Battle Hardened Kids

How Did We Survive?

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes. My Mom smoked. Then after birth, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints with bars wide enough to stick our little heads through and strangle on.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, no locks on doors or cabinets. I can remember as a kid the product “Janitor in a Drum” that looked like wonderful lime-ade that was under the kitchen sink cabinet. I never drank it though but it was accessible. When we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. My friends envied Evel Knievel and we built ramps to jump garbage cans with our bikes. More than a few of us landed badly. Cars of that time had no air bags whatsoever and the seat belt in the back seat was stuffed under the back cushion as it was an annoyance.

I drank the awfully chlorinated Pawtucket water from a polypropylene hose. Bottled spring water from Maine then? Never heard of it. Four of us would drink Coke from the same bottle and I don’t remember anyone contracting anything.

We ate those pink Hostess Snowballs, white bread and real butter and everything was full of sugar, but we weren't overweight because......

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. Mom’s of that time thought we were “underfoot” and shoved us out the door at every chance. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem. Trial and error didn’t kill us.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes nor video games at all. We had three major networks and fuzzy UHF channels. We had no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms. We had friends and imaginations instead.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. We played in the dirt and probably had numerous microscopic thingys crawling on us from that. As kids, we all should’ve received Purple Hearts for wounds. I can remember falling off a 40 foot railroad trestle into a disgusting algae filled river. I was sideswiped by a moving car when I was eight while riding my bike. Mikey fell off his bike and smacked the pavement so hard he was knocked out.

We made up games with sticks and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes. The same goes for BB guns.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Everyone was not a “winner.“ Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. There were no “Thanks For Participating” trophies then. Imagine that!!

We fought one another. Boys vs. boys and girls vs. boys. There was plenty of equality between the sexes then when it came to dirt yard scuffles. Over some argument when I was nine, I had smacked Gail S. across the face. She responded by gut punching me when I wasn’t looking. I saw Carrie M. swing a pool skimmer into John’s face about something I forget now. Yes, we were a violent bunch of rug rats at times then.

None of us died, no of us became deathly ill and we had FUN.