To All the Kids Who Survived the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!!

[Eieio]

To All the Kids Who Survived the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!!


I know this has been floating around the Internet for a few years, but it totally illustrates my point about how much fun it was to grow up in the mid 20th century. And really, I could not have said it better myself!
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First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps, not helmets, on our heads.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick-up truck 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, real butter and bacon.
We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar.
And, we weren't overweight.
WHY?


Full story (http://open.salon.com/blog/pattymooney/2010/05/27/to_all_the_kids_who_survived_the_1930s_40s_50s_60s _and_70s)

[neolitic]

And it was a real treat
to play with the "quicksilver"
from the broken thermometers!

[Bodger]

And good old metal toys. The kind of toys that could put an eye out if you fell on them just right. With small detachable metal parts that your little brother could swallow and choke to death.

Nobody I ever played with lost an eye or a brother.

[afkama]

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.



My mom died at age 54 from Emphysema.

It wasn't pretty.

Toward the end of her life she wasn't a big advocate of smoking.

Pregnant or not.

She certainly wasn't using the term 'survival' a lot.

[Dusty]

I can remember lying in the back window of Mom's car while she was driving.
I used the seat belts to hit my brothers. Yes they deserved it. Mom did not use them to strap us kids down.

[Blue]

We didn't get overweight because we played. Kids don't play outdoors today. We ventured miles from home every day, climbing trees, exploring,etc.

Gravy on everything, roast beef, ice cream, pop, popsicles, Kool-Aid tons of it. I ate more as a kid than I do now.

We didnt lock our doors we played until midnight during the summer, while the folks sat on the front porch. There was no puter, or cell phone. Everybody fixed their own car engine. The tv was for the news or football game.

[bconley]

And it was a real treat
to play with the "quicksilver"
from the broken thermometers!

We used the old silent mercury tilt switches they had a lot more in them!

[y.painting]

good stuff! I suspect, though, that 50 years from now, someone from Generation Y (1970-2000) will come up with a very similar sounding piece that will be just as provoking as this one is for the baby boomers.....I can already see it.....

"...when we were kids, we played x-box with our hands. none of this telepathy stuff. We actually had to key in phone numbers with out fat little fingers on out iPhones....no just thinking about it and the phone calling for us........"

[Bodger]

We didn't get overweight because we played. Kids don't play outdoors today. We ventured miles from home every day, climbing trees, exploring,etc.

Gravy on everything, roast beef, ice cream, pop, popsicles, Kool-Aid tons of it. I ate more as a kid than I do now.

We didnt lock our doors we played until midnight during the summer, while the folks sat on the front porch. There was no puter, or cell phone. Everybody fixed their own car engine. The tv was for the news or football game.


I never saw more than three channels the whole time I was growing up. And my mom didn't get a color TV until 1975. Or a lock for any door that we actually had the key to until about then as well.

[neolitic]

I was listening to a discussion of
"To Kill A Mockingbird" yesterday.
It occurred to me, that book and
"Huckleberry Finn" are very much in
the voice of the America I grew up in.
I think we were the last generation
who can say that.
Growing up in the '50s around here
wasn't that much different to the '30s.
Really, we were still doing a lot
of the same things as Huck.
Way closer than the xbox stuff...

[Allrounder]

We didn't get overweight because we played. Kids don't play outdoors today. We ventured miles from home every day, climbing trees, exploring,etc.

exactly! Todays kids need to get off of their butts and run around more.

[DavidC]

I was listening to a discussion of
"To Kill A Mockingbird" yesterday.
It occurred to me, that book and
"Huckleberry Finn" are very much in
the voice of the America I grew up in.
I think we were the last generation
who can say that.
Growing up in the '50s around here
wasn't that much different to the '30s.
Really, we were still doing a lot
of the same things as Huck.
Way closer than the xbox stuff...

Where ever me and my 2 brothers went, it was an adventure. It could be on the river shore, out in the swamp, across town or in the backyard.

Mom got a Rich Plan freezer once. The box it came in went out the back door and became a submarine, then a fort, even a rocket. When it just couldn't take getting rained on again we open it up an made a tent with it.

Good Luck
Dave

[shanekw1]

I never saw more than three channels the whole time I was growing up. And my mom didn't get a color TV until 1975. Or a lock for any door that we actually had the key to until about then as well.


I had 3 channels till I was 18. Only thing I ever watched was Sat. morning cartoons.

Playing inside? What was that?

[bconley]

How do you think we all learned to build?
It wasn't playing video games!
Building tree houses, forts and camps was a huge part of my childhood.

[Blue]

How do you think we all learned to build?
It wasn't playing video games!
Building tree houses, forts and camps was a huge part of my childhood.

Huge bike ramps over 20" tall were constructed with branches, bricks, and old fence boards hacked in two with a screwdriver.

All the kids would line up at old man Shipleys garage for bicycle service on Satuday mornings before the big ride.

Everyone had a sword or short blade made out of a prized stick that had been sharpened on somebody's sidewalk.

[Blue]

Your parents didn't protect you from anything. Everyone had a broken arm one time or another. Sometimes parents would just make a sling with a dish towel if the break wasn't bad enough. You were incharge of your own survival. You better be on site when dinner was put out or you didnt eat.

Entire baseball teams riding in the back of a pickup were very common.

Doctors knew what they were doing to, and you went to only one doc for your first 18 years. There were no specialist or Docs sending you somewhere else because they were afraid of the lawyers.

[Bodger]

Playing inside? That was like punishment. That only happened when it rained so hard you couldn't go outside.

I was lucky enough to have five acres to play on, and lots of trees. We dug trenches, built forts, re-enacted the Normandy invasion and won the battle of Gettysburg all in the same day sometimes.

Summers went by in a heartbeat and you had to face the horror of the first day of school in September. I still remember sitting at my desk at Walnut Street Elementary in 1960 wearing stiff new pants feeling as though I had been incarcerated. I was still hot and sunny outside, what could be worse than this kind of confinement.

And all the businesses on Main Street were family owned. Hardware, restaurants, car dealerships, all owned by families you knew. No franchises, there weren't many back then anyway and our little town wasn't on their radar anyway.
If you wanted hamburgers, you went to Puckett's Hamburger Inn where George Puckett and his wife deep fried the burgers in an inch of grease in a sunken grill thing that George had welded up himself. Or the Dairy Isle where they had a Queenburger that was about 10 inches across and they baked their own giant buns.

I was back home two years ago. Main Street is all but a ghost town. WalMart saw to that. And so many factories have closed that small businesses can't make it anyway because the local economy being in such bad shape.

I don't know what it's like for kids growing up in that town now, but it didn't look to me like they were going to have the same good memories of it that I do.

[shanekw1]

mmmmmmmmmm deep fried burgers..... :drool:

[Bodger]

mmmmmmmmmm deep fried burgers..... :drool:


Yeah, George had it going on. He ground the meat a little finer than regular hamburger, and rolled it into a ball until it was to be cooked.

He would then toss that ball into the grease in his 1 1/2" deep grill and smash it flat with a spatula. The grease was all the fat that had cooked out of previous hamburgers. So the burgers got fried in hot hamburger grease about an inch thick.
If you got them to go, they had to be tripled bagged because they would leak so much grease.

George eventually sold the place to someone else and let them keep the name, but they couldn't make a go of it.

BTW, George ate several of his own grease-laden hamburgers every day for about 40 years and lived well into his eighties. :laugh3:

Also, George was a veteran. Any soldier that sat down in Puckett's Hamburger Inn wearing his uniform ate for free.

[shanekw1]

He ground the meat a little finer than regular hamburger, and rolled it into a ball until it was to be cooked.

He would then toss that ball into the grease in his 1 1/2" deep grill and smash it flat with a spatula. The grease was all the fat that had cooked out of previous hamburgers. So the burgers got fried in hot hamburger grease about an inch thick.
If you got them to go, they had to be tripled bagged because they would leak so much grease.

Damn, now I have to have a big fat grease burger at 9 am for breakfast.:2thumbsup:

[Winchester]

I grew up in the 80s...

my mom quit smoking when she got pregnant with me.

i don't remember how many channels we had because I only really watched tv on saturday morning.

my dad did buy me a nintendo for my birthday and we played with our friends sometimes, borrowing each others games, but playing outside was the norm.

we had a huge plot of forest between us and the next town and there was a trail in there that me and my friends all called the "coyote trail". we would wander it for miles into the heart of the forest... there were so many adventures in there I can't even remember all of them (including getting lost)... or finding the way to the next town over. at one place near one edge of the forest there were a bunch of old cars covered in weeds and rust and bushes that we would play in too.

we got hurt all the time, cuts, stitches, bruises, bloody noses...

... can't forget street hockey....


I miss those days! and I know that when I have kids they will have such a completely different childhood