Posted on 04/14/2015 3:48:13 PM PDT by ButThreeLeftsDo
By today’s safety standards, every baby boomer should have been dead by the time we were 12.
We defied danger on a daily basis. We never knew that we were doing risky things, of course; we just thought that we were having fun. Nonetheless, we spent our days immersed in activities that we’d never for a second allow our children or grandchildren to do. Or even think about doing.
Here are some of the ways we courted trouble:
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
We use to go (my brothers and sisters) down in the woods where it was cool and damp and hunt snakes - barefoot. We had a big time with a cotton mouth once. I use to go barefoot in places where I wouldn’t go under no circumstances now. Well, if the “will you be my hero” girl beckoned...
Yes it was dangerous times.
I traveled many miles standing on the hump looking out the windshield when I was small.
Then there was playing in the woods. BB gun wars while running by the water moccasins so fast that they didn’t have time to strike.
Then off to a relaxing swim in the oil field ponds.
That night we rode bikes behind the DDT truck.
Later we drove motorcycles and Jeeps on what turned out to be the most expensive Superfund site in the nation.
Ha, ha, I’m still amazed I lived to be a teen considering the stuff I did before I was ten. Parents today would be shocked at the things we did at very young ages. With no parents around. I’m wondering if some parents with a lot of kids i.e. mouths to feed hoped a few wouldn’t come back. Just kidding.
My friends and I used to travel miles on bicycle, into areas I’d be afraid to drive through today. No helmets, no knee pads, and for a while in my case, no brakes. My parents would be locked up today.
is that a fake photo? It has a three plug outlet I never saw till new building rules about 1968.
The old outlets all had two prong holes, not three. One hole was the “hot” wire, the other the neutral, often called “ground”.
Often electric equipment, fans, drills, saws, electric lawn mowers, would have the metal casing around the motor grounded to the neutral. If you touched it with wet hands or while standing on wet grass, you got a jolt! The plug was not polarized with a wide and narrow slot to keep polarity straight. It was common to see a plug with the “ground” plug clipped or broken off so it could be used in a two prong outlet.
When people replaced their old outlets with three prong outlets, there was a problem as the old wiring only had two wires ( hot and neutral) and no ground. So some smart guys started placing a small wire from the green ground screw of the outlet and run it over to the neutral screw side so the neutral carried both to ground.
On the breaker box,the hot wire comes off the breaker, and the ground and neutral go to the ground. new wires have at least three wires. Hot, Neutral and an uninsulated “ground”.
I shudder to see some of the hack electrical wiring jobs I’ve seen in old houses.
It’s a wussy country now.
Boomers grew up in a golden age. Testosterone met technology, and the result was a LOT of good times.
The girls were just as bad-ass in their own ways.
No computer-phone will ever out-cool a hot rod.
I'll remember that photo until the day I die.
And I'll always wear my seat belt even if it's not required.
My 3 brothers and I made our own fun during the summer in the early 60’s.
One was “Army”. Get a baseball bat or a healthy stick and be Vic Morrow mowing down krauts or japs (any brother that wasn’t you) with a BAR or a Garand.
To add a little realism, stockpile a handful of hickory nuts or small rocks and hurl them with all your might at the bad guys. If you got hit, tough. You shoulda been an American.
So happy to be part of the last generation allowed complete freedom.
Doctors are now becoming Big Brother agents. Asking at check-ups (which I question need for, anyway) my son if he wears a damn helmet when he rides a bike, which BTW he still doesn’t know how to do and has only managed some tricycle skill. Son says no, he chastises us. Last year I got in a huffy argument with him.
It’s all BS and a great way to enrich the child companies.
It was definitely more dangerous in terms of injuries and deaths. The “controls” today have made certain things safer. There’s no doubt about that. I guess some people would prefer more deaths these days, instead ... :-) ...
Let’s see, vacuumed the toilet out twice, slinky in the electrical outlet, gunpowder manufacturing, melting lead, riding in the back of the pickup, no seatbelts, homemade hydrogen, etc.
I guess some people would prefer more deaths these days, instead ...
Agenda 21 wants to kill off about 80% of the world population to make it easier to control the rest.
They would have better luck, then, without seat belts, helmets and all the fancy safety equipment on cars ... LOL ...
When I was a kid, there were no seatbelts in the back seats of cars. Couldn’t have used them if we wanted to (and we didn’t want to)
That chart seems to indicate that todays boys are wusses. Killing themselves at only three-quarters the rate that the girls killed themselves when I was growing up. For the sake of saving one life in 4000. (Or rather, prolonging—we’re all dead in the long run).
Remember pop bottle rockets?
One of our things we did was to “accidentally” break a thermometer, then coat nickles with the mercury, which formed interesting little balls amid the broken glass. We had cool-looking, shining nickles when we got done. We probably put all sorts of contaminated nickles into circulation until one of our parents convinced us we would die a horrible death if we ever touched mercury again with our bare hands.
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