Cool! My daughter and her fiance live in Beaver County (Baden).
I used to ride a bike on the sidewalk. Then they made that illegal, which was honestly pretty reasonable. Naturally parents became afraid of children riding bikes in traffic, and this was/is apparently common in rural and suburb areas without adequate public transit.
I was raised in a big city, so I could walk places or take the bus. I wasn’t deprived much by this, but many children were, and that is still happening.
I read a horror story on Reddit, which, being Reddit, is not reliable. A writer claiming to be fifteen, living with divorced parents (so transfers between two households) got into trouble trying to get home from school on a day when her father (who she was staying with at the time) was not available to drive her home. She broke her smartphone’s screen. She didn’t have any access to public transit and didn’t even know her father’s address. She hitch hiked home, which was difficult because she could only vaguely identify where to go. This sounded like an exaggerated version of something that happened to my niece, who used to live in a place without adequate public transit (she knew where to go, but couldn’t get there).
When I was in high school in the 1970s, the older students were pushing for a smoking area for students (I moved before the issue was decided)
I graduated from high school in 1988 and there was still a smoking section, even for the students. I think it was removed soon afterwords.
I went home to an empty house starting in 5th grade. There were neighbors home, and I was only home for about an hour before my father came home. The key was secreted on the property. I did not carry it to school.
When it was cold enough, it was my job to start the fire in the wood stove downstairs.
Did you have a cap gun? I had several - used to buy paper rolls of caps at the general store (looked just like these Cap gun - Wikipedia)
Yes, I remember those rolls of caps quite well. I went through “playing soldier” phase and fired off quite a few of those (always liked the smell, too)!
We lived in a new area when I was 12-17, My friends and I used to hang out in the partially constructed houses in the evening. Sometimes even climbing on the roofs.
We also were given the keys to the family boats around age 14 and $20 for gas. Lots of dangerous stuff took place on the water during those summers.
And lawn darts, riding unrestrained in cars, making cannons out of tennis ball tubes, and bb gun fights.
If you hit a roll with a hammer (and the roll was on something solid like concrete or a rock) you got a satisfying multiple-bang.
I remember having the house key secured to my pocket using a safety pin.
(And by the way, my brother and I figured out a couple of ways of getting in the house even when it was locked. A couple of casement windows could be pried open.)
Speaking of how things have changed, I don’t recall my parents ever locking the house (unless we were on a trip) before around 1972.
Heh. Yeah, I think my friends and I did that, too.
We used to ride up to the gas station about two miles away when I was a kid to buy candy cigarettes, then pretend to smoke them on the way home. We’d also be dropped off various places, left there all day with enough cash maybe for drinks and fries and no one thought anything of it. Also, I used to love riding in the “way back” in my mom’s Buick station wagon on car trips. I grew up in the late 70s/early 80s in a fairly small to midsize town.
Now, even living in a bigger city I let my 14 year old son ride all over with his buddies. Sometimes I’ll give him some cash (and now a mask) to grab lunch and a soda at the grocery store and he’ll be gone from around 9 until 3. The big difference is that he’s got a cell phone so I can reach him. I will admit to being more protective of my daughter. Her friends live further away and near where they live they’ve noticed a few strange cars slowing down, driving around the block a few times and taking pictures of the kids. Last year we had an issue with a car actually following kids from the bus stop. Turned out to be a local teacher “looking out” for them, but he neither lived in the neighborhood nor did he actually work at the school the kids were attending (he worked at a different school about a 15 minute drive away).
Anyone else carry a pocketknife ALL THE TIME, including at school? I remember playing mumblety peg at recess. And this was in Chicago - not some rural area.
And, of course, there was the casual racism and prejudice. “Catch a n_ by the toe.” Calling people faggots, wops, whatever. Curious, because I don’t think we really WERE terribly prejudiced. We wouldn’t refuse to play with someone different than us. Instead, it was common to refer to people in insulting terms.
In college, smoking was allowed and each classroom had disposable ashtrays (aluminum foil with a paper backing) available. This was in the early 70s.
Professors would often post grades outside their office. To keep the names confidential, people were identified by their Social Security number.
In high school, smoking was banned, but students could to it outside the building.
My dad would send 6-y/o me to Shure’s Drugs to get him a pack of smokes for 26¢, including tax. It was about a quarter of a mile from home, across 2 streets and a big parking lot.
It was another 10 years before he quit smoking.
My current classroom is built on the site of “Smoker’s Hill,” the designated smoking area on campus back in the early 80s.
By the 1980s seat belt use was becoming commonplace, and my parents were sticklers for making sure everyone was buckled up, but… I also remember that if we were carpooling somewhere with other kids they would sometimes cram more kids into the car than there were seat belts, and have two kids share a single seat belt. I can still remember having to share the passenger seat of Mom’s Vega with another kid, with one seat belt strapped across both of us. In hindsight I don’t think that was particularly safe, although I suppose better than no seat belt at all.
When I started grad school, there were ashtrays situated periodically down the hallways. The rumor was that when the place was built, the dean lit a cig and walked down the halls and wherever he ashed they put up an ashtray.
While I was there smoking was restricted to one smoking area and the ashtrays were removed. By the next morning there were empty soda cans taped up in all the locations.
Hell, when I started grad school you could still smoke in the public library. In the 90’s. Granted this was WInston Salem, home of R J Reynolds.
Back around 1979, my older brother was always at work when the bank was open. So he sent me to the bank to cash his paycheck every week. The tellers gave me the money too, with no questions asked. So here’s ten-year-old me walking down the street with $100 in his pocket, worth about $350 now. I never lost the money, and never got mugged. Nobody seemed to think it was unusual for a child to carry that much cash. My mother was more concerned that I had to cross one busy street to get to the bank and back.
My friends and I were wandering all around town and through the woods and fields starting at about age seven. There was almost always someone home at my house, but some of my friends were unsupervised after school from the age of ten or so. I regularly carried a jack-knife everywhere, including in school, from age eight or nine. I wasn’t a hunter, but when I was in high school around 1985 some other students kept their rifles in their lockers so they could go hunting after school. I’m not sure if that was allowed, but they didn’t seem to make any secret of it, so I presume it was.
I remembered another one. Starting from the age of 7 or 8, I was responsible for picking up the mail from the postal box at the post office on my way home from school. I had what I think was the only key to the box and took it with me to school every day. I never lost the key, nor any of the mail. So for about ten years, I was in charge of bringing home all the bills, dividend checks from my father’s investments, and who knows what else.