Posted on 01/01/2015 1:17:04 PM PST by the scotsman
I'll bet it was a real conversations starter.
LOL! Being a kid in the 50’s was brutal. What with all those cap guns and rubber tipped arrows puttin’ kids eyes out. No helmets when careening down hills on bicycles at a thousand miles an hour. Some of us didn’t make it. No car seats, no seatbelts, ridin’ in the back of pick up trucks. Surprising a whole generation wasn’t totally wiped out. Then in the 60’s WE started driving. Yikes!
Don’t we still have forced busing and predator priests? I was subjected to both, but survived.
Funny. I came back to the states in 1971 in Prince Georges County in Maryland (near Andrews AFB) and went to Surrattsville High the first year they began busing. It was very tense and uncomfortable. Being a military dependent, I had gone to school with kids of all kinds, but having it forced was very stressful.
I remember an incident where a kid got beat up by a bunch of the new bussed in students, and came to school with a shotgun the next day and fired it into a bunch of their lockers. Don’t recall what happened to him.
I never see kids outdoors much anymore. They seem to stay inside all the time, apparently playing computer games and texting one another. It’s getting downright weird. And probably indeed “safer” for the little snowflakes.
Kids used to roam all around and explore their environment. I explored the underground storm drains, went out in the woods with my pellet-gun, fished at the nearby bayou, and biked every single road and sidewalk within a ten mile radius from home. Yeah, there was probably more ‘danger’ to a kid’s life back then, building treehouses, doing wheelies, throwing rocks, and such. But I have a strong notion it also cultivated a more beneficial “can do” attitude and education than what the current technological-tunnelview age is presenting.
Hahahahahaha...that’s great! Good comeback for someone LOOKING for an “inheritance”...:)
That’s hilarious. We used to spend a lot of time experimenting with various gunpowders and other explosives. We also had a couple of quart jars of mercury... that stuff was fun. I know it sounds horrifically dangerous, but it’s what we did. I have to keep chatter to a minimum because the things we did for fun back then draw the attention of DHS now. As a side note, we never blew anything up that didn’t need it and it was always on our own property (while my parents were gone)
I’m 52. I walked to kindergarten. It was around the block along and across a Main Street. On occasion I’d shortcut through the woods. 1-6 grade was at a different school about 1/2 mile away. Walked home for lunch every day too.
Exactly. I suspect if you let kids do that nowadays you might get a visit of some kind from a governmental agency.
Yea I know, I was trying to buy one for my dad as a Christmas present a couple years back and the damn things go for a couple grand in nice condition
I walked to kindergarten in 1961-62. Orange County town of about 35,000 at the time.
Busing was a disaster. I wonder why someone doesn’t compile memoirs from that time from the suburbs. Maybe NPR could do a series on it...lol.
Forty years from now, that video game player will be suffering from complications of COPD, osteoporosis, circulatory problems, diabetes and will probably already be in some kind of motorized personal transport. Delayed, but just as deadly in the end.
Childhood prolonged is not childhood safer.
I grew up on a ranch-one of the favorite things kids did was to help rid the pasture, pen and yard of destructive insects-like fire ants.
You got a container gunpowder out of somebody’s dad’s workshop-no need to get matches-we all carried matches or a lighter back then-you find an ant nest, gently pour gunpowder into the hole and in a trail leading at least 8 feet or so away. Light the end of the gunpowder trail, run like hell and hit the dirt-it goes BOOM, dirt and ants go into the air, then rain down and the crater that is left smolders very nicely while you dust off, laugh and go looking for another ant nest...
In all fairness, in the 1970s there were a lot of hazards for kids to face. Air and water pollution was still pretty bad. Lead in paint wasn’t banned until 1978. Lots of arsenic around as well.
The gun control act of 1968 was driving violent crime rates up. Most deinstitutionalization of mental patients in the US took place after 1972, turning tens of thousands of mental patients loose, many without the means to care for themselves.
In the early 1970s, radical leftists were all about “the revolution”, but president Nixon pulled the rug out from under them by ending the draft. Then congress passed the The Case–Church Amendment, ending the war, and most of the impulse behind the radicals evaporated.
Kids during this post-Baby Boomer time were just given the hand-me-downs of the Boomers, and the downside of social movements like feminism, smarmy multiculturalism, and very lowered expectations.
I was in a Boy Scout "explorer troop" for electronics back when I was in eighth and ninth grade. Meetings were held at a General Electric training site in our town (this was in the late '60s).
There were a pair of twin brothers that were regulars. Both were obsessed with explosives. They made nitroglycerine, ammonium iodide, and various metal fulminates. I remember them bringing samples of fulminate of mercury and fulminate of silver. Just a tiny pinch of these, wrapped up in a tight ball of Kleenex and secured with a rubber band, would give off an amazing bang when lit with a match.
They lived on a farm, and told harrowing stories of the various explosions they had presided over. The original "that blowed up real good" brothers.
Assuming they survived, I'm sure they had interesting careers.
My cub was brought up in the 70s-my husband and I were country kids, but needed to be within 20-30 miles of our jobs-gas was expensive-we bought in a funky little ‘burb in BFE that was large cheap lots on woods and a creek, nothing fancy, and houses that didn’t even look like they belonged together-it was great. The kid grew up playing outdoors, running in the woods, hunting rabbits with a gun-gasp! and playing in the creek with her friends, but knew to get home for dinner when she heard me or her dad yell at the back gate at 5PM or so.
It was the best we could do since moving back to the country was not feasible at that time She grew up in one piece and knows how to take care of herself...
I call BS. First, the millions killed in the womb, second, there is a striking increase in nasty diseases. Then add the childhood type 2 diabetes.. Pure statistical bs.
And skate boards were the thing back then. No helmets, pads, etc.
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