Leave hyper sensitive Americans alone! Just leave them alone myeeaahhhhhhh!
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 or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
We all took Phys Ed ..... And risked permanent injury with a pair of PF Flyers instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
We got the paddle for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honor & respect those older than us. We had 40 kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do math and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter.
Staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn’t got.
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 Netflix. We weren't!!
Oh yeah ... And where was the antibiotics and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? Could I have been killed!
We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mom pulled out the bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mom calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
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 never needed to get into group therapy and/or 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?
Don’t forget the cannonball dive from the high diving board at the public pool.
Those diving boards are no longer there.
.
I’d hate to see one of these many kids addicted to computer games throw a baseball.
We did just fine with BB-guns ... no wussy helmets on bikes ... rope swings ... being home alone while the parents worked ... playing in the park without an adult and MANY other things that make todays wussfied generation cringe. We did especially well without over bearing and way over protective helicopter parents and government.
” no beach closures then.”
Bwaaaa! Must not be from the Cleveland area! Every newscast gave the E.Coli count, and told which beaches were “safe!”
Leave hyper sensitive Americans alone! Just leave them alone myeeaahhhhhhh!
But, we did wait an hour before swimming after lunch...
I rode to school in a Chevy Corvair. And I survived.
Iodine is for sissies. We had Mercurochrome.
Bkmrk.
I have sometimes thought about our lunches and the lack of refrigeration.
I grew up in Houston, and partly before air conditioning, and your school lunch and refrigeration never came up, and the variety of home cooked food and sandwiches was pretty wide.
Cold chicken used to be a common lunch food, and what about the workmen with their lunch boxes, working outdoors in 1960 Texas, or anytime and anywhere before the recent years?
And we knew who the queers were and how to avoid them just like any other daily hazard.
And when we were bullied, we eventually got tired of it and fought back. We may not have won the battle but the bully looked for easier prey after that.
My PE teacher told of a time when there was a big bully in his class. One day in PE the teacher brought in two pairs of boxing gloves and put one pair on the bully and one pair on the guy most likely to give him a good fight. The bully was eager to beat up on someone. After he went a round with the guy the bully started to pull off the gloves when the teacher told him to keep them on, he was going to fight everyone in the class. After going going through about half the class, the bully was getting his butt kicked. By the time he got to the end, the littlest guys in the class were beating the crap out of him. The teacher looked at him and said, “If I ever hear of you bullying anyone ever again, you are going to get another boxing lesson”. That ended the bully’s reign of terror. That was in the late 1960s. Today, the teacher would be fired and possibly prosecuted.
“...on the same cutting board”
Actually, there is a reason. Wood is filled with potent antibacterial agents that last for many years. So unless you didn’t clean off the board after cutting up raw chicken, you should be okay.
You probably got E. coli, Listeria, and Salmonella several times, but the adults just thought it was a touch of the flu.
Survivorship bias.
I’ve my own long list of “I/we did _____ and survived! What’s wrong with y’all today ya wimps?”, but am quite sure that not everyone who rode on flatbeds, clambered about on high cliffs, swam in rather...lively...bodies of water, consumed toxins & diseases, etc survived. Not many people standing around going “I did all that, and look how I did! I’m dead!”
That said, I’m trying hard to find the balance between the two eras: protect the kids, but let ‘em push limits.
“Oh yeah ... And where was the antibiotics and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting?”
We used to use mud or the spring onion you find in the grass, which I still eat when I find them. Can’t tell you how many bees I stepped on barefoot or how many hornets nests we purposly disrupted with rocks, bb’s, firecrakers, water and such.
Army men wars with firecrackers for hand grenades and bb-gun artillery to knock down each others plastic soldiers.
Mixing vinegar and backing soda in plastic containers to make rockets, of course now they have menthos and soda.
Clackers made of epoxy glass balls you banged together or could use as a south American bolos when thrown.
Lawn darts was a fun and dangerous sport.
Chopper forks on your bike made from pipes and every kid tried to make his Schwinn bike with the longest front tire to look like an Easy Rider chopper. Those with extra lawn mower Briggs & Straten engines made makeshift single fixed gear adaptions to turn our Schwinn choppers into real motorbikes.
Real Cherry bombs and M80 fire crackers to blow up those old model airplanes and boats so you could spend days gluing new models together and survive the glue.
The endless baseball game that seemed to last the entire summer and than start all over again with the same friends when school started again during recess three times a day and during P.E.
Playing with discarded car batteries by putting a long screwdriver across the terminals to watch it arc.
Having Dad task you with throwing out the old motor oil in the storm drain.
Having BB rifle wars with the only rule being, aim from the waist down.
Running away from the Railroad police when they caught you playing in the rail yard.
Hurting yourself bad enough to have to get stitches and having your Mom tell you on the way to the emergency room that; “Your father is not going to be happy when he finds that dinner is not ready.”
Finding out the hard way that balloons in your bake spokes sounds cool but actually loosens said spokes.
Hiding in roadside trees to drop firecrackers on unsuspecting motorists.
Ahhh...good times.
I grew up in the New York area.
When I was in high school, our house was at the top of a hill. All the kids — including me — used to take their sleds to the top of our driveway and sled down to Route (, where we would deliberately crash into a snow bak just before hitting the “big” road.
Then we’d drag the sled up the hill and do it again.
Our parents saw nothign wrong with this.
I also had a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. We would play pickup basketball in the driveway. I had a friend who liked to come around behind me and I’d pass to hime through my legs. We never missed the timing.