Tuesday, November 23, 2010

When I was a kid....

Life sure goes fast. You take a breath in when you are a kid and breathe out as an
adult, in my case, a fifty year old.
No not really. But it does seem like it sometimes
You remember when you promised yourself you'd never talk
about "when I was a kid". The thing is, by the time you are my age life has changed so much that you miss the things you had then that either don't exist or
don't matter in today's society. Talking about them is like welcoming back an old friend long gone from your life. Do I want to have everything the way it was then? No, because like an old friend, visits from the past shouldn't wear out the welcome. Still, right now I want to pull the memories close and revisit a time when life was easier.
For me that time was in the 1960's. The gap between what life is like for a child now and what it was like in the 1960's is like the distance between the Earth and the Moon. So bear with me as I look back and talk about "when I was a kid"

News and TV in General

It is hard to know where to start but basically kids were really able to be kids then. Unless it was summer kids usually had a bedtime. The news wasn't on all through the day like now and we only had 3 channels.  All three of which closed down the programming by 2 am and played the United States National Anthem. Afterwards was a colored stripe with an ongoing screeching tone. But kids usually didn't see that except for maybe on a weekend in the summer because they had bedtimes. Anyway on the off chance you got to see the "nightly news" nobody cared what celebrity was seeing who, or which one was in rehab. Most news was centered on your local area too.  Things like traffic accidents, farm reports, festivals and government.  In fact government like what the president was doing, civil rights and at that time coverage of the Vietnam War were the main non local topics. These days everyday there are several murders at least, robberies and most devastatingly these days, child abuse stories and killings. Back then you didn't get that.  I only remember hearing about two murders then.  I know there were more but my point is I was in bed and missed the uglier side of life. Kids got to be kids.  They didn't have death and destruction pushed in their face every waking moment by a TV.

Most of the TV shows were game shows, soap operas, westerns and sitcoms.
"Star Trek" started in the 60's. Most sitcoms were light hearted stuff like "Bewitched" and "I dream of Jeannie" Kids thought it was a treat if they got to occasionally stay up later and watch the adult shows like "Laugh in" and The Jackie Gleason Show"
Daytime TV was soap operas which of course had the usual "cheating"
themes but back then nobody was nearly naked and were not shown in a bed. They started to kiss and then it would fade to black. Seriously.
Oh and reality TV? No such thing. The closest we had was the live reports
from the state fair.



Playing


But we kids probably would not have noticed. We were outside playing! We had never heard of a video game or a computer. We played ball, raced, rode our bikes and so on. Most of the time we would (if it was not a school day) go out in the morning, come back for lunch and go out again. We'd only stop running, skating, kick ball or whatever it was we were doing that day when we heard our
mothers yelling across the block to come in. Nobody had to schedule "play dates" We just went out and played. Kids still do this some but it used to be every kid on the block.  Now it’s just a few because most are in scheduled activities, or the parents work so they stay inside and play their video games.

Other things have changed too. Here are just a few off the top of my head.


Milk was delivered to your house in glass bottles. Hardly anyone bought it at a store.

A field trip usually meant a visit to a factory to see how things were made.

We were allowed to have Christmas plays in the school that included the actual Christmas story

Nobody had a cell phone. Most kids didn't use the phone at all except for a quick call to ask if your friend could come out and play. We dialed the number by sticking our finger in a circle with numbers until the "newfangled" push button phones came out. Most people had party lines at first. That meant several neighbors shared the same phone line even though they each had their own number. If someone called you or them everyone's phone would ring but each person has their own ring.  For instance at our house it was 3 short rings-stop-3 short rings. Someone else might have one long ring, a pause, another long ring. So we only answered our own rings but once we did any of the others on the same line could sneak on and hear everything. If you picked up your phone to make a call there might already be one of the other families using it so you'd have to wait your turn no matter how long they took.

This is getting long so I will stop here for now. My original point before I went off on a tangent was that life was so simple and safe then. We didn't have to worry about bombers in our planes and our schools. Kids didn't take guns to school. We could be kids and we could be kids without fears.

Of course it was not perfect and some kids didn't feel safe I am sure. There was some abuse plus some kids had fathers in Vietnam, and bussing during civil rights was happening.

But in their own families, and in their own block with neighborhood friends most kids were worried about missing the ice cream truck, the kind with the soft serve cone machine made with real milk for 15 cents, not the frozen high priced  chemical stuff on a stick now. But that's another post.