Posted on 09/06/2023 9:11:54 AM PDT by jcon40
We mixed chemicals in a real chemistry set and got satisfying smoke clouds, set off M80s and cherry bombs, started model airplane engines with wood props by hand, and went on boy scout campouts where we fired .22 rifles for hours.
We built plastic model kits using real nasty toluene based glue - and peeled it off our fingers afterward.
We carried our share of the family chores, including cooking, cleaning and ironing and when we bought our first car, we paid for it with our paper route money.
Then, when the next war came into view, we volunteered to go and fight because our dads and our uncles had done it before.
Remember iron lungs, measles and mumps? Those were good times
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Cleaning woman Clara Clifford discovered your clean copper clackers, kept in a closet, were copped by Claude Cooper the kleptomaniac from Cleveland. Now is that about it?
Swinging on the swing till it reached it highest point and then jumping off.
—> Then, when the next war came into view, we volunteered to go and fight because our dads and our uncles had done it before.
Wow, good comment !
Remember getting polio shot. Actually have Jonas Salk’s autograph on the wall of my study.
Yup! Thems was duh ‘50’s leading to the ‘y0’s with all those Mattel items that used those “greenie stick em caps”. All those G.I.Joe, Major Steve Canyon jet fighter goodies, and REMCO helicopters and tanks that shot bullets.
We didn’t have signs warning us not to dive off a bride into a stream 5 inches deep either...
Remember when glass thermometers broke and instead of calling the hazmat team and shutting things down, we played with the mercury that spilled out into little balls, and we touched the mercury balls with our hands!!
...I can't figure out why my grandkids are such mutants."
I’m from Jacksonville, FL originally. I the summer we would all be out in the street playing kick ball about dusk and the air tanker would fly overhead at tree top level spraying DDT. We just ran up on the front porch til most of it settled then right back out on the street. Sometimes they would just send the fog truck around spraying it everywhere.
We walked to school, me…two miles. One winter day I walked to school and it was closed because of snow. It was a Lutheran school, public school was open. I met another kid who walked there too. We decided to go sledding. Did that for a few hours and then went home.
hubby and i just shake our heads at the bubble wrapped kids in our neighborhood. There’s a family with 3 boys who don’t have bike helmets- gasp! I always think “Good for them”
we have a yoga -latte mommy who has asked the neighbors to drive slower than the speed limit so she does not have to watch her kids- her words not mine.
Yup - and I remember making rocket fuel in our high school chemistry class and launching the rockets afterward from a vacant lot nearby, with an occasional mislaunch where the rocket blew up just after launch or worse, tipped over and headed for somebody’s house.
boo hoo. what a bunch of snowflakes.
Mine's nearly identical to yours. Remember Fizzies?
“Yeah the 60s saw some changes but most of what was mentioned was still going on then.”
68 and 69 were more like the dark seventies, but mostly everything was great. Overall society was changing for the worse, but it was still a heckuva time to be a kid.
If we got sick or sunburned or experienced some other childhood injury that needed a bit of pain relief, we were given an aspirin!
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