I found this pretty interesting.
This was an article I heard on CJOB 680. This an editorial called From… Luther’s Dorr Step. The website I am sourcing this from is http://www.unioneagle.com/2004/july/29dorr.html and it is very interesting indeed.
Hopefully I credited it well enough to avoid and copyright infringments. If I did not credit it fully and you recognize that, please let me know and I will change it promptly.
How did the kids of '40s, '50s, '60s survive?
If you were a kid in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, or perhaps even the ’70s, you may recall some of what is to follow. The ideas came across my desk a few weeks ago in a piece titled, “How did people over the age of 35 ever make it?”
That may be an exaggeration but, for example: “We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.”
There’s something to be said for that. In those decades mentioned, in most little towns you could find kids playing baseball in a vacant lot, often being late for meals and often playing until it was dark.
There was such a lot in Princeton over by the railroad tracks on the west side of town where, if you hit it over the tracks, it was a homer. Kids played there all day, day after day after day. Tell me the last time you saw that in Princeton.
And when those kids took time out to play summer baseball in the morning on the South Elementary fields, it was just kids. There were no parents or grandparents sitting on the sidelines, coolers and all, and the league went for seven or eight weeks instead of five. Now we’re more organized.
“We didn’t have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99-cent channels on cable, video tape movies, Surround Sound, cell phones, personal computers or Internet chat rooms.”
So true, so true! And the kids still turned out OK and found things to do.
Or, “We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones!”
I remember not necessarily going home just because the street lights came on. You could still play catch, or shoot baskets, or even catch and throw a football. I remember a baseball going through a window one night and all of us running. And I remember banging into a car one night while running a post pattern but still hanging onto the football.
How about this one: “We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with bottled water. Most of us are probably jealous that we didn’t think of putting water into a bottle and then selling it. But it was a simple thing to grab that hose, if not as politically correct as the water bottle is today.
“We had friends. We went outside and found them. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball really hurt.”
Dodge ball, or trench as it was also called, became politically incorrect when coed physical education classes began in Princeton schools. In fact, there was one Princeton phy ed instructor who hated to see that happen and he told the boys it was OK to throw the ball at girls, or at the class bullies.
“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.”
Imagine doing that today.
“We fell out of trees and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents?”
Or this: “Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that.”
Or this: “Our baby cribs were covered with bright-colored, lead-based paint.”
Does any of this ring true? Or, to those of you who weren’t kids in those decades, does it make us sound old?
Trouble is, those things are all true. How did we ever make it?
posted by Curtis at Friday, May 27, 2005
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