Speaking of things that go boom, what about fireworks? We lit off anything that would fly or flame. Same with the edgier stuff- firecrackers, m-80s, homemade stuff. A friend and I were lighting firecrackers one day, and as often happened with the cheap Mexican stuff, a long fuse burned way too fast and the damned thing blew up in her palm. Her hand was numb for two or three days, but we didn’t tell anybody because her dad would have been pissed at us. Good thing it wasn’t permanent! Then again, this was the same dad who let us play with mercury, black powder and other fun stuff…
Remember GENERICS? For those too young to know them only as a medication option, grocery stores used to sell big white bags or containers of products with just the item’s name on it:
POTATO CHIPS
COOKIES
DOG FOOD
etc.
Some were indistinguishable from (probably identical to) the name brands, but others weren’t. The worst was
COLA
which made the store brand taste good by comparison. The main item we always bought generic was cat food and dog food for the army of welfare animals we took in.
Today we’re so marketing obsessed that I wonder if anybody would go near these items.
There was a man who used to come to our house sometimes- kind of scruffy looking but very well spoken and he drove a banged up old Jeep and if anybody knew his name they didn’t call him that- he was just “The Fish Man”. He lived somewhere on the river and he drove around to houses all over our end of the county (and occasionally we’d even see him in town) and sold fish he’d caught from Army surplus coolers in the back of his truck: catfish, brim, bass, other. He didn’t use scales he just guessed at the weight, and if you wanted to buy some he’d give you a price (way under the store price of course) and it was great fish. Sometimes, especially with catfish, the thing would still be alive once you started skinning it.
There were all kinds of wild rumors about the guy (“he’s a surgeon who went crazy…”, “I’ve heard he killed his wife…”, “he’s a murderer who’s hiding out from the FBI…”, “he’s a hippie that blew his mind on drugs…”) but whoever he was and whatever rumors the same person had told you about him, they’d always buy fish from him because it was a lot fresher and a lot cheaper than anything from the store. To my knowledge nobody ever got sick from eating any of the fish they bought from him, but today, even in a rural area, he’d probably be fined and imprisoned for not adhering to any kind of health codes and there have been “city folk” mortified when we told them we bought fish off the back of a weird (but nice) hermit’s jeep.
Of course where my sister lives (the gulf coast of Alabama) you used to see guys selling shrimp and flounder and other locally caught fish and seafood off the back of trucks until just a few years ago, but there was a major crack down on them a few years back when some people got sick. Today it’s ironic: it’s one of the shrimping capitals of the nation (Bubba Gump country) and the shrimp is the same price as it is pretty much anywhere else.
We weren’t allowed any hard stuff, but a sip of wine was authorized up to around age 10, at which point we graduated to a glass with about an ounce in it (but small sips only - had to last the entire main course).
Being a latchkey kid after middle school in the 80s. We came home on the bus, let ourselves in, went out on our bikes and played around on the street and got into stuff until our parents came home. Same in the summer – we’d go out and bike around in the neighborhood or in the backyard with parents saying “come back for dinner!”
Being left in the car in Texas summers as young children while the parents shopped inside because we hated being hauled in the store when we had perfectly good books needing read, or because we didn’t like the arctic-level AC and preferred being parboiled. (Mind, we were old enough to let ourselves out of the car and join the parents inside if we really wanted to)
Sitting on my dad’s lap as a weebaby to “drive” come Christmas light-viewing time. (at about 0.005 MPH, but hey.)
Playing with the backyard rocket launcher I got from selling magazine subscriptions without supervision. (I was sad when the plastic parachute didn’t work as advertised.)
The unthinkability of this is underlined somewhat by the knowledge that (back when we lived in the suburb of Haney/Maple Ridge) my older brother brought this cool older guy home for beers one time, with our parents’ full knowledge and nary a raised eyebrow, because said [randomly met] cool older guy was a solid citizen and possible employer.
Cool older guy was Clifford Olsen. One of my brother’s closest friends was among his victims.
Apart from that, when I was in my early teens I amused myself and my friends by making small explosive devices. I remember one time a detonator that I’d made went off with unexpected force and loudness, prompting my parents to look into my room. With my parents satisfied that nothing was damaged, I carried on assembling my little bomb. I was always able to persuade them that I had everything under control. They trusted me way more than I will trust any spawn of mine.
I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, in Queens, in New York City.
In the mid-Sixties, around the time I was in kindergarten, there was still a store around the corner from my house where they kept live chickens in wire cages, and would decapitate them on the spot for paying customers, to be plucked and roasted for dinner.
That place was gone by the late Sixties, and my younger brothers aren’t entirely convinced I didn’t imagine the whole thing!
The word “negroes” was still in usage though starting to be frowned upon
So was “American Indian”
I had never heard of bicycle helmets
I had to hear a lot about Ethiopia at the dinner table
My mother threw us out of the house at 8 a.m. and we’d be expected to wander back by 9 p.m… We were 6 & 4, respectively.
Mimeographs
There were no “playdates”-my mom used to lunch with other housewives. I still find this absolutely hilarious…that my mother belonged to a f*cking luncheon/tea party club of housewives. Also, I don’t ever remember anyone calling themselves SAHMs…the term housewife was more in use.
Everyone smoked…everywhere. Including on planes. Internationally. My parents hated Chicoutimi so we took a lot of international vacations in those days. I always remember them bitching about the smoking section on those long flights.
In 1990 I was 11 and babysitting a 9 month old and a 2 year old. They’re both taller than me now. sniff
As a teen in the '70’s, if the cops caught you drinking and driving (mind, 18 was legal then) they’d take whatever booze you had left and tell you to go home. After a stern lecture, of course. The real pricks (well, at the time) would make you pour out the booze on the street before they sent you home. That hurt. Whatever we were drinking wasn’t good enough for them.
Being 16 and drinking in bars -without- using a fake id. Or any id at all. And I don’t look old.
Going to the local drugstore and buying quantities of sulphur, salt peter and charcoal. At the same time. And some denatured alcohol to help pack it in tight. And don’t forget the box of potassium permanganate and a bottle of glycerin. Would make those purchases every month or so. Today, I’d be in Gitmo.
In grade school, in the 60’s, the Catholic nuns taught evolution as fact.
Those newly arrived hard working dark skinned people were ok. We almost rather welcomed them. Now we’ve got to build ourselves a wall.
sorry…I can’t stop thinking about the good old days…
Playgrounds were made up of jabby ended metal stuff. Including that wheel thing you could twirl around and around and then we’d all try to jump off…on to sharp pebbles.
My parents fed me Red 40 without the slightest bit of concern.
Mullets were acceptable fashion statements
I have never trick-or-treated with my parents, ever. It was always with the neighbourhood gang.
Oh yeah, I was part of a neighbourhood gang. It was a gaggle of girls and boys ages 4-10ish. The gang parented and watched out for one another during the day while our mothers smoked and lunched. Well, my mother didn’t smoke but she sure as hell didn’t entertain us during the day and she was definitely off to lunch or whatever the hell she did during the day. We usually biked to the gulch and did stupid dangerous sh*t and played a lot of four square and drew on cement.
There were no fences around swimming pools
I went to public parochial school and participated in christmas pageants
Just picturing an pre-80s playground, with the jabby pointed ended stuff but mostly the pebbled asphalt and concrete you’d fall onto (even from monkey bars!) makes me shudder and think it’s some sort of twisted evil-clown-like torture place rather than something meant for kids to have fun on. I’m not a spiritual person at all but I can almost feel the ghosts of kids crying out scraping their knee or opening their head from a nasty fall when I picture one of those.
In the early 1980s there were some cringe-inducing (even then) comments in public schools in Alabama by the older teachers whose career had mostly been before integration. Especially bad were the real dinosaurs who were actually out of the game but still worked as substitutes.
Actual comments from a 60-something she-substitute ca. 1981:
Same teacher (Mrs. Sue-Jean Ingram- why do I remember that?):
Surprisingly, if the black students were offended they didn’t remark on it. More likely they were just hearing “old woman babbling” like one of Charlie Brown’s parents, just like most of the white students.
The most racist comments came from Mrs. Jeter, who remarked to some black kids who were cutting up and giggling in class
Mrs. Jeter, as you may have guessed, was black (and older than dirt and mean as hell). She would make the black kids furious and the white kids very very nervous (“uh… please remember, it’s her saying that, not us…”).
At the all white private school I went to of course the ‘N’word was used all the time by an old coach [who was also vice principal]. The headmaster was a pot bellied Skoal dippin’ good ol’ boy stereotype in appearance but would paddle kids on the spot for using it (though he tolerated it from the old coach because he knew the coach wasn’t going to change and also the coach had been his coach and was almost a father figure to him.
Teachers could no longer smoke in the classrooms but there was a perpetual cloud coming from the teacher’s lounge at every school I went to. It must have been absolute hell for the non-smoking teachers.
In elementary school (all white upscale Christian school) we played “Smear the Queer”- which is what the coaches themselves (several of them ministers) called it. It’s a kind of dodge ball. At the time I didn’t think anything of it- loved it in fact, my favorite game (dodgeball’s fun)- but it’s shocking in retrospect. They also made you pray before you got paddled which even then struck me as sick. (I never got paddled at that school because they were scared to death of my mother, who was a teacher there.)
Speaking of gays, there was only one in the country: Truman Capote (a distant relative of mine who my father swore stole money from him as a kid- no idea if he did or didn’t). When gays were on talk shows or the news even the liberal hosts like Donahue treated them like freaks. My brother, valedictorian of his school, was offered a scholarship to Vanderbilt and was told by a recruiter from the college he ultimately went to “You know they had a faggot dance there and something like 200 people showed up, right?”
Also, some people seemed to find any reference to gayness funny. We had a police officer come to high school for a “drugs are bad, m’kay” talk and he told us “And I’ll tell you somethin’ else about pot… it breaks your wrist bones.” We were looking at him with a “Huh?” expression- which is what he wanted- and he gave the punchline: “Yep, guys smoke it, and their wrist goes…” and he did the limp wrist sissy boy promenade like Mr. Roper on Three’s Company while a few students laughed and the rest of us, even though we weren’t that gay friendly (even me), were of the “uh… okay… that’s kind of gratuitous and stretching”.
My grade school had a playground like that until about 1985. The main playarea was all pea gravel. Granted not sharp pebbles, but you’d get a nice strawberry if skidded at full speed through the stuff. The biggest concern the teachers on recess duty had were that girls hanging on the monkey bars had to have shorts on beneath their uniform skirts.
In first and second grade I not only walked to and from school but I also walked home and back for lunch as well. After 2nd grade we moved farther away from school.
Nobody wore bike helmets. No one. I came within an inch of getting splattered by a big van when I cut from one side of the street to the other without looking behind me. Had a couple nasty spills on my bike, but nothing worse than road rash on my legs.
Oh yeah another one - constant gun-play (making toy guns out of every conceivable material) and playing at killing each other, in grades 1 through 4. And this was at a QUAKER private elementary school. And they still turned a blind eye.
When we were kids, say ten and older, on summer days or on Saturdays during the school year, we would leave the house and spend the day doing things outdoors — riding our bikes around, going to the drugstore, playing basketball, catching frogs by the river, whatever. We came home at sunset, as told. Seems normal enough to me, but the last time I related that here at the Straight Dope, someone seemed rather shocked, and said if any mother allowed that today, she would be considered irresponsible.
Sorry, we weren’t tethered to our parents when we were young.
Not just a southern thing, but in our house it was a big coffee can . . . but one day when the can was filled with hot grease, our parakeet landed on the rim and fell in. My mother did a quick save, but the bird was slightly parboiled, lost her feathers and caught pneumonia. We had to feed her penicillin and keep a heating pad on the cage, till the feathers grew back. The damn bird lived to be 13.
Standing up behind my dad while he was driving may actually have saved me from injury in the accident we had when I was four. Dad ended up with several broken ribs and a gash on his head from the windshield, but I think I just kind of “rode” the seat when it went forward and back. Everybody else in the family ended up in the hospital for at least the night, and Mom was there for 7 weeks.
We made swords and rafts and anything else we could think of out of lath, using real nails and saws and hammers. And then we did swordfights. I think the worst injury any of us ever had was splinters. Of course, Mom had to dig those out and put mercurochrome or merthiolate on the spot. “Blow on it 'til it dries.”
And the one that really gets me, but I think it might have been unique to us. Dad made what he called shootsen guns for us. Wrap the end of a window shade spring with electrician’s tape so you can hold onto it. Cut a dowel rod about 6 inches long to use as projectile. Insert dowel into spring, pull back, let fly. Great toy for kids. It’s a wonder we all still have two eyes.
Then again, this was the same dad who let us play with mercury, black powder and other fun stuff…