To those of us who survived the '50s, '60s and '70s

[dlbpharmd]

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored
lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took
hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE
actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the
bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

[Loredoctor]

Cool post, Dl!

[MsMary]

I have seen this before.

Makes me think of those days I spent with friends riding our bikes through a huge vacant lot about a mile from our house. We used to play the best games there.

And we played baseball in the street ("That manhole cover is homeplate; that sewer is first base" etc)

Put on plays in a neighbor's garage.

Ran all over the neighborhood.

My kids' lives have been very different.

[Vector]

Dl, so very true. It is something that I lament almost every day, the passing of this era. I believe that, though less safe, such an environment did wonders for developing creativity and character building in general.

Yet so many younger people, some just barely 10 years younger than me, such as my wife, really have no concept of this lost golden age - before the lawyers committed the greatest crime of all, stealing the excitement of life and discovery, all the while making us think that all we were losing is any responsability for our own actions...

[Worm of Despite]

I was raised by my grandfather, who was part of the Silent Generation (1925–1945), so a good bit of dlph's list applies to me. I'm more old-fashioned and Spartan than most of my friends. I hate credit cards, cell phones, and a lot of that other new-fangled stuff. I'm also not a compulsive buyer, unlike most of my peers. When I go inside a place, 99% of the time I buy something I planned on getting days ago.

At the same time, I have similarities with my Generation Y cohorts, such as getting high on technology and video games. Despite that, I still have friends and go outside every day.

I think it's healthy to adopt various aspects from generations before and from those emerging. Shouldn't shutter yourself into one generational bracket!

[Cail]

Great post dlb! I remember summer vacation when I was in elementary school I'd leave the house at 7:30 in the morning and get home at 8:30 at night. We played in the woods, we threw each other into a lake, we played on construction sites. I don't recall anyone suffering any worse than a scraped knee.

The TV got 4 channels, the carpet was burnt orange, the car was 30 feet long and made out of solid iron. If you had a friend and two sticks, you had a day's entertainment.

[lurch]

...God created man from a lump of clay. Me and friends had lumps of clay. It was free. Reject clay from the factory we found in their " dump". Lots and lots of green and red clay.

And we created many a clay man. Green body( gumbyesque) but we added red organs. See, the clay was an educational toy also. We found out what kind of damage was done,,by,,say,,gettin run over,,or fallin out of a 3rd story window..or being hit with a basketball. Many an educational autopsy was performed. Actual hands on experience. Dr Kildare had nothing on us.

We got into life size stuff too, with the clay. We made our own halloween masks,well,,tried to. I recall,,using moms kitchen oven to bake the clay,,didn't quite work out in most cases. Mom wasn't all that happy with our creativity.

Of course, it was all outside. Clay on the carpet was worse than in your hair. I mean..this stuff wasn't the modeling clay of Art Class. No, this stuff, was ,,well, reject stuff. Why was it reject? who cared! Great gobs of it kept us entertained endlessly. I remember shootin little peas of it thru a straw, at the bats after sun down. It took 'em a while to stop divin for what they thought was an insect.

Of course , as with every clay creation,,comes the ultimate threshold, when met, there is nothing left to do. I speak of the intoduction of the firecraker. hehee. I was introduced to the horrors of war at an early age. Red clay, tooth picks , pipe cleaners , scattered about,,the horror,,the horror.

Yep,,God created a man from a lump of clay....I'm sorry, i'm even having a hard time with that,,blame it on the M&Ms...MEL

[Cheval]

I love it!
That's is where imgaination starts.
Back when you made your own entertainment,
and not being beamed into your eyeballs, watching T.V. and games.
Ah, the newest generation - the age of instant gratification.
Knows the final outcome, but not how it is acheived.

[High Lord Tolkien]

Just to get to Jr.High (8th to 12th grade) we had to walk along rail road tracks and walk over a small bridge and then a foot path through some woods.
No one ever got abducted or fell or got hurt.
I heard that they don't allow it any more.
Kids who do are punished and the town pays for the additional busing.

The neigborhood kids had beaten trails through the local woods next to the elementary school.
We used to break up into 2 teams and have rock fights.
Yes, rock fights.
We used to throw rocks at each other.
If you got hit with a rock you were "out".
You were only allowed body shots (not the head!) and the rock couldn't be any bigger than a 1/2 dollar.
No one was seriously hurt in my 3 years of playing.

We used to build forts in those woods.
Some monkey climbing kid would shimmy up with some boards, a hammer, nails and some knotted rope to get the fort started.
No girls allowed of course!

I went back to the old neigborhood and notice that all those trees in those woods had thier lower branches cut.
It made it impossible to build a tree fort the way we used to.
All the trees around the school had the lower branches cut to keep kids from climbing.

We used to play "Bombardment".
Bombardment was like dodgeball but everyone lined up in a row against a wall and one person threw the ball as hard as he could trying to hit someone. If you caught it you got to throw. If you got hit or "beaned" you were out.
They don't allow kids to play "cops and robbers" in school now forget about bombardment!
Nobody really got hurt and if you did everyone thought you were cool!

I didn't remember about just walking into friends houses until I read dlbpharmd's post.
Yeah, we did it all the time.
Used to cut though other peoples yards too.

We all used to clip baseball cards to our bike wheels and pretend we were riding motorcycles.
Now these kids just think about the trade value of the card!

And what ever happened to Big Wheels?
Do they not even make them anymore?
Every kids on the street over 7 years old had one.
I haven't seen one in 20 years.

Remember when kids used to deliver the news paper and not an adult in a car at 5 in the morning?

Thank God car saftey has improved though.
We used to fight over who got to sit on the "hump" in the backseat.
Anybody know what I'm talking about?
I remember my Mother yelling at me to stop laying on the platform above the backseats and under the back windshield.
not because it was not safe for me but because she couldn't see out the rear view mirror!

And for 5 years we had a little black and white TV sitting on top of our broken color TV!

[Worm of Despite]

I love it!
That's is where imgaination starts.
Back when you made your own entertainment,
and not being beamed into your eyeballs, watching T.V. and games.
Ah, the newest generation - the age of instant gratification.
Knows the final outcome, but not how it is acheived.

Careful, now. We'll be deciding whether or not you guys go to the retirement home.

[Kinslaughterer]

Kind of ironic that the same generation that got to do all that stuff is the same one responsible for taking it all away...
What happened??

[matrixman]

Interesting point, Kins. Maybe when that generation grew up, they looked back on their "reckless youth" and got scared by all the risks they had naively taken, so they overcompensated by instituting the rules and regulations that are around today?

My childhood was certainly full of imagination and daydreams: I had nothing much else to go on. We were just another poor immigrant family making our way in the West. I had no childhood buddies, and I had few "genuine" toys to amuse myself with, but it didn't matter much. I still got to see Star Wars, and miscellaneous objects around the house became my Star Wars action figures and spaceships.

Ate a lot of junk food, and absorbed the English language through endless hours of TV--whether Sesame Street or 70's sitcoms. I was allowed to watch almost anything, as long as I didn't bother my dad--he was an aloof kind of parent who I don't think really knew what to do with children. He wasn't an irresponsible parent, just a little clueless.

Anyway, I didn't have many "risky" misadventures in my childhood, but I mostly agree with the view that we're being overly protective of our children these days and controlling them unnecessarily.

[Cail]

Wow....I'd forgotten about Bombardment. Great game.

[Avatar]

Or maybe they just got so caught up in making a profit for themselves, and protecting themselves from being profited from, that they just forgot all about it?

Despite my age, I too was lucky enough to be raised without television, (which was only permitted ( ) in my country just about the time I was born, and was resultantly underdeveloped throughout my childhood), and I gotta say (in observational comparison with folks who did grow up on it), that not having TV made a big difference.

Quite aside from all the "legal" and "protection" issues in this thread, that one simple thing is changing the way that children see, experience and think about the world.

As Cheval mentions, nothing was "beamed into your eyeballs", you had to imagine it for yourself. And although the loss is that of the children of today, the real tragedy is that they will never know what a loss it is.

--Avatar

[drew]

Well, back to the basics?

Most of the things in that post were great, but I'm sure of them did cause some trouble...I'm sure some people did get sick from lead paint...I'm sure that there were some still-births and misscarrigaes from mothers drinking and smoking.--but for the most part, I agree.

Our kids play outside all the time, already starting to climb trees, we only have about 15 chanels on TV and no video games.

All of the modern conveniences come at a great price...back in the day..my father worked, supported the whole family, bought all the food, we had two cars, I played Little leauge ball every summer, and novice hockey every winter--of course he never had an Internet bill, a cell phone bill, gas was affordable, once you bought a TV, that was it!
Now, both my wife and I work, and we can barly afford food some weeks, because everything if so damned expensive.


Here's another one for your list...Road Hockey played with bright orangeball, so we could play in the dark.

[dANdeLION]

Heh, great topic. Remember party lines? For you youngsters, a party line was when your whole block had the same phone number, and it didn't matter because you knew whoever it was that picked up the phone and they'd go get whoever it was you wanted to talk to.

[MsMary]

Just to get to Jr.High (8th to 12th grade) we had to walk along rail road tracks and walk over a small bridge and then a foot path through some woods.
No one ever got abducted or fell or got hurt.
I heard that they don't allow it any more.
Kids who do are punished and the town pays for the additional busing.

You may have fond memories of that, but I have a friend whose gorgeous adolescent son was killed while crossing railroad tracks. So while I also used to cross RR tracks, or walk close to them, I agree with the laws prohibiting people from cross the tracks, except at legal crossing areas.

[High Lord Tolkien]

Just to get to Jr.High (8th to 12th grade) we had to walk along rail road tracks and walk over a small bridge and then a foot path through some woods.
No one ever got abducted or fell or got hurt.
I heard that they don't allow it any more.
Kids who do are punished and the town pays for the additional busing.

You may have fond memories of that, but I have a friend whose gorgeous adolescent son was killed while crossing railroad tracks. So while I also used to cross RR tracks, or walk close to them, I agree with the laws prohibiting people from cross the tracks, except at legal crossing areas.

Well, I agree with you there.
I should have mentioned that these tracks were seldom used and when they were it was for train car storage 1/2 mile further down which was a dead end.
So the trains never went more than 5 miles an hour or so.
That does make a difference!
It wasn't a high speed rail line we were crossing.
My point was that it was very isolated and we were left to our own devices to get to school and somehow we managed.
The conductor used to wave at us as he chugged by.
He used to fire the horn if we asked him.
I think we used to leave pennies on the rails so they would get squished too if I remember correctly.

[drew]

Who here actually had an Outhouse?

[Vector]

Who here actually had an Outhouse?

My family didn't, but we had friends who did. ... and it seems to me that the first summer homw we bought in New Hampshire had an outhouse - though we soon upgraded to another home.