Some memories of what it was like growing up in the 1970's in Michigan |
Memories of Growing Up in the 70's by Kendra Lachniet Kids sure have it made today. I started to notice recently that I never see kids standing on the corner waiting for a school bus. Instead, I see a car sitting at the bus stop, kids all cozy and warm waiting for their bus. Every morning I watch one woman drive her child to the end of the driveway to wait! Where was this when I was a kid? Even in the worst blizzard or pouring rain, our parents expected us to get to the bus stop about 1/4 mile away. If it were really that bad, they would've canceled school. At least we didn't have to walk in 12 foot drifts uphill both ways the ten miles to school like they did. And what's with “play dates?” Moms and dads accompanying their kids to a friend's house? I don't think I like this idea. We had a lot of freedom when I was a kid. Even when we were pretty little, we had loose boundaries and played relatively unsupervised. Think of all the adventures we would've missed had our parents seen us climbing those trees and jumping to the roof of Dale's house! And what if they had supervised the building of those engineering marvels made of snow that would give today's parents nightmares of children buried alive? And how would you ever learn what other kids' privates looked like with parents hovering around? I'm betting most play dates wouldn't include skinny dipping in Jimmy's pool.* I guess I'm glad I grew up in the 1970's. I have memories of riding my bike all over Tar Nation, which might not be on the map, but I know it included Rogers Plaza, Studio 28, the Wyoming library, Palmer Park, and Buck Creek. When our parents dragged us along on a shopping trip, my brother and I were dropped at the "Kid Korral" in Meijer's Thrifty Acres (a large platform located too close to the toy section with televisions mounted on the ceiling and large fiberglass animals to climb and fall to our deaths from). The Kid Korral lacked any kind of supervision, but God help you if the folks came back and you weren't where they'd left you. Sometimes we'd get on their "last nerve" before hitting the store, and they'd leave us in the car, where we'd unroll the windows and propel whatever we could find at each other over the roof. If they came back and found either of us had left the vehicle, no higher power was going to help. Talk about living in a dangerous environment! Growing up in the 70's was dangerous is a different way. Playgrounds, for one, looked really different. You never see merry-go-rounds anymore. We had one that you could pump using hands and feet to a barf-inducing spin. I never see teeter-totters either. Too many kids get a sore bottom from their partners hopping off suddenly? The maypole is gone. It had chains hanging down with handles. If you could get someone to give you a "whip," you could go sailing high into the air. Just don't let go! And now the seats on the swings are made of plastic--no more splinters in the tush when you jump and break a leg. We didn't have skate parks, although I think I really would've like them. We made homemade ramps and screwed roller skate wheels on a piece of plywood for a skateboard. We'd pull riders behind our bikes with a rope. Steering proved a challenge, and you considered yourself lucky if you crashed into the grass. I also love the climbing walls and zip lines I see today, but higher and longer would be better. The closest we came was climbing the big stone retaining wall on 36th Street and Collingwood and swinging on a rope over the gully at Grandma and Grandpa Lachniet’s house on Chamberlain. We stayed out past dark on most summer nights, playing games, like Bloody Murder, (aka Ghost in the Graveyard) in which participants had to run to a safe spot without getting caught while screaming "bloody murder!" And nobody called 911. Randy and I shot each other with plastic guns in the basement. One shot rubber bands (designed to be shot at cardboard animal targets) and one shot red plastic bullets. We found that the little orange Tinker Toys provided more sting than the "bullets." Kids today play video games in which they shoot imaginary monsters. In my day, we faced the real monsters of the neighborhood, like Larry, the big kid down the block whom you definitely wanted on your side in the crab apple fight, or Marilyn, the scary overprotective mom who screamed and chased kids who picked on her little Johnny (giving us all the more reason to pick on him). On the school playground, we played King of the Mountain, slamming into each other and shoving each other for control of the mounds of snow lining the parking lot. And in PE we played Dodge-ball, and not with those sissy little Nerf foam balls. Teachers never interfered with playground fights, and only dealt out punishment for getting too wet--the punishment was to wear an old pink nightie in class until your clothes dried. Now, THAT was scary! Along the Kent bike trail live a couple boys that I admire. They’ve built bunkers, forts, walls, and platforms in the trees with ladders. They spend all summer building and having adventures in the woods. Their dad occasionally joins them in the chopping and stacking of wood, but you don’t see him hovering over them every moment. These kids are the future problem-solvers (I hope, because the word militia also comes to mind). They aren’t on the cell phone with Mom asking her to bring out all the stuff they forgot to bring on their expeditions. My best friend Tammy and I had a secret club. We were the only members. We had three tests to get into the club, designed so that nobody could possibly win entrance. We called it SAS--Secret Agent Spies. We knew all the excellent hiding places in the neighborhood and all the escape routes should we perturb overprotective mom or rile the guy who didn’t like kids cutting across his lawn (we thought he was probably so grouchy because his parents gave him a girl name--Jean). We kept blackmail information on several neighborhood kids should they ever decide to cross us. Mostly we just liked eavesdropping and spying. It’s a good thing technology was lacking. Who knows what kinds of trouble we could’ve dug up with cell phones, digital cameras, and the internet at our disposal? Saturdays were, and still are, the best days of childhood. We’d watch cartoons on the new color television. Then we’d head outside to ride bikes or roller-skate or just run around. Dad usually went to school in the morning to work, and Mom always went shopping, then to a mystery friend’s house. We never met this friend, but every Saturday Mom would announce after unloading groceries that she was going to Penney’s, so they must’ve been really good friends. Sometimes my dad would take me on a motorcycle ride in the afternoon. He often promised we’d go buy a submarine, and I wasn’t sure why we needed one, but it sure would be awesome. But he always seemed to forget about it, and we’d just go get a sandwich at the deli for lunch, then go home. We always went out to supper Saturday nights, sometimes to the KumBak Hamburger place**, and sometimes to the drive-in at Russ’. They had the best pork barbecues and onion rings. My students often tell me they never eat with their families, which is an awful shame. The Sundays of my childhood left something to be desired. I grew up Christian Reformed, so we had some weird rules about what you could and could not do on the Lord’s Day. After church, we’d have a big dinner (not a day of rest for Mom!), then we’d be forced to take a nap. I hated naps. We could go outside later and play some games, but we couldn’t go swimming. We wouldn’t go to a store or a restaurant on a Sunday, but we would go for a ride in the evening, and we often stopped for ice cream (ice cream parlor is NOT a restaurant). That was the most marvelous thing about Sunday--we never had dinner, just dessert! I recently "read" (listened to the audiobook) Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Although he grew up in the 1950's, he observed at that time how kids were largely unsupervised. He writes: "I knew kids who were pushed out the door at eight in the morning and not allowed back in until five unless they were on fire or actively bleeding." I don't think that changed much in the intervening years. I suspect our parents didn't want to know what we were doing, and they weren't interested in our little neighborhood dramas and tragedies. Kids found out that most neighborhood disputes could be settled with toilet paper, soap, and/or eggs. Speaking of...what happened to Halloween? When we were kids, we were dressed up as super-heroes, princesses, sports heroes, or hobos. After dark we were set loose on the neighborhood. We ran from house to house as fast as we could (partly because it ALWAYS rained on Halloween in the 1970's), noting which houses had the full-size candy bars so we could double back. An urban legend gave us good reason to avoid the offerings of the health freaks who crushed our Reese's peanut butter cups with their dangerous razor blade-bearing apples. My parents used this as an excuse to go through our candy "to protect us from creeps who would hurt us." So we'd spread out our loot on the carpet and tally the Snickers, Milky Ways, and Butterfingers, suspecting our parents were pilfering the best stuff during the night. Today, I find kids showing up at the door at dinnertime looking like movie slashers, politicians, Disney characters, and tiny hookers. Their parents export them to the best neighborhoods where they can get the best goodies, arm them with umbrellas, neon necklaces, and probably pepper spray, and then stalk them, creating a convoy of mini-vans slowing creeping down the roads of the suburbs. Kids come home before the sun sets with a paltry stash of mini candy bars, coupons to McDonald's, and Tootsie Pops. So sad. The one holiday where kids still may experience some peril is Independence Day. We had sparklers, smoke bombs, and snakes. Sometimes the boys would put together some bottle rockets for a real thrill. But, for the most part, fireworks were left to the professionals. (Actually, while trying to research the names of the different products, I found statistics stating that the most dangerous items still are sparklers and bottle rockets.) Today kids put on their own fireworks display in their driveways. Neighbors have to put their pets in the basement, their cars in the garage (if they don’t want little burns all over the finish), and turn up the television to ignore the mini war taking place in the streets. I’m glad we didn’t have that stuff when I was a kid. I’m a sissy about fire-related amusements after watching my brother torch several of our toys in the backyard fire pit. Boys are dorks. Finally, technology was not much a part of life in the 1970’s. We didn’t have cell phones, but we knew dinner time, and Mom’s voice usually carried at least ten houses away. We remembered what we needed to bring to school or suffered the consequences if we didn’t. We used land lines that provided entertainment. There were numbers we could call and listen to a story. And sometimes you’d pick up the phone and someone was already on the line (not necessarily someone in your own house), providing a different kind of story, sometimes sordid. We had pen pals and wrote our friends notes in class in a shorthand similar to today’s texting. Pong and Space Invaders were okay, but they got boring fast, sending us back outside for real fun. No Wii Guitar Hero, but we had our own air-band in the basement, belting out songs from the Partridge Family or ABBA. I suppose kids today will think their childhoods were superlative to their kids’ too. Making childhood easier and safer doesn’t necessarily make it better...although I still think I would’ve liked my parents to bring me to the bus stop and wait with me in a nice warm car. *Just a note to pacify my folks, who were mortified by this revelation: My encounter with a boy's privates insured that I would find boys just plain yucky for many years. The boy who exposed himself to me had let loose a BM in his pants, and the caca coating his apparatus left a lasting impression. As for skinny-dipping, I bowed out at the last minute when I realized all the other girls were flat-chested while I was prematurely sprouting my little lady chi-chis. Who knew it'd be my last chance to dazzle anyone in this regard? |