To start your week…
If you’re an old fart…
Black and White (Under age 60? 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 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 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!
I remember “helping” dad dig out the hill in our back yard prior to putting in a retaining wall. Dad hands me five bucks, a fortune for a kid at the time, and asked me to go to the store and buy a carton of Winstons. I got the smokes and dutifully delivered both the cigarettes and the change. I was proud that dad entrusted me with so much cash. Today CPS would have been called for letting me go to the store alone, and actually trying to purchase tobacco.
A big pile of gravel must be climbed . If possible a bike must be pushed /dragged to the top to attempt a not so high speed glorious descent . At 15 or so every Dad who had a beer fridge in the garage got raided , my Dad being smart started buying Falstaff , we wouldn’t drink that shtt and he knew it . My Dad called his Winstons “fags” after being in the Air Force in Scotland . My friends always got a kick when my ol man would tell me to go inside and , “grab my pack of fags ” . Thanks NFO , I love the memories , always thought provoking.
Our local Mt. Everest was the 10-foot root mound of the oak tree that gave the Great Oak School its name. Standing under the spreading branches and looking down at the schoolyard was like being atop Devil’s Tower. Those who dared the 60-degree slope down the hill, without snagging your front wheel on a stray root, or bounce wrong when you hit flat ground were the heroes of the day, with at least an hour’s worth of bragging rights! Alas, the tree is no more, and the root mound leveled. It was cut down in 1991 “Due to its age”, and replaced with two new trees. Nothing will replace that hill…
Climbing a 2 inch rope in Gym class to like 30 feet above the floor with a lifesaving 3 inch thick mat to save us (or maybe the floor) if we fell….
I received a severe concussion playing softball during gym. That, and had a finger broken during dodge ball. Back then, it meant a trip to the doctor, and back to school the next day. I don’t what would happen today with the same circumstances, but am pretty sure it would involve some therapy, multiple doctor visits, and at least one trip to an attorney’s office.
We would have our annual fitness day. We’d have to run a timed mile, do sit-ups, pull-ups, and push-ups. We were a healthy bunch of youngsters, and many in the same shape of a Marine.
Riding bicycles with out a helmet.
Corporal punishment in schools. Every teacher up to junior high had his or her “board of education” excepting the gym teachers. Those were armed with old sneakers that would leave a red footprint on your butt. Ask me how I know.
Us being free range kids was a real blessing, but we didn’t know it at the time, it’s just the way it was. Playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ and ‘Army’ with rubber band guns, riding our bikes a lot farther away than our parents realized, playing in creek bottoms and on ‘jungle gyms’, carrying and using pocket knives, all with no parents in sight. As far as corporal punishment in school, almost every teacher had a paddle and would mete out ‘licks’ with it as appropriate – and the shop teachers were the worst/best at using their custom-made paddles. Kids today would be a lot better adjusted if that situation was still present,
Oh yeah. Riding miles and miles on a one speed Schwinn… that Chemistry set for Christmas! Learning to drive the farm tractor as soon as I could reach the pedals… and somehow we all survived. Different world.
Don’t get me (us – you know who you are) started on wasp nests. And no epi pens back then you just puffed up and suffered.
Mercurochrome – or as we called it, “monkeyblood.”
If you survived the “Fiery Red Spit of Satan”, Merthiolate, you were an Epic Hero! Mom used that to treat everything from cut fingers to near-decapitation!
agreed fir sure on most of this!
then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
in my day/area lawyers, suits, etc didn’t exist!
if you’re dumb enuff to hurt yourself-
you deserve it!
so- wise up squirt!
Juan
Astonishing that any of us survived, isn’t it?
Amen to all of that… we not only survived, we flourished.
Heck, for a few weeks, I snacked on eating raw bacon, chewing on small bit – pulled off bites straight from the package. I stopped after Dad told me that was a good way to get sick so I did stop. But never had any repercussions, luckily.
The kitchen knife worked on several different food groups but other when became bloody, I don’t recall anything more than a quick rinse or wipe with paper towel. I guess we were immune.
All- Yeah, we’d be in state custody today, and our parents would be in jail… sigh… I remember biking to the woods with my .22 tied to my handlebars and nobody thinking anything about it.
Every generation faces different problems. At least ours didn’t have too many overprotective parents.
Those were good times to live in! That was not humor but the truth. The Ninny Nannies of the State try to regulate EVERYTHING and most of them are Lawyers of which there are too many.
Hmm, Maybe it’s a reginal thing, but Dave and Chet are Who????
The only Chet I knew of importance was Chet Atkins.
Information please?
The news duo Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were more popular than Walter Cronkite.
Aside: B&W. Took me until 1973 to discover Oz was in color.
Some of the black and white TVs were still operable when broadcast went from analog to digital around ten or fifteen years ago.
(And there were converter boxes that might have been able to feed a BW system, I never tested.)
So someone as young as 25 or 30 could potentially remember a black and white TV, even if it is not at all the same experience, relatively.
Huntley and Brinkley were on NBC, Huntley in NYC, Brinkley in Washington, DC. They were better than Cronkite IMHO…
Yes, we had it better than the kids do today. Less oversight, more adventures, and we actually got outside!!!
We bought cherry bombs and M80s by the gross on the 4th because they were still legal at the time.
Catching tadpoles in the creek and raising frogs in fish tanks. Launching rockets with parachutes for “re-entry ”. I don’t remember the name of the rocket company, but they were out of Estes Park CO. Attaching gas powered model airplane engines to remote controlled cars. Boy those things could move! Broke both arms before I was 12. Me and my sister trick or treating by ourselves, in the dark! All of this without adult supervision. Somehow we survived. Oh! and no seatbelts in our cars.
Probably Estes.