I was listening to thisepisode of The Story, and found myself flabbergasted that my life and this man’s life actually overlap. His story seems like something that should be lost in the mists of time, it’s so foreign to me:
In the 1940s, Adam David Miller, a young black man from South Carolina, handed a note to a young white woman who frequented the shoe repair shop where he worked, and often chatted with him. The note said, “I would like to know you better.” A third party saw him hand her the envelope, and within a few minutes he was arrested, and soon charged with* attempted rape.*
In a similar vein, I remember being nonplussed when a Doper wrote about having to have a male relative sign the papers with her when she bought a house, with her own money, for herself to live in alone. And this one actually happened a couple years after I was born!
I don’t mean for the thread to only be about prejudices though. I’m interested in any story that kind of knocked your socks off because it features something you think of as “long, long ago,” but actually happened to someone who’s still walking around today.
When I see footage from WWII, it always looks so old. It just seems like another era. It’s probably partly because most of it is in black and white. My parents were alive during it. Heck, my mother’s uncle died in it.
An ex’s mother died just a few years ago. She was around to see the Red Sox win the world series. Twice. (But not the third time.)
My aunt – who is in her 60s – was hit with a ruler across her left hand whenever she attempted to use her left hand to write, color or use scissors in school. Children were only allowed to use their right hands, regardless of their natural handedness. She’s now pretty much ambidextrous because of that, but it was a long hard struggle.
My mom (younger of the two) had a teacher who made kids wear dunce caps, locked kids in closets or made them stand on stools for hours at a time as punishment, tied kids to chairs with their mouths taped shut… the list goes on. She was eventually forced into retirement, but not soon enough.
My maternal grandmother is approaching 90, so she was in her mid-teens during FDR’s first Presidential term, 21 when the U.S. entered World War II, about my age now (early 40s) when Kennedy was shot, and 49 when man first walked on the moon (and I was a month old).
She was 10 years old the year that D.H. Lawrence and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died.
I do often wonder what I will see if I live to at least her age – I’ll be 90 in the year 2059.
I am 33 and I had to sit on my left hand through grades one and two in order to prevent lefthandedness. (However, given that my right hand is a useless appendage that happens to be connected to my body, my parents stopped it.)
My grandpa and his family moved out here to San Diego California when he was young and he’s told tales of driving through the mountains, on the way here near the border with mexico, before there was a freeway and it was just a one lane road that had to be driven in reverse in some places because of the steepness of the road and the low power of the car. His dad would drive the car and the rest of the family walked along beside until they got to a part where the road was not as steep then they would get back in the car and drive forwards again.
I’m in my early 40’s. When I was a kid I took piano lessons from a woman in her 70’s. Piano teacher had an older friend, a man who was in his (I dunno…) 90’s or something. I remember the friend being around and talking about taking a trip as a child – in the Midwest – travelling from one town, across the expansive plains.
The trip was in a covered wagon. They had to be vigilant about possible Indian attack.
My older brother once casually informed me that when he attended college–at the same school that I did, and only a few years before me!–women weren’t allowed in the marching band. This blew my mind. I was used to my parents telling weird tales of the world they grew up in, but not my older brother.
The thing about that one is that she was 19 and married an 86 year old man. It wasn’t like she was around during the Civil War era, hell, she wasn’t even born until WWI. It just goes to show he was a long-lived, cradle-robbing Civil War vet.
There are still people alive who remember the Detroit Lions winning an NFL championship. I know this for a fact personally.
The corollary is that all currently living adults will likely be dead when/if it ever happens again.
My grandmother (who is admittedly dead now, but not for all that many years) was a pharmacist. She took some ten years off when she started having children. Before her break, she used to dispense leeches in the pharmacy. (After her break, she dispensed antibiotics, and no more leeches. Quite a shift.)
The marching band story reminds me of one of my own. I’m 37, and my high school had a smoking lounge - for students! I can imagine older people would have even more extreme smoking stories.
My grandmother was no stranger to corporal punishment; my uncles weren’t immune from being belted on their bare bottoms until they finished high school. She still ran into problems with schoolteachers using what she thought was excessive force. My uncle’s 7th grade teacher was known to be an alcoholic with a short fuse. Onetime he caught my uncle passing notes in class and rammed his head into the wall, :eek: he ended up in the emergency room for a head X-ray & stiches.
Granny was furious. The principal did apologize to her, but she got nothing from the teacher and the idea that anybody would apologize to my uncle was considered totally absurd. The principal kept telling her not to “raise a fuss” because they were going to deal let him go quietly at the end of the year (she wasn’t the only parent that complained against him, mostly for drinking during the schoolday). She had to threaten to get her brother (a local attorney) involved in order to get reimbursed for the doctor’s bill. This was in the '60s when parents suing the school was practically unheard off. Oh, and to top it all off she was told she was overreacting when she transfered her kids to another school.
