When I Was A Kid: Reflections Of A 50-Year-Old American

The Family Security Foundation ^ | 01-16-2013 | EDWARD L. DALEY

[Cocoa2012]

The United States of America was the greatest nation in the history of the world, bar none, and just about every American school kid knew why

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/when-i-was-a-kid-reflections-of-a-50-year-old-american?f=must_reads

[BykrBayb]

Those shows were easily seen in syndication on cable, in the 1980s and beyond. Not so much in the early 1970s.

[DH]

“Books were more popular than food stamps.”

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Food stamps?

I’m 66 and we did not have food stamps back then. The government only gave them basic food items and nothing else......period!

There is no way that this “author” lived back then and he only plagiarized the writing of someone else.

[ealgeone]

Man, I’m right there with you. I remember black and white tv shows and loved them. I remember Petticoat Junction and really liking the red head, along with the train. I used to like watching the news and remember thinking what I was seeing on the news wasn’t matching up with what I was reading in my history books.

I had the advantage of growing up in a very small rural town so we were insulated against a lot of the change but it did eventually get to us. Sad to say.

I remember talking with my dad and telling him he grew up in the greatest time in American history.

We have really gone downhill.

[yldstrk]

What I remember is teachers, firemen, cops and all other government workers made about 20K a year or less, and you knew if you worked for the gov’t you weren’t gonna get rich and that was fine.

[Cocoa2012]

Odd that most posts are responding to the TV part of the article and if the guy was accurate with the TV show, dates ad his age. What I found compelling what the entire article and how things use to be and how they are now.

[Thorliveshere]

Don’t care what age he is. He still nails it.

[DARCPRYNCE]

What does the age at which the author may have become politically aware have to do with anything? Just because a child may not have been cognizant of certain political realities back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. That’s why the word REFLECTIONS is used in the title. It’s written by the adult that the child grew up to be.

[Fiji Hill]

Some of these reminiscences sound rather curious for someone born around 1963.

• Most black voters were Republicans. Most blacks were Democrats since long before the author was born. The Republicans got only 13 percent of the vote during the Nixon landslide in 1972, and it was even smaller in 1968 and 1976. Where the writer was living, where the black vote was so much at odds with the national trend?

• The greatest movie ever made was The Great Escape. The Great Escape was in the theaters in 1963. Could he be referring to a televised version or a re-release?

• Video games were things you played at arcades, unless you were lucky enough to get an Atari Pong console for Christmas. Atari Pong went on the market for consumers in 1975, so the time period to which the author alludes must be the latter half of the decade.

• Our heroes were people like George Washington, Neil Armstrong, Mother Teresa, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, General George S. Patton and Albert Einstein. Mother Theresa? I don't recall her name being a household word until the late 1970's, when she won a Nobel Prize.

• Abortion wasn't a privacy issue, it was a moral issue, and people who committed abortions weren't "pro-choice", they were baby killers. "Abortion rights" became a big issue in the late '60's, the "Equal Rights Amendment" sailed through Congress and seemed on the way to being passed in 1972, and Roe versus Wade was handed down in early 1973. By the time the author came of age, much of the nation's liberal elite was "pro-choice."

  The author must have lived in a rural area, far from a major media market, and with a predominately Republican electorate.

[DARCPRYNCE]

Nowhere in the article is The Donna Reed Show even mentioned. The image of that show’s characters would almost certainly have been chosen by the editors of the website that published the article, not its author. Most op-ed writers don’t include pictures with their written submissions.

[Cocoa2012]

Agree! I am a new “teacher’s aide” for 3rd grade - and every day I think back about how things use to be in school. Did we have all these problems ? Why do kids today have these problems? Absentee parents? I am at a loss....

[Buckeye McFrog]

You are right about that.

I am around this age. When I was a kid I had Liberals, the Media, and various people in the school system telling me that the Age of America was OVER because we had to evacuate the embassy in Saigon and now the world’s peoples were rising up against our colonialism and capitalist oppression in places like Iran. The future was going to be one of Kumbaya Global Socialism.

Of course I quickly figured out that was all B.S. Most of us did (the main notable exception being Barack Hussein Obama).

[DARCPRYNCE]

The author doesn’t imply that the programs to which you refer were the main shows of his childhood. In fact, he doesn’t even mention them. The picture posted with the article is an editorial addition that has nothing to do with the substance of the piece.

[rfreedom4u]

I for one like this article. It brings back some of my memories of my childhood.

[DARCPRYNCE]

If you read the article, you’ll note that The Donna Reed Show isn’t mentioned in it. Images added to most op-eds are usually chosen by the publication’s editors, not the authors of the articles to which those images are applied.

[Fiji Hill]

“and the 50’s really WAS Ozzie and Harriet, and The Beav, and the Beach Boys.

No, not the Beach Boys. They were formed in 1961, and their first hit record charted in early 1962.

[BykrBayb]

I think he did a fair job of summing up the attitudes that were prevalent back then.

I don’t know if he has older siblings, but I do. As a result I grew up with a keen awareness of pop culture from up to a decade before my own generation.

Whether or not Leave It To Beaver was still on the air when he was growing up is of little consequence. That was still the world that most young children were living in.

Their older siblings may have run off to join a commune, but young children were still shielded from the horrors to come. They didn’t know anything about sex, much less sexual deviancy. They still played cowboys & indians, and dreamed of accomplishing great things.

They knew that America was the greatest nation ever, in the entire history of the world. And they were right.

[DARCPRYNCE]

The food stamp program was in existence in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 was the beginning of the modern age of federal food supplement benefits dissemination, and in the early ‘70s it was expanded.

[dfwgator]

No, not the Beach Boys. They were formed in 1961, and their first hit record charted in early 1962.

Of course, Brian Wilson went on to get hooked on LSD, and Dennis Wilson hung out with Charles Manson.

[Fiji Hill]

Mom got her monthly bricks of Government cheese and cans of government Pulled Pork,

That came to the attention of a soul singer from Detroit:

Welfare Cheese--Emmanuel Laskey (1963)

[Fiji Hill]

Of course, Brian Wilson went on to get hooked on LSD, and Dennis Wilson hung out with Charles Manson.

Seems they quickly got into the '60's counterculture.