when I was young....

[bigpoppapuff]

Another Goody For The Oldtimers

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. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting ecoli.

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.

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.

Speaking of school , we a! ll 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 construction sites, and when we got hurt, 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 $149 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 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 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

[cigarsarge]

I was around in those days...Life was simple and alot more fun.

[slcraiders]

What is a cell phone?

[chefchris]

[Empire23]

Why is that guy holding a urinal to his face?

[ukyfan]

Man do I remember those days! Another one that I remember is being in grade school and acting up got you a trip to get you butt spanked. What happens now if a teacher tries to do that?

[ashauler]

Man do I remember those days! Another one that I remember is being in grade school and acting up got you a trip to get you butt spanked. What happens now if a teacher tries to do that?

No shit....some of my teachers even had personalized paddles!! Complete with holes to improve the aerodynamics!!

[chefchris]

Well, I got paddling all the way up through high school, too! So there. I use to live in Jacksonville, FL and it took an act of Congress and the Presidents signature to be able to punish a kid like this. But when I moved up to Mississippi, aw man, every kid for themselves. I remember the first paddlin i got was because I threw a Chewbaca doll and hit my Math teacher in the head with it. From there on out, i recieved countless whoopings.

Another story, me and my best friend, Clint, use to get paddlings almost everytime we stepped into Mrs. Spearman's class. Class Clowns. She was an older woman, so it never really hurt and was almost always worth it. On one occasion, I recieved mine first, then stepped back to watch Clint get his. I kid you not, the woman was lifting her front leg off the ground. Classic.

[sprangalang]

Yeah, our PE teachers had humongous sneakers they'd use to swat us with. Looked like a size 15 blacktop.