How On Earth Did I Survive It? (60+, physically, weather)

[tijlover]

I was talking to a friend of mine from childhood, she's 66, I'm 68, and we got to talking about our both growing up, across the street from one another in MN, in a small 800SF 2 bedroom house, with no basement.

Back then, one TV set in the house, so if Daddy wanted to watch Westerns, then you have no choice to watch it as well. Only one bathroom in the house, in my house shared by 5, in her house shared by 4, but no shower just a tub for bathing. And the biggest mystery of all, those long winters, where one January in the early 60's, it barely went above zero for the whole month, nighttime lows of 30-40 below, and there we were, trapped inside a 800SF prison. In her case, she slept with her sister who peed the bed until 4th grade! And for telephone, there were the Party Lines!

I'm still pondering it and always will, how on earth did I survive it all those years and what did we do to occupy ourselves during those long winters with no Smartphones, cell phones, Internet or even a TV in the bedroom?

How about you, do you ever ponder that, how you survived it without going Kookoo.

Of course this post wouldn't have much relevance if you grew up in a roomy middle class home.

[sweetana3]

We had 4 kids, mom and dad in a 900 sq foot house with a partial unfinished basement. One tv after awhile. Lived in Anchorage, Alaska. Most work was done around the big kitchen table. One awful small bathroom.

We still played outside all year, spent a long time on school and read. Visits to the library were very important.

I survived but still remember the wishing for privacy and quiet.

[Over the hill gang]

My parents raised us in a 3 bedroom, 1 bath home that was 973 sq ft. We only had 3 channels on the TV but to be honest, there was always something good to watch. We watched TV together each evening. All homework was done at the kitchen table and my father always checked it, even in high school. I remember I had to go to Library for a lot of my homework so I could use the Encyclopedia's.

I remember I walked alone to school each day, rain, cold or shine but it was only a couple of miles. There was no bus at our school then. My friends got rides with their mothers, mine said it would do me good to walk, that it built character. I got excited when I got a bike for Christmas because I figured I could ride it to school, much faster than walking but my parents never allowed it.

We had one phone in our house, it was in the living room and was a party line. I can't remember the year we got a private line. I remember not having any privacy as a child and teen. I disliked rainy days and when it was really cold because I was stuck in the house. My parents were really strict and could be abusive but I think it's what they knew and maybe they did the best they could.

My friend would invite me to go with she and her mother to the movies and I never had the money so I found work. During the summer in addition to my chores at home I worked several days a week from about 10 years old. I think I was the only little girl that did all that. While other kids were enjoying their summer I cut grass for people in our neighborhood to make money and I started babysitting from the age of 12 for people we knew and I did one ladies ironing each week. During the fall of the year I raked leaves for people. I only got .25 cent per week allowance and that didn't go very far. My friend would invite me to go to the movies sometimes and it was nice having the money to go and I saved for Birthday and Christmas gifts.

We didn't have video games, computers or cell phones. We played outside and didn't stay cooped up in the house on nice days. I had chores to do, a lot of them. I got spankings and nobody called and reported my parents for it. If you were bad at school you were sent to the principal and got a paddle to the behind and parents backed the schools, I never got paddled at school. All little boys carried a pocket knife back then, even to school and nobody was arrested or kicked out of school. I remember some of the teachers would make the kids wear a sign around their neck when they talked in class to embarrass them. One year, I think it was 4th grade we had a teacher that forced us to clean our plates at lunch. I wasn't a picky eater but there were 2 things I could not eat, liver and brussels sprouts. Sure enough I got sick on my tray which caused a chain reaction when she forced me to eat brussels sprouts. She never told me to eat them again but I got a spanking at home when she sent a note home telling my parents about it.

My best friend and I played a lot of board games and we did puzzles. During the summer we'd get a big group together for a big softball game. We also played hide and seek, tag, Badminton and all those other childhood games. During the summer we stayed out till the street light came on but sometimes we got to stay out later to catch lightning bugs. My friend who lived across the street was the 1st to get a nice big color console TV in the 1960's so I loved going over to watch TV with her.

I got a portable record player for Christmas one year and I'd buy 45's at the grocery store! Our house was small and I had to keep the sound down very low so it didn't bother my parents, no privacy.

We didn't have a microwave back then and no frozen dinners came in our house, everything was from scratch and during the summer months we ate a lot of vegetables from my mothers garden. Believe it or not I did most of the cooking when my mother went to work at the Post Office. I can't imagine kids today doing all I did from such a young age.

Believe it or not, I survived it all. There was good and bad back then but I'd gladly take those days over the way things are today in this world but that's just me.

[Normashirley]

IMHO, we were far better off "back then".

I was raised "farm poor". We had a small herd of dairy cattle, raised a few pigs and some chickens.

We had an ancient poorly built two story home with no insulation, which meant we slept downstairs in the NE Ohio winters -- NE enough that "lake effect snow" was often the first words out a baby's mouth

We had a smoke house where livestock hung once they stopped being productive. Chickens went in the stewpot when they stopped laying eggs.

Mom churned our butter, made cottage cheese and sour cream. Nothing went to waste.

I was an only child --- there was. O time to bemoan that fact -- dad had a wrench in my hand before mom could get a frying pan in it.

To say our life was Spartan would be an understatement. To this day I do NOT regret any of the hard work, or the playtime outdoors with my dogs.

Today we live in a soft and very spoiled society. If someone were to tell me I had to give up my electronic technological miracles, I would. I still live on a farm, albeit a "farmette" by real farmers standards. I still bush hog, I still muck my own horse stalls, and I still spend a few hours every day with my two remaining horses.

I would really miss the air conditioning, and be sad to see my electronic things go but it wouldn't be Armageddon. I would make the adjustment with minimal whining as it's in my DNA to spend as much time possible outdoors

[Corvette Ministries]

People are who they are where they are when they are.

I'm 63 and remember many of those things! Like many our age, my parents grew up during the Depression and wanted better for their families because what they had was rough. And we did have it better!

I remember fondly drinking from the hose, (which, BTW, had a distinct metallic taste,) riding my bicycle MILES from home at twelve years old, (with a playing card clipped to the fork so as to rattle in the spokes like a motorcycle,) and staying home with my little sister until Mom and Dad came home from work, (with the door unlocked.)

We all survived fine, despite all odds!

[athena53]

Just shared this with my brother and SIL. SIL had to share a bathroom with her parents plus 8 siblings. She and her 3 sisters shared a room with 2 double beds. I grew up with 4 siblings and it was similar; I remember when we had a new house built and Dad told the builder he wanted a bathroom off the MBR. The builder tried to talk him out of it but Dad prevailed. It was a little tiny space with only a toilet and a shower but that was Dad's castle.

It's interesting how much expectations have changed and how that's raise the price of an "average" family home- now it's practically child abuse to put 2 kids in one bedroom. A lot (not all) of the inflation in the cost of living is due to greatly-raised expectations. Like NormaShirley, though, there are some things I'd hate to give up. That list would include the Internet, Netflix, A/C and modern kitchens.

[thinkalot]

I think most have already listed how we survived.

We played outside. We played board games. We watched TV as a family. We went to the library.

I will add.

We visited relatives and they visited us. They all lived local.

If the parents were going to be gone we got on a different bus and went home with some other kid and our parents picked us up later. The other kids parents knew we were coming.

Cub scout, music lessons, and the YMCA. We had bikes and we rode them daily.

If our friends were gone on vacation or whatever we wandered around until we met a new kid and played with them. Lots of kids then. I lived on a street of 40 houses. There were 60+ kids born between 1947 and 1960 so there were always kids in the neighborhood.

[kevxu]

Uh, only one television? You were wallowing in shameless luxury tijlover!

But that observation made me realize you and I were in different eras.

I was born in '38, so - of course - you sat around the radio, and read the paper meticulously and then the grownups had their magazines.

I lived in a small town in western NY state, lots of snow, but zero temps would never last a month! I just looked up the house we lived in for around my first ten years to see the sq. footage, but the real estate site is showing an entirely different plot and house with its guesstimates. We rented a two-floor, not large house, covered in big, thick tar strip siding with grit for color, all the paint flaking right down to the bare wood. The landlord seems to have just let it get rundown over the years...but the years would have been the Depression and WW II. The street was very pleasant, lots of trees.

Four of us, two bedrooms, one bathroom with a tub, a toilet in a closet downstairs. And a kitchen that was a sink screwed to the wall and an electric stove. The kitchen cupboards were a bunch of shelves between the kitchen and the teensie "dining room," but there were doors on each side. There was a modest amount of furniture, most of it the discards of my mother's father and step-mother or friends. Linoleum floors that were freezing to play on, until my parents could buy a rug. A party line phone. Our number was 14-1R.

I think from what I read from younger women who post on C-D or hear women in their fifties or very early sixties say that they would have broken down in tears if they had been told this was going to be "home" and this is how it was likely to stay for...for how long?

But my parents had been headstrong - a pair of mismatched arrogant kids - they ran away and married, the Depression began, the first baby was deformed and died, work was catch-as-catch-can for my father....etc., etc. So, for my mother and father, and her widowed sister, who was the pulling-it-together survivor of her husband's shocking and front-page suicide in Rochester, NY, the condition of the house was a minor glitch. But in later years they never carried on about how awful the house had been, only mentioning sometimes how "plain" it was. For me spending my primary school years there, I only became slowly aware that it was the dumpiest looking house and lot on the street, but my mother kept it spotless and neat. I also did not understand until the landlord's wife yelled at me when once again I delivered the rent late that we were barely afloat financially.

The street had a very class-mixed population, and I saw how various types of people lived. Our bathroom was pretty much what everyone had. I don't remember neighbors with showers. Nicer laboring class houses had a few real kitchen cupboards. If we were cold sometimes, it was because we had to skimp on coal and as I recall it was rationed or limited too.

I loved the outdoors...the creek with meadowy sloping banks and woods, and we used the graveyard behind our houses for a playground a lot.

My aunt remarried, the landlord wanted to sell and the price was too high. My father was able to buy a small, dilapidated, filthy wreck of a Victorian house (actually one-half of the house next door, from which it had been pulled apart and put on a separate lot.) No heat - zero. The floor on the first floor was simply wide planks nailed onto the cellar beams, which had dried out over the decades leaving gaps large enough to see into the damp, smelly basement, which had less than 6 ft. clearance, so you always had to stoop. My mother and father and I slept in a small room off the kitchen, which just barely held their double bed and the child's bed which I still curled up in. This step down was a scourge to my mother, who was spoiled and vain, and got the picture that this move might leave us flirting with "trash" as a label.

[galaxyhi]

He he he.

I was a child in the 60s, a teen in the 70s.

My father was fortunate enough to get a job for a still productive fortune top 10 company, even without having finished his degree. ( they paid for him to finish the last semester to achieve it).

I came "prepaid" at the hospital. Meaning he had to pay the expected bill before my mother went into labor.

My parents considered themselves lucky to buy a house with a single bath indoor plumbing! Both spent a good part of their childhoods with only outhouses!

We must have been rich, as they bought a 1300 sqft 3/1 house in a development on the outskirts of town.

Because dad had had such a great job, we didnt want for Christmas. Plenty of toys and gifts and presents, oh, my!

I grew up mowing the lawn 3/4acre! First with an old rotorblade push mower. Later an electric one because mom hated the noise of a gas mower. Hell to pay when you ran over the cord! Only problem is it required raking the whole lawn afterward to avoid grass tracked in!

Except as a baby, i never rode in a car seat. The baby one had a steering wheel and a squeaky horn to push, and would certainly NOT be up to code today!! It was a metal frame with a cloth woven seat in it...kinda like a Walker for tots.

From age 12 i went out and worked at mowing lawns and raking leaves! Child labor laws now, lololol! Nowadays kids dont do that anymore. And i shoveled snow by hand too. And only one client had a riding tractor.

My father has made the comment more than once that with things like riding bikes all over town without a helmet, and no car seats, that " its a wonder we didnt kill you kids growing up!"

Mon smoked and i picked up the habit very young. Bad. Because mom couldnt walk so well due to a disease, i was often sent to the stores to buy cigarettes for her. As a teen. Even though the legal age was 18, you could pretty much buy them from age 14-15 at most places. You could also buy cigarettesfrom vending machines unattendedmost anywhere. I did quit 12 years ago for 10 years, but stress caused me to go back for the past two years. The goal is to quit again permanently by years end.

When you were at a neighbor's house and did something wrong or bad, you were sent home, and boy mother and/or father knew what you had done Before you got home! And there was often hell to pay!
And God forbid mother made you call your father at work to tell him of your bad acts! Boy when he got home...or else we were threatened with the phrase " just wait till your father gets home( my father was physically abusive by far he got carried away with corporal punishment. He beat us sometimes just cause he felt like it...with the admonishing phrase " I'm sure you've done something you need to be punished for ". Anybody remember the phrase, " ill spank you till you cant sit down for a week"???? That was him. We had to sit on a bank of pillows to sit down after any beating. He beat us till we were literally black and blue and had blisters on blisters.)

I rode my bike all over our (small town). No helmet, only a dime in my shoe for a phone call if i needed to call home.if need be.

I ride to school...3 miles, uphill both ways, actually. That i was allowed to do from 8th grade on.

Ah, those were the "good old days".

Only 3 tv stations, only 3 radio stations, until PBS came in to being. Then we had 4 of each. FM radio was great when it came out!!! I loved all three of those ( 4 with PBS) stations. Pop rock, hard rock and country, then the classical on PBS.

I thought i really had something when i bought my own 8-track stereo system! I thought it was cool as a teen.

Because we had a van to camp in, my father one Christmas bought a "portable " 12 " b&w tv, that also ran on 12 volts, so we could get news and weather while camping.so i was lucky...we kids could watch one thing on it while mom and dad watched stuff on the big tv. We got a color one at a festival held every summer by the company. Dad actually won that one year. Another year he won a 110 instamatic camera.
So we had a TWO TV household!!!!

Food tasted good, grandmother taught us how to churn butter from the nearby farms raw milk.

Butter, lard, fats and greasy food tasted sooooo good back then!!

Ah, a simpler time, a treasured time, long gone.

Thank you for this stroll down amnesia lane...

[katharsis]

I am not sure if the OP was 100% serious about asking the thread question, but the simple answer is that one makes do with what one has, one doesn't miss what one has never known, and if everyone around you has the same "poverty-stricken" (yes, I'm being sarcastic) life you have, one doesn't feel deprived.

I am sure that there is at least a billion people in the world would think they were very wealthy indeed if they lived in the typical 1960 "working class" home (which I had, too, when I was a child) unless they saw modern television shows or movies, or had access to magazines that showed the homes of celebrities.

(But I personally would rather live in a 1960 typical lower class home with electricity and hot water than to live in largest and most elegant palace of 600 years ago; and I really wouldn't even want to live in a modern-day mansion.)

P.S. When my husband and I started planning our retirement home about 15 years ago (we have just now, two weeks ago, bought a lot, however), HIS plan was about 5,000 s.f. (!!!!), while mine was "only" 900 s.f.. He did eventually come back to reality, however, and our planned home now is just around 1500 s.f. I still think I would be happy with just one bedroom, a full bath, and a fairly large kitchen, though, so long as it had a wood-burning fireplace!