THEN versus NOW

[JustaCashier]

.....(well returning home when the street lights came on)...

I totally had forgotten using the streetlights coming on as a guide as to when to go home!

And ah yes! The Stingray bike!

It took me a long time to learn how to ride on two wheels! Age 7, I think.

As I remember it, which of course may well be inaccurate some 47-48 years later, () I immediately started to beg (whine?) for the Stingray, the very second I was able to balance on two wheels on the old second hand bike I had before the Stingray!

Mine was a blue Schwinn, single speed and pedal brakes, (locking them up and skidding was about the most daring thing I ever did on that bike), and the cool shock absorber mounted on the front.

The banana seat was one of the glittery type, with the smooth, clear plastic cover, as opposed to the more grainy (fake leather look, I guess) seat cover. Learned early on no to wax the seat, when doing so to the rest of the bike.

The seat height adjusting points at the rear wheel, were not the style shown in the photo that sms001 posted, but rather continual tubes, with clamps for the adjustment. My older, and much larger Brother, wrecked my brand new pride and joy, when he took it for a ride, (without my, or the parents permission as I recall), took a corner too fast, and bent one of the seat adjuster tubes.

Of course, I was pissed beyond belief, but Dad fixed it by just cutting the bent piece off, and an equal amount off the other side, and I eventually got over it.




About three years ago.

Mike

[Antisocial_Worker]

My brother was born in 1970, and my mom had a house in town then. She would send him up the hill by himself to the supermarket all the time, if she was cooking and needed something. Only, he wouldn't really be alone... our enormous black lab/St. Bernard mix dog would usually follow at a discreet distance. And because the dog was heavy enough to trigger the pressure plates for the automatic doors, my brother would usually end up inside the store being trailed through the aisles by a giant black dog the size of a small horse. Nobody at the store ever said anything... they knew us.

[Crossbow]

I tended bar at a restaurant when I was six. Made the drinks better than my dad did. Worked in the kitchen at the fryers, too.

[Cia]

- exploring abandoned mine shafts built in the late 1800's w/o hardhats or other safety gear beyond flashlights. (Yeah, my hubby and brothers weren't to smart.)
- riding bikes w/o helmets
- bottle rocket wars
- walking around the neighborhood in the middle of the night (had fights w/ my mom about this one - it was perfectly fine for my brothers and their friends to do this but according to her our friends, my sister and I would be attacked - by whom she would never come up with a straight answer.)
- tubing through culverts between the lagoons at the park
- tubing down Rapid Creek
- riding our bikes all day until it got dark
- jumping off a cliff in Dark Canyon into the creek (I have acrophobia so I skipped this one)

[El Pollo Guerrera]

- riding a bike around town without a helmet.

- being allowed to walk downtown by myself.

- "Trick-or-Treat"ing with parental supervision... me and my friends would cover half of the town before crashing after the sugar high.

- again with Halloween... eating the candy without having the parents go through the bag to make sure it was safe to eat.

[MoonCat]

Oh, one more.

My grandfather used to provide music for lawn fetes at local churches. He would haul a bunch of huge speakers and his big reel-to-reel tape recorder to the church. The tapes were full of music he'd taped from his extensive collection of record albums. Polkas mostly but other stuff also. He'd control the music from a table set behind the bar in the beer tent.

My siblings and I were allowed to go behind the bar and sit with him, when we weren't running around out on the lot playing the games and trying to win goofy stuffed animals and buying goodies to eat. We'd sip his beer and doodle on the cardboard placemats and play with whatever toys we'd won at the games. Our father would take us home late, after 11:00 when the fete was closing down.

No way they'd let kids even go into the beer tents now, let alone sit behind the bar.

[PaperTiger]

I remember riding my bike hell-for-leather down a gravel road, no helmet, no nothing, always wondering if I'd meet a logging truck coming at me from the opposite direction. Somehow my siblings and I all survived that!

And I remember getting sick at school once in the third grade (this was back in the late 70's), and my mom didn't have a car to come pick me up. We lived way out in the country, btw. So the principal of our school drove me home, and depended on me to show him the way. Nowadays they would have left me at school, puking into a bucket, rather than risk having a seven year old girl alone in a truck with her male principal!

[cindybubbles]

THEN: My mother left my sister in her stroller outside what was then known as The Bay. She went in to see a friend and thought nothing wrong of it. She left her child outside the store.

NOW: A few days ago, I reamed out a woman who left her child in a stroller in Sears while she was checking out the electronics department. The woman could not have been more than 100 feet away, and her child was inside the store.

[taxguykarl]

- "Trick-or-Treat"ing with parental supervision... me and my friends would cover half of the town before crashing after the sugar high.

- again with Halloween... eating the candy without having the parents go through the bag to make sure it was safe to eat.

Not only that but accepting goodies that were not factory wrapped...especially homemade
There was an old widow in my childhood neck of the woods who made the most awesome cookies. No TP ever touched her house, as there were some self-appointed guards to make sure of that.

[Ceir]

I remember playgrounds with blacktop and mulch, and the bigger play structures were wood. None of this 'My First Playground' molded plastic stuff. The only real safety concession was that the climbing chains were sheathed with rubber; aside from that, it was up to you to figure out how not to get hurt.

So much this. My playgrounds in elemntary school were wood and metal over gravel, and dangit, we liked it! Jumping off things, picking rocks out of your shoes (and occasionally palms)...how about seesaws, merry-go-rounds, and the big metal slide that fried your butt in the summer?

[ADeMartino]

Who remembers the Mini-Boggan? My school had a HUGE hill behind it, and we would all bring our sleds to school so we could go careening down the hill during recess on this hunk of plastic with only a hunk of rope as a hand grip. The speeds you could achieve on one of those things were amazing, and many were the times we'd end up in a tangled mess at the bottom of the hill.

[ADeMartino]

Nobody? It's official - I *AM* either senile or hallucinating. Perhaps both.

The 'Mini Boggan', for those who aren't quite as 'vintage' as I am, was basically a sheet of thin plastic (maybe 4 mm thick, if I remember correctly) with a rope handle on one end. You climbed on this thing when it snowed and could go rocketing down the side of a hill at some pretty damned impressive speeds. And you could go even faster if you borrowed dad's car wax and slicked up the bottom.... There no runners, no brakes, no way to steer at all. And unlike an inner tube, no cushioning other than that which genetics graced you with. We always came back home pretty banged up because we'd end up in woods or ditches or plastered against the side of a (hopefully parked) car. And once the snow of the hillside got packed down by hundreds of kids with these things, it got even more terrifiying fun.

I haven't seen a Mini-Boggan in probably 35 years. Looking back, I realize just how dangerous they were. I can only imagine the product was withdrawn because of the potential liability.

[sms001]

Nobody? It's official - I *AM* either senile or hallucinating.

Oh, I remember them, but they were for rich kids - we just used flattened out cardboard boxes.

[wolfie]

Nobody? It's official - I *AM* either senile or hallucinating. Perhaps both.

Except for the handle, that sounds like both the "Krazy Karpet" and the "Slide-a-boggan". Neither had a rope handle - one had a couple holes for hand grips punched out near one end, the other had a plastic handle.

[ADeMartino]

Come to think of it, mine might have had a plastic handle originally. The rope might have been a repair.