My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but I didn't get food poisoning. Did your mom do that? Did you ever get sick?

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. My school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't remember getting e-coli. I don’t remember the lunch ladies wearing plastic gloves while they served our Sloppy-Joes.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in McKamey Lake, Parksville Lake or a friend's pond, 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 or Converse All-stars or (more likely) black sneakers from F.W. Woolworth's, only worn in gym because we were not allowed to wear sneakers in school.
No 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 all said prayers, pledged allegiance to the flag and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We wore "nice" cloths. No jeans. No Tee-shirts. No provocative skirts or scoop neck blouses.

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. What did we have? Channel 13, 8, 5,… Any others? Even then, most of us watched TV in Black and White.
Remember the Ed Sullivan show, when the Beatles came on? (Mom and dad made me go to church.)

Dr. John Lillard had the first color TV I ever saw.

Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed! How many bugs did we swallow while running wind sprints at football practice? Remember how you could tell the football players by the huge scabs they had on their elbows caused by the rock hard practice field? Where was the ambulance? I don’t remember ever seeing one at any of our games.

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, football on any area large enough to be considered a playing field, tackle Korum (?sp) on a stone school playground, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (we liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked for being hurt.
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.

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?
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DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN...?

We all had ugly gym uniforms?
It took five minutes for the TV warm up?
Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when we got home from school?
Nobody owned a purebred dog?
When a quarter was a decent allowance?
You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?
Our Moms, and some of the girls, wore nylons that came in two pieces?
All our male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore heels?
You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time? And you didn't pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?
Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents?
They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed. . and they did?
When a 57 Chevy was every guys dream car...to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or go to the "submarine races", and we went steady?
We never needed a house key because the doors were never locked?
Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like, "That cloud looks like a" and playing baseball with no adults to help us with the rules of the game?
Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?
With all our progress, don't you wish, just once, you could slip back in time?
Remember when being sent to the principal's office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited you at home?
Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!
But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.
Remember Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy, Howdy Dowdy and the Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk?
How about summers filled with bike rides, baseball games, Hula Hoops, bowling visits to the Oaks, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.

Remember WALKING when you wanted to go somewhere?

Remember hearing "Go out and play"?

How many of these do you remember?

Candy cigarettes, wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside, soda machines that dispensed glass bottles, diners with tableside jukeboxes, Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum, home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, Newsreels before the movie, P.F. Fliers, Keds, telephone numbers that were only three digits long, party lines, peashooters, 45 RPM records, Green Stamps, Hi-Fi's, metal ice cubes trays with levers, Mimeograph paper, Beanie and Cecil, the Ken McKenzie show, roller-skate keys, cork pop guns, drive-ins, Studebakers, washing machines with wringers,
the Fuller Brush Man, Reel-To-Reel tape recorders, Tinkertoys, Erector Sets, The Fort Apache Play Set, Lincoln Logs,15 cent McDonald hamburgers,5 cent packs of baseball cards with that awful pink slab of bubble gum, Penny candy, 35 cent a gallon gasoline.

Do you remember a time when...
Decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-moe, catcha...."?
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, "Do Over!"?
Catching fireflies in glass jars could happily occupy an entire evening?

It wasn't odd to have two or three "Best Friends"?
The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was "cooties"?
Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot?
A foot of snow was a dream come true?
Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures?
"Oly-oly-oxen-free" made perfect sense?
Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?
The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team?
War was a card game?
Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?
Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin?
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?
Where did those days go?

I am a child of the 50s. I am a child of the 50's I am a child of the fifties. I am a child of the 60s. I am a child of the 60's.
I am a child of the sixties. I am a child of the 70s.  I am a child of the 70's I am a child of the seventies.

I was a child of the 50s. I was a child of the 50's I was a child of the fifties. I was a child of the 60s. I was a child of the 60's.
I was a teenager of the sixties. I was a businessman of the 70s.  I was a child of the 70's I was a child of the seventies.