I Remember When...

When you get older you inevitably develope a rather strange perspective. Old things are forgotten and then "reinvented" and are new. Some things just are gone forever unless TEOTWAWKI happens and those things will have to be reinvented.

So many of the things that people believe now as just the only way it should be just weren't possible or realistic 50 to 100 years ago. Even simple things like personal hygiene were totally different. I remember when people had smells. Different races had distinctly different body smells. This mostly had as much to do with what they ate as any real difference. Understand, in a world with NO airconditioning people sweated a LOT. Men wore sweatshirts and undershirts under their good clothes to keep them as dry as possible. Nowadays people would find being around someone that had a strong smell pretty troublesome. I don't remember it ever being a thing that you noticed all that much. People smell, you moved on. A hot sweaty man wasn't as bad as an older lady that had soaked and powdered herself with things to hide her odor!

You young folks just don't know what you missed learning to write with fountain pens. It is NOTHING like writing with a ballpoint pen and was HELL if you were left-handed. There was a whole hoard of things you had to have to go with the fountain pens like blotters to dry your signature after you signed a check and ink wells to refill your pen. You also ruined a lot of shirts and coats because they would leak.

Without birth control pills relations between young men and young ladies in polite society was...different. The rolls that the sexes played in the culture were much more rigid. A woman had babies if she was married and when you have a bunch of kiddos you don't have a lot of opportunity for careers. My great Grandmother had 17 kids!! At least 5 or 6 was common. When you have that many kids they have to be "seen and not heard" or everything turns to bedlam. Kids all had chores. It took the entire family to keep a farm and household up and running. Just washing clothes was an all-day event that started with gathering the wood and starting the fires. My family inherited three wash pots. With 17 kids that was a lot of washing!

People on the farms ate pretty well but it wasn't fancy. You cooked "enough" and everyone ate what they got. Kids that were picky eaters just got hungry a lot and if they gripped they ate standing up. A kid to some extent started being an adult at a very young age. Lots of girls were husband high at 12. Boys often went off to work at near that age. My Dad was graduated from Highschool and a full grown man that left home when he was 15. I've had a full-time job since I was 16 and a part-time job before that. I worked in a warehouse loading and unloading trucks before I went to school in the morning.

These "kids" that are still living with Mama and Daddy and not working into their 30s are beyond my understanding. I actually know a young man that has declined to get a drivers license and is in his early 20s. I started driving at 15 and got my license when I was 16. My Daughter started driving at 9 and got her license as soon as possible. When you live in Texas you have to have a license and a car. We don't have much in the way of mass transit even in the big cities and NONE in towns under 100,000 people. I don't understand the kid and I don't understand the Father at ALL.

People did not have so many THINGS. Life was a lot simpler in the past. When my wife and I decided to have a kid we wanted to not put it in daycare. My wife decided to quit working. Everyone was against it and told us that you just can't get by on one person's income anymore. We lived as our parents had. We didn't eat out. Our social life was our church and family. We actually had no problems. If you live a simple life it really doesn't cost much. For people like us returning to a simple life isn't scary. Refrigeration is about the only thing that we did have back then that we won't have in a bad collapse. The lack of a vehicle doesn't mean much when you have no place to go.

A huge number of people will find out in the early days of any collapse that their "friends" that they text and twitter and twerp with are GONE. Even the people that they work with will be GONE unless they have a REAL friendship with them and they are not too far away from where you live. Even families now are scattered far and wide.

Some of the things are in the past and good riddance but if we are forced to live in a world more similar to the 1900s than the 2000s there are going to be some SERIOUS adjustments to be made.

 

Great post. I just got back from some remote areas in India. Great people, very generous, l made a lot of new friends. But most Americans would be in cultural shock for many reasons. Many of them mentioned above in your post, but others reason as well.

I think real traveling is one way to dispel you people’s biases and “needs.”

 

I was left handed and the nib on those pens was meant to be pulled across the paper rather than pushed. Then after that my hand would come across it and smear it. Do you remember when left-handers sort of wrote upside down with their arm and hand above the paper rather than beside it? That was why. My left arm and side of my left hand was stained blue for an entire year until I learned.

People used to buy clothes for their kids that were several sizes too big. Then they would roll up the legs and make cuffs. As you grew the cuffs were unrolled. Belts were a MUST when you wore pants two sizes too big. Back then drooping pants that showed your drawers were NOT stylish.

I was really close to being pre-television. Eventually, we had one channel. Back then people didn't sit in the living room and stare at a box. Neighbors visited and we played a lot of games. Back then board, domino, and card games were big-time social tools. The parents played bridge, poker, and other card games and the kids played all sorts of board games. I include a deck of plastic cards and 6 dice in all my bug out bags and kits. After things settle down people are going to have a lot of time on their hands and won't know what to do with it.

People didn't wear as many clothes as we do now. When washing is a big deal and you HAVE TO HAVE a clear day to hang out your clothes to dry you tend to wear the same clothes several times before washing. In the summer all I wore was the cutoff jeans that were too short to wear as long pants and maybe a T-shirt. I have Fred Flinstone feet and back then there was no such thing as EEE width shoes. For me breaking in a new pair of shoes was painful and caused blisters until I stretched them out. Tennis shoes didn't really exist until I was a little older and they didn't come in widths at all. I only wore shoes to school and to church and when it was REALLY cold outside.

The biggest thing that remember is that when we were at the farm we were busy but there was always a lot of laughter and pleasure. A lot of the time when we went there it was between planting and harvest and we would work on things like repairs and such but always had a lot of time to go fishing, play cards and just enjoy being together. Farming when you are mostly just groingfood for you and your familly and animals to eat doesn't require the amount of labor that most people imagine. You can raise a LOT of food in a two acre garden and then another with corn and beans that is a little bigger will feed you.

We had a ton of fun harvesting and canning. I loved sitting out under the live oak trees shelling peas and listening to the old folks talk about when they were young. This sort of thing is mostly lost these days.

 

LOL, you guys make me feel young. Thanks for that. I was born in the mid 60s, so I missed a lot of what you guys are talking about. My mom only had 4 kids, but her mom had 13 that survived child birth. My dad's mom had only 6. I only had 2, 1 boy 1 girl and that was it. I will not have anymore. We had a TV growing up, but I was always outside, usually in the woods, at the beach, or on the base. We always had a clothes line growing up, but we used to wash at laundromats. There were almost always laundromats at the bases we got sent to. I would always garden from the time I was 7ish. I always grew veggies, especially tomatoes(yes I know they are technically fruit) and cucumbers which are my favorite salad to this day. Tomatoes, cukes, and red onions in an apple cider vinegar/olive oil mix for dressing. I was in the scouts, the sea scouts and the Civil Air Patrol as a teenager in Pensacola FL. Even now I watch only a little TV. I find it hard to relate to kids and younger adults in this day and age.

 

When I was a kid EVERY house had a clothes line. There just weren't many people that could afford a home dryer. God the line dried sheets smelled good!

At one point when color TVs were just beginning to come out, they sold these plastic screen covers that were blue on top and green on the bottom to very poorly simulate color TV. The early color TVs never seemed to be adjusted right and the people were either orange or green. We were poor and probably about the last people that I knew to have a color TV. LOL, my Dad bought a color TV for my Daughter because she crawled up in his lap and batted her eyes and asked why cartoons were so much better at his house than ours. that was in 1984. To tell you the truth I never really cared much about color TV back then. We by then had three channels and they ALL went off about the time that I got home from work after midnight.

 

Is a mangle the same thing as a wringer? It clamps on the side of a wash tub.

 

The mangle / wringer is good for more than wringing clean wet clothing... it is also a PERFECT tool for squeezing the moisture out of animal hides. I would love to have one of those things! But since I don't, I just use an old broken broom handle (0r similar kind of stick), much like as described in the 5th paragraph here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=-2Hw1Y7JmAAC&pg=PA163&lpg=PA163&dq=broomstick+for+wringing+out+hides&source=bl&ots=uQLgMCW1dp&sig=ACfU3U1DHsQx00yP0U33DdvhsjFkgy25JA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwigk7bA7b_hAhVPOq0KHRYHAv4Q6AEwDnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=broomstick for wringing out hides&f=false

Many times, I have used the same process for wringing out wet clothing, too.


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This brings back a lot of memories. I too was/am left handed, and can remember smearing ink across the page and having a blue hand.

My mother hung laundry on a clothesline after washing it. It only took about 10 minutes to dry in the desert, so it came down almost as fast as it went up.

We didn't have a color TV until 1968. My Mother affectionately called it the idiot box, and would religiously kick us out of the house to play. " You are not going to watch the idiot box all day." We too only had three stations, and if memory serves around midnight you got the Star Spangled Banner, and then a test pattern until about 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning on all of them. Late night TV was unheard of.

There was always a ballgame going on somewhere. You would leave the house around 9:00 with your baseball glove on the handlebars, and maybe a bat on your shoulder. You played until noon; went home for lunch; then played until 5:00 and went home for dinner.

We played whatever sport was in season, but Baseball was always the favorite. When we weren't playing baseball we were building forts in the desert or out hunting with BB guns. I started working summers when I was 14, but I have great memories as a kid.

 

Morgan101, my childhood sounds very similar to yours. Back then kids were not supervised 24 hours a day. We rolled out after breakfast and took care of ourselves. Like you played the current sport in season, built forts and basically ran together like a little rat pack with the older boys sort of running things.

I was raised in a swampy place so along with the hunting we fished and camped all year around and frog gigged in the summer months. When we got a little older we "helped " the older guys work on their cars and all of us had cars by age 16. In the summer most of us worked some but we also generally had a sort of communally owned project car that we worked on.

Doing all these things prepared us to be adults. dealing with the bossy older boys was good training for getting along with the boss later in life. We built all sorts of things from forts and treehouses to bike race trails and bunkers.

We learned to plan out and accomplish things where now kids are just told what to do by ever-present adults. We had bullies then just as we do now. We learned how to deal with them. Some were FAST and would run until the bully gave up and some of us learned to stand our ground because we weren't fast. Eventually, most of us learned that you didn't have to win a fight with a bully. You just have to hurt them enough that they will leave you alone and pick on someone else. Sometimes several would put together an alliance and let it be known that if you attacked one of us we all would jump in.

All of this was good training for adulthood and I see those lessons in the adults of my generation and sadly see their lack in the younger people.

 

Back in the good old days, and I do mean that sincerely. You are so right. We worked everything out with minimal adult supervision. We were fortunate, and everybody got along pretty well. Maybe because our age spread was smaller. We were all two or three years apart. No bullies. We built the bike trails, and had races. You also did what you were told. If the adults said " don't go there. " We didn't go there. If they said " be home by XXX" We were home by XXX. We really didn't have any gear heads. Maybe because none of us had the money to get a car. We were lucky if the baseball wasn't mostly electrical tape, and the bat had nails in it to hold it together. You learned to hit with it because it was the only one we had.

We just entertained ourselves. You are right. It did provide us with lessons that served us well later in life. We were raised with a true understanding of right and wrong, and there were consequences when you did something wrong. You followed directions, and did what you were told, and usually grudgingly, you realized there was a good reason for doing it the way you were told. The work ethic we learned then has carried over through my entire adult life.

 

Back then you could buy an old car in running condition for 75 dollars. We would then work the engine over with parts from the junkyard. Parts were pretty cheap if you went out and pulled them off yourself and when you were done they would buy them back to put on their shelves. To them, we were free labor.

We would do all sorts of things to these cars. We took a 59 ford and made it into a convertible with a cutting torch and later made it into something like a truck. We ran it in the woods and stuck it in the mud and it was last seen stripped of all the good parts as the tide came in the week before school started.

There were about 4 big kids and 3 or 4 younger kids in on that car and we learned a lot as we rebuilt and tore it to pieces. We weren't rich but most of us had some sort of income. back then kids delivered newspapers and did a lot of things like mowing yards, day labor on loading docks, changing oil and such so we had enough money altogether to do this sort of thing. Our parents approved because we were not tearing up their cars or our own and we were applying what we learned to fix up and maintaining our own cars.