The Elder Statesman

Looking back over my growing up years it’s hard to believe, in light of the laws on the books today to protect children, that I have lived as long as I have. In my generation children rode in cars without safety seats, seat belts or air bags.

Our baby cribs were painted with bright colored lead based paint. I am sure we chewed on the crib and ingested the paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles. We had no childproof doors on cabinets and we rode our bikes without helmets and skated on sidewalks without wearing helmets or kneepads.

We drank water from the garden hose. We spent hours building our soapbox racer that sometimes was no more than skate wheels nailed to a 2 x 4. And then we rode them down the hill as fast and carefree as we could go. We did install brakes — a piece of wood nailed to the side of the 2 x 4 that when applied would scrape the ground or cement and slowed down the motion. Generally we’d just run into the bushes and let them slow us down.

Every vacant lot was a potential playground and no one every objected, even when we built forts or a baseball diamond on the lots. We would leave home early in the morning and play all day without fear for our safety. The rule was to be home for dinner, which was always at noon in my growing up years. Then we would return to play, often until dark when the streetlights came on. We had no cell phones, so no one was able to reach us all day, but fully trusted we were safe at play.

We thought a treat was a cold biscuit in which we jammed a hole with our finger then villed it with cane syrup. Sometimes we snacked on bread and butter and drank Kool-Aid, but we were never overweight since we were always outside playing.

There was no Little League when I was growing up, but we played plenty of sandlot baseball, choosing teams from the rag tag bunch that showed up on a vacant lot. Most of the time the first team to bat was decided by hands grabbing the bat and walking hand-over-hand up the wooden stalk until the winner had the last grip. The games were serious and we learned the agony of defeat, which taught us to deal with disappointment.

In those days if you as a student weren’t as smart as the others you would fail a grade and you were sent back to repeat the same grade. I never failed a grade, but my mother wondered why I would get A’s in English, Literature, and History, and D’s in mathematics. I was always mystified by arithmetic, except when it was a written problem, like farmer Jones had two-dozen apples. He sold a dozen and a half, how many apples did he have left. That probably was an early indication that I would be a writer.

Some of us even got paddled in school, a fact we never shared with our parents because we would have been paddled again at home for misbehaving in school. The worst punishment was to have a note sent home from school telling of one of our misdeeds. That was not the era of spare the rod and spoil the child. My dad was the family enforcer and a sturdy belt was applied across the backsides to an errant child.

Of course that would probably be considered child abuse in today’s society, but I can truthfully say, he did not abuse the authority, but wielded it judiciously.

Somehow I survived those harsh times and I wish the children of today could be so lucky.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)