You Think You've Got It Bad

I’m sitting here with with my two little daughters, and like all grown-ups since the Bronze Age I’m thinking, “These kids have got it made.” No doubt about it, we had it a lot harder when I was a child.

Yep. Life was a challenge growing up way back in the prehistoric sixties. You kids now-a-days don’t realize it, but when I was a lad the world was just emerging from the dark ages. Our family was luckier than some, but even so, we only had dirt to eat. Still, it was better than nothing, and we did come up with some interesting variations to combat the monotony of serving soil for every meal. Oh, sure, there was brown dirt, red dirt, black dirt, and for a special treat, maybe a little clay. You could mix it with water and make mud (lots easier on the teeth), and in the winter of course, we had frozen dirt a-la-mode.

We didn’t have any of your fancy electronic toys to play with either. I remember the thrill of my first toy, (which I finally received on my seventh birthday). It was awesome. It was interactive.

It was a stick.

Not just any stick, mind you. A nice stick. It was about twenty inches long, with a few small
nubs on one end and smooth, brown bark. I was the envy of all my stickless friends, and when
I took it to school for show and tell even the teacher was jealous. I carried it with me wherever
I went, and in a fit of creativity named it “Stick”. Man, I loved that old branch. I often wonder where he is today.

Now, I hope I haven’t given you the impression that life was dull in those days. Far from it. We had our entertainment, stuff that would beat the socks off anything you can do today. I used to love going to the weekly Stare-downs. And then there were the Breathing Festivals, Walking Bees and Blinking Contests. We Pendletons come from a long line of blinkers. Grandpa was Tri-County champ back in ’13, ’14 and ’18, with an unbeatable flutter-shut combination that kept his rivals terrified for most of the decade.

“But wait,” you say, “I’ve heard so much about the music of that era. The Stones. The Byrds.
The Beatles.”

Well, there may be some selective memory at work here. Everything, it seems, looks better in retrospect, and those groups were really just A) a bunch of guys hammering different sized
rocks together, B) a flock of crows that shrieked from dawn ’til dusk in Harvey Tapp’s grove,
and C) a coffee can full of bugs that would buzz in annoyance if you shook them up enough.

Still, somehow we found a way to dance to it.

We had to walk to school. 37 miles. Through waist-deep volcanic ash. Uphill both ways.

Medicine was still in a primitive state. A visit to the doctor usually involved waiving around a chicken, dancing and drum-beats. The nurse used a syringe with a square, rusty needle to give you a shot, and usually had to pound it into your butt with a hammer. The X-ray machine could melt the plastic keychain in your pocket.

The only TV was in another county. It picked up one station, which in those days mostly featured programs about oven cleaning and pet de-lousing. Everyone looked forward to the big holiday tire rotation spectaculars. And movies! Kids today complain because they only have four thousand channels on cable, but in my day, movies were nothing more than three guys and a
light bulb behind a sheet. You may have seen the 1967 Oscar-winning “Dog Barking” on late-night re-runs. Personally, I thought “Ostrich Head” should have won that year, but who can account for Hollywood tastes?

There was no Nintendo. No Internet or e-mail. No cellular phones, VCRs, cassette decks or microwave ovens. No CDs. No color TV, no cable TV. No space shuttle, and no Super Bowl. Computers filled entire rooms and required their own nuclear power source. No pocket calculators, no interstate highways. No twenty-screen cineplexes. Heart transplants were a decade away, and anesthetic was just a large wooden mallet to the head. There were no women Senators or Congress-people. There were still Mailmen and Firemen, not letter-carriers or fire-fighters. Airline “food” was served by stewardesses instead of flight attendants. There was no Diet Coke, no contact lenses, no Taco Bells, Wendys or Arbys. We wore Red Ball Jets rather than Nikes. No one played football on Monday nights. There were no fax machines.

Pretty grim, huh?

Little daughters, you’re lucky to be living in the modern world. You can communicate via satellite with your cousin in New Mexico, and you take it for granted. Your world is full of promise and hope.

But I remember walking out into the yard one cloudless August night in 1969 and gazing up at a spectacular full moon hovering brightly in the sky above our farm. There were men walking around on that moon, and the thought of it nearly blew me away. In the first 13 years of my life we went from Howdy Doody to “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind”.

Maybe the dark ages weren’t so dark after all.