Seniors, what did your hometown have when you were a kid that it doesn't now and you'd love to see return?

Drive-in theaters, we used to have two.

Old fashioned cafes, the chain places like Denny's can't compare.

The A & W Drive-in Restaurant

Hacienda Hernandez Mexican restaurant

Velma's Bakery, her brownies were so good I could tell where they were made just by the taste

Sterr's grocery store, you could smell the deli and bakery in the parking lot, by the time you got a basket and went inside you were salivating

A free Natural History Museum at the university, visited it several times

T G & Y stores, the small one near downtown was good

A dress shop on Main street, always something good and they had a great variety

Holtzschues Hardware store, could find gaskets for pressure cookers & canners, get keys made & find any type of hardware needed.

Lindy's Barbecue, the best one in town

Grider's grocery store, the prices they marked on groceries and things stayed the same even during high-inflation times, it was the best place to shop & could compete with Walmart even today

Hyde's drug store, much more than pharmaceuticals. We could go test perfumes each visit, check out cosmetics, small housewares, candies and gifts. Fun place to shop during junior high when we were walking around at lunch, now lunches are closed campus so the students have to stay at school.

Back to the time when you could have a yard sale without having to buy a permit. People might clean out their garages and sheds more often if they didn't have to pay so much just to have the sale.

Doctors that made house calls. There were a few that would come out in difficult circumstances where the patient or family would have a problem getting them to town.

The fishing ponds walking distance from where I live now that were open to the public back then now have 2 state care facilities on them and the public isn't allowed to fish there now. I would love to have a fishing pond walking distance from my home. We used to catch crawdads the size of small lobsters in that pond.

This city used to be nearly half the size as it is now. I could walk all over it with a friend if we wanted to. It also had "character"...there were no petty laws like sign ordinances, you could see hand-lettered signs in cafes telling the specials of the day or large marker-written signs in the grocery stores with the sale items prices. Just drive by and read the sign and decide to stop and shop for specials. Also had a chain grocery store that had large hand-painted windows for each season. The artist became quite popular and other businesses such as the local feed & seed store and pet stores also got their windows painted in brilliant colors. The year before the Bicentennial our city had a contest for painting all the fire plugs, they were painted in different historical characters, painted as Dalmatians and other colorful characters too. We had colorful fireworks stands on the edge of town in separate small township, and kids from all over would walk to those fireworks stands and buy sprinklers, Black Cats and smoking monkeys. Those have been outlawed here too.

A huge city park, it was called Forest Park, it covered many acres. There, all the outdoor activities, baseball, (American Legion Teams), city soft ball teams, tennis courts, playground for kids that once were really fun and challenging. Too may injuries from kids misusing the equipment. Huge swimming pool,boy and girl scout camps with cabins. Picnic facilities to accommodate big parties, and small ones. Annual horse show in the summer, fireworks on the fourth of July, carnivals and circuses set up in that park. That park during my childhood and teenage years was for us as good as Disneyland! O'course, there was no Disney Land then.

There was definitely camaraderie and the town was very cohesive.

The park remains, The swimming pool replaced with an Olympic size pool, just not the same charm! Some of the acreage sold off, few of the activities still remain.

I wish the underground caves at Sea Cliff Beach were still there. We could walk under the rocks as the waves crashed overhead and the tide pools filled the caverns with rippling salty sea water. Then the seals would swim up and scare us when they barked at us as we held on tight to the metal handrails that were installed into the rocks! The guide would throw fish out for the seals.

It was awesome. Now it's gone.

So is the Kiddieland amusement park that sat right on the sandy beach.

Santa Land/Santa's Village is gone too.

Fun times and happy memories when we drove somewhere every weekend.

The Sulfur Pools are gone too.

I also dearly miss POP in Santa Monica and The Busch Gardens Animal Sanctuary/Zoo in the Van Nuys/Panorama City area of Los Angeles California.

And the Petting Zoo in Thousand Oaks was a big hit too.

Aww, now I'm sad that I'm old and only have my memories of those places.

Great question. I had many home towns as a child. All in California.

That is interesting. I was down to South Mountain twice. Once to a mobile park where we visited friends. And another time for a New Years party at a western steak house there. I would have loved to see acres of flowers. But the fruit orchards set off my hay fever every time they were in bloom.

The event we used to see televised on local TV was the Christmas parade that was sponsored

by Meier and Frank dept. store. Since Macys bought them out, we haven't seen this parade. Just the big televised Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade from New York. And I miss the smaller one in the

city of Portand Oregon, where I grew up.

This town, turned total multi college college town has fallen into ruins.

No hardware stores

Drive-in theaters.

No A&W root beer stands.

The old feed and seed stores when we 'were' a high agricultural area.

The old slaughter and butcher shops.

The fish markets

The old Woolworth stores

The countless shops that closed over the years, burger joints, coney island restaurant with their special hot dogs and sauce, and old barbeque joints.

The shoe repair shops.

Doctor's house calls.

Many kinds of trees and orchards bulldozed and replaced with golf courses, country clubs, and suburbs for urban heathens.

The lost fishing/hunting spots and mushrooming areas.

The topless bars and cat-houses. lol

Train stations, the turn table, and train travel

The hobo jungles we had where we could go down and talk to the old rail-riders and others that refused to live in the rat race. Even meeting one gent, a medal of honor recipient that said much about the wars were lies and fabrication and wrong. That he hated being recognized for it.

The bus station

The old schools instead of the prisons of today.

All the countless companies and mom&pop shops that used to be here when you could get anything you wanted or made. Employment was easy then too.

The old style .. good... caring hospitals. One ran by the nuns.

The old libraries before closing or changed due to censorship.

Dirt tracks for racing cars.

Smaller colleges before they ate the town and began fascist liberal ruling of us townies.

The old barber shops that would and could shave a guy, plus a cut, and splash old Bay Rum on you.

The airport where you could watch planes land and take off.

The old civil war era mansions and farms before being torn down.

Being gang, illegal alien and graffiti free.

Oh yeah, many things.

I've only been back to my "home town", ie the little Devonshire village of Hooe, twice since I left there in 1957. I went back in 1975 and 2006. When I was a kid, the village was built around a tidal lake, it was beautiful and a haven for birds...and kids ! My Dad used to take me sailing on it, in his little skiff. Beautiful. Sometime in the 60's , the local council, in its "wisdom" , decided to fill in the lake and turn into a park. But then they didn't even make it a park - just an expanse of grass. Incredible. It was still the same 40 years later, a boring acre of patchy grass where a beautiful lake once was.

I'm in CA.....My hometown is Sioux Falls....my best friend still lives there so I hear of the changes. My old neighborhood looks the same except it's now surrounded by condos instead of fieldsI played in.

The downtown was my favorite with Woolworths..Kresges..and Newberrys. The Hollywood Theatre where I met my first love is gone. When I visited back in '94 a lot was still the same. But now my friend says I wouldn't recognize the downtown at all. I want to remember it the way it was.

The Woolworth, Rose's and Ben Franklin stores downtown. A Dairy Queen and Drive-In movie.

Would like to see the kids today be able to play in the fields that are now housing developments.

The old Ice Skating rink is long gone too.

I grew up in west Texas (Abilene). We had wonderful billboard that was actually a large neon sign. It had a girl that drank fro a bottle of Coca Cola, raising the bottle to her lips and then lowering it. It was very colorful, the bottle was shaped like the old coke bottles and the logo was the familiar one. We also had colorful Christmas displays in the department store windows. Alas, the stores are all gone now, and that sign was torn down in the 1950's.

(North London)

No-one locked their front doors.

In fact, there was always a key hanging inside the letter-box, on a piece of string, which you could fish out and let yourself in and everyone did this, so everyone knew and it was all quite safe.

And there wasn't a single car parked along the street either. So we could play street cricket or rounders or Hide n Seek amongst the secret places made by the bomb sites.

Milk was delivered by a man with a horse and cart. So was bread and the coal man had a huge wagon with two Shire horses and a load of 40 sacks of coal on board.