"When I Was Your Age..."

eastcoascrazy
Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:25:48 +0000

When I was your age…

The legal drinking age (everything) was 18, so half of my class was legal midway through Senior year of high school, and everyone was legal within a month of starting college. Our college had a bar in the lower level of the student union. It opened at noon (I think… maybe this is wishful remembering), and a LOT of people spent their lunch hours there watching soaps and drinking beer. Dollar pitchers.

Growing up, there was no school bus service within the town limits, so everyone who didn’t live in the country walked to school. Parents only drove you if it was pouring rain or bitterly cold.

There was still a dress code (public schools) requiring girls to wear skirts or dresses until I was in seventh grade, when girls were allowed to wear “pants suits”. By the time I was in high school, the dress code had been dropped completely. My sister, a few years older than me, was sent home routinely one year for wearing her skirts too short. They were supposed to touch the ground when you kneeled… this was at the beginning of the era of the miniskirt. The administration gave up on that, and switched to requiring skirts to be no shorter than your finger tips. She continued to be sent home to change.

During my elementary years only the bus kids were allowed to stay at school for lunch. The rest of us walked home for lunch.

Everyone spent every waking hour possible outside, unsupervised. You went home when the streetlights came on. Our parents had no idea where we were most of the time, and no way of getting ahold of us other than to drive around town or call around to other parents. We rode bikes everywhere unless the streets were too snowy or icy in the winter. We went ice skating every evening, all winter, if it wasn’t too cold. My parents’ definition of “too cold” was less than 10 degrees. The ice rink was the flooded baseball field at one of the town parks. They played the same 8 songs all winter, over and over. Even now, whenever I hear anything by The Partridge Family my fingers and toes get cold. :)

I took swimming lessons at a local beach, in Lake Michigan every summer. Sometimes there were white caps running through the lesson. There was no town owned pool until I was in high school.

No wonder there was less obesity then! We all put on a lot of miles every day.

Funny thing, my actual schooling (what I learned, what classes I took) through high school is such a small part of my memories.