under 40 dont bother reading this

[Deleted]

(Under age 40? You won't understand.)


You could hardly see for all the snow,

Spread the rabbit ears as far as they g o.

Pull a chair up to the TV set,

"Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet."

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My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread Mayo on the same cutting boa rd 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. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.colic

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

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

W e 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 a safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... Even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. 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, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

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 con struction sites, and when we got home, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) 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 there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

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 s he 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 ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T- SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING

[Joan]

:)Lou......................remember it all. You brought back alot of memories and like you, I wouldn't have traded it for anything. Great time was had!

[Deleted]

i remember all the construction on bathgate ave-- the street was totally dug up and i think they were laying pipe ---- they used to put those smudge type pots out that were lit to keep people from falling in the ditch -- we used to pour sand on them to put them out and then tilt them so the oil would run out onto our sticks that we would light and play whatever game we were playing at the time

[Joan]

I'm not familiar with Bathgate Avenue - heard of it, but don't know exactly where it was!