A conversation last Wednesday with my 7 a.m. office visiting crew (Terry Townsend and Johnny Bradford) took me back in time as we reminisced about things we used to do during our childhood and youth that we, as parents, would never permit our children to do.
After much reflection on the topic, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s amazing that I even survived my childhood or teenage years.
Kids nowadays have no idea what it was like growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, much less the 50’s and 60’s. Knowing what we know now, we were just milliseconds away from death and destruction every minute of the day!
The 7 a.m. crew shared stories of riding with no seat belts, piling in the back (trunk area) of station wagons for long road trips and even sleeping laid across the back window area.
But that was just the way things were back then. We didn’t know all that we know today and nobody seemed to care.
For instance, most everyone I knew smoked cigarettes. My mom smoked and I remember many trips in the car with her window cracked about one inch to let the smoke out. Of course, secondhand smoke was everywhere back in the day as the huge plumes seldom made its way out of the car.
There had been no studies on secondhand smoke and no studies on how drinking alcohol was detrimental to babies in the womb. While my mother did not drink, many mothers thought nothing of smoking and drinking while pregnant. Had they known, they wouldn’t have done it. But they didn’t and life just continued on.
Here are some other facts about my childhood and many that would seem hard to believe if I hadn’t experienced it or seen it myself.
Little kids would sit in the passenger seat, up front, without a seatbelt. Infants seldom rode in a car seat as most sat in their mothers’ laps or played on the floorboard.
There was no childproofing back in our day. We could just as easily play with the chemicals under the sink as we could the pots and pans. There were no childproof medicine bottles and electrical outlets were there for stabbing with a fork. I’m not even mentioning the hundreds of choking hazards left within of our reach.
By the time we got old enough to use the restroom by ourselves, we were old enough to play outside by ourselves, often left unattended for hours at a time. In fact, I can specifically remember my mother telling me to go outside and play and “don’t you dare come back inside this house.” We would stay outside playing and would have bologna or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches handed to us through the door so we wouldn’t come in and “track up the house.”
Speaking of playing outside, there were no cell phones, iPad, Xboxes, four wheelers, etc. At best, we had a bike. And we knew nothing about bike safety. No one wore a helmet and every kid pretended to be Evel Knievel by making unstable ramps out of boards and jumping everything from toy trucks, and ditches, to each other.
By the time the sun set and we were called inside, we would be dirty from head to toe. Rain did not stop the playing but rather provided more fun with all the mud. Most of the time when we were called in, we would have to strip naked, be sprayed off with the garden hose and then escorted directly to the bathtub.
And speaking of the garden hose, if we were thirsty, that’s exactly where we got a drink from. We had no bottles of water, no fruit punches and certainly no carbonated drinks…just good old rubber-tasting water made extremely hot by the sun.
When I was growing up, there were no “time outs,” counting to “3” or having things taken away from us for not behaving properly. We received punishment the old-fashioned way by the administration of severe “whoopings” on our derriere. Usually it was with a belt and usually the number of licks was based on the severity of the crime committed or the amount of crying that was produced.
There was also this unwritten parenting rule when I was a kid that basically gave every parent the right and obligation to spank a kid who was acting up, even if it wasn’t their child. I have been the recipient of such justice distributed by another parent and when I complained about it to my mom all I got was another spanking. Of course, I really was a bad kid and needed every spanking I got.
This type of “village raising” was also applied to the school house. Should a child get in trouble at school that only meant they were going to get in trouble at home.
There was no “health conscience” concerning eating habits during my childhood either. Most everything had high amounts of sugar in it and we were instructed to eat everything on our plate and to think about all those starving kids in Africa while doing it. I never understood how me eating all my food would help a kid in Africa, but I cleaned my plate.
Watching TV from our three or four channels didn’t leave us much options. We were forced to watch whatever the grownups were watching, which usually meant old cowboy shows or nighttime dramas such as Dallas. But, the cowboy shows did teach us some things for when we got our first BB gun (which led to more spankings) and how to cut ourselves to become blood brothers with our best friends. We knew nothing about exchanging bacteria or diseases back when we were growing up.
Yes, it is amazing that I survived my childhood but to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be the man I am today without those many life-lessons learned growing up the hard way.
If you’d like to share some of your experiences while growing up the “hard way,” send us a Letter to the Editor and we’ll print it in the paper.
You can mail it to: Letter to Editor, P.O. Box 3050, Jena, LA 71342, or email to editor@ thejenatimes.net.
