I spend a certain amount of time in the past; not that I’m stuck there (okay my wife and kids might say different), but I definitely like to revisit. I’m by nature a history buff and enjoy hearing the stories of those who have traveled the roads of life ahead of me. I like museums and have been known to brake rather spontaneously for historical markers. I have the same feelings for nostalgia as do others when I hear music from the 70’s and 80’s — The Eagles, Dr. Hook, Journey, REO, Boston, April Wine, and too many other bands to name. I think back on the challenges we faced — the Vietnam War; the Cold War. I feel a certain amount of satisfaction for the achievements that were made — the Space Shuttle; the end to the Cold War. I’m reminded of the brands, fads, and names which became popular — Jordache, Yugo, Members Only, Hacky Sack, Disco, Boomboxes, big hair, and clackers — I loved the Clackers, until they started exploding. Good times!
Oh yeah, and there really was GoodTimes with J.J and “Dynomite!”
Sometimes I wonder if the world has really changed that much, or if we just know more about it. I mean, maybe it was always a crazy world out there, and we’ve suddenly become more aware since the world is more readily available through television and the internet. There was a time when Uncle Walter Cronkite came on and offered the news, matter-of-factually, once a day, and now we have it thrust upon us 24/7. Perhaps some of the things we see in the world today were happening all around us, but just hidden from our eyes because communication operated at a fragment of where it is today. Or, maybe the world has literally flipped its lid. I don’t know. What I do know is the world I grew up in was very different from the one my kids have grown up in.
We had the freedom of learning from trial and error. You know when you’re a kid out there being involved in the world, sometimes you fail, fall, flunk out, and get hurt. You make mistakes, and you learn from those experiences. It seems sometimes as parents, we forget that. We don’t want our kids to get hurt and we over protect, even from their own emotions. Hey, today, they all win, because we don’t want to them to feel like losers.
We rode our bikes everywhere (with no helmets) — around town, up to the cafe, out to the cemetery, even to Beaver. We were dropped off at the American Legion building to roller-skate for hours. We could be gone all day without being expected to check-in every fifteen minutes. Eh, usually we had at least a vague plan or general target for location we would share with our parents before taking off on a Saturday morning, but a plan to meet up with Mike could have easily morphed into football at Joe’s or a hike out to the dump with a group to plink cans. Of course there were no cellphones, no “Find my Friends” to make sure we were safe, no text messages, or Facebook messenger.
We walked ditches along the highway and the streets of town gathering empty pop bottles, returning them for the deposit money (recycling before recycling was popular — seems it’d be a good idea to go back to that). We walked through the cemetery just to read the headstones. We went door to door selling garden seeds, Christmas candles, greeting cards, candy bars, and anything else that might make us some money. There were any number of money making ideas in BOYS’ LIFE, along with the ads for x-ray glasses, rockets, gags, gifts and plans for that hovercraft or the mini-bike.
There’s a night which sticks out in my mind when I traipsed all over town until late in the evening with a friend getting customers for the GRIT Newspaper. We’d tried selling so many things that our parents told us the only way we could sell the GRIT was if we got a list of customers who would buy it before we started selling it. There was a heavy snow, but we wanted to make money, so we were out in the snow knocking on doors until about eight o’clock in the evening when my friend’s parents came looking for us. When they finally got us home, our toes and fingers were numb from the cold. The point being that we had the freedom to follow those crazy moneymaking ideas, even if it kept us out walking all over town.
We had Explorer Scouts and youth groups, sports, class parties, and school plays to keep us occupied. We had fall carnivals and the freedom to have a bit of mischief on Halloween. Sometimes we had the inspiration of those who came before us to stimulate our creativity, like the high schoolers who put the outhouse on the school steps or set bags of cow manure on fire down the middle of the road. I remember walking to school the day after Halloween and seeing trees draped with toilet paper, bales of hay and pumpkin guts scattered throughout town — hey, at least they were biodegradable. Those trailblazers motivated the most mechanical among us (the names will be withheld) to reach and achieve more by building a catapult to launch watermelons and pumpkins out of the back of a moving pickup. Still, I don’t recall outright destruction or permanent damage to personal property as part of our historical legacy. I do remember a few teachers who got in on it by having their own supply of eggs and tomatoes for any “delinquents” who dared to try to toilet paper or soap their homes. I’m sure that would go over well today.
Today’s kids can’t seem to wrap their heads around what possible enjoyment we got out of dragging Main. Yet, we spent hours driving back and forth over the same quarter mile and honking at friends, with little regard for the sixty cent price per gallon for gas. Listening to AM radio or the same loop of eight-track tape entertained us. We had some of the best bands in history to listen to; some that can still fill up a civic center today. Our playlists were cassette tapes recorded off American Top 40. They were broadcasted on Boomboxes, or listened to privately with a Walkman clipped to our waist. We found reasons to have a dance and were amazed at DJs who had strobe lights and fog to go with the 45’s they were spinning. When CDs came out, we thought we were on the cutting edge and tossed turntables and vinyl into the trash. Who knew they’d make a comeback?
Being from a small town, feeling the impact of the outside world moving beyond us, allowed us to hang on to the innocence a bit longer — something we considered lame back then, but cherish today. Those who didn’t go skiing with the church youth group on Spring Break spent it hangout with the rest of us losers, or sleeping in.
Since there were a lot of farm kids who got a head start driving around the farm, most kids back then knew how to drive by the time they got out of junior high, even some town kids. No no one seemed to freak out when they saw a kid behind the wheel though he might be a few months short of a driver’s license. Power braking was popular. Some were known for spinning tires down to the cord, and trying to see how long a black mark they could leave on the road. Almost every pickup at school had a shotgun or a 22 cal. semi-auto rifle in the back window rack. There was nothing out of the ordinary about seeing a couple of kids carrying a rifle through town on their way out to plink cans at the dump. No one freaked out because some kids had guns, but then I can’t recall anyone threatening to shoot-up or bomb the school either.
Uh, some of us probably learned to chew tobacco by buying it at the store and putting it on our dad’s ticket. It’s a high probability that we turned green the first time we tried it and should have learned from that mistake. It’s also possible that it was chewed in the back of the school bus, and there is also a high probability that a certain bus driver, who we believed had no idea what we were doing back there, might have turned on the heater in the back just to teach us a lesson, but then those could be a rumors as well. And drinking– well… uh…yeah there is a strong possibility that happened, too. We might not have wanted to say that out loud around our kids, but…yeah there’s that. Was it smart? No. That’s why we tried to get our kids to act more intelligently.
Sometimes we got into trouble, and sometimes we had to pay for it. In fact, if we got into trouble at school, we probably paid for it twice — once in the principal’s office and then again when we got home. There were always rumors as to which of the faculty swung the paddle the hardest, even in high school, and stories of how the principle had drilled holes in his paddle which had increased its aerodynamic efficiency, and therefore, its effectiveness. Of course there were those who got enough experience that they were authoritative critics in that area.
I suppose every generation has its own way in which it tests its wings, its own forms of delinquency, its own hunger for freedom, and its own stubborn style for stretching the boundaries within society. The craziness of adolescence has been going on as long as puberty itself, but it’s the dangers of growing up which one has to question when they read the headlines in the newspapers, see the Breaking News, or hear the Amber Alerts. Those are the things which keep parents up at night; far longer than the fact that they are missing eggs, shaving cream, and toilet paper on a Halloween night. As crazy as the seventies and eighties were, I just don’t know if they stack up to today’s world. But who knows? Maybe things just seemed simpler when the world was an eight-track tape playing over and over and over and….
