First and foremost, Happy Labor Day to all! I hope your most exciting labor was walking to the grill for another burger or dog… 🙂
Black and White- Those of you under age 40? You won’t understand.
You could hardly see for all the snow, spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,’Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.’
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. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
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.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches. 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 TV cable stations.
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 (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) 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 there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.
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, but we never did.
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 ever survive?
And in other news,
Jones the power Tsar has resigned, because we slandered him… yeah, right…
And the MSM FINALLY did at least one story on him today, must have been a REALLY slow news day!
We could have grown up in the same town, and the same neighborhood, and our parents could have been related! Thanks for the memories!
Same here.
I NEVER went to the doctor, even when I was really hurt. You had to rest at home and they put a bandage on it with IODINE if you were bad – BACTINE if you were good.
The world has changed.
I don’t see that it’s for the better.
And we survived farm work and farm machinery without child labor laws.
I think we all survived because we had what was called “Common Sense”.
And you’re right about acting up at a neighbors house. After *they* paddled us, it was “Wait until your FATHER gets home!”.
We always called our neighbors, and ALL elders, “Mister” and “Missus”.
If you were in trouble, find a policeman, fireman, or (gasp!) even a mailman, because they were authority, and were actually trustworthy at the time.
We respected our teachers, and they taught us from BOOKS, not from what their left-wing college “Professor” had indoctrinated *them* to regurgitate.
You went to The Doctor when Mom couldn’t make you OK, and that meant it was Real Serious.
Lawyers were for wills, and “Ambulance Chasers” were looked down upon as quick-buck artists.
If you did something stupid and got hurt, it was YOUR fault for not reading the instructions, or not listening to an adult.
If you didn’t study, you got crappy grades, and (GASP!) could be “held back” a year.
Don’t understand something? ASK, or go to the library and look it up yourself.
Yep, I sure as h3ll don’t know how we made it to adulthood without our government looking out for our every move!
Not only did we survive, but we had a wonderful time doing so!
One thing is for certain about a nanny-state: Nothing’s fun anymore!
Great post, sir!
Thanks for this…even if in order to laugh I have to admit to being old! We did not ever go to the Doctor, he came to the house! I remember him lining up 5 bare bottoms over the couch and giving us shots! If you moved, you got a shot and a smack on the bum! OMG how did any of us make it to this age! Remember playing in puddles DURING a thunderstorm?? Playing outside ALL day, no tv, no computer, nothing but bikes and hills and trees to climb and fall out of! I could go on forever!
Great post, thank you!
I’m doing my best to bring my girls up with the same sort of experience – not always easy but it’s what I’m aiming for.
My gym shoes were Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars. They worked pretty dang good.
The times that when you headed back to the house and some of your neighbours would let you know that you were going to catch hell for whatever stupid thing you had just done.
I remember growing up, we never stayed indoors. Either I was out on my bike (with no helmet mind you) or in the woods getting dirty.
Never got that hurt, nothing that dad didn’t say for me to walk it off.
Heh! Re: the school nurse. I went to a country school. My mother was my teacher and the school principal. One day, I got into a rock fight with another kid and he scored one on my right in the middle of my forehead.
My sister (15 years older) was our circuit music teacher. She was the school nurse that day since she was sitting in the one room school office when I was brought in bleeding like a stuck pig—she was closest to the first aid kit and the iodine bottle. I spent the rest of the day with a large orange splotch in the middle of my forehead.
I got a spanking by Mom at school for throwing rocks and another from Dad when I got home because I was spanked at school.
LL/Linda- I think we did 🙂
WSF- And we enjoyed it (most of the time) I remember driving that old Ford 8N picking up hay bales. I think I was 11…
Drjim- That common sense thing works pretty well…
RWL- Thanks!
Gia- I personally believe it made us better people. We interacted with REAL things!
Julie- Your kids will thank you!
Anon- There was always one uppity one with the Converses… 🙂
CS- Same here!
Crucis- Yep, those ‘small’ schools had some interesting dynamics of who was who 🙂
And I wanted to add that my grandkids, given a CHOICE about going outside with me for a bike ride or run/walk or playing PSP , DS , computer , they pick outside everytime!! Those things have just replaced babysitters for lazy parents who feel “bothered” when their children need their attention while they are on the computer updating their facebook, twitter or blog {: ( Oh I sound cranky on that don’t I ?)
Nail on the head buddy- couldn’t have said it better myself. I like the bit about cross- contamination. My mom, like yours used one knife, no cuttin g board and it didn’t matter if it was beef or poultry on the same counter. We ate it or we didn’t eat. HadI only known my dear mom was trying to do me in! My butt was prime spanking space and was readily used at will, and both my parents had the will to do it and did! I got chased around my house many times when i was kid, by my dad with a belt flailing behind me- Yep, It was a horrendous childhood. Wheres my shrink? Now i have finnally after 58 years figured out what my problem is. Damn, the government wasn’t intervening in my life , had I only known. Great job my man
Gia- Concur, and no you don’t sound cranky… just pissed off 🙂
Jeff- Yep, we’ve been there done that haven’t we 🙂
Holy Crap!! Since I’ve done all these things, does that make me old now?!?
Add this to the list…digging up worms, then taking them and a cane pole to the local pond, lake or river to fish all day long, without our parents!
You’re making me feel nostalgic. So many things we use to do, and yet it is a bygone time. Our kids will never have the pleasures we had back then. Too many laws, too many restrictions. Being out in the country they get half a chance. In the city……. maybe not so much.
Now I feel old again, and I can’t believe someone else remembers mercurochrome!
Same here in ‘old’ Europe:
– if we did something really bad and a neighbour called the cops, our parents wouldn’t come close to the idea of begging (or even threatening) the officer to give us a break.
– imagine, not only no cell phone, no Gameboy/PS, even no TV! Instead we learned how deep you can fall, which mushroom you couldn’t eat, and how to make our own dinner in the woods without causing new wildfires.
– building phenomenal multi-storied houses in the top of the trees was great! The idea to use tools and building material from construction sites was not considered as that brilliant. When the workers came over us and kicked our ass, all the parents would ignore our tears 😉
– asking a pilot of a small plane if he could take us on a flight (where do you wanna go? Woesn’t matter, we just want to fly) was a great idea as well. We went on a 5h trip to a stop at the Belgium frontier and back (1st time playing at the stick, yeah!!). Considering the desperate looks of my mum when I came home beeing 2h late for dinner and having the balls to tell her the story, I shouldn’t have told her. I was 13… and had no cell-phone to let her know I would be late, but in good shape.