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01-27-2003, 08:13 PM
I guess I am showing my age, but I remember doing all of these things.................


Randy



Subject: Just Remember When


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.
As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in
the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
Our baby cribs, toys and rooms were painted with bright colored lead based
paint.
We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when
we rode our bikes we had no helmets.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. 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. We played dodge
ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.
We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and
used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not
available.
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never
overweight; we were always outside playing.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't,
had to learn to deal with disappointment. Some students weren't as smart as
others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to
repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest
risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and
responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
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 and caught all sorts of negative
attention for the next two weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
I can't understand it. 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, PlayStation, 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 could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a
mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, 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 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 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 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?

daninthesand
01-27-2003, 08:30 PM
Randy,

I could not have written that better myself! LOL. Brings back many fond memories. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. ;)

Funny, but sad, in a way. Life seems to have gotten so much more complicated.

Daniel

01-27-2003, 08:36 PM
Damn Randy that is great!!!! I'm sheading a tear as I type. :'(
Guess that shows my age too....

Oh well. :-\

Glenn
01-27-2003, 09:30 PM
Randy your making me feel old.

01-27-2003, 10:01 PM
that was great... ;)

so what's the answer?? what happened?? have we been brain-washed into thinking we need lawyers and psychiatrists and that we shouldn't be held responsible for our own actions anymore?? ::)

01-27-2003, 10:15 PM
I hear you Randy ;D

Am just wondering what a kid from today will remember in say 2035 ???

Something like : Can you remember we actually had to use our hands and a joystick to play on one of what we called a computer :-[


Ronald

01-27-2003, 11:12 PM
Wow...... :-\ that brings back alot of memories huh??

just the other day I was thinking.....8 or 10 year old boys today dont keep thier pockets full of the INVALUABLE items I used to keep when I was that age....

pocket knife....
lucky rock.....
string.....
roll of caps......

Times have definately changed....

Tony

April
01-27-2003, 11:25 PM
that sounds exactly like my neighbourhood.
and tony...i still have all those cool things in my pockets.
i had pockets full of marbles...now their in my aquarium for safe keeping.
still got my swiss army knife..even managed to take it on the plane to your house withme...they never took it away . lol.
my favourite is the little chain for keychains that were my pet snakes. i still save them all and join them up. lol.

nalah
01-28-2003, 12:00 AM
thats progress........... or is it?
We did things as kids that nowdays could get our kids in a lot of trouble.

For kids anyway,life was better then.

brewmaster15
01-29-2003, 10:13 AM
LMAO thats too funny, and it describes my childhood so well....Those we the good old days!


Tony... ahhh the pocket knife and caps... man was it fun to hit the whole role at once with a rock, or toss it in the fire.

helmets..never owned one. we rode our bikes down cliffs, towed each other on skateboards, and fit more kids on the bilke than a school bus. Scrapes and bruises were baqttle scars to be proud of!

Spare the rod...spoil the child... I was definetly never spoiled :) though I believe several rods were broken during my upbringing...as well as an occasional shoe... which I swear my mom could throw around corners with precision!

Thanks for the memories!
-al

brewmaster15
01-29-2003, 10:14 AM
Oh and hey...remember that concept called recess at school... we used to get what seemed like hours..now they get maybe 15-20mins... sad :'(
-al

DarkDiscus
01-29-2003, 10:27 AM
Al,

My grammar school had recess - which was 30 minutes and a 15 minute break later in the day...

Depressing, ain't it?

John

cgrim10
01-29-2003, 10:42 AM
http://images.snapfish.com/3366%3A7%3A%3B23232%7Ffp6%3A%3Dot%3E2327%3D%3A48%3 D3%3B7%3Dxroqdf%3E232336%3B628%3A%3B7ot1lsi
this was one of my favorites. still is. cg

Lynn
01-29-2003, 01:00 PM
Randy,

That was great! I guess that makes me old too! lol

I think we miss out on all of these things today because we are too busy...the few people that I know that spend a siginificant amount of time with their kids, have kids just like that...pockets full of treasures, doing daredevil bike rides, camping in the backyard and roasting any food item in the fire and eating it!...and eating dinner as a family, with food that did come from a box in the freezer.

Maybe todays kids will have good memories too, we just can't see them yet.

Craig....nice top!

RichieE
01-29-2003, 01:24 PM
My childhood - 1 Tv ,13 channels, black and white, no remote, and I had to ask to turn it on.

My kids- 6 Tvs, one for the car, all color, Video games hooked up to most, all with remote, surround sound on two, ones on all the time.

My Mom and Dad- Radio Rich

Ryan
01-29-2003, 03:14 PM
You guys should all come raise your kids in Seville, Florida ::)

Our town population is under 1,000 -- we're a small agricultural community and it's mostly just rednecks and Southern folk who farm or raise cattle, etc. I grew up in a typically Southern Baptist home. My parents worked and I stayed with my grandma and grandpa everyday until I was 13 or so.

We didn't watch TV -- we all played outside. Didn't matter, we didn't have cable or satellite and we only had three channels anyway, and most of the day it was just news and talk shows. We sat down at noon everyday to eat "dinner" (what my grandparents refer to lunch as), and then again at 6:00pm for "supper." You didn't walk out of the kitchen with your plate, you ate at the dinner table.

Fights between me and my cousins were settled the hard way. Growing up, the most terrifying sound in the entire world was the whooshing sound that my grandpa's belt made as it got pulled off through his beltloops. We all knew we were in for it then. :o

We went to church on Sunday mornings and had Sunday dinner with the entire family at my grandparents' house. My grandma was a Sunday school teacher so during the week me and my other cousins would help her prepare a Bible lesson for the other students. She also taught us to play piano (that was one of our few 'indoor activities') because she played piano in the church and felt it'd be good for us to learn.

The only remedies my grandparents knew of were ice, a band-aid, and peroxide (ouch). If you fell out of the tree you were climbing, you were probably fortunate enough to get all three.

When I wanted something, I worked for it. My grandpa grew fern crops, raised cattle and pigs, and also had citrus groves. I spent summer days cutting fern, picking up fallen tree limbs, pulling weeds out of the garden, helping pick crops, etc. I wasn't given an allowance, I just worked until I made enough money to get whatever it was I wanted.

My uncles and aunts knew they were allowed to spank me, and my other cousins knew that my parents could spank them. And boy did we ever get a lot of it! You'd think we were all little masochists or something, the way we almost begged to have our butts beat.

I guess what's funny is that I read Randy's post and everyone was talking about how old it made them feel, but this is still how kids are raised down here. Oh well, I guess a lot of the smaller towns are probably that way... we're shut off from the rest of the world :)

Ryan

01-29-2003, 04:18 PM
Ryan, I can relate to much of your youth. Not the same but similar. I sit back and dream about "simple life" all the time. I made a promise to myself that I was going to find it again... even if it takes living in the woods. ;)

Mike

fcdiscus
01-29-2003, 05:34 PM
:DGreat Thread! Frank :D

BlueTurquoise
01-29-2003, 07:45 PM
Radal,

Great thread.

I remember the good times as a kid, we played cricket in our drive way and there was a cow paddock right next door, usually patrolled by one mean bull. If you hit a six (ball over the boundary) straight away we'd all call out "SHOTGUN" and the last person to shout it would have to go over the electric fence to fetch the ball. These days kids are inside playing cricket on the computer.

I remember summers spent in the river, all day, that's all we'd do, swim, becuase it was 44 degrees out of the water. These days we have aircons, even I admit that I am aircon addicted...

You had it bad with the belt! my uncle used to use the cane (big long stick). We used to hide it so he wouldn't find it, but stopped that when he started using his belt when he couldn't find the cain! hehe at least the cain was not flexible like a whip! ouch! These days my parents would probably sue my uncle!

It's great being a kid in the country...

Chong

Ryan
01-29-2003, 08:25 PM
Chong, my grandma on my mother's side used to make us go outside and pick our own switch off the tree when we were bad.. then she made us bring it back to her and she'd spank us with it. And if you pulled all the leaves off, she'd make you go and get another one, because the leaves used to sting and she wanted them left on :o ;D Let's just say, it made us never want to be bad... EVER...

Ryan

nalah
01-29-2003, 10:28 PM
In the late 60's,you could buy a small whip for kids....
i got one for xmas one year. can't remember it been used on me....

i dont belief in abuse but i do think parents should be allowed to punish their kids.a good smack on the backside never killed anyone.

at school,teachers used a ruler to hit you across the knuckles - boy that hurt.LOL

cgrim10
01-29-2003, 10:32 PM
the leaves stung?? maybe we didn't get the same whuppin?...

i didn't really want to "remember when" then!!
signed: a survivor

BlueTurquoise
01-29-2003, 10:50 PM
Ryan,

LOL that is downright torture! "Choose your method of punishment". I guess you would have to climb to the very top of the tree to get the new, weaker branches so it didn't hurt as much! LOL and then got in trouble for that too! hehe

My uncle used the "pain stick", full bamboo, you know light, swift and stung like hell! Woosh crack!

My grandma used to just use her hands on my thigh, one spank was all she needed to send me to tears! I remember one time when she spanked me so hard that I had a hand imprint on my thigh for ages! LMAO ouch... Brings a tear to my eye remembering...

Chong

jim_shedden
01-29-2003, 11:26 PM
Chong : I had a grandmother like that. Tiny little Scottish lady....about 3 foot 2 inches. My late brother called her Helga............. ;D. I really miss him...... ;D