The 50s are a little early for me, but I’m sure some of these 60s memories are applicable too:
1. Come home when the street lights come on. You would leave like at 8 o’clock after breakfast come home at night. Nobody particularly worried about it. That gave you a tremendous amount of freedom, autonomy, and self-confidence.
2. Who’s ever house you were at, their mom was making you lunch, or dinner if it was evening. Everybody’s mom was everybody’s mom.
3. Building tree forts. I don’t know the kids today have the equivalent of this. But we would just head out in the woods and build a tree fort. It never occurred to us to think about who’s property we were on, or whether we were allowed to build stuff on it.
“Who’s woods these are, I have no idea.
I think I’ll build a tree fort here.
Sometimes we would borrow nails or wood from who’s ever house we started out from. Sometimes we “liberated“ scraps from a building site, usually with permission. Sometimes we would cut down trees and just use that. We used nails if we had them or lashed things together if we didn’t.
4. Camping out. Sometimes we would just randomly camp out. Again, I have no idea whose land we were on. A favorites spot was in a pasture that wasn’t that far from my house. Pretty much everyone knew how to pitch a tent, make a fire, cook that kind of stuff. Again, you just had more self-reliance.
5. Unorganized sports. Baseball in the spring and football in the fall. No one set it up for us. We were just grab a ball and go out and play. Often, neighborhoods competed against one another. The only trophy we got were bragging rights. Those games could get pretty heated, but ultimately we worked out any issues among ourselves. Everybody played but the better/older kids got the skill positions.
6. Looking out for kids in the neighborhood. If a younger kid from the neighbor was getting picked on you’d stand up for him. It was an unwritten rule.
7. Asking trucks to sound their air horn. I have no idea about the origin of this, but pretty much everyone did it. Whenever you saw a truck you would make a fist and make a pulling down motion and the driver would be beep his air horn at you.
8. Going fishing. “Wanna go fishing?“ “Sure.“ ‘Nuff said.
9. Riding bikes. Your friend live on the other side of town, no worries, hop on your bike and get there.
10. Swimming. Pretty much wherever there was an open body of water, you were going to go swimming in it. Ponds, quarries, or, in my case since I live near the shore, the ocean. No lifeguards? No problem.
Life in America in the 50's. Like Archie and Edith sang....those were the days.
