Borrowed from ACE’s Place because it’s worth sharing:
How many of these points can you share? So much of this sounds so familiar….. although I was
6 at the time.
“Grizzledcoastie” wrote:
438 When I was 8 during the summer back in the summer of 1968, we’d swim in the bayou, fish all day, live in the woods near my home playing guns (liberals of today would have kittens), football (no helmets or pads), basketball and baseball. We caught crawfish and our dads would boil them in a huge picnic with the corn and potatoes. We’d wave to the shrimp boats and the party boats headed to the Gulf and they’d blow their horns to us on the bank.
I never really watched a lot of TV and never had a reason to do so. I did chores, such as clipping the beautiful hedges that surrounded our parcel like a living fence and mowing the grass under our giant live oak tree with an old push mower. I started mowing the grass when I was 8 and I got an allowance.
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My parents had a big, screened in porch that overlooked the bayou and we’d have sleepouts on it. We’d sneak outside and look at the massive amount stars overhead.
We’d walk alone to the gas station on the corner and spend some of our allowances on classic candy and Barq’s or Cokes in a glass bottle. The summers on the Gulf Coast were hot as hell, but it wasn’t because of “global warming/climate change/whatever they’ll call it tomorrow.” It’s the South. It’s hot in the summer. Either you deal with it or you don’t.
We’d flirt with the neighborhood girls and steal kisses and have little relationships. That’s how I met my wife for the first time and we started dating in high school.
The only rules were you had to come inside for lunch and supper and playtime ended when the sun went down.
If someone got hurt, we got an adult. It was no big deal. One time, a friend of mine broke his arm and his Dad took him to the hospital, which was 24 miles away in the city. There was no nanny state going after him for “abuse.” His attitude, like all of our parents, were “boys will be boys.”
Vietnam was raging, but it was so distant. It wasn’t until a boy from up the street died that it became a real thing for me. There were very few black kids in our town, so civil rights was also a distant thing for me.
I sold that house after my parents passed on and I do tear up when I think of it. My Dad never spoke of his time in Korea and not that I blamed him. All I knew was he had a Bronze Star that I happened on one day. I showed it to him and he gently said to put that away and never speak of it ever again. When I read the award after his death, I never realized that my Dad had the courage of a lion.
Now kids can’t be kids. They have live in hermetically sealed bubbles. We wonder why there is a childhood obesity epidemic (everything to the nanny staters is an “epidemic”) when we won’t let kids have their independence and play as kids were meant to do. We don’t let “boys be boys.” We have to drug them with Ritalin so they won’t leave their seats and be active. I was busy as a child, but my teachers accepted that as part of “boys being boys.” You want to know why we have man buns and skinny, feminized hipsters and there’s your answer right there.
We don’t let them learn at their pace and by methods guaranteed to help them. And we wonder why more women are attending college, not that is a good thing since they come out propagandized by the feminist movement into hating men and delaying childbirth or not even having kids.
Our elites denigrate flyover country and blue collar workers, at least until they need a plumber to unclog their pipes or a roofer to plug holes in their leaking roof.
I’m sorry about rambling here, but there’s so much in this society that makes me so depressed for the world I hand over to my children and now my grandchild. We need to continue to belittle this bunk from these perennial, freedom-hating busybodies and give our children a chance to have the rich childhoods that ultimately prepare them to be the great future citizens our nation needs them to be.
Totally agree and the liberals are kicking a Sleeping Bear at home and abroad. Also, we restore our Traditional Christian Roots or the American Tree of Liberty will die and fall.
We would pull a wagon to the hardware store, buy a bag of nails, and the saw mill guys in the lumber yard would give us scrap wood (Boat Guy can corroborate this). Then we headed off to the woods and built forts. Couldn’t happen today; if one us fell out of a tree fort (as we often did, lol) the hardware store might be sued out of existence.
If Grizzledcoastie sees this, you might learn about your Dad’s Korean War service at https://www.fold3.com/ (a remarkable electronic achieve of military records)
From a city dweller: Some of the fun was just using imagination. Lost in Space had been on the television along with other futuristic shows. Cassette tapes had just come out. Dumpster diving in the phone companies dumpster always yielded working phones and electronic parts. Riding my bicycle all over town and exploring the new areas being added was another adventure. Spending the nights with friends, watching the stars, drinking a cola or a real treat was a 7/11 Slurpee. The freedom to just be and enjoy has sure changed from the past.
Here is a book I am giving to my children with the hope that some of it sinks in. They are those very things that we did as children that now would probably be considered abuse by the lunatic liberal left.
50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) by Gever Tulley and Juliue Speigler.
See Also:
“The Dangerous Book for Boys”
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204097.The_Dangerous_Book_for_Boys
AND
“The Daring Book for Girls”
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1300866.The_Daring_Book_for_Girls
I’m slightly younger than most of the posters here, but I was born in 1972 and liberal loony-ism what still not what it is today.
My brother (who is a year and four days behind me) would be told “get outside it’s too nice to be in the house!” as soon as it was after breakfast on the weekends, during school and summer vacation (yes, even when it was cold out).
We drank from the hose, no one died. We rode out bikes without helmets, no one died. We climbed trees, no one died. We rode our bikes to the store, no one got kidnapped. Or died. We played in the woods behind our house, no one died.
If there was a fire close by, we all hopped on our bikes and tore down to watch the fire department at work. No one yelled at us to go away, or asked where our parents were.
Other adults yelled at us for being idiots. No one got sued.
We knew better than to talk back to any adult or we would be in big trouble.
We watched out for each other as kids, and yes, there was the usual kidding around, and it was taken as part and parcel of being part of the “gang” and growing up. You took it, and smiled, and gave it right back. No one went crying home to mommy complaining someone was mean. If someone got too rough with us, the others would step up and say “hey, cut it out that’s mean” and that was the end of it.
There was ONE fat kid in my entire school. ONE.
Gym class was kickball and baseball and field hockey, even for the girls. We were taught sportsmanlike behavior, and being a good loser. Only the winners got trophies and we understood we needed to try harder, practice more if we wanted a trophy.
Teachers expected us to show up with a pencil, paper, and our damn book. Sit down, shut up, and pay attention. If you didn’t you went to the Vice Principal and everyone was scared of him. As it should be. If you acted like an ass, you got detention and your mommy and daddy didn’t come down to complain and say it wasn’t your fault. You served the damn detention and that was it.
No one was on all kinds of pills and special diets. There was about 4 kids in the “special” class.
We played pretty rough on the playground, tag, and cops and robbers, and no one called the police on us because they were afraid. Kids fell, scraped their knees, you went to Mrs. Ahern, the nurse, and she cleaned with mercurochrome and put a band aid on and you went back to class.
In High School ( I went to a Tech school) same thing. No BS. We had to be responsible to run machinery and have sharp tools in our class (I was in Machine shop). We helped each other.
There was ONE girl who got pregnant the entire time and we were all scandalized. No one carried knives to school, or threatened anyone with assault or rape. No one was sticking vodka soaked tampons up their ass. Don’t get me wrong, we experimented with alcohol like all HS kids do, but no one died. We watched out for each other. Strange guys at parties were watched like a hawk by us girls. No one was doing Oxy or coke or heroin. Some kids smoked a little pot but that was the minority.
It was a rare thing for anyone to see hard core porn. Some of the guys would get a hold of their dad’s playboy or MAYBE a penthouse, and there was always the quest to try and watch the scrambled porn channel, but that was about it. Most of the girls in my class, including myself, didn’t have our first sexual experience until we were 17 or older. We certainly were not giving out blow jobs like Pez candy to every boy we knew.
Sigh. That’s gone with the wind now.
Carlin, on kids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSMYzDIPqHk
If you’d been on the Eastern Seaboard or West Coast in 1968 you’d have had very different memories ( or nightmares). LSD and hippies were big. Serial killers were just getting started. The ‘Zodiac’ murdered a cab driver a block from my house. The Manson Family was forming in LA. Martin Luther King got himself shot to death and our big cities erupted in serious riots. It wasn’t called ‘terrorism’ back then but some Muslim shot RFK to death after the California primary and the Democratic convention in Chicago dissolved into riots. The year started with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and 500 of our soldiers died every week while it went on.
No 1968 was anything but idyllic. For me, I’d go back to 1960 or so. America was calm except for the sound and smoke of boy’s cap guns and, in the summer, cherry bombs. Our cars were giant finned beauties and an ‘import’ was a British MG , Austin Healey or Jaguar. Schools were orderly and students clean cut. Brylcream was big. Rock and Roll was exciting but not seditious. A teen pregnancy was scandalous and moms kept an eye on the neighborhood.
I was living in west Baltimore in 1968, a white kid from rural New Hampshire who had not a clue why these black people hated me, and that was before MLK was killed. After that things got worse, Race riots get honked, burn baby burn worse.
Now 1967, when I was still living on the fringe of the North woods, that was a great time and place.
When cars had leg room.
Ah, yes, the time of the “pointed” bra. She definitely needs the extra room in front of that steering wheel.
One thing I’ve noticed is big boobs seemed to be few and far between when I was growing up (graduated in 1980). A girl with big boobs was instantly popular with the boys. Maybe it’s all the hormones in the meat and milk and maybe the high-fructose corn syrup doing it, but it seems like all the girls that went to school with my son (graduated in 2015) had large boobs.
Guys, have you noticed this?
19 years old and soon to be 1A
Admin: not only leg room but the back seat was like a couch. 1968 was incredible for me. I met my future wife in the Spring of ’68, had a great job working in a garage, turned 21(no more fake IDs), etc. I wouldn’t trade places with the young folks today for all the money in the world!
Who remembers riding in back of a station wagon? https://goo.gl/images/KXUK21
When I was a kid, we had a ’60s-era Plymouth Barracuda (can’t remember the year, maybe ’64 or ’66), the type with the big area behind the backseat with a bubble-type back window. When we went to the drive-in movie (with our own homemade popcorn and drinks), we would lay the back part of the backseat down onto the backseat and practically turn the car into a station wagon. We had our pillows (and blankets if needed) and watched the movie with our heads propped up on our pillow at the back (which led to the trunk). I was young so I usually fell asleep before the movie ended. Those were the days. Of course, the drive-in is gone, a new huge office building in its place.
But we do still have an original drive-in restaurant, like you see on “Happy Days.” It’s still open and doing great business. It’s called the “Sno-Cap.” Even the speakers outside still work.
Jumped from a barn loft into bales of hay. Back flipped off a rooftop into a 6 foot deep snow drift. Threw hickory nuts at windshields of passing semi trucks from the top of the tree. Hitchhiked cross country. Fucked a bunch of girls without a condom and caught no diseases from them.
My cousin is about 20 years older than I am. He said when they were young, the guys would get on opposite sides of the street and throw the football. The roads weren’t real busy, but when it was hot and the (pre-air conditioner) cars would drive by with their windows down, they would try to throw the football through the open car windows to each other. He said there many surprised faces when it worked.
Unless they had a arm like a John Elway I’d say you couldn’t do it. A car going 30 mph is moving 44 feet per second. A car is 6 feet wide and if all its windows were down would give you an opening of less than 5 feet so if the ball entered right at the beginning of the front window it would have to travel laterally 6 feet before the car moved forward 5 feet or just over 1/10 of a second. That would mean you would have to perfectly time the throw and the ball would have to be traveling over 50 feet per second or about 45 mph!
You just might manage to do it with a baseball ( you could throw it sidearm to make the trajectory the same height as a car window) but throwing a football 45 mph or more. Not likely.
Don’t get over excited reminiscing now, Take your medications and wheel down to the dining hall. It’s hot dogs in a blender tonight, your favorite.
Remember, ‘right now’ will be someone else’s ‘back in the good ol’ days’. Makes you wonder how weird things will be by then.
I’m always conscious of the fact that we are all just passing though this world. In June 2017, I made a point of having my daughter meet the WWII vets at the World War II Weekend in Reading, PA. I wanted her to hear from the men & women who were there. Since she might well live into the next century, I want her able to pass their stories forward. (great annual event, see http://www.maam.org, click on World War II Weekend).
We as boys always had something to do , collect bottles to cash in for the 2 cent deposit and milk bottles were a nickel and then we would buy a pocket full of penny candy . My dad had a heart condition so I cut the lawn at around 10 with a gas mower and no safety shutoff or hearing and eye protection had to edge and sweep up too had a paper route and then I got a job delivering soda on a truck Saturday mornings old wooden cases of quart bottles house to house in an old UPS truck with a jump seat and a grab bar no seat belt or air bag and the sliding door stayed latched open OMG ! Snow flakes did not refer to the crybaby fruitcake kid it was dollar signs falling from the sky . We were out in force with shovels as soon as we got the word no school . We had to help all the dads dig out to get to work because in those days if you were non essential you were unemployed .
“delivering soda”
Summer of 68, was about 1968, as opposed to the summer of 69, which was not about the year of 1969