You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears a s 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 mus t 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 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?
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Is there a question hidden in that rant somewhere ?
Is our society more overprotective now ? Yes. Is that some weakness ? No. There are several factors.
- People are more aware of what can go wrong.
- Legal reasons. (Companies wish to protect themselves)
- Media hype.
Perhaps you should mention those who died of Cancer, because they did not know smoking was harmful. Mention those with skin damage, because they did not know about harmful UV rays. Perhaps the damage done to the environment that has contaminated many of those lakes you preferred to swim in over pools, because your generation did not know better…
Past generations were not better nor worse; merely different.
Memories.I remember the monkey blood for cuts too.Deep cuts got rolled up spider webs on them,it worked.Fig juice for ring worms.Am I the only one remembering them.Thanks…
Oh, the good old days. I remember riding a cardboard box down the steps in our house, and jumping off the roof onto a mattress.
O’ how times have changed, thanks for that.
Thanks for the memories and the examples.I just went back to my childhood.
Thank you, sid.
How about the car accidents when you heard “I’m sorry” rather than “You’ll hear from my lawyer”???
We were tougher then. It’s a wonder we survived intact. But
survive we did. I wonder if today’s kids could survive what we did. Somehow, I don’t think so. We’ve gotten soft.
As a nation….We are gone. we were a real nation back when/. What happened to us. We suck!
I wonder this myself.
Another thing: If I did something bad while playing out in the neighborhood, the neighbors would be the first to swat me. THEN they’d call mom. I’d get it from her. And if she told DAD, I could pretty much expect it from him too. My butt would be red, but I still loved them all. Did I have Stockholm syndrome? No, a loving family and neighbors.
Very Good!
No one had insurance. Your pets only got a rabies shot if there was money. LIved in a town where there were no Attorneys. Yes, the good old days!
The best one was the Prayer, and National Anthem! Nothing was questioned.
Great one!!!!
I was born in the forties – but I’m not really a member of the ‘good old days’ club.
Though I do laugh at the array of ‘disorders and syndromes’ we have amassed these days. – Social Anxiety Disorder (used to be called shy) is one of my favorites.
The fifties:
I had a girlfriend with polio who is lucky to be alive, a girlfriend with leukemia who wasn’t so lucky, – and two Aunts dead of breast cancer before it was treatable.
And do I want to go back to the days of women in the kitchen and blacks riding in the back of the bus? – Not a chance.
.
.
Amen to all of that. You had to be there.!!!
Mercurochrome, Rubbing alcohol, and Hydrogen Peroxide, and of course the Band Aids. in every medicine cabinet.
No helmets, knee guards or elbow guards when you rode your bike, skateboards, or skates.
No car seats till you were 4′ 8″. Lucky if you even wore seat belts, and you even got to ride shotgun in the car.
We still made it thru it all, we all are still here, maybe a few scraps and bruises along the way. But stick a Band Aid on it and we were out doing it again.
Has anybody invented the time machine yet. Sigh!!!!, Sign me up.
ooh, and how about those days we took off at the butt crack of dawn,on foot or on our bikes, never to be heard from again until dinner? how did we manage with out calling home on the cell phone to check in?
Tough as nails back then: falling off swing sets and crying and my mother would just say.. well put a bandaid on it! Falling off bicycles and having scraped knees. Climbing up to the tree house and nobody worried if we fell.. we were resiliant. And the only tv we got to watch on Saturday mornings watching Tarzan movies and rushing out to the swamp to swing on the vines.. but I hated being Cheeta
. My brother’s bb gun that I tried to steal every chance. Sunday nights watching the Ed Sullivan show and Bonanza.. the only night we got to sit at the tv trays. Oh and I even survived Johnny down the street that insisted on flashing us girls and we would run home screaming to our moms.. just got told.. well just don’t look at it!
Perhaps we were tougher. Perhaps we just had acceptable standards of conduct that Mom and Dad established with firmness and resolve. If we had not sent Mom off to work so the family could buy things that we didn’t need but wanted we would have remained able to enjoy life more. Had we rejected the liberal point of view and resisted being taken care of by every idiot that had nothing better to do we would still be allowed to live our own lives. Well we ever return to those days? Perhaps we will but, the absolute hell we will suffer through to get there is not going to be pleasant. If and when we get back there there will still be people who will wail and groan and long for the days we now live in.. When we no longer have all of the things that Grand Pa and Granny never had nor needed we will be better off mentally, physically and morally.
A lot didn’t survive and the reasons weren’t as well known. Dying of ’summer complaint’ could well have been an early form of Ecoli or something similar. The old days had some good points, but no need to idealize them, because it wasn’t all that great either. Remember those summers with no air-conditioning? You can keep those good old days.
i don’t know about tougher but it’s the world overdoing it with political correctness etc. ok we’re more aware of stuff these days but it’s getting silly;
conkers are banned in schools,you’re not allowed to make dens in some instances,helmets have to be worn when riding donkeys at the seaside etc.etc.
wheres all the fun gone like floating down the river in an old tin bath! and playing on building sites.
and all this cleaning to keep our homes,(not mine) sterile isn’t good for you anyway,we all need a little of both good and bad bacteria for good health,it’s going too far
I don’t know what being tougher has to do with the things that you have mentioned. The kids today have to grow up tougher and be more street smart than fifty years ago. It sounds as if you had more reasonable, understanding and lenient parents who knew that children had to be given the chance to act like children. Today parents are scared silly and feel that they have to monitor everything their child does. Children today aren’t allowed to have a childhood like you were.
What do I miss ?
1. Having school close for the summer and by Saturday my folks driving me to my Grandmothers town to drop me off for the summer. Bad parents ? Nope. Me and my brother loved it. Small town, lakes, damns, lots of area to play like the town dump with the sand pile we’d jump off like paratroopers. Where we’d go with our bb guns or even a ‘gasp’ 22 rifle to shoot rats.
2. Warren’s Dam where we’d swim through the raceway from the lake side into the canal leading to the mill. Even got a large snapping turtle out of it one day.
3. Riding our bikes from 8am to 4pm with sandwiches Grammy made and the thermos of coffee to wash down the baloney sandwiches.
4. Working with friends in the tobacco fields in Connecticut for .15 cents an hour and having fun when we got home by walking up to Warrens Dam and swimming in our underwear to clean up.
5. Sneaking into the neighbors garden at night in the summer to eat the tomatoes or cukes and having him yell and fire his shotgun into the air to scare the crap out of us. In the distance when we were running, we’d hear his laugh clearly.
6. Mom & Dad taking us for rides on Sunday in the car to stop for an ice cream and maybe buy some corn or veggies at the road-side stands.
7. Of course I got the whopping cough and once the measles but the doctor came to our house and treated me there. Emergency Room ? What was that ?
8. Mike, Allen, Beverly, Carol. Where are you now ? I miss your friendship.
Sarge
I have to seriously doubt your remembrance of your mom using the same cutting board for various things without first washing it. I would never have done that and she probably didn’t either. As far as eating raw hamburger (yuk) it was packaged under much safer conditions back then. Now it is all about quantity and speed in the factories.
My dads little brother died from blood poisoning after getting cut on the foot by a piece of wood in a pond. It happened while swimming. My mothers brother developed blood piosoning from drinking water out of an outside faucet. Another kid bumped him while he was drinking and he cut the roof of his mouth a little. The blood poisoning went to his brain and he was mentally handicapped for the rest of his life.
My mothers uncle was bitten by a dog with rabies and died. He held my mothers mother up in the air to keep her from being bitten. She was much younger than him.
I think most schools stopped having PE and art classes.
I am not even going to get into the prayer and national anthem thing.
Kids were not bored without electronic games because they could play outside back then without the threat of some perv kidnapping them, raping or killing them.
We used Mercurochrome back when I was a kid too. It has mercury in it. Mercury is dangerous and that is a fact. I have to wonder if my Fibromyalgia is due to the use of Mercurochrome because it has been proven to have an effect on the immune system. And there are a lot of people around my age who have Fibromyalgia
There were in fact many dysfunctional families. The word dysfunctional was not used but everyone knows when things are not right in the home. Things like that were more hidden than they are now.
We live in a much more fast paced world now. I remember more time to visit family and friends. Even during the week.
More time on weekends for going somewhere together as a family. Now we have parents who have to work different shifts and different hours. There is hardly such a thing as job security. Without a really good education there is hardly such a thing anymore as getting a good days pay for a hard days work. Not when so much work can be had cheaper by illegals.
Kids these days have so many more tempations and pressures on them than we did. There is more sex and more drugs. Sex if everywhere and that is the fault of adults not the kids who are affected by it. So much more stress equals so much more mental, physical and emotional problems.
Too many kids are being ”raised” in daycare enviroments with no instructions of values being taught while there and in most cases none or little at home. No one has the time. So we have children who have to be watched out for. So we don’t want them in our yards.
However because of the widespread overuse of antibiotics new super bacterias have evolved. The body has probably lost some of its natural abilities to fight infection.
Some doctors overprescribe meds because they want to make money by keeping the patient coming back.
Society changes some for the better and some for the worse.
We survived by being immune to more germs (from a bit more exposure: asthma and allergies today are being blamed on insufficient exposure,so the immune system does not develop strngly enough).
We survived by being FIT – 4 or 6 or 8 block walks to the shops and back with shopping, walk to school, or walk & bus, no “mum’s taxi”. Of course no huge and distant shopping malls, either, so food was bought more often, less processed, fresher…and COOKED at home, not microwaved or reheated. Mums who did the wash by hand, with just a hand-turned wringer, swept instead of mopping, beat the rugs instead of vacuuming, never got a chance to get overweight. Nor did Dads who mowed with a manual (motorless) mower, or chopped wood for the fireplace.
In all fairness though, not everyone was tough. Babies died more often than now. No ultrasounds, less pre-natal medications, C-sections only in emergencies. Scarlet fever, polio, even chicken pox took some children every year. Tonsilitis or pneumonia could turn into killers, for lack of the right antibiotics.
The first heart attack killed you, no bypasses or pacemakers to keep you going another 20 years. Diagnosed cancers killed within 5 years, many people died from “mystery” undiagnosed ones.
But what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. So you could say, the survivors were tougher then.
Seven years ago my children and I moved from a small rural town in Pennsylvania to a much larger city also in PA. Back where we are from things are much different than here. My kids could walk in the grass in someone else’s yard and not get yelled at by the owner. The kids could play their music outside and not have to worry about the cops being called. “Back home” is also where I was raised. I raised my kids the same way I was raised. That is until we moved here. What a rude awakening it was to move to a city versus a small town. My kids didn’t have the computer games nor the fancy bikes, helmets, pads etc. Yes I used car seats when they were babies. But, my kids were raised to play outside if it was light and be home by dark. Have fun and don’t get into trouble. But here in the “big” city there is no such thing as having fun. No walking in others yards, no playing music. We learned right fast after moving here to watch our P’s and Q’s or the police would be called. No noise after 11PM (noise ordanaince). Don’t leave your bikes out after dark as they would not be there in the morning. We own our property but are not able to do with it what we want without permission. I don’t think a lot of the problems today has anything to do with the us being soft. It has a lot to do with people not minding “their” own business. When I was a kid everyone knew what was their business and what was not and stayed out of what was not. Kids had an imagination back then too. They could conjur up fun things to do without getting into trouble. We swam in the creek, no pools and had a blast doing it. It was a real treat. We went for walks in the woods and brought back a lot of treasures when we returned. We made up games to play outside. A lot of todays problems stems from those so called professionals telling us what is moral and what is right. Well if what we are doing not is not moral that we need to be told how to do it then back in my day there was a lot of immoral people walking around. I remember all the things that the person wrote about in the original post. Life was so good back then.. SO GOOD.
My mother did the same with the chopping board & we didn’t get e.coli either!! We didn’t have a refrigerator back then coz everything was kept in the larder…..no food poisoning ever.
There weren’t flesh eating bugs marauding our hospitals back then were there? We didn’t have to wear helmets, knee & elbow pads just to go out on our bikes or any other play equipment.
There weren’t any antibacterial cleaning products back then or good bacteria yoghurt drinks lol. But we were all healthy apart from the annual dose of colds & flu each winter, if a child in the neighbourhood got measles, mumps, german measles etc., then we got dragged to their house so we caught whatever too!!! It was to make us healthy my mum said! lol.
The list is endless of the things we used to do that kids don’t do now for fear of the life threatening injuries they could receive!
I’m glad I was born in 1957 & went through the ’60’s in my childhood. Most of my childhood was spent outside, getting sunburnt & playing miles away from home with mum never knowing where we were until we turned up back home for tea. As long as we were in on time there was no problems. Yes, we definitely had more freedoms than kids do today……I shudder to think what it will be like in another 5 – 10 years time……..there probably won’t be any kids playing outside by then, we’ll all be antibacterialled to high heaven, & wearing protective gear to prevent the onslaught of all types of flesh eating nasties!!!
I know we had to be tougher back then, lets continue your train of thought, when the measles, mumps, chicken pox, poison ivy, oak or sumac happened to attack one of us the others tried to get in on it too, it was no fun staying home by yourself and if you all had it then it was okay to play together.
We ate fruit right of the trees or bushes most of the time the cleaning of which was a quick rub on what ever clothes we had on, most of the time I bet we put dirt on the fruit. We drank out the hose at any house we were at and knew enough to let the water run hard for a minute to flush out any spiders or other critters, even the occasional young snake. Of course that started a fight who was going to keep it. We chased lizzards into ivy beds that had God knew how many other critters in it. At night we’d chase and catch for our jar-flashlight, lightening bugs, and of course we let them go when it was time to go in. Oh yeah who ever had the snake let it go too. Yeah we had to be tougher, we were also stronger, and I believe much healthier. Once you got past four if you had a cold you might stop and blow your nose or cough a little and might even use the arm of your clothes, and then right back to the dirt pile and your dump trucks. Now if my grandsons had a sniffle my daughter was real quick to get the allergy or cold med out. I finally got her to stop that until she knows it’s actually one or the other and not a case of dust or dirt in the nasal passage. I can probably count on one hand how many real colds I had (not counting the swine flu), I’ve got a bunch of faded scars from many dumb kids acts. Climbing a pine tree and the three hours it took my grandmother to get it the pine tar of my hair and off me and my clothes. During the whole time I heard about how a girl shouldn’t be climbing trees and building tree houses and playing with cap guns, and running like a scared deer down the street in races with the other boys. The boys would start being mad if I kept winning every race. Well enough of that you came up with a winner this morning. I love questions that make you remember the good times, even the ones like sneaking and making faces at each other in the duck & cover drills at school.
What a great trip down memory lane. Unfortunately, most will not bother to read your missive. I have also wondered about this, too. We managed to survive without little labels on everything warning us not to use our toaster in the shower or telling us not to wrap plastic bags around our heads.
Despite having over one hundred children in a single classroom in my school, we all learned to read, write and do math as well as American History, World History, Civics and Geography.
We never concerned ourselves with any particular species of animals yet they seemed to survive quite well, too. Despite an enormous amount of fellow Baby Boomer children in my neighborhood and thousands of children in my school, no one suffered from “peanut allergies”.
We played could spend the entire day away from home and come back unharmed. We ventured far and wide, played Army, Cops and Robbers with toy guns, climbed trees, swam in lakes, rode bicycles without helmets, played baseball and tackle football with no special equipment.
Even without all the safety labels and equipment, our world seemed to be far more “kid friendly” that today’s does. Our parents never worried about what we watched on TV or saw in the movies. We were allowed to be kids.
*