Some Thoughts About The Past In Black & White (how much, attorney)

[_Charles_]

A friend of my mine emailed this to me at work. I thought it was pretty good.

I saw this an had to laugh. Too good not to share :-)

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PAST IN BLACK & WHITE


How many of these do you remember?

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 icepack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli

Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli

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 all said prayers and 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 $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 our 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

Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.

[sierraAZ]

Originally Posted by _Charles_

A friend of my mine emailed this to me at work. I thought it was pretty good.

I've seen this before. I'm totally with ya, but it ain't gonna change a thing... Can't cross the same river twice... it's gone!

[PG77]

Those were the days!

[aj661]

I heard on the news of another haz-mat incident at a valley school. Someone spilled a drop of mercury. OMG!!!!

When I was in the seventh grade, they gave every student a drop of mercury to hold, roll around in our palms, then coat a coin with it. Thirty-five kids at time in a classroom playing with "liquid death". It's been forty years now, so when do we start dying from mercury poisoning?

[Captain Bill]

A couple months ago two neighborhood kids ages 4-6 were playing unattended in the vacant lot next door to us, which is on the lake. They were sitting at the lakes edge and throwing pebbles at the ducks. Had either one of them fallen in they would have drowned, because they don't know how to swim.

My wife told them to stop throwing rocks at the ducks and get away from the water.

One kid who lives two blocks away said to the other, "that's not your mother, you don't have to do what she says".

He didn't know who he was fooling with because my wife doesn't take any crap from anyone, and especially from a 4-6 year old who is being a brat.

She said, "get your butts out of that lot right now or I'm going to grab you by the hair of your head and drag you all the way home and tell your mother what you were doing. Now get out of here and don't come back".

They left without a word. And they don't come back to play in the vacant lot.

This, as I see it, is the result of not having discipline at home, and not being taught respect for others.

I got my butt whipped (whupped, as we said in the south) for misbehaving. It didn't take me long to figure out how to avoid those "whuppings".

Bill

[Ponderosa]

Originally Posted by aj661

I heard on the news of another haz-mat incident at a valley school. Someone spilled a drop of mercury. OMG!!!!

When I was in the seventh grade, they gave every student a drop of mercury to hold, roll around in our palms, then coat a coin with it. Thirty-five kids at time in a classroom playing with "liquid death". It's been forty years now, so when do we start dying from mercury poisoning?

That explains a lot .

[PG77]

Originally Posted by Captain Bill

A couple months ago two neighborhood kids ages 4-6 were playing unattended in the vacant lot next door to us, which is on the lake. They were sitting at the lakes edge and throwing pebbles at the ducks. Had either one of them fallen in they would have drowned, because they don't know how to swim.

My wife told them to stop throwing rocks at the ducks and get away from the water.

One kid who lives two blocks away said to the other, "that's not your mother, you don't have to do what she says".

He didn't know who he was fooling with because my wife doesn't take any crap from anyone, and especially from a 4-6 year old who is being a brat.

She said, "get your butts out of that lot right now or I'm going to grab you by the hair of your head and drag you all the way home and tell your mother what you were doing. Now get out of here and don't come back".

They left without a word. And they don't come back to play in the vacant lot.

This, as I see it, is the result of not having discipline at home, and not being taught respect for others.

I got my butt whipped (whupped, as we said in the south) for misbehaving. It didn't take me long to figure out how to avoid those "whuppings".

Bill

When we got whupped it was with a belt or the occasional extension cord (but that was only when I hid the belt) i believe that would be child abuse nowadays, eh?

[SOON2BNSURPRISE]

In the "old Days" I remeber our milk being delivered from the old Chase Brothers Dairy, (Still in business but sold in supermarkets.) to our door step. The bread and bakery came from Helms Bakery (Not in business anymore,) in a truck driven in the neighborhood each day. I remember all the moms going out to get there bread and cakes or what ever, around 9 or 10 am. That gave the moms time to make lunches for the family. I walked home from school each day to have lunch, since school was a block away. McDonalds was a treat that we were lucky to have every couple of months. Who needed to go out to eat, out moms were home making dinner by 4pm so that it would be ready when our dad's got home from work around 5:30pm. I have a colection of Pepsi Bottles from all over the world. Kids today never knew that soft drinks come in a bottle. They might swallow the bottle cap. I grew up near the ocean (still live there now.) and we knew how to check for the undercurrent that could drag you out to sea. Kids today are told to stay out of the water and never get to understand how the ocean works. I have friends back in Iowa that grew up testing the ice in the winter time, so they knew when they could go play on it. Now kids fall in and drown, because they never learned how to test the ice. We have hurt ourselves by protecting ourselves. Mom isn't home anymore to watch over us and give us direction. Many times dad isn't around either. In some cases dad isn't even known. My friends say that Fathers day is the most confusing day in South Central Los Angeles. Isn't that sad. I know we can never go back, but it is so nice to read a thread such as this to remember what it was like not too long ago.

[PG77]

I remember we used to entertain ourselves, not expect our parents to buy gadgets to keep us entertained. I remember catching grasshoppers in a jar, with plenty of airholes and letting them go, climbing trees, and playing in our gravel driveway scraping out roads and houses so we could drive our little toy cars on them, my brother and I setting up army men on the floor and rolling marbles across the floor and whichever men were knocked down first that country won. Now, it's buy me Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox and on and on. Oh, yeah, and I remember raking grass off of people's yards in order to get money to buy some candy and collecting pop bottles for the deposit money

[sierraAZ]

Originally Posted by PG77

I remember we used to entertain ourselves, not expect our parents to buy gadgets to keep us entertained. I remember catching grasshoppers in a jar, with plenty of airholes and letting them go, climbing trees, and playing in our gravel driveway scraping out roads and houses so we could drive our little toy cars on them, my brother and I setting up army men on the floor and rolling marbles across the floor and whichever men were knocked down first that country won. Now, it's buy me Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox and on and on. Oh, yeah, and I remember raking grass off of people's yards in order to get money to buy some candy and collecting pop bottles for the deposit money

I keep hearing there used to be normal days around here... Must be true. Wish I joined at the right time...