I think you’ll enjoy this. Whoever wrote it could have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a ‘T.’ Hope you enjoy it.
Black and White (Under age 40? You won’t understand.)
You could hardly see for all the snow, spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
‘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 the kid 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 ever survive?
TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA; AND TO ALL WHO DIDN’T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN’T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!
Now go enjoy your weekend!!! 🙂
Monkey bars were standard school equipment and all elementary schools back in the 70’s. Ours had a single bar about 5′-0″ away from the others. The dare devils would sit on top of them and leap across to the single bar. Great when you made it – but when you didn’t, you did a face plant on the dirt below ! One of my friends ‘almost’ made it, but lost his grip when swinging and fell flat on his back below. Looked like the coyote hitting the ground on a Roadrunner cartoon – dust flew out the sides. It was hilarious !
We chased the DDT truck in a cloud on military bases.
I chased flies with a can of DDT!
We’d ride our bikes for miles to go fishing, and I don’t think mom or dad knew where we were.
Yes to all, even in South Africa where I grew up. The only thing we didn’t have was the rabbit ears – we didn’t get TV there until the 1970’s.
We had rabbit ears until 1994. Mom grow beat Dad into,getting them so she could watch the Braves.
I’m good with only my high tops as a fashion statement now, though.
And Mom spanked. Hard and often. Lol
I am currently reading this book http://www.alibris.com/Jefferson-McGraw-a-novel-Weldon-Hill-pseud/book/3422332?matches=5
and highly recommend it for all of the old farts.
Slingshot wars Check
12 year old owning his own gun Check
Bank robbers Check
Fisticuffs Check, check, check
Pretty girls Check
Moonshine Check
Nekkid schoolmarms Hear-say only.
And nobody had air conditioning.
A few houses on our street still heated with coal. The delivery truck had a chute, (think a concrete truck chute) and the body would raise on a scissors.
And we all saw two more stars added to our flag.
Sadly, I lived (progressives would say “survived”) all of that to become the man I am today. There are progressive people who would say that we are what’s wrong with the world. I don’t vote for those people.
Ayuh…BTDT.
Guess I lucked out and just caught the tail end of it in the 80’s no mecurochrome, but nothing makes a better sledding hill than the excavation piles at construction sites. They usually have the one side that’s a nice drop.
I learned to ride my bicycle on a two lane road that was full of semi’s and cars going by so close I could touch them… without a helmet or safety stickers.
Riding my bike to school one day, got rear ended by some clown in a caddy. Not only did the folks not own him and his relatives, but he didn’t even have to pay the Dr.
Dad gave me a Winchester model 62 for my 10th birthday (which I still have). Carried it on my bike countless times to go to the Standard Oil range about 5 miles away. Nobody ever said boo.
Lead paint, second hand smoke, no answering machines….
LA beach town, hooray for the 50’s and 60’s.
Oh yeah, a brick of .22’s was less than five bucks, and a pre-teen could buy it.
Yeah, about 90% of that was my experience.
Many took guns and knives to school for Show-and-Tell!
And plastic and Made-in-Japan meant cheap!
gfa
Riding in the back of flatbed pickup.
Got bit by a dog down by the river.Dog’s owner gave me a ride home in his Corvette so Mom could take me to the Dr. for a shot. That ride was totally worth the bite.
Used to grab onto passing garbage trucks and surf the dirt roads.Way fun.
lol great list
Used to drive a friend’s dump truck around the block when I was 10.He only drove stuff with a Flathead Ford motor.
hey Old NFO;
They call it “Free Range parenting now…”
It’s positively amazing that any of us survived to procreate, without lawyers and the .gov there to tell us what to do, when to do it, and whether we should think for ourselves.
We’d apologize to our daughters, but they don’t know what we’re referring to. 🙂
My wife and I were raised in north-central Montana. In the winters, we saw the temperature go to 40 below zero with a wind up and lots of snow on the ground with more coming. We never missed a day of school because of the weather. Also, we didn’t have TVs in the house. In fact, we never even saw a TV until 1953 and we had left Montana for the shipyard in Bremerton, Washington. Also, I learned to drive in a 1945 K-7 International truck when I was 12.
And for those of us who grew up in the Midwest, wintertime meant SKITCHING!
As far as I can tell, skitching is a contraction of “ski hitching”, where you squatted down, grabbed on to the rear bumper of your buddies car, and got towed along on the snow covered streets.
If you had a snow saucer, you were really high class, but a garbage can lid with the handle knocked off worked pretty well, too…..
Baby boomer oncussion protocol. Steel bar cages like short monkey bars on the football practice field. We had to crawl / run under as fast as we could. If you raised up and hit the bar with your helmet going full speed, that was supposed to teach you to stay low when you ran, after you woke up. Same size bars for everybody. Bad time to be not short.
All- WOW, I never expected this many comments, but yes, we DID survive! 🙂
Thanks!
I’ve carried a pocket knife every day since 3rd grade (1961).
Mikey- 🙂
Strip mines have long steep sides that you can body surf down. The amount of damage done to said body being determined by how the weather had compacted the dirt. And we played army all day long with real guns that sat in the corner next to the door at Grandma’s house.
And until the riots when MLK was killed we ran the streets until the wee hours of the am without our parents worrying.
A family down the street was well armed and we would go shooting on their land down by the river. They also loaded their ammo. And, dad did not keep a close eye on how much gunpowder they had. Shotgun powder in a pipe stuck in the ground makes pretty sparks. Shotgun powder and some black powder makes a lot of noise.
That brought every dad on the street out on the front porch.
My mom used the iodine a lot. I figured it was a punishment for getting caught getting hurt.
Hi NFO,
‘Reminds me, Read Robert Ruark’s book,”Tales of the Old Man and the Boy” also the follow-up “Part II.” Just open it to anywhere and start reading!! ‘Worth the read!! Ch. 8 part II is “interesting!!”
Got Gunz………OUTLAW!!!,
III%,
skybill-out
PH- Yep, that was back in the day…
Titan- LOL, I’ll bet it did!!!
Jon- Yeah, mine too… I think she bought it by the quart!
Skybill- 🙂 I have it somewhere… I need to go back and reread it!