… back in the 70s, I slept in a single bed in an uninsulated upstairs bedroom. It was uncomfortably hot in the summer until around midnight when things cooled off, and in the winter time I would sometimes get about a quarter inch of frozen condensation on the inside of the single pane window. To get to school I walked about 300 yards down an unevenly paved street to the school bus stop, rain, snow or sun. I wasn’t always comfortable, but I was thankful.
Kids these days…
We live one street over from their school. It is a half a block walk to the corner, turn left and a half a block walk to the school. Our kids ride the friggin’ bus. I remember when I was in high school I had to walk one mile to the closest bus stop to take me three more miles to school. Our kids walk a half a block to catch a bus to a school that is another half a block away.
I blame the parents.
We owned about 100 acres and my father was a gun dealer. Starting at age 7 or 8, I would just wander the woods during the day and camp out deep in the woods all by myself. I stayed home alone a lot and our house was very isolated with a 1/4 mile long driveway. One night when I was about 12, I was home alone and I heard a loud sound that scared the crap out of me. Most kids would panic but I just marched into my father’s closet, grabbed our fully automatic Uzi, chambered one 50 round clip and grabbed another one in reserve and went back into the living to watch TV with the Uzi on my lap. My father wanted to know why I had it when he got home but my explanation was self-explanatory. Most kids would love to have an Uzi in their bed or on their lap for when they got scared. I was lucky. It was a simpler time then.
Was just thinkin’ the other day about how every summer from when I was 9 to 13 I’d spend all of July out west of Austin, Texas at a camp with no air conditioning and no fans, just screens for walls and canvas flaps you’d let down whenever it rained. It was on a big ranch and each activity was aways from the next and you walked or ran everywhere. This was waaay before the days of bottled water. In fact, I don’t remember any of the stations having as much as a fountain. There was one in the middle of the camp and you’d stop and fill up whenever you passed it, but you could go for hours on hundred degree days when you couldn’t even work up a passable spit. We didn’t know any better, it was just the way things were and complaining wouldn’t do a lick of good.
Today I think they’d be sued, yet I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.
When I was a boy, my room was the farthest from the furnace and tended to be significantly colder on winter mornings than other rooms in the house. This made me very reluctant to get out of bed in the morning. I asked my parents to get me a space heater.
They bought me an electric blanket.
This did not solve the problem.
This weekend, MrsChief asked me to give LilChief a ride to the home of a member of his exponentially expanding ring of friends. He was invited to participate in a Brawl Party* by a friend named Alex.
So LilChief got his controller, we hopped in my car and off we started down the street, I hung a right heading out towards our main secondary road.
“Where we headed, L’ilChief?”
“You see that gray house over there, Dad?”
“That’s where I turn?”
“No. That’s where he lives.”
Down half a block, make right. This house was another block down on the corner. All told maybe 150 yards.
:: Slow Burn ::
“Get. Out. You can damn well walk home.”
I get home, MrsChief asks me if he got there OK. I tell her he could have walked it quicker and we could have saved some gas.
“Not a whole lot of gas, dear. Alex lives right around the corner.”
“Then why in the Hell am I driving him if his friend lives around the corner?”
“He asked for a ride.”
:: Slower burn ::
“I am going out for a few hours,” I tell her.
“Good. You can pick up LilChief on your way home!”
::Head explodes::
- Six to ten kids gather to play elimination Super Mario Brawl Brothers or some such nonsense.
… You could eat the snow. Which I often did mixed with some milk, some sugar and a little bit of vanilla.
… I could buy some of those cool pot metal molds and cast my own lead toys.
… Working on cars was a lot easier.
… We used to play outside. A bush with relatively few thorns would make a fine clubhouse or if a hubcap were added a great vehicle.
… None of the girls I knew cried when they saw a road killed squirrel and none of them got pissed off when I poked it with a stick (although plenty got pissed off when I chased them around the yard with a dead squirrel on a stick).
… Torching green army men with a can of WD-40 and a lighter was awesome.
When I was in kindergarten, I walked at least eight blocks to school. (Thinking that maybe the distance was shorter than my tiny legs remembered, I checked google maps. It was at least eight blocks.) Except for my first time going, I always made the trek alone, or on rare occasions with a classmate.
One lesson that we heard again and again was never talk to strangers. I learned much later in life that there had been some abductions in the area. But I still walked there alone.
I loved my teacher, Mrs. Mitchell. She was such an awesome lady. So nice. One day I decided to show my appreciation by bringing her some flowers. I stopped by a field on the way in, and picked a whole bouquet for her. Pretty white flowers and pretty yellow flowers. I was quick about it, because I didn’t want to be late. When I got to school, she was standing out front waiting for me. She was furious because I was maybe 30 minutes late. “But, but, I got you these!”, I said, while handing her a fistful of dandilions. She was not amused.
When I was a young boy, my father, took me into the city, to see a marching band.
From kindergarten to third grade I walked to school with a friend. It was about a mile. Kindergarten and first grade was in a small town in Ohio, so it was pretty safe. After that we moved to California, but my parents still had me walk to school, just me and another girl. Sometimes we hitched a ride from one of her friend’s parents.
… back in the 70’s, I shared a bedroom with a brother and slept in the top bunk of a bunkbed. The smell of urine so saturated the mattresses that you could smell it as soon as you entered the house. How my mom (who otherwise kept our house impeccably clean) didn’t notice it is, to this day, beyond me.
We were never cold in the winter (at least not inside), but boy oh boy were we hot in the summer. My parents thought air conditioning was an extravagant luxury, and that suffering through stifling heat built character. Our air conditioner never came on before July.
Every summer Mom enrolled us in a summer program put on by a nearby daycare center. We went to a lot of activities (roller skating, matinee movies, etc.), but we also spent a lot of time in city parks. I pity kids today who don’t get to spend so much time outdoors (and probably wouldn’t want to, anyway).
I walked to and from school, until our school closed and I had to take a bus to one some distance away. Once I got to high school, I rode the bus exactly once. The bullies on it were so bad that I chose to walk about a mile and a half to and from school each day, and did so until the day I graduated.
When I was in first grade, we moved to a different state. I started taking the bus to school. It wasn’t easy being the new kid, but there was this one kid who was more of a jerk than the rest. Kevin. Oh, how I hated him. He was a mean jerky bad meanie, right from day one.
Nearly 40 years later, I told my nieces about him. Their response? “Yeah, that sounds like uncle Kevin alright!”
When I was a young meerkat!
When I was young…we didn’t have air conditioning or any reliable heat. The heat was no big deal, seeing as how this was Florida, but the air conditioning would have been nice. I don’t think…No, I know I never lived in a house with central air until I moved out on my own at 20.
I never lived in a house with two bathrooms until we bought this one. (And it has a double vanity in the master bath! Wheeeee!)
We also walked a quarter of a mile to the bus stop, then rode the bus for an hour (we were first on in the morning, last off in the afternoon, on a bus that drove all around my rural county.)
I would like to say I thought nothing of any of these, but that’s not quite true. I frequently wished we didn’t have to ride the bus, or that we had two bathrooms, especially when someone was showering and I needed to pee. 
The '70s were a distant country. My wife, when she was five or so, would walk a quarter of a mile to the store to buy cigarettes for her uncle. At the same age, or even younger, I would hang around a building site and cadge rides from the dumptruck drivers.
The gulf that separates the world of today from that of the '70s seems increasingly vast, not just because of the obvious factor of technology, but because mindsets have changed so radically.
I’m glad to hear everything worked out okay for you. But wouldn’t you concede that leaving a 12 year old home alone with an unsecured loaded sub-machine gun has a slight possibility of being a bad idea?
Ain’t that the truth!
I turned 12 in 1970. My brother and I, and tons of other kids used to hang out in the overgrown bayou (aka storm runoff ditch, about 20-30 feet deep.) There were beaten footpaths and rope swings and water moccasins, snapping turtles and forts and storm sewers to crawl into.
I don’t even remember going home at lunchtime, although I’m sure we did. We drank water out of people’s garden hoses, and nobody minded. We played outside until dark, at least in the summertime. We were always outside, riding our bikes or playing freezetag or hide-n-go-seek.
Ah, good times, good times. 
Naw, my father was a big gun safety advocate except that was before the push to lock them up. We had guns in most of the closets in the house and I had my own shotguns and rifles in my room. We all shot all the time and had three shooting ranges at our house.
It is strange how complete familiarity can influence your views on something. We never thought anything of it and neither did my friends because their houses were the same way. To me, it seemed obvious that, if you hear a noise, you just pick out the best weapon for the job at hand. I graduated from high school in 1991 and we could bring guns to school during deer season as long as we left them in our vehicle. That wasn’t uncommon in rural areas in lots of states.
My, how things have changed.
My response of “ain’t that the truth” was a reply to this statement.
o/When I was a young warthog...o/