Remember when?

[julie_angel]

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, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).
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 Keds (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 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 the pledge, 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) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if
we started getting the sniffles. 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,PlayStation,
Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.
I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize the denial
of the dangers that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20 acres, 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 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) here 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 lawnmower 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 survive?

[eeigh33]

[QUOTE]Schools didn't offer 14-year-olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway)[QUOTE]

I think your post is a great message..but am unsure as to when 14 year olds did not know what either of these two issues were.....
It has been 15 years since I was 14 and I knew what abortions and condoms were (i was not sexually active, but knew of these things).

[julie_angel]

Me too, eeigh33. My aunt e-mailed this to me and I thought it was interesting. She is in her late 50's, maybe early 60's, so I guess the world was a lot more innocent then

[eeigh33]

Sad..isn't it? I freak when I hear little kids say some of the things they do.....I am talking 4 and 5 year olds..... :(

[janelle]

I'm with your aunt. I'm 55 and if we didn't exactly not know about these things but they just weren't in our world, know what I mean. Like something out of science fiction or the wrong side of the tracks, like prositutes, and we just weren't in the same sphere and didn't have to think much about it. Not like now with stories on prime time with it in our face and our children's. And at school where they need to teach it because the innocent time is long gone. Sad.

[CARROLIN]

I HAVE ONLY ONE FEATHER TO PICK WITH YOUR THOUGHTS...
YOU ATE HAMBURGER RAW? YUK!! LOL MY BROTHER, MIND YOU
IS TWO YRS. OLDER THAN ME, AND I POPPED HIM UPSIDE HIS HEAD!! lol
I was 10 at the time.
(it wasn't the thought of e-coli...just him trying to make me
not eat dinner!!LOL (kids are mean to each other! lmbo!)

I FINALLY SICKED SNOWBALL ON HIM!!! (OUR DOG) SHE WANTED IT
MORE CUZ HE DROPPED IT, AND THEN REGURGITATED...YUK!!!


AND I WAS JUST GOING TO GO HAVE BREAKFAST BEFORE I GO TO THE
GYM!!! LMBO!! THANKS FOR ME GETTING QUEEZY!!;) ;) ;)

SMILES.

SMOOCHES TOO..TRUE STORY, JUST DON'T TAKE ME THE WRONG WAY,
I JUST HAD TO COMMENT ON A CHILDHOOD MEMORY. YUK!!;) :D ;)

[julie_angel]

I personally have never eaten raw meat of any kind. And the thought of the thing with cutting the chicken with the same knife on the same surface as everything else gave me goosebumps- ewwwwww! But like you, my brother tried to make me eat raw hamburg- then again he tried to make me eat worms, too! blecccccccccK! I, too, popped my brother numerous times, but he was into watching wrestling. Anybody remember "the claw"? The "figure four leglock"? There was not one day when one of us was not hurt and yelling "Moooommmmm!!!!"! Funny, the same things I hated him for then, are the same things that make me laugh now. :D

[janelle]

I was talking to my sister about not having the running shoes and other fancy foot gear growing up they have now and we almost never heard of any kid breaking anything. Now it's realy common to hear of it. Our neices and nephews kids have broken their legs and arms.

It's not because we weren't adventurous either. I remember climbing trees and my brother thought it was fun to climb every house in the neighborhood just to see if he could. We played baseball and ran the bases and played cowboys and indians and ran until we dropped. All this with in loafers with the leather bottoms. Never a break or even a big injury. Just scrapes and bruises.

Maybe it's because kids think they can do anything with their fancy running shoes and they take more risks than we did. I knew if my shoes started slipping while climbing up a tree I better not go any higher or I would fall. I just find it strange why the breaks are more now. Maybe safer really isn't.

[Tadbit]

Originally posted by janelle
I'm with your aunt. I'm 55 and if we didn't exactly not know about these things but they just weren't in our world, know what I mean. Like something out of science fiction or the wrong side of the tracks, like prositutes, and we just weren't in the same sphere and didn't have to think much about it. Not like now with stories on prime time with it in our face and our children's. And at school where they need to teach it because the innocent time is long gone. Sad.

I totally agree with you Janelle. It's amazing how things have changed in 25 to 30 years. So much more technology, which is not a bad thing but growing up without all of it, left a lot more to the imagination. It also helped you to be more creative, so it makes me wonder why kids get bored so easily with their toys, etc. today. I think it's because it's always been there for most of them. There are so many kids that have never even climbed a tree because their parents are afraid they will get hurt the same parents that climbed them, themself. I'm just as guilty. I wouldn't let my girls play in the mud when they were little because I didn't want them to get dirty, but I did it a lot as a child.

[jayhawkfan]

Ya know Im only 28 and half of these thing STILL to this day pertain to me or my kids.. When I was 14 I didnt know what an abortion or a condom was..I had no need to know. I still like to sleep out in a campground and swim in a lake. My kids favorite thing to do is play in the mud and we never wear shoes in the summer.Im glad to know that in my little part of the world things can still be simple and that just because your kids falls off his bike in front of my house that Im not going to get sued. Long live the simple life!!!!!

[enola615]

I hope you realize you put my brain into high gear. This sure brought back many memories. Do you remember; comboys and indians, cops and robbers, army, hide and go seek, snow ball fights, wrestlung in the back yard or fields (and no one got sued), all day monopoly games under the trees, canasta, baseball in the street, football in the street. Mothers having a neighborhoon coffee gab session at least once a week and we were free from being checked on while they gabbed. Parents talking over the fence, neighborhhod BBQ's. Neighbors jnew each other and were always friendly. Just a few memories.

[julie_angel]

Does anybody remember playing manhunt? I remember we couldn't wait until it got dark out, we'd burn corks and blacken our faces, jump out of trees and onto whoever was running by, looking for a spot to hide. Those were the days!

[jayhawkfan]

lol julie! My fav game was capture the flag. We would sneak out and go down to the park at night and divide up and play until our parents hunted us down lol. Over the summer I was helping with a youth group and we planned a night game of search and defend...any one ever play that? Basiclly a team hide and seek in the dark...we still love all those games here. Im sure it would be diferent if I lived in a city, but in a town of 7000 all those things are still possible :)

[mesue]

Originally posted by janelle
I was talking to my sister about not having the running shoes and other fancy foot gear growing up they have now and we almost never heard of any kid breaking anything. Now it's realy common to hear of it. Our neices and nephews kids have broken their legs and arms.

It's not because we weren't adventurous either. I remember climbing trees and my brother thought it was fun to climb every house in the neighborhood just to see if he could. We played baseball and ran the bases and played cowboys and indians and ran until we dropped. All this with in loafers with the leather bottoms. Never a break or even a big injury. Just scrapes and bruises.

Maybe it's because kids think they can do anything with their fancy running shoes and they take more risks than we did. I knew if my shoes started slipping while climbing up a tree I better not go any higher or I would fall. I just find it strange why the breaks are more now. Maybe safer really isn't.


This may sound like a crazy theory but when you've got all that padding under your feet you have less control of your feet, everytime I wear thick shoes I find I'm more likely to fall all that padding and rubber is much more easier to twist under the impact of your feet hitting the surface of anything and the slightest twisting of what ones whole balance is on especially if one is jumping or running would seem to me to make it easier to get thrown off balance and fall. I can tell the difference when I'm wearing a thnner bottom pair of shoes, I have more control of my balance. I think originally running shoes were made to protect our bodies from the impact of jogging but now everyone wants running shoes even though a lot of us who wear them have never thought of jogging. JMO

[mesue]

Funny story that has to do with the not knowing what certain words meant, a friend of mine had an aunt they visited frequently, she was in her nineties and bedridden, one day they went to visit and she told them she now knew what was wrong with her and had been making her sick she had seen an advertisement on tv about it and she had all the symptoms, they asked what it could be, and with firm conviction that she had this disease she announced, "I've got VD!"

[kelblend]

Shoot I'm just 34 and its a WHOLE different world now. I remember the whole neighborhood playing werewolf and kick the can. We used to play down the road mind you in the creek and catch fish and crawdads lol. We rode our bikes forever it seemed. Oh and a new house was being built and as I drive by it now I can remember swinging from the two by fours lol. I was in the middle of alot of those changes. I just wish my kids were in the same world I grew up in. :0(


Hey jayhawk, just saw your post, and your search and defend is the same as our WErewolf!! lmbo was a cool game huh!!!:D

[jayhawkfan]

Very cool game kelblend. I can wait for summer so I can teach my nephew and his friends how to play. I have to say my sis and I are just as bad as the kids are lmao!

[kelblend]

LOL wow haven't played it in years. *sigh* heehee :0)