When I was a kid...

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Our house didn't even have a shower.
Personal washing was invariably done at the twin concrete laundry sink (the laundry being in a little room separate from the house)
Btw, the toilet was also separate from the house.
A bath was a rare luxury.

What "when I was a kid" stories do you have?

My bedroom was upstairs and the winters were very cold. The heat in the house would stop at bedtime and it would get so cold in my room that I had to have many many blankets to stay warm. I would estimate that I had approximately 12 inches of blankets layered over me. I would then pull them over my head and leave only a small breathing hole making a blanket cave for myself. I found nothing wrong with the situation as a kid and figured that's what I needed to do to solve the problem and it was actually comforting to be in my "blanket cave".

I also didn't really know how to, or feel it was necessary to tell my Mom that my shoes were getting to be far too small. As a result my toes just continued to curl more and more to the point that they formed that way (aka hammertoes). For whatever reason it didn't occur to my Mom to buy me new shoes.

Ending on a good note, When I was a kid, I loved to play by myself mainly outside in nature.

When I was a kid...

... we were six kids sharing two bedrooms.

... there was no heat above the ground floor, where us kids slept.

... there were no electrical outlets there, either.

... both parents smoked indoors; sometimes as much as two packs a day each.

... there was no air-conditioning.

... during the hot summer months, we slept on the front porch.

... I was 7 or 8 before I figure out that mac and cheese casserole was not a meat dish.

... I was in my teens before I figured out that Spam was not a luxury item.

... before I turned 10, every kid I knew lived a free-range existence.

... after I turned 10, all of our parents watched us like hawks.

... on the night before my 10th birthday, one of my classmates was kidnapped, raped and murdered; her body was left just down the hill from her grandparents' house. The murderer had escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane just a week before. When he was caught, he was sent back there, never to be heard from again.

When I was a kid...

I hammered so many nails into the mango tree out the back I'm surprised it didn't go into shock and die.
Neither did I die from the hiding I received from wasting all the nails.

When I was a kid we used to live in a water tank on a rubbish tip.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

^ Tim Brooke Taylor?

When I was a kid...

I never missed an episode of the Goodies.

Our house was big and had two bathtubs, each one with a shower, of course,
but we didn’t use them, mainly because we had no hot water. Instead, we
went once a week to a flat my parents owned elsewhere to have a bath.
By the way, we had a boiler, but couldn’t be bothered to get around to
installing it. My parents finally did it when I was a teenager, but it
only worked for a brief period, maybe a few months. Then they surprised
me by having it working again once, when I was about twenty and came to
visit them from the place where I was studying. Again, it lasted less
than a year, and as far as I know, the house has remained without hot water ever since. Of course, my parents are getting too old to endure those
living conditions, so they had to do something. What’d they do? Buy
another flat, of course, while keeping the house where I grew up in its
unfinished state and in growing disrepair.

By the way, there was a small room attached to our garage where my
parents intended to keep a washing machine, so we could do the laundry
there, instead of carrying it to the flat and back. Unfortunately, the washing
machine didn’t make it past my early childhood, so you can rest assured we did go back and forth with our laundry ever since. Besides, they put a shower there, with only cold water, too,
needless to say. If you guess we used it exactly zero times, you
guessed right! There was also a toilet, which we, astoundingly,
did use a few times. Anyway, faithful to our tradition,
we let both become unusable before we could ever truly benefit from
having them.

We didn’t exactly live in the middle of nowhere, but the population
density was low enough for it to be conveniently impractical for me to
spend much time with other kids, and, at any rate, my parents didn’t get
along very well with most of their neighbors, nor did the latter among
themselves, so any hazard that I might make friends and learn a bit
about socializing was duly averted, and it was thus guaranteed that my parents would
always have a reason to scold me for being so socially awkward.

I had my own bedroom that had its own bathroom in a house that had heating and air conditioning. Sorry, didn't mean to brag.

When I was a kid we listened to music on cassette tapes. We carried around walkmans to listen to music on.

i shared a room with my sister.


and my parents in puny apartment.

i had a racecar bed. kickass.

I can actually remember a time when I had to use a dvd to watch a movie instead of it being available digitally.

Walkmans came out when I was a senior in high school. I had a transistor radio----but never took it out of the house.

Kids didn't usually bring radios with them when they went out to hang out. Teenagers used to bring their radios to the beach and schoolyard, though.

We only had air-conditioning on a couple of occasions in the 1970s. Both didn't last long.

When I lived in a house in Far Rockaway as a teenager, I slept in an attic room where the heat didn't reach.

A couple of years in summer camp, we had latrines, rather than toilets. They were like outhouses with multiple "toilet" seats in them.

I started travelling along in the subway when I was 8. The fare was 20 cents then.

In 1973, when I was 12, a 16-ounce bottle of Coke went for 27 cents, including 2 cents tax. We thought we wuz being robbed.

I spent my allowance playing pinball in the neighborhood candy store. I got $1 a week when I was 10. It went up to $2.50 by the time I was 13. The candy store guy was named Mike. He would throw me out if he caught me reading the comics, saying, "What is this, a library?"

I got nickels and dimes from the tooth fairy for each tooth that came out.

My father used to throw a quarter into a machine to pay the tolls on some bridges in New York City. Most of the bridges and highways had no tolls at all.

I was 10 when JFK was assassinated - we had a black and white TV.

We didn't have a shower, only a bath and all of us kids would be bathed together once a week. (4 of us). I think it was once a week - it could have been more but definitely not every day.

My dad rigged up a telephone to be a radio I could listen to in my bed and I used to listen to a pirate radio station that dad had tuned it to. I had a favourite fizzy drink, Tizer, and I would steal the teats from my sisters baby bottle and put it on the bottle of Tizer and drink and listen to the radio. Good times.

I also had comics, lots of them, and also got shouted at by the newsagent for hanging about and reading the comics. I read DC rather than Marvel and was in love with Superman. My parents also let me subscribe to Dandy and Beano.

My mother donated all my comics to the local Doctors surgery one day, she thought I had "finished with them". I mean what the heck????

My pocket money in those days was 9 pence, I think, and that was enough for 1 comic and maybe some sweets.