Good Old Days email forward

[_Jersey Girl]

This gets circulated to my email every so often. Thought I'd take a moment to comment on it here. I'll comment in bold.

Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand.)

You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.

The Huntley Brinkley Report. Yup, I remember it. At one point, we had two working televisions. One with sound, the other with the picture. We put the small portable on top of the big TV and made do.

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.

I know! And she likely wouldn't wash her hands in between any of those jobs. What slobs we were!

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 ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

I can totally beat that. Our family ground beef outside on a wooden table in summer. And yup, I ate raw hamburger too.


Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

Me, I preferred the beach and still do. I remember once as a kid stepping on a still lit cigarette butt on the beach. Took the darn thing out and walked home to get ice on it. No ambulance!

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

And we had air raid drills in our schools. As if getting under your desk were going to save you from the atomic bomb.


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 reflectors. I can't recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

In our school, the girls were forced to wear stark white gym suits. White for teen girls? Come on.

Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

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

In my grade school, the first grade teacher read from the Bible each morning, either Psalm 23 or 100. Once our spiritual behinds were covered, she went about pulling kids who acted out by the ear and no one charged her with abuse.

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

Remember lice examinations?

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

Still do.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

We suffered with hopscotch on the street, jump ropes, bikes, jacks and pick up sticks. Talk about total deprivation.

Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We put mud on our bee stings.

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.

Mercurochrome had a nice red tint to it as well unlike the muddy brownish orange of iodine.

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.

There are studies being done on scaring children out of play.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front step, 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?

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.

Me either.

[_moksha]

The Huntley Brinkley Report.

And Eric Severeid would always say something undoubtedly wise but incomprehensible.

[_Gazelam]

Thank you for sharing this Jersey.

Another country will never have to take us over. We'll just litigate ourselves to death.

I can remember what life was like in the late seventies/early eighties enough to be discouraged about how much we have changed. I wonder how those of you who are 10 and 20 and 30 years older than I am view the social changes that have taken place. Was there an era you recall when things were "just right"? right before things went sour in your view?

Or are we way off and we should be thankful for the way things are and appreciate progress?