Hysterical Journey to Historic Places


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September 20th 2013
Published: September 20th 2013
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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">KIDS BEING KIDS<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">My granddaughter, Rachel, has asked me to prepare a story for presentation at grandparents’ day at her school. The story needs to address the differences between going to school now and going to school back in the day. It is a story that I will take delight in telling.



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Everyone knows that there have evolved massive cultural and societal differences over the past 50 odd years that have greatly impacted not only education, but children too. Back then girls never wore pants to school. They wore dresses or they wore skirts and blouses. Back then kids never called adults by their first name. It was Mr. Whoosits, or Mrs. Schnozola, or Miss Rumpulfuss. I still don’t know the first names of any of my teachers, or little league coaches, or my friend’s parents. <strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The schools had lunch programs but they were not mandatory and they were not free. Parents, not schools, were expected to feed their kids. If the family could not afford the school lunch program kids brought their own lunches. The school lunch system required that kids bring money to pay for the lunches on Monday every week. It was called lunch money. Sometimes the kids lost it, or used it to buy candy for their friends, or older kids took it away from them at the bus stop. It wasn’t a great deal of money. Lunches for week cost less than a dollar. It was a responsibility though. If you didn’t pay for your lunch you didn’t eat all week.



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">There were no backpacks, and of course there were no cell phones, or pagers, or computers. Some of us did not even have TV’s. Instead we had imagination and we used it good and hard. Kids played outside with their friends every day. We played cowboys and Indians, we played cops and robbers, we played army, and we climbed up in trees. Sometimes we fell out of the tree and broke our arm. We rode our bikes without helmets or pads. If we crashed our bikes sometimes we got scuffed up some. Sometimes we got in fist fights and made up and went right on playing. If there were any fruit trees around we got in fruit fights. We got in egg fights. Sometimes we got in rock fights. Sometimes we shot B B guns at one another. It was all good though. It was part of growing up and didn’t hurt us at all. One day I saw my friend, Alan, sitting under a tree banging two rocks together. I went over and asked him what he was doing. He said, “Well, I just fell out of this tree and landed on my elbow. It hurts real bad, but I am too old to cry, and I am too young to swear”.



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I grew up in Auburn, California. It was a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Maybe five thousand people lived there. Kids from Kindergarten to 4th grade went to Lincoln Way School and the kids from 5th grade to 8th grade went to E V Cain school. Those schools were about a mile apart. All of the kids from kindergarten to 8th grade used the same buses every day. The young kids got dropped off at Lincoln Way and the older kids got dropped off at E V Cain. Usually the older kids tolerated the younger kids pretty well at the bus stop, but not always. If it was raining we waited for the bus across the road from the regular stop under a big pine tree. There was a puddle under that tree though where rain water collected. The older kids liked throw rocks in the puddle to splash us younger kids. Sometimes that led to a rock fight and the younger kids always came out on the short end of that stick. Johnny was an older kid that I decided to make friends with because he was a much better friend than he was an adversary. Johnny was in the 4H Club. They don’t have 4H here which is really too bad because it was a great club to be in. The 4H club gave kids animals to raise. It was a great learning experience for those kids. They learned about responsibility, and about caring for their animals, and about doing good things.



<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Johnny had been given a Holstein calf named Betsy. When I was in the 3rd grade, like Rachel is now, me and Johnny quit riding the bus to school. We left early and walked to school so that we stop along the way at Mr. Howard’s barn where Betsy had a stall. Each morning we used the pitchfork to dispose of Betsy’s manure, we put fresh straw in the stall for Betsy to wallow in, and we fed her alfalfa hay with black strap molasses. It was my job to shovel the manure. Sometimes Johnny and me would get in manure fights and both of us would show up at school covered from head to toe with fresh cow manure. Fortunately there were enough 4H kids in school that it wasn’t much of an oddity. My teacher, Miss Scott, disapproved of it though. Once in awhile she would send me to the principal’s office and the principal would have to call my folks and have them bring clean clothes. Mostly though we just waited until the manure dried and brushed it off out in the playground during recess.

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