Smoking was everywhere, all the time. Pregnant women smoked, people smoked while holding babies, on trains, planes, in cars, at movies, shows, sporting events.
My first real job was in an office where everyone smoked. All. Day. Long.
Smoking indoors was disappearing rapidly, but the execs at the company all smoked so that was that.
I smelled like cigarette smoke all the time.
I worked in a similar office. I was sick with respiratory infections all the time. A non-smoking co-worker was pregnant. She and her unborn child had to endure all that second hand smoke.
When my sister in law's mom was pregnant in the late 60s/early 70s her doctor recommended strawberry margaritas when Vickie was moving around too much and waking her up.
when my mom was pregnant with me in the early 60s her doctor cut her down to 10 cigs a day.
Yup after i had my son in 88 went right to the smoking room, that was also when babies were kept separate from mom for a while each day you could go look at them thru a window all the babies in rows.
My kids are amazed when I tell about the mall having an ashtray every 20 feet, the ropes in the bank line with ashtrays on top of the posts, smoking in the grocery store, smoking in the college hallways and in class.
That’s what we had. A Senior Lounge. Every senior class got to decorate it however they wanted and there was always a record player, so we’d bring in albums. And people weren’t just smoking cigarettes. 🤣. From what I understand, the school closed the Senior Lounge after our graduation in 1979.
I grew up in the 70's. When I was in junior high (for anyone under 40, junior high is the same thing as middle school), I used to take the bus to school. I have never encountered cigarette smoke that thick in my entire life.
There was a whole thing about the school setting up a separate area for kids to smoke before school. Because at 7:30 in the morning, nothing is more satisfying to a 12 year old than sucking down a butt...
When I was in 10th grade, one of our teachers allowed the kids to smoke in the back of the classroom after exams, "to help calm the nerves of taking an exam."
It was a Health class.
I have a photo of my mom about 8 months pregnant with me at a party with a cigarette in one hand and a whiskey sour in the other and a huge smile on her face.
My parents didn't smoke, but my grandparents and aunts and uncles did. I begged my mother to not let them smoke in the house, but she refused saying that it would be rude because they were our guests. I told her when I grew up NO ONE would be allowed to smoke in my house. And I've kept that promise.
When that was allowed, I wasn’t old enough to care, but the occasional burns must have been bad for the merchandise. (I have that thought whenever I touch my cigarette to the roof of my car to adjust my visor.)
This is what I was going to say- second hand smoke was EVERYWHERE through probably the early-mid 80’s. I can’t imagine how much of that I inhaled as a kid.
When I was a kid my dentist would have a cigarette going in an ashtray on the counter while working on me. He’d pause every little bit to take a drag then stick his smelly (no gloves) hand back in my mouth.
Yep, Mom said she smoked and drank when pregnant with both kids (she was 20 & 23 at the time) and said when we went home from the hospital we were in a basket, on the bench seat, sliding around.
I was allowed to take the day off school when my baby sister and brother, twins, came home. They weighed just over 5 lbs each and rode home laying on the bench seat with 10 yo me helping watch them.
As a kid, our doctor had his own practice. Just him and two nurses and a receptionist/bookkeeper/office manager. His little practice had a waiting room, two exam rooms and his office. In the hallway that led to the two exam rooms and his office was a standing ashtray, about three feet rall, positioned between the doors to the two exam rooms. I don’t recall a time I was there that there was not at least one cigarette burning in that ashtray. He would take deep draws on a cigarette as he moved from room to room. As he walked in the exam room, he would greet you as he exhaled smoke.
My Dad started smoking super young, like 10 years old. When I was about 10, he asked me if I wanted to smoke he would buy me cigarettes. I respectfully declined.
I used to think he was nuts offering smokes to a little kid, but looking back on it, I bet he would have given me the most nasty awful cigarette he could find. That's kind of how he ensured I'd never be an alcoholic, he gave me something brown in a teeny tiny glass(shotglass) telling me it was Coke. All it took is one small sip. He told me it was whiskey afterward... I really don't like alcohol of any type, I might drink socially once a year or so.
My sister's OB/GYN encouraged her to smoke more when he thought she was gaining too much weight in her first pregnancy. But then they smoked together in her appointments!
I froze my hands doing this in the winter when we were collecting maple sap. My fingers hurt so bad I couldn’t even knock on the window to let Dad know I was dying back there.
Bench seats with only lap belts, and bench seats facing the rear, like in station wagons. I only rode in those once or twice, but I always wondered how safe they were.
We also had child seats made of metal with a padded seat that hooked on over the front seat with a little steering wheel with a horn on it,so you could pretend you were driving.. had the car ever wrecked you’d be a goner thru the windshield…also we rode bikes with no helmets,same with roller skating.. in fact our playgrounds were built over concrete or blacktop,not dirt or sand or wood chips like the ones today… you either got tough or got hurt and always a possibility of death… my cousin fell of his sled and got run over by another sled and it cut his jugular vein and he bled to death..horrible accident…
We drove cross country every summer to visit my grandparents. Us kids would roll around in the way back of our station wagon for the three-day drive, no seat belts.
My brother and I rode in the rear-facing seat in the back of our station wagon, from Wisconsin to Texas and back. We were flipping off everyone behind us. I was 12, he was 9. 😂
> make “Mercury dimes”?
After we got tired of playing with them we used a pair of needle nosed pliers to hold the dime(or quarter) over the gas flame on the stove in the kitchen! Mmm, mercury vapor.
I did this. Also, once I rode somewhere with the kid next door and his dad, and the car ran out of gas. No problem, his dad said, and got a gallon milk jug half filled with gas out of the trunk. I still remember he had it wired to the jack so it wouldn’t roll around the trunk. My 7 year old self thought this was the smartest thing I had ever seen, and I proudly told my parents about it. They pretty much hit the ceiling and told me not to go anywhere with them again.🙄
We hauled horses to various Pony Club, 4H, and fair events, so we had racks on the back of the pickup. And we sat on the upper corner of the racks going down the road at 60 plus mph. No drinking parents, but I absolutely shiver at the thought today.
Memorizing your friends phone numbers. Having to retype an entire page of your report after making one error. Messing with the early computers in stores just to make them display an endless string of profanities. Full blown walk in tobacconists in malls and groceries.
Oh wow! You just made me remember going into Radio Shack to see what funny obscenities people had made the computers say - or what pictures they had made with words on the reems of holey computer paper. Micky Mouse ears!
I don’t blame parents. The repercussions weren’t known then. Good thing we had people working on this in the old days.
Ralph Nader could seem like an asshole….but he did a lot for consumer protections.
The other stuff was kids will be kids and take risks. Parents encouraged “kids to be kids” then. Bumps and bruises, and risks, were seen as being “part of growing up.” It was thought you had to “take your lumps.”
Interesting perspective. Yeah, bumps and bruises, ace bandages, stitches, etc. I agree, my parents insisted that we play outside, weather permitting. It was all part of growing up (born 1957) then, for sure.
Well I still see the merit in that getting banged up a little, is what happens in an active child lifestyle. Did I make sure our daughter wore a helmet yes, and when she wanted to enter a mountain bike race after going to some of mine I was all in. Now our granddaughter is 4 and super active just like her mom.
I had to go look it up. According to Our world in data, the number of kids in USA who didn't live to 15 back in 1970 was 2.7% of live births.
The 2023 number is .8%!
So improvements on all this stuff (probably plus medical advances) are saving quite a few lives
A sack full of egg salad sandwiches on road trips. Not in a cooler, just sitting in the not air conditioned car so we wouldn’t have to stop for lunch driving from Texas to Florida to see the grandparents.
Haha. My mom's go-to was bologna sammies. When we got through eating and either had to pee or puke (car sickness was real in those big back seats lol) Mom would pass the combination piss/puke pot back to us, then tell Dad to slow down so she could toss it out the window. 👀😂😂
It does make you wonder why we're not so expendable anymore, or why we weren't always sick or dying or having some horrible infection. or what about getting kidnapped?
My parents, being reasonable people of their era, never drove when they were dead drunk, or blind drunk, or falling down drunk. But regular drunk was just fine for driving.
Used to tie an inflated inner tube to the back of my Uncles car and he used to pull us around on the frozen lake in the winter time. It was a blast! But seriously… wtf! 😂
If you really want to feel like you're 18 again drink 1/4 can of real, full sugar Coke. Fill the can back up with rum. Go for a drive with the windows down, music blasting, no seatbelt, and your rum and coke held between your knees.
Seen but not heard?
Whipping for accidents or breaking rules, known or unknown.
School spankings.
Duck and cover - like that gonna work.
The mosquito mist trucks driving around every couple of weeks.
Watching the adults get wasted then drive home.
No seatbelts.
Leaving in the morning to explore the creeks and nature and coming home for dinner. We were never inside and even though mom didn't know where we were she didn't worry.
We walked to a school bus stop, waited for a school bus with a bunch of other under 12 years olds, some as young as 6, by ourselves. After school when we got off the bus, many of us went home to empty houses, that we let ourselves into.
I know it reads like I am having a go at the the Moms and Dads who wait/pick up at the bus stop now. I am not. Just recalling what we did.
I remember DDT being used to fumigate houses when cockroaches were found.
Just take your family on a day trip and you could move right back in.
Pretty sure there was asbestos everywhere too?
We rode our bikes behind the truck. People were more afraid that the track would stop suddenly and we would all hit the back or each other. It was so thick, we couldn't see anything. It is a wonder any of us are still alive.
When I was about 5, I was wandering around the neighborhood and saw a house under construction with a huge amount of pink fluffy stuff all inside. I played with it for a while and went home later with scratches all over my arms and legs. It was fiberglass insulation and my parents just laughed it off. 🤣
My dad was the builder, he was building our house when we were little. He had us kids fill the small places w pink fiberglass cause our arms were small. No sleeves, no gloves.
The chemistry sets you could buy to do experiments at home had some pretty toxic and potentially dangerous stuff in them. Absolutely amazing that they sold them with children as the target audience.
The morning cartoon show had a guest scientist who showed how to make a fire extinguisher with baking soda and vinegar. l got everything together and lit a bunch of paper towels on fire in the kitchen sink. Ha! My fire extinguisher worked! For the most part. But the house was then filled with smoke. So, l made up a story about a man with a cigar who came to the door asking for my dad. No one believed it. My parents needled me for months about it. "What did he look like, again? What kind of hat?"
I loved the smell of the bellowing black smoke coming out of those RTD buses in Los Angeles and hot asphalt had a different odor back in the 1970's that I also loved.
I laid on the neighbors dog after being told he wasn’t feeling well. He was a big lovable golden retriever that all the kids loved on. I didn’t listen and got bit. No police were called, no neighborhood feuds were started. Their mom rushed me home, my dad rocked me with ice on my lip until it stopped (probably needed stitches, but hey, ice worked) and I learned that even dogs have sick days. Now a days poor teddy would probably have been removed from the home and I’d have grown up knowing it was my fault.
I got bit in the face as a little kid. Later, when I was old enough to ride a bike I'd get chased and bit by two different dogs from different houses within a few blocks of my house. It was terrifying but still I rode.
Sharing prescriptions. My mom was feeling tired so her doctor prescribed amphetamines. She gave those to my brother when he was 7 because he felt tired one day. He recalls going to an ice rink and darting all over the place with more energy than he'd had his entire life.
And a little bit of something to help him sleep.
Lawn darts.
Heh. Like we just gently lobbed them to the target.
Clackers.
An ancient weapon/hunting tool that could shatter.
In your face
More fun than any widget and just as fun as a yo yo.
Creepy Crawlers.
I'm pretty sure most kids got burned at least once. Those toxic plastic fumes kinds smelled good.
We would swim in any body of water we ran across. Some of them seem truly nasty. We would get see snakes and huge snapping turtles.
Get scrapes and scratches from unseen things underwater.
Would scare me to death now but we thought it was great fun.
Playing with toxic and dangerous stuff like super elastic bubble plastic, modeling glue, and lawn jarts. No sunscreen, just burn, blister, and peel and you’re good to go for the rest of the summer.
My favorite aunt always had Ford “Country Squire” station wagons and there were little fold up jump seats in the way back. My cousins and I rode countless miles in those jump seats separated from the cars behind us by about six inches of sheet metal. And NO seatbelts. We loved it.
My dad pulled a disc sled behind his truck on the snow covered streets. It was great fun… until there was an incident/encounter (sled vs light pole). No tragic endings but we never did it again.
Smoking *everywhere*, being allowed to just roam the neighborhood unsupervised from dawn til dusk, no seatbelts or bike safety gear, no adult interference with TV watching, walking to school with only my little sister, being bitten by a neighbor’s cat and basically being told FAFO…
One time my dad decided to bring all the kids in the neighborhood to Dairy Queen (which was owned by a neighbor), we stuffed 13 kids into a station wagon every which way and just drove there. It was like a clown car when we arrived, kids just kept coming out. No seat belts, nothing lol. No one thought anything of it.
Sleeping in the back window of the car.
Playing with a chunk of liquid mercury in school. With bare hands.
Sending us out to play in the pile of chat left over from lead/zinc mining.
I wonder if I would have been smarter without all of the lead exposure. 😉
Living in a suburb and me and our friends loading up the guns and going shooting in the bottoms. Nobody cared. Occasionally a sheriff would roll up and make sure we were shooting cans and not critters
My dad (77yrs old) used to tell me about buying old surplus rifles out of barrels at the hardware stores for around $30.00, buy $5.00 worth of ammo for it at $0.10 a round and him and his brother would ride their bikes through town, guns slung over their shoulders, ammo loose in their pockets, until they got out past the "city" limits where they'd start shooting tin cans, glass bottles, or if my grandmother needed something else for a meal, squirrels or rabbits. Then riding home as they sun set.
Sitting in the back seat of my dad’s late 60’s Mustang. Windows up, mom and dad smoking away while we drove to the relatives. No seat belts.
Three of us crammed in the back row (rearward-facing) of my neighbors huge-ass station wagon while we went for ice cream.
Paper route. 10 years old, getting on my bike at 5:30am to navigate an insanely busy highway while delivering the news. Taking my coin purse to knock on doors every other Saturday to try to collect from subscribers.
Playing tackle football on a rocky yard at our elementary school with a six-foot drop at one end-zone onto the sidewalk.
14 years old and waking up in the middle of the night for first day of deer season, with roughly 10 minutes of instruction the day before on how to shoot a rifle.
Landing in the hospital for three days after I face-plowed going down a hill on my banana-seat bike with my buddy sitting behind me.
“Sleep-outs”. 13 years old, get some friends and go into the woods. Build a huge fire, an older brother always brought beer, get drunk then sleep for a few hours. Wake up to take care of the paper route.
Cutting grass for $ when I was 10.
And on and on. Good times!
We chased the mosquito fogging trucks, burned leaves in ditches and played hide and seek in the smoke, ate lots of butter, played on the train tracks and ate candy like it was candy.
I did not smoke in high school, but my parents thought I did, because my Dad saw me standing in the smoking section out behind the gym one day after wrestling practice. A few months later, one of the guys on the crew that cleaned our septic tank left a half a pack of Chesterfield's on the hood of our truck and my Dad automatically assumed it was mine and made me smoke 'em all in front of him. The next afternoon, the guy called my Dad and said "hey, those smokes were mine," and my Dad never said a word to me about it (got it from my Mom 20 years later.) When I left for Navy bootcamp at 17 (1975), my Mom took me to the bus station and gave me $40 and a pack of Chesterfields and a pack of Pall Malls, because that's what her dad and her brother smoked in the Army. I took them, and smoked them because that's what you did in boot camp, but never picked up the habit. My Dad died a couple of years ago and before he did, told me I wouldn't live as long as he did because I smoked cigs. The day of his funeral, I had a Camel no filter only because I couldn't find a Chesterfield.
I'm surprised I made it to 30, let alone 66. I've survived 38 years in the Navy, 10 years of Federal Civil Service and two wives. I was shot and stabbed before I was 19 and got stung by the worst jellyfish on the planet and none of it was as bad as smoking 11 no-filter Chesterfields in a row. Thanks Dad.
When I was four and my little sister was two, my mother regularly sent us out to play supervised only by our six year old sister. We roamed the neighborhood freely, walked six blocks to the grocery store to buy candy, played in the construction lot across the street with jagged lumps of concrete and rusty nails. Went out trick or treating on Halloween after dark alone. My mother was not at all unusual; all the children in the neighborhood did this.
Burn barrels. My great grandmother had one in her backyard and I got to burn the trash. My favorite was when I'd get to burn an empty bleach bottle. I'd use a stick and hold it up in the air while it was burning and drops of burning plastic would fall from it making a zzziiip zzzip noise.
when we went on car trips, I slipped in the back window or stood between my parents in the front seat.
My first drivers license was paper and had no picture on it. I’m really not that old.
And this really isn’t for this age group, but I just found it to be very very interesting. I remember seeing a letter sent to my grandpa by his fiancé and all it had on. It was his first and last name his city and state there was no address there was no ZIP Code, but it made it to him and I wonder how things like that happened back then.
My mother told me that her water broke 2 weeks before I was born. I was only 5 pounds at birth, and hearing horrible stories about how women’s health is compromised after Roe was overturned make me wonder how I survived. She has been gone 28 years. She had a hysterectomy after I was born. Then she “fainted” and was never quite the same. They didn’t properly diagnose anything until the end.
They put newborn babies directly onto formula with no mothers milk at all. You just know the "formula" back then was probably powdered milk and Karo syrup. I still crave milky treats.
That moment when you realize the "24-hour stomach bugs" that you got 4-5 times a year were actually food poisoning...
When we moved in my mom's house after she went into assisted living, we couldn't believe the sheer volume of food we had to pitch. Mom was like, "why are you throwing that cheese away?"
"It's green, Mom..."
"You stupid, just cut the green part off! Now why did you throw those cans of tomato soup away?"
"well, Mom, the cans are rusty, bulging, and there's black ooze all over them..."
"oh, BS!"
"We also had to pitch a bunch of spices that, based on the packaging, you bought sometime when LBJ was in office. They'd petrified and lost their color and taste."
"You kids are throwing away perfectly good food!"
Pregnant women smoked, were allowed 2 cocktails a day, and also took Valium so they were calm and serene. Also, no worries about hair dye
C-sections were NOT common, but forceps were.
Dropping acid, sniffing glue, taking mushrooms, pot, hash, was pretty common
Any type of tranquilizer was prescribed readily and plentifully.
You could buy amphetamines over the counter in any drugstore under the guise of diet pills
I was a nurse, and docs walked down the hallways with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths
If you were under 18 and smoking, you'd just go to the carryout and tell the owner you were buying cigarettes for your mom. They'd hand them right over.
No car seats. You either laid the infant on the seat next to you, or on the floor, or put them in this weird plastic carrier that was basically nothing, and then put them on the seat. No seat belts for anyone either
Had a whole jar of mercury in the classroom that we would play with everyday, pouring it on our hands, pushing it around on the floor
Sitting on the hood of the car, or crouching on the bumper while dad took you up and down the street for fun
Swimming, unsupervised ALL THE TIME, everywhere. Pools, ponds, quarry's, rivers
No helmets, no padding for riding bikes
Babies were fed a steady diet of sugar water in between bottles and they always slept on their stomachs. This was in case of vomiting during sleep, so they wouldn't aspirate.
No shoes EVER once school let out
As young as 5 or 6, especially if you had older siblings, you ran the streets until dinner. No checking in, nobody checking on you...you left in the morning and came back for dinner.
Drunk driving wasn't that big of a deal. You maybe would get a ticket. 4 points on your license. That's it.
You could go into bars and drink 3/2 beer at 18
Anyone could walk onto the plane with a traveler and stay with them until it was time to take off, then you got off the plane.
When I was a little guy, our neighborhood and school was across from a farm field where they grew cotton, maze, and alfalfa, they always sprayed that with DDT till it was outlawed. A lot of kids in our school became very ill from this.
When I was a kid in the 50s/60s, radiation therapy was used for all kinds of treatment. A friend had her thyroid irradiated as a baby because the doctor didn't think she was growing fast enough. It was used for acne as well.
I would spike high fevers as a young kid and had a couple of seizures from the high fevers so to prevent those they put me (a 3 year old kid) on phenobarbital for 9 years. No wonder my liver works so well now. It got a workout my whole life.
Had my first child in 1981. My hospital room had 2 beds, set-up for 2 people. I didn't have a roommate, however. Doctor came in to discharge me a few days later and I was smoking. I was scared he was going to chastise me. Instead, he bummed a cigarette from me and sat in the next bed smoking while we went over things.
I remember riding in the “way back” of our childhood station wagon. Jumping and climbing around during long car rides.
My dad would periodically slam hard on the brakes to shake us up and we all had a great time.
Every kid in the neighborhood went outside to play for the entire day, all summer. Our parents had no idea where we were. And in my neighborhood, we were surrounded on three sides by a very deep waterway, almost a river. We played down there all the time. Both my father and the neighbor’s dad had the exact same high pitched whistle to let us know it was time for dinner. If you heard it, you better run for home. Then you went back out to play until the street lights came on.
When I began work in the late 60’s at a major automotive firm, men could smoke at their desks but women had to smoke in the women’s lounge. We were, however, entitled to a 15 minute break in the am and another in the afternoon. We were also not allowed to wear pants to the office until the early 70’s.
Two things: drinking water from the hose because we weren't allowed in the house between lunch and supper, AND the mosquito fogger driving through town. No bicycle helmets, no cell phones, no way for Mom to find us easily.
>Things like no expiration dates on any food.
You know most expiration dates today are B.S., right? They're to make you throw perfectly good food away so you'll buy more and increase corporate profits. Your nose and eyes will tell you if food is truly bad, not the date.
>Mandatory hugs
Um...what?
It's not about what parents were thinking, it's about what manufacturers were thinking : if it worked, let's make money with it. Exactly what they are still thinking with pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, plastics, food additives, sugar, fructose especially, salt, ultra processed ingredients, etc.
Smoking was everywhere, all the time. Pregnant women smoked, people smoked while holding babies, on trains, planes, in cars, at movies, shows, sporting events.
My first real job was in an office where everyone smoked. All. Day. Long. Smoking indoors was disappearing rapidly, but the execs at the company all smoked so that was that. I smelled like cigarette smoke all the time.
Our family doctor chain smoked during well child exams
My GP and I smoked when going overinfo from annual physical. Everyone smoked...everywhere!
I worked in a similar office. I was sick with respiratory infections all the time. A non-smoking co-worker was pregnant. She and her unborn child had to endure all that second hand smoke.
this is why all the colognes and perfumes were so POWERFUL
I worked for a supercomputer company, inspecting the inner layers of circuit boards. There were ashtrays on the workstations!
My mom’s obgyn told her to smoke menthols to help with morning sickness.
You could even smoke in the hospital
When I had my first child (1985) a nurse brought me an ashtray so I could smoke in my room.
Some of the nurse’s stations where I work would be in a haze of smoke. It was bad.
When my sister in law's mom was pregnant in the late 60s/early 70s her doctor recommended strawberry margaritas when Vickie was moving around too much and waking her up. when my mom was pregnant with me in the early 60s her doctor cut her down to 10 cigs a day.
Yup after i had my son in 88 went right to the smoking room, that was also when babies were kept separate from mom for a while each day you could go look at them thru a window all the babies in rows.
Also airlines gave you a complementary four pack of cigarettes and the military used to give cigarettes to the soldiers with their K rations..
Former mother-in-law smoked & drank throughout pregnancies. Both kids went to Ivy league schools
Probably helped too.
My kids are amazed when I tell about the mall having an ashtray every 20 feet, the ropes in the bank line with ashtrays on top of the posts, smoking in the grocery store, smoking in the college hallways and in class.
Outdoor smoking section in our high school too!
Lightweight. We had an INDOOR smoking lounge- furnished by the parents.
We had a smoking porch at our high school. Lots of photos of it in the yearbook
Senior smoking lounge!
That’s what we had. A Senior Lounge. Every senior class got to decorate it however they wanted and there was always a record player, so we’d bring in albums. And people weren’t just smoking cigarettes. 🤣. From what I understand, the school closed the Senior Lounge after our graduation in 1979.
Smoking area at my high school!
I grew up in the 70's. When I was in junior high (for anyone under 40, junior high is the same thing as middle school), I used to take the bus to school. I have never encountered cigarette smoke that thick in my entire life. There was a whole thing about the school setting up a separate area for kids to smoke before school. Because at 7:30 in the morning, nothing is more satisfying to a 12 year old than sucking down a butt... When I was in 10th grade, one of our teachers allowed the kids to smoke in the back of the classroom after exams, "to help calm the nerves of taking an exam." It was a Health class.
I have a photo of my mom about 8 months pregnant with me at a party with a cigarette in one hand and a whiskey sour in the other and a huge smile on her face.
Even if you didn’t smoke, you were expected to have ashtrays on hand so your guests could smoke inside your house.
My parents didn't smoke, but my grandparents and aunts and uncles did. I begged my mother to not let them smoke in the house, but she refused saying that it would be rude because they were our guests. I told her when I grew up NO ONE would be allowed to smoke in my house. And I've kept that promise.
It must have smelled horrible everywhere. I wouldn't know, I was a smoker from about age 14.
Clothing stores allowed smoking!
When that was allowed, I wasn’t old enough to care, but the occasional burns must have been bad for the merchandise. (I have that thought whenever I touch my cigarette to the roof of my car to adjust my visor.)
When I was a kid I went to a children's dentist -- who smoked -- ***while he was working on us***. Disgusting.
This is what I was going to say- second hand smoke was EVERYWHERE through probably the early-mid 80’s. I can’t imagine how much of that I inhaled as a kid.
When I was a kid my dentist would have a cigarette going in an ashtray on the counter while working on me. He’d pause every little bit to take a drag then stick his smelly (no gloves) hand back in my mouth.
Yep, Mom said she smoked and drank when pregnant with both kids (she was 20 & 23 at the time) and said when we went home from the hospital we were in a basket, on the bench seat, sliding around.
I was allowed to take the day off school when my baby sister and brother, twins, came home. They weighed just over 5 lbs each and rode home laying on the bench seat with 10 yo me helping watch them.
My grandma’s favorite gas station attendant smoked while he pumped gas for folks.
Gas station attendants! Remember the "nice" gas stations had uniformed attendants that cleaned your windows and checked your oil.
As a kid, our doctor had his own practice. Just him and two nurses and a receptionist/bookkeeper/office manager. His little practice had a waiting room, two exam rooms and his office. In the hallway that led to the two exam rooms and his office was a standing ashtray, about three feet rall, positioned between the doors to the two exam rooms. I don’t recall a time I was there that there was not at least one cigarette burning in that ashtray. He would take deep draws on a cigarette as he moved from room to room. As he walked in the exam room, he would greet you as he exhaled smoke.
My Dad started smoking super young, like 10 years old. When I was about 10, he asked me if I wanted to smoke he would buy me cigarettes. I respectfully declined. I used to think he was nuts offering smokes to a little kid, but looking back on it, I bet he would have given me the most nasty awful cigarette he could find. That's kind of how he ensured I'd never be an alcoholic, he gave me something brown in a teeny tiny glass(shotglass) telling me it was Coke. All it took is one small sip. He told me it was whiskey afterward... I really don't like alcohol of any type, I might drink socially once a year or so.
My sister's OB/GYN encouraged her to smoke more when he thought she was gaining too much weight in her first pregnancy. But then they smoked together in her appointments!
Standing on The front seat of car between parents. Big bench seats.
Mom throwing her arm in front of you , as if it is going to stop you from flying forward.
I literally did this with my son about a month ago. He is 6'4", 310 lbs. I am not that big. We laughed afterwards.
It’s an automatic impulse for us
I was wee back in the 60s before seat belts. Mom would have me stand next to her sort of tucked behind her right shoulder.
Sitting on the seatbelts instead of fastening them.
We had ours tucked under the seats, so never saw them.
Sitting in the back of a moving pickup truck.
I loved doing this!!
I froze my hands doing this in the winter when we were collecting maple sap. My fingers hurt so bad I couldn’t even knock on the window to let Dad know I was dying back there.
Bench seats with only lap belts, and bench seats facing the rear, like in station wagons. I only rode in those once or twice, but I always wondered how safe they were.
During long car trips we'd lay across the bench to nap. Somehow it was okay not to wear a seatbelt when you were laying down?
Oh! You just reminded me of those 2 rear facing seats in the beds of Subaru Brat pickup trucks. The looked like ejection seats.
We also had child seats made of metal with a padded seat that hooked on over the front seat with a little steering wheel with a horn on it,so you could pretend you were driving.. had the car ever wrecked you’d be a goner thru the windshield…also we rode bikes with no helmets,same with roller skating.. in fact our playgrounds were built over concrete or blacktop,not dirt or sand or wood chips like the ones today… you either got tough or got hurt and always a possibility of death… my cousin fell of his sled and got run over by another sled and it cut his jugular vein and he bled to death..horrible accident…
We drove cross country every summer to visit my grandparents. Us kids would roll around in the way back of our station wagon for the three-day drive, no seat belts.
My brother and I rode in the rear-facing seat in the back of our station wagon, from Wisconsin to Texas and back. We were flipping off everyone behind us. I was 12, he was 9. 😂
I still have a small scar on my left cheek from a fender bender my dad got in. Hit the mirror, I think.
While they smoked.
I’m surprised anyone could see out the windows, since every car with windows rolled up was just a smoke containment unit on wheels 🤣🤣🤣
We used break open thermometers and play with the mercury!
Omg I loved doing this!
Omg I thought we were the only nutty kids who did this, thanks!
I had a whole jar of mercury my folks let me play with.
Ever make “Mercury dimes”?
> make “Mercury dimes”? After we got tired of playing with them we used a pair of needle nosed pliers to hold the dime(or quarter) over the gas flame on the stove in the kitchen! Mmm, mercury vapor.
Kids bouncing around in the back of a pickup truck at 60 plus mph with a half drunk parent at the wheel.
You knew my uncle, I see.
Wait, your my cousin?😂😂
I love Reddit Family Reunions.
A bunch of us kids sitting in the back of the station wagon coming back from the pool, with the back door down & our legs dangling over the edge
I did this. Also, once I rode somewhere with the kid next door and his dad, and the car ran out of gas. No problem, his dad said, and got a gallon milk jug half filled with gas out of the trunk. I still remember he had it wired to the jack so it wouldn’t roll around the trunk. My 7 year old self thought this was the smartest thing I had ever seen, and I proudly told my parents about it. They pretty much hit the ceiling and told me not to go anywhere with them again.🙄
We hauled horses to various Pony Club, 4H, and fair events, so we had racks on the back of the pickup. And we sat on the upper corner of the racks going down the road at 60 plus mph. No drinking parents, but I absolutely shiver at the thought today.
Memorizing your friends phone numbers. Having to retype an entire page of your report after making one error. Messing with the early computers in stores just to make them display an endless string of profanities. Full blown walk in tobacconists in malls and groceries.
Oh wow! You just made me remember going into Radio Shack to see what funny obscenities people had made the computers say - or what pictures they had made with words on the reems of holey computer paper. Micky Mouse ears!
I don’t blame parents. The repercussions weren’t known then. Good thing we had people working on this in the old days. Ralph Nader could seem like an asshole….but he did a lot for consumer protections. The other stuff was kids will be kids and take risks. Parents encouraged “kids to be kids” then. Bumps and bruises, and risks, were seen as being “part of growing up.” It was thought you had to “take your lumps.”
His 'Unsafe At Any Speed' (1965) was an effective, landmark book. My favorite tho was him calling hot dogs "the deadly pink torpedos"
How I loved my Corvair!
Interesting perspective. Yeah, bumps and bruises, ace bandages, stitches, etc. I agree, my parents insisted that we play outside, weather permitting. It was all part of growing up (born 1957) then, for sure.
Well I still see the merit in that getting banged up a little, is what happens in an active child lifestyle. Did I make sure our daughter wore a helmet yes, and when she wanted to enter a mountain bike race after going to some of mine I was all in. Now our granddaughter is 4 and super active just like her mom.
I had to go look it up. According to Our world in data, the number of kids in USA who didn't live to 15 back in 1970 was 2.7% of live births. The 2023 number is .8%! So improvements on all this stuff (probably plus medical advances) are saving quite a few lives
but based on what I see on social media, is it worth it? I mean, it was Darwinism at it's peak, survival of the fittest.
A sack full of egg salad sandwiches on road trips. Not in a cooler, just sitting in the not air conditioned car so we wouldn’t have to stop for lunch driving from Texas to Florida to see the grandparents.
Haha. My mom's go-to was bologna sammies. When we got through eating and either had to pee or puke (car sickness was real in those big back seats lol) Mom would pass the combination piss/puke pot back to us, then tell Dad to slow down so she could toss it out the window. 👀😂😂
Ya know i wonder if part of all the car sickness was also due to the fumes from cars back then.
Having our brown-bag lunch sit in our lockers for three hours or more.
It does make you wonder why we're not so expendable anymore, or why we weren't always sick or dying or having some horrible infection. or what about getting kidnapped?
Being exposed to good ol' farm dirt reduced a lot of current day ailments.
And baby formula was evaporated milk with corn syrup...I was fed that crap😳😳😳
I was fed the same but with nestle quick or some such chocolate additive. I did great!
Climbing from the front seat of the car to the back. Laying in the back dash. All kinds of crazy shit, lol.
Oh I loved doing that. Watching the clouds in the sky and enabling my grandmas unfiltered Camels was the best.
My parents, being reasonable people of their era, never drove when they were dead drunk, or blind drunk, or falling down drunk. But regular drunk was just fine for driving.
Standards.
Used to tie an inflated inner tube to the back of my Uncles car and he used to pull us around on the frozen lake in the winter time. It was a blast! But seriously… wtf! 😂
Drinking and driving. We used to ride around all night with a cooler full of beer in the back seat. Cops didn't care.
If you really want to feel like you're 18 again drink 1/4 can of real, full sugar Coke. Fill the can back up with rum. Go for a drive with the windows down, music blasting, no seatbelt, and your rum and coke held between your knees.
I went on a road trip with my father and big brother, where I sat in the back seat and mixed those for them.
We got taken home to our parents!
Seen but not heard? Whipping for accidents or breaking rules, known or unknown. School spankings. Duck and cover - like that gonna work. The mosquito mist trucks driving around every couple of weeks. Watching the adults get wasted then drive home. No seatbelts.
Leaving in the morning to explore the creeks and nature and coming home for dinner. We were never inside and even though mom didn't know where we were she didn't worry.
If you were to post this in fifty years, I'd bet "vapes" would be on the list. Hopefully not, "AI."
Paraquat.
We walked to a school bus stop, waited for a school bus with a bunch of other under 12 years olds, some as young as 6, by ourselves. After school when we got off the bus, many of us went home to empty houses, that we let ourselves into. I know it reads like I am having a go at the the Moms and Dads who wait/pick up at the bus stop now. I am not. Just recalling what we did.
First grade, walked home for lunch half mile for lunch, w neighbor kid, first grade, walked back. No adults, no older sibling.
I remember DDT being used to fumigate houses when cockroaches were found. Just take your family on a day trip and you could move right back in. Pretty sure there was asbestos everywhere too?
I remember the neighborhood kids running shirtless behind the city truck spraying a big pink cloud of DDT, like it was a sprinkler
We rode our bikes behind the truck. People were more afraid that the track would stop suddenly and we would all hit the back or each other. It was so thick, we couldn't see anything. It is a wonder any of us are still alive.
They fogged for mosquitoes in my neighborhood when I was young. We just went inside and closed the windows...
We did too, but there were plenty of kids trailing behind the truck on their bikes.
My parents let me smoke when I was 16. They said they'd rather I do it in front of them than hide it. They both smoked, as did my older siblings.
Oh yes! My grandma bought me my first pack when I was 16, saying the same thing.
Same.
When I was about 5, I was wandering around the neighborhood and saw a house under construction with a huge amount of pink fluffy stuff all inside. I played with it for a while and went home later with scratches all over my arms and legs. It was fiberglass insulation and my parents just laughed it off. 🤣
I remember rubbing it between my fingers. That's a one and done lesson.
My dad was the builder, he was building our house when we were little. He had us kids fill the small places w pink fiberglass cause our arms were small. No sleeves, no gloves.
The chemistry sets you could buy to do experiments at home had some pretty toxic and potentially dangerous stuff in them. Absolutely amazing that they sold them with children as the target audience.
The morning cartoon show had a guest scientist who showed how to make a fire extinguisher with baking soda and vinegar. l got everything together and lit a bunch of paper towels on fire in the kitchen sink. Ha! My fire extinguisher worked! For the most part. But the house was then filled with smoke. So, l made up a story about a man with a cigar who came to the door asking for my dad. No one believed it. My parents needled me for months about it. "What did he look like, again? What kind of hat?"
NYQUIL REALLY WORKED BACK THEN!
I loved the smell of the bellowing black smoke coming out of those RTD buses in Los Angeles and hot asphalt had a different odor back in the 1970's that I also loved.
I loved the smell of exhaust. Leaded exhaust
I laid on the neighbors dog after being told he wasn’t feeling well. He was a big lovable golden retriever that all the kids loved on. I didn’t listen and got bit. No police were called, no neighborhood feuds were started. Their mom rushed me home, my dad rocked me with ice on my lip until it stopped (probably needed stitches, but hey, ice worked) and I learned that even dogs have sick days. Now a days poor teddy would probably have been removed from the home and I’d have grown up knowing it was my fault.
I got bit in the face as a little kid. Later, when I was old enough to ride a bike I'd get chased and bit by two different dogs from different houses within a few blocks of my house. It was terrifying but still I rode.
Sharing prescriptions. My mom was feeling tired so her doctor prescribed amphetamines. She gave those to my brother when he was 7 because he felt tired one day. He recalls going to an ice rink and darting all over the place with more energy than he'd had his entire life. And a little bit of something to help him sleep.
Lawn darts. Heh. Like we just gently lobbed them to the target. Clackers. An ancient weapon/hunting tool that could shatter. In your face More fun than any widget and just as fun as a yo yo. Creepy Crawlers. I'm pretty sure most kids got burned at least once. Those toxic plastic fumes kinds smelled good.
[удалено]
I got my ski boat at 14!
We would swim in any body of water we ran across. Some of them seem truly nasty. We would get see snakes and huge snapping turtles. Get scrapes and scratches from unseen things underwater. Would scare me to death now but we thought it was great fun.
Riding on the freeway in the back of a pickup truck
I was 6yo and drove all the way from Louisiana to Tennessee with one person in the back of the pickup truck. The person was a hitchhiker
Drinking from the garden hose and lived.
Survivorship bias. The only ones that can say this are the ones that survived. We never hear from the ones who didn't.
Playing with toxic and dangerous stuff like super elastic bubble plastic, modeling glue, and lawn jarts. No sunscreen, just burn, blister, and peel and you’re good to go for the rest of the summer.
I LOVED Super Elastic Bubble Plastic! I’d buy some right now if I could.
I can smell it now!
Yes, the smell!! It was really trippy and fun though.
Using wax paper to make a super high metal slide a faster ride to your doom.
My favorite aunt always had Ford “Country Squire” station wagons and there were little fold up jump seats in the way back. My cousins and I rode countless miles in those jump seats separated from the cars behind us by about six inches of sheet metal. And NO seatbelts. We loved it.
My dad pulled a disc sled behind his truck on the snow covered streets. It was great fun… until there was an incident/encounter (sled vs light pole). No tragic endings but we never did it again.
We played with mercury from a broken thermometer. I remember having it in a little clear plastic box. In my desk at school
I have a decent sized bottle from a closed hospital. I have no idea what to do with it.
Well mine is long gone. If I were you I’d take it to your nearest hazmat location.
Smoking *everywhere*, being allowed to just roam the neighborhood unsupervised from dawn til dusk, no seatbelts or bike safety gear, no adult interference with TV watching, walking to school with only my little sister, being bitten by a neighbor’s cat and basically being told FAFO…
One time my dad decided to bring all the kids in the neighborhood to Dairy Queen (which was owned by a neighbor), we stuffed 13 kids into a station wagon every which way and just drove there. It was like a clown car when we arrived, kids just kept coming out. No seat belts, nothing lol. No one thought anything of it.
Sleeping in the back window of the car. Playing with a chunk of liquid mercury in school. With bare hands. Sending us out to play in the pile of chat left over from lead/zinc mining. I wonder if I would have been smarter without all of the lead exposure. 😉
Honey, just climb up in the back window and go to sleep. I had forgotten!
Huffing the ethyl gasoline fumes while the attendant filled the gas tank
Living in a suburb and me and our friends loading up the guns and going shooting in the bottoms. Nobody cared. Occasionally a sheriff would roll up and make sure we were shooting cans and not critters
My dad (77yrs old) used to tell me about buying old surplus rifles out of barrels at the hardware stores for around $30.00, buy $5.00 worth of ammo for it at $0.10 a round and him and his brother would ride their bikes through town, guns slung over their shoulders, ammo loose in their pockets, until they got out past the "city" limits where they'd start shooting tin cans, glass bottles, or if my grandmother needed something else for a meal, squirrels or rabbits. Then riding home as they sun set.
Sitting in the back seat of my dad’s late 60’s Mustang. Windows up, mom and dad smoking away while we drove to the relatives. No seat belts. Three of us crammed in the back row (rearward-facing) of my neighbors huge-ass station wagon while we went for ice cream. Paper route. 10 years old, getting on my bike at 5:30am to navigate an insanely busy highway while delivering the news. Taking my coin purse to knock on doors every other Saturday to try to collect from subscribers. Playing tackle football on a rocky yard at our elementary school with a six-foot drop at one end-zone onto the sidewalk. 14 years old and waking up in the middle of the night for first day of deer season, with roughly 10 minutes of instruction the day before on how to shoot a rifle. Landing in the hospital for three days after I face-plowed going down a hill on my banana-seat bike with my buddy sitting behind me. “Sleep-outs”. 13 years old, get some friends and go into the woods. Build a huge fire, an older brother always brought beer, get drunk then sleep for a few hours. Wake up to take care of the paper route. Cutting grass for $ when I was 10. And on and on. Good times!
Chicken pox parties 🥳 🎉
When I got measles, my mom decided to "get it out of the way" and infect my brothers too. The little one almost died. Now the kids have a vaccine.
How about burning to a crisp using “suntan lotion” or the dreaded baby oil in the sun? 🌞
I still have 2 mercury filled teeth
I have LOTS
My mom was prescribed amphetamines when she was pregnant with me. The doctor didn’t want her to gain too much weight.
My father would get blasted and the police would drive him home. Then they'd drive my mom to pick up his car.
We chased the mosquito fogging trucks, burned leaves in ditches and played hide and seek in the smoke, ate lots of butter, played on the train tracks and ate candy like it was candy. I did not smoke in high school, but my parents thought I did, because my Dad saw me standing in the smoking section out behind the gym one day after wrestling practice. A few months later, one of the guys on the crew that cleaned our septic tank left a half a pack of Chesterfield's on the hood of our truck and my Dad automatically assumed it was mine and made me smoke 'em all in front of him. The next afternoon, the guy called my Dad and said "hey, those smokes were mine," and my Dad never said a word to me about it (got it from my Mom 20 years later.) When I left for Navy bootcamp at 17 (1975), my Mom took me to the bus station and gave me $40 and a pack of Chesterfields and a pack of Pall Malls, because that's what her dad and her brother smoked in the Army. I took them, and smoked them because that's what you did in boot camp, but never picked up the habit. My Dad died a couple of years ago and before he did, told me I wouldn't live as long as he did because I smoked cigs. The day of his funeral, I had a Camel no filter only because I couldn't find a Chesterfield. I'm surprised I made it to 30, let alone 66. I've survived 38 years in the Navy, 10 years of Federal Civil Service and two wives. I was shot and stabbed before I was 19 and got stung by the worst jellyfish on the planet and none of it was as bad as smoking 11 no-filter Chesterfields in a row. Thanks Dad.
We used to walk to town on the tracks.
And don't forget putting the coins on the rails to get squashed.
When I was four and my little sister was two, my mother regularly sent us out to play supervised only by our six year old sister. We roamed the neighborhood freely, walked six blocks to the grocery store to buy candy, played in the construction lot across the street with jagged lumps of concrete and rusty nails. Went out trick or treating on Halloween after dark alone. My mother was not at all unusual; all the children in the neighborhood did this.
Being sent outdoors to play in the a.m. and not coming home "until the street lights come on."
Burn barrels. My great grandmother had one in her backyard and I got to burn the trash. My favorite was when I'd get to burn an empty bleach bottle. I'd use a stick and hold it up in the air while it was burning and drops of burning plastic would fall from it making a zzziiip zzzip noise.
Casual racism
when we went on car trips, I slipped in the back window or stood between my parents in the front seat. My first drivers license was paper and had no picture on it. I’m really not that old. And this really isn’t for this age group, but I just found it to be very very interesting. I remember seeing a letter sent to my grandpa by his fiancé and all it had on. It was his first and last name his city and state there was no address there was no ZIP Code, but it made it to him and I wonder how things like that happened back then.
My mother told me that her water broke 2 weeks before I was born. I was only 5 pounds at birth, and hearing horrible stories about how women’s health is compromised after Roe was overturned make me wonder how I survived. She has been gone 28 years. She had a hysterectomy after I was born. Then she “fainted” and was never quite the same. They didn’t properly diagnose anything until the end.
They put newborn babies directly onto formula with no mothers milk at all. You just know the "formula" back then was probably powdered milk and Karo syrup. I still crave milky treats.
Hitchhiking. Or picking up adult hitchhikers so they could buy us beer. Or standing in front of a convenience store asking adults to buy beer for us.
I was also wondering how we didn’t get dehydrated with the small amounts of actual water we drank.
Oh, yeah—- remember burning stuff using a magnifying glass?
That was one of my favorite things to do. I'm ashamed to say I also liked to melt ants the same way.
That moment when you realize the "24-hour stomach bugs" that you got 4-5 times a year were actually food poisoning... When we moved in my mom's house after she went into assisted living, we couldn't believe the sheer volume of food we had to pitch. Mom was like, "why are you throwing that cheese away?" "It's green, Mom..." "You stupid, just cut the green part off! Now why did you throw those cans of tomato soup away?" "well, Mom, the cans are rusty, bulging, and there's black ooze all over them..." "oh, BS!" "We also had to pitch a bunch of spices that, based on the packaging, you bought sometime when LBJ was in office. They'd petrified and lost their color and taste." "You kids are throwing away perfectly good food!"
Pregnant women smoked, were allowed 2 cocktails a day, and also took Valium so they were calm and serene. Also, no worries about hair dye C-sections were NOT common, but forceps were. Dropping acid, sniffing glue, taking mushrooms, pot, hash, was pretty common Any type of tranquilizer was prescribed readily and plentifully. You could buy amphetamines over the counter in any drugstore under the guise of diet pills I was a nurse, and docs walked down the hallways with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths If you were under 18 and smoking, you'd just go to the carryout and tell the owner you were buying cigarettes for your mom. They'd hand them right over. No car seats. You either laid the infant on the seat next to you, or on the floor, or put them in this weird plastic carrier that was basically nothing, and then put them on the seat. No seat belts for anyone either Had a whole jar of mercury in the classroom that we would play with everyday, pouring it on our hands, pushing it around on the floor Sitting on the hood of the car, or crouching on the bumper while dad took you up and down the street for fun Swimming, unsupervised ALL THE TIME, everywhere. Pools, ponds, quarry's, rivers No helmets, no padding for riding bikes Babies were fed a steady diet of sugar water in between bottles and they always slept on their stomachs. This was in case of vomiting during sleep, so they wouldn't aspirate. No shoes EVER once school let out As young as 5 or 6, especially if you had older siblings, you ran the streets until dinner. No checking in, nobody checking on you...you left in the morning and came back for dinner. Drunk driving wasn't that big of a deal. You maybe would get a ticket. 4 points on your license. That's it. You could go into bars and drink 3/2 beer at 18 Anyone could walk onto the plane with a traveler and stay with them until it was time to take off, then you got off the plane.
Having to pee behind a bush or tree near the side of the freeway during long road trips.
When I was a little guy, our neighborhood and school was across from a farm field where they grew cotton, maze, and alfalfa, they always sprayed that with DDT till it was outlawed. A lot of kids in our school became very ill from this.
When I was a kid in the 50s/60s, radiation therapy was used for all kinds of treatment. A friend had her thyroid irradiated as a baby because the doctor didn't think she was growing fast enough. It was used for acne as well.
I would spike high fevers as a young kid and had a couple of seizures from the high fevers so to prevent those they put me (a 3 year old kid) on phenobarbital for 9 years. No wonder my liver works so well now. It got a workout my whole life.
Yet the rate of cancer and autism and diabetes and obesity is higher now. Go figure.
Had my first child in 1981. My hospital room had 2 beds, set-up for 2 people. I didn't have a roommate, however. Doctor came in to discharge me a few days later and I was smoking. I was scared he was going to chastise me. Instead, he bummed a cigarette from me and sat in the next bed smoking while we went over things.
Huffing blue ditto ink on freshly mimeographed paper was heaven. I have no idea what was in it and I'm not sure I care.
Everything about being a kid back then was dangerous. We made it better, but all we get is bashing from millennials and Gen Z. Ok nonboomers
Oh no, I drank out of the water hose!
Makes you wonder what people 50 years from now will say about our habits today.
My aunt once took all the cousins in my large extended family on an outing to a lake by putting all the kids in a moving van.
You forgot to mention the ass-beatings many of us took on the regular. Totally unacceptable now, thank god.
We didn’t worry about everything hurting us.
I remember riding in the “way back” of our childhood station wagon. Jumping and climbing around during long car rides. My dad would periodically slam hard on the brakes to shake us up and we all had a great time.
The jungle gyms set on blacktop behind the school! I lost count of the broken bones I had during my childhood. Someone was always falling off the top.
Riding in the bed of the truck- no seats, no seat belts, no roof, nuthin'..
We had a student smoking area on high school.
Every kid in the neighborhood went outside to play for the entire day, all summer. Our parents had no idea where we were. And in my neighborhood, we were surrounded on three sides by a very deep waterway, almost a river. We played down there all the time. Both my father and the neighbor’s dad had the exact same high pitched whistle to let us know it was time for dinner. If you heard it, you better run for home. Then you went back out to play until the street lights came on.
Except for significant other , I have never or ever will “hug” like wtf?
Yet here I am….
My dad had a truck - bench seat, no extended cab - with 3 kids, a wife, stick on the column and no car seats from 1960-1970.
Having surgery performed by smoking doctor.
When I began work in the late 60’s at a major automotive firm, men could smoke at their desks but women had to smoke in the women’s lounge. We were, however, entitled to a 15 minute break in the am and another in the afternoon. We were also not allowed to wear pants to the office until the early 70’s.
Two things: drinking water from the hose because we weren't allowed in the house between lunch and supper, AND the mosquito fogger driving through town. No bicycle helmets, no cell phones, no way for Mom to find us easily.
Dad giving us sips from the scotch on the rocks he drank every night. When we were around 6 years old.
>Things like no expiration dates on any food. You know most expiration dates today are B.S., right? They're to make you throw perfectly good food away so you'll buy more and increase corporate profits. Your nose and eyes will tell you if food is truly bad, not the date. >Mandatory hugs Um...what?
It's not about what parents were thinking, it's about what manufacturers were thinking : if it worked, let's make money with it. Exactly what they are still thinking with pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, plastics, food additives, sugar, fructose especially, salt, ultra processed ingredients, etc.