The Good Old Days

[Sumeri]

I had an interesting experience with this, as I truly never encountered racism as a child. Now obviously it was out there, but it just wasn't tolerated in the circles I traveled. I lived in a very diverse area that gradually became very black (my family is white) and we never had problems, and then we moved to a neighborhood that was very mixed with everything EXCEPT black kids, but nearly every single teacher I had from first grade on was a black woman. So I think it was sort of pounded into my brain that women work, and they are also the ones in charge of things. I was in 7th grade before I had a white, male teacher.

I was thinking about this the other day (probably why I started this post!) because I think my experience in the 70's was really atypical. I went to a regular Chicago public neighborhood school -- this was before magnets became all the rage -- but we had a really zealous focus on the arts - I swear we wrote plays for every damn thing, from school elections to science class - and we also had a very "Free to be You and Me" feel goody aspect to our days. Our gym teacher started our day with an affirmation every day, and this was starting in 1974 - really pre-EST.

And you know what's interesting? Out of all the kids I know now who I went to elementary school with, there is not one that has become weirdly religious or Tea Partyish or off-putting in any way. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we were all educated in a pretty hip, tolerant place.

[JenniferJuniper]

What the hell? And I thought I couldn't be shocked.

It was a common mind set. My 6th grade math teacher in 1974 announced in class more than a few times that girls shouldn't even be allowed to take math. Pretty much dooming us all to failure. That was the year I got my first "C" ever (in math, naturally). I'd been a straight A student until then.

And I was in what was considered to be a pretty progressive school at the time.

[JesusFightClub]

It sucked for my best mate who was hoping to be a doctor. She was an expert at maths and raised her hand every time.

[JenniferJuniper]

Also (and someone may have already mentioned this)--segregation and racial discrimination. I think that for some fundies, THAT'S the part of the good ol' days that they miss.

I'd say it's a toss up between this and having the wimmen folk at home making their babies and their dinners.

"It is good to be king."

[mirele]

I graduated from a suburban Houston, Texas high school in 1978. Smoking was NOT allowed, but I know the girls' bathrooms were thick with smoke in between classes. We were also not allowed off campus for lunch (only 25 minutes for the lunch period). We said the pledge (with "Under God" ) every day and evolution was not taught in biology class. We had a dress code and it was a constant fight between teachers charged with telling boys "your hair is too long" and girls "where is your bra?/why are you wearing hip huggers? you can't wear spaghetti straps in school," etc.

The only time I said a prayer in school was in spring 1968, when I was in Mrs. Gaede's class at Silverwood Elementary School. I'm naming names here because of *what she said* when I started to eat my lunch (new kid, got my lunch, started eating, just like over at Sun Terrace). "D****, we are not pigs, we pray before we eat."

Yeah, nearly 45 years later, I'm still pissed off about it. That's why I'm dead set against prayer or religious observance in school, because I still remember the seven year old I was and I was MORTIFIED. Thanks so much, Mrs. Gaede. You're probably 65+ years old now and don't remember me, but I remember you.

[Jinger Jar]

The 24 news channels are also a huge factor. I've had arguments with otherwise-intelligent people about the fact that crime stats are pretty clear about the fact that things are NOT getting worse, and in many cases are better now than they were 25 years ago.

When I was growing up we got broadcast news every evening for an hour - local news from 6:00-6:30 and Walter Cronkite from 6:30-7:00 - and on the radio in hourly snippets. If it was a Very Big Deal (e.g., the moon landing, MLK Jr.'s assassination, Watergate) the networks would "interrupt their regularly scheduled broadcast to bring us this important news," and you perked up and listened carefully because it was going to be a biggie.

Sometime in the first half of the 1980's my grandparents got cable, and with it, CNN. They spent a lot of time watching it, and when I visited them they'd tell me about a serial killer in Missouri, some man in Miami who was shot to death at a gas station, or a drug-related shoot out in Los Angeles. My grandfather was a decorated WWII combat veteran and my grandmother was a war refugee. They both knew all about calculated risk taking and the difference between immediate and distant dangers. Yet after 24/7 broadcast news came into their lives they wouldn't drive up to Toledo for fear of becoming crime victims. They spend their old age convinced street gangs from the cities were going to invade their tiny farming community Any Minute when the reality was they were more like to be injured or killed on their farm than they were shot in crossfire outside the Knights of Columbus Hall.

[Jinger Jar]

Has anyone mentioned how expensive clothes were back in the 70s? If you can find a JC Penney's or Sears catalog someone has uploaded to the Internet, take a look at the prices. They're only marginally less expensive than they are today.

Parents went clothes shopping once a year for their kids, in August right before school started. If we were lucky we got an Easter outfit. By late spring the following year our school uniforms had morphed into flood waters, mini-skirts, and belly shirts. I think the sisters didn't give us a hard time about it because they knew clothes were mighty expensive, and parents couldn't just run out and buy a few pairs of slacks or blouses. I have vivid memories of my mother putting winter coats on layaway for myself and my brother in the spring/summer of 1976. I remember because his was a bicentennial red, white, and blue affair. She went to the layaway department to make payments for months until those coats were paid off, and mine was the last one I owned until I was almost out of college.

And the clothes were really uncomfortable. Nobody wore cotton or any other natural fabric because those needed to be ironed and they stained too easily. We dressed head-to-toe in wrinkle-free, stain-free, un-breathing polyester. Polyester bras. Polyester panties. Polyester so thick the makers pressed permanent creases in trousers and shirtsleeves. I had polyester trousers cut and dyed to look like denim jeans. In the summertime it felt like you were wrapped neck-to-toe wax paper. I can remember feeling like I was just melting inside my clothes.

[NurseNell]

It was a common mind set. My 6th grade math teacher in 1974 announced in class more than a few times that girls shouldn't even be allowed to take math. Pretty much dooming us all to failure. That was the year I got my first "C" ever (in math, naturally). I'd been a straight A student until then.

And I was in what was considered to be a pretty progressive school at the time.

My daughter finished high school, in 1997, with a 4.0 GPA. Her first 2 years of college as a music major saw her with a GPA of 4.0. She decided to switch to surveying. This was in 1999 and she was told girls never finished surveying, the math was too hard. This was told to her by the head of the department. He did not want to admit her but had to. She finished #1 in the class, finished with a 4.0, and today is well respected in the surveying world as well as serving on the state discipline board for surveyors. She was the first woman to head a county surveyor's officer in her state.

[NurseNell]

I think the biggest difference between when I graduated in 1963 and those who graduated after 1972 was in girl's sports. We had NO girl's sports competition with other schools. There were intramural sports where you played against classmates. There was no recognition that girls could play competitively. The only girls who got any recognition were the cheerleaders. We had P.E. for all 13 years of school so we learned all the games plus in our school we even had archery. But the girls who really wanted to play basketball, volleyball, and softball mainly were SOL. Title IX was a major thing that I think most people forget wasn't always in existence.

As for smoking in my public school, students couldn't smoke. Very few kids did, it wasn't cool in our school at that time. It was mostly kids who weren't very good students who smoked. Once in awhile someone was caught in the bathroom smoking. Teachers could smoke in their lounge but very few did. Drinking wasn't huge because it was New York state, the drinking age was 18.

We had no school dances because the Free Methodist administrators didn't allow it. In grade school we did have Halloween parties. And we had Valentine's parties through 8th grade.

[Sydney Fox]

Has anyone mentioned how expensive clothes were back in the 70s? If you can find a JC Penney's or Sears catalog someone has uploaded to the Internet, take a look at the prices. They're only marginally less expensive than they are today.

Parents went clothes shopping once a year for their kids, in August right before school started. If we were lucky we got an Easter outfit. By late spring the following year our school uniforms had morphed into flood waters, mini-skirts, and belly shirts. I think the sisters didn't give us a hard time about it because they knew clothes were mighty expensive, and parents couldn't just run out and buy a few pairs of slacks or blouses. I have vivid memories of my mother putting winter coats on layaway for myself and my brother in the spring/summer of 1976. I remember because his was a bicentennial red, white, and blue affair. She went to the layaway department to make payments for months until those coats were paid off, and mine was the last one I owned until I was almost out of college.

And the clothes were really uncomfortable. Nobody wore cotton or any other natural fabric because those needed to be ironed and they stained too easily. We dressed head-to-toe in wrinkle-free, stain-free, un-breathing polyester. Polyester bras. Polyester panties. Polyester so thick the makers pressed permanent creases in trousers and shirtsleeves. I had polyester trousers cut and dyed to look like denim jeans. In the summertime it felt like you were wrapped neck-to-toe wax paper. I can remember feeling like I was just melting inside my clothes.

I'm also 45 and grew up in rural western Canada. We were really poor when I was little, so I didn't have many new clothes. Mom made a lot of our kids' clothes from adult clothes that people donated to our family and my mom cut down to fit. I can't imagine many people doing that these days; there are so many sources of cheap clothes now. My mom remembers when footed pyjamas showed up in stores in the late 1960's. She says they were incredibly expensive, like $30 each.

Back in the good old days, there weren't toys in the stores all year round either. Toys magically appeared at Eaton's or The Hudson's Bay Company just before Christmas, and they weren't cheap. There was no running down to Toys R Us for some cheap plastic crap every week. Toys were a real luxury, and were lucky to get a few gifts at Christmas.

As a person with a lot of allergies, I'm also glad about the changes to the smoking laws. Mr. Fox remembers driving downtown Vancouver as a child with his parents smoking like chimneys in the front seat. His dad kept the windows on the car closed because he didn't want to breath the pollution outside. My poor husband would press his nose against the window to try and get some relief.

I agree that "The Good Old Days" really mean "Back when we were mostly White." Growing up, the only minorities we would see in our small town were First Nations or maybe a Chinese family or two. When I went to teh ebil university in Victoria in 1985, the student population was still very white. Now, B.C has a large Chinese and SE Asian population. Most of the older folks in my family (those over 60) are really uncomfortable with this demographic change and wish Canada was the white country of their youth.

[Arete]

It's interesting for me to see that, even though I'm one of the oldest people here in this discussion, I seem to be the only one who never saw a Nativity play performed in my public school. Even before the ban on school prayer, it seems my small blue-collar city had more of a separation of church and state than I've seen elsewhere and more recently.

I never saw a Nativity play performed in our public schools either growing up. Or now for that matter. The earth has stopped rotating on it's axis when suburban New Jersey is a model of the counter-culture compared to Fundistan, USA.

[Hane]

Has anyone mentioned how expensive clothes were back in the 70s?

So true! I saved big bucks by making almost all my clothes back then, and regularly made things for my mom, sisters, daughter, and mother-in-law. Nowadays, it's almost always cheaper to buy something than to make it. Sewing patterns have gotten expensive, and it's difficult to find stores that sell good-quality fabric for garment-making.

Until the '80s, virtually every department store had a sewing and fabric department, and each town had several privately owned fabric stores. Nowadays, I have to drive 15 miles to a JoAnn's, and the fabric there is geared more toward quilting, home decor, and crafting than toward dressmaking. And what little they have is nowhere near the quality of what I used to sew with twenty or thirty years ago.

[2xx1xy1JD]

Clothing (and other manufactured goods) wasn't mass produced in China in the 1970s. Part of the reason for the higher prices was higher wages paid to garment workers.

[famof4]

I think the amount of religion one experiences in schools depends on the community then on time.

I experience far more prayer and religious things in public school when I taught in the the '90s then I ever did when I was a student at public school during the '70s and '80s.

[Hane]

Clothing (and other manufactured goods) wasn't mass produced in China in the 1970s. Part of the reason for the higher prices was higher wages paid to garment workers.

In the late '70s, I met a friend's sister, a Quaker missionary who had lived and worked in Asia. She told me she insisted on wearing only clothes that had Union labels, because she saw the way garment workers were exploited in many parts of Asia. Nowadays, you'd be hard-pressed to find Union labels on anything.

[freejoytoo]

I'm only 23 and I'm already hearing people talk about how much safer we were in the 90s, although I'm sure in many people's eyes we were already well into the Great Cultural Decline.

Same here. All my friends talk about how there was 'more of a childhood' in the nineties and stuff like that, even though I remember us being criticised for watching too much TV. There also seems to be this view that the world was safer then.

[CuriosityMuseum]

I'm 27 and I sang hymns in school and said prayers in assembly up until the age of 13, and I went to a secular school in evil socialist England. I thought it was normal at the time but looking back we had a significant Muslim minority at my school so it really seems off now.

[RosyDaisy]

Good old days my ass. I have my great-great grandmother's journal (she was a midwife and recorded almost all of the births she attended). She encountered everything from "inconvenienced" husbands who wouldn't have a hot meal on the table to kids being beaten while the mother was in labor. She lost one mother due to hemorrhaging because the doctor would not come. He considered childbirth a women's only thing. The father of this woman showed no emotion other than who was going to raise the other 4 kids. Before his wife was even cold in her grave, he remarried and left his 4 kids to the mercy of the world. Yeah, them was the good 'ol days aright (excuse my redneck speak).

[NurseNell]

Good old days my ass. I have my great-great grandmother's journal (she was a midwife and recorded almost all of the births she attended). She encountered everything from "inconvenienced" husbands who wouldn't have a hot meal on the table to kids being beaten while the mother was in labor. She lost one mother due to hemorrhaging because the doctor would not come. He considered childbirth a women's only thing. The father of this woman showed no emotion other than who was going to raise the other 4 kids. Before his wife was even cold in her grave, he remarried and left his 4 kids to the mercy of the world. Yeah, them was the good 'ol days aright (excuse my redneck speak).

What a treasure to have her journal! Have you ever considered publishing it through the historical association?

[JaChelle Sugar]

We need a punch gif to give to stupid fundies who aren't even old enough to have lived through the 'good old days' they rhapsodize about.

[RosyDaisy]

I have considered publishing her journal, and I may do that at some point.

[crazyforkate]

Did a quick family poll.

Dad - 75, grew up in various schools in small towns around Alberta and Ontario, mostly secular schools, though his dad was a priest (and, briefly, principal of a residential school - how's that for awkward family history?). Said The Lord's Prayer and had a hymn most of the time, plus God Save the Queen/The Maple Leaf Forever/O Canada.

Mom - 59, grew up in Winnipeg. Had the occasional prayer and sang religious Christmas carols in her public school.

Me - 21, grew up in the "BC Bible Belt", which is nowhere near as extreme as the American Bible Belt, but still pretty cracked. Public schools all the way, except for this one hippie private school I went to which didn't get more specific than "winter". I definitely remember Christmas concerts where one class would do a Nativity re-enactment, usually combined with other classes doing secular songs or things from other traditions. I recall playing an angel at least once, and singing "Happy Birthday Baby Jesus" another time. This was in public schools in the 1990's/early 2000's in Canada, people.

[teddybear]

I am 53, born in 1959 and attending public school in a small southern town. First through fourth grade, no religious stuff in school. Fifth grade my devoutly Baptist teacher read us Bible stories every morning and said prayers. Sixth through 11th grade, no religious stuff at school. I never went to sporting events, so don't know if they prayed then or not. Between my junior and senior year of high school we moved from southeast Missouri to a really small town in central Indiana. On the outskirts of town were the world headquarters for the Wesleyian Church and the principal of the high school was a Baptist minister. Many of the kids I went to high school with were preacher's kids. Religion was everywhere in this school. Prayers all the time, religious school assemblies, all kinds of religious groups for students, a Bible as literature class that wasn't really about literature. If you were Catholic, like I was, you didn't exist so most of the Catholic kids all hung out together. We had one or two Jewish students, who kept quiet and to themselves. I can't think of anyone that was openly non-religious. It was a scary time.

[RosyDaisy]

Here's another one I'm not proud of. My great grandfather raped a 13 year old and got her pregnant. I found out this is why my paternal grandfather always said he was an orphan. My great uncle molested his daughters, which is why my grandmother and mother would never, ever allow my sister and I anywhere near him and cut off all contact with him. Tell me again how the good 'ol days were so good?

[karismanic]

I've enjoyed this thread and even came out of lurkerhood to contribute...

I attended public school in rural Louisiana in the late '80s through HS graduation in 1999. In elementary school we had annual Christmas plays featuring religious carols and a nativity. I vividly remember my second grade year, as I was the best reader and had the honor of reading the Luke 2 nativity account from the KJV (!!!) as the kindergarten class supplied Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and angels. No one seemed to have a problem with these displays until maybe 1993 when the one Jehovah's Witness family complained. Then we just had classroom Christmas parties -- an excuse to have cupcakes and avoid any afternoon work for the teacher, probably. :)

We also had daily pledge and prayer (student-led) over the intercom system until eighth grade (1995).

What is probably the weirdest "good ol' days" story of my childhood is that my high school had segregated proms -- in 1999. The events were even called "White Prom" and "Black Prom", and continued through 2002 when that school was closed. I wish I could say I didn't attend because I was taking a principled stand, but -- in reality -- I was just a dork without a date. :D

My hometown is a treasure trove of fundie stories I look forward to sharing. We even had our own Westboro Baptist Church wannabes who picketed Walmart at Christmas time ("Santa = Satan") and traveled to protest Mardi Gras parades.