Back in my day...

Rich Soby

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Cape Cod, Ma.
We have turned into the older generation(not the oldest)...If you are 36, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways...yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of stuff like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!



But now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

1) I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

2) There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

3) Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our bottoms! Nowhere was safe!

4) There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

5) Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

6) We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

7) There weren't any cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOSH !!! Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

8) And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

9) We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen.. Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

10) You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were out of luck when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your keester and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

11) There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons!

12) And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!




13) And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!




And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!




See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1970 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd
 
...2) There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to find a mailbox on the corner these days.

...5) Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up!

Back in my band days, we had good friends who were DJs at the local rock FM station, so we'd just go to the station, browse through the record stacks, and make copies of the songs we wanted to learn. They'd turn us loose in a production room with turntables and every form of tape recorder imaginable, and we'd leave with a cassette or two of the latest songs. :D
 
10) You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were out of luck when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your keester and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

11) There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons!

We only got 2 channels growing up, and the reception on one of those was questionable. We did have a remote for the TV.......ME! I also was in charge of turning the antenna. "Turn it the other way, no back, more, more, STOP, hold it there!
 
We have turned into the older generation(not the oldest)...If you are 36, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways...yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of stuff like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!



But now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

1) I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

You had to know something about the Dewey decimal system to use the card catalog also. Oh, and you had to be able to read and write. We used typewriters for reports.

2) There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Stamps were 3 cents when I was a kid.

3) Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our bottoms! Nowhere was safe!

I grew up in the country and all the neighbors disciplined us as necessary also. When we got in trouble mama made us go and cut our own switch which she used on our legs to get our attention.

4) There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Never heard of shoplifting when I was a child.

5) Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

No tape decks either. The first big music innovation for me was an 8 track player. Boy was that a fine piece of equipment.

6) We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

When I was a kid no one had a private line and when you picked up the phone you had to listen to make sure no one else was using it. Not only did people get a busy signal when you were on the phone but they got a busy signal when anyone on your party line was using the phone also.

7) There weren't any cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOSH !!! Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

All of our friends were within walking or biking distance and when we wanted to be in touch with them we went outside and played with them.

8) And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

Once again with a party line you had to be careful and use proper phone etiquette when your neighbors were on the phone. Of course you didn't receive telephone solicitations back in those days.

9) We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen.. Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

There were no video games. We played baseball, football, basketball, built forts, and rode our bikes. We didn't sit around watching TV.

10) You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were out of luck when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your keester and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

Figuring out what was on was easy when you only had two channels. I was 12 or 13 before we had 3 channels.

11) There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons!

Yep, that was when cartoons were on but sometimes when we had enough money we went to the kiddie show at the movie theater and watched B horror movies on Saturdays.

12) And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

Everyone knew how to use the stove and didn't burn the house down.

13) And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!

See number 9.


And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!

It has been a long time since I heard anyone talk about the "safety arm". Mom and Dad saved many a child from knocking out his front teeth on the dashboard with the "safety arm".

See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1970 or any time before!

1970, well in 1970 I was thinking about getting married. I had already bought my first new car and was living on my own. That makes me old.....

Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd

I decided to respond within the body of your post. Old geezers have a slightly different perspective on things....
 
I grew up in the country... we didn't have electricity until I was about 6 or 7... closest library was 20 miles away by wagon.. we didn't get our first car until I was about 6... otherwise we traveled in a wagon behind mules...
our radio was a big old battery powered monster that we only played at night when Dad wanted to listen... otherwise it used up the battery and cash wasn't a plentiful thing in our sharecropper household.
We got our first TV after my parents divorced and my mother moved the family to town... I was 14 or 15... was actually in the fifth grade the first time I ever saw one.
We didn't have a telephone until we moved to town... again 14 or 15.
Where we lived in the country was usually at the end of the road... I spent most of my time playing in the woods with the neighbor kids... my mom may have known the general direction I went, but if I had ever gotten lost in the woods, she and my dad would have had no idea where to look...

Once out in west Texas, my sister and I got off the school bus and started walking home... we had about a 2 mile walk from the bus drop... a blue norther blew up and temps dropped from a balmy 70 deg to below freezing in about 15 minutes.... if a neighbor hadn't come along and picked us up we likely could have frozen... we had sleet and a cold wind... I only had a light canvas jacket and I don't think my sister was even wearing a coat... the day had started out a sunny day so we didn't need a coat and we had no instant weather report...
 
I grew up in the city. Never knew anything different but I always felt this way of life was not normal.
Our house was a rented upstairs of a two flat. Heat was a single kerosene space heater in the living room. I had to haul the kero up from the basement, three flights of rotted, slanting stairs. In winter they were ice coated and super dangerous.
Houses were only three feet apart. I learned the facts of life by watching the couple next door out of my bedroom window. They were no more than six feet from me.
Snow didn't stay white very long. It quickly turned dirty, ugly brown from the pollution.
Our neighborhood was mixed ethnic European. We were Italian, as were the neighbors across the street. Others were German, Polish, Jewish and so on.
The main form of communication was opening a window and shouting. The women would sometimes have these 'conversations' for hours.
I rode bicycles we (friends and myself) built them in the basement from junk parts. We were into recycling before the word was even known.
I also made zip guns in that basement. Any chemical desired could be bought at the local pharmacy. I made my own explosives by the age of seven. The guns were made from scrap parts and would shoot ball bearings or glass marbles. Crude as they were they would have been deadly at close range.
We used them to hunt and shoot rats in vacant buildings.
Occasionally, I would 'run away' to the local fire department. They would feed me and treat me like royalty and let me slide down the pole. A fireman named 'Frank' would give me rides on the high rear seat of the hook and ladder truck.
At the young ages of six or seven I would take the electric street car from the far west side of Chicago into the lake front and go to the museums by myself.
Hey!!! I'm on a roll here..........somebody stop me. :saythat:
I'll stop soon.
By the age of 12 I took that same street car into the city but by then I would go to the burlesque shows and strip houses.
I'll stop here. But, if you are thinking I didn't have much parental supervision, you are very astute.
 
2) There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen!

You had pens??? We had to chew the flesh off the tips of our own fingers and then scrawl the letter, in blood, on a piece of our own flayed hide with the bony fingertip.

And to quote the Four Yorkshiremen:

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

:rofl:
 
:rolleyes:
Wow, Frank! That's some story. Really fascinating, actually. Any more details?

Thanks,

Bill

We later moved to the suburbs. Our new house was only a couple blocks from woods and cornfields. Much better to my way of thinking.
Middle class suburbia was my way of life then until I returned from service, got married and some years down the road gave that up for a small town in Indiana and seven years after that the Arkansas Ozarks.
BTW: I'm restraining myself here. You asked for details. You do know I write books, don't you? :rolleyes:
Bill, I write up stories about some details in my life I call 'vignettes'. Even if no one else thinks they are interesting, I do and I enjoy writing them. I'll pick one out to e-mail to you if you are interested. PM me.
 
Boy, this is turning into a treat thread! I love reading all the responses!!
Let's keep them coming I think this is a great way to learn more about each other and the lives we have each led!
 
the formative years

yesterday ..........today,,

yesterday when i was 4 i could go out back in the yard and play or go exploring and if i wanted i could venture off further into the woods, the furthest i can remember being away form the house would be around 3 to 4 miles, this would be on foot or on a pony later on age 13. was no micro chip in either of us and no adult chaperone, and made it home for supper on time, today i still can get that far from the house and find my way back home even farther now that i can drive.. and during that time yesterday ,my parents had no worries and i didnt either. i learned from nature many things and i also learned from parents many things. we are definitely a result of what we grew up in socially and physically.. and the lucky ones of us are still learning be it from nature or society. i dont carry a electronic tether(cell phone) but can see where they are a good tool for trips, when on yesterday you could stop and use a phone, today they wont let you in the house.. no matter what you look like.. which is better, is dependent on what you were in yesterday and what you have today..
 
yesterday ..........today,,

yesterday when i was 4 i could go out back in the yard and play or go exploring and if i wanted i could venture off further into the woods, the furthest i can remember being away form the house would be around 3 to 4 miles, this would be on foot or on a pony later on age 13. was no micro chip in either of us and no adult chaperone, and made it home for supper on time, today i still can get that far from the house and find my way back home even farther now that i can drive.. and during that time yesterday ,my parents had no worries and i didnt either. i learned from nature many things and i also learned from parents many things. we are definitely a result of what we grew up in socially and physically.. and the lucky ones of us are still learning be it from nature or society. i dont carry a electronic tether(cell phone) but can see where they are a good tool for trips, when on yesterday you could stop and use a phone, today they wont let you in the house.. no matter what you look like.. which is better, is dependent on what you were in yesterday and what you have today..

One reason we move to a rural part of America was to give our children a better environment to grow up in. As a former city boy I didn't know straw from hay, I thought polled cows were raised in pole barns. Yep, really. :eek: We started learning about animals by raising rabbits and selling the meat. Later we got our first cattle and I/we raised cattle for 25 years after that. I am convinced the work and experience help forge our children in a positive way. e.g. 'you gotta do what you gotta do'
 
I grew up with party lines, clothes lines, an adult whose kid was teaching them to read, etc. (born in the time this is directed at)
But I knew neighbors, parents, etc, and what they grew up with. It always makes me think of this quote:
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

attributed to Socrates via Plato.

It was quite interesting to listen to a neighbor, who lived in three centuries.
 
attributed to Socrates


Yep. Of course, he didn't actually say it. He did actually say this:

"A boy must hold his tongue among his elders.. .Greed was abhorred, it was taboo to snatch Radish tops, aniseed, or parsley before your elders, Or to nibble kickshaws and giggle and twine one's feet. . .So, you shall learn to hate the Agora, And shun the baths and feel ashamed of smut; . . .And to get up and give your seat to your elders, And not to behave towards your parents rudely..."

That actually sounds more like Socrates... ;)

Here's a good one Hesiod didn't say:

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint."

And here's a really, really good one Hesiod *did* say. Around 700 BCE. Just for Rob and Allen... ;)

"A bad neighbor is a misfortune, as much as a good one is a great blessing."

Thanks,

Bill
 
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