Our Childhood in Black and White.

Black and White
(Under age 40? You won't understand.)

You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.

Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.' 

Afalfa

Buckwheat   Chubby  Darla Hood

Brisbane         Stimby               Froggy

Mickey Daniels

Butch               Wheezer

Spanky

Pete
My Mom packed our school sandwiches  wrapped in wax paper in
a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake
instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone
in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE .. and risked permanent injury with a pair
of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training

athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors.
I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because
they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids!

I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem,
and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
What an archaic health system we had then.
Remember school nurses?
Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish
something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers,
Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization
kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites,
and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome
(kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did)
and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room,
followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics,
and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor
for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where i t was suc h a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did,
we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked
again when we got home.

I recall Warren McDowell coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop,
just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house.
Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof.
It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a
dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes?
We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't
even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA.
TO ALL WHO DIDN'T; SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.