Black and White (general, state, segregation, country)

[adysmom]

Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand.) You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set;
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e-coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system..

We all took gym, not PE.. and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. And we were not forced into mixed race schools.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah .. and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T; SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.



Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures

are very often the best.

[Ann in Oriental]

Loved your post, I too often wonder how so many of us survived without seat belts or car seats. Shoot, I could even drink a beer while driving and it wasn't against the law! We knew how to visualize too since we actually read books! What I can't understand is how did we end up producing these "other"people?

[Fred314X]

Now I don't feel so alone any more! It's always good to stop and think about the fact that the world does not revolve around computer screens, MP3s, video games, and "political correctness" in the schools. (Sometimes I can't help but imagine that we're the real people, and most of what has come along since consists of zombies and robots).

[Coolhand68]

Speaking of black and white television, I can remember when stations went off the air for the night. They'd play the National Anthem with the flag in the background followed by what looked like a dartboard with numbers on it that stayed on the screen until the station went back on the air that morning.

[Fred314X]

Yes, those were the days--when the Idiot Box was actually quiet for a few hours!

[mainegirl]

Awesome thread ! You bring back some great memories. It's a shame things are the way they are now.

Children don't get outside and play anymore, they're in front of computer screens and video games, or worse, texting on their cell phones all the time. It's no wonder there are so many obsese kids and teens.

I remember playing red light-green light, tag, and mother may I. Our imaginations were our main toys and we were perfectly happy with that. We were taught to respect our elders and authority. We ran and rode our bikes and didn't have to worry about being abducted. Saturday morning cartoons didn't have the violence they do now.

[thriftylefty]

I remember when "soda pop" was something you drank at picnicks a few times a year, but you could by "Fizzies" at TG&Y to put in your cool aide, BTW remember the term 5&Dime store. back when seeing a dime on the playground would send three of us into a Kamikazi dive for it

[harry chickpea]

"To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?"

Selective memory.

Some of it was that us kids didn't know squat back then. They weren't "dysfunctional families." They were those "crazy Bickersons that I don't want you EVER playing with." They were those "Mackerel Snappers that worship the Pope." They were those neighbors that you could hear screaming at each other every night at supper, and all night long on Friday and Saturday, when the dad had one tied on and was slapping family around." "Prozac" was a bottle of Jim Beam and a couple packs of cigarettes, and Susie's mom used to "fall down" a lot without complaint.

You went to the five and dime as a kid because you got a quarter or fifty cents for mowing the lawn IF you were lucky, and couldn't afford anything more expensive than a dime or two. You longed to have a decent slingshot and not the cheap one of twisted metal. Your 5 cent balsa airplane generally broke after a couple of flights and the cellophane tape held it together for a couple more. The ones for 50 cents were way too expensive, but SOOO cool with the long wingspan and wind-up propeller. If you went fishing, you durned well bring something back to eat, or be chided for wasting time when chores could be done.

You liked to play football, but only one kid in the neighborhood had a football. A baseball glove was held to the same value as a new car today, and if it didn't have a hundred applications of neats foot oil, and more scuff marks than an old pair of shoes, it was "new." That old apple tree that you loved was a favorite because you could actually eat and feel full. The cafeteria area at school smelled so vile that it was all you could do to keep from retching at lunch. The little cartons of milk were always warm, often sour, and you were amazed how kids never complained. The cod liver oil capsule tasted good in comparison.

There were days when you were bored silly, and you and your friends moaned "I wish there was something to DO around this dammed town." You rode a hand-me-down bike that had no gears and weighed as much as a Buick. The geeks DID fail gym. They DID get to be the last one picked on the teams - every single time. Your position in the pecking order was based on how many bloody noses you gave other kids on the school playground. Johnny would break a leg or arm while doing farm chores, and the cast would be so hot and sweaty that he'd take it off and the break wouldn't set properly, or his arm would have a rash on it for weeks. You knew at least one kid who had drownded swimmin' or gotten killt playing some game.

Cars were black and didn't have air conditioning. You tried to stick your head out of a window to get cool and either you got a bee sting or bug splats on your face, or a backhanded swat or worse. If you did succeed, it just made it all that much hotter when the car slowed. When there was a car crash, the people ended up dead or in the hospital for a couple of weeks at least. You got to see a filmstrip at school showing people impaled on steering wheels, decapitated passengers, and scenes with more blood spilled than some battlefields. All this was a bit puzzling, since you couldn't drive and there wasn't much purpose to it other than making school lunch even less enticing.

The only kid's programming on tv was on Saturday morning, so you had a choice of watching your favorite shows or spending the only time you were free for a day outside. If you wanted to watch a program, you developed a group of friends in hopes that one of them would be allowed to watch the show and your parents would let you visit.

Vacations were your chance to get re-acquainted with the mosquitoes and chiggers at a state park, smell the sickening waterproofing smell on the old wall tent, and wonder how this was supposed to be fun.

Your pants had patches. When the patches wore out, they were replaced with more patches. You thought that iron-on patches were cool, cause you could do it yourself. Your sneakers always had holes where the little toes had busted through. Your long sleeve shirt became a short sleeve shirt after you wore out the cuffs or elbows. If you were lucky, you had eight pairs of regular socks and one dress pair of socks for church and funerals and weddings. The others had holes.

Orange juice was never fresh. Sometimes there might be apple cider or grape juice, but mostly you drank water or milk. When Kool-aid was invented, sometimes that was available. Soft drinks were in 8 oz bottles, so they were more a treat than something to drink on a regular basis. Coffee was bad. REALLY bad.

Yeah, I remember childhood fondly.

[catman]

When I saw the thread title, I thought it was about segregation! Things weren't so good for blacks in the 'good old days'. I never saw them except in the back of the bus or on the backs of garbage trucks.

But I certainly do have fond memories of that era (not being black!). There were a few bad things that happened to me, but on, balance, I can't complain. I fondly remember Saturday morning TV (black and white, of course), with Fury ("the story of a horse and the boy who loves him"), Sky King and Whirlybirds. The TV was a Zenith with 'rabbit ears'. Everything was really cheap, but the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour when I was 16. Everyone had an evaporative cooler if they had any sort of air-conditioning. The scholls weren't air-conditioned at all, but the hallways seemed really nice and cool, since we were all used to it.

"Well, that's the way it is [was!]", as Cronkite would say.

[xlabel]

I remember when schools didn't have fences around them and on weekends it was the place to be. Drive by most schools nowadays and it's a ghostown.

It's now law for kids to wear a helmet riding a bike. We used to watch Evel kneivel do a jump on ABC's Wide World of Sports and immedietely go find anything we could build a ramp out of and jump our bikes all day long, nobody ever got injured, no helmet.

I'd find a few 10 cent glass pop bottles, check a few coin returns on the pay phones, and keep myself in candy and gum and baseball cards the rest of the day.

A bicycle, a water hose, and a good tree to climb was about all I needed to have fun back in the day and Mom and Dad's rule about 'being home by dark' was tested every evening.