From his amazingly roomy trash can — "cold and dank and miserable, the way real and total Grouches love it" — Oscar the Grouch has spent 40 years keeping watch on Sesame Street, where monsters and Muppets and sometimes a movie star or two have been known to stroll. So how have Sesame Street's favorite visitors — children — changed over the years? "Well, [back then] they didn't have cell phones attached to their ears," Oscar says. He has a cell phone too, by the way, "but it weighs 7 pounds — it's an old one Jim Henson threw away." In any case, he used it to call LIFE and share some Grouch-y memories from the past four decades.