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Lol... with smart phones, tablets and computers I seriously doubt a VCR would baffle many 6 year olds today.
My 4 year old cousin knows how to video chat on a tablet... he's probably never touched a VCR. When I was 4, a VCR would be the most technologically complex machine I could operate.
Slingshot, home made with inner tube cut with jack-knife.
Inner tube
Jack-knife. In my pocket, 4th grade.
Baseball glove without webbing, pocket in the palm, use two hands,
Coins. You could buy something with a penny, lots with a nickel,week's allowance a quarter
Lawn mower whose blades went around when you pushed them
Bonfires
Walking to school
School on snow days
Mittens
Galoshes
Tire chains
Cars you could stand up in to see out the back-seat windows and ask queations about the world.
Cork inserts in pop-bottle caps so you could wear them like badges. Polio, when parents didn't have to invent imaginary fears.
Don't worry, the anti-vaxxers are making sure to bring this one back.
Buying a pair of shoes and using an in store x ray machine to see if they properly fit. 1950’s.
I've heard of those! Yeah, they stopped using those since it was determined the amount of X-rays was 50 times what medical doctors used for their x-rays today!
I have never understood the like for cursive handwriting. I know some people have beautiful penmanship, but I've never found it to be useful. I've never seen a "cursive font" in any sort of mainstream newspaper, book, etc.
It's main purpose, IMHO, is more fluid writing with far less effort - which is particularly important when one has to write a lot! "Printing" letters won't get you much beyond one page (if that! More like half a page!)
But, I guess these days when no one writes that much even at school, perhaps, it is not that important anymore?
Everybody knew. We knew who the pervs were, and pointed at them and made fun of them. Everybody in town knew each other. Half the population of the country lived in small towns.
True (well, mostly--in my neighborhood kids were taught not to make fun of people; but that may have just been because I lived in the midwest). Anyway, your main point is absolutely true. There were people on my streets that we kids were told to avoid, it's not like there weren't bad people back then.
And there were two people where the rule was never to go in their yards, even if you accidentally throw a ball over their fence. Years later I learned one had emotional troubles following something that happened in WWII and one was involved in the local mafia.
People sent so many Christmas cards that, the week between Thanksgiving and Christmas, our mailman delivered the mail twice a day.
That reminds me of another thing that might baffle people today: many towns had both a morning newspaper and an afternoon newspaper. So the baffling thing would be discussions about which newspaper to get your news from. The morning news people liked being the first to know, the afternoon news people bragged that they got the complete story.
Going outside. The graphics were better than any video game!
We were able to go outside and play, because our mothers were at home. Why is it today they are not? Well, look at how all the cheap labor has depressed the wages of everyone today. The women have to work in order to have enough money for necessities. Go back further, before the illegal alien invasions, and it was the women themselves who were "burning their bras" and throwing off the shackles of their home bound existence. All of a sudden the available workforce became more than he demand for workers. Employers could get the job done for less. When it began, women still had the choice to stay home. I wasn't long though, before it became necessary for the women to go into the workforce. In the early 20th century it was common for a middle class family to have a maid to help the women raise a family with more than three kids. Now, the only way you can raise a large family in a middle class home is for both to work. No Maid, and the kids are not at home either. They are in child care settings.
I am not blaming the women of that time. Heaven knows I could never have brought up children in that manner. I am merely pointing out one of the reasons kids grow up these days without a strong desire to play outside, like we did. Sure, the technology of today has a role in it. I think however, that technology has become a babysitter of sorts. If it weren't for the technology, and the mothers were home dealing with kids running around the house with all that pent up energy, the mothers would make sure they went outside to burn it off.
If I could go back in time and warn all those mothers who wanted to get out of the house and go to work, what the outcome would be, they would not have done anything different, so I don't blame them.
Just pointing out one of the reasons a family struggle these days when there is only one person making a salary.
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