Hey old timers, I was just thinking.....

[Paper Roses]

How did we ever make it this far in life? I'm not talking politics, I am talking about the things we grew up with that are now considered dangerous, deadly, unhealthy. Some of the dangerous ones are obvious. But here we are, still prodding along.

Remember:
Mom smoked
Lead paint
Asbestos shingles and insulation
bike helmets
(NO) seat belts
No car seats or at best, horrible ones
No electric plug caps
No cabinet locks to deter toddlers
Ever played with a ball of mercury? I still have a tiny bottle but they want $25.00 to dispose of it.
Gone all day to play, no worries
Never heard of a pedophile
Halloween candy that was safe including the 5 cent huge Hershey bars.
No diet coke and the like.
Juice or water was all you got.
Good food from the stores, home grown. Can't remember if we ever say a country of origin label,
now it is standard to look and omit some.
Sodium? Who looked, MSG, who ever heard of it.
Bread tasted like bread. Now we have to but the fancy artisan bread to have something worth eating.
TV? That was the thing the neighbors had. Now the kids overdose on it.

Tons of other things in this vein.
Yet, here we are, still chugging along. What do you remember?

[monmouth]

1. If you were lucky enough to have Grandma living with you , you

might get homemade bread once a week, a cake and frosting made from scratch, a trip to the shoe store where you could see an x-ray of your feet, milk on the porch in the morning, walking to town and a neighbor would pick you up and drop you off where you wanted to go with absolutely no fears and $.50 would get you into the movies with a gazillion cartoons, great news footage and a feature film along with popcorn and maybe a soda....

[elifino]

2. Add DDT TO THAT LIST

[shanti]

18. oh yes

i'm (only, lol) 55, but remember when dad was in the AF in japan. we lived on base and they would have trucks spray for skeeters many nights in the summer. i will never forget the smell - nasty!

i grew up in southern california mostly though, during the 60's, and one of the high points of the day was when the the helm's man came around in his truck selling junk food in the summertime. i especially loved the fresh chocolate donuts - yumm!

[T Wolf]

3. Here's my take... we have made "some"improvements in health, etc. like lower-fat

foods, exercise science, etc.

BUT these "advances" are merely (sometimes) only keeping us even with the general degradation of our planet and our lives that we have engineered.

We are sedentary much more than in previous generations, so all the exercise and physical beauty bullshit is only compensating for a lifestyle much more destructive than that of our parents.

We eat shit, and much more of it. Without the diet foods and other "improvements" we would all be 100 pounds overweight.

So, all those things from the past that could kill us are still here, but we are a little smarter about them (who didn't play with mercury?). Problem is, we have added so many more things to the danger list that living itself is problematic. Without the "advances" - we would all be dead already.

Like everything - one step forward and two steps back.

[LiberalEsto]

4. Trick or Treat for UNICEF

The milkman leaving big blocks of ice with the milk on hot summer days
Fins on cars
Roller skates with keys
Eyeglasses that look like the ones in Far Side cartoons
Girls prohibited from wearing pants to school except on very heavy snow days, and we only wore them under our regular dresses and skirts and took them off along with our galoshes
Going steady and wearing a guy's class ring on a chain around your neck
Root beer floats and Coke floats
Saddle shoes
Girls wearing their hair in two braids
Soupy Sales
Buying cheap makeup at Woolworth's
Pop bead necklaces
Reading about Alaska and Hawaii becoming states in My Weekly Reader
Listening to the first U.S. launch of astronauts on the teacher's tinny-sounding transistor radio
McDonald's was a once-a-year exotic treat
Atomic bomb drills

[napi21]

5. Oh I remember ALL those things.

I don't think they even made protecs...iI had man skinned neew to prove that!

I remember ONE doc took care of everybody in the family including delivering babies AND actually answering the phone when yu caled to ask his advise. He didn't demand you come in or refer you to some specialist, he just told you what to do and/or called in a prescription for you.

All meat really tasted GOD unlike now where they've bread out so much of the fat most things taste like flavored cardboard.

There were NO fat kids in your class at school.

Dad made us a rope swing with a small piece of tree limb tied at the bottom to sit on, and it swung out over a deep ravine.

Teachers diciplined you if you misbehaved and were praised for it. If you got in trouble in school, you got in worse trouble when you go home because of it.

You could go to a Sat movie & buy a box of popcorn all for a quarter!

[Warpy]

7. Yeah, but that doc you called was often not so wonderful

The one my parents called completely missed the fact that a fourteen year old kid with red, swollen, painful ankles had a problem that didn't involve riding her bike too much.

My problem turned out to be rheumatoid arthritis, the crippling kind.

Of course, his incompetence might have done me a favor. Most of the treatments then were brutal and did no good.

[sarge43]

8. Yup. Took me years to overcome my fear of dental work thanks to that brute

who thought kids should "tough it out".

[Warpy]

9. My mother took me to one of those one time

but I knew how to push her buttons. I told her the equipment was dirty and never got taken back.

[jaysunb]

10. +1 n/t

[sarge43]

6. And how many of our contemporaries are pushing daisies, not chugging along.

How many died of cancer before their time because smoking, 'cides in the food, water, buildings, etc.

How many have rotten teeth and digestion problems thanks to that junk candy and food?

Wonder bread did not taste like bread; it tasted like grout.

No, we didn't hear about pedophilia. However, we now know it was pandemic. We didn't hear about illegal often lethal back alley abortions either.

If a person grew up during the Cold War and had an imagination, it was not care free, not with weekly duck and cover exercises.

If you were WASP and had a decent income, yeah kinda good old days. Otherwise, no so much.

[SharonAnn]

19. How many died of polio, measles, chicen pox and mumps? I knew several.

[damntexdem]

11. Tell it to those who didn't make it because of those things.

Just read it out at their graves.

[meow mix]

12. i remember rising cancer rates. and rising birth defects

rising alzheimers disease. ect

im sure everything youve mentioned is just totally safe though!! more lead!!

[LiberalLoner]

13. I remember playing outside all day with all the other kids...if the weather was

decent, none of us wanted to be indoors. We felt safe, and we were pretty much unsupervised. (BTW, I was born in '61.)

I remember "Sock it to me" and flashing peace signs to the other kids in school in the hallways as we walked past.

I remember AM radio and how we were glued to it from morning to night to hear the music.

I remember watching TV the day we walked on the moon.

[Still Blue in PDX]

14. Far too many of my former classmates haven't made it.

I've lost many co-workers in their 50s and several in their 40s, mostly from cancer that very well could be attributable to all those things listed in the OP.
:cry:

For myself, I was constantly sick as a kid. My parents took many measures to treat my allergies, e.g., throwing away all my stuffed animals, tearing up carpet, putting plastic on the furniture. It never occurred to anyone that it might be secondhand smoke making me sick, though. Both parents smoked and my stay-at-home-mom was never without a cigarette in her hand. She also drank too much and was hooked on "diet pills."

My dad was a functioning alcoholic and got drunk every weekend and beat up my mom. I didn't think anything of it since it was fairly normal amongst the parents of my friends. Divorce would have been a very bad thing, so they just stayed together, got drunk, and fought. We were a very typical middle-class family.

Racism was the norm.

On the upside, dad could support a family of four and except for the house my parents were debt-free. They scrimped and saved for major purposes and bought nothing on credit.

It wasn't all bad, but it wasn't all good, either.

[Paper Roses]

15. My post was one of those 'shake your head in wonder' things.

We all lived through many of the things some of you mentioned. It is amazing that so many of us are still here. Those years were generally good but had dangers lurking all around us of which we were unaware.

I was born during WW11. If I had the time or a good enough memory, I bet I could compile a list of today's blacklisted stuff a mile long.

My post not meant to be a critique but rather a list of some of the things that we somehow lived through.

I laughed at some of the posters who understood my intent.
DDT in a flit can--at least that is what my Dad called those pump cans. He sprayed it all over the place. I can remember the smell of that stuff.

[trof]

16. I bet you drank straight from the garden hose, too.

;-)

Lessee...
Tying a balloon so your bike's spokes hit it and you thought you sounded like a Harley going down the block. At least for a few minutes until the balloon popped.

Simon Sez
Taking Giant Steps and Baby Steps playing "May I?"
(Was that game teaching us manners?)

The Yo-Yo Man who visited the school playground during recess each Spring.
He was always a Filipino and the school authorities didn't see to be concerned about a stranger on the grounds.

Huge downtown parades of soldiers just returned from WWII.

Ration books.
(Yep, I'm THAT old.)

The Vegetable Man who toured the neighborhoods, ringing a big bell, in an old truck with the back converted to a 'produce aisle' with in-season veggies.

Your family's charge account at the local non-self-service grocery store which sent a monthly bill. And the first time they let you take the grocery list there all by yourself.

Hitting an entire roll of caps with a hammer or a brick for a REALLY BIG POW!

Carefree days...carefree days.
:-)

[Paper Roses]

17. Heck, I even remember when milk was delivered by truck.

The milkman would give us a chunk of ice to chew on. He came twice a week, left the milk in a metal box on the porch. The Cushman's bread man came 2 times also. Mom would only buy whole wheat or oatmeal only. I was jealous of the kids who had white bread sandwiches in their lunch.
Your thoughts are all included in my reverie.

The Caps? Remember the smell of those things? In my neck of the woods, every once in a while you'd come to the train tracks just in time to hit a 175 car train. Seemed like hours of waiting. We always counted the cars.

My neighbors son had baseball cards clipped to his bike spokes with a clothes pin to make the fluttering noise.

Sheets and pillow cases make from grain sacks during the war rationing. Damn seams all over the place.

"Oleo". Push the button around to turn whatever that stuff into something that looked like butter.

Here's a good one. Bleach in glass gallon jugs. Ever hear Mom yell if that thing broke? Nightmare!

[dixiegrrrrl]

20. You and me, trof....

I remember seeing a man in uniform walking by, on crutches, one leg gone. 1949.
Ever since then the saying " I complained because I had no shoes, until I saw a man with no feet"
conjures that picture.

NO parental supervision. Played outside all the time, all we had to do was SAY when we going past a certain point...more than one block away, or past the grocery store.
Anything stupid we even thought of doing was pre-emptively addressed by our parents:
" If I catch you doing****** you will wish you were dead!"
They meant it, too.
Altho we always volunteered to let the starving kids in China eat the food we did not like.
" So send this stuff to them then!" Height of sassyness ,that was.

Bicycles were freedom!!!! Age 8, I had a bike, and put cards in the spokes, with clothespins, to make that cool sound. Off on the bike, all day long on weekends, summers, the angle of sun told us when to come home.
Age 9..a whole quarter a week allowance, plenty for the movies and drink and popcorn, and we could sit thru the matinées twice, if we were sneaky. And TWO of us on one bike to and from the movies
( for reasons I forget).

even sneakier was going into the alley behind the corner grocery, taking a couple of empty pop bottles off the cases sitting there, and returning thru the front door to sell them for ...a nickel? I forget how much. My brother and I were smart enough not to hit the same store more than twice a month.
Bicycles and alleys...what a combo.
Favorite thing in the whole world was a pack of Fisher's Sunflower seeds ( 5 cents), a long summer day and a good book. By dinner time I would be puckered up and craving water.
Remember when you only "got to" drink ONE coke on Friday nights after school?

Miracle my brothers and I came thru alive, looking back at some things.