Growing Up During Yesteryear

In my childhood experience my next door neighbor kids were African American, Hispanic, Latino, and I didn't even realize it until I'd grown up and left town. Here's a great piece from someone who lived during the era of America I did as a kid.

Black and White

(Under the age of 45? You won't understand.)

You could hardly see for all the snow,

Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.

"Good Night, David.

"Good Night, Chet.

[This was what we heard at the close of the day's news on the television set.]

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 before frying it up in the skillet for dinner and our sandwiches for school lunches were wrapped in wax paper and kept in a brown paper bag until lunch time, but I can't recall anyone getting E.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or river instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures or "Keep out of the water!" signs were posted.

The term "cell phone" would have conjured up images of a phone that was used in a jail cell, and a pager was the school's P.A. system.

We all took gym, not P.E... and risked permanent injury by wearing a pair of high top Keds (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles. I can't recall any injuries, by they must have occurred because they tell kids nowadays how much safer they are now.

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

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the National Anthem (We said prayers partly because we were ducking and covering underneath our tables and desks during the Cold War.), and staying in detention after school resulted in all sorts of negative attention from both our classmates and parents.

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

All kids thought that we were supposed to accomplish something before I we were allowed to be proud of ourself back then.

I remember how the rule was we could stay out until dark before coming home. We play with the other kids in the neighborhood. We didn't have the Internet, computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations; just three. ABC, NBC, and CBS. PBS came in later when we were in high school.

We played 'King of the Hill' on piles of gravel in vacant lot construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Merurochrome (kids like it better than iodine because it didn't sting) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $99 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where kids could play.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either; because if we did, we got out butt spanked there, and then got it spanked again when we got home after the neighor's parent called our house... on the party line.

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

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac or Opiates!

How did we ever survive?