The Best of All Possible Worlds...

Then and Now...

I suppose I am biased, but I have to admit that I feel sorry for all of the kids who are growing up today and didn’t experience what we experienced. While today, it seems that nothing happens unless its organized, and included on the calendar, in our day, there was no such thing.

In effect, we were allowed to grow up as kids far from the intense micro-management of today’s kids under the always watchful gaze of their parents. As a result, there were no schedules, no helmets, no competitive furor among parents and no awards for smiling nicely regardless of your lack of any real achievement. Yesterday’s kids were not coddled!
Want some praise, patch the fence, plant the garden, paint the back wall, take care of your siblings…

Like most of the kids of my generation, when you were out of the house, you could have been a thousand miles away. Nobody worried about you being carted off by bogey-men or being herded off to some strange middle eastern country by a terrorist hanging around every corner…

And living in the City as we did, it was easy to get anywhere under our own steam. That meant no fathers being recruited to pick us up and drop us off, depriving us of our freedom and a big dose of our privacy.

We had all of the great things right there in our neighborhood, including a huge tree covered park that ran for miles with a separate section with baseball diamonds and other play areas; we had a huge lot that became a dumping ground for cinders that came out of the coal burned in our apartment houses and made an ideal football arena as long as you didn’t mind getting ripped open by raw edged cinders; a punch ball lot between two local stores that was the perfect size for a great game of punch ball or stick ball and we even had our own official haunted house buried in the trees and ferns about a block away. And to top it off, there were the mandatory candy stores where you could wile away your time checking out hundreds of choices for the investment of a few pennies, the requisite ice cream parlors and pizza dens…


What more could a kid ask for?

What’s more, kids in our day played outside—something you don’t see today. All of our games, from knife games ie. Territory to Ringo-Leavio to Johnny Ride the Pony, Hide and Seek, King of the Hill, marbles, kick the can, punch ball, Hit the Penny, stoop ball, stick ball, handball were all games that you played outside. And the thing was it cost nothing to have a ball!
A Spaldeen brand new and pink was fifteen cents. A stickball bat was nothing except you had to slip your mom’s old broom out the door. Marbles, you’d trade them. Baseball cards? A penny apiece including a piece of gum that you could use as a “skimmer.”.

What every kid needed however was a roll of electricians tape. You could not have a professional looking stickball bat without the requisite black electrician’s tape wound around the handle a few times. And when that baseball had its stuffings knocked out, it was black tape to the rescue. I recall now that I never saw a round baseball; all of the ones that we played with were black, wrapped round and round with you guessed it, black tape.

There were only two rules in our home: don’t bring the police to our door; and don’t be late for dinner. Dinner was served at 6:30 and if you weren’t there, not only would you not eat, you would be punished big-time. My dad’s shaving strop hanging on the door was always a constant reminder of what might happen if I didn’t toe the line. I have to laugh today to think that in this generation, if dad reached for the shaving strop, he would be put in jail for brutalizing his child. A lot of us got “brutalized” if that’s the word and all I can say is that we turned out pretty good for the lessons we learned.

Today, you drive by all these nice residential sections and you don’t see a kid outside playing. And when you do, he or she is being guarded like a hawk. Most are protected with knee pads, leg pads, shoulder pads and helmets, the US version of the veil that seems to say, we’re parents doing a job of protecting our kids against anything they might come up against--from jutting elbows to falls off bicycles with training wheels. Training wheels, can you imagine?. How can you learn to ride a bike unless you fell off every few feet? Today, kids can’t simply meet and choose up sides, they have to be entered into the calendar and have their folks involve them with a team that has organized practice and organized games and requires the parents to be on-site.

What kind of a life is that?

When they’re not playing organized sports, where are the kids?
I’ll tell you. According to the surveys, they are glued to their TV’s. If it’s not the TV, it’s the computer or the games or the digital hand-helds. All in all, they don’t get off their couches. And then parents worry about them getting too fat.

On the plus side, it’s nice that the parents are involved. It would have been nice to see my folks come to one of our games. On the other hand, it’s even nicer to have your freedom, to go where you want, return when you want, play the games you want, choose the side you want to play on without the pressure of all those parents standing on the sideline pushing you on.

And when you come to think about it, somehow even though we were totally disorganized and never arranged things in advance, we got plenty of exercise and we learned self sufficiency which I think helped us to survive in the world. We had to meet other kids and find ways to get along and we had to assert ourselves, social skills that many kids seem to have trouble with today.

Despite it all, we even managed to survive without helmets, without prizes for accomplishing nothing and, for most of us, without a cent in our pockets.

In this day and age, that alone seems an accomplishment. And I wonder if today’s coddled generation they will find the same sort of outcome for themselves at some future date when they have to stand on their own two feet and get used to life without attention and unwarranted praise for every little thing that you did.

Les Aaron