I was born in 1966, and so many of your posts have brought me smiles of remembrance…
When I was young, they used to dump oil on the dirt roads to keep the dust down. And yes, we were all on wells; no city water where we lived.
Drinking and driving, too. Until the late 80’s, the cops in our town would give people rides home!
No joke! Scenes like that pictured in the magazine were routine jerkoff material for me during high school, but I would have chewed my arm off rather than have to participate.
Showers after gym were weird when I was in school. In 6th grade in 1996, showers were “mandatory” but weren’t really enforced. Everybody was terrified of being naked in front of one another, so we’d shut off the lights in the shower room (I know) and maybe dash under the water for a few seconds. The gym teacher sort of wandered in and out (frankly, the idea that a guy in his 30’s was wandering around a room of naked 12-year-old boys seems insane to me now) and chastised us for being prudes.
By the time I was in high school, showers were “encouraged,” almost nobody took them, and the gym teacher didn’t set foot inside the locker room while we were changing.
A lot of stuff people are listing are things I remember from growing up in the early and mid-90’s. I’d walk to and from school with a group of friends every morning and afternoon, which now seems bizarre. In the evenings and during the summer we’d take off on our bikes and head god knows where without anybody knowing where we were, etc…
Not from my childhood, but from my mother’s, roughly 1946.
Mom and her two sisters, (all a year apart) went downtown (easily 20 blocks) on a tricyle and a kiddy car with one sister riding on the back of the tricycle. Ages 4, 3, and 2. They were thirsty and trying to find the water fountain in Eatons. The town wasn’t that big, but it was a bustling little town, a sort of transportation hub, certainly not everyone knew everybody.
I believe my mom (the eldest) was able to tell a lady who phoned home and arrangements were made to get the girls home. My grandmother who would have had an infant under a year and most likely been pregnant already with baby #5 must have loved that. At that time my grandparent’s didn’t have a car.
As for my childhood in the 70’s…being a latchkey kid at six, babysitting my brother at 10, cutting our own marshmallow sticks with jack-knives, very routine. On the other hand my Dad was/(is) very protective, so I wasn’t allowed to light matches or have campfires unsupervised, go out in a boat without about 17 different flotation devices, or go to the corner store more than two days in a row. (Its not a hang-out. I won’t let you kids start hanging out at the corner store. That’s how you get into trouble!)
As for me, I’m trying to find a balance between giving my son some space and freedom to be a kid, and not having the Children’s Aid Society apprehend my child for “neglect”. On the other hand, he has already had several snow days this year in Senior Kindergarten, I remember only once being sent home early on account of snow in my entire grade school/highschool career.
Here’s a weird one. Although I suspect that it might have been unthinkable then, too.
When I was in grade school we ate lunch in the gym at a bunch of long tables with attached benches. The “lunch ladies” would roam this space, looking after us and taking out trash when we were done. You raised your hand and they took your trash, leftovers and uneaten food.
I don’t know how it got started but you could say to one of the lunch ladies “First pizza” or “First chips” and when they got that item uneaten from another kid they would bring it to you and give it to you. And you would eat it. Sometimes you’d be third or fourth for a particular item. Sometimes you’d have gotten the pizza (or hamburger or salisbury steak) for lunch yourself and want to have two. Chips usually meant something someone had brought from home, and was often not a Snackpack bag, rather someone’s ziplocked Ruffles. No one ever said “First apple.”
I never realized how unusual this was until I was an adult. I don’t know why it happened or how it was let to go on for so long. I mean, it worked out fine I guess. But I can’t imagine a parent now (or then, really) being comfortable with such a communal attitude towards all the food in a elementary school cafeteria. I don’t know if my mom even knew about it; I should ask her.
(I was born in 1979, btw.)
Good one. I remember that. Was part of the summer time ritual. Once the dirt road got dusty out came the oil truck.
I had completely forgotten the oil on dirt roads.
The worst thing about wells v. city water is that when the lights went out (which they seemed to do a lot more frequently then) you were without water also. You had one flush per toilet until they came back, and after a big storm it wasn’t uncommon for the water to be muddy.
Absolutely true story: my father was known for his skills as an orator and his last words, spoken on the night he died when the power was out due to a snowstorm and there was one flush left in the toilet, was “You wanna take a dump in here before I flush it?” One of those “I felt guilty for laughing about that at the funeral…”, but not so much anymore.
I remember paddlings in school. Wow, that word is so verboten, it shows up as misspelled in spellchecker.
They were more humiliating than painful, but once you got one, it was like you completed a rite of passage and moved up on the coolness scale. Teachers would hang their paddles on their desks with pride, many of which had notches for each butt they hit. Some students put their initials on them as well. There were also the painted paddles that had bare spots eroded from contact with so many buttockses.
You did NOT want to fuck up in gym class. Coaches had the strongest arms, and you were only clad in those thin cloth shorts with no protective padding to speak of.
Of course, a particularly feared teacher would be alleged to have a paddle with serrated edges and bloody nails sticking out. “Time Out” will never have that equivalent reputation of fear.
Our principal was rumored to have an “electric paddle.” I didn’t know what one was, but didn’t want to find out.
There’s a King of the Hill episode with a paddle–Peggy uses it on her students. Or threatens to, anyway. I always thought it was odd that in the old days people would actually spank people’s asses. I guess it’s become too sexualized for me.
<Snip>
Heck, I feel a little guilty for laughing about it right now!
When I was 11 Michael Jackson was on tour(1981). My cousin got to go and since he couldn’t keep his big mouth shut, I found out right when they were leaving for the concert. I cried all night and to make it up to me and my sisters, my mom took us all to a (wait for it…) Rick James concert. It was the Mary Jane tour.
Speaking of Mary Jane, I remember a few nights where the kids would have to go upstairs and we would hear Richard Pryor albums and lots of laughter coming from below.
In 1979, I attended a private boarding school. It was well known among the students and most of the faculty, that the male history teacher was dating a Senior girl. They didn’t flaunt it, but with everyone living right there on campus, it was hard to keep secret. It didn’t become an issue until one of the older teachers that lived in the neighboring town, saw them on one of their dates. The history teacher was fired, but they continued to date.
I graduated in 1982, and there was student smoking area outside, just off the cafeteria. If you got caught smoking in the bathrooms, you’d get in trouble, but catching a smoke between classes in the designated area was fine.
Hitchhiking. Nobody hitchhikes now. The assumption is that either the driver or the passenger will turn out to be psychopathic killers. But I did it once (late 1980s, from Nuevo Leredo, Mexico to Los Angeles, CA) because I had to get home once, and had no money. It was a little strange, but nobody ever tried to hurt or rob me or do anything violent. Most just seemed to be interested in sex, which I politely refused, or conversation.
Oh? How so? 
I graduated high school in 2004.
-There were still designated smoking areas outside at the high schools.
-I was a little too young to remember party lines, but we still had a party line when I was born in 1986.
-My mom was still smoking at her desk at work in the late 80s.
-I didn’t have a carseat either!
-Our house didn’t have indoor plumbing until the early 80s.
-We had a zipline at my elementary school. You know, one of those handles attached to a wire that you held onto while going down a hill. Only ours ended quite close to a ditch with a barbed wire fence. With snakes in it.
-My mom had to take me to work one day, so I spent most of the day at the nearby diner eating chicken and reading comic books. Nowadays, leaving your child alone all day at a restaurant? Blasphemy!
-Total latchkey kid too.
As for the generic brand issue, Canada still has a brand called No Name, and all the packaging is black text on a bright yellow background. It’s actually a store brand, but the particular chain has two store brands. President’s Choice is the good store brand, and No Name is the ghetto store brand. It kinda disappeared for a while, but with the recession it’s starting to get advertised more again.
If there was a station like that now, I’d listen to it. I’m 38.
When I was a young child in the 1970’s, there was a program in my area called “Helping Hands.” People could get a special “helping hands” sign to put in their window, to indicate that they were willing to help out children in trouble. Parents, including mine, told their children that if they had a problem while they were walking somewhere, they should look for a house with a helping hands sign, and go there. As far as I know, there was no background check required to participate; you proved your worthiness by asking for a sign, and your house magically became an officially-sanctioned safe haven for passing children. Today, of course, this program would be considered insane.
Like others above, I remember roaming freely over a wide area without adult supervision. When I was about 10, my friends and I fancied ourselves BMX enthusiasts, and we would ride our bikes to “the trails,” a wooded area with hills and dirt trails, where we’d race each other and perform (extremely lame) bike stunts. This wasn’t a park or an official biking area; it was just some unused land where kids went to ride bikes and screw around. We had some pretty spectacular wipeouts over the years, and we’re lucky no one seriously injured himself (given that I have no idea how we would have gone about getting medical attention).
When we weren’t going to “the trails,” we’d amuse ourselves by building bicycle ramps on the sidewalk in front of our houses, out of bricks and scrap lumber. We’d gradually make them bigger and bigger, launching ourselves as far and high as we could. Every now and then someone would land on his face, and he’d run home crying, and possibly bleeding. This was not interpreted as a sign that we should stop doing what we were doing. Naturally, all of this was done without helmets or any kind of prective gear.
Oh, man. I lived a half block away from a city park. And it was wonderful - it had a jungle gym that was nothing but iron bars and a slide that was about 20 feet tall, as well as a softball field and tennis courts. I drove by that park about a month ago. The field, the courts, the jungle gym and the slide are gone and all that’s there is some plastic piece of crap.
I used to ride my bike all over the place with no worries. When I was 13, I was a very active bowler in several junior leagues. It was nothing for me to put my bowling gear in the basket, tie it down and ride four or five miles to whatever lane I was bowling at; no helmet, no nothing. Nowadays, you can’t ride a bike past the end of the block, and you have to armor up like the Michelin Man.
And the Board of Education. The coach kept it in his office. A flat paddle with holes in it. Three pops with that thing and you found religion, at least as far as the school rules went.
And the entire block was my playground. Someone else’s back yard was just as much fun to play in as my own. And they all knew who I was and more importantly, they knew my home phone number if things got out of hand.
I dated a guy from Oklahoma (heh, a former OU football player…oh my 20s) in the late 90s/early 2000s who told me they still had paddlings at his high school (this was the mid-90s). I kept insisting that it was so…semi-sexual but he just said that was my smutty east coast mind talking.
We had corporal punishment growing up in Quebec but it was the ruler on the palm.