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 icepack 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 reflector. 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.

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson
[and provided comic relief] by running in the halls
with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the
wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we
only knew we could have sued the school system.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the
national anthem and staying in detention after school
caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year
olds an abortion or
condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was
anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin
and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles.

What an archaic health system we had then. Remember
school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

Do you remember going to the School Board dentist?
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.

I must be repressing that memory as I try to
rationalize through the
denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we
trekked off each day about a mile down the road to
some guy's vacant lot, built forts out of branches and
pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who
got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property
owner thinking, letting us play on that lot? He should
have been locked up for not putting up a fence around
the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an
infrared intruder alarm.

Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and
sterilization kit when I got a 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 (physical
abuse) and then we got it spanked again when we got
home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for
coffee.

Kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway
while playing with Tonka trucks (Remember why Tonka
trucks were made tough .. it wasn't so that they could
take the rough Berber in the family room).

Dad drove a car with leaded gas.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to
play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my
imagination a couple of times when we went on two week
vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the
danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds
in the family tent.

Summers were spent behind the push lawn mower and I
didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I
was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop
or an auto-drive.

How sick were my parents?

0f course my parents weren't the only psychos. I
recall the kid 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?

Merecurochome (sp), I spilled a bottle on the living room rug. My mom, bless her soul, was so mad. Remember going to the office at school and having them mimeograph copies. I loved the smell ( kinda of a drug thing). I remember riding on the back of my friends bike with our eye closed in our really neat neighboorhood and saying "guess where we are", we also used to go into the woods, ( which no longer exist) and "build" tents with trees. I feel so bad for my son that he doesn't have these experiences. I live in a city of about 100,000.00 but when I grew up we still had woods, now it's a TPC Golf Course which courts Tiger Woods. I brought home so many wild animals. His wildest is a, never mind, he has never brought anything home. I was alway nursing a Cardinal, Pheasant, Turtle, Fox, Pollywog ( he has no clue) we had a great pollywog pond and lots of other animals. I really miss our imagination and fun we had, now I'd worry about him going into the woods, but the woods are now a golf course ( although we do have a little left which last year I took him to and found a beaver swimming in).

I used to walk to middle school every day - 1 mile each way. That walk with my best friend was always an adventure. We'd pick up friends along the way, cut thru the woods, have a blast. We currently live 1 block from my daughter's elementary school - approximately the distance to my bus stop as a child - and there's no way I would dream of allowing her to walk to school. People no longer pay attention when driving thru a school zone not to mention all the perverts we hear about all the time.

Fraudman...you missed one. We never wore helmets to ride our bikes (no hands, down very steep hills)!!!

It's truly amazing that we are all still around to talk about it. Seatbelts weren't mentioned either, my parents had a "car-bed" for my brother and I.

And we could go all over the neighborhood and play until after dark without carrying a cell phone! My God! What were our mothers thinking????

Does anyone remember playing ditch. We could hardly wait for it to get dark out so we could run and hide all over the neighborhood.

How about riding in the back of a pickup truck or in the winter having an older friend drag you down the street behind his car while you held onto the bumper.

What about: Playing "kick the can" and catching fireflies in an one pickle jar. Laying in the backyard after dark and counting stars. Pitching a tent in the backyard and "camping out" and climbing trees.

Ahhh - some of those memories are still so fresh - even all these years later.

Going into the orchard and picking fruit right off the tree and eating it without first washing it or my hands. Pulling up carrots from the garden, giving it a quick wipe on my jeans before munching away. Walking behind the cows and having my Dad squirt milk into my mouth before it was homoginized (sp).

Playing hide and go seek with all the kids in a one block radius. ("You can hide in any of these 8 yards, front yards only.") We would do "One potato, two potato...to see who was "it" first, and if it got dark, we changed the rules a bit and played the flashlight game. (You only had to shine a light on the kid barreling toward home base to get him out.) We had kids from age 5 to 18 playing together, and all the parents sat in lawn chairs in the "chosen" yard, having a beer and a cigarette.

I remember going to the school's handpicked doctor for my Jr. High football physical.

I rememer going to the school's handpicked barber (it may have been the town's only barber) for my Jr. High football haircut. We were instructed to ask him for the "football haircut." I remember being humiliated by my very short hair in 1972 even though every other football player had the same haircut.

When we were thirsty we just grabbed the nearest garden hose and drank from that.

We used to walk the railroad tracks as a short cut to getting around town. We even walked them in the night.

When I first started driving, my mom had a huge 76 Caprice Classic. We could pile about 12 people in it. Drive down Broadway, hollering & whistling, then stop at a red light, all get out and run around. We called it a "Chinese" firedrill.

How many of you played Spin the Bottle?

guilty.

We did the Chinese Firedrills also along with a good game of Cat and Mouse in our vehicles.

I remember riding my bike everywhere sometimes with someone on the handle bars or on the back of my banana seat!

All the neighborhood kids would come over and we would play "hide the flag" at my house for hours on end.

Sand lot baseball games and the big kids would make me hit grounders because I was so little.

Dancing in the living room (because that was the only room with a TV!) on Saturday mornings to American Bandstand!!

I remember when VD was something the soldiers in Vietnam had to worry about, but not us.

No block parties for us, but almost every night there was a parental gathering in one yard or another, and someone always brought out something off the grill, or chips and dip. And when we got thirsty, the hose was there. I can still almost taste the water.

If we fell down and scraped our knees in the school yard, the gym teacher (who had a nurse?) would treat it with Listerine as an antiseptic. Ouch! You never went in for a scrape, it hurt less than the treatment!

Your ditch was Kick the Can for my kids. It's their kids that are missing out on all that good clean all-American fun.

Riding buses is not what it used to be. My grandmother would take the 3 oldest grandkids to ride the bus in Chicago to Lincoln Park Zoo or the newest Disney movie downtown. And we'd get to go to the dimestore to pick out a treat. Wow, now look at the dust and cobwebs you've shook up, Fraudman!

Remember candy cigarettes and the wax bottles with flavored water in them?