I remember climbing around slag piles on the coasts of Michigan, various of the Great Lakes, when we went camping in the early 60’s. I also remember mom sending us to the store to buy her cigarettes when we were in grade school.
i’ve done both of these things, only it was Lake Erie, and it was my grandmother in early high school.
And back then, Lake Erie really did have dead fish on every beach. I grew up thinking that the dead fish smell was naturally how large bodies of water smelled like.
It exists in Canada too, only it’s called “Block Parent”. Their website says they’ve been around for 40 years, although who knows what the screening was like when I was a kid.
Edit: And I also remember picking up cigarettes for my father when I was around 6, there was a “smoking pit” at my high school (graduated in 1990), I would rather die than have been accompanied by an adult trick-or-treating after the age of 6, and I routinely disappeared for the entire day while exploring construction sites, looking for neat stuff along the railroad tracks, and building structurally unsound forts in the woods.
You just brought back memories. I grew up in Whitby and we used to go to the beach all the time. For a time I lived in Port Whitby and the harbour was walking distance. Whitby has a stony beach, so it wasn’t all that great, but it was still The Beach. Sometimes there would be myriads of small silver fish washed up on the beach, rotting and stinking. And remember the algae? The great reeking mats of greenish algae that would wash to shore and mingle with the sand? Sometimes it built up to great thicknesses on the surface of the water, caught in the angle between the beach and the pier, and we would go out along the pier and throw rocks at it. Even quite large rocks would just land on the algae with a wet ‘splut’ sound and rest there on the surface.
In 1970, my father moved us (four kids and himself) from Chicago to Atlanta.
My big sister (9 years old) got to sit in the front seat. My brother and I, being much younger, were placed in a playpen and put in the back of the station wagon with the rest of the luggage. 
Alewives! They stunk up the Lake Michigan beach, and on a hot, humid day they stunk up downtown Milwaukee.
My body is a testament to my misspent youth. I have a scar on my arm from a cigarette. That was being smoked on the down elevator of a department store. There was always an ashtray at the bottom.
Below my left eye is a small scar from the infamous JARTS. Yes, I am one of the reasons they became outlawed.
My leg has a scar from a metal food bin from the summer camp I attended. Yeah, it was rusty. No, I didn’t get a tetanus shot and no, we didn’t tell!
I also spent many years on the back of my Grandfathers Moto Guzzi motorcycle stopping at every bar along the way, he’d have a beer, I’d have a Shirley Temple. It turns out, he was drunk pretty much all the time. Always had a beer in his hand, and it didn’t seem unusual. Did I mention that the first two times I got drunk was with my Grandparents?
I flew alone when I was 5. I was seen by the school guidance counselor because my mother was (shhhh!) d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d! I babysat a 7 year old and a 6month old when I was 11, about 4 times a week.
Are those the nuts that my father, after a drink or four, would refer to as “nggr toes”? I can remember being aghast, even as a child, and my mother’s disgust and anger with him.
Thankfully, it was a term that was unthinkable in our family back then as well as today, except for, well, my aforementioned drunk father. He thought it was quite clever when he was drunk. No one else did. It was my mother’s attitude that I inherited–thank god.
We used to live at the top of a hill which became countryside, in which was a residential home for male alcoholics. We were never once told not to go there, or to avoid the men.
We used to use their swimming pool (with adult supervision) alongside them, as well as their tennis courts. Because we were always being supervised, I guess that wasn’t so dodgy. But we also used to go up into the nearby forrest and build dens and just generally play around. We’d occasionally find stashed bottles of alcohol.
It never once occurred to me as a child to be afraid, or even wary, of these men.
It used to be their proper name - my dad and his sisters had no other name for them. When I was maybe ten I had a can of mixed nuts and Dad said something about how nobody really likes the “… you know… I don’t know if you can call them that anymore…” “Huh? Oh, the Brazil nuts?” “That’s what you call them?”
And then there’s the fairly common joke people tell about their grandmothers and elderly aunts - so I had Granny in the car and we stopped at a gas station, and when I went in to pay she yelled out of the window, “Hey, get me some of those nigger toes while you’re in there!” And you say, “Granny! We don’t SAY that anymore!” and she yells, “Oh, sorry. Get me some of those Negro toes, would ya?”
Frankly, my grandmother probably wouldn’t have been able to figure out what the objectionable word was. Toes, maybe?
These postings have brought back a lot of memories. When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s during the Summer my mother would feed my 5 siblings and me breakfast and then we were on our own until supper which was at 5:00 p.m. We’d go outside, find our friends, wander around the neighborhood, play some baseball on the empty field near by, hitchhike out to the lake to do some swimming, go over to the dump to shoot our BB guns, go to the playground to play some whist (later poker), use our jacknives to cut our intitals in the park benches, and generally mess around. We had a great time.
One tremendous change I notice between then and now is that in those days when you walked around the neighborhood it was filled with people (little kids playing in their yards, older kids just “hanging around”, mothers hanging up washing, milkmen delivering milk (!), etc.). Now, although I live in the same sort of neighborhood, when I walk my dog in the middle of the afternoon, I can walk for blocks with out seeing a single person. Where are all the people?
P.S. One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that we didn’t have leash laws in those days. Our dogs were as free to roam the neighborhood as the children were.
When I was a pre-teen, in the early 90’s, my friend and I used to go to the mall. My friend would take her mom’s credit card, along with a permission slip from her mother. The stores always accepted it.
Growing up on a farm, we always took all of our trash (the stuff that wouldn’t burn, of course) and found a deep ditch along the side of a field and dumped it there. We also used to de-lice our hogs by dumping used motor oil mixed with diesel fuel all over them. Seriously.
What I’m sad about is that they seem to have banned Chemistry sets.
When I was a kid, we had all sorts of Gilbert (and other company_ chemistry sets. I could even go down to the auto-parts store and get bottles of replacement chemicals. Sodium Silicate Solution, Sodum Ferrocyanide, Ferric Ammonium Sulfate (mix the last two and you get Prussian Blue!). Cobalt Chloride (Good for Weather Predictors! Or mix it with the Sodium Ferrocyanide and get Green!) Magnesium strips, fer cryin’ out loud! Lots of other, garden-variety chemicals.
Then they started finding things were dangerous. Ammonium Stearate (used in “drying” experiments. Ammonium Dichromate, used in the classic “Chemical Volcano” experiments (it burned, sputtered, and sent out “lava”) – highly toxic and possibly carcinogenic. ( http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/jcesoft/cca/CCA3/MAIN/VOLCANO/PAGE1.HTM )
They banned the good with the bad, apparently because they were afraid kids would eat the che,micals, or something. My Golden Book of Chemical Experiments (the same one used by the “Radioactve Boy Scout”) was a treasure trove of good experiments. It told you how to build up a chemistry lab from scratch, make Nylon and Plastic Sulfur and Electrolytically decompose water into Oxygen and Hydrogen, distill alcohol, and plenty of other stuff) is a thing of the past.
How are our kids going to learn chemistry if the only lab kits we can give them are "Perfume Science and “Grossology”?
No, it’s all a matter of perception. Even those who recognize that the threats are minuscule and the risk is overblown realize that if, God forbid, something terrible were to happen people would say “why did you allow this obviously risky activity?”
We had a ‘recipe’ for a mange treatment we used for dogs that involved motor oil mixed with… not sure what else. We didn’t dip them in it but put it on the bad spots; I never knew one to have a severe reaction, or at least not worse than the mange, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t healthy. Later we switched to a sulfur mix sold at the feed stores that supposedly was safer but Gawdamighty it stunk to the stratosphere.
How many people had moms who gave you sugar (or peppermint) and whiskey (or moonshine when she could get it) for coughing when you were a kid? I know this is at least as far spread as Scotland as a Scots co-workers said her mother did this one. No idea if it helped the cough, but turned me off drinking whiskey and sugar.
I’d sort of argue that this isn’t something ABSOLUTELY UNTHINKABLE today. But in a different sense.
Just a few nights ago, I’m out at dinner with my parents. There’s a burlesque show going, and the girlfriend of one of the female burlesque dancers is pretty obviously digging the scantily clad women. And my mom’s all going, “Gosh, I can’t believe this. I’ll just never get used to that. Nature knows what’s right, let me tell you!”
So I says, “Yeah, well welcome to the 21st century. They let black men marry white women these days too.”
Ah well…
I was raised during the depression, we children worked in the fields etc. I was 4 and had to pick cucumbers for the pickle factory, I had to wash dishes and cook from the time I was 7, we had to pump the water, heat it to do dishes. I was out looking for a job at age 10( I didn’t get one). I did take care of my 3 younger sisters and a younger brother( Now that would be called child neglect). I left home at 13 and worked my way through high school. I had my own apartment at age 17. I walked home from one town to another it took me almost 11 hours. No teen ager in my school had a car.
There was no food pantry in those days and if you didn’t have food you just went without. it was considered shameful to except or expect charity. My parents were embarassed to except the government provided food. You didn’t buy anything you couldn’t pay for. Honesty was more in fashion than being rich. Entertainers were paid the least money. Many doctors treated you just for a chicken etc. We survived. Responsibility was more important than having fine clothes etc. .
Monavis
You HAD responsibility? Well, you were lucky because we were too poor even for that.
Also, can I submit the above to snopes as glurge?
Something I’m glad we didn’t have when I was a kid are video games. You could only spend so many hours playing PONG before the thrill was gone, but if I’d had the “looks like a movie” shoot 'em up games I’d have been a total couch potato.
[OLD FART ZONE AHEAD]
Instead I had to play outside and we actually used imagination- that big stick can be a spear, a gun, an enemy, or a big stick depending on the needs, and I still miss some of the forts I built for plastic army men out of rocks and in little crevices. If you wanted to hear the sound of one of 'em’s head getting blown off by a cannon then by golly you had to make that sound… and we LIKED it that way!