Grew up in Inglewood, CA til I was 12. Only (half) white boy on the block. Learned very quickly how to defend myself. Dad worked hard to get us out of there.

We eventually moved out to Ventura County when it was still horse country and you could ride dirt bikes everywhere. I really miss the days when you'd see kids carrying a shovel under one arm while riding. We built jumps all over town.

Yep! :p

My parents were married April 7th 1951. The man that was my dad's best man had shared a crib with my mom when they were infants.

That is just alien to me. My parents grew up in the same neighborhood an went to the same schools and had several mutual friends. The lady my dad had his first date ever (at age 14) was the neighbor of my mom and my mom's best friend.

My parents did not start dating until they were 19 and they were 21 when they got married. They knew each other since they were in second grade in the same classroom.

They could discuss the teachers name even after their 50th wedding anniversary. I can't even remember the name of the schools of six different schools I went to for 1st to 6th grade.

Wow I could go nuts on this post,
My earliest memory is going to watch em dig the Expressway in Chicago with my Grandpa.
Tons of kids in the neighborhood -- played nothing but sports and toy guns, (we were very well armed -even if we imagined half the weapons). Walked to school -- dreamed of Stingrays -the bike. Later the car.
Got one buddy from three doors down - known longer than all my brothers. Most moms did not work - we did not have a lot of stuff but seems we had every thing.

My Grandparents were in the same one room schoolhouse and lived near each other and were married for 65 years. My parents grew up across the alley from each other, had the same teachers/classes, and went the prom/dances together, and been married for 55 years. I guess the apples don't fall far from the tree because my brother married a nice girl who lived 6 doors down the street, and was in the same graduating class, and I married a girl from the street behind where I grew up that was a classmate. We didn't start dating until we were 22, and been married for 26 years now. The neigborhood where we grew up was always active with kids on bikes or playing basketball in the driveway, and tents were out in the backyard for sleepovers.

There were no electronics to play with until I was a teen and got a electronic, hand held football game with 5 buttons on it. You had to DIAL the phone and sit in the kitchen to talk because the cord wasn't long enough, and we only had one car until I was almost driving age.

Yea, when I was a teenager talking to a girlfriend on the phone meant going back to my parents bedroom to have some form of privacy. My brother and I fought over phone time. We were limited to 30 minutes of phone calls per night. My dad was always on call back then so we could not tie up the phone too long. One time my brother was on the phone for an hour and the Air Force sent an officer over to get my dad on the phone to talk to a general. My brother was grounded for that.

Lest I be drawn and quartered for my humorous reflection of "uphill, in the snow..." (not I put it in green). I can state that I certainly have a lot of recollections from my childhood and days gone by. Some of the modern marvels I remember were:
Color TV
FM Radio with no static (not to be confused with the moderator)
Amana Radarange that could bake a potato in ONLY 20 minutes
Cassette tapes
CB Radios
Radial Tires
Cordless telephones in the home (heck I remember the breakup of ATT so that you could actually own your phone!)
Answering machines
Integrated Chips
Nuclear Powerplants (and the advent of the phrase NIMBY)
My High School was so advanced, we had a teletype modem connected to a computer at Hofstra.
Commodore 64 and then my first IBM clone that ran at 8 MHz!

I was always in love with cars. It started with drag racing greats like Big Daddy Don Garletts, Snake and Mongooge... Built a ton of model cars. I remember when STP was high tech and it was super cool to have the stickers on my school books, Andy Granatelli, when AJ Foyt was a driver, Mario Andretti winning Indy.
My and my buddy Bob, watched for the new models kept in utter secrecy until they were unveiled on a specific day. Hemi Under Glass. My buddy's `69 Camaro SS and my `67 Chevelle SS (oh if we had only kept those cars!).

And yes, I actually walked 1.5 miles to Junior High and High school in the snow because in my school district you had to be 2 miles or more to ride the bus. :p

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Born in 1971, but still lived through some stuff that is unthinkable for today's kids. I remember when our school bus slid off the road due to some ice and we had to get out to push it out of the ditch - probably illegal today. When I was about four, every day my dad would come home from work on his motorcycle, take his helmet off, put it on me and take me for a ride around the block. Around that same time my kindegarten class all dressed up in early American costumes and went down to a local TV studio to say the Pledge of Allegiance while all standing on a set of bleachers (would probably be illegal today). Soon therafter Channel 11 ran that clip of us every night for a week after Gunsmoke and before Adam 12.

My mom was one of those marketing research people that came up to you in the mall to ask you try this food or drink and then take a survey on it, similar to the Pepsi Challenge commercials. Ron Howard was filming the movie Cotton Candy in the local mall and I got to go watch some of that, got an autographed photo too.

I was Gene Simmons for Halloween in 1977 and I might do that again next year.

I just remember that simple things made us happy.

This is how my grandfather described Brooklyn in the 40s/50s.

I was born in detroit in 1950 but we summered there and left at the first snow to S fla
detroit had 2 or 3 TV stations plus one from canada, miami had only one at first
in detroit we had a big lake front house but no kids on our street 10 mile road
we had a huge B&W projector TV with a 3x4' screen but it ran hot and could catch on fire
dad was into Jags mark IV and V's nice cars but not very reliable so we had a caddy as a back up car and needed it
and always took a caddy or Lincoln to south fla on pre-interstate US 41
by 57 dad got into 356's after my much older brother started racing them in the SCCA

miami was still segregated totally with even buses by race [the black ones always came before ours] mom never bothered to learn to drive even thou we always had two or more cars
I found that odd as detroit schools were not and I had a black kid as a best friend there in 1st grade
another odd thing in miami was all the boys and girls were paired up as BF/GF in that school
it started in kindergarten and continued in 1st and second grade
I remember my G/F being pissed at me for moving away to coral gables as that left her alone

I was born in 1942 & we lived on a rented farm in Illinois. My first memory was when I was maybe less than two years old. We were at a small local fair at night, & my mother was carrying me. There were sort of dim light bulbs strung up for lighting. Kids were riding some sort of small trolley things on a track like a model train would use. They were chain driven and the kids were using their arms to crank a bicycle like chain mechanism to make them go. I remember my mother telling me to wave at one of the kids who was a cousin. We had a cow named Elsie for milk & butter and a coal burning stove for heat. We didn't have a telephone, but my grand parents had a wooden crank phone on their wall where you'd tell the operator who you wanted to talk to. We moved to the San Joaquin Valley in CA & lived in a 27 ft. trailer (five of us by then). Behind the trailer park was a junk yard and in front was highway 99. I walked to school in the first grade carrying my lunch money tied in a handkerchief. Actually I walked to school until I graduated. Afterwards moved to a small place in a small town where my dad was manager of the only gas station (Standard) on the main drag next to the railroad track and where the highway went through the main drag. We got our first B&W TV and I remember watching Howdy Doodey, Spacer Patrol, Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, and the like. Before TV I listened to Buster Brown, Sky King, The Shadow, etc. on the radio, played, or wrote stories. We went through a 7.2 earthquake there in 1951, of which I have vivid memories of. Later we moved to a big town of almost 100K people where I started in junior high. I was a country hick with a DA and wore a corduroy, patched jacket of different colors my grandmother made by hand. After the first day I was the famous guy with the patched jacket. Stayed there through high school and started working at almost 15 in a gas station on the outskirts. I learned to drive on a 1944 military Jeep and my first car was a '55 Ford two door sedan with a Y-block V8 & 3 speed stick. Starting in my junior year I worked loading diesel trucks with milk at a dairy 4 nights a week in addition to playing football and running on the track team, which I became captain of in my senior year. Things were different then, but they will be different another 50 years from now, and the people then will probably be doing what we are here now.

Born in 1946 and grew up in Warren, Ohio in the 60s. My grade school was visible from our house and we rode our bikes everywhere. We would take the bus downtown to the Y on Saturdays morning and go to the movies that afternoon. We’d always get home in time for dinner. We were really on our own most of the time – there was never any parental supervision when we were out of the house.

The only organized sport was Little League – and you had to try out to even be allowed to play. Not everyone made the cut. We’d play sandlot baseball and muddy field tackle football every chance we got. No one knew what hockey was – but we’d play a sport called half-ice in the winter that was really nothing more than football on the ice. In the fall we would hunt pheasants and in the summer we’d fish – sometimes with our Dads/Grandparents and sometimes just by ourselves. We were trusted and allowed to be on our own. Just be back home by the time the street lights came on.

Our neighbor got a TV in 1951 and everyone came over to their house to watch TV. My Dad told me that once after a big storm, I found a TV antenna that had been blown off someone’s house and had brought it home so ‘we could have TV too!’

In the 50’s and 60’s Warren and it’s bigger neighbor, Youngstown, were very much controlled by organized crime and we got away with all sorts of stuff that today would have landed us, well….just say I was lucky. Ohio at that time allowed kids between 18 and 21 to drink 3.2 beer, and, the minimum age of 18 was really just a suggestion most places. And almost every night would end at the Warren’s famous ‘Hot Dog Shoppe’ were we would get two dogs with sauce, a half-order of fries with sauce, and a root beer for 63 cents. That would ‘freshen’ your breath in case your Mom or Dad might be awake when you got home.

A friend’s brother who was three years older than us went off to Whittier College in 1962 and came home in the summer of ’63 with a bright red Chevy 409 door SS coupe. It had been modified a bit with an Isky 505 cam (that wasn’t advertised so that it could still run in the ‘stock’ class at the local dragstrip) headers ‘by Doug,’ American mag wheels with Denman tires, a hot ignition system (I think it was a Mallory Mini-mag), traction bars, and a ram induction system that we fabricated by taking out one of the headlights on each side. We ran it that summer and the next one at Sunset Drag Strip in Sharon, PA – icing down the engine after each run with ice we had liberated from the Holiday Inn to keep it cool. At the same time, we were also racing our family’s cars.

I would take my Dad’s 1962 red Buick Invicta station wagon that had a 340 HP V8 and a Dynaflow transmission and enter it into D/Sa races and did pretty well - as Sunset was a 1/5 mile strip. We’d open up the exhaust system for no flow restriction, pop off the wheel cover, take off the air cleaner and paint the car with white shoe polish and other water soluble paint – turning it into “Crow’s Fire Wagon” and then washing it off on the way home. I also tried to race my Mom’s 1962 Pontiac Tempest with no luck – what a pig!

I was really fortunate to have had a great childhood and learned a lot things that have helped me along the way. I began working at age 12 and still am today. Surprisingly, my best friends today are the same guys I grew up with in Warren.

You nostalgia guys better go check this out. I remember leaving the house every day in the summer when it got light and not coming home until it started getting dark. We lived about a half mile from the American River, so I was there all the time. I never saw a homeless person down there until after I went away to college. By 1990. they were camping out and trashing the area along the river.
groovy new and old aerial shots of the US

Things that were important, significant or troubling then (I was born in 1956) that are not now:

Vapor lock: Used to happen to cars.

Gun racks: My HS parking lot had dozens of truck with them, and they were
populated.

The draft: The last draft was in 1973.

VD: Rumor is a little shot in the bum, problem solved. How quaint.

Rabbit Ears: When we got a roof top antenna with an electric pointer
mechanism, shut up: We were the Jetson's

Drive In Theaters: License to steal some free time

TV Test Pattern: Replaced by the Housewife's of Madison County

Air at the Pumps: Because you needed it.

So much more.

The best part of growing up when I did was getting and staying outside, unorganized games without a coach.

Oh I remember the first day of deer hunting season a lot of kid in school were absent. The second day a lot of the boys had a gun racks in the back window with a rifle in the rack and ammo in the glove box. The principal would walk the lot to make sure all the trucks were locked.

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The rooms were so much colder then
My father was a soldier then
And times were very hard
When I was young
When I was young

Smoked my first cigarette at ten
And for girls, I had a bad yen
Life meant so much more
When I was young
When I was young

When I was young, it was more important
Pain more painful, the laughter much louder, yeah
When I was young
When I was young

I met my first love at thirteen?
She was brown, and I was pretty green
I learned so very much
When I was young
When I was young

When I was young, it was more important
Pain more painful, laughter much louder, yeah
When I was young
When I was young

My faith was so much stronger then
I believed in fellow men
and I was so much older then
When I was young
When I was young

I'll see your eric and raise you alice
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(although the animals were the better of the two)

I see your Alice and raise you a Who:

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And:

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