50 some years ago

All us kids in our little school district never really had a bully.
One of our farm girls would pound knots on his head if he got out of line.
It was fun when it snowed and drifted hard so us older boys could help the
bus driver put on tire chains.
It was not uncommon for a couple guys to have a fire arm on the bus and nobody ever asked why.
The bus driver would let one of the aforementioned kids out in the middle of "a couple miles from home"
so the kid could hike over some ground and shoot a rabbit and or a squirrel or two on the rest of the afternoon.
I was one of the kids and my Uncle was the bus driver.
His daughter, my cousin Cathy was a year older than me and the toughest woman I have ever known.
I lived with those folks for quite a few years and remember when they were getting plumbing in the house sometime in the 60's
We had quite some times back then, I was an accomplished truck and tractor driver by the time I was 12.
Kind of would like to drift back there again.

LOL Zim

Sounds like good times Zim

The 60's and 70's were a good time to grow up. Too many electronic distractions nowadays! Urban sprawl has not helped either!

Chris

The first time I solo'd on a tractor, I was six. My uncle and dad were loading irrigation pipe on the trailer while I tried to keep the wheels in the row going about 1 mph. At the end of the row, my dad would jump onto the tractor and get me turned around the other direction and step off again.

My mom got pulled over for speeding in the family beetle. There was an uncased 20ga shotgun (unloaded) on the floor of the back seat that my dad used to kill crows in the corn field. Three of us little kids were in the back seat with it. State trooper didn't say a word about it.

My 10 year old friends and I would take our backpacks and sleeping bags and disappear into the woods for the weekend with no adults.

I guess we had kind of a facebook back then, now that I think about it.
It was called a party line.
Ours was 3 rings.
There were no secrets.

Zim

I remember dad would drop off me and my friend at daylight wherever we wanted.
As long as we were back at my uncle's at dark.
Common to go through a brick each of .22 rounds shooting Jack's.
We'd walk MILES a day.
No permission needed. Wasn't uncommon to see over 1000 Jack's a day. Now, seldom see one.
Ahh, the good ole days!

The fiftys were the best years for me. Could go as far as my leg would take me, no one would think a thing about it, just say howdy! I started the fiftys off with a bang. Dad went to town, town was a mile from the end of our half mile long lane. I decided to go there too. I was three, and had a tricycle for wheels. Here I was about eight in the morning pedeling my bike down the highway. A number of people went by and waved, before the next door neighbor stopped me only about a quarter mile from town. He hauled me home and mom worked on my hind end a bit!

About 57 or 58, a neighbor boy that I ran around with some, decided that a fish bait stand along the highway would be a good endeavor. We dug worms, caught grasshoppers, crawdads, minnows and such, and made ourselves a few bucks. Was a good time to grow up, as even the local lawyer was well liked and was like everyone else. Wasn't the backstabbing and money grubbing that goes on nowdays, back then....or at least as a kid, I sure didn't see it! lol

My first trapping was done in 54. I thought I'd died and went to heaven! Civet cats, aka spotted skunks were the main menu, with a few possums and stripers. Used to get the FCTaylor fur price lists in the mail, and spend days looking at them. Dream about catching a mink.....but I lived on an upland farm, and there wasn't even coon around. I remember crossing the pasture in the summer, and there in some baked dry mud was a set of coon tracks. I dreamed about catching that coon for months, but never saw any sign again!

Those were good days and times. I wish the world was as simple and honest as folks were back in those days. Thanks for letting me ramble!

I never rode a trike to town but all the rest rings true. Thanks for the memories.

bunch of oldies on here

I took a marlin .22 to school and made a new walnut stock for it.
Later I sold it to a policeman.

Hey Zim...did you take a Big Bus...or a Little Bus to school...........:)

50 years ago-aaaah the girls.

I collected pop bottles for a year to buy my first deer rifle a 30-30 Marlin. Still got it!! Took guns to school to do reports on and even ammo to show what they shot, teacher just stacked them in the corner. I wonder what has happened to our country and why we cant get it back?? I think if they threw a few parents in jail for their kids shooting up a school people might start checking their kids better. No way could I have got out the door with my mom not knowing what I had. But she loved me and parents were different back then kids were not your best friends they was kids and the teach was right!!

thanks guy brings back lots of good times

The 50's :

A spincast rod/reel was the cats meow, When we eventually did get one, it took 5 minutes for the B/W television to warm up and get a picture, not very good by todays standards. Rawhide was my favorite show.
Cars were made of real steel and had a lot of character. Us kids used to run behind the fog (DDT) trucks that drove through in the summertime. Drinking a soda pop and eating a hamburger "out" was a huge treat.
I remember the buzz watching Sputnik overhead in the night sky. I remember sitting in my uncle's dentist office, getting my first fillings without any anesthetic.

All of the Above!!!! Those were good days!!

I remember bringing my single shot .22 to school on the bus for "show and tell".Every country boy had a knife in his pocket.Every class had one big pencil sharpener in the back of the room.Ours broke one day and the teacher put me in charge of sharpening pencils with my jack knife.On lunch break we would shoot marbles out in the gravel parking lot.every boy had a bag of marbles with him.No running water in our farm house.Had a double seater out house in the back.I remember the old man sending me up on the roof to spin the TV antenna and he would yell when the channel came in clear.3channels,,4 on a real clear day.We would watch Red Skelton at night for laughs.Rawhide and Bonanza were two of my favorite shows.Also the Rifleman.We raised pretty much everything we ate.150 chickens each year along with one bull,three pigs and some turkeys.Canned everything from the garden.Helped the neighbor hood dairy farmers hay their fields for some spending money.Money was usually spent on BBs or .22 shells.

SO many good memories from 60's & 70's growing up. I think about those times ad the things that have changed that the young today will never experience.

I remember getting off the couch to change the channel.....boy do I miss those days........

And buying tubes of BB’s

Some of the things my brother and I did while growing up would have the FBI and the ATF knocking the front door down these days.

And just so you don’t think I’m old....that was only 40-45 years ago.

i've always thought i was born 100 years too late.

hahaha smuck

I would pour a bunch of them in my mouth then spit them into the BB gun.Hahaa swallowed a few over the years.

A good Read Zim... a Time machine would be nice, sometimes though we might not want to return.

Same procedure here up - Early stages of "disposable firearms"?

I grew up in MO and back in the early 60's. One of our school bus drivers was a quail hunting fanatic. During quail season he always had his shotgun in the bus. If a covey of quail ran across the road or was spotted off the road. He would jump out of the bus and shoot some birds! All the boys would jump out of the bus and go retrieve the birds!

When I turned 16 (mid 60's) I got a job with the local concrete company putting in a sewer line the some new logon's the town was putting in. We were always running into rock that had to be blasted. I got to do it all.........drilling, loading the holes and setting it off. What could be more fun than a 16 year old working with dynamite!

That same year I went into the local Western Auto and bought myself a new Remington 1100 (20 ga) with my summer earnings. No paper work at all. The salesman just ask if it was OK with my parents that I was buying a gun. I said "yep" and he said "here you go"

I really don't know if I would want to be a kid growing up in todays world?? Like everyone said "The old days", society was a lot different for us.
We were gone sun-up to sundown (sometimes later). Rode the wheels off bicycles or wore out tennis shoes walking!

took my 5 yr old back the lane where my great aunt and uncle use to live yesterday. We walked it about quarter mile each way and i thought he was gonna die......are we almost there dad ? are we? He soon got over it.

I'm a youngster compared to yall. Grew up in late 70's and 80's(parachute pants, big hair do's, blah blah). My Dad wasnt much on fishing, hunting, he never owned but a bb gun. So our fun was bike riding, shooting model rockets, sports, climbing trees and reading about all the real stuff we wanted to do like hunting, trapping, fishing and shooting guns(when i was 11 i worked 7 hours for a win mod 67a 22 rifle[i still have it], but never had much chance to shoot it). I wasnt able to start trapping till i was 23, but i already had the traps bought when i was 18.

took drivers training in 68 My Dad was a dairy farmer and Mom didn't drive as I had to be there at 7am in the summertime I drove myself to town so did the other farm kids

50 years ago I was still pretty old (22). I can relate to many of your experiences 65 years ago.

I can relate to about everything mentioned, one thing I have noticed and kinda bugs me is why we need so much stuff now. I remember people in 50's and 60's only had the bare bone essentials, now you can't function in todays world without a boxcar load of STUFF.

I find your total disregard for anyone that sat quietly cowering due to the aggressively offensive behavior quite disturbing. A major failure on the school districts part for exposing children to such an overdose of masculinity.

Oh yeah, and another thing. The adults should be held accountable for allowing such shenanigans when the planet is approaching temperatures of uninhabitability.

The BB tubes I remember were like paper shotgun shells. No brass end and crimped on both ends. One's pictured came later.

In high school (66 to 70) I would have my 243 in my car, the gym teacher/baseball coach would come get me out of class if he saw a woodchuck on the football or baseball fields. I would carry the rifle thru school, out the back door by the shops and shoot off he top of a car. For each chuck Coach bought me a lunch! Those that see me can vouch I did not miss many lunches. Last year in school I had a 1970 GTO with pails in the trunk. Bought chucks other kids had shot on the way to school for a quarter and we fed them to the zoo animals. In Jersey you could get a farmers driving license at age 16, but all of us drove way before that. I drove a 10 ton straight job 40 miles each way 4 times a week to get cow udders, lungs, tripe and livers for mink feed. All this fresh product was in metal 55 gallon drums,open tops, no hand trucks, you rolled them on bottom edge by hand, took some practice to do. Was indeed a different world back then.

Can relate to all the stories. We would bring our guns to school and keep them in the boiler room where the janitor stayed. After school we would change into our play clothes and hunt our way home. We also helped put chains on the bus and during deer season our bus driver had his 30-06 on the bus and we had the windows down looking for deer. 95% of our roads were dirt roads with houses far and few between.

50 years ago I was a working ranch hand in NV., soon to be joining the USN. The '50s were interesting times, by '70 the country was already on track to what we are today.

Great post Zim, brings back a lot of memories.

During the early 70s I liked to hunt and trap a lot more than I liked going to school. So that is what I would do. One morning, as I was walking down a dirt road towards the farm to hunt squirrels, the truant officer pulled up beside me. He hauled me and my rifle to school for a day of in-school suspension. Me and the rifle were released to the custody of my mom after school was out.

I refinished my dad’s old Ithaca model 37 as one of my woodshop projects.

Me and a bunch of my high school buddies would always have small game gear and guns in our trucks or trunks of our cars and would go hunting almost every night after school in the fall. Guns and knives in our vehicles and nobody ever got threatened, shot, killed or arrested. Times sure have changed.

I remember those crimped tubes as well as the ones pictured. In my area there were two sizes...."Quarter Pack", or "Dime Pack". I spit a bushel basket full down the loading spout of that Daisy 94 So much of what's written was a part of my upbringing. My folks were Old-school honest, and they instilled in me a strong disdain for liars and thieves. Nearly all the adults in my family were hard drinking, and I saw a lot of stuff I shouldn't have, yet these same people never missed a days work from being hung-over. You went to work, that was the deal, and they held up their end of the bargain. I did the same, minus the booze. Both my kids got the work ethic gene too, thank God.

Gun racks in the with guns in the back window of pickup trucks. A new pair of high tops. Bellbottom jeans and those amazing miniskirts. Leaving the door unlocked and the window open when you were gone. Drive in theaters and speakers hanging on the car window. Running around barefoot in my grandparents 2 acre garden in the summer.

one of the required projects in metal shop was a hunting knife

i was driving dad gas delivery truck when i was 16,,,but i was big for my age,,maybe cause i was 3 years old when i was born

One of the best reason I can think of growing up in the late 50's and 60's is having parents from the depression era. Looking back I learned so much from my parents because of what they went through in those very tough years of the 20's and 30's. I beleive parents these day teach in many different ways then parents that were born in the 20's.

True that!!!!!!

I thank you for the reminisce of the late 50's , 60's! After 1970(married) and working in Lansing, Mich. at Oldsmobile, family raising.

In 1977 moved back to my hometown and drove 150 miles round trip. I loved living back up north.

We(wife) and I raised our kids mostly in the country. Saw lots of game and lived like when I was young.

Here in our county in Wy. we had a bounty on Magpies at 10 cents skunks were a buck, coyotes and bobcats were 5 buck so we had fun hunting to make money. We had lots of prairie dogs to shoot any time when we had money to buy 22 ammo. Also had miles of the Wind river on the place to fish. But of coarse lots of riding horses and working cows up to the mountains and back, great life then.

Before my time but my father would tell me the stories of hunting pheasants to and from school.

I used to bring my pocket knife to school so I could go ttaught to my grandfather's . Would turn it in in the morning and pick it up after school. No one blimked am eye.

We would collect empty pop bottles for the 2 cent refund.

Gun racks in the with guns in the back window of pickup trucks. A new pair of high tops. Bellbottom jeans and those amazing miniskirts. Leaving the door unlocked and the window open when you were gone. Drive in theaters and speakers hanging on the car window. Running around barefoot in my grandparents 2 acre garden in the summer.



I remember those days!...good times!

I remember walking a mile and a half one way to a one room store with my mom to get a pop or a Popsicle my favorite was banana.. The gentleman who owned the store was about 80 and blind as a bat. No one ever thought of cheating him! We would wade in the Creek behind the house and catch crawdads by the dozen or pinheads (Baby minnows). We picked blackberries with my mom who made all our jams and jellies. We never ate a store bought vegetable or piece of beef. On Sundays we was at grandmas house with all my cousins. At grandmas the men and boys ate at the table and the women and girls would eat in the kitchen. I asked her once and she said she guessed just to get the men back to work?? No one wore a seat belt and traveling 10 miles from home was a huge deal.

My uncle went to high school in the late 40s in northern Centre County, Pa. His bus driver carried his 30-30 Winchester on the bus in deer season and killed several deer out of the driver’s window of the bus.

Woodstock or Saigon
today it is millenial or Bagdad

When I was in high school, we all had guns in our trucks in the winter - heck it was hunting season. One day just after Christmas my buddies and I are hanging out in the school parking lot at lunch time. One kid got a new shotgun for Christmas and got it out to show us. That led to everyone else pulling their guns out to show off. Pretty soon the principal comes walking by on his way back from lunch. "Dang it you guys, you know better than that. Put those away" was all he said. That was 1985.

NBC, CBS, and ABC plus 3 fuzzy UHF channels were all there was on TV. If you wanted to know how to butcher something, how to cook something, or how to make something it required a trip to the local library. We went out to McDonald's once or twice a year and it was a BIG deal.

Dad had an old Ford pickup that had a shifter on the column. That broke so Dad installed a shifter on the floor instead. Then that broke so we had a hole in the floor where the shifter used to be. He kept a tire iron on the seat. You would reach down through the hole in the floor with the tire iron and flip the levers on top of the transmission to shift. That's how I learned to drive.

I can relate to some of that. My first vehicle as a 1948 International KB1. Wish I still had it, was a real chick magnet.
Once my cousin Cathy came upon a big guy bullying a smaller boy. She did not say hey, no, yes or maybe, just walked up and gave the
guy a flathander that put him out of business.
I know that feller yet today and he says that girl hit me once so hard, I thought it was two.
LOL Zim

59 years ago at age 13 and in 8th grade at our one room country school I could hunt from home 2.2 miles and arrive for class. I would put the rifle back in the case and put in the culvert at the drive way and bring the ammo in and give it to the teacher and she would keep that in her desk until the end of the day. She had allowed that for several years and she knew how to keep the 30-30 ammo from the 30 06 ammo, the 35 remington and the 8 MM as well. Never did shoot at a deer coming and going from school but was neat to be able to. We all had tasks and you better believe our tasks at the end of the day were done in quick time so we had some light while walking home through the woods.

Bryce