I was thinking how different my kid’s lives are than mine was and then I thought about how different things are generally. There are so many things I experienced (I’m 40) that kids today don’t including:
1) Dodgeball in gym class.
2) Making ashtrays in art class for your parents.
3) Dressing up as hobos for Halloween
4) Public school teachers saying “God bless you” and not have to call their union rep to save their job.
5) Buying chocolate cigarettes.
6) Wrapping your lunch in tinfoil and put it in a paper bag.
7) “Green” was just a color in the crayon box, not a way of life.
8) Carrying around a Swiss Army knife everywhere you went.
9) Learning that America is a great country.
10) Saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
Bonus: Playing war with finger guns in the schoolyard and not getting suspended.
Playing outside all day and your parents having no idea where you were as long as you were back for dinner.
You got any to add?
October 25, 2010 at 2:58 am
Smoking my pipe in the faculty commons. Oh — you mean the kids.
In my school we still pledge allegiance every morning. I say "God bless you" when a kid sneezes. There is no collective bargaining for teachers in Texas and 34 other states. Kids still bring lunches. "Knock-knock" jokes share equal time with Chuck Norris jokes. There are bibles on the shelf in my room, tho' they tend to gather dust.
Don't make me monger on you!
— Mack
October 25, 2010 at 3:15 am
1. Riding bikes carelessly for hours around the neighborhood. (just saw you have this one-oops)
2. Being parent's remote control/rabbit ear adjuster
3. Looking up books and researching through card catalogue at the library
4. Watching music videos on MTV/VHS
5. This is a big one-having change and looking for pay phone to call someone!!!!
6. Actually knowing friend's phone number and not just finding them on your contact list and pressing send. (Son picked up house phone and dialed 2 to try to reach his dad:)
7. Passing notes in class and having a shoebox full of notes.
October 25, 2010 at 3:15 am
Untangling a telephone cord.
October 25, 2010 at 3:17 am
I knew that if I did something wrong at school, my mother would know about it before I got home and I dreaded going home.
Being told "Do we need to go to the bathroom" had an alternate meaning.
Being grabbed by the top of my ear was a means of getting my attention.
Big Red "chew" that was chewing gum.
October 25, 2010 at 3:38 am
We learned to count…is the one between 6 and 7 supposed to be a separate one? 😉
October 25, 2010 at 3:48 am
When I was little, I loved to curl up on the floor behind the driver's seat on a long car trip, and fall asleep to the rythmic sound of the tires crossing the expansion joints in the cement freeway. Now, of course, anyone that small in a car must be synched-in like an astronaught.
Kate
October 25, 2010 at 3:51 am
1.Marbles
2.Pressing the tar bubbles with your big toe
3.French cricket when we didn't have 11 players for each side (never heard of it…big in Australia in those days)
4.Being invited by super neighbours to watch TV when we didn't have one at home.
5. Restless Gun, Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, The Lawman, The Rifleman, Wagon Train and Rawhide
5.The Perry Como Show
6.The Catholic Hour on 2SM, Sydney each Sunday Night.
7. Brother Healy outside the school gate to see our hats were straight,our shoes done up and shiny clean. (even after school…no excuse)
7b. Wondering where Brother Healy was when he wasn't at the school gate….he was waiting two blocks away at the bus stop to follow the same procedure PLUS ensure our bus stop behaviour was exemplary.
Oh those wonderful days !!!
October 25, 2010 at 4:09 am
1)Getting hauled before the principal because it was discovered a 7th grade classmate was wearing your ring (had that happen to a friend of mine in Catholic school).
2)Having a nun put your hair in bobby pins because it was too long (happened to another guy I knew in the 8th grade).
3)Getting a hotdog from a roadside vendor in a van (haven't seen one in years, did they get regulated out of existence?)
4)Walking with my father all the way to the boarding gate in an airport with no security checks.
5)Considering a cross country phone call as a big event. They only happened on special occasions (pregnancy and birth announcements, deaths, etc.)
6)Watching my first color television and wishing everyone's face wasn't orange or green or bright yellow.
7)Wondering if pro wrestling was actually real?
8)Gas wars where you could pay less than twenty cents a gallon.
9)Having an attendent fill up the car with gas, check the oil and water and wash the windshield.
10)Believing that only rich folk had air conditioned cars.
11)Washing the empty milk bottles before putting them out in the box for the milkman.
12)Reading cheap fiction where everyone had a computer and thinking, "Yeah, right!"
October 25, 2010 at 4:10 am
…and really important faith practices:
SATURDAY NIGHT. Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help..then known as Perpetual Succour). Happily after 40 years absence in my life we now have the Novena in our Parish each Wednesday Night.
SUNDAY NIGHT. Holy Hour
MISSION. How could we ever forget the Redemptorist priest when he lifted the volume level when he spoke of Hell.
MORNING MASS Three rows of Mercy Nuns sitting in the front seats as my brother and I served on the altar.
October 25, 2010 at 4:10 am
Where have all the teeter totters gone? You know, see saws?
Susan
October 25, 2010 at 4:22 am
When I was a kid I rode my bike without a helmet.
Kids got "licks" at school when they misbehaved.
October 25, 2010 at 4:24 am
Do kids today still have to memorize the multiplication tables?
October 25, 2010 at 4:34 am
Most of these I still had/did as a kid in the 90s and early 00s…
Maybe participating in the Cultus of the Flag is something we could leave in the past.
October 25, 2010 at 4:47 am
Didn't have to worry about saying the word "gay". Saying someone was "gay" meant that they were jolly and happy, not homosexual.
October 25, 2010 at 4:55 am
Watching tv at 8pm at night confidrent that you won't find any sexual innuendo, nudity, swearing, or other offensive material.
School dances. Do they do those any more?
Eating a peanut butter sandwich at school. Or granola bars for that matter.
October 25, 2010 at 5:14 am
Tearing perforated feed paper off the side of the sheets from your dot matrix printer.
Typing a paper double-spaced by hand (at the front of the line: down arrow, return, down arrow, return, down arrow, return, down arrow…) and then having it all mess up when you add a word to a sentence. ("Hold on, let me take away all those double-spaces, add the word, and put them back again…").
Atari
Listening to parents and school officials argue about whether the Simpsons are family appropriate.
Commercials telling kids that if they're lost, they should look for someone who works with the electric company because he knows all the roads and will gladly take you home (yeah, how safe!).
Oh, and let's not forget that kids no longer get honest feedback from teachers. "Well, ma'am, your son is a slacker and tries to sleep through my class" has how been changed to "I just don't think I'm entertaining enough for your son. I sure will try harder."
October 25, 2010 at 6:01 am
1.Kick the can
2.Girls playing jacks
3.Boys playing army (my brother had a HUGE army)
4.Really cool glue to make your models – it's why we were all so happy 😉
5.Trading cards and stamp collections
6.Frozen jelly sandwiches for breakfast in grammar school during Lent when we went to early Mass every morning (I was in Minnesota)
6. Playing with the mercury from a broken thermometer without calling a hazmat team for cleanup
7. Paper dolls
8. Pick up baseball without a bunch of adults dressing us up like midget professionals. Not the right number of kids? No prob!
9. And how I miss streetcars. We had a tunnel in St. Paul. My grandma used to let us ride back and forth so we could go through the tunnel. God bless her!
10. Dressing up in special clothes for Mass on Sunday and having a big family Sunday dinner.
11. Watching Bishop Sheen on TV
12. Having an actual family owned little hobby shop/candy store in the neighborhood where we bought our school supplies at the beginning of every year. We each got a free little bag of popcorn when we bought our supplies.
13. A neighborhood pharmacist you could actually call in the middle of the night if you needed an emergency prescription filled. Ours was King's Drugstore and Bud King did just that for all his customers.
14. Blue laws – everything closed on Sunday
15. And buying a real malt at Kings Drug Store. They had a soda fountain…
16. Learning beautiful penmanship
17. A neighborhood grocery that allowed you to buy on credit and had a delivery boy. Ours store was next to our home and I was always developing crushes on the teenage delivery boys…sigh
18. Chugs – (I think they're called soap boxes most places) and having street races without being thrown into jail.
19. Girls using curlers to curl their hair
20. One I won't miss and wouldn't wish on anyone – girdles
Glad I was here for the 1950's. It was last sane time in this country…
October 25, 2010 at 6:24 am
Make Collect phone calls, get busy signals, or kick people off the phone because you are 'expecting a call'.
25 minutes of homework a day, 45 starting in 6th Grade.
Be the 'class clown' (ADHD), a 'bully' (criminal, torturer), a 'weird kid'(social disorders) etc.
buy a treat ONCE a week at the corner store.
October 25, 2010 at 6:35 am
I'm only 25 and I remember doing all that stuff. Although I am from the south.
October 25, 2010 at 6:39 am
1. Getting up before dawn in the summer and riding my bike all over town when Glen Ellyn was my private preserve, swooping down winding hills like a hawk, walking like a lonely king through Lake Ellyn's Park. Nobody brought me home for breaking curfew.
2. Marvelling at all the fish swimming in the creeks of suburban Chicago, before they started using salt to melt the winter ice and killed all the fish.
3. Emptying the wastepaper into the wire container in the side yard and burning it every day. Fall was always pleasantly incensed with the smell of burning leaves.
4. Filling the stoker with coal every day to fire the furnace. Breaking up the clinkers in the furnace with the poker, taking them out and strewing them over our icey hill so the cars could get traction in the winter.
5. Climbing all over the new post war housing construction, getting pine sap all over my hands. Climbing far up the scaffolding of the new church that Monsignor built in 1956, solemnly writing my name on the inside of a matchbook cover and dropping it into the hollow of a cement block to be discovered and marvelled at centuries from now.
6. Listening to Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and the Green Hornet on the radio after school. See The Christmas Story for a depiction.
8. Having Measles and Chicken Pox with Mom bringing me breakfast in bed, listening to the radio all day long, including Don McNiel's Breakfast Club, Arthur Godfrey, Queen for a Day, Stella Dallas. Beat going to school.
7. Later as a junior in high school, preparing for a Russian invasion by going on maneuvers with my friends during the night at Glen Oak Country Club, they with their M-1 carbines and I with my Lee Enfield .303 jungle carbine. The Russians never showed up, but my buddies went on to distinguished military careers.
8. Taking down the screens in the late fall and putting up storm windows, reversing the process in the Spring.
9. Reading Jack Kerouac, dropping out of school and hitchiking around the country. It was not the flirtation with death that it is now. I would have been a hippy, but I was born 6 yrs too early, thanks be to God.
10. Going to Catholic schools when they were still Catholic, before the Baltimore Catechism was put on the index of forbidden books, when Fenwick HS was staffed by many Dominican priests steeped in St. Thomas Aquinas and before DePaul U. developed an interest in the unspeakable.