Memories of Growing up in the 1970's

Memories of Growing Up in the 70's
by Kendra Lachniet

Kids sure have it made today. I started to notice recently that I never
see kids standing on the corner waiting for a school bus.  Instead, I see
a car sitting at the bus stop, kids all cozy and warm waiting for their
bus.  Every morning I watch one woman drive her child to the end of the
driveway to wait!  Where was this when I was a kid?  Even in the worst
blizzard or pouring rain, our parents expected us to get to the bus stop
about 1/4 mile away.  If it were really that bad, they would've canceled
school.  At least we didn't have to walk in 12 foot drifts uphill both
ways the ten miles to school like they did.

And what's with “play dates?”  Moms and dads accompanying their kids to a
friend's house?  I don't think I like this idea. We had a lot of freedom
when I was a kid.  Even when we were pretty little, we had loose
boundaries and played relatively unsupervised.  Think of all the
adventures we would've missed had our parents seen us climbing those trees
and jumping to the roof of Dale's house!  And what if they had supervised
the building of those engineering marvels  made of snow that would give
today's parents nightmares of children buried alive? And how would you
ever learn what other kids' privates looked like with parents hovering
around?  I'm betting most play dates wouldn't  include skinny dipping in
Jimmy's pool.*

I guess I'm glad I grew up in the 1970's.  I have memories of riding my
bike all over Tar Nation, which might not be on the map, but I know it
included Rogers Plaza, Studio 28, the Wyoming library, Palmer Park, and
Buck Creek.  When our parents dragged us along on a shopping trip, my
brother and I were dropped at the "Kid Korral" in Meijer's Thrifty Acres
(a large platform located too close to the toy section with televisions
mounted on the ceiling and large fiberglass animals to climb and fall to
our deaths from).  The Kid Korral lacked any kind of supervision, but God
help you if the folks came back and you weren't where they'd left you.
Sometimes we'd get on their "last nerve" before hitting the store, and
they'd leave us in the car, where we'd unroll the windows and propel
whatever we could find at each other over the roof.  If they came back and
found either of us had left the vehicle, no higher power was going to
help.  Talk about living in a dangerous environment!

Growing up in the 70's was dangerous is a different way.  Playgrounds, for
one, looked really different.  You never see merry-go-rounds anymore.  We
had one that you could pump using hands and feet to a barf-inducing spin.
I never see teeter-totters either.  Too many kids get a sore bottom from
their partners hopping off suddenly? The maypole is gone.  It had chains
hanging down with handles.  If you could get someone to give you a "whip,"
you could go sailing high into the air.  Just don't let go!  And now the
seats on the swings are made of plastic--no more splinters in the tush
when you jump and break a leg.  We didn't have skate parks, although I
think I really would've like them.  We made homemade ramps and screwed
roller skate wheels on a piece of plywood for a skateboard.  We'd pull
riders behind our bikes with a rope.  Steering proved a challenge, and you
considered yourself lucky if you crashed into the grass.  I also love the
climbing walls and zip lines I see today, but higher and longer would be
better.  The closest we came was climbing the big stone retaining wall on
36th Street and Collingwood and swinging on a rope over the gully at
Grandma and Grandpa Lachniet’s house on Chamberlain.


We stayed out past dark on most summer nights, playing games, like Bloody
Murder,  (aka Ghost in the Graveyard) in which participants had to run to
a safe spot without getting caught while screaming "bloody murder!" And
nobody called 911.  Randy and I shot each other with plastic guns in the
basement.  One shot rubber bands (designed to be shot at cardboard animal
targets) and one shot red plastic bullets.  We found that the little
orange Tinker Toys provided more sting than the "bullets."  Kids today
play video games in which they shoot imaginary monsters.  In my day, we
faced the real monsters of the neighborhood, like Larry, the big kid down
the block whom you definitely wanted on your side in the crab apple fight,
or Marilyn, the scary overprotective mom who screamed and chased kids who
picked on her little Johnny (giving us all the more reason to pick on
him).

On the school playground, we played King of the Mountain, slamming into
each other and shoving each  other for control of the mounds of snow
lining the parking lot.  And in PE we played Dodge-ball, and not with
those sissy little Nerf foam balls.  Teachers never interfered with
playground fights, and only dealt out punishment for getting too wet--the
punishment was to wear an old pink nightie in class until your clothes
dried.  Now, THAT was scary!

Along the Kent bike trail live a couple boys that I admire.  They’ve built
bunkers, forts, walls, and platforms in the trees with ladders.  They
spend all summer building and having adventures in the woods.  Their dad
occasionally joins them in the chopping and stacking of wood, but you
don’t see him hovering over them every moment.  These kids are the future
problem-solvers (I hope, because the word militia also comes to mind).
They aren’t on the cell phone with Mom asking her to bring out all the
stuff they forgot to bring on their expeditions.

My best friend Tammy and I had a secret club.  We were the only members.
We had three tests to get into the club, designed so that nobody could
possibly win entrance.  We called it SAS--Secret Agent Spies.  We knew all
the excellent hiding places in the neighborhood and all the escape routes
should we perturb overprotective mom or rile the guy who didn’t like kids
cutting across his lawn (we thought he was probably so grouchy because his
parents gave him a girl name--Jean).  We kept blackmail information on
several neighborhood kids should they ever decide to cross us.  Mostly we
just liked eavesdropping and spying.  It’s a good thing technology was
lacking.  Who knows what kinds of trouble we could’ve dug up with cell
phones, digital cameras, and the internet at our disposal?

Saturdays were, and still are, the best days of childhood.  We’d watch
cartoons on the new color television.  Then we’d head outside to ride
bikes or roller-skate or just run around.  Dad usually went to school in
the morning to work, and Mom always went shopping, then to a mystery
friend’s house.  We never met this friend, but every Saturday Mom would
announce after unloading groceries that she was going to Penney’s, so they
must’ve been really good friends.  Sometimes my dad would take me on a
motorcycle ride in the afternoon.  He often promised we’d go buy a
submarine, and I wasn’t sure why we needed one, but it sure would be
awesome.  But he always seemed to forget about it, and we’d just go get a
sandwich at the deli for lunch, then go home.  We always went out to
supper Saturday nights, sometimes to the KumBak Hamburger place**, and
sometimes to the drive-in at Russ’.  They had the best pork barbecues and
onion rings.  My students often tell me they never eat with their
families, which is an awful shame.

The Sundays of my childhood left something to be desired.  I grew up
Christian Reformed, so we had some weird rules about what you could and
could not do on the Lord’s Day.  After church, we’d have a big dinner (not
a day of rest for Mom!), then we’d be forced to take a nap.  I hated naps.
We could go outside later and play some games, but we couldn’t go
swimming.  We wouldn’t go to a store or a restaurant on a Sunday, but we
would go for a ride in the evening, and we often stopped for ice cream
(ice cream parlor is NOT a restaurant).  That was the most marvelous thing
about Sunday--we never had dinner, just dessert!

I recently "read" (listened to the audiobook) Bill Bryson's The Life and
Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Although he grew up in the 1950's,  he
observed at that time how kids were largely unsupervised.  He writes:  "I
knew kids who were pushed out the door at eight in the morning and not
allowed back in until five unless they were on fire or actively bleeding."
  I don't think that changed much in the intervening years.  I suspect our
parents didn't want to know what we were doing, and they weren't
interested in our little neighborhood dramas and tragedies.  Kids found
out that most neighborhood disputes could be settled with toilet paper,
soap, and/or eggs.

Speaking of...what happened to Halloween?  When we were kids, we were
dressed up as super-heroes, princesses, sports heroes, or hobos.  After
dark we were set loose on the neighborhood.  We ran from house to house as
fast as we could (partly because it ALWAYS  rained on Halloween in the
1970's), noting which houses had the full-size candy bars so we could
double back.  An urban legend gave us good reason to avoid the offerings
of the health freaks who crushed our Reese's peanut butter cups with their
dangerous razor blade-bearing apples.  My parents used this as an excuse
to go through our candy "to protect us from creeps who would hurt us."  So
we'd spread out our loot on the carpet and tally the Snickers, Milky Ways,
and Butterfingers, suspecting our parents were pilfering the best stuff
during the night.  Today, I find kids showing up at the door at dinnertime
looking like movie slashers, politicians, Disney characters, and tiny
hookers. Their parents export them to the best neighborhoods where they
can get the best goodies,  arm them with umbrellas, neon necklaces, and
probably pepper spray, and  then stalk them, creating a convoy of
mini-vans slowing creeping down the roads of the suburbs.  Kids come home
before the sun sets with a paltry stash of mini candy bars, coupons to
McDonald's, and Tootsie Pops.  So sad.

The one holiday where kids still may experience some peril is Independence
Day.  We had sparklers, smoke bombs, and snakes.  Sometimes the boys would
put together some bottle rockets for a real thrill.  But, for the most
part, fireworks were left to the professionals. (Actually, while trying to
research the names of the different products, I found statistics stating
that the most dangerous items still are sparklers and bottle rockets.) 
Today kids put on their own fireworks display in their driveways.
Neighbors have to put their pets in the basement, their cars in the garage
(if they don’t want little burns all over the finish), and turn up the
television to ignore the mini war taking place in the streets.  I’m glad
we didn’t have that stuff when I was a kid.  I’m a sissy about
fire-related amusements after watching my brother torch several of our
toys in the backyard fire pit.  Boys are dorks.

Finally, technology was not much a part of life in the 1970’s.  We didn’t
have cell phones, but we knew dinner time, and Mom’s voice usually carried
at least ten houses away.  We remembered what we needed to bring to school
or suffered the consequences if we didn’t.  We used land lines that
provided entertainment.  There were numbers we could call and listen to a
story.  And sometimes you’d pick up the phone and someone was already on
the line (not necessarily someone in your own house), providing a
different kind of story, sometimes sordid.  We had pen pals and wrote our
friends notes in class in a shorthand similar to today’s texting.  Pong
and Space Invaders were okay, but they got boring fast, sending us back
outside for real fun.  No Wii Guitar Hero, but we had our own air-band in
the basement, belting out songs from the Partridge Family or ABBA.

I suppose kids today will think their childhoods were superlative to their
kids’ too.  Making childhood easier and safer doesn’t necessarily make it
better...although I still think I would’ve liked my parents to bring me to
the bus stop and wait with me in a nice warm car.

*Just a note to pacify my folks, who were mortified by this revelation:
My encounter with a boy's privates insured that I would find boys just
plain yucky for many years.  The boy who exposed himself to me had let
loose a BM in his pants, and the caca coating his apparatus left a lasting
impression.  As for skinny-dipping, I bowed out at the last minute when I
realized all the other girls were flat-chested while I was prematurely
sprouting my little lady chi-chis.  Who knew it'd be my last chance to
dazzle anyone in this regard?