Here Are 15 Facts From Back In The Day That Will Blow Your Children’s Minds

Or possibly your grandchildren, what do I know? Anyway kids, things were different back in our day, and I’ve written about them several times on this very site. Simply click on any of the titles below to get a taste of what I’m talking about:

Here Are 15 Things You Don’t See In Cars Anymore

Lamenting Landlines and Stuff

1971 vs. 2021: A Comparison

What Today’s Kids Are Missing: Toys That Could Kill Them

Killer Toys, Soft Kids and A Sobering Realization

Childhood Injuries: A Retrospective

Anyway, peruse those stories and you’ll get the idea. And guess what? There’s more, and I shall thusly list them accordingly. Read on and be amazed . . .

Some high schools had smoking areas for students.

Not even kidding. Oh, at my high school we didn’t have a designated area, but everyone knew that behind the football scoreboard was the safe zone. No teacher would bother anyone there. Oh, and the Teacher’s Lounge? You could smoke a side of beef in there.

We were completely unsupervised most of the day.

Yep. You’d go outside after breakfast, stay there until lunch, leave again until supper, then leave again after supper until the street lights came on. Keep in mind there was no way to get in touch with us either. Cell phones were in the distant future, man. We were free range kids!

Playing with mercury was the height of fun.

You know mercury, right? That stuff that can kill you if it enters your system? There was nothing better than finding an old thermometer, busting it open, and pouring the mercury into the palm of your hand. That texture was cool as hell.

I read that it could only harm you if you had a small cut on your and it got into your blood. Of course we were 11 and all had small cuts on our hands.

Nobody wore seatbelts.

Hell, the first thing my dad did after buying a car was cut out those pesky seatbelts. Those things were a pain to sit on. Also, if any wussie used a car seat it looked like this:

Hold on kid!

To do research for a school project you actually had to, you know, go to the library and read a book.

Insane I know but Google (or the internet for that matter) wasn’t always a thing.

There was only one phone line on our entire street.

What this means, youngsters, is that you had to wait until somebody hung up before you could use your phone. You’d actually pick up the phone and hear old Mrs. Meeker down the street talking to her friend about her latest underarm abscess. Pure entertainment, man. And if you kept checking back to see if the line was free you got yelled at a lot. My sisters used to scream at each other to get off the phone so they could use it. Ah, the memories.

Just about anyone could beat your ass.

You’ve heard me harp on this enough, so I’ll keep it simple. In 2023, swatting your kid on the butt can literally get you arrested. It’s nearly disappeared as a teaching tool. When I was a kid, not only did my parents whip me, any adult could beat my ass. I was smacked by my barber, the neighbor, and the guy who ran the gas station. But hey, I kept riding my bike over that wire/tube thingy that rang the bell in front of the station so I deserved it. In addition, I didn’t tell dad because he would have throttled me again. And look at me, I turned out alright. So to speak.

Everyone smoked everywhere.

Yessir. Your doctor and dentist smoked during your appointment, teachers and students at school (see above), pro baseball players during games, the list is endless. T’was a less enlightened time.

Keith Hernandez killing a heater.

Our playground equipment was downright dangerous.

Sure it was, but that’s what made it fun, right? That’s also why we climbed trees, rode downhill fast on our bikes and shot BB guns at each other. Anywho, on our playgrounds we had monkey bars, steel slippery slides and merry-go-rounds from hell that looked like this:

Hold on suckas!

We rode the bus to school.

Listen, I don’t know what the percentages are but I know the drop-off for students before school these days is wild. Back in my day you hopped on the damn bus so mom could get an early start on her Bloody Marys.*

*Not my mom of course. My mom was a saint.

Half the trucks in the student parking lot were equipped with gun racks.

And yes, they contained guns. On a related note, nobody cared.

Almost every teacher had a wooden paddle and wasn’t afraid to use it.

Hell, I had about 20 that my students had made for me. And yes, many had holes drilled for maximum effect.

We only had 3, and finally 4, television channels.

Yep. 4, 6, 10 and when Channel 13 was added we thought we’d died and gone to heaven. Sure, the stations went off the air at 2:00am but still.

Booze was used as a cure for many household illnesses.

As an example, I recall my grandmother rubbing whiskey on the gums of a teething baby. It worked too, possibly because the kid was drunk.

We practiced hiding under our desks in preparation for a possible nuclear attack.

This was during the Cold War between the USA and Russia and especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Sadly, we have a variation of this today with our active shooter drills.

Not sure those desks could stop an H-Bomb but ok.

So how many of these things can you remember? Any? All? Gimme a holler and let me know.