In Our Youth....

[Mimi]

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.

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 staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

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 baby 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 that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, 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 Enadryl 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) here too ... 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?

 

[Drago69]

I survived by not being born at that time. Go me.

 

[Haltickling]

Although some of those topics seem to be quite typical for American adolescents, most of them are quite familiar to me. I remember how we used to play trapper and Indians in the nearby forests for more than a few days and nights in a row, without going home, without tents, without TV or radio, and without any serious injuries.

I remember how respectful we treated elderly people, how all the family including grannys and uncles stuck together in bad times, and how helpful the neighbors were. Just a few examples...

But memory paints with a golden brush, as the Chinese say. Not everything was rosy. Both my parents were war refugees, and they were very poor. My father even had to borrow a suit for his wedding. After my mother's early death (I was 3 then), I grew up with both my grandmothers, and I can clearly remember days when we all were hungry. We had to collect twigs and branches in the nearby forests to survive the winter, because we couldn't afford coal.

The village priest was allowed to slap us in the face if we came late for sunday mass, or if we whispered among each other, in a time when corporal punishment was banned from schools. Employers were allowed to slap apprentices, too, and they were exploited as cheap cleaners after the regular 9 hour shift.

I saw my first TV when I was 10, my first computer when I was 20, and I got internet access when I was 40. But I had travelled to all 5 continents when I was 30 ...

OTOH, my two daughters grew up well, without much TV, without computers or playstations, without being harrassed by strange men in macintoshs, and without Prozac or worse drugs.

Times change, and so do the circumstances we grow up with. Not better, not worse, just different...

 

[venray]

We left the house for hours to play with our friends and walked everywhere. We were not fearful that we would be abducted by perverts nor did we even know what a pervert was.

WHAT WAS MOM THINKING! Letting us walk to school or the library or to see a movie without a can of mace or adult supervision.

Ah the days of innocence...gone but not forgotten.

🙁

 

[Faramir]

this is an excellent thread...I love it..!! I have something to add, but not the time for it today, so it will have to wait till next week..! gotta get ready and go to my corp AmeriKa workplace...everything goes up in price, except my paycheck...!!

 

[kis123]

What a great post.......

I came from a family of seven girls (six still living) and a single mom who worked nights at the VA hosp for over forty years (a feat within itself). I found out after Mom died that she never made over 29000 per year. Yet, she owned her own home in the suburbs, took care of the six of us, plus raised my nieces and their children (when they decided to become teen parents )

Why is it that families making twice as much as my mom have never owned anything in their lives, always living off of credit and never getting out of debt? My mother's philosophy was that it didn't come in her house unless it was paid for first (yeah for lay-away!) and she saved until she got the 20% down payment to put on her house first. I work in finance, and people nowadays are pretty jacked-up financially without anything short of a miracle to get out.

Where did our children get this entitlement policy from? They think they should have everything they want when they want it. No working for and waiting for it anymore.

Dr. Spock and all his cronies should have been drawn, quartered, and burned at the stake for leading people to believe that having one's behind spanked was bad for them. Not to be confused with abuse, just discipline and respect learning where the lines are drawn and the limits were. Now these kids will kill you and get away with it because some psychoanalyst backs them up with ridiculous theories. When we did wrong, there were swift and immediate consequences for our actions and we didn't go to the same trouble twice.

I'm glad I was born in the timeframe I was. This world has gone buck-wild-crazy. We are overworked and underpaid, cost of living is astronomical, kids are being left home to raise themselves because both parents (when they're lucky to have both) are working two jobs just to stay alive.

I didn't have the world's greatest childhood, either. But I'm glad I'm not a child today. What they have to deal with daily sucks!

 

[Moses25]

Re: In our youth...

I remember seeing my first personal computer in grade 7 and thinking, "Where, oh, where, can I get a narly-looking tv set like that without the accompanying furniture cabinet that my parents had?"

I remember a time in Canada when there was no such thing as a guard-dog (unless you owned a farm with livestock) and every home was a potential Block-Parent House.

I remember a time when a bag of chips increasing in price by a mere 10 cents would cause a public outcry and make the news (ok, perhaps that's just Canada).

I remember a time when it was preferred to ride a bicycle without a cumbersome helmet, banana seats were a luxury, and not having a kickstand on your bike meant that you were poor.

I remember a time when wearing a helmet in the NHL was up to the players themselves.

I remember when there was not enough entertainment in one's home to keep children inside on a sunny day.

I remember a time when the business of multitasking was the business of everyday living.

I remember Snow Days (wherein public schools would close) were a gift from God, not from Microsoft.

I remember when corporations and other multinational companies took pride in their products and you were never expected to buy a product unless you really needed it.

I remember a time when men were men, women enjoyed being women, and being a child on this earth was the greatest gift that God could bestow.

We are all living history...

Great thread. Cheers.😀