Posted on 09/10/2023 7:35:22 PM PDT by DallasBiff
Yes. If it rained we wore black rubber rain boots over our shoes and yellow rubber rain coats.
Everybody. We piled the boots in a corner, hung the coats on pegs.
except for stickball in the ztreet, all else YUP!
when we playdd war, that mosquiti fog truck was just right to sneak up on the other kids and then blast them with my Mattel Combay Sgt Saunders tommy gun!
Car wrecks. High dives. Head injuries neck injuries.
we [somehow] grew up [and survived] ALL 27!
27 mostly wimpy things compared to what we did in the Sixites. I didnt see Mercuachrome in the list but my Nana would swab my sore throat with the stuff, and it worked too.
Go unescorted to a friends house? lol, we would take off on our bikes ride several miles to a lake and fish off the spillway. Wrecked my bike, fell off the handlebars, fell out of trees, etc - one of my brothers fell backwards out of a moving convertible and no broken bones, a couple of scuffs thats all. I was in worse shape propelled from the back seat to front when my Mom slammed on those Cadillac power brakes!
Kids today dont know what FUN is.
I can give you a MUCH more recent example, my father’s family.
If you include only those that were born and lived to adulthood in the 20th century, their average age at death is 82.6 years, but if you include the infant deaths, that average drops to 59.3 years.
THAT is why the “average age at death” in the middle ages was ~34. If you made it past 6 years of age, and avoided industrial death, you lived just as long as today.
Don’t kid yourself, there were abductions too. I had a friend “disappear” in the ‘60s. I have no doubt there were others.
Yes, we got hurt, but that taught us to avoid that kind of activity. Through my years in school, there was at least one, and as many as six kids died during the school year, EVERY YEAR, some during school activities. I went to relatively small (the biggest was 950 students) schools
The press is the biggest reason for the fear. Because there are many more people, more events occur. The press blows every one of these events into the greatest crisis the human race has ever faced.
That you don’t see the artificial hysteria is a testament to the effectiveness of the propaganda.
One summer afternoon at our property, a couple of acres in the back yard which had chain link fencing, I was at the very back climbing over in my swim trunks and the sharp pointed ends scratched my leg and caught my trunks, but that material was tough and supported my weight so I was suspended between heaven and earth and could not get down.
I hollered for a good while with a bloody leg but I was stuck hanging there for nearly a hour until the neighbors found me. Im certain I made a great impression on their daughter, too. At least in 1969 people in did not have cell phones or there would have been photographic evidence of the incidence - and thank God school was out or the story would have been general knowledge the next day.
One option would have been wiggle out of the trunks, but then I would have been indecently exposed!
I remember the Schaefer’s jingle!
“Hydrogen peroxide takes the blood out of carpets.”
A life lesson that still serves today!
My dad must have been in high school when he filled a baby food jar with match heads, drilled a hole in the top for a fuse, sealed it with plumber’s putty, lit it and ran. Of he hadn’t been behind a wooden fence, he’d have been hit by the shrapnel.
In the 90’s, there were still a handful of parents who let us run wild. My mom grew up in Chicago, so she was protective. I had to fight to sell lemonade in the front yard...
I'd sling my .22 and ride my bike around the lake into the village. At the gas station/bar/general store, I'd buy a box of .22LR hollow points, $1, ride thru town, (Pop 200.), and out to the dump. The guy who ran the bull dozer didn't mind if I shot rats...
We did just about the whole list and survived but had a heck of a fun time doing it too.
We had a drogue chute from military surplus tied to a rope and slung over the highest branch on a big oak tree that Dad could reach. You pulled the rope as you lifted your feet and hoisted yourself up into the limbs of the tree. You could see all over the neighborhood!
At five I got my first .22 and that same year drove an Allis WD-45 squarely into the corner post of the pig pen. Hand clutch and I just couldn’t get it pulled out of gear. My cousins and had a rope swing in grainery and we landed in the shelled corn. That could have killed us if we had sunk in.
Then there was the time I was jumping the pond bank on the motorcycle and when Dad came home from work I wanted to show him a good jump. Watch this! Went clear over the pond bank, motorcycle caught high in a tree and I didn’t. Nothing broken and a relieved laugh by Dad.
We went just about everywhere in the summer in the back of a pickup, winter too sometimes in sleeping bags and covered with a big canvas tarp. Head near the tailgate is least wind.
Broken arms were just one of those things. Not much in the way of ortho drama and pins and all that stuff. They were sometimes set in the doctor’s office. My sis had to have a couple of pins in hers. I broke / cracked both arms and wrists on the same day. College.
The statute of limitations has not run out on some of the other things Dad let us do but he is gone now so he won’t be in trouble. Bull riding on the neighbors little Mexican bull dogging stock. That was a riot but not for long.
#24...
Spare the rod, spoil the child.
Not saying you have to leave
a mark on ‘em as most types
of this level of discipline were
ment as a ‘scare’ tactic. Never
was a time in our family where
our parents administered this type
of discipline out of hate or
emotions run wild. And we learned
very quickly what the boundaries
were.
I spent the last hour setting up a candy bar lineup
“I can remember riding a bicycle behind the DDT truck. “
Yep!
And following the garbage truck guys every Thursday morning in the summer to pick through the neighbor’s trash! (Got a lot of good books)
I wasn’t born until the 70s but a lot of these were still quite familiar. My parents did not smoke and were strict about safety in the car so everyone had to be buckled up at all times but otherwise.....yep.
We used to make big dirt piles, lay plywood on them and jump them (and anything else we could) on our dirt bikes. Numerous scrapes and even broken bones were the inevitable result. Nobody wore a helmet.
When I was 13-14 some of us kids rode the 4 miles to town with our guns across the handlebars and went to the hardware to trade these guns for others.
My brother won a candy selling contest when he was in 9th grade, one of the prizes he could choose was a semi auto 22 rifle and of course thats what he took. They gave it to him at school and he brought it home on the bus. That was about 1967.
If chewing bubble gum made a list of horrifying things that have been done, I’m not even gonna bother clicking in to read the rest...
There were something like three disappearances in my town in the late sixties early seventies but they were all teenage girls.
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