To all the kids that were born in the

[paladin]

1930's, 40's and 50's!!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.


They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.


Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.


We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.


As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.


Riding in the back of a pick up 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 and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because.....


WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!


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 O.K.


We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride 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 Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!


We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no

lawsuits from these accidents.


We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.


We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,

made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.



We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!


Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!


The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!


This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!


The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.


We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned


HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT ALL!


And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!


You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.


and while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.


Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!






PS -The big type is because your eyes are shot at your age

[rbgarr]

Except for a healthier mother, unpainted crib and seat belts (always, duh!) my children grew up the same way in the 80s and 90s... and have turned out much better than me: more accomplished, travelled, and self sufficient.

So what's the problem again? Perhaps the parents and not 'the times' or 'the government'?

[LeeG]

that's good, we wore t-shirts, not suntan lotion. Mothers day mom got a clay ash tray. But luckily enough we got the health class saying it was bad. Mom got lung cancer. We tried getting dad to stop by putting a lady finger firecracker in one of his Kent cigarettes,,he didn't stop and we ran when it turned out not to be funny.


"we're over the bluff, back before dinner"

Dad had a fog horn to call us to dinner.

I think my first touch asking for divine intervention was climbing up a 100' sandstone bluff with loose rocks and no one was around.

[Ron Carter]

I've reminded my kids a number of times that mom smoked a pack a day and had 2 manhattans for dinner when she carried them. For that matter so did I at that time. When they were older they rode in the back of the pickup under the topper on trips. I've asked them how much better they might have turned out if raised in today's world.

[Bruce Hooke]

Then there are all the people who might now be around or who might have lived much healthier, happier lives if not for some of the things listed above. I can think of not a few people gone before their time from that generation. One good friend would most likely have grown up with a father in her life if that father had been wearing a helmet when he rode his moped home for lunch back before helmets were considered the norm for such activities. I've also seen the lifelong health consequences of being born to a mother who drank too much while she was pregnant. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is not a pretty thing.

[LeeG]

hell, middle aged alcoholism is not a pretty thing

[bamamick]

smoke or drank) you hit my childhood pretty much right on. My dad had a ship's bell that my grandfather had from somewhere and he hung it off of a board between two pine trees. When my mom wanted me to come home someone would go out and ring the bell. I had about 1,000 acres of pines to ramble in as a kid and when I heard the bell I would run all the way (my dad's mood was not always predictable and a swift return was the better idea).

From the time that I was about five until I was into middle school I played some kind of ball game just about every day. I have played football games that lasted five or six hours (without commercial interruption, of course!) and baseball games that went 100 innings. Watching television was not something that I gave a second thought to, but I did read for at least 15 minutes every night.

We got clothes at the beginning of the school year and at Christmas. Christmas and your birthday was a REALLY big deal because that's the only time that you got anything outside of the food on the table. At the end of the school year my mom would cut the worn-out knees off of my jeans so that I had shorts. Mom made all of my shirts for school. I used to go get my hair cut with my dad once every two weeks. Crew cut, off course.

So many memories. We weren't allowed to open the refrigerator. You ate at meals and you had better eat everything with a smile on your face. I didn't have a BB gun at 10. I had a .22 at about 7 or 8, but I was taught strict rules on the use of the gun by a man who really, really cared (my father). To this day if I see a small child point anything that's supposed to look like a gun at another child I cringe. We just did NOT do that.

My grandfather owned sawmills, a car dealership, and other businesses in rural Arkansas before the Depression. Once that hit he went to work as a law enforcement officer in Arkansas, Georgia, and Alabama, where the family wound up. Eventually he wound up in Mobile where he had one last mill and bought 50 acres of land. My grandfather on my mother's side lost a leg in WWII and came home to work as an Alabama State Trooper until he retired. His family were all shrimpers in a little stretch of mosquito infested sand called Orange Beach, now one the nicer resorts on the Gulf Coast.

My dad worked in a sawmill at the age of 12, was in the Navy for 6 years, and wound up working in an asphalt plant for over 40 years. My mom stayed home with us until I was six and it was determined that I was old enough to take care of my sister. Then she went back to work as a bank teller, eventually becoming the office manager of a medical supply company.

Everything that I am and the way that I have lived my life is because of the influence of these people. Scrupulously honest, hard working, but with sympathetic hearts and full of compassion for people who have it worse than they do, and with more appreciation for where they are than 90% of the people you will meet. My parents are the kind of people who get taken to the bank by con men because they just can't believe that someone could look you in the eye and lie to you. People who have never told a lie are like that, I guess. I just can't express in words what they have meant to me.

Paladin, your post is one of the reasons why this is a great site. Thank you.

Mickey Lake

[geeman]

Yes I am the product of honest parents.My mom also smoked while pregnant,I came out fine.I wasnt exposed to drinking or drunks until I was almost grown.In summer all I wore was a pair of shorts, no shoes, and played in the woods all day long,sometimes with friends ,sometimes alone.The rule was I could go as far from home as I wanted ,as long as I was back before dark.And that can be pretty far on a bike.We watched 3 channels on Tv and it didnt occur to us that we were deprived.Lucy was QUEEN of the airwaves ,and so Matt Dillion and Jackie Gleason were the kings.I did learn during that time that evil people will kill people that you admire ( JACK,BOBBY.I also learned what "duck and cover means" when I was taught to run out in the hall in school during bomb drills.I had a wonderful childhood ,was very happy until I got to my teen years and met real people that took delight in hurting people.I also learned for the 1st time that rich people were a diferent breed,and took delight in letting you know it.All my early childhood it never occured to me that we were poor,until my teens years and my "peers" pointed it out.numerous times.People did get killed in car wrecks,and they still do,,

[LeeG]

having to wear shoes,,it was like being hobbled,,,"BUT WHY????"

"because you can't go to school barefoot"

"WHHHYYYYYYYY????"

oh the tragedy of it all....

[brad9798]

WOW! What a great post Mickey. Very touching ... very moving.

And thanks for starting the thread, Chuck.

[Moonshadow]

Good stories!

One thing, aside from all the fretting we now do about health, that was very different was the pace of things. It seems to me that nothing much changed for my first fifteen years or so, and then blam, sometime around the middle of Vietnam it shifted gears and hasn't stopped accelerating since. Hell, I remember not having a TV! And when we finally scratched enough shekels together to get one it only pulled in three stations!

We didn't own a car until I was two or three. Dad caught the corner bus to work.

An openness between neighbors was also in the air. I grew up in a great post WW II neighborhood that was chocked full of the kids of the baby boom. Everybody knew each other, and the entire 'hood was our oyster. A kid would break an arm falling off your swing set, or get nipped by your dog, and no one even thought about hiring a lawyer. Kids will be kids, dogs dogs.

There were fewer grumps around. A few, but not many. Old man Smith, a widower who was fussy about his poseys, would yell at you if you so much as glanced in his yard, but we learned to avoid him. For the rest, the yards and fields were open, and we rarely abused the priviledge by being noxious little monsters. We learned manners, and when you did something wrong there was very strict hell to pay. Nothing terribly violent in my case, an occasional good spanking, but I knew, in no uncertain terms, that such behavior would not be tolerated and towed the line.

How about today's experience of kids in public? Parents seem to think junior's palate has only golden colors. I was at a restaurant, a decent Tai place recently, and one set of parents had no control of their kids. They were running amock, being noisy and generally obnoxious. One cheeky little bastard came up and tried to eat off our plates! A withering look at the parents got a, "Oh isn't he so cute" response. NO! He's disrupting my nice dinner. Sit him down and make him shut up! If you're incapable of disciplining your children, please leave. I didn't say that, but that's what I thought.

A helmet? A helmet was worn when you got to junior high and went out for the football team. Funny, I don't remember one kid being badly injured while riding his bike.


It wasn't paradise. I'm sure there was a share of backbiting and gossip and adultery etc., all the things that go with any neighborhood, but as a six year old it came pretty close. For about twenty years 1945-1965 we knew who we were: our parents had survived the depression, won the war, and were now relatively prosperous and at peace with themselves; on about the business of making a living, raising a family, and keeping the lawn mowed. It was a truly lucky generation.

Again, the change in pace seems remarkable to me. Anyone else notice it, sometime after JFK was gunned down? It's like a ball set in motion at the top of a steep hill and it doesn't seem to be bottoming out anytime soon.

[geeman]

Jacks killing is what changed the world as I knew it too ISH errr Moonshadow ,,,,,,,,,,,

[Rick Clark]

Life was good in the old days and are just about the same today, I just don't ride the bike as far.

[TomF]

Where I live, I think the changes have a lot to do with simple demographics. While there's a crop of quite young kids on my street, my daughter and older son have nobody closeby who's anything like near their ages. When I was a kid, there was a pack of about 8-12 of us available, pretty much every day, just from within a couple of blocks. But from my house, I can throw a rock and hit two closed elementary schools.

Not having anyone closeby means that kids have to be driven around, or schlumped off to organized events (soccer etc.) just so they'll see kids their own ages. Never happened in my day.

At least in Fredericton, there really aren't the worries about violence, or various kinds of rebellious behaviour ... at least, not any more worry than when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. But there's precious few to grow up with now, in some locales...

[LeeG]

YES! Rick,,you are exactly right. All you gotta do is go to a park or boat ramp and see a grand dad and a kid or someone with a dog.

[brad9798]

I guess I live in a sort of engineered small town ... seems to be the trend of late.

Tidy houses on tree-lined streets ... alleyways with no driveways in the front ... great neighbors with lots of kids playing at any given time ... the boardwalk market place where we can walk a block to get anything we need, really.

I'm about 45 minutes west of St. Louis, and I love it.

The peacefulness, the serenity, the safety ... all good stuff.

[Cuyahoga Chuck]

Hold the phone all you revelers!
How good was it? Well, if you was born in the thirties there was a modest chance you would not be around in the forties. Of course, things got better if you were born later.
Being a family historian I have spent many eye-straining hours going thru' microfilms of pre-WWII newspapers reading obituaries. What struck me was the number of people who died at, what I would consider, early ages. And the number of children who died, while not large, was eyepopping, nonetheless.
The people that I was reading about lived in a major city with plenty of doctors and hospitals but medical knowledge and technology was infantile compared to what it is now.
The air, at that time, was fouled by a thousand industries pumping out pollutants. There were signs on all the streetcars warning that spitting was a punishable offence. They were still worried about the spread of TB.
I still look upon that time fondly even if it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.

Charlie

[Moonshadow]

As I said, a close look tells it wasn't a paradise. All kinds of problems, Being black was a terrible burden because of prejudice and structural racism. The sword of the bomb hung over our heads. The doubt of a war in Asia wore on us.

With JFK's assassination, something changed. I was only six, and I don't remember the details well, but something, some innocence and hope, got quashed. I felt it like you feel cold on a winter night without enough blankets. We hunched, became uncertain, febrile, angry, cold. Johnson, uncle cornpone as the Kennedy clan called him, commanded the force and took us deeply into a war that we've never quite gotten over. Anyone conscious at that time knows it is seminal to what we are now.

All the wild machinations I think are part of this acceleration. Carter, Mr. nice guy Christian who was a failure at president. Reagan, "It's morning in America again." Billy Boy, with his dipsy doodles. There was a lucky man! The Berlin wall had fallen, and he could govern in a time of relative peace. He did some good things, like welfare reform which has put many people back to work, gave them substance again. I still think he's an unctious politician.

Didn't last long, eh? And here we are, with a dimwit controlled by Svengalis at the helm.

Ah well, this too shall pass. It's one of the fine things about America that every two and four years we get to elect another bunch of idiots.