[Dan in Pasadena]

No problem with reminiscing as long as you know what it is. Classic "old people" rant is worrying about the "moral decline of our youth", "things were always better in the old days". Well, yes and no...maybe, but they're over, we ain't (unfortunately) going back.

Having said that, born end of 1954. Childhood in little suburban Whitter, CA. birthplace of Richard Nixon. For me, childhood was about 1961 or 62 to 1972. Coming in summer nights when the street lights came on...but begging and getting let go again to play hide-and-seek (and check out one of the neighbor's hot young wives that was a bar maid at a local dive). We were peeping toms, I admit it. Collecting "polliwogs" in the local drainage ditch before they were concreted. I HATE to think of the $hit and junk I was wading through with skinned knees. The muck we reached into with bare hands to catch crawdads, wiped our hands off on our dirty shorts and reached into a lunch sack for a snack - eek! My street was a long downhill cul-de-sac crossing a through-street. We'd race our bicycles down the hill and across the intersection to the cul-de-sac on the other side. We should have been killed multiple times; never even a close call, no one standing lookout, we'd just haul azz down the hill and hope for the best! Incredibly stupid.