The way we were

Every generation is nostalgic for the days of their youth. Regardless of who you are or how old you are, most of us look back on those days gone by with fond and loving memories. Every generation brings new ideas and concepts to the world we live in and only history will be able to determine whether or not those things were ultimately good or bad. I would like to reminisce a bit in this column by looking back at my youth and the way we were a opposed to the way we are. Several things in this particular column were submitted to me by one of my former students, Angela Vaughn. Others have been bandied about the Internet for so long that authorship is not known and yet others come from yours truly. I hope you enjoy.

Everyone over 35 should be dead. According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the '40s '50s '60s, and maybe even the early '70s probably shouldn't have survived. Our baby cribs were covered with bright-colored lead-based paint and had high sides with bars that could have easily suffocated us, had we gotten our heads caught between the bars. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. Hitchhiking was a popular way of travel. We would ride in cars with no seat belts, child protection seats or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. We drank water from the garden hose rather than from a bottle. We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and kool-aid that we added sugar to, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

We shared our soft drink with all our friends, all drinking from the same bottle, and no one actually died from this. There were as many surrogate parents as we had friends because parents actually kept track of where their kids were, who they were with and what they were doing. We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then rode them down the hill, only to discover we had forgotten the brakes. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, unsupervised, and it was okay as long as we were back home when the streetlights came on. We played baseball together, without coaches or other adult supervisors, until it either became too dark to see the ball or we ran out of the black tape we used to replace the cover after we had knocked it off. When we would call one of our friends to make plans, the operator (ours was named Thelma) would tell us where they were if they were gone and when they would be back.

Once we left the house, we were unreachable because there were no cell phones. We didn't have Play stations, Nintendos, X-Boxes, video games, cable television, videotape and DVD movies, surround sound, home computers or Internet chat rooms. We had friends instead. We went outside and found them. We played dodge ball and sometimes it would really hurt if you got hit just right. We fell out of trees, jumped off bluffs, got cuts and scrapes and broken bones and knocked out teeth and no one ever sued anyone else. Because they were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents? They're becoming extinct because we now have a mindset that places blame on someone else for anything that might happen to us.

We had fights and punched each other and got black eyes and broken noses and learned to get over it. We made up games, usually using sticks in some form or fashion, that would entertain us for hours and we ate worms and, although we were told it would happen, we didn't put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell, or most often, just walked on in. No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked. And you got in big trouble if you accidentally locked the doors at home, since no one ever had a key.

We had girlfriends who wore our letter jackets and our class rings, almost always wrapped on the inside with huge amounts of tape so it wouldn't fall off their fingers. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. There was only one graduation and that was when you successfully completed the 12th grade and some people didn't graduate. Some students weren't as smart as others so they failed a grade. I don't know if grades are still failed or not because we certainly wouldn't want to injure a child's delicate psyche by suggesting to them that there were certain things they had to learn before they could be promoted, regardless of how long it took. Exams in school were not curved or adjusted. Our actions were our own. So were the consequences. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. In fact, they actually sided with the law or the school officials and whatever happened to us there was minor compared with what we faced when we got home.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. Because of that, those generations that lived then as youth has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors the world has ever known.

Writing this column has reminded me of the two mantras I created so many years ago and have always tried to live by:

"The leading cause of death is life." "If you live every day as if it were your last, one of these days you'll be right."