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Who Grew Up This Way?

B

BUDDINGGEEZER

Guest
Black and White TV (Under age 40? You won't understand.)

You could hardly see for all the static/snow, spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, 'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'

The big 3 TV stations went off the air shortly after midnight and played the National Anthem while the American flag waved in the wind. After thatit was all static/snow until the morning.
The TV had channels 2-13 and UHF all of which were controlled with 2 knobs. There was NO remote control.

The TV repair man came to the house with a huge suitcase filled with vacuum tubes which were used to replace the burned out ones in the TV.

My Mom had her ÔÇ£Christmas ClubÔÇØ at the local bank where she deposited $5 each week with a coupon and at the end of the year she purchased a room FULL of Christmas gifts for 3 children and had money left over.

Central heating and A/C was only for ÔÇ£richÔÇØ people. Everyone else had to carry window mounted air conditioners up from the basement every spring and install them in each room of the house. Every fall, we carried them back downstairs for the winter.

We would go outside after school, ride our bikes and play with our friends until mom opened the back door and yelled our names at the top of her lungs. Then we all came running home for dinner.

We would play outside in the woods or fields and ride bikes all over the neighborhood until the street lights came on. ThatÔÇÖs how we knew it was time to come home. There was never a fear of being kidnapped, molested, raped, or murdered.

Everyone came running when The Bookmobile stopped by in the neighborhood.
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 pray ers 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.=2 0Instead, 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?

LOVE 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.
Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.

The only thing in life you regret are the risks you do not take...........Marilyn Monroe

Ralph Sims
 
Remember?
- - - Kick the Can, Red Light-Green Light, and Red Rover?

- - - Wearing your older siblings' hand-me-downs?

- - - When whining was handled by a quick but effective swat?

- - - When you had to walk, ride your bike, or take the bus?

- - - Sleeping in the basement on hot summer nights?

- - - Push lawn mowers with no motors?

- - - Tree swings made out of old rubber tires?
 
My dad's 1963 Dodge didn't HAVE seatbelts.

We were NEVER in a car seat.

I remember riding in the back of my uncle's Ford F100 while he 'went around the block' to every bar in the county. When we got back to the farm, he taught us how to drive both the truck and the old Ford tractor. We ran the rake over the hay fields. We weer 12 or 13 years old then.

We never locked the doors to the house, even when we went on vacations. The first time Mom locked the door was when she kicked dad out finally.

We walked to school if we lived in town. In the same town today, all kids ride the bus to the same schools I attended.

We used to ride out bikes everywhere, even out on the highways.

We slept outside in the summer every so often.

I had a Thingmaker. That was basically a hot pad with metal plates that you poured Goo into and cooked it into bug-shapes. I guess the government thought that was perfectly OK to give that to a 10 year old. Yes, I burnt my fingers on it. And I managed to set myself on fire with my chemistry set's alcohol burner.

My mom worked hard. We had to get ourselves out of bed in the morning while she slept and got ourselves ready for school. We came home for lunch in Elementary school, and Mom would have it ready for us. Sometimes no one was home when got there after school. I guess we were Latchkey Kids.

No VCR's, DVD's or HDTV.

I remember watching a Steeler game that was blacked out in the Pittsburg market area. We picked it up from an Ohio station. The picture was fuzzy and there was no sound, so we turned on the radio. We didn't mind that one bit.

Cartoons were violent. I never tried to drop an anchor on my brother's head, like Wile E. used to do. The Warner cartoons were made in the 40's and obviously WWII propagana and politcally incorrect. We didn't notice. They were funny and only on TV Saturday mornings.

There was no sex and violence on TV, but they smoked an awful lot. Just think of shows like 'I Love Lucy'.

We didn't have a shower in our house. We had to take baths.

We had a coal furnance. I had to shovel coal when I was a kid. Talk about slave labor. In the cold winters the furnance often went out at night. There was no vent in the bathroom, either. Somehow we stayed warm.

Mom used Hydrogen Peroxide on our cuts. Talk about a sting!!!

The doctor came to our house when we were really sick. Mom told me that when I was a baby, I got sick and slept for several days straight. My doctor came to the house every night to watch over me to make sure I was OK and so Mom could sleep.

I was eating solid food before I left the hospital as a baby. Apparently all I would do was cry. They brought the doctor in and he looked at me and told them to feed me something.

Good old days...
 
We would go outside after school, ride our bikes and play with our friends until mom opened the back door and yelled our names at the top of her lungs. Then we all came running home for dinner.

In my neighborhood, we had 2 Tracys, 2 Staceys, and a Casey all on the same block. When one mom yelled, we all went home!
 
We always had to stay in the car while my parents went into the tavern. (Three little girls, ages 2, 4, & 6) One time we were fighting and someone kicked the car into neutral and it rolled into the lake.

My older sister crawled out a backseat window and got into the bar to fetch our parents. We all knew a major whooping was imminent.

These days, that would have made headline news across the country. We would have ended up in some social system as wards-of-the-state.

Instead, we did get the spankings we knew would come --- and after that, our parents just took us into the taverns with them.
 
Wow, you had it pretty good.

We only had two channels on TV, yes they both were perpetual winter scenes, worse if anyone ran anything electrical within a half block area.

Never had any sort of AC. Nor a lake to swim in. Cooling down was done via lawn sprinkler or a wash tub full of water in the backyard. If we begged enough, Mom (or someone else's mom) would drive us to the neighbouring town to swim in a real pool. Then we'd stop for icecream afterwards. There would be more kids in the car than seatbelts (not that we ever used them anyway), or sometimes we'd just pile in the back of a pickup truck.

No bookmobile, we had to walk to the library to get our books.

We sure did have a lot of fun riding the old Radio Flyer wagon down the excavation pile behind our house. Poor thing was trashed after that summer. The next year I had a mini bike to ride - Briggs ad Stratton engine, cetrifugal clutch and no brakes. What fun that thing was, until one day my buddy discovered that the construction guys had removed a large part of the back of the dirt pile - by riding right off the edge. I'm sure we could have been set for life finacially if we had only realised. Instead we hauled the wreck to the local sporting goods store and came home with another bike.

Yep, it was a lot of fun.
 
First day of school, Mom said: "If you get a whipping at school, you're getting one twice as bad when you get home." And she meant it.

No point in denying you got in trouble: Every other Mom her called to make sure she knew and she went out of her way to return the favor....

+1 on everything else. How did we survive it?
 
Air conditioning did not make it to our house until the mid 50's. I had a oscillating fan in my room. I guess that is why I don't mind summers in the deep south. TV had only one channel WDSU. WJMR-TV began in 1953 and WWL came on the air on 1957. Color TV's were expensive when they became available.

The clothes dryer was a clothes line in the back yard. The phone was black, heavy and had a rotary dial. It was located in the hall. It belonged to the phone company. No one bought their own phone back then. Street cars (electric trolleys) were everywhere. Public transportation was 7 cents until the 60's.

Every few blocks there was a small Mom and Pop, grocery store on the corner. People who smoked could buy cigarettes individually from an open pack at the corner store.

Ike was President and segregation was the order of the day. It very slow getting rid of it. It was still the norm in many places when I graduated from college the same year Armstrong walked on the moon.

And all the neighbors knew each other.
 
Only time at work keeps this post short

White bread slice covered with real butter, sugar cinnamon smashed on another slice with same condiments- after school snack

My dad filled his own extinguishers, and bullets, recharged every battery we ever used. Dad's specialty was made homemade root beer. Both hard and regular. The hard was very good., and regular was for ice cream. My mom used to bake every pie, doughnut or sweet that we ever ate.

Summertime snack used to be setting in the garden in the shade of the large tomatoes plants and eat cucumbers raw and munch on mini carrots by the dozen.

Favorite summertime activity- catch tadpoles; the ones that survived the m-80 explosion in the horse tank got to live into frogs. Nowadays THERE IS NO FROGS!

When I was 14, I had to work for my Dad on the ranch on the weekends, I mowed 6 or 7 lawns every two weeks or so, I delivered the local paper on Wednesday, I scraped 4th of July window paint off the windows in town for $1.75 per window- these were just yearly summertime jobs till I was old enough (14) to get a REAL job. I bought my first car a Nova straight six on my own when I was 15. I already had my Honda trail 90 from two years prior; it was also paid for by me.

Pop and soda was unheard of. Kool-Aid was there in mass quantity.

I will go straight to hell for all the birds I killed with my .177 pellet gun; I carried spare ammo around in my mouth (lead)?

My dad used to bring home mercury (phone man when he wasn't playing cowboy) which we would play with at end until we lost it somewhere in the house:jawdrop . (Before you guys put 2+2 effect, my sister played with it too, and she now is a doctor!)


My friend and I would go out in the living room after my parents had a cocktail party, pour all the drink glasses into a jar we hid in my basement bedroom way back under the stairs.yummm!! uggh! We also took every cigar butt and kept them for a rainy day!
 
We always had to stay in the car while my parents went into the tavern. (Three little girls, ages 2, 4, & 6) One time we were fighting and someone kicked the car into neutral and it rolled into the lake.

My older sister crawled out a backseat window and got into the bar to fetch our parents. We all knew a major whooping was imminent.

These days, that would have made headline news across the country. We would have ended up in some social system as wards-of-the-state.
Instead, we did get the spankings we knew would come --- and after that, our parents just took us into the taverns with them.

Well, you have to consider back then there was no way to get the word across country! Ha Ha!

Several of the countires I grew up in didn't even have TV and the only radio I had to listen to was little crystal set I MADE MYSELF! one place (Lybia), didn't even have phones! Wanted to know if someone could play? Well go over to their house and ask! we had feet that worked so we USED THEM!!

How about toys? Large Sheet Metal sharp edged Tonka trucks, big enough to sit on and ride willy nilly down the loonnnnng hill behind your house right smak dab in the middle of the street!

Remember models YOU ACTUALLY HAD TO ASSEMBLE?? And Balsa wood kits that came with Excto knives and fine cut saws that you used even at age 9 or 10 WITHOUT ADULT SUPERVISION YIKES!

Riding your bike down that same looonnnng street and zooming around the corner into the dead-end with YOUR HANDS OFF THE BARS!! Bike helmet, what the fu....???

Roller skating with those metal roller skates that you clamped to your shoes with a big key and then rolled down that darn hill again!! as fast you could pumb your legs!! Knee pads?????? Elbow pads????? Huh?? you're kidding, right??

Playgrounds with asphult and concrete play areas and rusty chain swings and see-saws and rusty metal climbing bars, fall from the top rung and you KNEW IT! and what did you do, climb right back up to the top all over again! Yu had to be pumping out serious blood to bother running (remember RUNNING??) home for a band-aid..

when I got older I realized my folks kept several boxes of cigs around the house for guests, Hmmm a vise just waiting to be learned....

Yeah, I remember....



















So what were we talking about???

Ha Ha!

RM
 
No air conditioning in the house when I was a kid. My dad took hay and stuffed it into chicken wire, ran the water house on it and sucked air through it with a fan. I remember when we got a stroe made water cooler.

No seat belts in the cars, my kids did not ride in car seats either. riding in the back of a pick up, even riding on the hood of a car.

Climbing trees, there was a big magnolia I feel out of and broke my arm. Cut my foot badly chasing tadpoles in the creek down the road.

The doctor came to my house also.

Hanging the wet clothes on the line was rough in the winter. My sister had to bring them in.

If you stepped on the floor furnace barefooted, you didn't stay on it long.

Ralph Sims
 
Man talk about memory lane ...... everything is true .....

We also had a chemistry set and would make firecrackers. We would also make model cars. If they turned out bad, guess what got blown up? It was fun (maybe in hindsight stupid, but fun). Did our parents know, heck no. Today, the kid would be labeled a terrorist and the parents thrown in jail for neglect.

I went to church and Sunday school every week. Yes I still believe but more so, I respect others and help others (wonder if those traits have anything to do with this?)

If I stepped out of line, I got spanked. Ya know, looking back - I deserved it.

After dinner - home work and if there was time, a bicycle ride (only if it was light out). But there was no helmet -

My Mom had Christmas Clubs at local stores and little punch cards showing her regularity for contributing to them. Some times on Saturday AM, I would ride my bike around and pay them for her at her request. (age 12)

I had a morning paper route. I had to wake up everyday (Except Sunday) at 5:30, deliver my papers, and collect for them on Saturday AM. (age 13 to 15)

And oh yes, Bugs Bunny was violent, but funny. No one ever thought of doing that stuff to other people. That was plan stupid - it was after all, Television.
 
I hope the statutes of limitations apply

Dad reloaded bullets; we had gunpowder. We felt that old metal galv. pipe cut with one end smashed closed and the other with a screw cap might be interesting if it was filled with gunpowder, and a m-80set inside with the fuse sticking out the hole we drilled it out with the drill press might be interesting! It was, we shattered the windows in the labor house (migrant house) and we also learned how to glaze windows thanks to that little incident!

Gasoline had many properties that if ignited in large enough quanity, had the propencity to blow the eyebrows and eylashes off everyone involved! We were lucky we are here to tell about it!

You guys are great! What a great time to grow up!
 
My children still look at me when I mention that we didn't have VCR's when I was a kid.

What I did have was parents and neighbours who cared about the neighbourhood children, and thought nothing of giving any of us a wallop if we needed it.

I grew up in a small western town, my best friends dad was the Chief of the volunteer fire department, and they shared the building with the RCMP detachment. Unfortunately this made me well known to the police.

How many kids have come home with their bicycle in the back of the RCMP truck because we were riding at night without a headlight, or speeding down a hill in town?

My dad wasn't concerned that I had been speeding, coming home in a police vehicle, and having the neighbours see me, that was a different (and painful for me) issue.

That said, I made bicycles from old wrecks, used dads woodworking tools and machinery, or built electronic items that I was interested in.

Safety was an issue, however not at the expense of doing things. We went hunting alone when we 14, two .410 shotgun shells, and you had better come home with something edible. Camping alone with friends in the mountains, fishing, hiking, hitching rides with the logging trucks, life was different then.

My children have grown up in a large metropolitan city, I worried a lot about them, however we gave them more freedom than was comfortable, and they've both become independent, caring daughters, who had some good experiences of their own.

Regards, Rod.
 
Now this is a bit of fun!

- climbing up and over the neighbors Henry J
- riding bicycles through burning leaves at curbside
- riding bicycle with no hands and still able to turn a circle
- shinny up the street corner sign and touch the top
- finding my buddy's dad's Playboy in the cellar.... the new one with Marilyn
- twisting the arms on your sled to turn sharper
- Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy/Dale, Gene Autry, Zorro
- Elvis on Ed Sullivan
- Groucho Marx on To Bet You Life
- Name That Tune
- Bishop Sheen on Sunday morning
- Hudson Hornet, Edsel, Studebaker Golden Hawk registers 150
- hair freezing in winter.... but you were cool
- and Dad saying, when I did yet another crazy stunt: "do that again and I'll knock you into the middle of next week" He never did .... but he must have felt like it.

Dang!.... now I really am starting to feel like the fella I used to help cross the street when all of the above was part of my life. sigh. -Bob
 
Hide and Seek in the neighborhood!

Toy guns! Cap guns! Caps!

We used to play "War" (I always wanted to be the "Krauts!")

Mom used to give me the money and send me down to the grocery store to buy her menthol Benson and Hedges.

Remember when you went shopping downtown?

Malls were brand new. So were interstates.

The closest McDonald's was 25 miles away. It was a real treat to get to eat there. We'd go over there for Christmas shopping and before school. Dad would get a Big Mac. That was the 'adult' meal. Us kids got cheesburgers. No such deal as Super Sizing it. Today's 'regular' drink was a large back then and for Dad only.

They delivered the milk in glass gallon jugs. If we forgot to fetch them off the proch, they'd freeze and bust.

Stealing apples, grapes and blackberries off the neighbors.

Pop came in glass bottles. You paid a deposit on them and took them back for a refund. Kids used to collect them off adults until we had a hoard, then take them to the store to get candy money.

My Mom never had a drivers license. She didn't need one. Everything she needed was within walking distance.

Getting a pizza was a HUGE treat. We thought we were really blessed when Mom would let us order a cheese pizza from the pizza joint.

We hardly ever ate out.

Capturing bees in a jar. Heck, it is hard to find a damned honeybee these days.

We left our dogs tied out all year long. Having a dog in the house was a no no. (Today I have two in my house!!)

I remember when wearing jeans to school was not allowed. Girls had to wear skirts with the hem below thier knees. I can recall when they started letting the girls wear slacks.

From 7th grade until I was a senior in High School, Gym class was NOT Coed. We had to wear white t-shirts, white gym shorts, white socks and white gym shoes. We got demerits for not wearing the uniform or if it wasn't clean. We had gym twice a week all year long. They actually had the gall to make us run sometimes!

Tag! Freeze! Fox and Geese in the snow! Sled riding! Snowball fights!

If a kid dared to call in a bomb threat, his punishment was getting a spanking and detention, not getting arrested for terroristic threats!
 
likely most of us have been very lucky to HAVE lived so long! Hey kid, ya ever flip baseball cards against a wall or done 'nickel flip and match'? -Bob (60 next month:gerg )

I guess I'm hanging around the right people then... if I have good examples maybe I'll live a long and prosperous life, as well? :wave

Josh - 30 next month :)
 
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