You Old Timers will relate to this...

PhilL

PhilL

Joined
Oct 1, 1999
Messages
6,490
You Old Timers will relate to this...

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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.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).

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

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.

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

Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. What an archaic health system we had then.

Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

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

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger.

What was that property owner thinking, letting us play on that lot? He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.

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

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 and then we got our rear spanked. 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.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our rear spanked (physical abuse) here, and then we got our rear spanked again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.


Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent or what about those makeshift beds in the back of the sedan - while dad was driving!


Summers were spent behind the push lawn mower and I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were my parents? Of course my parents weren't the only psychos.


I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front porch 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 survive?
 
Ask someone to count your change back.
Slide rule for math problems? No calculator. HA!
 
Geez, I was the "loner" who "lived in the woods" and didn't take part in school "events". I had an "un-natural" tendency towards hunting, fishing, trapping, guns, and knives. Today I would be placed in therapy as a budding serial killer. :rolleyes: :confused: :eek: :barf:

Paul
 
And when parent s supported[ not sued] the teacher that disciplined their kids .And you didn't do anything too serious in school because the worst thing was having the old man get a note from the teacher.!!
 
I remember the "Board of Education" hanging on the wall in the principal's office...it was oak and had holes in it (it reduced wind resistance she said). It had the desired effect...she never had to wack me with it. Oh yeah, and if she felt the need to deal with the board of education at school, I would have gotten a refresher course when I got home.
Now that I think of it, I do remember getting wacked across the knuckles with one of those metal edged rulers.
Hi-top Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars...clearing the snow off the basketball court to play before the big guys got there...CD drills and crawling under the desk away from the windows.
Being taught how to make a fire, sharpen a knife, tie a few knots, camp in the snow...maybe I r one of them old timers
Jim
 
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).
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Can't swim in a pool. I grew up on the beach every summer. Got pulled out by an undertow and drowned once -- my uncle pumped the water out of me and I went back in.

We had a lake in town here, we used to take our daughter to swim. They shut it down years ago because the insurance rates were consfiscatory. It's been an unused wooded area since, with the old buildings half-rotted, half-burned down. Depressing.

Safety comes from knowing how, not being kept from.
 
"Ask someone to count your change back."

nifrand, I have to laugh. A few weeks ago a kid at a burger joint took 2 minutes(I timed him) to figure my change on a purchase of less than $5. I kept my mouth shut.It was hard!
 
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations.
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For those of you who aren't aware, I'm actually Chairman of the School Board at St. Paul Lutheran Schools. In fact, I've spent the last couple of hours working on next years budget.

Last year, I got this idea that we didn't have enough playground equipment for the older students. We have teeter-totters, swings, a slide, etc. The younger kids have great fun. But there's nothing for the older kids. So, I researched all these play structures for upper grades, etc. And then, for some reason, I thought, "I'm gonna ask the kids what they want." I expected them to be all excited about this. Their response was, "We could use some new soccer balls. They old ones go flat to fast."

All they wanted was the existing field left open. They play soccer, they play tag, they play catch, they play flag football. They love it.

A few years ago, at one of the evening activities, I noticed that someone had brought one of these video game machines and they'd managed to somehow hooked it up to the projection system in the gym. They were playing some game lighting up the whole wall with the PA system shaking the whole building and they thought it was great. So, I asked which game system they wanted me to buy and install (I really wanted them not messing around with the expensive equipment, please). They agreed that they didn't want it. It was fun to bring one and hook it up every once and a while, but it wouldn't be fun if it wasn't special. And then they got bored with the video game thing, cast it aside, put up the Vollyball nets and played vollyball.

Even today's kids don't necessarily want all that video game stuff all the time.

And I got some really good soccer balls and saved a whole lot of money.
 
It's the same with absurd food fads that seem to preoccupy people to the point of paranoia today. Back in my grandfathers day, (and I know this for a fact because I used to help out sometimes during shearing on the sheep station), they ate real food. Real milk, including the cream, from the cows on the farm. There was usually a couple of pigs and or sheep hanging in the cool room ready to be butchered and eaten. My grandmather made cakes that contained, (gasp!), sugar and whole eggs from the chooks on the farm, sugar and salt were considered essential food additives, not dangerous chemicals to be avoided at all costs.

They did all this and lived into their nineties. If they were around today they'd be told that they'd be dead by 30 eating like that!
 
We send a letter home to parents prior to the first day of school with special instructions for the first day. One item is that no food items are to be brought except for individual student's lunches during the first week. The reason is that it takes us a few days to sort through all the medical forms and figure out which kid is allergic to what.

The first day, I stopped this woman in the hall carrying a huge sheet cake. "Where are you going with that?"

"It's my child's birthday today and I want him to have cake with his new classmates."

"Woman, we have not compiled the Alergy List for this year yet. I have no idea which child that cake could kill. Get it out of here NOW!"

Last year, for a few months, we had a kid who was one peanut away from the grave. Normally, I get upset when students withdraw mid-year. It screws my budget up. But when they told me that family was moving due to a job transfer, I signed the refund form happily. Good riddance. Get him out of here before someone leaves a peanut butter cookie unguarded and the kid dies on us.

Chocolate allergies, peanut allergies, latex alergies (we have to check every balloon that comes in the place), and we've got a big safe full of Asthma inhalers and bee sting injectors. When I was a kid, this stuff was unheard of. Suddenly, all of these kids are allergic to everything... and not just get a rash, but drop down dead allergic.

I read an article the other day speculating that all of this is due to the fact that we keep our kids to clean these days.

We drank unpasturized milk every day. My father (who was a farm kid) preferred the flavor. We never got sick from it.

I don't know. Something has changed.
 
Gollnick said:
I read an article the other day speculating that all of this is due to the fact that we keep our kids to clean these days.

We drank unpasturized milk every day. My father (who was a farm kid) preferred the flavor. We never got sick from it.

I don't know. Something has changed.
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Precisely! How many ads do you see on TV for things soaked in disinfectant so you can sterilise every damned thing in your house including the light bulbs. It's all bullshit. Somebody gets a cold now and they rush off to the doctor to demand antibiotics, even though they are useless for colds. We're now breeding a whole zoo of antibiotic resistant bugs. We're even putting antibiotics in animal food to make them grow faster. Greed and stupidity. No wonder modern kids drop dead if they pass within 2 metres of a peanut or eat a sandwich that was prepared on a benchtop that wasn't previously sterilised with gamma rays or some damned thing!
 
I used to go to school every morning in a freshly pressed white shirt, a blue tie, blue slacks, and black shoes. The every afternoon I would comeback with a torn up shirt, bloody kneeless pants, a messed up tie, or a missing heel. More then once I came limped home with all of the above and sometimes a few extra bruises. All of this was a result of paying hard contact ball games in a paved lot. Yet, we played these games throughout our grade school years, and although everyone often limped home in the same condition, no one ever complained or did anything to interrupt our play.

Kids were allowed to live in the real world, where the pain was real enough to temper our youthful energies. I don't recall anyone ever suffering a major injury, the paramedics were never called, and no one was ever suspended for more then a few days. The limits were painfully obvious to each of us.

I don't think the kids today have that perpective. So they tend to get hurt trying to imitate the latest idiotic stunt they saw on TV or in a video game.

n2s
 
Any kid in my neighborhood with a helmet on when riding his bike would have been tormented by the rest of us as a "pussy". I don't use that word any more (a whole other can of worms there), but that is what we used to use. I and others suffered many serious cycling accidents, including a few hospital trips. But most had nothing to do with your head. It was all arms and legs. I don't doubt that helmets save the occasional kid. But they are going to miss that sensation of the wind in your hair, which was worth the risk in my opinion.
 
Gollnick said:
I read an article the other day speculating that all of this is due to the fact that we keep our kids to clean these days.
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Or maybe it was just because all the kids with the allergies and stuff got killed off early? Survival of the fittest.
 
The worst thing that ever happened to me was the school yard bully shoving me to the ground. Today, you get you ass "capped". :(
 
How old is everybody in this thread? I'm 30, and I remember most of the aforementioned activities and lifestyle. As an aside, I am not paranoid about food poisoning, but my GF is a freak about raw food. If god forbid raww chicken touches anything, she has to bleach everything in a ten mile radius, and there cannot be enough handwashing. I eat crappy food, grew up in the beautiful land of New Jersey, and I'm fine...Better living through chemicals. Joe
 
Call me an Old Timer also. I remember riding my bike around town one day, and hitting a big pile of gravel as I turned a corner a little too fast. Big time accident, with me laying in a heap, bleeding from the knee. I got a ride home from an old man I had never seen before. Think a kid would do that now? I don't think so.
 
I do want to toss in a memory of the time we had to stay indoors for a while, since a pack of wild dogs was holed up in a basement of one of the neighborhood buildings, and one summer, we hardly went out to play at all, with a polio epidemic raging.

It's good to learn and improve, but not to live in fear. These attitudes, unfortunately are widespread.

From today's Telegraph.com: Adventure pursuits 'too risky for schools'

Children are missing out on life-changing adventure pursuits because teachers fear they will end up in court if things go wrong, says Ofsted.

Outdoor activities such as canoeing, rock climbing, archery and sailing are in decline as schools opt for less risky courses or drop adventure training altogether, says David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools.

Teachers have been prosecuted, and one was imprisoned for 12 months last year, over the drowning of a boy on school visits. Schools also fear compensation claims from parents if children get injured.

In a report to be published today the inspectors say outdoor education is a minority area in most secondary schools, despite some excellent examples of courses led by teachers with vision.

"The benefits of outdoor education are far too important to forfeit and by far outweigh the risks of an accident occurring," says Mr Bell.

"If teachers follow recognised safety procedures and guidance they have nothing to fear from the law."

The reduction in outdoor education is part of the wider trend of limiting risk that has led to the banning of "dangerous" playground games, such as marbles and skipping, and the curtailing of sports such as rugby.

A fall in the number of educational visits to give pupils a taste of challenging pursuits such as mountaineering or abseiling has been fuelled by the decision of the second largest teachers' union to advise its members against taking responsibility for them.

Chris Keates, the acting general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said Mr Bell's comments were "unsympathetic and dismissive" of schools' very real fear of litigation.

The union was dealing with a long list of cases where teachers had been unfairly blamed when things went wrong or been victims of malicious allegations from pupils on residential visits.

While some tragic cases involved the deaths of pupils, others were unsubstantiated allegations of abuse, she said.

In one case, a member of the union was taken to court after a mother complained he had spilt fruit juice over her son's head in a farm's dining room. The case was later dropped when the CPS offered no evidence.

"Mr Bell has failed to grasp the reality of what actually happens when accidents occur," she added.

"As NASUWT casework has demonstrated time and time again, following the procedures and guidance is no protection against litigation."

John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said: "The fact is that accidents can happen. With so many parents turning to the courts at the first sign of a problem, schools are right to be extremely cautious in their approach to the organisation of outdoor activities.

"Regrettably this has created a situation in which many teachers have felt unable to take on the additional responsibility.

"This has led to a reduction in the number of visits which are a vitally important part of the educational experience, especially for children from families that could not otherwise afford them."
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