I’ve mentioned this in another thread lately: when we were in school we had Phys. Ed. every day: 6 weeks of gym, 6 weeks of swimming, and 6 weeks of hygiene class. Showers were mandatory after gym class, and in swim class the boys had to swim nude. If you had a doctor’s excuse from swimming you had to walk around the pool naked for the whole period. I don’t think they could get away with that today.
Where did you go to school, ancient Greece? I have NEVER heard of what you’re describing. What time period was this, and where? Swimming nude? I have got to know more about this.
Someone mentioned upthread kids trick-or-treating without parental supervision as well. My childhood was not that long ago (in the 90’s) and I remember doing those kinds of things by myself or with friends around the neighborhood all the time with no supervision. Even younger than 10, too.
The only time it got me in trouble was when we were playing around a construction site. Yeah, yeah I know, bad idea. I stepped on a nail and it went all the way through my foot.
Primary school - the Headmasters class had a wire cage cordoning off the corner of the room from floor to ceiling. There were budgies and gerbils in it. Very satisfiying when a budgie crapped on a gerbil. The teacher in the class below brought his dog to school. It lay under the desk. The dinner ladies would send one of the kids to the shop every day for a packet of ten number six cigarettes. Not greeting some old fuddy duddy on the road was about the worst thing you could do. Having a child size bicycle elevated you to a semi-godlike status.
My father was in high school during WW2. He told me about the old male teacher who asked permission of the boys’ parents to talk frankly with them about sex after school, and several of the boys attended the lectures. When you think of sexuality in those times you think of “from time to time you may get urges… ignore 'em or you’ll burn in hell” mentality, but… my father still remembered these almost 40 years as the most frank, forward, explicit straight-talk imaginable. Perhaps it was because the war was on and so many 18 year olds (including my father) were graduating and going immediately into service (some had never left the county and now they were off to the other side of the world), because there wasn’t even sex education when I was in high school (it was a hot button issue actually), but he said the old man told them how to put on condoms (still called ‘rubbers’ then) and why they were important, he showed them a slide show of horrors of men with VD, told them about things to use and not to use for lube, etc., and even warning signs that meant “don’t stick it to this woman” (i.e. signs of STDs or menstruation). It seemed amazingly progressive, and my father was impressed by the fact the old man wasn’t the least bit embarrassed while doing it, nor apparently did it seem inappropriately pederastic, but a genuine service.
(I actually wish I’d had some type of guidance along these lines when I was a teenager because I had some embarrassing as hell misconceptions, plus the first time I had blue balls I thought I was freaking dying [and had no idea how easy they are to ‘relieve’]. If I ever have a son, blue balls are DEFINITELY something I’ll tell them about- I may even mention them in my will just in case I die before the kid’s grown.)
It’s actually jarring to think of how recent it was that you could walk all the way to the terminal if you were meeting or saying goodbye to somebody catching a flight. You’d have to walk under the metal detectors of course but I never remember taking off my shoes or anything more severe than removing my belt.
We were on a party line with my grandmother and another old woman when I was a kid. Again, I’m 42- that’s not ancient (more people my age are having babies than grandkids) but few people under my age even have an idea what a party line was.
Previous SDMB thread about nude swimming at schools and YMCAs. It was more common thank you’d think up to the 1960s. LIFE magazine even ran a color photo in 1950 of a water volleyball game at a high school in a Chicago suburb.
Hot…
As a deeply closeted gay (not even really out to myself) in high school, THANK GOD that was out of our system (not that we had a pool at my school) or ‘My Secret Identity’ would have been public knowledge.
Unrelated to the above: my school lunchroom had actual knives and forks. (I’m not talking Bowie knives or even serrated steak knives, but they were at least metal and could conceivably have done damage; people I know with kids today say it’s strictly plastic packets.)
I wonder if there are still un air conditioned public schools. Hopefully they’re things of the past: a room with no air conditioning and 30 kids (some of them hygienically challenged) on a 100 degree/90 percent humidity September day… DAMN. Those oscillating fans were old and only cooled you off for two seconds at a time and not even that if you were on the opposite side of the room. I remember one teacher sweating so hard we thought he was having a heart attack and a student passing out during one heat wave.
Well, I’m a young pup, so I don’t think I have any really good stories.
I have been meaning to get around to compiling that list of Things They Got Away With on G.I. Joe (semi-realistic firearms (occasionally); references to death or dying, in dialogue; a few offhand references to having been in 'Nam), or, even better, all the exceedingly screwy, by today’s standards, programming they aired on the Disney Channel in the early days—Donald Duck’s introduction to higher mathematics and the Pythagorean Cult; odd “civil defense” shorts, complete with aircraft carriers with pagoda-shaped superstructures; all those Rankin-Bass specials (“This sword is named Orcist—the goblin cleaver!” “URRRARGH! MURDERERS! ELF-FRIENDS!” Holy crap.); creepy early U.S.-released anime…
Cleveland Hts. High School, Class of '63.
Yup, that could have been us.
You had fans???
A few friends and I pedaled our bikes 20 miles to our favorite fishing hole, camped for a few days and then pedaled back. We were around 10 or 11.
The “Lord’s Prayer” isn’t allowed in public schools here anymore but when I was a kid I remember reciting it every day and finding it strange that it was allowed.
I remember getting sent to the grocery store at around age four or five carrying a shopping list I couldn’t even read which I would hand to the clerk. A six-block walk each way.
Also, walking to kindergarten by myself was the norm. That was 10 blocks or so, each way.
Back in the late sixties, my mom would send me (4) and my sister (3) down to the grocery about two blocks down the street by ourselves for milk, bread or other small items, and have us put it on her charge, even though we couldn’t even sign the ticket yet. And heaven forbid if we bought any unauthorized candy.
We also went without child seats, seatbelts and rode in the back of pickups as kids. In the summer, we would get on our bikes and ride the seven miles to our grandparents home by ourselves, where we drank coffee to our little hearts’ content.
Our family also had a small truck farm out there. At seven, I was driving a small tractor and at ten, the farm truck. Nobody blinked an eye seeing a kid drive either one to the grain elevator or the produce broker in town in rural Indiana. We were the stoop labor for the farm and as a bunch of pink skinned blondes and redheads, were sunburned for six months of the year (no sunscreen back then).
Like others have posted, we left the house in the morning and didn’t return until evening during the summer months when we weren’t at the farm or the lake. If we did something rotten at the other end of town, whatever adult was around took care of the dicipline, then called Mom, meaning a repeat when we got home. We also babysat and cut grass beginning about ten years old and worked for extra change as saw offbears for my dad’s woodworking shop. :rolleyes:
I also am barely old enough to remember the “colored” balcony at the movies when we would visit relatives in Tennessee and North Carolina. Us kids actually thought that would be the most fun place to sit. I also remember when some department stores wouldn’t allow non-whites to try on clothing or return garments (saw this happen with my Amerindian aunt). :rolleyes:
And we liked it! 
(well, some of it)
When I was a kid, our house had an outside toilet (I saw my last outside toilet in about 1997 - I’m pretty sure that was the last of the breed).
In primary school in the '70s, our uniform in the summer was summer dresses and smocks (the smocks stayed in the classroom - I’m sure the headmistress would have had apoplexy if we’d tried to wear them outside the school). Of course the school had no air conditioning, so if it was really hot we could take off our dresses and just wear the smocks (they were perfectly decent by themselves). But the Prep kids (5 year olds) got even more leeway - they could take both off and run around in their knickers!
Hats were strictly for wearing to and from school. I can’t remember if there was a rule against wearing them at lunchtime, but you’d certainly get laughed at. These days if you forget your hat they won’t even let you out to play!
You know, this thread is really begging for a peanut butter story (don’t have one myself, we never ate the stuff). Anyone? Anyone?
I remember getting my mouth washed with soap at the kindergarten, back in '82 or so. Regular bar soap on a nail brush, at that. Felt like violence, but it was neither covered up nor remarked upon. Wonder what would happen today?
By age four we we’re exploring the woods on our own in boy gangs, doing things like snapping wrist-thick saplings by climbing to the top, banging scrap iron onto quartz boulders to induce sparks and spying on the homeless addicts living in the deepest parts of the forest. We did encounter a derelict pedophile once. He tried to persuade us boys to come for some candy in his shack. We were street-smart enough to start running, fast.
Gun play was constant, and I much preferred the cap guns made from metal (some zinc alloy, I think) that had the heft and the workings of real handguns (revolving cylinders etc.) No red plastic hats on the muzzle, either. The best public “matches” involved us 6- to 10-year olds “killing” each other in the gruesomest ways, spewing out profanities in the process. Much fun.
On Saturday nights Mom and Dad liked to go to the bar. Until my sister got old enough to babysit me (around 10, in other words), we went with them. Try getting away with that these days.
We weren’t the only kids there, either. We’d play outside in the broken glass strewn parking lot if the weather was nice, get plonked on Coke, and “wait tables” for the grown-ups for quarters which we would then feed into the honky tonk jukebox - lots of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and Hank Williams. Occasionally your quarter would get stuck; they kept an old butter knife on top of the jukebox for wiggling your change out of the coin slot. Years later, when I was legal, I went back to that bar and damned if that knife wasn’t still there.
I was also buying my own cigarettes at the age of 13. This was mid-80s; they didn’t really start cracking down on the carding thing until after I’d turned 18.
Wandering around and through construction sites (they were not fenced off). Construction sites always seemed to have ladder that led to the upper floors or even the roof. Great fun. I suppose if I had been caught I would have moved from the “college track” to the “parole track.”
My mom lived at home during college and remembers being given a buck each day by her parents, part for the bus, part for lunch and part for cigarettes. She did get in trouble for smoking in the bathroom in high school, but apparently her parents considered smoking a necessity.
Back in the early 80s, when I was 8-9 I guess, I was given money to buy a pack of cigarettes for my grandfather. I remember the woman at the store asking if they were for me, but she still sold them to me. I also had to walk to the store to get them, which was probably a 5-10 minute walk.