My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting
board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food
poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw
sometimes too, our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown
paper bag not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting ecoli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a
pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a
pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of
high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I
can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us
how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must
be much harder than gym.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson [and provided comic
relief] by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and
hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only
knew we could have sued the school system.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem and
staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or
condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway)

What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours
wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was
allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station,
Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the
denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day
about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, built forts out of
branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be
the Lone Ranger. What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on
that lot? He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around
the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder
alarm.
Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got
that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left on vacant construction
sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of
Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine
did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency
room followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom
calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious
pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got
our butt spanked (physical abuse) there too and then we got butt spanked
again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down
the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks
(Remember why Tonka trucks were made tough .. it wasn't so that they could
take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded
gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure
that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on
two week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger
they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.

Summers were spent behind the push lawn mower and I didn't even know that
mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic
blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents? Of course my
parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny Reynolds from next door
coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell
off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead
she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a
neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they
were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?
We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes!

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even
notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever
survive?

That was a good read.

Thanks, I enjoyed that.  Those were the days.........

Glad to say that I survived those days and enjoyed every single one of them.

oh the memories!!!

God...I'm only 27 and I'm already reminiscing about how it was when I was a kid.

Good read though and spot on...I had an Atari 2700 and a dirt pile.  Dirt pile won hands down every time (Pong did rock though).

what did our parents do without adderall or ritalin?

I'll add a few:

In the old days, when the teacher called home about you, you were in deep kimchi.  Most parents these days have a "my little Johnny would never do that attitude."  My ass was grass if the teacher called home with anything but good news.

How about school work the teacher passed out to you that was hot off the mimeograph machine.  The first thing you did when you got it was put it up to your nose and take a good strong whiff....ahhhhhhhh!  These days, mimeograph machines and chemicals would be banned as hazmat.  

How about that white paste that used to come in a little plastic container with a built-in brush.  I knew a girl in grade school that used to love to nibble on that crap.

How about school lunches for a quater that were actually a nutritious balanced meal?  My school district in Maryland made the best peanut butter brownies.......

Remember the full service gas stations with free maps?  I used to love to go to the gas station as a kid.  28 cents a gallon and the gas smelled good then.

How about black and white tube TVs with only 3-5 local channels?

Those were the days.........

It's a wonder any of us survived!  We've come a long long way and not all of it is good.  

ice cream at school was only a quarter.

Baseball cards cost me the princely sum of 40 cents.

Chewing gum cigarettes were still sold.

Got this as an email and it seemed like a great match with the topic on hand.


TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the

 
1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70'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,

< /SPAN>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 walked in and talked to 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!  

I can remember 5 cent Cokes and 19.9 cent per gallon gasoline.  Some of the time you would get a free steak knife with a fill-up.  And some guy would fill your tank, check your oil and wash your windshield.  He even wore a uniform!  Yep, you could trust your car to the man that wore the star.

How many of you remember when you used to get a free water glass in a box of laundry detergent?

I grew up in the 80s, but still very true.

In elementary school, i used to ride my bike every day as long as it was warm out. I passed my school a few days ago an noticed that the bike rack was long gone. I felt sad.

kids today are pussies

We dug a tunnel (Playing the Great Escape) beneath the garage and almost caused the slab to collapse on us.

The huge stagnant infested puddles at the neighborhood vacant lot served as our Jungle-land battlefield.  

In the summertime, we left the house after breakfast on our bikes, and returned home only to eat.
Hershey bars were a nickel.

Let's not forget the old playgrounds;

They as an old Navy fighter parked on a cement slab. We'd crawl all over it, inside and out.
Every once in a great while, a kid would climb up to the top of th etail then do something stupid, fall and break an arm. That taught us all what NOT to do! Rather Darwinian - thinning out the stupid from the heard!

We spent entire days at the local swimming pool. We had swimming lessons, OUtSIDE, some days the water was very cold, but we went and learned.

Our mothers didn't have to work outside the home. They were there when we got home from school, or playing outside all day.


Prib

Quoted: Got this as an email and it seemed like a great match with the topic on hand.

I read this sometime ago and loved it. I think when I read it, it was titled something like "Everyone over the age of 35 should be DEAD" or something like that.

Quoted: My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. {snip} We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

Most of your first post is/was true for me and I'm 16.

A few people doing something that you don't like and is different than the "good old" days does not mean everyone is like that.  

When I was a kid (you mean, Dad, when dinorsaurs roamed the earth???)... well, when I was a kid, sunsets were much, much prettier back in the days of above ground nuclear testing.

Quoted: I'll add a few: In the old days, when the teacher called home about you, you were in deep kimchi.  Most parents these days have a "my little Johnny would never do that attitude."  My ass was grass if the teacher called home with anything but good news.

+1. And that wasn't too long ago.

When I was a kid,
You respected your parents
there was still no such things as cell phones, or the internet.
Reagan, GHW Bush, and Clinton were president,
Lunchables were what kids ate at school.  

Quoted: Quoted: I'll add a few: In the old days, when the teacher called home about you, you were in deep kimchi.  Most parents these days have a "my little Johnny would never do that attitude."  My ass was grass if the teacher called home with anything but good news. +1. And that wasn't too long ago. When I was a kid, You respected your parents there was still no such things as cell phones, or the internet. Reagan, GHW Bush, and Clinton Johnson, Nixon, and Ford were president, Lunchables Brown paper bags full of PBJ or bologna sandwiches, chips, and a homemade cookie were what kids ate at school.

Quoted: kids today are pussies

Naa...

Either all of you guys live in cities or don't go outside much.  I think mostly times haven't change  in rual areas.

<making an observation> Much of the things listed here are not allowed by the parents today. (That means your generation)</making an observation in which I know it will not apply to a lot here>

Im only 21 and I know what you mean. It seems like the world is growing more pussified as the days go by.

When I was a kid I would frequently play at a local park that had little wood forts with planks running in between and a hug arch that you could climb on. There was a nice big slide and lots of swings.

Now all that is left are some 'safer' swings. everything else is long gone because of pussified sue happy parents worrying too much.

AND another thing...  when I was a kid, teachers did not give kids drugs (Ritalin) and no one worried about the school bully feeling bad and acting out because he had "low self esteem".  

I remember walking to school if you lived in town, now the kids in town ride the bus and we live in a smaller town with three well spread out schools so the different grades are segregated.

And worse my brother started the whole thing.  Poor guy has Down's Syndrome, so he was bussed because the school had special funds to do this, at first they used a car but as more kids with Down's or other DDs needed rides they switched to a small bus.  When they switched a neighbor who ran a day care conned the SD into picking up her school age kids.  When some of the richer more "powerful" parents around town hear that kids inside city limits were being bussed, they demanded their kids be bussed to.  Even tough some of them were 2-3 blocks away for one of the schools in town where busses stopped and shuttled them around to the right school.  Then everybody had to have their kids bussed.  

So where's the fun of walking to school and seeing if you can make it on time?  Where's the meeting up with friends on the way?  Where's the stopping at the local drugstore or grocery store and buying something for your sweet tooth on the way home? Where's the buying a comicbook, a model, or anything????  WHERE DID CHILDHOOD GO?


Kids today just don't know the simple pleasures of BEING a kid anymore, if they do their lucky.

I would recommend using a separate cutting board for meats and vegetables, and to thoroughly cook eggs, pork and chicken. Although it was okay in the past, food poison today is caused in part by the way chickens and cows are raised as opposed to back in the day.
Even if you have access to free-range chickens and cows, it's better to be on the safe side.

Quoted: I would recommend using a separate cutting board for meats and vegetables, and to thoroughly cook eggs, pork and chicken. Although it was okay in the past, food poison today is caused in part by the way chickens and cows are raised as opposed to back in the day. Even if you have access to free-range chickens and cows, it's better to be on the safe side.

It was a JOKE  






JK - Welcome to ARFcom!!!