Oldie but goodie

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MrQuackers

MrQuackers

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Back Then

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have.....

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets.

We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not available.

Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), the term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge and stayed in detention after school and caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles.

What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot. He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.

Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked (physical abuse) ... and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.

Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents?

Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

How did we survive?
 
What you said is the absolute truth. When I was a kid growing up in the 50's and early 60's we would leave the house in the morning and not go home until dinner time. Our parents had no way to contact us which in my eyes taught us to be self sufficient at an early age. Some kids were smarter than others and others were better at sports. We wanted to leave home right after high school and under no circumstance did we want to go back, instead of todays kids living with their parents well into their 30's. We learned that there are winners and losers in everything we did which was just part of growing up. We didn't act up in school because we knew what would happen when we got home. Neither of my parents was against pulling out the leather belt once in while which today could mean a visit from the child welfare authorities. I'm glad I grew up when I did, I believe it made me a better person.
 
Oh WOW!!! Very true post. I can remember riding my bike down the tracks about mile out of town and eating lunch with the hobos waiting for the next train to hop! You sure as heck wouldn't do that now. If any kids are reading this....DON'T DO AS US OLD GUYS REMEMBER....were old and our brains are fogged up from exhaust fumes and getting oil on our hands with NO rubber gloves!!!
 
I'm only 33, and that is how I remember things. Things have changed really fast.
People realized they could make money by keeping us nervous about our kids.
 
Growing up, mom drove us around in a Corvair without seat belts.
We took the sled down killer hills each winter.
We rode our bikes everywhere, even out to CLE to plane spot along Brookpark Road. Being along the road under the approach path was awesome. You have no idea how loud a 707 or a DC-8 could be, even at low power seconds before touchdown.
If the winds were such that we were under the departure path, the noise was awesome.
We rode our bikes down the hills into the large park that was called "the valley". These were long, steep hills, and we found the speeds attainable to be wonderful.
I cut the grass at home using a Toro reel mower with a Briggs. I also made a little coin by mowing yards around the neighborhood using the mowers of the homeowners. I cut the tip off of my middle finger, right hand clearing a clog from the discharge of a Craftsman rotary while mowing a neighboor's lawn.
Probably shouldn't have left it running. Anyway, nobody even thought of suing anyone. The couple who's grass I was cutting had lost their only child, a son, in Vietnam. The husband drove a Rambler American as a work car, and they had a nice yellow Galaxy coupe as their good car.
We enjoyed a lot more freedom growing up then then kids do now, and I think we may have grown into more competent adults as a result of that.
 
Originally Posted By: artificialist
People did get psychological problems back then. They often got taken away and sent to a special hospital for many years.


Yep, good thing we got rid of most of the state hopitals for those with serious mental illness.
Today, many of them end up in state prisons instead.
 
Back then you could tell the insane from the sane. If someone was walking down the sidewalk talking to them-self you knew they were off there rocker. Now days with cell phones and blue-tooth the loonies blend right in with the others.

We use to go family camping for a week or two. My parents in the front seat with Mom holing the newest arrival in her lap. Mon would have a bag with wet wash cloths and small frozen bottles of ice water or ice cubes, no AC in that big old Chevy station-wagon. She would pass out cold wet wash cloths for us to each rub on our heads when the station-wagon really got hot. Eventually the family grew to seven kids and we always had room for the kid who lived across the street to climb in somewhere in that wagon. Those that could not find a seat in the front or back seat would sit in the back of the wagon, no third row seat, no seat belts. The trunk of the wagon was filled with camping gear. A U-Haul trailer that my dad bought and added large side doors and a middle shelf and roof to was being towed with the tents. The row boat was on the roof of the wagon, a 5.5 HP Sears engine for the boat was in the trunk of the wagon. The 18 foot Gruman canoe was on top of trailer tied down with rope along with a bicycle for every kid that was somehow tied in on both sides of the canoe.

Car seats for kids, what were those, never heard of them. Though one time walking home from school, one kid pointed to the big tank of a car (a late 50's Buick or something similar) and said "see that hole in the windshield, that is where the babies head went through". There was some damage to the front bumper. That tank of a car probably did not even have seat-belts.

When I went to high-school the girls had a drill squad that performed at the high-school football games. They each had a WWII rifle that had been white-washed white. Those girls could really spin those rifles. And when their fathers marched in parades, they would carry the same rifles and seven of them would stop and fire three times as a 21 gun salute at every cemetery the parade passed.

I was a member of the gun club. We met every couple of weeks, and like the other members, I would bring a gun inside of a gun case to school about half the time there was a meeting. In the morning I would walk down the hall of the school and put the gun in my locker and there it would stay until the final bell. Then I would take the gun to the gun club meeting in one of the class rooms, and show the gun to other members of the gun club. At any given gun club meeting about half the members brought a gun to snow and talk about. We never brought in any ammo for a meeting. But on some week ends we would meet at the school and take a trip to someplace out in the middle of no where, so we could shoot at skeet or targets. Then we brought ammo. I still remember the kid who brought his grandmothers 16 gauge single shot demascus shotgun and a box of old paper case pumpkin-ball ammo to shoot at skeet. He said that the ammo was getting old and he wanted to get rid of it. And he hit quite a few skeet with it.
 
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In all the years of growing up when I was a kid, there was only one time when someone fired a gun in the neighborhood. Some old man lost it and came outside with a pistol and shot at kids across the street. He did not hit any, and the police took him away, without killing him.

There was one family of triplets, all boys, and the mother had a hart attack. The police came and put an oxygen mask on her and loaded her into the back seat of the police car and drove her to the hospital. The oxygen mask the police used did not force her to breathe and she died. We did not have ambulances or paramedics back then.
 
I should have added regarding only one time that someone fired a gun in the neighborhood while I grew up, that now days someone firing a gun is practically an every day thing. A couple of years ago, when the snow melted a body of someone who was shot a week before finally showed up when enough snow melted.
 
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I'm still teed off that they didn't invent Tonka trucks until after my childhood. Everything I played with was made of polystyrene and would break.
 
It's a good post and brought back some really good memories about tree forts, tire swings and building ramps out of old lumber so we could jump our bicycles like "Evil Knievel." We never played "Cowboys and Indians," We played "North and South" - and woe to the group that had to play the "Yankees." (My weapon of choice was a long piece of pipe I found that I called my "100-100 Rifle."
 
BTW - whenever we played "North and South," the "South" always won.

My worst "war wound" was when I came running around my Dad's tool shed at the exact moment a "Yankee" had thrown a grapefruit at us Confederates. The timing was perfect and I received a rotten grapefruit square in the face with a massive, face engulfing "splat." At least my "100-100" rifle was unharmed.
 
What saddens me the most....and all of those things happened to me or I was around it when I was growing up....my daughter will never, ever know what it was like. She can't even get over not having a remote back in my time, much less black and white T.V......
 
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