Timothy Birdnow

So I was talking to my dear sweet wife Cathy this morning and we did some reminiscing. In particular we were talking about cigarette smoking.

My parents both puffed away why like coal-fired train engines why I was growing up, and often I would get sent up to Gasen's drug store to buy them cigarettes. Now, I was as young as 8 years old when they had me do it. Can you imagine that today? There are legal age limits for buying tobacco products, and here I was a little boy sent by himself with a dollar to pick up a pack of camels!

And nobody said a word at Gasens; just handed over the pack and off I went!

Now parents wouldn't even let their kid walk the two blocks to the store alone. At that age I wandered the entire neighborhood. I remember being ten or eleven and walking miles from home. I went to a day camp for kids at Florissant Valley Community College, which was a number of miles away, and occasionally walked home from there.

It was a very different world.

Back to the smoking; my parents would light up as soon as they got in the car, and we would be treated to a car with smoke as thick as a forest fire. I mean it was like the mist werewolves would come out of in horror movies. If it was cold they would keep the windows up. And if it was my mother she would keep them up even on boiling hot days to avoid her hair being blown all over. In those days we didn't have air-conditioning in our car. If we were lucky they opened the little wing window, but that was about all we could hope for. Even after my dad bought a LTD station wagon with a/c he wouldn't run the air because it burned more gas (and this at a time when gas was under a buck a gallon.) So we would swelter in a car that was probably over 120 degrees F. And the seat would burn the backs of our legs.

Those were the days!

Later, we would put Gasen's lax attitudes to good use when we became teenagers because they weren't very scrupulous in checking I.D.'s for beer. I remember getting warm beer from there, and a bag of ice, and going over to "the little creek" which was basically a drainage ditch with some trees along the side of Lewis and Clark BlVD. Once we tried digging a hole in the ground to act as a cooler, but it just made the beer muddy. Good times!

The other day the local PBS station ran the eighties movie "Arthur" and I watched a portion of it. It's amazing how much our civilization has changed; Arthur was a sloppy drunk and that was accepted as humor back then. No more. He drove while drinking hard liquor, and in one scene parks on the sidewalk because he was too drunk to park properly. Nobody thought anything of that back then. Now the man would probably wind up in prison for DUI and wreckless driving.

It's a very different world now. Safer in some ways but far more stifling. Kids are never away from some authority, and their lives are always structured. Back then we were the freest human beings on Earth during the summer months. It was paradise! We could go where we pleased and do pretty much what we wished as long as we were home before dark. Parents did not fear this freedom for their children. They knew the kids would develop an adventurous spirit and a curiousity by interacting with the world. And there was little fear of perverts kidnapping a kid; any adult man would step in if a kid started shouting, and he would know what to do with such a scumbag. Now the man would be arrested and the pervert would wind up being feted on television as an oppressed class. And, of course, the kids all knew not to get into a stranger's car. We knew the ropes.

We are told how much we have advanced, how the Progressive project has made our lives so much better. Yes, materially things ARE better; my family didn't have air conditioning until we moved into Bellefontaine and then it was only a window unit. My parents rarely ran it because of the cost, too. We didn't have computers or anything like that. We were lucky; we had two black and white television sets, one with a rooftop antenna which my father had to adjust on the roof during storms. Here he would climb a ladder during an electrical storm and manipulate the antenna until we said the picture was watchable, while the rain poured down and the lightning flashed. He - and we- thought nothing of it.

The television used to roll, too, and we'd always have to screw around with the vertical hold to stop it. I remember watching half a picture and the bottom half over the guy's head! And "snow"!

We had a party line telephone, too, and often had to wait until the old ladies who shared it with us hung up.

But it was amazing luxury compared to most people in the world.

Frankly, I wouldn't trade the freedom and joy of my youth for all of the electronic gadgets. Kids these days are withered and strangled. They have amusements to make their prisons easier, but they are still prisoners. We were free. I am so very sorry for what we have done to our youths.

It's why they are angry and want things like socialism and radicalism. They sense they were cheated out of something.

It's sad that those days are gone, distant memories for me now. And they grow more dim as each year passes. The years grow shorter and the memories grow weaker. Ah well.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:21 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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