Posted on 09/10/2023 7:35:22 PM PDT by DallasBiff
[[His family lived on a dead end street.
We would drive it after school, up and down the street.]]
We had a large field that we .earned to drive in, which we tore up from one end to the other- it taught us valuable skills for correcting slides, spinning out, how,to handle a fishtailing car, doing burnouts lol. We were lucky and lived in the boonies where we could drive the roads and not get caught.
The roads were covered in our burnout marks.
I went to pick my brother up from driver’s Ed, and I thought I’d show off, and did a burnout out of the parking lot... bad move... cops were just coming around the corner right as I did it. Felt about 2 inches tall lol.
[[Read later.]]
The whole thread is worth the read! Some really great stories of growing up free and carefree.
Didn’t mention riding in the bed of a pickup truck. Did that often when the family car was on the fritz. Being one of 6 siblings there was not room in the cab for all 8 of us.
They didn’t mention kids getting locked inside refrigerators back when they had mechanical (instead of magnetic) catches on them.
We never went home when the street lights came on. We lived 3 miles from the nearest burg. No street lights.
Also, never followed any DDT sprayers. We lived with the damn bugs. Flies so thick the cows’ tails never stopped moving.
Rode the bus to school, but you still had to wait at the end of the long lane in the cold or rain until it got there. Sometimes earlier than scheduled, sometimes later. The neighbor girls freezing in their short short skirts because they refused to wear pants like boys!
I think sugary breakfast cereals are still a thing with significant demographics.
Quisp!
We used to empty out the cereal boxes after we came home from the supermarket to get the toys inside.
Or cut glass dishes in boxes of oatmeal.
Lol,@ the street lights. We didn’t know what street lights were practically. The moon was our only source of light for finding our way out of the woods to get back home by.
I do remember them spraying though, but it didn’t seem to do much good. Deer flies and horse flies were a constant bane- mosquitos and black flies and midges too. Nowadays they carry west nile and zika too, and where I live now, they haven’t sprayed in years, and the mosquitos have been really really bad. It used to,be a tourist town, but folks have been staying away because they are so bad now- we just wait till early fall and touhg it out till then- the tourists though have been driven from the area
I don’t know anything about that stuff. Some of the kids would have red stains on their knees and arms.
In 1968 we had a lot of kids, like everyone. Lived in a great spot on the gold coast of LI. We still got treated like urchins. The whole neighborhood. Walking around casts, bandaged. We were barefoot from June to September except for Church. No exaggeration
Our GP- family MD- later told me he had given his nurse/assistant a standing order- if Mrs Whoozywhatz (my mother) calls, just hang up and call an ambulance to the house.
Forget about it.
It says “currently unavailable” lol
Yes, but texting cost a fortune, as did carrier pigeon.
Ah, jeez. Easy come, easy go.
I was fascinated by farm machinery and airplanes, riding along with Dad as early as 4 years old. By age 6 he had me driving an Oliver 88 pulling a 4 section harrow (not much too it, as you just drag it, there was no raising or lowering it. But being 24 feet wide, you just had to stay clear of the fences when turning at each end of the field). Dad was in the same field plowing with the John Deere 730 diesel.
A week before I turned 7 he had me on the JD730, raking oat straw so he could go cut oats for the neighbors. Unsupervised, I thought I was big stuff, doing big man’s work.
My mistake was making myself useful at that early age. Work, work, work, it was all the time it seemed. Except for things like an occasional game of blind tag in us kids’ second home: the wonderful big maple in our front yard.
Now that I have kids of my own I understand what we put my parents through and how they had to bite their lip and just be thankful we hadn't managed to kill ourselves.
But tough is the right word, the world is rough so you have to be tough could almost have been the family motto.
i agree, tho I have an aunt that was born in 1933 she will turn 90 in a few months. she hates the way our america has turned out.
my aunt, her two kids and myself refused the jabs too.
That’s so cool that you kept your classmates’ signatures!
Not stupid at all to think of breaking a bone as a rite of passage — we were encouraged to run and play hard, accidents happened with sports, metal playground equipment and bikes, and parents didn’t sue. Doctors charged affordable rates before BigMedicine (and the taxpayer subsidizing welfare and illegal aliens’ clinics, too).
I remember so many kids with arms in a cast and slings made out of old bed sheets, crutches for broken lower limbs and heavy plaster casts covered with signatures. Can’t remember what we signed with before felt markers became ubiquitous around 1958.
The girls from wealthy families had pink or green casts—food coloring or paint mixed into the plaster at the orthopedist’s office, I guess. Most of us schlubs had plain white plaster with gauze wrapped around it before it dried, and a wooden stump on the bottom of the leg casts.
The casts soon got dirty. You had to tie a plastic garbage bag up around a cast in order to take a shower so the plaster wouldn’t dissolve. Can’t remember what we did before plastic garbage bags became affordable, also around 1960 — probably had to stand at the sink and wash with a cloth, like in Victorian days.
Broken collar bones, arms, legs, ankles, foot bones, fingers — all part of growing up.
The thing I remember, was “cast off day”, the Doctor showed me that the buzz saw to cut the cast off, didn’t hurt the skin.
Yes, those were the days of growing up free and carefree. Going to a friend’s house unscheduled and walking to school by yourself are unsafe nowadays? I walked a mile to school for 7 years. I loved visiting playgrounds afterwards. Of course, I walked on an air force base. I never wore a bike helmet and never needed one. Guess I was lucky. Plus, I loved candy and Froot Loops growing up. Didn’t have a cavity until I was 12. Going to beach alone: I got caught in a rip tide once. I eventually swam in enough to get out of it. I found out it was a rip tide years later. Lucky that day.
lol- i was a sugar hound and only had 1 cavity until i was 40- then all hell broke loose-
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