Atari, Colecovision and the future wave of electronic gaming systems hadn’t yet come along – those were still a few years off. The most sophisticated things we had were pocket football games with super bad graphics, and of course “Operation!” which was always out of batteries because no one had a steady hand. We read books, played Checkers, Candy Land, Chinese jump rope, and Twister. If we wanted to be spooked out, we had the Ouija (pronounced “wee-gee”) board and the Magic 8 Ball.

There was always the Big Wheel to get around in style (and there was no recovery once your plastic tire wore down and got a “flat”), and if you didn’t want to go anywhere, you sat down on the Sit and Spin right after lunch…going around and around and around until you vomited the meal onto the sidewalk. Of course there were the yellow cones that you strapped on your feet and held the rubbery strings and nearly broke your neck when the cones finally gave way to your weight and collapsed. The pogo stick was for advanced kids who could walk and chew gum at the same time. Most of us uncoordinated kids just stuck to the old-fashioned hoola hoop and the lemon twist that you put around your ankle and skipped with (if you were really uncoordinated, the lemon twist was known as the “shin buster”).

If all your toys of the day still didn’t make your world go ‘round, you always had your brothers and sisters to beat up on, introducing them to the “Horse” family. “Charlie” Horse was rough, but his brothers “Irving” and “Pony” always hurt more. Then you had the dreaded “melon baller” (you firmly grasped the person’s head down by their ears and with the palm of your hands applying most of the pressure, you forced your hands up and it “burned” the sides of the skull for a moment or two). The meaner version of that was the “match stick” (you made a fist and with a pressured stroke, you ran your knuckles fast upwards from the base of the skull, which left the victim howling). There was always a good old game of “Flinch” to be played (palms up on the bottom, palms down on the top; the person on the bottom shakes their hands and tries to slap the hands on top. If they miss, they have to take the top position). The meanest of the mean was the post-sunburn “lavin peachie” (a good slap on your lobster back).

It was still an honorable profession to make world-class mud pies and threw worms at each other and daring one another to eat them. No one did, and it gave birth to the grandest of insults: “You’re CHICKEN! Bock! Bock! Bock!” No one thought of shooting each other – we worked hard to come up with insults like, “Your mother wears army boots!” and “Your momma is so fat, when she sits around the house, she sits AROUND the house!” You always followed the insult rule: never make it so mean your friend won’t play with you again.

We sang the “Miss Lucy” songs that always bordered on swearing and got our mouths washed out with soap for it. I discovered back then Joy liquid dish detergent and a Budweiser chaser to rinse it out was never a gourmet combination. So we learned songs that helped us to democratically pick who was going to be “it” for tag or “one-two-three-redlight”.

“One potato, two potato, three potato, four…five potato, six potato, seven potato more.” The other favorite of the day was, “My mother and your mother got in a fight. My mother punched your mother right in the nose…what color was the blood?” Everyone who wanted to play had their fists in a circle, and with each word of the songs, you would tap their fist. The last word of the song tapped the fist “out”, and the last person with a fist in the circle was fairly chosen as “it”.

Today’s world is a different place. You can’t leave your kids in the back yard without supervision because someone might call Child Protective Services on you for neglect, or a weirdo might come by and steal your kids. Lawn darts and horseshoes? Never! I was in my teens when lawn darts were outlawed, and I haven’t seen horseshoes anywhere for at least twenty-six years.

Now we have anti-bacterial hand cleansers to protect our kids from germs – and we grew up chipping in our pocket change to walk to the store to buy a coke six with of us with sniffles would share. For that matter, if you see a young kid wandering around alone, it’s automatically assumed he is neglected. If someone got the measles of chicken pox, you didn’t run your kids over and get them infected, you kept the separated and hoped for the best.

We didn’t need labels on hair dryers or toasters to tell us not use them in the shower or bath; it didn’t take a brain to know you toast to crisp your bread, and tossing it in the bath makes it soggy. DUH. You didn’t use the curling iron in there, either – actually, back then you tried your best to escape the curling iron because those things were responsible for more neck and ear burns on kids at school picture day. That was torture, not fun to play with those things.

Most importantly, we learned as soon as we got some money from paper routes (which you never see kids doing, either), it meant economic freedom. It was nothing to walk a few miles to store to buy a 45 vinyl single (everyone who’s been brought up with CD technology is scratching their heads). The best investment I made growing up? I learned to buy food. Remember I said earlier my mom cooked by the fire alarm in the house to tell her it was done?

When the Tupperware container craze took place, out went all the buggy cardboard boxes and in came airtight plastic, which should’ve meant no more stale cereal. Instead, it meant my mom started mixing cereals to save space. Imagine having imitation corn flakes and cheerios in the same bowl! They were hideous enough alone, but I couldn’t convince my parents otherwise they were feeding us toxic poison. “We will buy more cereal when you eat THAT.” “THAT” sat around for six months before they got the hint five kids would rather starve.

The “generic” craze in food shopping had begun, and everything was stuffed into a name brand plastic container. The containers were more valuable than the food, and God help you if you went to school and “lost” one of the sandwich containers because your bologna and ketchup sandwich was soup by the time lunch came around (mom was a gourmet and we didn’t have the heart to tell her). No one put their food in the fridge in school – you froze it the night before and it thawed during the day. If you got a hot lunch at the school cafeteria because it was easier for mom to pony up the $1.25 a week, then you got used to the warm milk you got with your mystery meat meal and rubber peaches.

We grew up knowing we had to compete for trophies; they weren’t handed out to everybody to help foster their self-esteem. We knew it was win or lose and we accepted it. The only mood altering drugs were the ones Cheech and Chong made look cool to take in their movies and records. You had aspirin, baby aspirin, cough syrup, iodine, band-aids, a shaving pencil to stop the bleeding on double-edged razor blades, liquid Ben Gay, and Phillip’s Milk of Magnesia in your medicine cabinet and that was it. No Zoloft, no Prozac and certainly no Viagra. When the sex was over, it was over. There was no such thing as ADD or hyperactive kids – they sent home an orange card and then asked your parent’s permission if they could keep you after school for punishment. No parent said no back then – that was free, unscheduled sex time! “Coffee, tea, or me?” was the motto of the day.

It was nothing to give a kid a model airplane kit with toxic glue that you could get high off of, and Sharpie markers weren’t around – we had Marks-A-Lot that smelled like awful black licorice. Your target high was Elmer’s Glue in the squeeze bottle; the paste didn’t work no matter how much you tried. It was better for eating.

The schools screened your vision, your back for scoliosis, and your hair for lice. They left you alone after that, unless you didn’t do your homework, then they sent home a yellow card to be signed.

When I look back on the seventies, I must admit I had more freedom than the kids today. I could stay out in front of the house late at night and never feared anything (except the stray rock with my name on it). I mixed Pop Rocks and Coke, trying to see if it would make my stomach explode, like “Mikey”, the kid who had sold the Life cereal on TV for years (he wasn’t dead, it was an urban myth).

Kids today have cell phones, and when I was their age, I wasn’t allowed to dial the phone, but I knew my home number and address if I got lost. There were stickers in windows for “safe” houses, in case you were afraid of “Radio Joe”, the Vietnam vet who walked around with an AM transistor radio up to his ear, flashing the peace sign at us. He never did harm anyone, and we were too young to understand his situation.

Only after a few years after the eighties were ushered in, did I start having to take precautions, and that was carrying fifty extra cents for the pay phone, in case of an emergency.

Times certainly have changed.