Here’s some childhood memories my parents told me. When my mother was in grade school not only was corporal punishment in use she can remember boys getting bare-bottom spankings in class in front of everyone else. Girls weren’t spanked, but could be slapped on the face or have a ruler taken to their hand. Her brother once had his head slammed through the wall. Grandma was furious after the wall thing and sent mom to a different school to make sure she wouldn’t have that teacher; this was considered odd.
Not only did my father have to shower after gym class (something I never had to do), but swimming lessons were conducted in the nude :eek: (& certainly not coed). Same for the Y and summer camp. Imagine a school trying to do that today.
Sam Kinison was another. He was ruthless towards homosexuals.
Oh, and I had an ashtray in my desk at work (1987, I think). When break time rolled around, I just took out my ashtray and lit up. When the company moved to a new building and made the smokers go outside, we were horrified. Outside?!? :eek:
And I LOVE that scene in Jaws when the mayor lights up a smoke in the emergency room!
Ha ! Same here. Late eighties, early nineties. The whole school yard was asphalt with pebbles strewn on top. If you ran and jumped and twisted in the air just the right way, you could get a mad spray of pebbles, with a kickass “KRRRRR” sound to accompany the whines of whoever got a facefull of small stones. But of course, if your balance wasn’t all that good, you’d get a bloody elbow. In fact, I still have a huge scar on my left knee, from the time I played goalie after watching a few episodes of Captain Tsubasa. Diving catches on asphalt ? Un-smart, as I learned. I drove a pebble so far inside my flesh that fat came oozing out of the wound. It was soooo cool. 
I also remember, still from grammar school, that they’d let us out of the school at 4:30 PM no matter what. A seemingly neverending river of shreeking kids flowing out on the sidewalk, totally unsupervised. No parents out there to pick you up ? Tough luck. Somebody else’s parent, or someone who said he was picking you up ? shrug, all right then. No ID, no credentials required, no questions asked : all kids must go.
Mercurochrome. Every kid had those bright red patches around every little scrape and booboo. Those bright, red, possibly toxic patches.
And yes, smoking. As late as high school (late nineties), nobody besides the crazy French teacher even gave a flying fuck that we students were smoking in the halls between classes ! And now, suddenly, a mere decade later, even lighting up on a damn street will get you murderous glares and at least one asshole piping up on the general subject of your health if he’s just a regular asshole, or a grand sermon on nasty murderous second hand smoke if he’s a raging asshole.
Heh, now that I think about it, I still remember the sheer terror I felt when I went into a tobacconist’s to buy my first pack of rolling tobacco. I was 15, looked 13 and was ghastly afraid someone’d ask for my ID, call the cops or worse : tell my parents. The lady didn’t even bat an eyelid. Selling cancer to kids ? Business as usual 
Sanford & Son used the ‘N’ word on several episodes; in the syndicated reruns those have either been overdubbed or omitted altogether, including one of the biggest NOT SAFE FOR WORK laugh linesin sitcom history. Archie Bunker, though he was played as a bigot and derision, got away with saying many things NO character with even a slightly redeemable qualities (and Archie had many) could say today (“England is a fag country”, “You got a mic, a spic and a Hebe… it’s a balanced ticket”). Many years later it made front page news when the title characters on the TV show SISTERS talked openly about orgasms; odd the dichotomy and the changes in shock value.
Wandering around the local mall at Halloween, dressed as a soldier and armed with a full-size replica M-16 and grenades.
Mostly what y’all said, but to add a new one: coffee. My grandmother gave me coffee when I was six. Every morning during my summer vacations.
And sugar. Parents would add sugar to kids’ milk and food. My daughter thinks Splenda is sugar.
A.T., have you ever read a series of stories/novels by science fiction writer Jack Williamson featuring the Humanoids? In these stories, a race of androids (technically, a single computer brain controlling countless remote bodies) carries out it’s programmed directive of keeping humanity “safe from harm”. With relentless machine logic, they conquer every human occupied planet they can and then eliminate anything that could conceivably cause harm. Since mental anguish also counts as “harm”, they use brain surgery to “cure” anyone who can’t adapt to their regime. When the stories were written in the late 1940s, it was extreme satire to suggest that children’s wooden blocks should be replaced with soft plastic ones.
Ha! That happened to me!
I was going to say, I thought that smoking was long regarded as a “vice” like drinking: fine for adults, a forbidden rite of passage for teens. Maybe there was an inbetween period after this, but before the “all smoking is eevil” took over?
I was a kid in the 70s and a teen in the 80s. I swear, I think I had the perfect life.
Giving kids alcohol: I was always allowed to have “a sip” of any wine or cocktail my parents were drinking. JUST ONE. My mom really enforced the “just one sip” rule. As a special reward for good behavior, I would be allowed to mix drinks for my parents and older relatives. I loved this, I though it was so grown up and I was extra special careful to make really good drinks. I remember my dad teaching me how to pour a beer into a glass to minimize the foam. I was teethed on whiskey and also had whiskey-soaked cottonballs for other tooth ailments, especially when achy molars were coming in.
Babysitting: I don’t have kids so I’m not sure how this plays out today, but I started babysitting when I was 13. I took care of infants for long periods of time. Prime babysitting years were 13, 14, and 15 … at 16 kids could get “real” jobs like working at McDonalds, so the younger teens were more available for sitting.
My mom once drove me and most of my 1st grade class somewhere (the zoo or something-year was 1968) in the back of her old station wagon-with the back seat folded down. Yep, if she had a crash (which she never has had), we would have had about 15 little projectiles impacting her windshield. And if that happened, and it was this decade, my dad would have become an instant pauper.
My dad is a retired doctor who quit smoking, himself, around 1971. But he kept the ashtray in his waiting room until he closed the office in the early 1990s.
In general, though, I think the near-zero-tolerance attitude began to work its way into the popular mindset, in California, around 1982. I was at UCLA at the time, and they had just banned smoking at Kerckhoff Coffee House. When I arrived at UCSD in 1975 they had just banned smoking in classrooms, but you could still buy smokes from vending machines and the sundries store. They must have stopped doing that by the time I was at UCLA, because I know they weren’t available there.
In a run-down grocery store my parents frequented, one of the open freezer cases would give you a mild electric shock if you touched the metal trim. It was this way for a long time. This was in the 1970s
70’s kid here, and, yep, we were out the door and on the street, in the woods from early light. In small towns, sure, but, even in winter in Maine, we were away from adults, that was the fun. We kinda checked in at lunch, but that could be at other kid’s house, and parents would fix lunch for whoever was around.
A lot of kid activity was spent building forts. A fort could be a pile of sticks and twigs with pine needles on top, or, more ambitious, a big ass hole dug out in the ground with scrap wood piled on top, raided from a construction site. This took a whole week, but very cool as a fort. Do kid’s build these Lord O the Flies style forts anymore? The great part of it was that you did it on kid society passalong info, with older kids directing, no adults involved.
Rocket Club. Estes rockets, in all forms, were a wow staple of the 70’s. Two of us girls wanted to join the all guy Rocket Club, and had to rationally argue our way in there, finally accepted. They were supposedly supervised, but there was a whole lotta launching and modification going on without. Blammo ! I loved it, and only suffered a small knee injury. Do kids do that anymore, or is it too explosive?
Huh . . . I actually heard LL when she was doing the roast of Larry the Cable Guy. Yeah, that’s pretty out there, but is Lisa really mainstream? She’s almost 50, and she hasn’t been in that much, as opposed to Eddie Murphy who was burning up SNL and becoming a virtual brand name before his 20th birthday. I wouldn’t go so far as to call her fringe, but I don’t think she’s really mainstream.
Call it like you see it, but she recently had a special on Comedy Central, had one not too long ago (a year, year and half) on HBO, was nominated for a Grammy, and she was one of the roasters at the “Larry, the Cable Guy” roast. Is she Paula Poundstone? No. But she’s pretty well-known.
I stand corrected, thanks.
I think the “clean your plate because of orphans on another continent” method of feeding kids has gone out of fashion as people have gotten fatter.
After going to the beach during summers in Florida, we used to ride home in the open bed of a pick up truck. That might’ve been illegal even then, though (1990s).
One of my elementary school teachers used to call kids up to the front of the class for play spankings on their birthdays. She’d probably be arrested for that now.
Keeping your pets outside on chains.
Kids riding in the front seat of the car is a thing of the past due to airbags.
Do they still have the bubble gum cigarettes with the powder sugar “smoke”?
Ooohhh, bummer, just went to the Estes Rocket webpage, and guess the ol’ rocket launch pales to current video games, the site is verrrryyyy dulll:
Poor girlhood back-in-the day excitement was building and seeing those rockets go wayyyyy on up in the air; it was magic, plus, you could light the engines on the ground and watch it explode right before your eyes!
Heavin’ a sigh.