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Winter 2011 Applegater
APPLEGATE OUTBACK: MY OPINION
Looking back
BY BOB FISCHER
When looking back, it’s hard
to believe that we have lived as long
as we have...................My mom used
to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread
mayo on the same cutting board with
the same knife and no bleach, but we
didn’t seem to get food poisoning.
My mom used to defrost
hamburger on the counter and I
used to eat it raw sometimes too. But I can’t remember
getting E-coli. As children we would ride in cars with
no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup
truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
Our baby cribs, toys and rooms were painted with
bright colored lead based paint. We often chewed on
the crib, ingesting the paint. We had no childproof
lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when
we rode our bikes we had no helmets.
We drank water from the garden hose and not
from a bottle. We would leave home in the morning
and play all day, as long as we were back when the street
lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.
We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would
really hurt.
We played with toy guns, cowboys and indians,
army, cops and robbers, and used our fi ngers to simulate
guns when the toy ones or my BB-gun was not available.
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda,
but we were never overweight, we were always outside
playing.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made
the team. Th ose who didn’t, had to learn to deal with
disappointment. Some students weren’t as smart as oth-
ers or didn’t work hard so they failed a grade and were
held back to repeat the same grade. Th at generation
produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem
solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and re-
sponsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
Almost all us would have rather gone swimming
in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring).
Th e term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in
a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all
took gym, not PE...and risked permanent injury with
a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of
having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles
and built in light refl ectors. I can’t recall any injuries,
but they must have happened because they tell us how
much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an op-
tion...even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much
harder than gym.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a
lesson by running the halls with leather soles on linoleum
tile and hitting the wet spot. How much better off would
we be today if we only knew we could have sued the
school system. Speaking of school, we all said prayers
and the pledge and stayed in detention after school and
caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two
weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
I don’t understand it. Schools didn’t off er 14
year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn’t have
known what either was anyway) but they did give us
a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started
getting the sniffl es. What an archaic health system we
had then! Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat
and everything.
I thought that
I was supposed to ac-
complish something
before I was allowed
to be proud of my-
Bob Fischer
self. I just can’t recall
how bored we were without computers, Play Station,
Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must
be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through
the denial of the dangers that could have befallen us as
we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to
some guy’s vacant lot, built forts, out of branches and
pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who
got to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property
owner thinking, letting us play on that lot. He should
have been locked up for not putting up a fence around
the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an
infrared intruder alarm.
Oh yeah...and where was the Benadryl and steril-
ization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been
killed! We played king of the hill on piles of gravel left
on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, mom
pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome and
then we got our butt spanked. Now it is a trip to the
emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49
bottle of antibiotics and then mom calls the attorney
to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile
of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either
because if we did, we got our butt spanked...and then we
got our butt spanked again when we got home. Mom
invited the door to door salesman inside for coff ee, kids
choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while
playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks
were made tough...it wasn’t so that they could take the
rough playing in the family room), and dad drove a car
with leaded gas.
Our music had to be left inside when we went
out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my
imagination a couple of times when we went on two
week vacations. I should probably sue the folks now
for the danger they put us in when we all slept in camp-
grounds in the family tent.
Of course my parents weren’t the only psychos. I
recall Danny Reynolds from next door coming over and
doing his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell off .
Little did his mom know that she could have owned our
house. Instead she picked him up and swatted him for
being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amok.
Summers were spent behind the push lawn
mower and I didn’t even know that mowers came with
motors until I was 13 and we got one without an au-
tomatic blade-stop or an auto-drive. How sick were
my parents?
To top it off , not a single person I knew had ever
been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.
How could we possibly have known that we needed to
get into group therapy and anger management classes?
We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills,
that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t
taking Prozac! How did we survive?
Reprinted with permission from, Th e Firing Line,
March 2003.Bob Fischer, Life Member
Bob Fischer • 541-846.6218