Ahhhh... Those were the days. One more to add: My 4 brothers and I used to fight over who got to ride on the armrest that folded down between the driver and passenger. Second runner up: Who got to lay in the ledge below the back window on long car trips. Today I would call Children's Services if I ever saw someone let their kid doing either of those things! 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. 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 that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, 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 butt 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 butt spanked (physical abuse) here too, and then we got butt 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 two week 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. Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower 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 stoop 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? AMEN
Preach on Brother. im only 23 and had much of that even in a small quasi suburban/rural area. man.. the fun those days were. I rember going to construction sites and playing king of the hill. I also rember playing dare I say it.. Smear the Queer with the neighbors. those were good times... and times when things were much simpler. Nate
And it didn't matter if your neighbor was or not... The name of the game didn't change and still nobody got in trouble. I'm 33 buy the way. MARK
29 Here... (well, Almost 30:ball: ). And every bit of that is true... "Smear the Queer"...... Now there's a term I haven't heard in a LONG time. Things sure have changed alot... In a short amount of time.
35 here (or will be in 3 weeks), Ahh smear the queer, what a game. I doubt kids could play it now as someones parents would undoubtably end up pressing battery charges. Times were better back in the old days. I also remember laying up on the package tray of my parents 68 Catalina. That was a sweet car. :grin:
our road trip car was a brand new 63 bonneville, then a 65 impala SS [i'm 42] and i cant remember the number of times i crashed on my stingray or my uncles wooden skateboard WITHOUT A HELMET!ou: TV had 4 channels you had to turn to by hand, you never got to talk on the phone for more than a few minutes, and had to stay in one spot near the phone table:laugh: because there was a short cord on the phone. games came with boards, cards, and dice. the dirty pictures you got to see were in your dads sock drawer and were VERY tame by todays standards. you didnt get your own credit card till you were at least 18 and HAD A JOBou: and the music you got to listen to on the AM transistor radio had to do more with holding hands and having a cool car than who you shot, raped, or got high with.:spank: MAN, we sucked!
We used to play lawn darts (Jarts?) after dark. I don't know what they were called in other parts of the country, but we called it a Polish Canon. A series of tin cans with both ends cut off and taped together. You would then squirt lighter fluid in the bottom, drench a tennis ball in the same, drop it in and light it from the bottom and shoot the flaming ball into the air like a mortar. All the while the parents sat back without a care. Chemistry sets were given out as Christmas presents and contained all kinds of nasty stuff like various acids, and I recall, a vial of mercury. No one wore a back pack to school. You carried the books you needed for homework to and from school. If you wore a backpack back then, you probably would have gotten a black eye. You kept score. There were clear winners and losers. There was none of this "Everyone is a winner" mentality. If you lost, it meant you didn't try hard enough. Can I go back? Knowing what I know now of course.
We ALWAYS were outside playing games and sports. We made our own rules, sorted out disagreements for ourselves, NEVER ran for our parents to get involved because "Billy hit me!" or "Jimmy called me a name!". You had a problem with someone, you beat the crap out of each other until you both were tired. And you didn't go get a 9mm for revenge. You were still friends the next day, and you did the same stuff as always. Somewhere along the line, people got it in their heads that life is about staying safe. I say it's not. The greater the risk, the greater the reward. You spend your whole life staying safe and being careful, your gonna be sitting in your rocking chair, wondering where your life went! Not me! I'll be sitting there wondering how I survived that long! :beer
My wife and I are different! She bought the kids a TV/VCR for there bed rooms last year for christmas and this year she bought them handheld game boys, video nows, and cd players all with head phones. I bought them BB guns, targets and shot gun shells for the 12 gauge. Guess what they play with? Yeah thats right Dad bought the coolest presents!!!!!!!!!!!! I hate keeping up with the Jones' and the Smith's. Me and the boys (Brian 8 and Jamie 6) are always outside playing, target shooting, hunting, working in the shop, etc. Yeah thats right I have both my boys shooting the 12 gauge shotgun. Brian will put it up against his shoulder but Jamie is to small so I put my hand behind the gun. The last two days we have been outside for hours wet and a little cold playing in the snow and ice. We took the go cart and tied the boogie board behind it and traveled many a mile through the neighbor hood while the other kids must have stayed inside playing nintendo! Boy did we have fun. So much for getting one of my projects done. Too many parents buy their kids to much junk and then tell them to "go play somewhere, get out of my hair". Sometimes I think that I am just a big kid.
Never heard of Smear the Queer, but we played: Kill the Guy With the Ball Red Rover Bombardment TACKLE football without so much as a single pad! We'd play a game called "fig"... There was a vacant lot across the street (no house was built on it as the owner of the adjoining house bought both lots) and every night after dinner the dads would come out with a beer or gin and tonic and they'd play outfield. The kids endlessly batted. Every out was a run for the parents and every run was a run for the kids. It was really weird... there'd be 8 or 9 dads and 14 or 15 kids!!! We'd play til dark. Man, how cool! Don't think anyone really kept score, but endlessly batting as the dad's BS'd! There were 3 FBI men living on our street... Estes Rockets
Wow, Good post Shark. Only my folks musta liked pain cause instead of mercurochrome, they used methayolaid ( I probably spelled these wrong, but you get it). Man that stuff burned!!!
Smear the Queer is the same as Kill the Guy With the Ball. My favorite was Battle Ball, and a similar frisbee game I made up. Actually, a few years ago I worked at a residential high school for girls with severe behavioral problems. For gym we'd sometimes play Battle Ball.
