his age (more or less) now we are his dad’s age – and passing him these years. I watch older TV shows from when I was a kid – say father knows best – and now I am older than the parents.
We interpret with our reenacting unit a house at the local restoration village for their Christmas candlelight nights. Based on research Robert and others have done we really feel like we know the family who lived in the house in the 1770s (plus and minus) . Robert and I and some of the others do first person at the event. We are a (not a real) person from back then and know nothing past the matching day of the year in 1775. We have been doing this for around 20 years. I have been saying that I am a girlhood friend of the wife and we have a story that Robert and I were introduced by the husband and wife at a party “such as this one” as the husband is a friend of his. One day about 2 Christmases ago I realized something – time has passed. The wife would be in her very late 20s or more likely around 35 and i am was in my early mid 60s – if I push it as Robert says we should as we look younger, I am, say 55. Heck, I am old enough to be her mother – I can’t be her girlhood friend as she never ages (and every year,since the year does not change, I have to have been born a year further back in time – currently I was born in 1720 when Geo I was on the throne). So now I am a girlhood friend of her mother’s and she is like a daughter to me. But the years just slip by.