Guest Post by Fred Reed
Today we will ponder America, a country, even a civilization, that existed long ago where the United States is today, but bore little resemblance to it. It will be like studying cave drawings, or Sargon of Akkad. Pay attention. The is original source material of historical importance.
I was there, in America: Athens, Alabama, at age twelve.
Athens was small and Southern, drowsy in summer, kind of comfortable feeling, not much concerned with the outside world. It left the world alone and the world left it alone. In those days, people in a lot of places figured this was pretty workable.
Kids went barefoot. So help me. After about two weeks in spring your feet got tough and you could walk on anything, except maybe gravelly black asphalt that got hotter than the hinges. Parents let you do it. Today I guess it would be a hate crime, and you’d get an ambulance, three squad cars and Child Protective Services all honking and blowing and being important. We didn’t know we needed protecting. Maybe we didn’t.
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It wasn’t like today. When your dog wanted to go out, she did, and went where she thought was a good idea, and nobody cared, and she came back when she thought that was a good idea, and everybody was content. She probably slept on your bed, too. Today it would be a health crisis with the ambulance and squad cars. We just didn’t know any better. I don’t remember anybody dying of dog poisoning.
Now, BB guns. We all had one, every kid that was eleven years old. Boy kids, anyway. Mostly they were Red Ryder, for four dollars, but I had a Daisy Eagle, that had a plastic telescopic sight, and was no end uptown. I was always aristocratic. Anyway, you could go into any little corner store and get a pack of BBs for a nickel.
In downtown Athens–there was about a block of it, around the square–there was the Limestone Drugstore. It’s still there, like them pyramids at Geezer. Kids came in like hoplites or cohorts or hordes, or anyway one of those things in history and leaned their BB guns near the door, with their baseball gloves too usually.
Nobody cared. We didn’t shoot each other with the BB guns because we just didn’t. It’s how things used to be. We didn’t need the po-leese to tell us not to do it because it wasn’t something we did. Shooting another kid was like gargling fishhooks or taking poison. You could do it, but probably wouldn’t.
Anyway the man that owned the Limestone was about eighty or a hundred years old and had frizzy red hair like a bottle brush and his name was Coochie. It’s what everyone called him anyway. He liked little boys–not like those Catholic preachers always in the newspapers–we didn’t do that either–but just liked kids. There was this big rack of comic books that nobody ever bought but you just took them to a table and read them till they fell into dust and drank cherry cokes and ate nickel pecan pies. I think Coochie used comic books as bait so he could talk to us. It was mighty fine.
We all had pocket knives, or mostly anyway. If you were rich you had a Buck knife. That was the best kind. We’d take them to school because they were in our pockets and it was hard to leave your pocket somewhere even if you thought of it. You could carve your initials on your desk when the teacher wasn’t looking.
Today if you had a knife in school you’d get the squad cars and ambulance and get handcuffed and have to listen to a psychologist lady until you wanted to kill someone. Probably her.
It was different then, back in America. We didn’t think of stabbing anybody. It would have seemed like a damn fool idea, like eating a peanut butter sandwich dipped in kerosene. It wasn’t how people were. I guess how people are is what they’re going to do, not what laws you have. You can tell a possum to sing church songs, but he won’t, because a possum just doesn’t have it in him. It’s not how he is.
When you shot a BB gun at something that needed shooting, like an insulator of a telephone pole, it was like a thing of beauty. You could see the BB sail away, all coppery and glinty against blue sky and it was like a poem or something. Maybe anyway. You could see it start to drop when the speed wore off and go sideways a little with the wind where there was any. You learned to calculate and you could hit just about anything.
Lots of things was different. Water fountains on the town square said White and Colored, White folks and black people didn’t mix at all. I thought it saved trouble for everybody but people from up North said it was wrong and I guess it was. Now the black folks up north are killing each other by hundreds, the papers say, and I’m not sure why that’s a good idea, but then blacks in places like Newark and Detroit have really good schools because Northerners really care about blacks and they mostly go to Harvard, so I guess it’s a lot better.
Another thing you could do with a BB gun was to get a twelve-gauge shotgun shell which you could do in several ways. You might steal it from your dad’s gun rack if he had one, or stick it inside a roll of toilet paper in a store and buy the toilet paper. But I don’t know anything about that. Anyway you could cut the shell off just in front of the powder and put the powder and primer on the end of the barrel of the BB gun. Pow! A spray of orange sparks would shoot into the air. It was real satisfying. It may not have been real smart.
Finally, manners, morals, and language as practiced in America. As boys, which is to say small barbarians in need, when alone together, of socialization, we insulted each other. “I’ll slap the far outa you, you no-count scandal.” I will slap the fire out of you, you scoundrel of no account. Or, “You ain’t got the sense God give a crabapple.” But, barefoot and tatterdemalion though we might be, or in fact certainly were, the elements of civilization had been impressed on us. We did not cuss or talk dirty in the presence of girls or women. We didn’t curse out teachers neither. I don’t rightly know what would have happened if someone had tried it. No one did. We weren’t that kind of people. It’s the kind of people you are that counts.At least, that’swhat I reckon. Even at twelve, I had that figured out.¿
I remember those days too, Fred. That’s why most people older than 40 wish they could go back and live in the ’50s (I have been conducting an informal poll), when we dirt folks never had any contact with the Feds, and darned little with any other government busybodies.Also, we boys would leave home in the morning and often not return for hours, with no discernible reaction from Mom, who had other fish to fry….It was heaven.
It all ended after the ’62 coup. Lyndon Baines Johnson began the dismantling and it continues till this very day.
Enjoyed reading this. Wow, how did we get here from there? I would prefer that more simpler time.
We got here from there via the fedres banksters and the fedgov thuggocrats.
Gee, that must have been before the Hart-Cellar Act and the Civil Rights era, when the US was 90% white and segregated, a one-income household with kids on a working-class income, and not much of a police state.
Such a graphic description of White Privilege and immorality…. Sad.
Fred is mistaken. That world never existed and it must also be fundamentally changed. Or something like that.
Aside: my youngest walks around without shoes about 9 months out of the year, hates them. He has no problem playing outside in the snow barefoot, with his BB gun and a pack of dogs for company. Seems perfectly well adjusted to me.
Jeez, you annoy me at times.
Who the hell are you to say FRED’S world, as HE remembers it … “never existed”? Such hubris! How about the next time you write about life-on-the-farm a few of us say likewise to you?
If your son decided he likes the taste of hemlock, would you let him partake? Yet, you let him play in the snow with no shoes? You need a visit from Child Protective Services.
Uh, Stuck, I believe the good farmer is had tongue fully in cheek as he was typing that. Perhaps your sarcasm detector needs recalibrating.
You never seem to have any trouble spotting snark when it’s directed at you. Next time I’ll post a warning, “Caution: Sarc Ahead”
I grew up in the same world he did, I know it existed. I just happen to live in the progressive era where everyone assures us that such a time and place never existed and at the same time tells us how oppressive it was and how it must be dismantled, etc. Kinda schizo if you ask me, but hey, have you seen what they do to their bodies?
And as far as my son goes, they are his feet, if they’re tough enough to handle the cold then more power to him. I wouldn’t do it, but like I said he spends most of his time without shoes and let me tell you the bottom of his feet are like moccasin leather. We also have a trampoline without a net around it and he rides his bike without a helmet. You have kids? They can be willful and have their own ideas about what they can do. You choose your battles but so far he’s turning into a solid human being. You know what he doesn’t do? Bend his head at a 90 degree angle to stare into the abyss of an electronic device like every other toddler I see out in the civilized world, so there’s that.
Sure enough, I missed the sarcasm. Sue me.
Brilliant reasoning. Why not let your son smoke? It’s his lungs. Why not let him take meth? It’s his brain.
Doesn’t matter that his feet are tough as leather.
In winter, when it’s raining, cold, and wet almost all the time your feet are more exposed and vulnerable. When your feet get wet, they soften. Think back to when you stayed in the bath for too long, your feet shrivel and become soft, right? Exactly. Yes, your feet DO develop a strength and a natural coating of tough skin if you walk barefoot, BUT in winter, this is broken down by the moisture. Also, if it’s particularly cold you could get frostbite as a result of the blood in your feet freezing or becoming clogged …. and it can happen very quickly. This is BAD. Right?
But, not only will you not listen to anyone … you won’t even acknowledge the possibility that it’s a bad idea. Instead, you just double down with more rationalizations and excuses.
And you have the balls to call ME obtuse?
At least my obtuseness is over minor shit. Yours could result in your kid having his toes amputated. I wonder what you will say then?
You win.
Now I have to find some meth and a pack of cigarettes.
Yet another snarky response. Nice. I don’t care about winning.
My mom suffered greatly due to not having proper clothing in cold weather. The Russians decided Germans didn’t really need to have much heat in their gulag camps. Due to that (and other issues) her hands are so gnarled she can’t fully open either one.
There are 2 reasons why I might have taken the time and effort to write my responses to you.
1. I’ve got nothing else to do on a fucking Sunday ,.. a day I promised Ms Freud I would stay off TBP for the most part.
2. I actually care about you and your son, and I just want you to CONSIDER the very real possible consequences.
But, no, you gotta respond in a snarky and flippant manner. And I get 5 goddamned thumbs down for giving a factual response that tough-as-leather feet don’t matter when it’s cold and wet???? WTF?
Well, pardon me!!! You can go fuck yourself before I take the time to try to be of help to you again.
This place is a community?? Yeah, right. You 5 down voters can suck the shit right out of my ass, and I don’t care who you are. What a goddamned waste of time it is posting here at times.
Hardscrambled, frostbite is the least uh yer gawd dammed worries. Yer boy is squishin all kinds er shit from yer awesomely happy organic livestock between his bare toes, and I bet he’s got uh massive clump uh pinworms congregated in the ol bung hole. One time i had ter use uh plunger on Billah jr and good gawd we had enough bait fer uh weeks worth uh fishin. Anywats I’m with Cap’n Noodledick on this one. Git yer boy some gawd dammed flip flops at least.
Wormwood tablets are good for worms, Billah. No plunger needed.
Nanny Stucky. Who would have thought?
By the way, if a kid wants to smoke, he’ll do so whether his parents want him to or not. I should know because I did it.
Stucky- Don’t be a d*****bag. We don’t need anymore. Got enough of ’em already.
Farmer, I lived in that small-town world, too, growing up. And I’m still barefoot 9 months out of the year.
A barefoot,natural medicine practicing, gun loving, Christian libertarian survivalist-got it. TBP girls are super cool.
Thanks, Barney. You’ve summed me up to a T.
“We did not cuss or talk dirty in the presence of girls or women.” What’s the matter with you, Fred. Are you some kind of homo?
And, may I add that Fred is a big sissy. That hot asphalt ain’t that bad at all to walk on if you have toughened your feet on gravel and hard clay.
I had my BB guns but I got my first shotgun at the age of 12 . Would walk down the street through neighborhoods to go hunting and no one ever called the police or said anything.Then again I wasn’t thinking about shooting people so it was ok.Now a kid would probably be arrested and his parents put in jail.
Kids don’t get out and play like we used to.I Never see kids riding bikes anywhere either.My bicycle was my transportation to see the world.I Never see kids doing what we thought was fun .I guess they are inside playing videogames.
I remember it well, Fred and BB. What the hell did we let happen?
Gee, I guess it’s NOT racism, seems everybody’s been acting not in their own, or their children’s, best interest for 50 years in order to NOT BE RACIST.
“By 2007, minority hiring at Kennedy increased to 23 percent. Today, minorities make up 27.2 percent of just over 2,000 NASA civil service employees at the Florida spaceport.”
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-helped-kick-start-diversity-in-employment-opportunities
How about that manned space program now, eh?
At least you can’t be called racist, and that all non-whites respect you and appreciate all the non-racist gibs handed out on behalf of the working whites. Who are dwindling in numbers but not burden, or just turning to opiates because their New American Dream is infinity brown people.
But WTF do I know, except at this rate man will never explore the stars, because that’s racist.
It’s racist to achieve things others can’t. It’s racist to rub those achievements in others faces. All we are seeing is what already happens in schools across the country. It’s racist if some groups of people consistently find themselves unable to graduate high school. So, rather than providing those who can with as much knowledge as possible, we simply lower the standards and teach to the lowest common denominator. Which, in most cases, is blacks. So, now all kids are simply taught at the level blacks are thought to be able to comprehend. As a society, we have given up on achieving greatness and focused instead on bringing minorities, especially blacks, up to white levels of achievement and intelligence. But, since that has proven impossible, we are now moving towards lowering the country to lowest common denominator level. Since Blacks and others can’t be made to live like whites, we’ve decided to make our whole country at their level.
1 – 2 – 3 Everybody say: Oh-bah-mah Oh-bah-mah
His election ended that America. The good America. America is nothing anymore. Just a bunch of rich folks fighting over the scraps that are left, while everyone else looks on and makes believe it’s all ok.
There is one last fleecing that is taking place. And only by refusing to participate can it be stopped. But, because it is based on greed and greed is so universal, it will happen.
This ad-
And
This explanation- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3Ju8AhCKM
I wonder how many can resist this get rich quick scheme that is really just the banksters last attempt to get what is left of your wealth from you.
Maranatha!!
Blessings:-}
I used to hitchhike with a friend and we both carried shotguns and even dead ducks. Rides were easy. Eastern Washington state.
As a young boy, I remember going to stay with my grandparents every summer for two weeks in Okolona, Mississippi. This was around 1959. My grandmother would give me 25 cents and I’d head out the front door, walk downtown, go see a movie and get a toy at the dime store, at 5 years old! No problems, no safety issues, just freedom and good fun, this was America. Now its’ government tyranny and a decadent culture, this is the US. If we are to ever get back to what America once was, I think the US will have to first experience a very great fall, pick up the pieces and rebuild. Hopefully America would re-emerge, but that’s not a given.
At six I would take my 3 year old brother fishing about 300 yards away at a lovely pond for bluegill. We had a grand old time and yes I was aware enough to look out for him. As we grew older we had bikes and would be gone most of the hot Florida summer days. I could walk on the black asphalt and we loved to watch it steam after the later afternoon showers. The Crossman 760 power master was our BB gun aspiration. We did have bb gun wars, layered up and wearing diving masks, very entertaining. Long long days of basketball, fishing, jumping bikes off ramps, skateboarding, throwing oranges and of course camping. We knew all the deputy sheriffs as they were also our baseball and football coaches…….and regularly checked in with the schools and parents. Lots of laps were run on special request. We had fights and even if you knew you were likely to lose, showing up after school for the event was a matter of honor. We had honor as pre-teens and no it wasn’t street cred or “respect”, you just did it. Of course things were not perfect, we had broken homes, domestic violence and one coach committed suicide which we couldn’t begin to understand. A kid the next town over was murdered by two pedo’s which might have been the moment that I felt a changing wind. Those were good days while they lasted and I am glad my kids are experiencing Montana now which while the distances are longer the feeling is still much the same.
It really wasn’t that long ago. I’m only 32 and it was like that when I grew up. But, now the 90+% white area i grew up in is something like 20% white and dropping by the day. We used to go out and do all kinds of shit in the woods and all over the neighborhood when we were elementary school aged. Parents never knew where we were half the time. Climbing trees, building forts, shooting things with BB guns too. Our summer favorite was flashlight tag. There’d be a dozen or more of us out as late as possible. I have a relative that until recently lived on a military base, and it’s still like that, minus the BB guns of course.
The Good Old Days – decades ago, it used to be just a statement made in contrast to some specific current event. Today, it is a reflection on the societal life as a whole.
Yes, it was much simpler and better, even without TV, Internet, i-gadgets, and especially gov’t nanny state.
Iris Dement & John Prine – We’re Not The Jet Set
Wrong Athens, but right kind of thinking. This is why they want your guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
Great walk down memory lane Fred.
We used whole shotgun shells on the end of our bb guns, not often but we did it. Mumblety-peg and knife carry – yes. Matches in our pockets – yes. I would start fires at the bus stop on cold Florida Panhandle mornings. I been busted on federal property twice for carrying as a youth with zero repercussions. In jr high we would walk miles and miles alone along country roads to collect bottles to cash in and buy cokes to drink with peanuts poured into the bottle, or go ride go carts without parents. Hitch hiking was common. It was great fun to go with my classmate nicknamed Squirrel (and would become mayor) – walking miles around town and out to the beaches of Destin and Okaloosa Island, then stop by his father’s Rexall Drug Store for a free soda. Another friend and I would go camping overnight by ourselves with a pellet gun at a city park (and shoot sea gulls to cook on our camp fire). City cops came by and all we had to do is mention his father. We always got respect as his ex Army Airborne father was in the Highway Patrol, (and would become a 33rd degree Mason) and was nicknamed ‘Cuz’. Who remembers Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol from 50’s tv?
We would have pellet gun wars wearing thick clothes and a dive mask for eye protection. Three pumps only were allowed. One of the boys still has a bb embedded in his cheek. It was more fun than shooting rolled cardboard in rubber band wars. We made pipe guns using cherry bombs or silver tubes for powder.
We always respected all adults and said yes sir and yes ma’am. Insubordination at school ended up with a boarding on our butts.
I am sometimes surprised I survived.
So I might be the youngest to comment about the “good ol days”. Born in 1972, grew up in the “Quiet Corner” of NE CT.
Weekends and summers my mom would tell me and my brother, right after breakfast “you kids get outside it’s too nice to hang around indoors.” and out we would go. Never to step foot inside unless it was to grab our lunch or use the bathroom.
We rode bikes without helmets ALL THE WAY TO THE CORNER STORE! All by ourselves! And made it back! It was miraculous.
We built forts in the woods, with nails, and hammers. No one died.
We climbed trees. Ok, so some of us fell, but I don’t remember any serious injuries other than the constant scabby knees every kid under 12 had in those days.
If a kid was getting picked on at school, we pretty much gang up on the bully and ran him off. And that was that. The police didn’t come, and usually even the teachers stayed out of it and let justice take its course.
There was one fat kid. ONE.
Nobody was drinking or smoking weed.
We drank out of the hose. No one died. Or even got sick.
Once the chicken pox were coming around, the parents got us all together so our whole group could just get it and be done with it. Seriously.
We pitched tents in the yard and slept outside in the summer with our friends. Alone. No one died. Or was kidnapped.
We stood at the bus stop all together with no parents every morning. No one died. Or got kidnapped. We got off the bus every afternoon the same way. We all made it home.
We had those swing sets in our yard where if you swung really high, the poles supporting the set would hop up off the ground a little. We thought it was a blast, no one fixed it, and no one died.
We made spears out of sticks and threw them at each other. Everyone still has 2 eyes and no one died. We got really dirty every day. It was expected. We were OUTSIDE. You know, where there is dirt and stuff. We ate our sandwiches out there too, amongst the dirt and bugs. No one died. OR got sick.
We caught bugs, and spiders, and kept them in jars. No one got bit, or died, or got sick. But we learned a lot about bugs.
We played in the woods. ALONE. Just us kids. Everyone came back at dusk.
Not one kid yelled at a teacher, or swore at a teacher. We were all petrified of the Vice Principal. He was big, and scary, and had a crew cut. I never saw him actually DO anything, but I guess the fear of him was enough to keep us in line.
We did our homework. We turned it in. If we screwed up, it was our fault, not the teachers, because hey, pay attention, read the assignment, and do the damn homework. You bring your book and your pencil to class, everyone knew that, it was common sense. It’s not the teacher’s fault if you were lazy and just blew it off. If you acted like that, pretty much all the other kids would ostracize you, and you knew it, and then you stopped acting like a delinquent and we accepted you back in the group. Case closed.
Boys didn’t hit girls. It just wasn’t done. It was a scandalous thought, and I remember when one little girl accidentally got caught in the middle of 2 boys roughhousing and she got a bloody nose, those two boys acted like they killed her, they were so upset.
Other kid’s parents could yell at you, and tell you to do things, and you just did. Parents were parents.
Grandparents were sacred. We loved them, treasured them, helped them put things away.
Dads went to work, and sometimes some moms did too, but mostly parents were home at night and on weekends.
If one kid had a pool, it was everyone in the neighborhood’s pool and that’s just where we went in the summer.
We watched out for the little kids, made sure they didn’t wander off into the street because they were just little and didn’t know any better. We knew it was our job, we didn’t care, we just did it.
After supper we picked up our plates and either washed the dishes or if we were a lucky family, put them in the dishwasher. We took out the trash. Made our beds. Raked leaves. Shoveled the snow. Fed the dog or cat. Every kid had chores. On Saturday we would say “what do you want to do after chores?”
Parents actually didn’t let us watch rated R movies. They were considered too violent, or too much swearing. They actually cared about what we watched.
We had limited phone time. We didn’t pay the damn bill so get off the phone.
We shut the lights off when we left a room. We didn’t touch the thermostat upon pain of death.
My dad was in law enforcement. He had a gun. Never in our wildest dreams would me or my brother ever, EVER consider going to look for it and take it or even touch it. NEVER.
We read books.
We played board games. Video games were for rich people.
We had ONE TV. And dad was in charge of it. Period.
When it was time for bed, we went there, and went to sleep.
All that is gone, and the lunatics are running the asylum.
Realestateput, that really brought back some memories.
This is the best thing I’ve read on the internets all this year. Well said, my friend.
I sincerely hope the lone thumbs down was due to a phat finger, not some dweeb salivating over a chance to play Emperor…..
All of the above. Also bottle rockets and wrist rockets.
Yeah, the same except firecrackers tied to the tip of arrows and then sent straight up. Never knew where the arrow might come down. Nobody ever got stuck by an arrow. Miraculous.
One of my childhood buddies, who was a big fella ( later in life his fire department Tug o’ War team named him Baby Huey ) and the rest of our motley crew were big fans of Saturday afternoon movies at the local theatre. The most popular films were the adventures of Robin Hood, Tarzan, Ivanhoe etc. Cost 25 cents. Another dime bought you a box of toffee that lasted all afternoon and had a cellophane window built in to the box. It could be played like a kazoo if you blew just right into the end of the box. Also had pea shooters to take out the bad guys on the screen. We decided it would be a real good idea to make our own medieval weapons out of wooden sticks and such and indulge our fantasies. Baby Huey came up with a crossbow fashioned from a 2×4 with a car leaf spring as the bow and wire for the bow string. He was the only one who could draw it and he used his dad’s darts as ammo. Used to fire them into rats at the city dump and on occasion, randomly into the air. No idea where they came down as they would basically disappear into the sky. Luckily, this phase didn’t last long and baseball and roller-skate hockey took it’s place. But I’ve always wondered about those darts….
Ya we used to launch bottle rockets at each other. They were illegal in my state, but on the way from GA to Panama City in the summer, we’d buy some in Alabama on the way home. I’d spend all my money on the 144 packs of cheap bottle rockets. I could take them outside and light them off in supervised too. Looking back, it’s pretty amazing none of us ever got a serious injury from any of the dumb stuff we used to do. All I remember is getting some burns on my hands s couple times, and getting told by my parents that ‘they are called bottle rockets because you are supposed to put them in a bottle to light them, not hold them in your hand’ and that was that.
It’s really unfortunate that all of that was racist and had to be destroyed.
And dirt clod fights
Girls did a lot of those things, too! I didn’t know any girls that had BB guns, though. In the summer, the whole neighborhood would play hide and seek , not at any one persons house, just all over the neighborhood. We just had to come home when the street lights came on.
I used to walk to the store by myself a lot to get a couple things for my mom because we only had one car. When it was warm I walked barefoot and they didn’t kick you out of the store! This was not in a small town, we lived in the suburbs on the Kansas side of Kansas City. There was one kid in the neighborhood who was trouble, like we had to stay away from him. Really bad trouble. Turned out he had a brain tumor and died at around 16. That may have been what cause him to be such a terror. But his mom was a single mom and was never home, so who knows. I still remember his name, that’s how scary this kid was.
The girls all had Barbies and we never, ever compared ourselves to how Barbie looked. As Fred said, it just wasn’t done. It went without saying that Barbie had a body that was not realistic, duh, hello, no nipples, no hips. Sheesh, now they obsess about it.
KCK my home town. Graduated HS in 1960 so I got a good dose of 1950’s America. Which suburb Christine.?
Over, it was Roeland Park. My parents built a little 2 br, 1 bath house there after the war. There was no such thing as a home owners assoc. So all the houses were different. So I used to walk to the shopping center at Roe and 52nd. It was the. 60’s for me but probably not much different than the 50’s.
I had cousins that lived near Quindaro for a while. That was like another world. They moved to western KCK later.
Mary Christine, I had a BB gun when I was young. I grew up with two older brothers and the majority of the neighborhood was boys. I was a huge tomboy. For Christmas, I used to get a lot of girly stuff, but ended up playing with my brother’s trucks and cars, etc., so eventually whatever my brothers received, I received as well. By junior high, the tomboy died out and the girl emerged, but I still loved shooting, riding bikes, rollerskating, skateboarding, camping and building fires. In fact, I still do.
My playground were Baker Beach in San Francisco and Land’s End. They were just places then as John Burton had not yet created the “Golden Gate National Recreation Area”. My Irish Setter didn’t need to be on a leash and could chase seagulls, pelicans or another dog to his hearts content. He’d even go in the water for a swim and was lucky a shark didn’t get him as they were out there. I had a wrist rocket and managed to shoot the beak off of a pelican when it soared by the cliffs of Land’s End. I felt bad about it but not as bad as the pelican and they didn’t go extinct.
I bought a BB gun from Dave’s Sporting Goods out on Clement St. I didn’t know it was against the law for Dave to sell them inside the city limits of San Francisco but found out when a ricochet broke a neighbors window. I saw the neighbor glaring back at me and ducked but it was too late. He’d seen me and the police came. The police took my BB gun and returned with my money. I suspect they were a bit harder on Dave’s Sporting Goods!
I grew up Hawaii in the early sixties. My Mother, to get us out of her hair would drive me, my siblings, and as many of the neighborhood kids we could fit into our blue station wagon down to the beach where we were dumped off at any given spot.
In her broken English, my Mother would yell her two rules; 1) be there when she honked her horn. 2) do not bring sand in her car or she will beat you with her slipper.
She never gave us a time frame of when she was coming to get us, we just had to listen for the sound of that horn. And if you knew my Mother, you best pay attention to any horn blowing.
We were given no money. If we got hungry, it was understood that we could mooch off someone having a BBQ. And there were plenty of families having one who were more than happy to share with a bunch of strays.
There was no sunscreen handed out and half the time she wouldn’t give us towels because it meant more work for her.
We weren’t told not to drown or go off with strangers. It was “DONT BRING SAND IN THE CAR!”
Imagine, living in a time when getting sand in your car was your biggest nightmare as a parent.
We never went anywhere without our BB guns, pocket knives and big loyal dogs. We ranged far and wide in the woods and fields were we lived on the outskirts of town and had detailed plans if ever set upon. In the wintertime we put on our snowshoes and snared rabbits that my friends mother would fry up with beans for us. Good ol days for sure.
Take away all these wondrous experiences from kids and they are grossly deficient in developing self-reliance, understanding of natural consequences, respect for authority, creative problem-solving, accountability, and courage. What you have left looks like a standard issue Millennial.
Scary thought: What comes after the standard issue Millennial?
Some very lucky folks above. My brother’s friend was maimed for life with a pipe bomb made out of firecrackers, which almost took his foot clean off.
Another friend almost died from getting speared with a homemade spear, albeit it was an accident. A neighbor kid lost an eye from a bb gun. We accidently burned down a farmer’s barn screwing around with fireworks. Another kid was knocked cold with an ice ball and spent several days in the hospital. Some kids lost teeth and had bones and noses broke in those after school fights, some of which I caused. And there were myriad cuts, broken bones, dislocations, etc., from the various shenanigans. And, oh, yeah, let’s not forget the kids that drowned (2 in my school) or died in car crashes (4), plus the odd death by horse, motorcycle, etc.
Some of the activities mentioned above were dangerous as hell, and make no mistake, some kids were severely hurt. It was not all peaches and cream and good times and no bad stuff. Either folks were very damn lucky, or memories have faded.
My kids never saw any of those bad things, and grew up much more genteel than I did. They missed out on some of the wild, but also some of the tragedy. All weighed up, I think genteel wins by a nose. If they can somehow get through life without the aggression I was born and raised to, it would be a good thing. So far so good. I hope I have provided them the skills to deal with the tragedy but the circumstances of not experiencing it. Time will tell.
Better to learn from someone else’s bad experiences and not repeat it, than to learn the hard way on your own.
Rocky – indeed.
But folks around here get all nostalgic for the ” good old days” and forget the bad stuff that happened. And a lot of bad stuff happened, but seems to have been forgotten and dismissed. Death by car, for instance, was common among the young in the good old days. Today, it is much more rare.
Can’t see the thumbs-down, but I disagree. More like natural selection, By over-protecting our kids, we are interfering with evolution. Makes for a weaker gene-pool. The human race is de-volving, if that’s a word.
Robert (QSLV)
Lipoh, we’ve all seen friends get hurt, maimed, etc, but that’s where the responsibility and consequences come in. If you take the risk, you take the consequences. Some didn’t go as far as others. Some were daredevils. Many learned from others’ mistakes. Everybody was different. But every action you took had consequences and it was up to you to decide if it was worth it.
Well, there is the time my cousin set her legs on fire when we were in the 2nd grade. Matches and gasoline = two weeks in the burn unit.
Llpoh: Make no mistake, we had our fair share of injuries, but the majority of time we didn’t. It wasn’t until I was in high school the bad shit really started to happen, and mind you this was 1986-1990.
So the world was rapidly changing, socially for our age group. Cocaine was now a real thing, even in the suburbs. Teenage drinking. The freshman girl who started the school year pregnant. Rape. Three kids in my class died, two from car accidents, one from suicide.
But as a child, and I mean under 13, we were more likely to get a broken leg than end up dead. Certainly accidents happen, but keeping kids swathed in this bubble-wrap away from life is not working because now we have a whole generation of overly sensitive babies who cannot handle chalk on a sidewalk. But drink and have access to recreational pot.
Gentile? call me confused. I also survived unscathed; born in ’48. I remember a kid who lost toes to a lawn mower. We learned the hard way, but we never forgot those lessons.
Genteel. Thanks for the catch.
Drowning, maiming, loss of an eye, etc., are hard lessons to learn. I prefer my kin to avoid those lessons. I will try to verbalize rather than demonstrate those lessons. But that is just me.
The bad I remember was childhood leukemia, polio, and the common occurrence of kids falling out of the back seats of cars while riding along.
As long as human beings interact with nature, including human nature, and machines there will be mishaps. In deference to safety and the removal of every kind of danger imaginable for everybody, to the point that now even speech is considered a danger, we have given up a lot. But I grant you a 10 year old boy is much safer sitting on his couch playing online games than he would be outside with his bb gun and spear and his similarly armed buddies.
Yeah the 10 year old is physically safe…mentally he’s at high risk. Parents always know what’s good for their kids, just not what’s best for them.
Kids need to be physically living their childhood not sitting on a sofa playing shoot-em-ups in front of some electronic babysitter. Please define crappy parent for me, will ya?
Those were great times and are great memories. We had orange groves all around us and went hunting for rabbits and such with a shotgun at a very early age. Bycicles were our main mode of transport as well. Almost always barefoot. It was indeed a different time.
Even here in Montana where I live now we have change agents living in the larger cities, usually from the more Marxist states, who want those things to remain in the past. But, since we live outside of any city limits here we are not too affected by them…… yet.
Thanks for the trip.
Blessings:-}
Drank out of the hose went into the woods and the abandoned quarry and sand and gravel pits with our bikes and B.B. guns no helmet no knee and elbow pads . Our skate boards were old skates screwed and nailed to a board . Walked to school or road our bikes . Had a paper route after school . Always had some part time job or hustle to make a few bucks . Snow was dollar signs falling from God . I hit the street with a shovel early and went sled riding later . Wow as a kid some of the lazy kids always wondered how I had money in my pocket all the time , but when you asked them to pitch in on any job that came up poof gone . They grew up to be criminals or Work for the Social Security Adminastration LOL
“Drank out of the hose”
Remember letting it run few seconds for the warm water to pass and get the cold water, lol.
Buying a bag of nails at the hardware store, and the sawmill guys in the lumber yard would give us scrap wood to build tree forts with. Today, that would be inviting a lawsuit (as someone invariably fell out of the tree fort, lol)
Ah yes.. skate boards made from steel roller-skates. We use to play roller hockey at the local school. Get there at the crack of dawn with homemade nets ( courtesy of a local Halibut fisherman ) and a big box of assorted parts. Spent the first hour sweeping the gravel from the asphalt school ground ( don’t want to hit a piece of gravel at top speed – face plant ) and trying to assemble a decent pair of skates from the assorted bits and pieces in the box without having to actually go to the hardware store and buy some ( an allowance didn’t go far ). Because we all wore running shoes, and since roller-skate clamps were made for street shoes, we came up with a workaround by using strips of rubber inner tubes wound around the instep of our feet and the skates. Worked great except they had to be tight and would cut off the blood circulation in your feet at times. Trying to turn and stop on steel wheels was an adventure and the wooden blades on the sticks would wear away to little 1 inch strips eventually making it difficult to control the fuzz less tennis balls we used as pucks. Great days indeed!
The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn Iggulden, Hal Iggulden
Great gift if you have kids or grandkids. Availiable at most online booksellers.
“The bestselling book for every boy from eight to eighty, covering essential boyhood skills such as building tree houses*, learning how to fish, finding true north, and even answering the age old question of what the big deal with girls is. In this digital age there is still a place for knots, skimming stones and stories of incredible courage. This book recaptures Sunday afternoons, stimulates curiosity, and makes for great father-son activities. The brothers Conn and Hal have put together a wonderful collection of all things that make being young or young at heart fun—building go-carts and electromagnets, identifying insects and spiders, and flying the world’s best paper airplanes.”
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The Daring Book for Girls, by Andrea Buchanan & Miriam Peskowitz
“The Daring Book for Girls is the manual for everything that girls need to know—and that doesn’t mean sewing buttonholes! Whether it’s female heroes in history, secret note-passing skills, science projects, friendship bracelets, double dutch, cats cradle, the perfect cartwheel or the eternal mystery of what boys are thinking, this book has it all. But it’s not just a guide to giggling at sleepovers—although that’s included, of course! Whether readers consider themselves tomboys, girly-girls, or a little bit of both, this book is every girl’s invitation to adventure.”
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Idyllic boyhood provided by a coal miner/factory worker hero father and home maker heroine mother who both had been weaned on the thin gruel of the depression and WW2. Both thought Dr. Spock was the idiot he was and my roots were planted and nurtured deep in their rich bootstrap blue collar American soil.
Started cutting grass, shoveling snow, carrying grocery bags, then graduated to paper routes (had two at one time for a while – bit off more then I could deliver). Part time in the grocery store at 16…then full time on 2nd shift in a plastics factory (bit off more then I could chew again – but I had game)…hustle…hustle…hustle…save…save…save.
Usually worked two jobs. Saved enough to buy my first house by working 3 jobs, 96 hours a week. Started falling asleep sitting on the toilet…then went down to 65 hours a week once I had the down payment and the closing costs…a cake walk.
Climbed the corporate ladder until I got fed up with the political wall it had to lean against and opened my own consulting company at 55, when I realized I actually knew enough to take the gamble. Rolled the dice and a string of 7’s & 11’s.
America…has always been the land of opportunity for me…because all it asked was hard work and money handling common sense…which I was taught and caught.
My mom said the only thing Dr. Spock ‘s book was good for was smacking the kid upside the head, lol.
Reading this article and all the comments was like a trip down memory lane. My brothers and I were feral kids. Always out on our bicycles looking for adventure. I don’t even think they had bicycle helmets back then. I can’t remember any. Summer time we were out at dawn and didn’t come in until way past dusk. We had guns. We were properly trained on how to handle them before we got turned loose with them. If Mom ever worried about where we were or what we were up to she never showed it. Yes some bad things happened and I myself cheated death a few times, but I’m here to tell about it. We saw other kids get hurt. It was an education on what not to do. Like a built up immunity to stupidity. There were some things that were off limits that we didn’t dare even think about and that was enough. I think it’s a shame that so many people keep their kids insulated from life in a protective bubble. They enter adulthood with a rule book and theoretical teachings of what’s risky and dangerous, but handicapped by no practical real life experience of it.
My brothers and I still joke about how it’s a miracle that we lived through some of the stuff we did, and it is a miracle, but dammit, we had FUN!
Llpoh,
You approve of Laissez-faire capitalism, so why not a Laissez-faire life?? Everything worthwhile comes with risk. I would much rather take the small chance that my son could lose an eye than to overly shelter and protect him and risk the much worse outcome that he could turn out to be another Lindsey Graham. I’m not trying to stir the shit with you, just making a point. I would prefer to bury-the-hatchet on previous grievances. Your choice.
Another point: Fred has always irritated me because of his assumption that Yankees are oblivious to such things as BB guns, jack-knives, catchin’ catfish, goin’ barefoot, etc. He is less well-traveled than he imagines himself to be.
Vodka – I did not say I advocated for laws restricting anything. I said that the consequences of such behavior is far more severe and common than people are suggesting. And I personally discouraged my kids from such activities vigorously. My parental right.
Speak for yourself… I got shot quite a few times with a bb gun. And I dont know about no $4 bb guns. I would spend $4 just shooting one. I had a CO2 powered bb gun that would burn through 30 bb’s in a few seconds. The pump ones were fun too though. Lots more power.
My bb gun as a kid had a lever-pump: up to 10 pumps depending on the desired velocity.
10 pumps would make a neat hole through 1/4″ plywood.
Crosman 760 Powermaster???
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BTW – My bb gun was a 22 or a shotgun. Youse folks were a bunch of pussies.
Very entertaining and nostalgic prose! From that to this, tragically!
U.S. Publicly Condemned by U.N. for Horrific Human Rights Abuses and Extreme and Excessive Poverty – Andrea Iravani
To Andrea Uravadani
From: USA
Good Freshman journalism article. Go to China for a year…..then resubmit.
Mr. Reed, you forgot to mention that you had fewer choices for an undertaker as well. Unfortunately, my grandparents are probably rolling in their Graves at the Athens City Cemetery realizing that Mitch McConnell’s other half of the family buried them. Boy what a loser he turned out to be, and he lived here for a year or so as a yute.
Not sure when the last time you were here, but it is nothing like it use to be and there are black and white marriages everywhere, whiggers, tats, bad dress, nad manners, you name it. Back then though, we thought we were coming to civilization during our summer visits to Athens from Oklahoma.
As for me, my upbringing in Oklahoma was much, much more barbaric and full of freedom, which made it all the more sweeter. Even then, the aristocracy of Athens, of which part of my family belongs, was and is a bit too much to take.
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Great post and great comments. Born 1960 and experienced a lot of the above and more. By today’s standards I’m apparently lucky to be alive… Chip
Smaller – just lucky to have lived
It would be interesting to hear how everyone raised their kids. I never let my girls play at the schoolyard by themselves. I kept a closer eye on mine, only letting them go a few houses down the street by themselves.
When I was about nine, I was playing at the school near me with a friend and this young man flashed us as he walked by, turned around and headed back our way. We took off for home and told our parents. They never reported it, like they do nowadays, it will be all over facebook and usually makes the local news.
That made me forever wary of schoolyards.
I could be mistaken but this picture you painted almost sounds like true freedom. TPTB certainly wouldn’t want that for its proles…
Lived most of this growing up in middle TN in the 60’s – 70’s. Boy Scout campouts and hikes, band and chorus from elementary school (recorder first, eventually French Horn) through high school, trips with Scouts, church groups, school groups. Lived on a thirty-acre farm, half was woods, with big grassy fields and all kinds of wildlife from rabbits and skunks and field rats to barn swallows. Dad put in some time keeping the bumblebees from taking over the outbuildings; sulfur candles and Raid were always in stock. Regular bees would have been fun, but we didn’t keep them. Butterflies, from blue sulfurs and zebra swallowtails to Monarchs and the lookalikes, can’t remember their name. Dogs, rarely a cat, once a duck but we didn’t keep livestock either (doubt any of us wanted the twice-a-day milking and vet bills). Wolf spiders wandered in the house until my mother caught them, learned what brown recluses and black widows looked like from rare examples. Not too many snakes, once in a while. We planted a couple hundred white pine seedlings the second year, they mostly grew up spindly but a few were tall and straight.
It’s a shame you can’t have two childhoods so you can get it right the second time, but I’d not want the ignorance just to redo the friends and family times. We have lost so much, and if we want it back WE will have to build it. And keep the jealous, ideological haters out of it.
This was one of the best TBP articles ever. Merry Christmas everyone! ….from a place so far away…they really do put up signs that actually say ”Merry Christmas”