It’s strange how a particular odor can trigger a childhood memory of growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in old Middletown.

Just opening a can of fresh roasted peanuts can bring back memories of walking into the G.C. Murphy store on a Saturday morning on the way to the Strand Theater.

Getting a whiff of an old coal-fired train engine at Metamora, Ind., can bring back memories of our old coal furnace and the days when Mom rued chimneys belching black soot on her Sunday wash on the old clothesline out back.

Feelings of having Dad nearby once again flood my thoughts when I drive by where the old Armco fabricating plant once stood. Memories of those factory odors — that lingered on his clothing well after he returned home after a grueling day at the mill — come to mind.

Driving by the site where the Middletown Ice and Coal once stood reminds me of being a kid, scavenging for chips of ice on a hot summer day, when we lived at 1314 Woodlawn Ave. in 1946 and I attended first grade at old Central School.

Kids these days have their iPods and cell phones. We were thrilled with our cardboard 33-1/3 records that we cut out of cereal boxes and could play on our record player.

Kids today have phrases that they use for texting. We had catch phrases like “Hi-yo, Silver” — from listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio. That’s a phrase which, incidentally, became a military password during World War II.

We seniors like to freeze a moment in time with our mind treasures.

Kids today watch “SpongeBob SquarePants” on TV. We had comics, such as “Barney Google,” “Snuffy Smith,” “Felix the Cat,” “Brenda Starr,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Skeezix” and “Uncle Willie” in the “funny papers.”

We got our first TV in 1948. One of my favorite commercials in the 1950s featured Andy “Jingles” Devine dressed in his familiar floppy buckskins with fringes, shouting — with his raspy-whiney voice — “Hey, Wild Bill (Hickok), wait for me!”

Today’s “tweeters” have nothing on the folks who grew up in old Middletown.

Frank Frisch is a retired Middletown resident.