Stretching the truth

Dear editor:

I guess I should have inserted the words "with tongue in cheek" somewhere in my letter of July 1. To me it means I was joking or stretching the truth about my having been born before many inventions were produced, but one of your readers didn't take it that way. He produced a list of things that were discovered before I was born in 1938:

Penicillin -- 1928; plastic -- 1907; frozen foods -- 1924 by Clarence Birdseye; contact lenses -- 1936; television -- demonstrated in 1926 by Scottish inventor John Baird; air conditioning -- 1902 by Willis Carrier; ballpoint pen -- 1888 by John J. Loud; FM radio -- 1936, just to name a few.

I did err, according to one unnamed source, about what one could do with a quarter on a Saturday after spending four hours at the Roxy Theater for 10 cents. We would go to Cook's Ice Cream store (not Purity's); we could not afford their 20 cent malt, so we pooled our dimes together and each of us got two smaller cups. If we didn't get ice cream, we went to Kniseley's Drug Store to buy a 10-cent (not five cents) comic book off their rotating rack.

The only thing I was not joking about was my eternal salvation when I trusted Jesus Christ as my Savior. That was during the time I was to defend a munitions storage area in Vietnam against enemy troops. I knew that if I died, I would not spend eternity in heaven. I've served my Savior for almost 50 years.

I'm still celebrating!

Donald Cunningham

Hot Springs