It was normal back then... A thread about our youth

Research papers in highschool actually required you to go to a library and research, or at the very least find books to check out to find information.  It required learning how to use a card catalog and the Dewey decimal system.

I was lucky enough to have a pretty prestigious small college in my town and we could use the library so we had a great place to research papers.  And if you had parents, family or friends that worked for the college you could probably find someone to check certain ones out for you.  It was also where I learned to look up old articles and find them to read on microfilm or microfiche.

If you had to order something or saved up to order something special it was 6 to 8 weeks shipping time for the norm.

When a new movie came out you saw it in a theater or you didn’t see it for a long long time.  I was a junior in highschool before VHS took over Betamax and more and more people could afford them.  We got our first local video rental store when I was a Junior. 

I think the internet and 24/7 news just makes us more aware. We never knew what was happening in other cities, unless it was something really major. We only had 30 minutes of World News, and an hour of local news. Both were shown at like 6PM and then again at 10PM.

I had to look it up, but seatbelts were not mandatory in California until 1986. You would think California would be one of the first, not last. I know it was in the 80’s when I went skiing and some of us were riding in the back of a van, no seats and no seatbelts. I remember our dad made a “bed” for the backseat of the car when we were kids. We would use it on long trips to sleep on while dad was driving. And one time a bunch of us kids piled into the back of a pickup truck (with a camper shell) for a ride up to Magic Mountain (amusement park) for the day. No seat belts for us.

Anyone remember candy cigarettes? I would walk around thinking I was “cool” with it hanging from my mouth. And we had cap guns as kids.

We had thermos’ that were made from actual glass. I don’t know how many times I would get my thermos out at lunch time, shake it and hear the broken glass inside of it.

I remember as a ten year old going to get my Dad a couple of cigarettes at the little shop on the corner. Never questioned it because that was just the norm back then!

So many of these resonate. How did we survive? Seatbelts were mandatory in 1977 where we lived.

I hated the smoking, my memories are being car sick all the time when someone smoked in the car. That cured me of ever wanting to smoke.

I played softball on a community team and basketball and volleyball teams in high school. Few parents came to watch unless they had to drive the team. I know I rode my bike to play ball. Parents being at the games just wasn’t a thing.

Rear facing until 1 year or 20 pounds.

Now it is 2 years and 40 pounds. Some do it still at age 3.

Yep.  My one neighbor (the "mom") was able to produce this incredibly loud, shrill 2 finger whistle, and it rang out throughout the neighborhood very easily.  Other moms just yelled out kids' names.  And you'd go home for dinner and bedtime/dark according to those calls, but otherwise we came and went where we wanted, when we wanted.  In our cases, we did tend to stay probably within maybe a 6 block radius most of the time simply because there were SO many kids in that radius, along with a corner market, a shopping center, a corner market with penny candy, and 2 parks.  So we didn't feel the need to go any further, most of the time.  Two more blocks and we could be right in town.  We did tend to tell our parents if we were going there.  But otherwise, we were in the roads, the woods, backyards all over, abandoned properties, you name it.

And as a kid, it was fantastically fun.  We all had oodles of fresh air & exercise.  We learned to mostly solve our own squabbles with one another.  We learned how to deal with many other adults other than our parents.  We used our imaginations and were incredibly resourceful & imaginative.

I think myself, my siblings, and most of the other kids in our neighborhood had pretty idyllic childhoods in most respects.  I'm still in touch with most of those kids, and for the most part, they all seem to feel the same.

Having to ring a friend on their landline and hoping neither of the parents answered.

Walking everywhere, unlike America, cars were owned by adults and not even all adults, so as kids and teens we walked, rode bikes or took buses to wherever we wanted to go.

While I didn’t feel like my parents couldn’t stand me, the rest of this was very true. Literally from the minute we finished our breakfasts, my mom was chasing us outside. When I was a kid, I *HATED* being outside. I would much rather hole up in a corner somewhere with a book than be outside doing anything else.

We had a swingset in our back yard but we didn’t have a decent playground with slides or swings anywhere close. Even the “playground” at our school was nothing more than a blacktop parking lot. There were a couple vacant lots a few blocks away and that was where we would go to play. Sometimes the older kids would start up a pickup game of baseball on the bigger open lot. My younger brother and I preferred to hang out by ourselves in the smaller one that was overgrown with crabapple trees and we would eat the crabapples from those trees until we were almost sick.

I have vague memories of walking the loooong walk to kindergarten alone. It was about 3/4 of a mile from our house to the school, mostly a straight shot. She walked with me with my little brother in a stroller for the first couple weeks so I would learn the way, and after that I was on my own. There was an older kid who was a police patrol who would meet up with me a couple blocks from school and walk with me the rest of the way.

I think your comment about parents being absorbed in their own lives is kind of ironic for back then since so many complain now about people constantly looking at their phones and ignoring their kids. It seems like nothing has really changed then, it’s just that people have different distractions now.

So many of the other things people have posted resonate with me too, especially the nonstop smoking, ugh. I’ve always hated that and never did smoke myself as a result.

Something else no one has posted yet was that for my family it was normal for my mom to always be baking something. We always had things like homemade cookies, cake, pie, apple crisp, using whatever was in season. These days it seems like nobody does and I can probably count on one hand the number of people my age and younger who know how to bake anything more than break apart cookie dough from the grocery store. People are always surprised when they’re eating something I’ve made and they’re like, “You MADE this?” 😆

In a related vein, my mom sewed a lot of our clothes back in the day too. Now no one even knows how to fix a button that popped off.

Not only did we sit in the back of station wagons but did so with the big back window down.

Riding in the bed of pickup trucks on the main roads.  😬

We'd sit back there and gesture to passing tractor trailers to try to get them to honk their horns. We celebrated like mad every time we got someone to honk, and we booed and hissed when they didn't, LOL!

Smoking/non smoking sections on airplanes. Like it worked. You are in a closed cabin, you could still smell the smoke in the non smoking section.
Cigarette vending machines.
Catalogs in the mail. At this point, even magazines in the mail.
No car seats, no seatbelts, riding in the back of pickups.
Calling for the time.  
Prank calling people.

My best friend's parents chainsmoked and I remember sometimes you couldn't see across their living room. Thankfully, we mostly hung out in her bedroom or the basement. But I remember my mom wanting me to not take too much with me when I spent the night because it all came back smelling so bad.

I always walked to school - only 3 blocks but "blind" from our house and crossing 2 streets, one big one. My mom would watch me crossing the big street until 3rd grade when she went back to work because I had epilepsy and she was afraid I'd have a seizure in the middle of the street. Middle school was 8 or 10 blocks away, so for that it was worth it to ride bikes. We had 6th grade in one building and 7th/8th was across the (busy) street, but a few electives (band, home ec, shop, maybe others) were over in the 6th grade building, so if you were in those you had to leave your school and go to the other in like a 4-5 minute passing period, completely unsupervised.

The (only) town orthodontist was a freaking genius because he built a new house just across the street to the side of the 6th grade building, catty-corner to the 7/8, and made the basement his office! So, if you had an ortho appointment, you just left school and walked over there on your own and - theoretically at least - came back when it was done. There was a convenience store across the alley, so lots of people made a side trip there for candy or cinnamon-flavored toothpicks before going back to class.

In HS, we had the smoking area too. But in the late 80s, even though most parents still smoked, it was really just the "undesirables" who used the school smoking area. Pretty much all the guys dipped, though. We could have gone anywhere, with no car trackers or cell phones, but weekend nights, we just drove up and down that one street over and over again, just like everyone else, until we were old enough to get into bars.

We used to ride bikes everywhere from about age 5 on up until we could drive a car! I'd ride 10 miles each way on a sketchy road to go to the next city over's pool that was nicer than ours when I was about 12. My bestie lived about 5 miles away, and I rode to & from there on busy streets frequently from 9 or 10. There was a church in the neighborhood that had a big ramp and a hilly sidewalk that was fantastic for riding on, and it would never have occurred to them to run us off (for insurance reasons), because we weren't causing any trouble.

I didn't ride to too many babysitting gigs, though, because of how late I was usually done. We thought nothing at all of getting in the car alone with whatever family's dad, though. People were more than happy to pay a 12yo kid $1.75/hr to watch 3-4 kids, always with at least one and often 2-3 in diapers still. Now, no one would even consider a 12yo sitter for one kid!