Growing up in the baby boom years!

[Foxhound]

I/we did so many things when I was a kid in elementary school from 1957-65 in London, Ontario that I never see kids doing today:


* Walking just over half a kilometre to kindergarten unaccompanied by any parent/adult in the fall of 1957. Walking unaccompanied the nearly two kilometres to grade school in the fall of 1958.


* Just leaving the house in the morning to go out and play with friends, whether it was baseball, football or whatever activity in the park, or hide-and-go-seek or any other game right out on the street. Sometimes we'd ride our bikes as much as a mile away to a particular park or street. The key though was that there was no need to report to parents, so long as we were home by the time it got dark.


* Trick or treating on Halloween with my buddies without any balls and chains(a.k.a. adults) in tow. Using a pillowcase to maximize my haul.


* Being given bus fare and taking the bus downtown by myself for French, Lithuanian or accordion classes at the Ontario Conservatory of Music. The latter of course required lugging a full-size accordion on the bus.


* Hitting up my parents for a dime to go to the skating rink or swimming pool with friends. No parents to supervise of course. Pools had lifeguards. What more did you need?


* Hitting up parents for the twenty cents to go to the Saturday afternoon kids' matinees with two movies and cartoons or Three Stooges shorts at the neighbourhood theatre.


* Going out for little league football (Chester Pegg at the Normal School Grounds) without the parents knowing anything about it. I mean why would they care?


* Reaching into ice water coolers in variety stores to select soda pop in dripping wet proper ten ounce refillable glass bottles. Such joy on a hot summer's day!


* Roaming streets looking for empty pop bottles for the two cent deposit. I needed the money for cards, comics and potato chips because I was always collecting something.


* Going to the local library several times a week to check out books and read the newspaper and magazines such as Boy's Life, Model Airplane News, Life and Look. I didn't watch much TV at all since we didn't get a TV until the summer of 1961 in the first place and we picked up only one channel anyway. Nor was I allowed to watch TV on school nights either.


* Looking through the spinner rack at corner variety and drug stores to select ten and then twelve cent (eeeeek!) comic books. Specialty comic shops weren't even imaginable, let alone comic books that cost over 25 cents.


* Sneaking peaks at the titty magazines in corner variety stores.


* Flinging baseball, hockey, etc. cards up against brick walls in winner take all games with nary a thought as to future "values".


* Selling newspapers and chocolate bars door-to-door.


* Having an early morning or after school paper route.


* Being sent to the store to buy cigarettes for my dad, or six bottles of pop for the family.


* Hitting up my parents for dimes and quarters to buy firecrackers before Firecracker(Victoria) Day. I mean what's wrong with young boys letting off firecrackers? Playing with caps all year round.


* Playing with marbles, Yo-Yos and Duncan Spin Tops. Sidewalks would often be taken up by young girls skipping rope. When was the last time any of us saw any little girls engaged in this splendid aerobic activity?


* My skateboard was a first generation wooden one with steel wheels very much like this Nash Shark model here:





We didn't do any tricks with it. We just did our best to navigate down hilly pothole infested roads (such as Cove Road) without wiping out.


* Doing wheelies on my bike. That's something rarely seen these days. Whether wheelies are no longer fashionable or whether kids don't get the chance to pop any wheelies under the ever present gaze of helicopter parents is a question I can't answer.


* Playing nickel pinball machines at local variety stores or diners. There were no pinball arcades in London at the time. Then the killjoys banned pinball machines as potential gambling devices for about a decade.


* Building model kits and slot cars. Racing these slot cars at the hobby shop track downtown (Cowan's Hardware). Kids don't build models anymore. Kids these days aren't interested in anything that doesn't provide instant gratification, i.e. anything not TV screen related. Just check out the clientele of the few remaining hobby shops. They're all aging boomers.


* Firing up the .049 Thimbledrone engine of my Cox Spitfire gas powered plane in the house. What a racket! It was line control but I never mastered the trick of flying it without crashing immediately. I had to order a new body from Cox to replace the one I'd shattered beyond repair.


* Playing with pea shooters. My parents giving me a BB gun and a bow and arrow with a steel point.


* Carrying a jack knife around for games such as knife baseball.


* Going for a dip in the creek behind the house on Phyllis Street which my father had dammed up to form a swimming hole.


* Camping out in a tent overnight with friends in the backyard.


* Climbing trees.


Oh, I'm sure modern parents would all be aghast. They want the kids safe in front of the TV with video game consoles at all times. And that's why so many kids are obese and end up with deadly peanut and bee sting allergies. Keep kids squeaky clean and of course they don't develop their natural immunities. And of course when these overprotected kids eventually leave the nest to go to college or somewhere, they're all snowflakes with such fragile egos that they need "safe places" where they can be insulated from dissenting opinions/inconvenient facts.


Deny kids deadly pea shooters and (heaven forbid!) metal lunch boxes and they end up arming themselves with real knives and even guns to go to school. It's the principle of the dam. Keep denying kids whatever is "unsafe" and the pressure just keeps building up and building up till it explodes.


The ultimate irony of course is the parents who demonize sugar (of course their inactive kids don't need the extra calories). These kids then take to experimenting with alcohol, pot, crystal meth and cocaine at first opportunity. It's the boy who cried wolf syndrome. "Hey, remember, you were the ones who told us sugar was so bad! You think we're going to listen to you now when you tell us to avoid booze and drugs? And what about all that Scotch and gin you drink and those sleeping pills and pain killers you pop all the time? Sure, sure, we kids are going to listen to you old farts. Yeah, right."

[bannedforlife]

Did all those things. I haven't run into anyone since I was a kid who knows what knife baseball is (maybe there are some people here who know). My brother and I lost the old man's knife through a hole in a pier playing knife baseball. As I like to say, he was too pissed to speak on the drive home.

I came from a big family and we were trained not to ask for anything: no birthday or grading presents like the other kids. My friend "Adolf" would always get a grading present, a new bike etc. I asked my mother why I don't get a grading present and she said "We expect you to grade". A ten year old isn't equipped to battle logic like that

Christmas was big for us. Contradictingly (if that's a word) because we never asked for anything, on the rare occasions I did ask for something I got it. On two birthdays I asked for two things on the list above: a skateboard, and the infamous Cox PT19 control line trainer.

The skateboard was about $30 in the mid/late 70s (a fair sum). It was fibreglass (all my friends had soft plastic cheaper boards) so I caught up and surpassed them. I even was able to get the black grip tape to go with it Was never into comics but did get skateboard mags for a while. Had a great article on how to build a halfpipe (be the first on your block) but being so young I figured the snow in the winter would rot the wood so I didn't bother. The thing was huge though, not a little ramp.

I was kinda impatient so I couldn't figure out how to fly the airplane so we took it back. I always kind of regretted that.