A Childhood in Athens
No Sign of Socrates, Though
By Fred Reed
http://www.fredoneverything.net/AthensChildhood.shtml
January 18, 2014
It is common for aging men, worn by the long years of drinking and skirt.chasing and strenuous dissolution in the fleshpots of Asia, or any available fleshpots, to remember their youth in roseate hues that never were. But, dammit, we really did go barefoot. And had BB guns. And the dog could go anywhere it damned well pleased, and come back when it chose.
Athens, Alabama in 1957 was a small Southern town like countless others in Dixie with a statue of a Confederate soldier on the town square and little evidence of government of any kind, which was well since it didn’t need any. While the South had not fared well in its ardent resistance to Federal regulation a century earlier, still there was little meddling by Washington in my years there. The South’s martial displeasure with federal intrusion was remembered, though: When I moved down from Virginia, I was to other kids “the damyank on the corner” until I learned to wrap words in a comfortable padding of syllables, as God commanded.
On the square. While Southerners are the most patriotic and martial of Americans, they have the least use for Washington. In which I heartily concur. Photos: FOE Staff.
Although my father was a mathematician at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, and perhaps entitled to social pretensions, he didn’t have any. Consequently I lived as a half-wild disciple of Tom Sawyer. So did most of the town’s boys. Come summer, we at first tentatively abandoned shoes. No one thought this odd, because it wasn’t. Soon our soles toughened to leather and we walked everywhere, even on gravel, without ill effect.
And nobody cared. Oh sweet age of nobody cared. Child Protective Services didn’t show up, officious passive-aggressive snots, to carry my parents away. Today they would, droning censoriously of hygiene and worms and crippling cuts from broken glass and parental irresponsibility.
Many of my friends lost feet to these perils. To this day you can see them rolling about in wheel chairs in their dozens.
Foot-nekkid and fancy free, we went to the Limestone Drug Store on the town square, piled our ball mitts and BB guns inside the door, and read comic books for hours. The owner, a frizzzly redhead man in his seventies whom we knew only as Cochie, liked little boys. Today this would be thought evidence of pedophilia and he would be required to undergo therapy and wear an ankle bracelet. Actually, Coochie just liked kids. And since it was his store, nobody at corporate got his panties in a knot because the comic books were read into virtual dust without ever being bought. The federal government had not yet regulated small-town soda fountains to protect us.
Still there, fifty-seven years later. Much changed inside but the current owners, whoever they are, had the decency to preserve the orignial soda fountain.
The devastating plagues that swept the South in those years, mysteriously unrecorded, were doubtless the result of bare feet in Limestone Drug.
BB guns, I said. We all had them. Most were the Red Ryder model, costing I think $4.95 in as-yet uninflated currency. Mine was the Daisy Eagle, a more glorious version with a plastic telescopic sight. Every corner store sold big packs of BBs. We went everywhere with these lethal arms, often with a ball glove hung of the barrel for convenient carrying.
Today children of six years are led from classrooms in handcuffs for merely drawing a rifle (curious in the world’s most militarily aggressive country). I suppose we would have been executed for actually having one. But, as I say, the saving benefits of federal counsel had not yet reached Athens.
What did we do with these weapons? First, we didn’t shoot each other, or anyone else. We weren’t stupid. Stupidity properly comes with adolescence, and then is directed into drink and insane driving, as it should be.
A BB gun provides excellent training in marksmanship because you can see over the sights the little coppery pellet arching into the distance. It produces an eye for elevation and windage that shows up on the rifle ranges of Parris Island.
I remember afternoons of shooting cotton-mouths from the rusting iron bridge over the creek near the Valley Gin Company, no longer e3xistent. (In the South, “gin” means a place that takes seeds out of cotton, instead of vodka made unpalatable by the addition of juniper juice.) Further, we tried to shoot dragon flies that flitted in iridescent blues and greens among the swamp weeds, wings making a papery rustle. Usually we missed. These insects, known in varying locales as the Devil’s darning needles, snake doctors, or ‘skeeter hawks, are elusive.
Today they would be a protected species. Buying a BB gun would require proof of adulthood, capacity would be restricted by federal law to six BBs, the purchase of which would require registration and a waiting period. In 1957 Athens figured that BB guns were none of the government’s goddamed business. The concept has been forgotten.
However, regulation is not without reason. If you walk around the town square today, you will notice that perhaps just over half of the men are blind in at least one eye from BB wounds, as they roll about in wheel chairs because of feet lost to going barefoot.
My pooch at the time was Penny, an agreeable gal dog given to occasional promiscuity. This was only human of her. She was a cross between something and something else, as dogs should be. I do not like snooty purebred dogs who eat only at the finest restaurants and probably have psychiatrists.
At night Penny sometimes slept on the foot of my bed, common in those days. When she wanted to go out, she scratched at the door, and went. I don’t know where she went. She was a grown dog, competent to manage her affairs. When she returned, she scratched, and came in. This did on two occasions result in new little dogs, but no system is perfect
Pretty much identical to our house, now gone, but ours was without the flags.
Today she would require a license, vaccinations, enrolment in Obamacare, and an implanted chip so NSA could protect her from terrorists (always common in Athens). She would have to be constantly on a leash, like all other Americans, and Child Protective Services would carry my parents away for letting her sleep on my bed.
This would be for our own good. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that between 1950 and 1960, 1.2 million Southern children died of dog poisoning. Further, unleashed dogs like Penny frequently killed and ate old people rocking on their porches. I didn’t understand that when Penny licked my hand, she was checking for flavor.
Such was America, when it was America. It was a helluva country, warts and all, and Athens was a helluva childhood. These never will be again, but they were, and for those who knew them, it was enough.
We were able to shoot shot guns at high school on the back side of the school away from the parked cars.We did it from 1975-1979 and had a great time learning how to shoot.They ended the program in 1980 because someone complained.No one ever got hurt and I learn a lot about gun safety.That america is gone forever.I hate what has happened to our nation.
I regret all the birds that fell to my bb gun. I did not know better.
I never had a bb gun. When I find a spider in the house, I put a glass over it, slide a paper underneath and toss it outside. I’m not sure from where I learned to respect non-threatening life, but that’s who I am.
God bless old Fred…
We ran barefoot in the summers. Rode bikes without helmets. Carried BB guns around. Mom would kick us out of the house around 9am or so and we wouldn’t come back until after dark… fished craw-dads out of the creek, went around collecting pop bottles for the deposits (I had to find an old Coke bottle with the dime deposit stamp on it in an “antique store” to prove to my boy that yes, we did get a dime back for each bottle we brought back to the corner store). Got into and out of trouble on our own. We would pirate building materials from construction sites and use the pilfered wood to build tree houses in the woods. One treehouse was so huge, it spanned the creek. The city found out about it and demolished it. Took them two days! 🙂 Played lawn darts (anyone remember JARTS?) and nobody got killed or speared…
Our high school had a shooting team, but that was gone by the time I got there. Still, bringing a rifle to school didn’t warrant a SWAT team response… nobody said anything.
When we were older, we would drive around and collect up orange construction cones. When we had enough, we would block off a random intersection somewhere, then sit back and watch the fun. Or, we would pilfer “FOR SALE” signs, then put them all in front of our rival school. That actually made the newspaper once.
We got whacked at school if we fucked up, and whacked at home when Daddy found out about it. Nobody called CPS. We lit off fireworks (the GOOD kind! Not the phony shit they sell today) and threw then down sewers, launched Folgers Coffee cans high in the air… built tennis ball cannons powered with hairspray or lighter fluid and shot them off in the street… nobody called the cops…
Fucking do gooder asshole nosey-assed busybody Feds and all like them….
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i remember riding home from the store, at 7 yrs old, cradling my new bb gun in my arms, earnestly praying to God that the rapture would not happen before i got home to shoot it.
LIpoh ,objective guilt is such a bitch.I knew you were guilt ridden about something.But birds, I thought you had killed a bunch of people.
Cherry bombs ,TNT and M-80s.There was a kid in our town that got his fingers blown off playing with a cherry bomb.They were powerful firecrackers but a lot of fun .You had to be real careful when playing with them.
Well, now I know the name of the dickhead that got JARTS banned.
Dave Snow of Riverside California.
Yep. California. Who DIDN’T see that coming?
Seems his kids and some neighborhood kids found an old JARTS set in a closet. His 7 year old daughter was killed when a neighborhood kid tossed a dart.
So, instead of laying blame where it should have been, old Dave decided to blame the object and crusaded against JARTS until they got banned completely. As a father, I feel for Dave, but blaming an object instead of the kid misusing the Jart, or even taking responsibility for not watching his kids (we ran around unsupervised, but not at 7 years old), is just fucking stupid. Sort of a harbinger of the gun bans, yeah?
According to Wiki, 6100 people total were brought into emergency rooms due to Jart-related injuries over the course of 8 years, starting in 1980.
8 into 6100 gives us 762.5…. call it 763 people per year.
In 1980, the population was 226,545,805 people.
226,545,805 divided into 763 gives us 0.0000003% of the population being injured per year by Jarts… such a scourge on mankind, I have no idea how Western civilization survived.
A curse on the Dave Snows of the world.
bb says:
Cherry bombs ,TNT and M-80s.There was a kid in our town that got his fingers blown off playing with a cherry bomb.
ya, ol’ rusty freeborn got his hand blown off trying to get to the kitchen sink to put one out when his mom pulled up…. he didnt make it.
and by the grace of god go i –
my aunt came out and asked what we wanted for lunch, i put the fire cracker behind my back, and as i answered her, it goes off. BOOM! I didnt lose any appendages, but my hand was fucked. Although my cousin denies it, i know he lit the fuse as i held it behind my back.
Jarts: OK, some things just are not right. Those are random cranial kinetic penetrators with a couple of beers….
Methodical Man says:
Jarts: OK, some things just are not right. Those are random cranial kinetic penetrators
that could be said about just most anything.
I’ll gua an-damn-tee ya that statue is gone or there are plans to replace it wif a “civil rights activist”. Fuckin’ yankee do-gooders make me sick.
I remember growing up in those days in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. What happened is we became a nation of administrative laws and lawyers. Today we raise captive kids. We are now a captive nation living asleep under federal administration.
Our children did not grow up like us. While we were busy working as two income families we put our children in captive day care centers and captive government schools thinking all is well while our children were taught how to live under administrative laws being created by the flood of lawyers graduating from law schools and pouring into government positions and new law firms.
Administrative Law; so unlike Common Law that we grew up under, is a law form that restricts and punishes liberty and acts of liberty; the type of liberty we grew up under. It creates arbitrary laws based on someone’s, or a group of persons logic rather than principles that come down to us by thousands of years of human experience. The problem with logical thinking is it is based on one dimensional thinking. It is a form of thinking coming from a point of view. It is like looking down a line from a point on the line and making a judgment; a very one sided judgment. Then this judgment is put into law. This is Administrative Law. And this limited view law is what we now live under in our cities, schools, State, and Federal government. Law enforcement is the arm of this law that forces people into compliance of these one dimensional irrational logical laws.
It is Administrative Law that changed this country. And people are living in sleep under these oppressive laws that have invaded our liberty and now put us under a police state where the law is primary over the people and not vice versa.
I have faith that our grand children will wake up to this oppressive system of law and get rid of it along with the people who are programmed by the system to enforce it.
Yes, our children have been captured by this law and are asleep in it. Don’t count on them to change it. It is our grand children that have the open mind (because it is not yet corrupted by personality) to change things back to our time when liberty was cherished. Our children are lost in their toys and self absorption in their own vanity and pride of material things to see the value of personal liberty; so, growing up in captivity they are like our domestic animals with little or no desire for liberty.
But our grand children are different. So if you still valve America and what it stands for then put your remaining time in your grand children to teach them to understand what you know.
When I was a kid the only time you were allowed in the house was after it got dark. All year long. I vividly recall pretending I was an astronaut marooned on Pluto as I walked around in the middle of a blizzard, wind shrieking, temperature below zero waiting for dinner time. In Summer we’d pack a lunch and a couple of fishing poles and ride bikes across the Delaware- to another State for crying out loud, no helmets, no cell phones, barefoot and then camp out wherever we wound up for the night. Occasionally we’d canoe down the River for a few nights, canoe back up the D&R canal and the only notice you gave your parents was “we’re going camping”. That was when we were 11 or 12.
Today you’d lose custody of your kids if you tried that kind of parenting, but it was idyllic to us.
words by Major James Innes Randolph, CSA First published in 1914..still relevant today..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3RpBu0TFCQ
The pussification of Amerika can be seen in Warning Labels.
In my day there was only ONE warning label; “CAUTION: This can put your eye out.”. (No one EVER lost an eye.)
How fucking stoopid are we??
So stoopid you need to be told not to stick a drill bit up your dick.
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So stoopid we can’t check for shit the right way
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So stoopid at least one person ironed a shirt …. while wearing it
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So stoopid as to stick a thermometer in your mouth … after it was in your ass
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And for fuckssake do not put a baby in a plastic container and close the lid. Yeah, people need to be told that.
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This one actually makes sense.
It’s for people like bb.
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Stuck,
Stupidest one I ever saw was the warning for a toaster…. said something like “Do not use outside during rain”…
Thing is, how this shit got started was that some fucker read the warnings and thought of something that wasn’t covered… then they did that, got injured and sued… and some fucking moronic jury awarded said idiot the Ghetto Lottery.
So, the law-yuhs have to write all sorts of stupid shit into the warnings, just to cover their asses…
Stucky, You forgot the baby on board sign.
Matslinger: One has to ask; who built this matrix that controls us? Answer?
Let’s go to an example at the local government level to find out:
The Code Enforcer? How did thus guy get on the city payroll? Was it people complaining about the activities or in-activities of their neighbor? Complaints pile up at city hall and the next thing you know the city council; eager for more power, creates the job of Code Enforcer.
Let’s take the Building Department. What do we need a Building Department for? To enforce the Codes. What Codes? The Codes developed by different professional people telling us how to build our structures. Much of the code is designed for utility and some for safety. But utility should be a personal choice. But enough people are gullible enough to buy into arbitrary opinions based on one dimensional logic that when told to support an arbitrary law they do it not realizing this law will came back to them some day to bite them.
People in America have become negative and critical of everything. Each person has their brand of negativity and criticism and calling for more one dimensional ego centered laws that are causing all sorts of unintended consequences and blaming the other guy when things go wrong.
This is the America of today. People of today would not want the America of yesterday; the America of my generation. The America of many others of my generation living today and having to watch this three ring circus of stupidity and total lack of commonsense. You know what has replaced commonsense? It is Administrative Law.
People don’t own anything; they only have title to it. And the ones that have the real title like the Government think they own it when all they are holding title to is a piece of slag crust on a nuclear reactor called Earth that could blow at anytime causing the plates to sink or move in violent ways causing everything to be wiped out. We humans are really petty.
Freedom is a new concept in the thousands of years of human history we know. America became a place of freedom because government did not have it’s hold on the new continent. My generation and a few generations back experienced freedom because of this lack of government.
But now the freedom dance is coming to an end because the people value the illusion of consumerism more than they do liberty and freedom. When all their places to live are under corporate management and the jobs they have are either government provided or corporate provided where they are run like machines, told when they can take off, and are all riding on public transportation, eating low quality corporate food then they will again cry for freedom.
Or maybe they will give up total independence in their minds and become as the ant colonies have become.
Ever heard of the conscious circle of humanity? This 25 point plan is for use on people that are asleep; as most people are. Every point in it suggests what is happening today. This 25 point plan creates disorder out of order so what is the point of it in creating a one world order. Creating disorder out of order is the opposite of freemasonry. A system like this cannot last long because it is self destructive by it’s very nature.
It is true that I can see this plan as it is being used today across the country and around the world. But chaos leading to ignorance cannot cannot sustain a one world order.
Humans are self developing organisms with a brain large enough for all types of adaptations. This 25 point plan for creating disorder out of order will eventually fail because humans being what they are ( self developing organisms) will adapt around this non-organic system (internet) put in place like an octopus sucking everything out of the economy into it’s controlling diseased mind and giving nothing back to sustain life.
Who are these creatures that came up with this 25 point plan? Are they the same aliens that ruined Mars and settled here altering the DNA of the creatures here to make them into workers and soldiers? This 25 point plan you have did not come from the human mind. Humans by nature are not that criminal. We are violent due to our negativity; but not criminal with intent to subdue.
But it is interesting how far along this 25 point plan is in it’s execution. I think this one world order thing is a scam against the high ones in this world that think they are getting total control of the world by going along with the aliens that tap resources out of planets until nothing is left; then leave the ruined planet for another one.
With out lawyers and our joke of a legal and tort system, none of this would be possible. We have one lawyer for every 100 people, far and away the most litigious society on earth. You can’t do anything anymore without signing a “release of liability” so you can’t sue somebody. Having a party and you have a pool? Better have every guest sign a release, so when they get drunk, and they’re clumsy because they’re obese and slip and fall, they can’t sue you and get your house.
There are 15 million, MILLION lawsuits filed every year by scumbag fuck lawyers trying to cash in on the stupidity of people. And since nobody is responsible for anything they do, they have every right to sue for spilling coffee on themselves (or using an toaster in the rain). Used to be, if you were a dumbshit and you did something stupid because your IQ is 50, it was your fault. Well, not anymore, it’s somebody else’s fault you’re an imbecile, and it’s actionable in court. What a fucking joke. It’s the lawyer’s fault. All of it.
And yet that freedom to act first and litigate later to correct dysfunctions is what allowed this country to create and innovate on the fly. That opinion is still in practice, although in the case of greenspan’s refusal to rein in the bankers, it sometimes results in major calamities.
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for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
hairstyles can change but in most pictures we can see michelle’s dominant eye is her right eye, her left hand appears to be below her right eye.
It’s just Michelle giving the Wookie salute.