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I was born in 1965 and when I was a child in the '70s some of the stores in the downtown area of the small town that I grew up in still had creaky wooden floors, the type of celing fans with the belts on them to connect them to a power source, and stamped tin ceilings all left over from the early 1900s. You could go down the block and find separate mom and pop stores for clothing, hardware, camera supplies and gifts, shoes, pharmaceuticals, appliances, and a five and dime, along with a few churches and family run restaurants. It was bustling all week except on Sundays when everything closed except for one restaurant. The yearly sidewalk sales in July brought everyone in town out to socialize and look for bargains.
Today, that whole area is comparatively dead, pretty much every store long gone and only a few legal and insurance offices and a restaurant left, everyone is at Rite Aid, Walmart, McDonalds, and Taco Bell out on the edge of town along the state highway. I would love for kids today to be able to experience what a small town downtown was like back then, people were friendly, everyone knew everyone, kids were safe to come and go as they pleased, most of the items sold were still made in America, not mass produced in China...I miss it. All most kids today know is big box stores, chain restaurants, and Amazon.
You could go down the block and find separate mom and pop stores for clothing, hardware, camera supplies and gifts, shoes, pharmaceuticals, appliances, and a five and dime, along with a few churches and family run restaurants. It was bustling all week except on Sundays when everything closed except for one restaurant.
We had streets of small mom and pop shops like that in every town I lived in, too. Kids today might be baffled if you asked them to go to a dry goods store. Or, if you asked them to run errands "down the street" and one of them would be to get taps put on their shoes (they'd probably think you'd need a dance studio for something like that). The idea that shopping had to be done on Saturday, because stores were closed on Sundays might make them wonder a bit, too.
This from Georgia in the 1950's/early 60's.
1. The smell of fresh-washed clothes as you're taking them down from the clothesline on a sunny day.
2. The family dropping everything to run outside to get the dried clothes because a summer shower about to hit.
Exact same time era....... running to get the clothes off the line because about 30 of the neighbor's cows got loose and are headed your way.
I remember my mom shooing my brother, our Collie, Lassie, and I into the house and then running back outside to get the clothes off the line. LOL
Right past us my grandparent's Dachsund, Rusty, was tied out in their yard, thought he was a gonner but the cows went right around his barking little self.
Our yard was full of cow pies and hoof prints!
Something else rare today......no lawsuits filed by any of the neighbors.
Also if there was a brisk wind coming from a specific direction, Grandma couldn't hang the laundry out at all because it would come back in the house smelling like the pigs on the neighboring farm.
Made from metal pipes, and built several levels high.
Boys would play 'King of the Castle', and if you slipped and fell you would hit several pipes on the way down before landing hard on the asphalt. No rubber mats in those days.
Made from metal pipes, and built several levels high.
Boys would play 'King of the Castle', and if you slipped and fell you would hit several pipes on the way down before landing hard on the asphalt. No rubber mats in those days.
I remember those being called "jungle gym". Lots of fun.
Made from metal pipes, and built several levels high.
Boys would play 'King of the Castle', and if you slipped and fell you would hit several pipes on the way down before landing hard on the asphalt. No rubber mats in those days.
How about swings with metal chains that pinched your hands, metal merry-go-rounds with wooden seats, those things on a pole where you toss a volleyball into the top and it comes out of one of the chutes on the side that determines your score, and tetherball. Also dodgeball in gym class. Do they still allow kids to hurl large rubber balls at each other from across the gym? We also had to square dance in gym class, I can't imagine that now.
Not only monkey bars, but no slacks for little girls to wear to school, so lots of "snow down under" showing while swinging on the monkey bars and wearing skirts or dresses.
That's something else that might baffle kids today. It used to be that elementary was kindergarten through sixth, then 7th and 8th grade were Junior High, then Senior High, 9 through 12.
Now they've changed this to "Middle School", which is, I think iin most towns 6th through 8th grades. My daughter went to the same schools I did, and it's still set up the same, with a K-3rd elementary, a 4 - 6 elementary, and then the Jr.-Sr. High School, but I guess with the need to be trendy, they stopped calling 7th and 8th "Jr. High" and called those two years Middle School instead.
Jr. high in my area was 7-9. The theory was to segregate the kids going through puberty from the hormone stew of high school. I don't know if it worked. I sure knew some sexually active 7th graders when I went through that age.
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Monkey Bars
