SURVIVING CHILDHOOD

(June, 2024) Buzzfeed asked about things people used to do as a child that no one would ever let you do today. Some of the responses:
– “There was a swimming hole near our Alabama home in a creek. In order to use the hole, you had to throw a couple of large rocks into it, which caused the water moccasins to run out of the water and into the woods. We would then swim there.”
– “Tricks off the high dive at the local swimming pool. These days, public pools don’t even have diving boards, let alone high dives.”
– “Parents sent me on foot to kindergarten alone. The trail started behind the barrier of a dead-end street, wound past a cornfield, and then passed an apartment complex before it took me to school.”
– “Delivering newspapers and collecting the money; 11–15 year-olds waking up at 4:30 a.m.–5 a.m. daily, sitting on a corner alone waiting for the papers, riding a bike around the neighborhood trying to throw newspapers onto people’s porches. Then, we went to every house every two weeks to collect the money, sometimes carrying around $50–$100 in a pouch. To top it off, it was considered okay to be welcomed into the houses during winter when collecting the money.”
– “I lived in Guam about 10 years after WWII, and in certain areas, ammunition had been dumped, and other places where the soldiers had left it in the heat of battle. We used to go looking for the ammunition, and then we disarmed it, cleared it up, and added it to my collection. I knew how to completely unload Japanese and American hand grenades, knee mortars, and shells below 40mm.”
– “There was a medical clinic near our house. They would dump the test tubes full of blood into the big trashcan. We liked the glass tubes with stoppers, so we pulled them out and washed out the tubes to play with them.”
– “My sister and I rode home from vacation one time sitting on lawn chairs in the back of our dad’s truck, for hours.”
– “In northwestern Pennsylvania on the shores of Lake Erie. Think ‘lake effect’ snow. We would go out at night and wait for a car to come by, run to the back, grab the bumper, and get pulled as far as we could without falling off.”
– “My sister and I regularly crawled through the storm drain tunnel in our town. At the halfway point, there was a road with a bus stop overhead and a drainage hole. We’d stand under it and use vulgar language at people waiting for the bus. Then we’d continue to the end of the tunnel, where we’d sit and smoke cigarettes.”
* PHONE TOPIC: Was there a particularly dangerous activity you used to do as a kid?