Posted on 02/06/2010 8:02:54 AM PST by Dallas
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No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us, WE ARE AWESOME !!! OUR LIFE IS LIVING PROOF !!!
To Those of Us Born 1925 - 1970 : At the end of this email is a quote of the month by Jay Leno.. If you don't read anything else, please read what he said. Very well stated, Mr.. Leno. ~~~~~~~~~ TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE 1930s, '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s!! First, we survived being born to mothers who may have smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes. Then, after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets, and, when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps, not helmets, on our heads. As infants and children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes. Riding in the back of a pick- up truck 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, real butter, and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And we weren't overweight.. WHY? Because we were always outside playing...that's why! 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 OKAY. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride them 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 Play Stations, Nintendos and X boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVDs, no surround-sound or CDs, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms... WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
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Very true. The socialism of the country has created a very bad beast. Removing God from the town square only resulted in Satan moving in.
When I was a kid in Houston, at dusk the city would send smoke trucks down all the streets and they would blanket the neighborhood in an impenetrable smoke screen. We kids could run or grab our bicycles and follow the truck keeping totally immersed in the smoke until our deep gulping breaths were not enough to keep us going as we tired.
DDT smoke made for some of our best child hood fun, and at dusk it was too dark for any more BB gun fights and rock throwing wars anyway, of course after the smoke cleared, there was always door bell ringing.
Having been born in 1971 I experienced the same. The cutoff date of 1970 is peculiar at best. I’d have probably placed it around 1980 - 1985 (having had a child grow up in that time-frame myself I know what things were like for him). PC really became ferociously evident around 1992 or so and just got worse from there on. I worked at a middle school from 1992-1994 or so and it was bad then.
Our middle school was built with a rifle range. It's now used for robotics, but it hasn't been completely destroyed. I'd love to see it used for shooting again . . . not likely, but dreams are free!
We would leave the house in the morning during summer and go play ball all day long, sometimes returning for lunch, sometimes not. But we were either home by dark or it was a business meeting with Dad downstairs out of earshot of the younger ones.
When we weren't playing baseball, football or basketball we were building tree houses, battles with the next block over or taking old lawn mower engines and mounting them to old bikes.
And then we started noticing girls and everything changed. :-}
Geez, without street lights how did you know when to go home? That must have been a tough childhood. snicker snicker :O)
I wired all the boys houses for two blocks so that we could have our own private telephones. I climbed the trees and ran the wires across the street repeatedly, it was a pretty impressive communications system and the entire time we did stuff like that, it seemed like the grownups were totally oblivious to our sub world of projects and activities.
Actually, with several grandparents, aunts and uncles close, going "home" was just an option...I spent more time at relatives than at my own home. ;)
are we sure that this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance
For nearly 2/3 of that time period, God wasn't in the Pledge of Allegiance. We survived that too.
Now that sounds like fun.......my family was spread out all over the place...
So true. They gave us space to be kids and to learn by doing. My parents both had a lot of freedom during their childhoods in Czechoslovakia (between the wars), so letting us entertain ourselves came naturally. My mother grew up with grand-dad's lumber mill in her backyard. They had a pond, tennis court, and mounds of lumber just outside the back door. She always reminisced about the fun times and freedom of her childhood. Dad grew up in a village, near a trout stream. He rode his bike or walked everywhere - mostly to the stream to fish. (He's 89 now, and still fishes whenever he can.)
Most of us had "good" bikes from Santa, but it was the "beaters" we rode everywhere -- including pounding our tails off riding for miles on the railroad's crossties... But our favorite summertime "trick tracks" were the huge, dry, surface drainage ditches that abound on the Texas Gulf Coast (between Houston and Galveston Bay).
We never bothered with "fancy stuff" like fenders, chain guards or kickstands -- because they would surely get "thrashed" anyway. (You could spot a "beater bike" owner: their right jeans leg usually showed signs of "chain bite"...)
We learned some physics, too -- because we were thrilled to find scrapped bikes with different tooth-count rear or front sprockets. We had a great time messing with different ratios. (No ten-speeds -- or three-speeds -- for us!)
I guess the older we are at this juncture the more daring and uncontrolled our childhood...I was born in 1938, and remember vividly BB-Gun wars (no eyes put out), jumping off a bridge into the swirling tidal rip at the age of 7 and 8 - no cops no complaints - no disciplinary suggestions... Hell - we raised Hell and had a wonderful time, invented all sorts of games, usually variations of the Marines landing on Guadal or Tarrawa, used names that would today put us or our parents in Court, and never (that I remember) hurt ANYBODY, or even ourselves. I was the fastest draw of my cap gun, and went on to the Marines one day to shoot as well. I cherish a lot of those memories, and defy any present day social and intellectual eunuch to suggest that what they enforce today is one particle better!
i’m sorry...indeed...girls were under tighter rein then to roam....no doubt
How’s this for an old memory....late 50’s. My Grandmother(Baba) used to sour her own sauerkraut. She would place my brother and I in the cement stationary laundry tubs in her cellar to scrub our feet....put clean white cotton socks on our feet....then place us standing in huge crocks to stomp on the raw shredded cabbage and salt...then jar the results once it was cured. PRICELESS!!!!
Yes, those were the days. I remember my first paor of ice skates at age 7. I was thrilled, I spent many after school hours on the frozen pond from the time I walked to the pond until it was dark and I knew I had to get home the quickest way was along the RR tracks. From this falling down and getting bloody to playing on the high school team. The concern that my parents had was don’t be late for supper as you will have to eat it cold.
Summers were another grand adventure - camp out in the woods with our sleeping bags made from old blankets with safety pins holding them to-gether, no adults allowed. Built a log cabin with the gang, jeesh, we had axes and saws we were twelve, eleven, we didn’t cut our fingers off or get trapped by a falling tree.
Leaping from the roof of a building to a light pole guy wire with cardboard folded in our hands so we could slide down without burning our hands. Was a good time to be a child. My kids had almost the same as they were born in the covered period, I didn’t worry that they went to the pind and caught crawdads, or came home covered with mud from falling off the raft they made.
I feel for my grandkids they will not know the fabulous feeling of freedom that we had as children.
Meh. I bet YOUR pickup truck had SIDES around the bed. We rode around on the flatbed, clinging to whatever we could for dear life - and loving it!
We've tried to provide our children with freedom. We let them get dirty, sent them to 7 weeks of old-fashioned boys' camp in New Hampshire, sent them out to play in the stream and woods in the back yard, and provided them with Scout camping trips. They've had more independence than most of their school friends, and yet they think we're over-protective. We each need to do what we can to help youngsters develop independence and to give them some space to play. It's harder than it was in our time. Their pals are all in structured programs, academic "enrichment camps", and otherwise protected from "wasting their time" or getting hurt. Today our guys helped my husband clear the driveway and now are out playing in the fresh 15 inches of snow. They're throwing snow into the stream, attempting to build a land bridge to another continent (along with throwing it at each other, of course). Good old fashioned fun, even at 14 and 16!
1946. Grew up in Long Beach, California. Rode my bike everywhere. Took the P.E. (aka Red Car) by myself up to downtown L.A. to see relatives. Made stops in Willowbrook, Watts, etc. Never bothered by anybody. As others have said, it was a different and IMHO better world then.
Dialing 911 is the government’s twisted idea of Dail-a-Parayer.
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