Seriously? Like, “Williams?” “Here.” “Randall?” “Here.” “Smith?” “I can’t participate in gym because I sprained my ankle-” “NO! Say ‘Fagitis’! Say it!’” “Sigh. Fagitis.”
I remember reading the Babysitters Club series (hey, don’t laugh) which started in the mid eighties, and thinking it seemed reasonable (when I was in elementary school) for eleven through thirteen year olds to be routinely left alone for days with kids, babysit infants, cook for them, etc. Now it’s like, WTF?
Yes! I vaguely remember them from the 80s.
Though Sally Beauty Supply sells a “brand” called Generic, it’s cheap knock-offs of more expensive hair products - decent stuff for the most part, actually.
My list, mid-80s to mid-90s:
playing in the woods with friends but no supervision (those woods are now McMansions)
“driving” the car in my dad’s lap
riding in the back of pick-up trucks or the big space in the back of a station wagon
getting tastes of my parents’ drinks, I actually had a taste for beer when I was 4, my dad had to put it out of my reach when he had some because I’d keep drinking it when he wasn’t looking
when I was an older teen (16+), being allowed a glass or two of wine at family parties - not totally unthinkable today, but frowned upon
You know, some of these things haven’t died out yet (or died out later than you think). I grew up in the 90s and did a lot of them.
I think all this was pretty typical when I was a kid. I think it’s kind of rare these days to see kids taking the bus on their own but I can still see the rest happening.
When I was in elementary school, girls had to wear dresses or skirts, no matter how cold it was. If it was extremely cold, we wore pants to walk to school and then changed before class. One day I was at lunch and a teacher told me to go out onto the playground and deliver a note to another teacher who was supervising recess. (It was below zero, so they should have been having recess in the gym, but no one cared for our safety or comfort.)
I put on my pants and went out and delivered the note, and came back in again, whereupon another teacher spotted me and gave me a nasty talking-to. My protests were in vain, and I was sent to the principal’s office, where I was exonerated. I was probably seven years old.
Now girls dress like prostitutes on street corners.
A black man with an African name being elected President of the United States of America.
Not laughing, I loved that series!
And to add to my own list, being left home alone when I was 11 - mostly for a few hours after school, I’d get home on the bus & my parents/older sister (13 at the time) didn’t get home until later. I somehow managed to not burn the house down, even though I did cook for myself. Not microwave, on the stove, with real food.
I’ve never had a pet, but is it really unthinkable to keep a pet outside on a chain? I didn’t know that.
When my mom had to go to the mall, she’d bring us and tell us “meet me at this door in 2 hours”, and we’d go off and explore on our own. I think I was about 10 at the time.
We used to take long driving vacations. There were 4 kids, so three in the backseat and I usually sat in between my parents in the front (bench seats in those days). Around 4:30 or 5 pm, wherever we were, my mom would pull a couple plastic glasses from her bag and a bottle of wine out of the cooler by her feet, and she and my dad would have happy hour. Since I was between them, I’d have the cutting board on my lap and my job was to slice the cheese and smoked sausage. So, me with a sharp knife in my hands, cutting board on my lap, about a foot from the steel dashboard, while we hurtled down the highway at 75 or so while my parents sipped their chardonnay. And my siblings in the backseat without seatbelts.
I had a friend whose parents were… hedonists, I guess. Their house was decorated with pictures and paintings of his naked mom. It wasn’t uncommon to be over there and see her walking around in a short silk robe and panties; if I stayed overnight she’d come down that way in the morning and cook and serve us breakfast with her tits basically falling out of the robe as it gaped open. We used to go into their bedroom closet, with their full knowledge, to “borrow” some of the porn magazines they kept in there. And they had some of the kinkiest stuff I’ve ever seen, even by today’s standards. Not that any of it was any more acceptable then than it would be today, but I’d suspect that these days they’d be a little more circumspect about it.
What, you didn’t try to get anyone to bite them? Amateurs! 
The funny part for me was, if I understand the usage correctly, -itis usually indicates a condition of inflammation and/or swelling.
“I can’t run laps today, my fag is all swollen up.”
Hi,
Most of mine have already been mentioned but the first is kind of an opposite. When I was a kid, growing up in the 70’s near Las Vegas, we sometimes went to steakhouses at the Skyline or other casinos. When there, we had to MARCH directly from the door to the restaurant, if we were anywhere near the slots and not moving fast enough, a casino staff member would at minimum, hostily stare at my parents or I and encourage them to get the kids out of the gambling area. There are still laws about kids near slots but now when you go down to the strip, there are tourists with kids everywhere and many places cater to families. When I was a kid, casinos were absolutely for grownups.
My parents left us unattended in the mini-van once I was 6 or 7 and old. I was the oldest of four siblings and the youngest, my brother, was developmentally delayed and very difficult to take into public places. So I got stuck in the van with two bickering sisters and a brother that was barely controllable. Great fun. If it was hot, we just rolled down the windows.
I started babysitting at about 9, but I spent the evening lighting little pieces of paper on our gas stove (done without incident, but I left the evidence) for the entertainment of my sister so my parents put off that responsibility for another year or so, at which time I regularly was in charge of all three siblings. One night I locked my parents out, they got home so late that no one woke when they banged on the window in our bedroom. Banged on it so hard it broke.
I also walked to kindergarten, well over a mile, when I was 5. My earliest school memory is when my friend Nita and I walked to school and came across some beer bottles in the gutter and that was enough for us to stop and play there for awhile, making me about an hour late for school. There was no frantic searching for the missing kid- when I finally made it to school I was IN TROUBLE for the rest of the day and could not participate in Weekly Reader, which was my favorite thing. I have been a fairly punctual person ever since.
We walked everywhere in town, often barefooted and usually wandered up to three miles (or more when we had bikes) from home. We did have to leave a note of where we were going, but it was usually multiple places (the drug store for ice cream, the park, the friends house, etc).
Lastly, I sold Girl Scout cookies and delivered them door to door, by myself at the age of 8 or 9.
I remember seeing chain gangs. Never made it up to the Prison Rodeo in Huntsville; it ended in 1986. (Somewhere there’s a picture of Ernst Magritte wearing a cowboy hat instead of a bowler. He was visting the De Menils in Houston & somebody took him on a road trip to watch the convict/cowboys.)
And I remember when you couldx-ray your feet in shoe stores! But most of the machines I saw were old & dusty, even then.
Born in 1961, my brother was born in 1959.
Hm, I learned to shoot the year my dad finally retired from the army and to kill the summer he taught shooting at the boy scout camp in Pike NY. I was 8 years old.
Same summer I got my first sailboat, a sunfish
We moved to a summer cottage memorial weekend and moved back to town for a number of years after that summer, until I was like 16. WE got fed breakfast and promptly vanished for the day, only thing was we had to be home by the time the YMCA camp down the shore played mess call, call it some 6 or 7 in the evening. During the day we could scrounge raw veggies from the garden, con my grandmothers cook into feeding us or go mooch off of some variant of family up and down the lake shore. We had friends in town which was a 5 mile bike ride to go around the lake to the other side, or a 10 minute sail if we had the money to rent a dock slip.
It was not uncommon for me to swim half a mile down the lake shore to visit cousins, or 3/4 of a mile across to visit cousins on the other side. I was taught to swim before I could walk, my grandfather owning a fairly large sailboat that we would pass time on for vacations. With my dad being army, many summers we got sent home to my grandparents or an uncles house. Sort of an odd lifestyle, but I never felt neglected =)
Trick or treating was always my brother, myself and a generic gang of kids wandering around from just after dinner until probably 9 at night.
I walked to and from school the 2 years I was in public school, kindergarden and first grade. Then I did variations on catholic and private schools, and another stint at public school - because of the distance of them, I got driven.
I babysat a few times at 12 for a neighbor, and decided I really didn’t like kids, so I stopped. Also starting around then I had bought a nice touring bike [a heavy assed schwinn, I swear that thing would survive a nuclear blast!] and it was not unusual for us to bike all over hell and back, being gone all day on saturdays and sundays. I know for a fact that it was not uncommon for us to do a century in a weekend, especially if we rode in to Rochester [from Caledonia] to do a movie and visit friends from school.
Hm, winter camping - grab the supplies, the cross country skis and light out along the old unused train tracks out into the middle of nowhere [great pond for skating that only a few of us kids knew about and bothered with] for a couple of nights. This would have also been about from 10-14 years old. We used a ratty old 4 man tent my dad liberated from the boy scouts as it had gotten a rip init that we fixed. We would cram 6 or 7 of us in there like sardines. Pitched under the pine trees, it tended to stay fairly comfortable. My sleeping bag of the time was an ancient abercrombie-fitch expedition one, that was rated for assaulting Mt Everest.
To me, this is the most shocking one yet. Do you have kids now, and does it blow your mind to think of them doing the same?
I do remember playing outdoors all day unsupervised, going to the bar with Dad, building forts in the woods, getting paddled at school (complete with prayer afterwards), and buying cigarettes for my stepdad when I was around age 12.
Sampiro, I didn’t realize until just now that the grocery stores don’t carry GENERIC food anymore. I thought I was just shopping in nicer stores. 
The incident that most amazes me when I think back on it occurred in 1984. One day, in the middle of my ninth grade drama class, two guys wearing camouflage and carrying guns busted in and started screaming at everyone to get down on the floor and be quiet. Everyone complied with a minimum of fuss, looking at each other in bewilderment, except one girl who totally lost her shit and went wailing to the teacher, “Saaave me!” The teacher dragged her under a table as well. The two guys ran around hollering and threatening with the guns for a few minutes, and then the teacher got up and introduced them to us as some of her former students who had agreed to help us with the concept of improv. We all thought that was totally cool. Also, we ragged the hell out of the scared girl.
My barber (Norvie Schultz?) as a kid would always finish us up with a straight razor. If we got out of line while waiting for our haircut he wasn’t afraid to use his razor strop on us. Mid 60s. The other barber in the shop was nicknamed Mohawk Murphy because he often cut you when he cut your hair. We liked going to Norvie better.
I was born in 1941 when Hitlers Luftwaffe was bombing the shit out of Britain, I lived…obviously.
At or about the age of 11/12 me and my pals used to set off early in the morming on our bikes and we’d cycle for miles armed with nothing more than a bottle of pop and a few spam butties which we shared around, we all lived despite drinking out of the same bottle your pal had wrapped his chops around minutes earlier.
If it was a particularly hot summer we’d camp out the night in some farmers field miles away from home…we all lived.
After a day and night of this we’d cycle back home, tired, dirty and hungry but still alive.
Mum and dad never worried about us and we never worried about anything…we all lived.
Try doing what we did then, now!
I used to work with a guy who would go on and on about how kids are too coddled today.
He also used to lament his son’s stupidity.
One day he made the comment that the government went way too far in banning DDT saying,“Hell when I was a kid in Florida, the city used to fog with DDT every other night.
Me and my brothers used to ride behind the fog truck on our bikes and I can’t see that it hurt any of us.”
To which I replied, John, you’re always going on about what a moron your son is. Isn’t it the tiniest bit possible that the DDT just skipped a generation?"
On the subject of kids left alone in cars, I always preferred to sit in the car and read a book during clothes-shopping outings with my 4 sisters. If they were at one of the town’s only two shopping centers of that time, I could wander off to one of the stores, but had to leave a note as to my destination and lock the car. Since I didn’t have car keys and didn’t want to traipse through all of those “girlie stores” to beg one from Mom, I generally didn’t take that option.
My folks didn’t want me reading MADmagazine or “comic book trash” in public, so other adults would see me reading library books and they would smile and nod. Imagine what the typical busybody of today would have done about an “abandoned 11-year-old sitting in a car reading Tom Sawyer”. Not only would my folks have been fined, but the whole damn family would have been sent to Re-education Camp, aka family counseling, because of my toxic exposure to racist writings.
When I was kid we used to play Jarts all the time. Lawndarts. Which, apparently, are now entirely banned in the US. I guess that applies.
Darn, I liked that game…
Uh, people still read Tom Sawyer today. And I think it’s one thing to be upset over a two year old being left in a car, but I doubt anyone would care about an 11 year old. That’s old enough to get out.
I’m probably 20 years younger than you and I could do the same thing. I didn’t ask that often, but my parents didn’t care. Most kids can probably still do this.
Agreed. It’s a staple in high school English classes.
That’s about how it went. If you weren’t able to participate, you shouted out, “Fagitis!” or “Strepto back Fagitis” if you wanted to get cute and weren’t able to participate because of a back injury, for example.