When you were a kid.

[mintygreen]

I guess back when we were 'scaring age'. LOL. By the time MI came out though, I was 17.

Here's a picture of me when I was 10, almost 11:



My hair wasn't curly when I was a kid....it became that way when I went through puberty. LOL. Although I didn't know it was so curly until I grew it out and stopped blow drying it.

And here is one when I was 13:

[pitbulllady]

As far as I know, there are no pictures in existance of me as a kid. My father had an entire cabinet at his house devoted to album after album of photos he had taken of me, my brother and younger sister and other family members, pets, vacations, etc. His house burned down to the ground a little over three years ago, taking all those memories with it.

When I was a kid, cable tv did not exist. Only the military and the largest universities had computers, and those were huge mainframes that took up entire vaults. One of my earliest memories was of John F. Kennedy's assasination. There were three networks on tv, plus ETV. If you lived way out in the country like we did, you needed a huge metal antenna on a pole to access the channels, and you had to go out and turn the pole when you wanted to change channels because the stations were located in opposite directions. If anyone was running a tractor or an electric fence was on within, say, 10 miles, it messed up your reception so you couldn't watch anything. At midnight, all networks signed off the air with the National Anthem, and came back on at 6 am, usually with farming shows, followed by the local news. There was no internet, no video games, no dvd's and even the Sony Betamax video tape player/recorder was years down the road. FM radio was something only found in the large cities, and AM radio played everything from Country to R&B to Rock on the same station. At night, you could listen to stations hundreds of miles away. I lived in terror of jets breaking the sound barrier with those loud sonic booms and would run inside anytime I heard one approaching! We raised our own farm animals, and one of the highlights of each winter, once the weather got cold, was killing, processing, and cooking a hog. It was just a fact of life that you got used to at a very early age. I can remember at the age of five or so, helping to scrape the hair off a dead hog that had been dunked in a 55-gallon metal drum set at a 45-degree angle into the ground and filled with a mixture of boiling water and Red Devil lye, and helping to cut up chunks of skin and fat to be put in a big black "washpot" over a fire to be rendered into lard and "cracklins", the best part of the hog!
My grandparents lived next door and owned the property we lived on, and I was very close to both of them, more than with my parents. My grandmother's parents had both come over from Ireland, and she used to tell us traditional Celtic folktales of monsters and things and sing us traditional Irish songs. There was a big microwave relay tower nearby, that had a blinking red light on top at night to warn passing aircraft, and she told me it was a child-eating monster called "Raw Hide and Bloody Bones", that ate bad little kids that refused to come inside at night...had me scared half to death of that thing! Ah, those were the day...
I was already legally an adult when Pong came out on the Atari game system, and when Apple released the first home/personal computers. I'd already been a professional educator for many years when the first portable phones, a monstrosity called a "bag phone", came out.

pitbulllady

[mintygreen]

May 16, 2012 20:25:35 GMT -5 pitbulllady said:

As far as I know, there are no pictures in existance of me as a kid. My father had an entire cabinet at his house devoted to album after album of photos he had taken of me, my brother and younger sister and other family members, pets, vacations, etc. His house burned down to the ground a little over three years ago, taking all those memories with it.

When I was a kid, cable tv did not exist. Only the military and the largest universities had computers, and those were huge mainframes that took up entire vaults. One of my earliest memories was of John F. Kennedy's assasination. There were three networks on tv, plus ETV. If you lived way out in the country like we did, you needed a huge metal antenna on a pole to access the channels, and you had to go out and turn the pole when you wanted to change channels because the stations were located in opposite directions. If anyone was running a tractor or an electric fence was on within, say, 10 miles, it messed up your reception so you couldn't watch anything. At midnight, all networks signed off the air with the National Anthem, and came back on at 6 am, usually with farming shows, followed by the local news. There was no internet, no video games, no dvd's and even the Sony Betamax video tape player/recorder was years down the road. FM radio was something only found in the large cities, and AM radio played everything from Country to R&B to Rock on the same station. At night, you could listen to stations hundreds of miles away. I lived in terror of jets breaking the sound barrier with those loud sonic booms and would run inside anytime I heard one approaching! We raised our own farm animals, and one of the highlights of each winter, once the weather got cold, was killing, processing, and cooking a hog. It was just a fact of life that you got used to at a very early age. I can remember at the age of five or so, helping to scrape the hair off a dead hog that had been dunked in a 55-gallon metal drum set at a 45-degree angle into the ground and filled with a mixture of boiling water and Red Devil lye, and helping to cut up chunks of skin and fat to be put in a big black "washpot" over a fire to be rendered into lard and "cracklins", the best part of the hog!
My grandparents lived next door and owned the property we lived on, and I was very close to both of them, more than with my parents. My grandmother's parents had both come over from Ireland, and she used to tell us traditional Celtic folktales of monsters and things and sing us traditional Irish songs. There was a big microwave relay tower nearby, that had a blinking red light on top at night to warn passing aircraft, and she told me it was a child-eating monster called "Raw Hide and Bloody Bones", that ate bad little kids that refused to come inside at night...had me scared half to death of that thing! Ah, those were the day...
I was already legally an adult when Pong came out on the Atari game system, and when Apple released the first home/personal computers. I'd already been a professional educator for many years when the first portable phones, a monstrosity called a "bag phone", came out.

pitbulllady

Awww I'm really sorry to hear that all of your child photos burned away, PBL.

All of the pictures of me as a kid were taken with a regular camera though too since even when I was a kid, digital cameras weren't really a thing yet until I was at least a teen. So all the pictures of me as a child are physical pictures, not digital ones uploaded on a computer.....that's why I had to take a secondary picture(with my digital camera) of the pictures in my photo albums(I don't know how to use the new scanner we got yet).

I also feel like I'm pretty much the last generation of kids that still played outside more than staying inside watching TV and video games. I mean I played some video games as a child since they were around at the time but for the most part kids who were born when I was still played outside a lot. The internet started to become a big thing more around the time I became a teenager and now a lot of kids that came after me don't play outside so much anymore. I mean some do still of course, just in general....since you hear all these news stories these days about kids being too inactive.

Anyway it must be interesting to see that many things change over the course of your lifetime, PBL. It's actually really amazing how much the world has changed over the last century actually....before that it feels like everything moved more slowly but so many things have been created in the last 100 years.

It sounds like you're probably around the age of my parents(well, I'm guessing you are still younger than them since you say JFK's assassination is one of your first memories....and my dad was already 20 by that time). My parents were both born in the 40's. My dad was actually born during WWII over in Nazi occupied Holland.

I don't remember my family trying to scare me with monster stories but I do remember checking under my bed every night to see if there were any. LOL. I did scare my little sister into believing that there were monsters under our deck in the backyard though and she ran into the house screaming. I guess that's kind of mean....but I think a lot of kids do that to their younger siblings once in a while. I never did anything really mean though. lol. My sister and I get along pretty good.

My dad grew up on a farm too by the way, PBL. Not me though, I've always been a city kid.