To those who grew up in the last century, how did we ever survive childhood?
I enjoyed this. Brought back lots of happy memories.
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I used to love to swing high and jump out. Had a little jigsaw we could’ve cut a finger off. Rode my bike everywhere by myself. Used to take out a 12 foot skiff when I was about 12 years old with a 7 hp engine. I should’ve been dead a long time ago
Although I grew up in the country, so no playing in the "street" for us. The local road was a through route from South King County to Seattle and always had significant traffic runnig a 45-50 mph or so. 
We played in the pastures, dodging cow patties. 
Also had some good forested hillsides to play around in with no significant wild animals to worry about. Too much civilization around.
Snow days happened when the snow was too high for the buses to navigate the locals hills, which had some pretty steep access roads.
Yeah, good times!
Halloween coming up reminds me that we'd cover what felt like square miles, hitting all the "good" houses first. The ones we knew had the prime candy selection from past experience or some pre-season "recon." It was a relatively tight community. Mom would send me off with not much more than "Be careful and watch before you cross the street." I rode my bike to to Junior High, and hitched a ride to high school with a friend lucky enough to have inherited an old beater. What a strange world by today's standards.
In the Summer, other than meal time, we roamed the neighborhood all day long until Mom finally had to yell for me to come in as the sun was setting. Followed by the inevitable..."It's not dark yet! I can still see!" If dad pipped in, I got my skinny butt home. He didn't fool around. 
Played with electricity, took apart Tube TV sets, sprayed ether into the carburetor to start the car in the cold, chucked cherry bombs.
Learned to drive in a 57 Fairlane with a 312 V8.
One of my first jobs was at this new hamburger place.
Got a physics degree and worked in aerospace, computers and university, an investment company.
It was great to build computers before there were computers on the shelves, thousands of solder joints with the OG solder, lead and tin.
Still have my wits about me, my hair -- salt and pepper yet --
"Sky's the limit" ... I should post sometime the great accomplishments of women in astronomy and space science. (and lots more!) They are awesome and just coming into recognition. I always encouraged my daughter to pursue whatever dreams she had and gave her the opportunity ... whether that was the electronic and computer gear (I was early to that game), growing roses, photography, or piano or whatever.
When she moved out of the home, I gave her drill driver and some odd tools. She reluctantly accepted them, but soon sent back photos of handy work she had done. GREAT!
You can find Erector sets under the name of Meccano, in thrift stores, and TBH, the odd parts are great for repairing this and that. I think that some parts are holding together a couple of piano hammers that broke.
Hung onto the original screwdriver.
Best of luck. Welcome to DU and may all your *current* dreams come true.
I enlisted in the USCG after college.
Loving your work, or at least being proud of it, is important. Glad for you that you got to do so.
In the early 50s we would make a scooter out a 2x4, a skate pulled apart, a wooden fruit box and a couple of slates for handles. Bent nails could be found just about everywhere and it didn't take much to make them straight again. When the wooden fruit box came off, you had a skateboard.
Your friend pushed into the creek? I know how that felt.
Our school was nice enough to make a deal with a local swimming pool so we students could take lessons. They even provided buses to transport us there.
The first summer I was able to take the classes, a bully who was two grades ahead of me pushed me into the deep end of the pool. I barely knew how to float without killing myself, and to deal with that? I do remember the terror that I was about to die.
Someone came and got me, I guess. I don't remember. The next thing I remember is being on the bus with the towel wrapped around me, and they had given me some candy to calm me down. They were candy cigarettes, one of my favorites for the soft mint flavor of them. How's that for a blast from the past? Also: nobody now would give a kid candy to calm them down, but that was standard when I was young.
I also don't remember beating the dickens out of the bully. Or the bus driver pretending he didn't see what was going on before he drove us home. My grandmother later told me that guy waited for me to finish before turning over the engine!
These days, everyone would have the vapors about a fight of any kind on school property. Back then? If a teacher or whoever thought a bully was getting what was coming to him, they'd look the other way until the dust settled.
I remember the driver letting me off at my house, rather than at the school not far away (country--we didn't have "blocks" . My grandfather was never home during the day, but there he was, waiting for me. Probably to make sure I was really okay, and to be prepared for tears or who knows what.
He looked me over and only asked, "How was the swimming?"
"I got in a fight with ----- for pushing me in the deep end."
"Did you win it?"
"Yep."
"Good. Go on inside and get dressed. The stallion threw a shoe, so it would help if you'd hold the reins while I put new ones on."
He no more needed my help with shoeing his horse than I could fly, but he was giving me some normal to get back to, to take my mind off what happened. He was good at things like that.
My grandmother also gave me the once over and nearly the same conversation. But they already knew what had happened. Everyone in a ten mile radius knew I'd beaten up my bully, before we left the swim park.
I can tell you one thing, though: That bully never even looked at me funny again after that day. She knew what I could do to her if she riled me up. Yeah, violence is not the best way to handle things, but I think adults back then knew that some people had to learn the hard way about FA&FO. So they'd get out of the way when the learning day came.
And that you taught the bully a lesson!
I don't miss the fighting back then, but adults definitely allowed it to happen more frequently in the past.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it also seemed like kids rarely shared much of anything with their parents when I was growing up. We understood the intentions of the other children, but parents might mistakenly call the parents of another child who caused an accidental injury. Such as when we played a stupid game like "war" by throwing dirt clods at each other. At a long distance, not within just a few feet. Then the dirt clods would resemble the smoke from explosives as they (mostly) hit the ground. A kid would rarely get hit sometimes, though, and most of us knew better than to tell a parent that so-and-so hit us with a dirt clod. Everyone involved had willingly participated in the stupidity, after all.
In your case, it was obvious bullying. The later consequences for it might've helped put the bully on a better path in life, hopefully.
Me and my friends just yelled at the bully over the pushing incident into the creek. He seemed genuinely worried about what he'd done after the shove, or we probably would've done more than yell.
Last edited Sun Sep 25, 2022, 08:28 PM - Edit history (2)
I would've thought rural children could have all kinds of outdoor adventures without parents knowing any of the details.
My parents both grew up on farms, about 12 miles apart, during the Great Depression.
Mom's family was poor, and she frequently went to bed hungry. She described secretly watching people at other farms eating dinner, through their windows at night, with nobody ever noticing her.
Dad had a few run-ins with a bully at his one-room schoolhouse, an older boy who was cruel to him and the other younger children, but he never told his parents about that either. (The bully later died as a "hero" because he was one of the marines who was photographed raising the flag at Iwo Jima, in the iconic photo, but that didn't change my father's opinion of him.)
Picture of me in my childhood suburb, about age 8 or 9, after I caught some catfish (which we later ate). Not too far from all of those homes were woods, rivers, etc.
EDIT: Because of her own childhood, food was my mother's obsession when I knew her. Our dinner table was covered in a variety of food every night (much of it reheated leftovers), with everything prepared from scratch. It was like Thanksgiving every night in our household, except without traditional Thanksgiving fare like turkey and cranberries. It's often called "comfort food" now, with the kind of stuff often served at restaurants like Cracker Barrel.
Tony Hall was in our neighborhood when he first ran for US Congress, appealing for votes door-to-door, and Mom begged him to come inside. Which he did, and then she insisted that he eat with us. As soon as he saw all of the food on our table, his eyes bulged and he asked if he was interrupting a special event for my family. Mom told him no, so he was more than welcome to sit down and eat! He acted tempted as he quietly continued staring at the food, but then he said he couldn't afford to stop because it would be a close election.
I later learned about Tony Hall's hunger strikes, and the memory of him gawking at all of our food made me a little embarrassed. But my family was mostly just "food rich" thanks to Mom, and not very wealthy in other regards. And it was that way because my mother suffered through hunger for years as a little girl!
My mother also admitted that she hated my father when they were young children, after seeing him walk down a dirt road carrying a bag of groceries. Sticking above the bag was celery, and my mother thought, "Celery! His family is so wealthy that they can afford to buy celery?! Celery can't even keep a person alive, but they bought it anyway!" (Her notions about my father, and celery, obviously changed years later.)
