remember being young and playing outside from early morning until late at night??
dreher
Member Posts: 8,892 ✭✭✭✭
If you remember playing outside all summer long, you probably had a great childhood!! Riding my bike all morning until the pool opened at 1:00. Season tickets to the public pool so all afternoon in the pool swimming. Kicked out of the pool at 6:00, a one block sprint to my home. Flew in the door ready to eat!! Famished!! Ready to eat the north end out of a south bound skunk, raw!! 7:00 out the door, back to the pool until 9:00, home again change out of the swim suit, head outside. Neighborhood hide and seek games or water balloon fights, maybe crawl in the door at 11:00. Fall into bed. For some reason I never had trouble sleeping back then!! 😂
Get up the next morning, repeat!!
Am I the only person who would find a perfect hiding place for hide and seek, get stuck taking my little brother with me, who would blow my perfect hiding place when he would get the giggles??? Funny now but it sure wasn't funny when I was 10 or 11!!
Wonderful, wonderful memories!!
I wonder what kind of memories todays kids will 60 or 70 years from now?? 😕
Comments
yepper .....riding a Schwinn Green Phantom bicycle all over our small town day or night .... cannot afford $3K + for a restored one but did find a perfect repro 11" x 6" NIB...got it sitting on the shelf with scale model of 53 Ford convertible, 52 Chevy pickup, and a 79 silver Trans AM ...all of which i have owned...... mucho memories
5.00 Supper Time. You did not miss being there to tell the folks what happened all day. If something went haywire my name was usually associated with it.
Been there and done that dreher. I grew up across the street from Glen Oak Park in Peoria, IL in the '40's. Springdale Cemetery was just a block away. We used to play in both places. Those were the days - not a care in world. Now look what we have. 😕
I remember waiting till it got dark enough for kick the can. 11:30, 12:00 ... 12:30 ... eventually it did get dark. Sorta. We had to fake it a lot.
What children miss the most I bet is being free range kids that could go in the neighborhood and play from morning to night and feel safe. Not anymore the idiots starting coming out when they began poisoning the Halloween candy in 1970's.
serf
Living in the country on a small farm playing was limited. You worked your tail off taking care of the animals then go to the field. After supper, still daylight head to the POND, as a swimming pool. 🙂
Mom usually appreciated it if we hit the pond, before dinner, to rinse some of the smell off...
We would be at the neighbor's house playing kick the can until 10:00 at night in the summer. After a full day of riding bicycles, playing baseball, catching turtles in the woods etc.
My brother's 11 and 12 year old grandchildren just visited for 2 days. He lives on 5 acres way out in the country. Last year he built a tree house for these kids.
I just got off the phone from talking to him. They stayed two days and didn't go near the tree house. They spent all the time indoors playing video games.
When I was 8 years old we built our own tree houses.
I did tell brother I feel sorry for kids growing up these days. We didn't have video games, or Iphones, or air conditioning. All summer had to go outside and do stuff! Seriously, I think it is bad for the brain of a kid to sit inside playing video games for 12 straight hours.
LIke Grasshopper I grew up on a farm . Saturday was about our only free day as an almost teen . We , all the neighborhood kids would ride bikes , roam the neighborhood at will . Just be home by dark
Mom used to tell us "Just be home before dark"
We used to carry one of the little Morton salt shakers, took the pucker out of green apples and removed blood suckers after swimming.
Nope, I grew up on a farm and there wasn't much "play time" after I was 6 or 7 years old. Closest thing to play was riding my pony to bring in the milk cows. By 13, I was the primary farm operator and if I wasn't in school, I was working. In summer, I got to go fishing if it was raining too much to work and in the winter, got Sunday afternoon off to go rabbit hunting .
Gone after breakfast, home for supper (in the summer time). Man, home was the last place you wanted to be.
I'm soooooooo glad that I grew up without cell phones or computers, heck, I didn't even see a color TV until I was eleven but boy did we live life, always in the woods or the beach and almost never wore shoes. The soles of my feet were like elephant hide, now it hurts to walk on concrete. :-)
I have a million great memories and very few of them involved the "indoors".
I grew up in town ( a very small town ) but the couple blocks around us there was about a dozen maybe 15 kids all with in a couple years of each other . dark thirty was time to head home . so many stories and memories that most kids will never do .
cap guns with cowboys and native American's just does not have the same ring to it 😮 collecting pop bottles to get any spending money at 3 cents each . ya that would go over today , a quarter would buy buy you a 16 oz bottle of pop and a full size candy bar and a pop bottle to turn back in
it was also nice having the "older " maybe 2 or 3 years older LOL kids , boys and girls who taught us younger kids a lot about things ( well a long time before the internet leave it at that )
simpler times and I would wager most generations say that about them self growing up . I can say it holds true for me any way .
I spend a lot of time with my grown kids and I've always got a story for them. Both of them have said many times how much they feel they were born in the wrong time. Like they don't "belong" today.
I told them it doesn't have to be that way. Just because you're surrounded by mindless peers that spend their life inside their phones, you don't have to. So both my kids are constantly out doing stuff that scares the pants off me, but they're home by dark. Now I know how my parents felt!
my two sons had the fun of there grand parents on my wifes side of the family they had a small section of land with a creek and scrub trees . a wonder land for most young boys ( now not so much i would guess ) my boys loved to spend time with them , we just talked about that a few days ago . my MIL and FIL were good old southerner folk ( as my mom and dad but they lived in town ) and laid back big time the boys and there cousin had run of the place . I would hate to guess what they got into to ( same as all of us i would say . )
I commented once if they wanted to burn the couch my MIL would have handed them her lighter .
'nother farm boy here. Lived 12 miles out in country, "next door" was 2-1/2 miles away (same corner as our mailbox)
No telephone, 4 sisters and 2 brothers. Spent lot of time by myself in dad's shop, built Soap Box Racer.
Then got big enough to drive tractor and that was start of some long days. They perfected tractor lights just in time for me to enjoy plowing after the sun went down.
8th grade summer dad put me on his second combine for wheat harvest. Hired hands ran grandad's combine and dad's newer one while I got the older one (all John Deere 95's). Two weeks of 16-hour days to get it all cut.
Only time I saw the city swimming pool was when we drove the combines past it moving from one field to another.
My son's have thanked me for not raising them like that!
yep
farm life is not as easy as some think . although some actually do have time to play I had a old landlord that would go to Florida every winter then come back in time to plant . and i knew others similar but most all I knew it was 24/7 work always something going on with the farm .
early on in life I had a farm girl GF and helped on the familys farm some . for a city kid it was fun for a while like a week or two 😁 they were third or fourth generation farmers I think every uncle ,cousin had a farm , I did enjoy all the open land , but the work not so much . I feel for all you farm kids
My roommate in college was on an athletic scholarship, linebacker for the football team. We'd go work out in the gym and he was immensely strong, all over. I asked him about it once, he said he got strong at an early age. During hay season he'd walk along behind the baler and pick up the 100# bales and throw them up onto the trailer. He said it made him tired when they'd get up to the 4th or 5th layer high on the trailer. Man, throwing 100# hay bales 5 layers high onto a trailer, hour after hour? No wonder he was strong.
My worst was when I screwed up at work and spilled 110 gallons of nitric acid in the warehouse, tearing the tops off two barrels as I backed out of a rail car with the forklift... didn't have them quiiiiiiite high enough for the ramp. Boss took away the forklift keys and said "do the next one by hand". So I unloaded a 40' railcar by hand. 68 tons is 136,000 lbs of 100# bags. So I carried 1,360 bags out of that railcar and restacked them on pallets. Carefully.
And fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit
While sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life
And drink it from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche
Coming down the mountain
Same here out in morning be home for dinner. Back out till street lights came on. But could stay outside in front of the house. You better listen to any adult that spoke to you.
Wouldn't that be Unsolved "mysteries" rather than mysterious?
My childhood was so long ago, street lights hadn't been invented yet!
My question... how did we know when it was dinner time? Now THOSE were hunting/gathering skills.
Way back during the evening or later on weekend
I remember when the weather was nice all the adults would gather on the porch or yard and just talk tell stories maybe borrow a cup of sugar ,flower ,or some coffee even a few cigs untill next payday sometimes a few dollars for gas to get to work
Back when family and neighbors were not tied to electronics and tv. Had two station
Seems like a life time ago but I guess it was in a sense it was sadly all those folks are RIP
Now but simplier times sure brings back memories
Dark was when us kids would play hide and Seak or round up night crawlers for a Fishing trip hopefully
Lived on a dead end, There was several around the same age. We played baseball with PeeWee balls and bats, non stop for yrs. Had a great reservoir, pretty close,and caught a million fish. I saw a giant bass twice. My friend saw it first and called me. It looked like any other bass, proportionally, but looked like 3 feet ++
as mentioned before as a kid get out of hand and any neighbor had permission to give you a swat to get you back on track . unlike today lawsuit waiting to happen
we ( kids ) would fight do not even remember why other than a insult or just because and back playing a couple hours later , and repeat as needed thru the summer to sort out the alpha LOL
most all the boys carried a pocket knife and had easy access to a firearm and yet not one kid was ever stabbed or cut even threatened with such things , even the younger adults who would fight on the weekends with bottled courage having there back LOL never used any thing but there hands and feet to settle disputes .
I am sure like a lot of you if we had any thing nice it was treated with respect ( well with in limits of how a kid would play ) as getting another one was unlikely. along the same line just about every thing could be repaired or parts to repair could be found to be thrown away it really had to be trashed