Use a rotary phone. Go out by ourselves at like… 10 years old and be trusted to just stay in the neighborhood and come home or call by the time street lights came on. We could also smoke cigarettes in a way that people saw as “cool”.
Prank call people randomly selected from the phone book. Kids these days will never know the thrill and hilarity that transpire. Hell, I consider it a rite of passage.
Read cursive.
I’m retired and I volunteer at a history archives where I transcribe 18th century documents written in cursive. They just interviewed a college junior for a summer internship. He literally can’t read cursive.
Drink at a park Friday night and not get hassled until midnight. Then cops would just make sure someone was sober to drive home after emptying out remaining alcohol or “confiscate” unopened.
Get into a fight or argument with your best friends and go home after and then not have 65 text messages and phone calls continuing the fight… so when you got back to school the next day, you both forgot about why you were mad and moved on. Learning that many arguments aren’t life or death issues that are worth blowing up friendships.
Sadly, too many 80s kids have forgotten that lesson
Between the ages of 5 and 8, I don’t recall there ever being an adult until dinner time, just older kids feeding us little ones random bits. We’d play all over the place, living down in a beach town so most summer days swimming or playing on the rocks.
My sister had a bad accident and almost died. The extent of her injury could have been avoided had there been adults around to notice. and that kinda made my parents rethink leaving us on our own while they worked in the city an hour away.
It’s the prime example of why people don’t do it now with their kids, but those really were some awesome days.
Buying cigarettes is the big one. Not being harassed by adults for being on your own with no supervision. Basically being on your own, being friends with adults as peers (nothing creepy, adults just treated you as equals). People didn’t mess with you.
It was pretty cool. You were on your own, and you liked it like that.
Pops told me to not bring home the cops or a pregnant girl. Other than that, I was free range. Had my own car at 16, I pretty much did whatever the fuck I wanted.
Use pay phones collect call to leave a msg without paying! lol
Do you accept the call from : “hi mom I arrived bye! “ I remember the big yellow phone book with everyone’s phone number and home adresse you can find people easy with that.
Being out late until 10 pm good old time
Of all the stupid – play outside, fall , skin my knee, shit I did as a kid, I NEVER ran or walked into a street or sidewalk without looking. Now it’s fucking rampant in my area where kids ( and so called adults) walk SLOWLY into traffic without stopping to look if it’s clear whether they’re glued to a phone or not.
Do anything outside alone or with just your friends. Ride your bike to a friend’s house alone, even though they lived blocks away, or even further. Be dropped off at the mall or the movies with just your friends. Walk or ride your bike to/from elementary school by yourself. Come home from school to an empty house for hours before your parents got home from work. Four people riding in a two seat car. Ride in the bed of a pick-up truck on the open road. Get a Happy Meal with an actual toy in it. Walk into a convenient store and buy a soft drink for a quarter. Buy a realistic looking snub-nose revolver pop-gun in a convenient store for a couple of bucks.
Smoke cigs, even at the high school, they had smoking areas. Ride bicycles literally 30 miles away from your house at 10 -16 years old. Nobody would fw you either. Not where I was from anyway. 80s kids could look at each other and were required to have in person or landline phone conversations. No screens. Ohhh how I miss those days.
Go outside and play till the wee hours.
Walk to school by themselves.
Not cry when they have a boo boo. Or when they have to do chores.
Take a spanking or whippin’.
Get the strap at school.
Learn the meaning of the word ‘no’.
Cycle miles to your friends house to see if they could come out to play, only to be told no, and have to cycle on to the next friend. Mum actually had a phone but it was too expensive to even ask to use it.
Enjoy what it was like to plant your ass in front of your TV on a Saturday morning with cereal, milk and some other sugary snacks and watch all the cartoons from sometimes 6am to early evening, get up and go bike riding to your friends house to play Nintendo!
Roll in the back of a pick up truck. Fake smoke candy cigarettes. Put on toxic plastic Halloween masks you could barely breathe through. Watch Cartoons on a Saturday morning.
Comments
Smoke cigarettes at school
Play with lawn darts
Get their picture on the side of a milk carton
Tire rolling with a thin stick. Absolutely amazing.
Have fun and enjoy life without recording it and worrying about how everyone else will see and judge it.
Communicate without a cell phone.
Use a rotary phone. Go out by ourselves at like… 10 years old and be trusted to just stay in the neighborhood and come home or call by the time street lights came on. We could also smoke cigarettes in a way that people saw as “cool”.
Get theirselves home from school
Burning their legs on a metal slide in 90 degree weather.
Stay out until the TV asked their parents if they knew where they were.
Buy Good Cheap Cocaine
Be alone with their thoughts
Encounter supernatural forces and monsters from the upside-down world.
Ride on the back of a truck or station wagon with no seat belt.
play outside alone without CPS being called on their parents
Jesus Christ … we were damn near unsupervised and our parents didn’t give a shit
so … pretty much everything
Climb a tree.
Be a mile deep in the woods unattended with 2 other morons at 8 to 10 years old doing insane dangerous dumb ass things.
Prank call people randomly selected from the phone book. Kids these days will never know the thrill and hilarity that transpire. Hell, I consider it a rite of passage.
Have friends wtihout having phones
Watch Empire Strikes Back ending unspoiled.
Stay out all day riding bikes without the slightest interaction with parents.
write in cursive
Spend hours outside with nothing to tell us to come home but the street lights turning on
defend themselves an not get suspended
Get away with stuff.
My dad and everyone in his school called the game king of the hill “smear the queer”💀
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Find a payphone. Get to a destination by using a map.
Exist without anxiety
Read cursive.
I’m retired and I volunteer at a history archives where I transcribe 18th century documents written in cursive. They just interviewed a college junior for a summer internship. He literally can’t read cursive.
Free play with zero parental supervision.
Go to arcades with rolls of quarters
Find porn in a bush.
Drink at a park Friday night and not get hassled until midnight. Then cops would just make sure someone was sober to drive home after emptying out remaining alcohol or “confiscate” unopened.
Find authentic era hippies in their 40s smoking pot in the woods behind your house
Go outside without adult supervision.
Dewey Decimal System
Rotary phone.
For better or worse, get in a fist fight with a buddy on school grounds and not go to jail. But also know the limits and when to stop.
Ride in the back of a pickup truck
Ding dong ditch.
Get into a fight or argument with your best friends and go home after and then not have 65 text messages and phone calls continuing the fight… so when you got back to school the next day, you both forgot about why you were mad and moved on. Learning that many arguments aren’t life or death issues that are worth blowing up friendships.
Sadly, too many 80s kids have forgotten that lesson
Remember a phone number.
Play with crazy dangerous and cool fireworks, like M-1000’s and Roman Candles
Jump into a ball pit
Go play outside till the street lights come on.
Bad boy shit without being caught on security camera.
Roam around freely.
Between the ages of 5 and 8, I don’t recall there ever being an adult until dinner time, just older kids feeding us little ones random bits. We’d play all over the place, living down in a beach town so most summer days swimming or playing on the rocks.
My sister had a bad accident and almost died. The extent of her injury could have been avoided had there been adults around to notice. and that kinda made my parents rethink leaving us on our own while they worked in the city an hour away.
It’s the prime example of why people don’t do it now with their kids, but those really were some awesome days.
Be able to wait at the school bus stop without mommy sitting in the car 10 feet away making sure a boogeyman doesn’t come.
Be able to ride a bike around town all day with the only provision to be back for dinner.
Buying cigarettes is the big one. Not being harassed by adults for being on your own with no supervision. Basically being on your own, being friends with adults as peers (nothing creepy, adults just treated you as equals). People didn’t mess with you.
It was pretty cool. You were on your own, and you liked it like that.
The excitement of getting toys/ prizes in the cereal box…
Meet friends and family at the gate at an airport.
Steal lumber from a site to build your fort.
I could go in a gas station at 5 years old and buy a pack of cigarettes for my great grandma with a note because she wouldn’t get out of the car.
Run amok in the neighbourhood…the only rule was be home when the street lights turned on (dinner time)
We were the last of the free range children…care free and happy
Qualudes.
Cursive handwriting
Have money
Be a fan of OJ Simpson.
Pops told me to not bring home the cops or a pregnant girl. Other than that, I was free range. Had my own car at 16, I pretty much did whatever the fuck I wanted.
Get home without directions.
Use the Dewey decimal system to find books in the library
Tape Record a song off the radio
We could do anything we wanted. Literally anything and no chances of being caught unless we got snitched on.
Wander around outside. These days some karen would call the cops about unattended kids and the parents would be arrested.
Walk off a crappy ass job on a Friday afternoon and have another job by Monday or Tuesday the following week.
Pedal a bike
Play arcade games for a quarter.
Bb gun war
Use pay phones collect call to leave a msg without paying! lol
Do you accept the call from : “hi mom I arrived bye! “ I remember the big yellow phone book with everyone’s phone number and home adresse you can find people easy with that.
Being out late until 10 pm good old time
Put a chain back on a bike.
Speak freely with all people in their peer group and not get shot.
Drive a manual transmission
Bleed a damn radiator
Lawn darts.
Did someone say read and write cursive?
Afford their rent?
Walk or ride their bikes to a nearby gas station/grocery store/fast food restaurant with their friends for a snack
Operate a rotary phone, or even know what one is. Same for a typewriter.
Ride your bike to the local gas station to buy cigarettes for your mom, when you’re 10 years old.
walk to school and be home alone for hours on end.
Read and write cursive
Of all the stupid – play outside, fall , skin my knee, shit I did as a kid, I NEVER ran or walked into a street or sidewalk without looking. Now it’s fucking rampant in my area where kids ( and so called adults) walk SLOWLY into traffic without stopping to look if it’s clear whether they’re glued to a phone or not.
Do anything outside alone or with just your friends. Ride your bike to a friend’s house alone, even though they lived blocks away, or even further. Be dropped off at the mall or the movies with just your friends. Walk or ride your bike to/from elementary school by yourself. Come home from school to an empty house for hours before your parents got home from work. Four people riding in a two seat car. Ride in the bed of a pick-up truck on the open road. Get a Happy Meal with an actual toy in it. Walk into a convenient store and buy a soft drink for a quarter. Buy a realistic looking snub-nose revolver pop-gun in a convenient store for a couple of bucks.
Read write cursive
Buy a house.
I remember no seatbelts in the car. It was weird if you used one. Strangely it seemed like less bad car accidents also.
Fix a computer.
Go outside when the sun’s up, ride your bike off into the distance and show back up home when the street lights came on.
Drive stick
Not sure about this one but, read an analog clock. ?
Add, subtract, multiply, divide, sound out words, be on time, buckle down.
Smoke cigs, even at the high school, they had smoking areas. Ride bicycles literally 30 miles away from your house at 10 -16 years old. Nobody would fw you either. Not where I was from anyway. 80s kids could look at each other and were required to have in person or landline phone conversations. No screens. Ohhh how I miss those days.
Play outside.
Be creative.
Actually interact with people in the same room at the same time.
Survive without a phone?
Go outside and play till the wee hours.
Walk to school by themselves.
Not cry when they have a boo boo. Or when they have to do chores.
Take a spanking or whippin’.
Get the strap at school.
Learn the meaning of the word ‘no’.
Play outside safely, even if it was a few streets away.
Read a couple of sentences without skipping words, or do basic arithmetic without a calculator.
Watch silent but free porn on UHF TV by twisting a tuning knob just right
Take a shortcut through a neighbors yard without getting shot
Memorized a lot of phone numbers.
Riding a bicycle without a helmet. No one dared to wear a helmet.
Write in cursive.
Walk to school alone
Take a joke
Watch Saturday morning cartoons.
Stay outside for 4 hours.
Walk into a store with $1.00 and walk out with 100 candies without a 5 finger discount.
Cycle miles to your friends house to see if they could come out to play, only to be told no, and have to cycle on to the next friend. Mum actually had a phone but it was too expensive to even ask to use it.
Play cops and robbers outside with toy guns.
Go more than 50 ft from our front door without someone calling the cops or CPS for a child endangerment.
Make change without a calculator or a till.
Go a week without using a phone!
Take a joke
Show respect
Enjoy what it was like to plant your ass in front of your TV on a Saturday morning with cereal, milk and some other sugary snacks and watch all the cartoons from sometimes 6am to early evening, get up and go bike riding to your friends house to play Nintendo!
Roll in the back of a pick up truck. Fake smoke candy cigarettes. Put on toxic plastic Halloween masks you could barely breathe through. Watch Cartoons on a Saturday morning.
Buy a house.
Set a VCR clock
Memorize phone numbers. I bet I had 20 phone numbers in my head. Friends, family, etc.
Handwriting.
Afford to buy a house when they grow up
Today’s kids will never know how cool arcade games were.
Tekken
King of fighters 97 (my fav)
Metal slug
Ride in a car without seatbelts.
Hit a nail with a hammer.
Have social skills
Read a map