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 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 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 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 20, 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. The 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 Ken Scotten 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! I watched the Cooper boys ride by in their new 58 Chevy’s, and dreamed. Went to scouts, with George Miller. Tried chewing tobacco and got sick. No Doc Hunt, just get over it. How did we survive?
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Todd Holden writes from his home, amid 24 acres of soybeans and woods. He continues with his “Walden Experiment” which is living in harmony with nature, except now and then he has to shoot a rabid raccoon that tears into the feed shed.
I look fondly back on the days when I used to play with my cousins and friends outside–barefoot in the stream, building tee-pees in the woods, holding sword fights with sticks, and rolling down the neighbor’s hill in the fresh cut grass. We used to cut through the cornfield out back, and eat blackberries right off the bush. In the winter we spent just as much time outdoors, eating snow and seeking out the best conditions for sledding. We never tired of it. Now kids hardly play outdoors. They’re more glued to their computers and ipods and tv. I hope that when I have children, I can encourage them enough to enjoy the outdoors as much as I did.
Great piece, Todd! We need to be reminded of where we’ve come from and where we’re going.
WOW!! This is a GREAT one! I have SO MANY memories of so many days out in the woods or just riding bikes or walking around the town of Havre de Grace with my friends and sisters!We NEVER went in the house until we were called in by our Moms. I just can’t imagine being a child of THIS generation instead of mine!!
I think this was put SO, SO well by Bucky Covington in his song “A Different World”! That is the song I used to tell my kids how REAL LIFE was!! :)) If only they could know how my life growing was, TRULY, so much better! A lot of kids these days are afraid to even go outside for the fear that one of the kids in the group will do something real stupid and they’ll ALL get in trouble for it! They can’t go out late at night and just walk around town like my friends and I used to do because the drug dealers hang out on the street corners and they’re afraid a drug deal will go wrong and they’ll end up caught in the cross fire! It’s all so, very sad! I wish I could change today’s world so these kids could realize the peace and tranquility of having a childhood where there wasn’t a fear that everything was going to hurt you or kill you!!
Thank for this piece! It’s very humbling, and memory arrousing too!!
~ Terri ~
I hear ya loud and clear.
But about those simpler times, I don’t know exactly when you grew up, but for me it followed this timeline, more or less: segregation, civil rights, race riots, the Vietnam war, assassinations galore, H. Rap Brown’s buddies getting blown to bits right in Bel Air(!), Watergate, Reaganomics, Nuclear Freeze. But of course, most of that was offstage for us kids. Still, some of us were paying attention.
Please don’t assume that your good old days were a cultural universal. For example, the good old days of my well spent youth seem a shade more bohemian than yours. Nevertheless, it still seemed a wonderful time – for me. I’d like to suggest that one’s own past, no matter how idealized, isn’t necessarily something we should set as a template for all future generations to follow. It’s just history, though not my history (except the Tonka Toys, of course).
And I had BB guns, and firecrackers, and ran amuck in Scouts, and had a mini-bike, and a chemistry set with real and dangerous chemicals, and all that stuff and thought it was great. Once I was heating up some ammonia crystals over an alcohol lamp in our tiny, unvented workshop, when I decided, out of curiosity, to smell the vapors, I went temporarily blind and was scared almost to death. “That’s what happens when you don’t follow proper lab procedure,” my mom scolded, unsympathetically. I was about ten years old.
As we got older, we sowed our wild oats on Saturday night and went to church on Sunday morning to pray they wouldn’t take. Nobody whined about abstinence nor did we just say no. What a person did in private was his or her own business, as long as it didn’t hurt anybody else, that would be “uncool.” And uncool was a great sin for us hick hipsters.
And back then, we thought God built the universe using evolution as a tool, our parents remembered the New Deal with gratefulness, and HARCO was rife with “yellow dog Democrats.”
I hitchhiked everywhere.
I remember skipping gym (straight D’s all the way through), in order to spend more time with the likes of Richard Brautigan, Diane Wakoski, and Jack Kerouac. (Fourteen year old me thought Diane Wakoski was the sexiest thing since Sylvia Plath and a good deal less dreary.) Gym was for dimwits.
Oh, we read many things that would be frowned on today, terrible stuff like the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tao, and the Koran, heck we even read the NIV and the Good News Version too – “Dang hippie Bible!” Didja ever skip high school to drink wine and read aloud on Bloomsday? How about Bicycle Day?
It was all great fun and maybe that’s why I’m not bitter, but if you’ve gotten to the point where you’re nostalgic for leaded gasoline (not to mention Reye’s syndrome, anaphylactic shock, and mercury tinctures) well, that seems a little bitter to me.
These days, my neighbors set traffic cones in the road when their kids play in their yard (really), and I think they’re bonkers.
However, I am fully confident that no matter how overprotective parents get and no matter what the do-gooders try and make into law, boys will still be boys, girls will still be girls, and kids will still be kids. I am not afraid to stand up and say that today’s youth will succeed in getting into as much mischief as they want. Knees will be skinned and worse.
Today’s kids are smart and diligent, just like every generation before them. And they don’t need anybody telling them how much better things used to be. Don’t you remember what a drag listening to that BS was when you were a kid? My mom thought her youth was the greatest thing since sliced bread: Prohibition, The Great Depression, polio, WW2, food rationing – yeah boy.
(BTW, my mom, a biochemist, bleached our wooden cutting board every Saturday afternoon, when I was a kid – highly recommended. And once I got meningitis from swimming in a pond, but went swimming in ponds afterwards anyway.)
After all, the oldest book in the world starts with something like “Things aren’t the way they used to be.” No they ain’t, but that doesn’t make them better or worse by default, just different. Sure, I miss the past sometimes, but I don’t recommend it – I’d just as soon “be here now.”
But, oh to be a dumb kid again, with a head full of chemicals and a handful of whatshername, reciting from memory:
“since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world …”
Boy howdy.
Wow….
We used to get a ride or hitch to the beach every day….every day…every single day in the summer…Jones Beach. Parking field 4
Well those were the day’s a coca cola was the ”real” thing. a candy bar was 5 cent’s. main street bel air was dual road. albert ragan’s store mr stamper’s across from him.
teenage hang out was Ronny & tinker ballards gulf station, at fountain green a cross from them was fountain green hospital. ( rite aid is there now) lundy’s store in route too fountain green. where penny candy’ was still being sold. harford mall was the site of the bel air race track. ( Horses)
dope & crime was almost unheard of. bel air police had 3 officer’s one of them was crippled. minimum was about a dollar twenty. but sure went along way.
I think my earliest recollection of Bel Air was the Harvey House Drive – In.
Very true, Falmanac … very true. It is sure easy to see the world around us today and wish for the times when some of us felt safer but, today’s kids (I have 17 and 14 year old boys, one who is an active outside child, the other (17) is a stay inside video gamer, and a 14 year old daughter who loves a mix of the outside and the instant messengers on the computer), would not know what to do with themselves, for the most part, if they were taken back to the 70s and 80s when I grew up. They, I can speak for the kids in my family only, of course, would be simply lost without the technologies they have today. My younger sister can’t remember life before the remote control, like I can.
It’s SO funny when we have these conversations because the age difference between my older sister and I and our youger sister (8 1/2 and 6 1/2 years respectively) seems like such a great span when we start talking about the technological advances that happened during “our time”. We often, during these conversations, find ourselves laughing, from our souls, about the differences now a-days!! How often the “if we had done some of the things these kids do today, Mom and Dad would have half killed us” comes up in conversation is hysterical!!
Yes – looking back on “our time” is so much fun FOR US, and it will be for our kids too! There will be things about their childhoods that they will wish they could give their children, or maybe even wish they could take them back in time to see how different “their world” was and, for my children to be able to do that with their children (should this world last that long) we have the awesome technological creation – THE DIGITAL CAMERA!! LOL! I keep mine handy with rechargable batteries so we don’t miss the good things!!! I LOVE the technology of today – I just sometimes long for the peace that existed in “my world” from the yester-years!! Thanks for sharing guys!!! These stories are wonderful to read!!
P.S. – I don’t know that the days of polio and all that would be such a fond memory time though!! That’s a bit questionable – I’m sure you were thinking that too! :))
Anyway – speaking of the digital camera … I must get mine ready for the first day of the 2008-2009 school year!! This one’s special since June 1st of this school year will be the 20th anniversary of my Senior class’ graduation from H.H.S.! AHHHH – the memories!!! LOL!! Have a GREAT day folks!!!
Share some more of these wonderful stories!!
~ Terri ~
Often I think of my grandmother; born in 1889, she grew up herding cattle on the Cherokee Strip and later the Llano Estacado. She used to talk about the isolation, the boredom, and how the schools (which she never got enough of, but was still very well read) closed regularly for epidemics and how when they reopened, there would always be a couple of empty seats in the room.
She rarely talked about her sister who died in her 20’s of septicemia, or her other sister who died of complications from childbirth, or her brother-in-law who went stark raving mad and died wandering in the desert, or her 3 uncles (whom she never met) killed at Chickamauga, or the homestead they were cheated out of in the great land run of 1893, or the difficulty of supporting her elderly mother, who lived on a Civil War pension of 13 dollars a month, which never went up even though she lived well into the 1950’s.
She never talked about having only oatmeal to feed her children for weeks in a row during the height of the Depression (though my mom sure did), or how they had to wait all day to get seen at the public clinic when they were on “relief.” Or how, as a woman in 1918, she wasn’t allowed to work for the federal government after she got married, or later, how terrified she was of losing her job during the McCarthy days. Compared to all that, we are, most of us, spoiled brats and should be very thankful that we are.
And yet she remained a lively and cheerful person. My grandmother loved technology, cars, radio, antibiotics, TV, and especially photography, which she took up around 1912. If she were alive today, I’m sure she’d be fully digital. And I am profoundly grateful that she left me boxes and boxes of pictures from those days. (You can see some of her pictures from the pioneer days at http://qrai.blogspot.com) Old photos are the best inheritance of all.
todd holden is a pal of mine, he writes what he knows, and what he feels…tough Boy Howdy…you did your thing and Todd did his…he just wrote about it sooner than your diatribe epistle…
Todd is a great resource for the county’s history…and yes, he was at the scene of the Featherstone car explosion, and he covered the story fairly and objectively…
Sorry for this comment, but there’s always a prick trying to find fault…and i had to stand up this time and say ‘take a break, dude’…
Hiram well said. I will second that.