1. "How Did We Survive?"
Posted by Kat on Mar-13th-03 at 3:52 AM

Submitted by Susan..unknown from whence it came...it is SO Cool!--KK

How did we survive?  Hmmmmmm.....I WONDER...

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have. 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.

As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

Our baby cribs, toys and rooms were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We, often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.

We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not available.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment.

Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade.

That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

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.Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two weeks. 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 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 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.

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?     




(Message last edited Mar-13th-03  3:53 AM.)

Some comments.

Your hamburger came freshly ground from the local butcher, and only a few hours old. Not from 2 thousand miles and days away. Weren't thing fresher then?

No seat belts = unsafe. But at the local 25-30 MPH there were fewer bad roads. Note that the National Highway System (high speeds) was followed by seat belts. Front seat belts were followed by collapsible steering wheels (don't think about this!).

Things were rougher and tougher then (playing in a vacant yard!) then because that's the way it was. We also had fewer lawyers then, and different expectations.

Few were fat because everyone walked everywhere; no big malls or monster schools that required constant riding. Few TVs, and radio lets you do other things while listening.


But the life expectancy may have been lower too. I remember the people who would die from heat stroke in hot summers, or flu in cold winters. I'll take riding in a car anyday over walking miles in cold rain.

Your experience may differ.

I've read recently that if you keep your house too clean, your kids will suffer from more ailments than they would if it were a little dirty.  I can only say that my kids were never in the least danger!  I've also read articles that say having a couple of pets in the household is good protection against developing asthma.  This description of the "good old days" is similar to what's published in the program for every 50th high school reunion in the country.  Believe me, folks, the good ol' days weren't all THAT good!  Interesting list, though.

Most people only remember the good times, and forget the bad.
So it always seems better in retrospection. Didn't this also occure in the past centuries?

Yes, Edisto, what is your experience in past centuries?
This I gotta hear!

Well...back in the twentieth century, before my arteries began to harden and when I, like Andrew Borden, was still warm to the touch...

Back when I was a little girl in the 70s, when the bustle was still in style.... this was how we lived. I remember playing with my brothers in the dirt with their Tonka trucks, running wild and free all summer.  Shoes?  What were they?

I sent this to my mom and she got all weepy about how things used to be when "us kids were small".  I wish I knew who the author was, it is a thought evoking piece.

Funny Edisto!
  This topic reminded me how us 4 kids grew up in a cloud of
smoke, everyone smoked and we all turned out just fine.  My Dad
said when they all came home after the war (WW2) they would go
into an establishment and management would say "you can't smoke
here" and the guys laughed and said Oh Yea? and just smoked and
drank, nobody could tell them what to do.... these days they'd go
to jail or be shot?

I understand that those veterans who faced Nazi and Jap machine guns and cannons were not likely to be put down by a mere clerk!!!

Submitted by Susan!  Don't know source.
It's odd she sent this tonight.  I did get my monthly fill-up tonight!
$1.89 super.

GAS? Too expensive?????


I hope this makes some of you feel a little better about the $$$$ we're putting into our car's fuel tanks. So you think a gallon of gas is expensive?

Diet Snapple 16 oz $1.29 ......... $10.32 per gallon

Lipton Ice Tea 16 oz $1.19 ....... $ 9.52 per gallon

Gatorade 20 oz $1.59 ............. $10.17 per gallon

Ocean Spray 16 oz $1.25 ......... $10.00 per gallon

Brake Fluid 12 oz $3.15 ........... $33.60 per gallon

Vick's Nyquil 6 oz $8.35 ......... $178.13 per gallon

Pepto Bismol 4 oz $3.85 .......... $123.20 per gallon

Whiteout 7 oz $1.39 ............... $25.42 per gallon

Scope 1.5 oz $0.99 ................. $84.48 per gallon

and this is the REAL KICKER......

Evian water 9 oz for $1.49 ........ $21.19 per gallon.

$21.19 FOR WATER! ....and the buyers don't even know the source. But then again EVIAN spelled backwards is naïve. So, the next time you're at the pump, be glad your car doesn't run on water, Scope, or Whiteout, or God forbid, PEPTO BISMOL or NYQUIL!!!!



Just a little humor to help
ease the pain of your next trip to the pump...

And you think the price of a gallon of gas is high?

If I recall correctly, when Stef & I drove England in '86 gas was like $1.80 a gal. back then!
Of course we had to convert to pounds and litres so I may be off a bit.
(I could do the pounds, I could NOT do the litres.)

Found a table for conversion, you just have to be good at math, which I'm not.  I'd need a calculator at my side! 

Volume
To convert imperial gallons to liters, multiply by 4.55

To convert liters to imperial gallons, multiply by 0.22


US gallons to liters, multiply by 3.79

Liters to US gallons, multiply by 0.26

Uh, Ok.
I just sat in the back making bologna sandwiches and passing my lbs. to the front seat whenever we stopped for P E T R O L

They have bologna in England?  I always think of that as such an American thing, don't know why?  Its German, isn't it? 

I made that meat up.  it might have been braunscweiger.

On another road trip past the Grand Canyon I was hastilly making bologna sandwiiches for a hungry Capricorn from the back seat as well!  Luckilly I had seen the Grand Canyon many times before!
Ever go on the road with a hungry Capricorn?  (Not Stef)

Yes, many, many, many times.  My husband was a Capricorn.  I worked all day and came home with him expecting dinner on the table ala that 1950s article. 

Oh yea!?  And when they're tired?
Hungry & Tired, Look Out!

Whine & Gripe and Irritable!

Stuff 'em full of bologna sandwiches and you can make a civilzed human being out of 'em!  Good company!

  That would have been great if he liked balogna sandwiches.  He liked turkey sandwiches alot though. 

But you are totally right about the whining and griping!