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I'm 80. Nobody can live in the 1950s and the 2050s, if I have to choose one, I certainly would not choose the 2050s. In fact, I an not even curious about what they will dream up and inflict on you.
I arrived where I am after an amazing run of good luck, and I got away with my mistakes. I'd hate to have start over and depend on that kind of luck again.
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"I don't understand. But I don't care, so it works out."
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Originally Posted by turkey-head
To be fair, I grew up in Southern Appalachia... outside a dying coal mining town. So that colors my memories of the 80's.
But lemme tell you... it was a whole different world back then. Some of that was good... much of it wasn't. But it was totally different. I feel like an old geezer when I reminisce about growing up in the 80's:
If you didn't grow up in the Cold War (or at the tail end of it in my case), I don't think you can really grasp what imminent nuclear annihilation meant to people, and how it affected society. My grandparents had a fallout shelter in their basement. The local schools and the local dam had fallout shelters. We had air-raid drills (though we didn't call them that)... and I remember that when Chernobyl blew every adult around damn near **** their pants. Read the book Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner and you'll realize how right they were to do so. IMO there are apocalyptic denominations of christianity still around today that largely grew out of that mentality... whether consciously or not. The Holy Rollers I grew up among were no exception.
We didn't have air conditioning until I was a teenager. Didn't have cable til I was grown and gone. We were poor but not *that* poor... this was common when and where I grew up. Even for kids whose dad *wasn't* occasionally unemployed and/or in a mental hospital.
In the world I grew up in, it was *common* for a man to build his own house. Literally put it together with his own hands. My dad did that- the preacher, his father-in-law, and his friends helped him out. My grandpa built his own house. So did several of my friends' dads. Today's cardboard castles built by Mexicans just didn't exist... at least not in Deepest Darkest Appalachia where I grew up.
Men worked on their own vehicles- this was the norm. If they weren't very good at it, they'd get a friend or relative to help out- hardly anybody could afford to go to a mechanic. Women raised gardens and canned stuff... seriously, they'd mess around in the garden all the time. When we weren't at our home almost directly under some high-voltage power lines, my brothers and I roamed the woods, rode our bikes for MILES in any direction, played in the river just down the holler. We climbed trees and cliffs... threw anything we could find off the cliffs. Got in fights with other kids in the neighborhood, built assorted tree-houses and crap like that. Chopped down trees with our hatchets that for some ludicrous reason our parents bought us when we were maybe 8. Got ran off the road on our bikes on a few occasions by the local drunk white trash... my brother and I both ended up in the hospital on separate occasions this way. But my parents didn't seem to think much of it We also enjoyed playing with the large jar of mercury that my grandpa kept on the mantle above the fireplace.
My friend lived in a rotten trailer house on top of the ridge... so rotten you had to watch where you step or you'd go through the floor (his half sister still lives in that same trailer thirty-some years later... no kidding). His dad worked for a foundry because the coal mines had closed down... never did make much money. So when they had supper, he was only allowed one serving- the kid was so hungry most of the time that he'd come over to our house where he could eat all he wanted. They didn't have room in the house for all the kids and step-kids, so he had to sleep on the couch. But he's doing well these days and still lives right across the road from that rotten trailer.
Our school was built in 1939 (I remember this plaque on the wall). Still had a boiler room to heat the cast iron radiators in each room (and this dirty janitor guy who would shovel coal all day). No air conditioning- ever. The playground had this 20-foot-tall metal slide... bare metal that would reach about 150 degrees surface temperature in the sun. With either jagged rocks or a mud puddle at the bottom depending on the weather. We also had falling-apart see-saws, some sort of basketball court thing that might have been level and usable in 1950, swings with chains that occasionally broke, and steel 'monkey bars' that we would throw each other off of. Oh, and field full of sharp rocks where we would play tackle football.
We used to have a Baptist preacher (Mr. George!) show up now and then and preach to all us kids assembled in the gym. At least he didn't dwell on hell so much like they did at my church. There was one Mexican kid who showed up at school one time... none of us really understood what that meant, we just wanted to hear him speak Spanish. He left after a couple months. Another time a these two half black kids showed up- their dad was black and their mom was white. I remember that it was quite a scandal, though I didn't really understand why. They also left after a few months. Nobody ever said why, but our barber was a Klansman (not even embellishing there), so I can guess.
The only computers we had in the entire school were three old Apple computers of some sort... took a 5 1/4" floppy. I was one of five kids selected to tinker with the computers after school. Learned to write a few very basic programs and change the colors around in f r o g g e r (it was a video game- why is the board censoring this word?). Also played some Taipan and Oregon Trail... damn the dysentery! That was pretty much the extent of my education on computers until I started tinkering with them as an adult. Anyhow we were the last class to 'graduate' from that ancient, asbestos-ridden, lead-paint-clad elementary school. They closed it down the year we left. It's still there, last I knew it was being used as a machine shop.
So, children, are you getting a somewhat different impression of the 80's than you'd get from Stranger Things or ET? I'm sure it beat the hell outta Sub-Saharan Africa... but the 80's weren't necessarily all they were cracked up to be. It was mediocrity of a whole other kind than we have today.
Your posts are so interesting to me, because for some reason I have an inordinate interest in rural poverty in Appalachia, since reading the book "Stinking Creek" about a mission project to help out Stinking Creek Kentucky. Written in the 1970's. GOD, that was poverty.
Your memories aren't about the 1980's way of life, Turkey Head, they're about Planet Appalachia. Nobody lived like you did in the 80's except the people time forgot - the rural Appalachians.
The rest of us all had air conditioning, (if they live in a warm climate) they didn't build their own houses, they didn't work on their own cars (except people who had a hobby of doing that), they didn't run around with hatchets chopping down trees.
Your wistfulness isn't for nostalgia, but rather, grinding poverty in a country where the Kennedys took trips out there to hang their heads in shame in the 1960's and vowed to correct it.
On the other hand, your memories ARE of an era gone by - somewhere around 1900-1920.
Your posts are so interesting to me, because for some reason I have an inordinate interest in rural poverty in Appalachia, since reading the book "Stinking Creek" about a mission project to help out Stinking Creek Kentucky. Written in the 1970's. GOD, that was poverty.
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I hope you have read, or will read, James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men". Probably the most important book I've ever read about Americana.
Your posts are so interesting to me, because for some reason I have an inordinate interest in rural poverty in Appalachia, since reading the book "Stinking Creek" about a mission project to help out Stinking Creek Kentucky. Written in the 1970's. GOD, that was poverty.
Your memories aren't about the 1980's way of life, Turkey Head, they're about Planet Appalachia. Nobody lived like you did in the 80's except the people time forgot - the rural Appalachians.
The rest of us all had air conditioning, (if they live in a warm climate) they didn't build their own houses, they didn't work on their own cars (except people who had a hobby of doing that), they didn't run around with hatchets chopping down trees.
Your wistfulness isn't for nostalgia, but rather, grinding poverty in a country where the Kennedys took trips out there to hang their heads in shame in the 1960's and vowed to correct it.
On the other hand, your memories ARE of an era gone by - somewhere around 1900-1920.
Thanks for posting, sincerely.
Glad you enjoyed my rant. I've never read that book, but Stinkin' Creek isn't too far from where I grew up. But I've been gone for well over two decades now, and will likely never be back except for the occasional visit. The land there is beautiful- I do miss that and a handful of friends and family still there. There's little else to miss about the place though, or the culture.
Southern Appalachia may be one of the more extreme examples, but I think a lot of people from rural areas would've had similar experiences growing up in the 80's. My wife is from Dust Bowl country...she grew up on a farm on the High Plains outside a town of less than 200 people. 90 miles even to a Walmart. Her childhood was similar to mine in a lot of ways. There are awful little forgotten places like this all over the country
And in a way they provide a real-time window into the past. A few years ago I drove through the Ozarks in Southern Missouri. It reminded me a lot of Appalachia in the 80's.
Last edited by turkey-head; 11-22-2018 at 10:46 PM..
Your posts are so interesting to me, because for some reason I have an inordinate interest in rural poverty in Appalachia, since reading the book "Stinking Creek" about a mission project to help out Stinking Creek Kentucky. Written in the 1970's. GOD, that was poverty.
Your memories aren't about the 1980's way of life, Turkey Head, they're about Planet Appalachia. Nobody lived like you did in the 80's except the people time forgot - the rural Appalachians.
The rest of us all had air conditioning, (if they live in a warm climate) they didn't build their own houses, they didn't work on their own cars (except people who had a hobby of doing that), they didn't run around with hatchets chopping down trees.
Your wistfulness isn't for nostalgia, but rather, grinding poverty in a country where the Kennedys took trips out there to hang their heads in shame in the 1960's and vowed to correct it.
On the other hand, your memories ARE of an era gone by - somewhere around 1900-1920.
Thanks for posting, sincerely.
The 1980s was when cocaine was a rich white people drug. Pre-AIDS so sex != death. MTV. Detroit still made cars that imploded before 100,000 miles. The beginning of the 80s was hyperinflation and a huge recession with higher unemployment than at the peak of the Great Recession. Cars finally had pollution controls so smog mostly went away. The Superfund happened in 1980 so the worst of the industrial pollution started being cleaned up. A long distance phone call was really expensive. Email only existed in corporations for internal communication. The internet by 1989 was limited to universities, defense contractors, the military, and some large tech corporations.
I’d like to go back in time knowing what I know now so I could invest in Microsoft and Intel and Sun Microsystems and Cisco.
The past is to be learned from, not reverted to. Look forward but remember where you came from. Reminders of that are ok, but understand technology will always change but your own ideas and thoughts should remain.
It's weird for me to imagine a life where you live in essentially the same world with the same level of technology as your father's father's father and you can expect your kid's kids to live in exactly the same world you did... but that was the norm for most of human history. I wonder if people in those circumstances even felt nostalgia for the times before them like we always seem to?
With live being so complicated and ever-changing it's only natural to long for "simpler times" but nostalgia is usually a semi-fantastical view of another place while wearing blinders.
I would not want to live in a earlier time... when it's all said and done we've got a broader perspective of what it means to be human than ever before but I would like to visit to see things that are now lost to time.
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We also enjoyed playing with the large jar of mercury that my grandpa kept on the mantle above the fireplace.
