S is for Survival

Gowing up and moving out

1952 family photo; Olive and Jan

It’s a miracle that any of us survived growing up in the 1950s,1960s, and 1970s.

Smoking. Our dad smoked all his life, exposing my brother and me to secondhand smoke from Day 1. Although Mother didn’t smoke, the stench of tobacco permeated our house and car at all times. A photo of a baby shower in August 1951 in an apartment in Toledo, Ohio, shows women smoking and drinking to honor my Mother’s pending delivery. As a child watching TV commercials promoting cigarette smoking, I considered which brand I might like to try once I grew up. I coughed on planes because the smoking section didn’t protect the smoke enough from circulating. I sat in Resident Advisor meetings in college with clouds of smoke in small rooms. Once I grew up, I never smoked.

Baby formula. My brother and I were bottle-fed on the recommendation of the pediatrician (“Don’t worry! You don’t have to breastfeed. Just give them this formula.”) As Mother documented carefully in my baby book, I was fed on a formula of evaporated milk, Karo syrup, and boiled water, and not fed on demand. Oh no. Instead, there was a rigid schedule for mealtimes, right from the first day home after several days in the hospital after a birth in which Mother was sedated, Dad was confined to the waiting room, and Baby Jan was dumped alone into a nursery.

1951 family photo; Olive and Jan

Bedtime. Pediatricians encouraged moms to put babies to sleep in what we now know were unsafe cribs, on their tummies, alone in a nursery. The cribs often had slats where babies’ heads got stuck, fingers were caught, or covers impeded breathing. There were no baby monitors. No cameras. No nannies. And certainly no sleeping with parents.

1952 family photo; Jan in the crib

Child restraints in vehicles. Granted, the interstate highway system was in its infancy, and cars drove at slower speeds. I guess. But in my earliest years, there were no child car seats or seatbelts. I came home from the hospital in my mother’s arms, in the front seat. On long trips, we kids slept in the back of the station wagon or even in a sedan, on the back of the seat, wedged next to the window!

Outdoor playtime. There were trampolines without nets, playground equipment that sometimes toppled over, and unsupervised use of swings, bars, and teeter-totters. Kids were often unsupervised outdoors, even very young ones. Once, I was walking on the sidewalk near our home when a kid threw a rock at my toddler brother, hitting him in the head. I ran home with him, blood streaming down his face. There was another incident I wrote in The Story of My Life, written at age 11:

“Here I think I should mention a certain incident that happened at a creek in the very back part of our lot. My brother, now about 1 ½ years old, a friend of mine, and I [age 3 ½] were playing ball with an older boy who watched out for us while we were at the creek. We were trying to learn to catch a large rubber ball. The older boy tossed the ball to Donny, just for fun and as the ball went sailing over his head straight toward the creek, Don chased it with his arms in the air trying to catch the ball. My girlfriend and I were quite scared now because if someone didn’t stop him, Don would go straight into the creek. We were jumping up and down yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!” when he did fall into the creek. Immediately, I ran to help him, but being so little, I couldn’t get him out without going in myself. While the older boy tried to reach him, he was floating toward a large drainage pipe big enough to fit him! Finally, though, he was brought ashore and I promptly took him home.”

Did I accurately remember those details at age 11? Would I really have been out alone as a toddler with a one-year-old? Who knows? I wrote those words in sixth grade.

No bike helmets. My only spectacular bike wreck involved skidding in gravel at the bottom of a driveway and flying face-first into the road. A neighbor saw the accident, ran out, scooped me up, and delivered me home, blood everywhere. I remember my mother saying, “I don’t know what to do.” There were doctors’ visits. I was well into adulthood before wearing bike helmets became a requirement.

No childproofing at home. Childproofing was an unknown concept. No such thing as childproof medicine bottle lids or secure latches on cabinets, drawers, or doors. Once kids were mobile, forks might go into electrical outlets, or chemical-filled bottles under sinks became potential toys. Where was the supervision?

1953 family photo

Going places alone. Children were often free to roam about, walk to school on their own, or go into shops in a nearby village. That was not the case for my brother and me, although I rode my bike to elementary school and junior high school. Mother was unusually and perhaps atypically vigilant about where we were and what we did. I once wandered off to play with my friends in a nearby snow-filled ditch. When my mother discovered I was missing, she found me quickly, angrily marched me home, and sent me to bed sobbing. I suspect she was terrified, but I didn’t see it that way at the time. However, as I got older, I’d go unescorted to friends’ houses nearby or to a local park with no time constraints or pre-visit review of safety issues, such as guns in the house or encountering unknown people in parks.

Sugar. Sugary gum and candy were everywhere growing up. There were heavenly candy stores. Chewing bubble gum was a popular pastime. At one time, I had a long rope of bubble gum wrappers. There was a special way to fold the wrappers and attach them to make a continuous wrapper rope. Our parents bribed us to eat tomatoes by sprinkling sugar on a slice. Same with half a grapefruit sprinkled with sugar. Cereal was a common start to the day; always something sugary like Frosted Flakes. Cornflakes required multiple teaspoons of sugar to make the meal tolerable. Ice cream with chocolate sauce was a family favorite. Every year, I sold Girl Scout cookies door to door, alone. And I ate plenty of cookies myself.

Corporeal punishment. Spanking in school and at home was the norm, especially at Catholic schools, which fortunately I never attended. I wasn’t smacked at school because I was a perfect student. At home, things were different. I was labeled a sassy child. Our mother’s frustrations with what she judged as unacceptable behavior often resulted in spankings, including slapping across the face.

Beach time and no sunscreen. We moved to South Florida in 1963, where going to the beach was what everyone did as often as possible, with friends, usually not with family. Frequently, no lifeguards. We’d just wander the beach looking for shells, getting fried, peeling, and smoothing baby oil on our skin, thinking it produced better tans. Once, a friend and I were walking along the beach, and some kid crawled out of the nearby mangrove patch and said, “Do you wanna do it?” I said, “Do what?” We kept walking. Supervision nonexistent.

Water quality. We drank from garden hoses and taps until we moved to Florida, where the tap water stank of sulfur. We started drinking bottled water in 1963. It came in huge plastic bottles that sat in stands. The water guy delivered the big bottles. Who knew about microplastics?

Unsafe “toys.” We had a BB gun in our house that we sometimes took outside and “practiced” shooting things in the front yard. In junior high school, we took archery in gym class, were allowed to borrow a bow and arrows to take home, and practiced shooting arrows in the backyard. What were they thinking?

Mosquito control. In South Florida in the 1960s, trucks cruised the neighborhoods in bug season, emitting pesticide sprays. It stank, and we ran indoors to avoid the nasty stuff.

After school. Although coming home to an empty house wasn’t something I experienced growing up, I was aware that some of my friends’ parents worked outside the home and weren’t there when the kids got home after school. As a teenager, I wished my mom worked away from home so I could have peace and quiet after a long school day. But that never happened. As a young child, I was only left alone once that I remember. Being alone terrified me. I sat on the steps in the garage, crying until the rest of my family got home after some errand out with my brother. Most of the time, Mother was always there. In larger families, the older siblings often had to watch the younger ones, whether they wanted to or not. Teenagers weren’t always reliable child-minders, as I found out much later with my own children. My brother and I rarely had babysitters. There were no available relatives, nor did our parents go out often without us.

Hitchhiking. This was the ideal way to get into Grand Teton National Park from the dude ranch where I worked during summers in college. Otherwise, I didn’t hitchhike anywhere else. Even in the 1970s, there were cautions against hitchhiking, but lots of people in my generation used that method of transportation.

Raising children became a totally different experience once I had kids in my mid-30s in the 1980s. How different life was for our children. How did we survive all those dangers in mid-century America? Most of us did; perhaps we were just lucky. And survival didn’t mean that all that stuff was OK. There were certainly positive aspects to growing up and coming of age in those years, but those are topics for other posts.