BS: Here's something you may relate to!

Subject: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Dave Masterson
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 03:51 AM

This is doing the email rounds at the moment. Thought you might find it amusing… and something a lot of us may relate to!


TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright coloured lead- based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live in us forever.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang
the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!



And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!



You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Steve Parkes
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 04:20 AM

On this side of the pond we didn't even have local radio stations or commercial TV!

We had a lot of things back them that todays kids don't: rickets, smog, leaded petrol, Perec Rachman ...

Steve

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: whiterainbow
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 04:28 AM

I most certainly do remember those carefree days Dave.....and I feel todays kids are missing out on simple things in life,.....the main one being freedom, safe freedom that is.....

WR

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Peace
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 05:19 AM

I read your post with nostalgia. Thank you.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: GUEST,Skipy
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 05:26 AM

I used to live in a shoe box at the bottom of a lake.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Trevor
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 05:36 AM

Shoe box.....that were....oh I can't be arsed!

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Davetnova
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 06:16 AM

One lump of coal between six of us.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: kendall
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 06:25 AM

Makes me wonder how many kids DIDN'T survive those days.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: fat B****rd
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 06:31 AM

..LUXURY !! Sorry, couldn't resist.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Susu's Hubby
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 08:06 AM

.....reading that makes me feel a little old......just like when my daughter asked me for the first time...."Dad, what did you do for fun in the olden days?"

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Donuel
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 08:13 AM

I was an abortion who survived.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 08:58 AM

yes!

a folklore collecting friend & I were talking tonight about billy carts, mulberry tress & blackberry bushes, huge bonfires & how the gang from the next street was always trying to steal stuff from our street's bonfire (my parents had a garage & we always had lots of tyres)

... the good old days,

Just in case someone born later reads this I'm referring to primary school days in the late 50's & early 60's & our gangs were nothing like the ones currently in the news for dealing drugs & killing each other & police officers.

Any stories of your gangs?

sandra

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Rapparee
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 09:21 AM

We threw "spears" made from tall weed stems at each other, sometimes with heavy root clumps attached. Sometimes we got into rock fights or threw mud or dried mud clods at each other. Usually we missed. Usually.

My great-uncle was the cemetery sexton and he would dump a load of dirt in our driveway (which was gravel). We lived on "filled land" -- an old dump -- and spread the dirt in the garden. It was also a great thing to play in. I was digging in it with a spoon when my brother, who was digging with a shovel, sliced open my thumb. I still remember the blood mixing with the dirt. I didn't get "blood poisoning" or "lockjam" -- Mom washed it out, put mercuchrome on it (ouch!), and bandaged the wound. I have a small scar.

At 12, Mom sent us to learn target shooting at a local range run by the high school. We learned to respect firearms as tools, not as ends in themselves. We also learned to pull the bullets off .22 cartridges and replace it with wax, creating our own blanks. These we would fire at the bedroom door (when Mom wasn't home of course). The wax would splatter against the plywood door, we'd have made a noise, we'd scrape off the wax, and then one day Mom decided to paint the door. She said at supper that night, "I must have some bad paint; it doesn't stick in a lot of places on your door." We survived...barely...but the bolt from "Daddy's rifle" disappeared until the last of the three boys turned 18.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Davetnova
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 09:23 AM

WE had the run of a rag factory (collecting and baling rags) after closing times. The thrill of throwing yourself of a sixty foot pile of baled rags knowing you were going t land softly on more bales was great when you were eight. Then it would be down to the railway to steal detonators, they were absolutely magic.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: GUEST,MMario
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 09:43 AM

we had lots of swordfights with "false bamboo" ; contests to see who could smash the most skunk cabbages - would measure mudholes in the marwsh by jumping into them; played tag in geyser fields (okay - just one summer on vacation)- used to play follow the leader across the ruins of a waterwheel (about a 10 foot fall onto jagged metal if we missed)

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Mooh
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 10:23 AM

Hopped my first freight train at 12 or so. Parents took us up north every summer and essentially set us free to rock climb, fish, hike, canoe, scavenge and forage for food, build tree forts, and tell of our adventures every evening before bed (which was often on the ground).

Dave...thanks for the memories!

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Layah
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 10:35 AM

Is this trying to imply that lead paint and riding in cars without seatbelts and smoking and drinking while pregnant are not dangerous? Why can't people reminisce about how great the good old days were without blatantly or subtly attacking the current younger generation? When I was little I had a nintendo. I also had a swingset and a sandbox. Guess where I spent more time. In no way do I want to take away from your memories of your childhood, because I'm sure that they were wonderful, what I resent is the implication that it was better then, during times of legal racism, polio, lung cancer (not that that problem has gone away, but definatley improved), when rape was the woman's fault and being beaten by your husband wasn't necessarily cause for a divorce. THere were good things and bad things, and now there are also good things and bad things. To clarify, I"m only objecting to the tone of the original post, all subsequent posts have been much more innocent and less argumentative.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Amos
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 10:46 AM

Wassa mattah witchoo guys -- don't you know you could put someone's nose out of joint with that stuff? How would you feel then, huh???


A

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Sorcha
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 10:52 AM

We collected stray cats and had backyard circuses with them. Until I found out my dad was taking them to the river and using them for target practice. Used to walk over the railroad trestle river bridge, daring a train to come along.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: jacqui.c
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 11:09 AM

We would spend the whole day roaming round the park, greasing the slide with candle wax to make it slipperier, making camps in the bushes, climbing trees, fishing for tiddlers the wrong side of the pond railings.

We would collect empty bottles for the deposits and go door to door asking for old newspapers to sell back to the paper mill.

Saturday morning cinema was amndatory and we were always reading.

Sunday lunchtime radio - Life With The Lyons, Ray's A Laugh, Round The Horne, The Billy Cotton Bandshow.....

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: GUEST
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 11:15 AM

Down the fields where the paedophiles played.


Memories

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: CarolC
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 12:28 PM

You may be ok, Dave Masterson, but I have been suffering from all kinds of debilitating physical and learning disabilities almost all of my life. And I suspect my mother's smoking and other environmental factors were major contributors to my problems. I was born in 1956.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Amos
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 12:39 PM

Carol C;

You may be right. But there are too many variables, I would imagine. I have been relatively healthy all my adult life, but I was born premature and underweight, my parents both smoked like chimneys and drank hard liquor every night.

Now, I admit it made me crazy, but the harm seems to be limited to that!!:D


A

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: CarolC
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 12:46 PM

But you're just a freak Amos, while I, on the other hand, am perfectly normal.

;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Amos
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 01:04 PM

Ah, in that case, madame, I withdraw my objection!!

A

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Rapparee
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 01:14 PM

Apart from growing up on "filled ground" (ever dig a hole and find the roof of a Model T?), our first playground away from the back yard was an old dump (as I mentioned before). One neat thing was to find old batches of discarded medicines and mix them up -- "playing chemistry."

No, we CERTAINLY did NOT drink or take them!!!

Environmental factors? Probably -- six neighbors who lived within 100 yards have died of lung cancer (and so has my mother). But as Amos said, there are too many other variables.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Swave N. Deboner
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 01:20 PM

This reminds me of the Faygo pop commercial jingle on TV when I was a youngster. It actually rose to #3 in the pop charts, and 45 rpm records of the song sold for 25 cents. Anybody remember that? (Faygo is soda, or if you're from Michigan, "pop." It comes in several flavors, like "Redpop." Them were the days!

"Remember When You Were A Kid?"

Written by Ed Labunaki
Originally sung for Faygo by Kenny Karen

Comic books and rubber bands
Climbing the tree top
Falling down and holding hands
Tricycles and Redpop
Pony rides and Sunday nights
Roller skates and snowball fights
Climbin' through the window
Remember when you were a kid?
Well, part of you still is
And that's why we make Faygo
Faygo remembers
Flying kites and funny shoes
Easter eggs with speckles
ABCs and counting by twos
Washing off the freckles
Kissing a hurt to make it stop
Startin' school in September
So many things you almost forgot
Tryin' to remember
Remember when you were a kid?
Well, part of you still is
And that's why we make Faygo
Faygo remembers

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: GUEST,Mrr
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 01:34 PM

I'm a thalidomide baby - but I have all my arms and legs. Mom didn't take it till after my limbs budded, I guess.

We used to burn golf balls to watch them explode and then zoom around like crazy unravelling all the rubber inside them.

I actually got in trouble with the cops for letting one of my 9-year olds bike around our neighborhood. He had a helmet on and everything!

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: dianavan
Date: 10 Feb 05 - 09:35 PM

Sorcha - We did that , too. You were considered a baby until you had waited on the trestle. When the train came along, you had to scamper down the wooden beams and hang on while the train passed overhead. Scary, scary! Especially because nobody ever clued you in to the amount of vibration you had to endure.

If you passed that test (somehow we all did) you had to stand on the red ant hill until you couldn't stand it any longer.

There were so many rights of passage! Our parents never knew!

Did it make me a better person? Probably not but it made me a much stricter parent because I knew that neighborhood kids are capable of just about anything when the adults aren't around.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: AllisonA(Animaterra)
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 06:09 AM

Layah, it's true- a lot about the good old days was pretty bad. We old farts all know this. My dad may have worked on the intitial stages of Agent Orange development- it was so top secret, even he isn't sure, but guesses that was what it was about.
BUT- as more and more water passes under the bridge, the good parts of the bad old days do take on a rosy glow. Just you wait. Even Nintendo will bring on that old warm smile when your hairs are turning silver!

Allison

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: fat B****rd
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 06:20 AM

My "gang" used to go to the "Willer Wudz" (Grimsby pronunciation) and get branches to make bows and arrows.
One Sunday morning two of us were sitrting on a wall when a slightly older boy (I was 10) came towards us with his baby brother in a pram. "You be a stagecoach and we'll be the Indians" said I. I let an "arrow" go.
It hit him in the eye and could have blinded him. My father apologized to his parents, clouted me and smashed my bow and arrows to matchwood as I watched tearfully.
47 years later I still regret incident but I can honestly say it was one of the few malicious acts I have ever performed.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Davetnova
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 06:26 AM

To paraphrase a Mudact quotation - " The older I get, the better things were".

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 09:34 AM

The chief thing I think of to add to this discussion is that my friends and I hung around the river. Sometimes we had a raft of sorts, but I remember (in non-raft times) at least twice wading in (with all my clothes on) and letting myself float downstream, oh, maybe a mile. This would have been perhaps 1939 or 1940.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 09:35 AM

Layah, you are right that the dangerous things were not good. I'd never want to go back to riding without a seat belt, for example.

Meanwhile, here is the schedule for a recent Sunday as lived by a friend of mine and her seven-year-old daughter:

7 am - soccer game
10 am - church
11 am - lunch with my husband. The little girl announced she was invisible, and he made a big deal of it. "A chocolate chip just disappeared off that pancake! Who took it?"
12 - go to movie theater, watch a movie too violent for the kid
2 pm - basketball practice
7 pm - basketball game

I bet the best part of the day for her was when he paid attention to her "invisibility."
-------
This would not be the life for me.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 10:00 AM

Teachers and their ilk pontificate that kids shouldn't have jobs during the school year, because it hurts grades, they say.

During WW2 there was a terrific labor shortage, with so many men in the Services. So the day we got out of school after 9th grade a friend suggested we should get a job over the summer. "Fine! Where?" "I'm sure one of the hospitals" (this was Rochester, Minnesota, where the May clinic is) "would hire us."

So we talked to the hospital manager. He was interested, but said to me, "What does your mother think about this?" "Huh?" Never occurred to me that she might have an opinion. "Well, don't you think you should call and ask her?" So I called her at work. "If that's what you want to do, David." (I should mention that I had the world's original hands-off mother.)

So that summer I worked a 48 hour week--for 32 cents an hour! I was rich! When school came around, I got a job at another hospital, a shorter work week. I worked all through high school, 36 hours a week during the school year, and 48 hours a week during summers.

During the school year I played in the high school band, participated in several plays, belonged to the rifle and ham radio clubs.   I once calculated that from the time I arose, at 5:30 a.m., until I hit the sack at night, I had a TOTAL of 1/2 hour that was not preprogramed, five minutes here, ten minutes there. My hands-off mother said nothing about this except, now and then, "I think you really should get more sleep, David." End of report.

So what happened to the grades? I was number 21 out of a class of 260, and a member of the National Honor Society.

So much for educators' theories.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: stevi
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 02:16 PM

its nice to look back with nostalga at perhapes a happier time but i think apart from the general fast pace of life! i prefer life now rather then back then.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: open mike
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 03:38 PM

we used to take the wax paper wrappers from inside bags of loaves bread
to sit on while playing on the slides in the park. Then there were those roller skates: the kind you clamped to your shoes. And in winter the city would flood a flat area in the park so we could go ice skating for free. I loved to ride my bike and explored further and further from home..eventually riding to the neighboring city 60 miles awway.
In the autumn, i would go door to door to get jobs raking leaves.
and at halloween, would travel far and wide collecting treats.
i would check out book from the bookmobile and library...(i drive the bookmobile now...must have made a lating impression!!) and there was a summer reading club where we read as many as 100 book in the summer.
One of my favorite things to do was catch garter snakes...we had lots in our yard and neighborhood. Not many other girls liked to do this!
The Girl Scouts went camping, did crafts, and worked on badges.
I also went door to door selling cookies...yum..come to think of it the time of year for girl scout cookies is coming around again...
the local troops get a booth at the farmer's market these days.

Subject: RE: BS: Here's something you may relate to!
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 11 Feb 05 - 06:57 PM

UK side, there were good things and bad, but I think on balance we had things better than SOME kids today.

I work at a primary school, and the most common cry of the pupils at breaks is "I'm bored, I've got nothing to do". They do have a point, as they are prevented from playing in the way we used to by considerations of safety and PC. The school is always afraid of being sued by parents if any child is injured, so imposes strict limits on acceptable play.

Children of five arrive at the school, already indoctrinated with the belief that the police are the enemy, and to be avoided at all costs. We were never bored, because we were free to roam. They can't do that now, for obvious reasons. We were s**t scared of our local beat cop IF we were misbehaving, because he would give you a belt upside the head with his rolled up cape, that would make your ears ring for an hour, and, if you told your dad, he'd give you another the same for giving the cop reason to clout you. At the same time, if you were in trouble, or lost, you knew that the cop was a friend who would do whatever it took to help.

I had a happy childhood, virtually NO health problems, and the hell of a lot of fun, and I often feel that we have let our kids down by not trying harder to give them the same.

No rose tinted specs, just telling it like it was where and when I was a kid.

DT