A little more adventurous than me at that age, but I was riding the Toronto subway by myself when I was 11 years old. By the time I was 13, I knew all the bus/streetcar and subway connections I’d need. So did my friends; we’d spend summertime weekday afternoons using free transfers riding the subways and streetcars, connecting where we could, and collecting more transfers (they were time-limited), so we could ride further and longer. At the end of the day, we’d spent one fare, but ridden all over the city.
Starting when I was 10, I’d take the subway from Queens into Manhattan with friends to spend the day in the city, when there was no school. I also occasionally went to Penn station, and got the LIRR to visit family on Long Island, by myself.
The times I flew by myself when I was 11 or 12, one of my parents would go to the airport with me, but by the time I was 15, I’d just get the bus by our house, go to the subway, and make my way to LaGuardia alone.
On the Indiana end it was a little different, because I flew into Indianapolis, and then needed to get to a city about 75 minutes south. I was fully prepared to take a Greyhound, but my family always met me at the airport.
When I made the same trip as an adult, though, I’d rent a car in Indy, and drive south.
My parents and my aunt and uncle who I lived with for a while, gave me all kinds of freedom. Once they let me go to King’s Island in Cincinnati when I was 16 with my boyfriend, who was 19.
When I was in my 30s, I remarked on it, and my mother said “Well, were you ever getting into trouble?”
“No.”
“So we were right.”
Unaccompanied minor policies generally apply to children between the ages of 5-14 and it doesn’t mean they can’t fly alone, just that there are restrictions ( for example, only nonstop flights for certain ages) , some services ( for example, the child will only be released to a designated person on arrival , supervised lounges for those making connections, flight attendants will check on them when they can ,etc ) and of course a fee.
People still do let their kids fly unaccompanied- almost certainly more than they did when I was a kid because there are more reasons to do so now . My kids used to complain that we never took “flying vacations” like their friends - their friends weren’t flying for a vacation exactly. They were being sent to visit grandma for the summer so their parents could work - that didn’t really happen in my childhood (there were fewer two-income families)
Hmmm.
I once sat next to a 17-yr-old unaccompanied minor who bitched about being treated “like a baby” the whole time. Maybe her parents had requested special services for her, or maybe it was just that airline.
Didn’t shut up no matter how hard I ignored her. I can see why her parents wanted to send her off somewhere for a couple of weeks.
Which is why I wear my headphones when flying. If someone taps me on the arm to ask me something, I sigh, then remove my headphones and put in my hearing aid. Then I answer their query as minimally as possible, remove my hearing aid and replace my headphones. Follow-up questions are ignored.
Are you a man?
I think people try harder to engage a woman, because people will not give up on me.
Once I was next to some woman, about age 50, and her granddaughter, Sinead. This woman was flying for the very first time in her life. I swear, I made eye contact with her once, when I first sat down, just for the usual, yes, we have the right seats sort of chit-chat, and after that, did not take my nose out of a book the whole time, but I got regaled with this woman’s entire biography, and that of her granddaughter, Sinead.
I’m a man, I’m a man
I’m a full grown man, baby
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh
All you pretty women
Stand in a line
I make love with you, baby
In an hour’s time.
(Tip of my hat to McKinley Morganfield aka Muddy Waters.)
In my teens you could ride in the back of pick up trucks, drink while driving, get served at bars, disappear all day and night & say you couldn’t find a phonebooth to call & say you were late. Buy smokes at vending machines, make anonymous crank calls, never wear a seat belt. Usual 70’s shit.
Readily agreed.
I’ve always seen alcohol as over-the-counter Truth Serum.
My Ex’s older brother would wake up wicked early on Saturday morning.
In Pittsburgh.
Get the bus from Squirrel Hill to the airport. Fly to LaGuardia.
Take the bus into Manhattan. Subway to Julliard.
Classes all day. Dinner out at a local Chinese place with classmates.
Bus to LaGuardia.
Last flight home to Pittsburgh.
He was doing this from the age of about 12 on.
And, he was carrying a violin. Which nobody ever thought to touch. Or give him a hard time about.
My but those times have changed…
When I was in high school (class of 1966) if you had a headache, you walked to the office-- no hall pass necessary-- and asked the school secretary for a couple of aspirin. She took a huge bottle of aspirin from under the counter-- not under lock and key-- and tipped them into your hand. That’s all there was to it. No parental note needed. I guess the school assumed that a high school girl would know if aspirin was something she could safely take.
All girls Catholic school, total enrollment about 300.
When I was in high school in the early 80s, you were allowed to carry OTC medicine with you, and take it as you needed. This stopped being allowed sometime around 1997.
Also, at some point, students who took prescription medications stopped being allowed to carry them (EXCEPTION: rescue inhalers), and take them as indicated. It didn’t matter what they were. Antibiotic you are on for 10 days? seizure medicine you take every day at noon? PRN for migraines? it all now has to be kept under lock & key, and students have to go to either the nurse’s office or the main office to get their medication when they need it. I can’t imagine getting a migraine aura, and asking a teacher for a pass to the office for a PRN, and having the teacher tell me to wait until whatever, which some teacher will invariably do.
There was to do at some school when a kid in high school was on a benzodiazepine (Valium-Xanax family) as a PRN for seizures, and not allowed to carry it with him. He was supposed to take it immediately on getting the aura he felt with an oncoming seizure, but the office didn’t want a student carrying that kind of medication. There was all sorts of bargaining back and forth-- he’d carry only one pill at a time, and so forth. The kid lost. The office kept the medication locked. The only concession was that the kid didn’t need a hall pass-- he could just get up and go to the office any time he thought he needed the medication. But he had to hope someone was there who could get it for him right away, and that no teacher stopped him in the hallway and asked to see his pass.
Starting in elementary school I would take am Actifed, which was only by prescription, at lunchtime. It was scotch taped to the inside of my Tupperware lunch box.
When was this-- what decade?
Or, if you thought you might need aspirin, you just brought it to school with you; or any other meds you routinely took, or occasionally took but the issue might come up at school. We didn’t think of it any differently than we thought of carrying tampons, or facial tissue. And you might borrow aspirin or similar OTC meds from a friend, instead of bothering to go ask anybody official.
And at some point in my teens, no older than 15 and probably younger, I was on a train by myself (I would have been accompanied to the train by an adult and met at the other end by an adult, but I don’t think this was in any way required) and I got a bad headache. I walked up and down the train car asking total strangers for aspirin until somebody gave me a couple. I got a few weird looks, but that was probably just for begging, not because it was aspirin that I was begging for. – early to mid 1960’s.
Gosh, I remember once when I was on an airplane when I was probably in my late 20s, and I accepted acetaminophen from my seatmate. Never occurred to me it could be anything else. I did know how acetaminophen was stamped, I’d taken enough of it, but I don’t remember specifically checking it.
I would never take a pill from a stranger now.
Scary memory: I was in Chicago right when the Tylenol poisoner was active, and bought a huge bottle of the stuff. I mean, I bought it the very week the tampered bottles were on the shelves. I took maybe two from it, and brought it back to Indiana, when the warnings came out on the TV about the poisonings, and they were telling people nationwide to toss it. I did, as much as it had cost. I don’t remember where exactly I bought it, so I have no idea whether it was in the neighborhood to have been a tampered bottle-- I don’t know Chicago that well-- but it was capsules.
When I was in high school (class of 1970, all boy Catholic) we could go to either the office or the gym coach and ask for aspirin, but for some reason they couldn’t “give” it to us - they would hold out the container and we had to take it from the container ourselves. No idea why, unless it was some sort of liability issue regarding “dispensing” medications.
I was in Disneyland, a nice lady from Australia was sitting next to me, we started chatting. One thing she didnt like about the States is that she couldnt buy real Sudafed. So I gave her a dozen, and she was very happy.
Her husband was a Captain in the RAN. He tried to get me to go into the bar there in Starwars land, to buy a round of drinks but I demurred.
I attended college in the late 90s and even then they were cracking down on people in the dorms taking medicines. I had some prescribed sleeping pills (I distinctly remember there were no over the counter sleeping pills at least in my area in the 90s, they were all prescription based despite the ones I took basically being the type and strength of over the counter ones now) and one of the guys on my floor asked to borrow a nights dose because he was having trouble sleeping for an important exam. I gave him two, he took them, and then literally the next day he reported me for distributing prescription drugs (not me exactly but he told the RA that somebody was giving others sleeping pills on the floor) and they had a massive stand-up where they claimed that giving anybody ANY drugs either prescribed or even just over the counter Tylenol was illegal and you could get expelled for it. Supposedly if you had stuff like Tylenol or NyQuil in your room you had to have the receipt nearby to prove it was yours.
For some reason, it would never have occurred to me in a million years to carry aspirin. Hell, I don’t even think I carried lipstick (we weren’t allowed to wear ANY makeup.) I had a purse-- I wonder what the heck I put in it?
I don’t think I discovered tampons until college a few years later. I mean, one didn’t see them advertised in magazines back then, and certainly not on TV! 