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Post by DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) on Jul 18, 2015 0:35:23 GMT
Whoever wrote this must have been my next door neighbor because it totally described my childhood to a 'T.' Hope you enjoy it.
Black and White in the early TV age. Black and White (Under age 40? You won't understand.) Old movies like “Our Gang.” The Jacky Gleason Show The Mouseketeers Batman Gene Autry The Lone Ranger Mayberry The News (really live) Ed Sullivan Sid Caesar Howdy Doody Kukla Fran and Ollie And so many others all in black and white and nearly all live.
You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, 'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
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 e..coli.
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.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a nurses 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.
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.
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 amok.
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?
And working for our spending money, collecting papers and beer bottles for the salvage money, collecting wire hangers for the cleaners, washing cars, etc. Setting up your first bank account.
Walking a mile or so to school come rain or shine. No school busses in our neighborhood.
Seat belts? What were they? How did we ever survive without them?
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