Posted on 07/06/2009 10:51:37 AM PDT by JoeProBono
Bike helmets? SPF? Veggie meals? No way, if you grew up in '50s, '60s, '70s When Phyllis Murphy's mother was pregnant, back in the 1950s, her doctor advised her to take up smoking for relaxation.
A few years later, that same mom smeared her toddler's skin with a concoction of baby oil and iodine for a deep, rich tan. Now, safely in adulthood in Vancouver, B.C., Murphy fondly recalls childhood as a time of leaping from rooftops and accumulating “more scars than Joan Rivers.” And Tim Palla, a 46-year-old pastor, spent his childhood just north of Pittsburgh where he got just one vaccination, gobbled wild berries and mushrooms, drank from the ditch, and chewed road tar like gum.
Like Palla and Murphy, many of us who were raised in the 1950s, '60s and '70s are survivors. We were tiny daredevils: sun-blasted, pocket-knife-carrying, bottom-spanked, cow eaters. We ran the streets armed with BB guns, boxing gloves and bottle rockets, wholly unprotected by bike helmets, sunscreen or Amber Alerts. Our houses were filled with the blue cigarette smoke of our cocktail-drinking parents and we believed it wasn’t supper without a mountain of red meat.....
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
We swam in the Missouri River, just downstream from where 4-packing houses dumped their blood and guts from the kills prior to learning such was valuable. Water had a red tinge and occasionally a cow organ chunk drifted by. Catfish the size of a small car. The river froze over and we could walk over to Nebraska in the winter. (Saved the dime bridge toll.)
Good old days
At the age of seven and a half we moved to larger house in the midst of the oil fields. My sister and I along with a dozen other kids spent our summer days free from the confines of adult supervision. We slid down grassy hills on cardboard box sleds, piled up tar covered rocks in a nearby creek to make a swimming pool, used jack knives to cut bits of tar from the roadway for chewing gum, created a variety of forts from high a top a chicken house to deep under an abandoned farmhouse.
I had a wonderful childhood.
Our family of eight rode thousands of miles on vacations WITHOUT seatbelts, with Dad smoking his stogie in an enclosed car. Those things (seatbelts) were once novelties!
And we could play all day as long as we were in before dark. And all the moms had implied permission to punish someone else’s kid who misbehaved.
Yes, I got spanked at age 4 by a neighbor who was concerned that I had decided to plop myself down in the middle of a street. I’m sure my mom thanked him for it.
...boot mounted luggage rack, ash tray, AM radio, heater, wire knock-off wheels,and lap belts. I remember my folks fretting that I would be thrown from the vehicle in an accident. I assured them that in the case of an accident I would be firmly impaled by the non-collapsible steering column which was essentially a piece of pipe pointed directly at the driver's heart.
Luv it!!!!
My mother said that her mother never did a lick of house work after her and her sisters could do it, they were Irish also. Couldn't cook either, my fathers mother showed her how.
I grew up in the woods playing Army, chopping down trees to make lean-to’s, and building ramps to jump our dirt bikes. We shot BB guns and .22s, sailed out to islands to camp without our parents, built fires, caught trout, and got into bottle rocket wars. It was a dusty, smoky, grass-stained and bug-bitten way to grow up... and it was phenomenal.
My children will be raised the same way.
Right field was the apple trees
The telephone-poled chickenwired backstop my dad made
The big maple I knew every branch on,
The tougher oak too.
Hide and seek with the mile away neighbor girls
Capture the flag at night
Lightning bugs
Stars, the moon and a Christmas telescope.
Dancing and showing off to the Music Man
Oklahoma, the console dropping platter after platter
Mom & dad in their chairs nodding appreciatively
King of the hill on the horse’s manure pile,
Digging for fat worms in it & feeding the bluegills with them
Bike for miles
No fear, truly free.
Stopping at Mrs. Burgher’s rhubarb patch –
She’d give a good fat stalk to me & I’d ride off into the ditch with sour tears.
Hiking through the woods waving sticks in front,
Tip, Rags, & Rogue smartly attending
Football, basketball, frog baseball, chicken
Snowforts, and sister
ABC’d on the steps
Cookies mom made when the bus couldn’t make it through the snow
We were kings of apple town, then
Yesirree!
Notcare had I at endless days
The ways
protected
must’ve been!
by some shimmering being.
I learned to drive tractors when I was in my early teens working on a dairy farm. I must say it gave me quite a boost of confidence driving these giant ( they seemed giant! ) tractors down the road to get to the next field.
Without reading replies, I’m wondering when the 1st argument will occur about how good it is that we have all these socialist safety-NAZI laws now “for the chhiiillllllldrennnn”.
I feel sorry for my baby boy. Bike-helmet nonsense is just the beginning.
Yeah, and lots of us could’ve prevented those thousands of car accidents by NOT DRIVING CARS.
I am so sick of this nanny-NAZI crap.
They have no right to tell me I must wear a seat belt or a helmet.
It’s absurd.
It was while living on a homestead near Roy, New Mexico, that my daddy first tasted Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. His mom placed a small handful of the flakes into a chipped teacup. He ate the flakes one by one without milk. He said they tasted like tiny cookies. The year was 1917.
I’d hate to put a damper on fun, but when I was a kid, the next-door neighbor’s adolescent son was fooling around with a homemade pipe bomb. That experiment cost him a hand and an eye.
I read a children’s story called “Follow My Leader” about a boy who was permanently blinded by a lit firecracker a frightened playmate tossed in his face. The rest of the story dealt with the boy’s coming to terms with his blindness and learning to use a guide dog, and eventually forgiving the kid who blinded him. It was a pretty sobering story and I still think about it, and about my neighbor.
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