• You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
• Rich kids - Dirt poor kids - didn't matter. You couldn't tell the difference. Uniform at school saw to that.
• My mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread then chop the celery and onions on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
• 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 gone swimming in the creek, lake or at the beach, and as a last resort run through the lawn sprinkler, instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring). No beach closures then.
• We all took PE ..... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Keds Sneakers instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
• We got the blackboard pointer across a hand for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline. We seldom told our parents that "Sister hit me" because that would mean mom or dad would do it again across the legs with a "switch" or "the belt" for getting hit by sister. Yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour and respect those older than us. Strange but not one kid got arrested and not one of us have any criminal record today
• We had 50+ kids in our class, we didn't change class, the teacher changed class. And we all learned to read and write in "Palmer Penmanship", do math, learn how to read music and sing the notes (do, ray, me, fa, sol) and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter; knew who was president, knew the "times table" and do math accurately and the calculator still was 30 years away.......
• We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.
• 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. We weren't!!
• Oh yeah, All I Got was an ice bag and an "Ice Popsicle" with two sticks... and where was the doctor visit, antibiotics and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? Today they say, "I could have been killed by that bee!"
• We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the bottle of iodine and then WE got "The Belt".
• Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mom calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
• 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 never needed to get into group therapy and/or 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! Aaaah…those were the days!!!!