Teach the younger generation some tricks

[vrider]

I am truly sorry that you had such a horrid and scary childhood. But i would bet that your children (probably unknown to them why) will prosper from a set of loving and caring parents. Thanks for your input, maybe by sharing it you can put some of them aside.

Cruzr Joe

Thanks.... I never actually wrote that down before it just sort of popped out, think the other posts I read triggered those memories. Unfortunately I really never got to the real subject of the post. So I do have a few tricks for the younger generation:

1. You can indeed survive on Mac and Cheese, hot dogs, Ramon noodles if you have to.
2. Cardboard in shoes for soles, bags on feet, socks on hands do work.
3. You can fix a lot with duck tape.
4. Learn from your failures and especially from the failures of others.
5. If it sounds to good to be true...... yep it is. Love all the trips I won... lol
6. You make your own choices, you control what you say, what you do, how you act.

 

[IdahoMtnSpyder]

We weren't abjectly poor, I don't think, as I was growing up we sure didn't have any extra money for goodies. I grew up on a farm so we had meat, milk, and eggs as long as I was home. The meat was canned in quart fruit jars, or sometimes stored in rented freezer space at the local butcher shop. Things really got a lot tighter for Mom and my youngest brother in subsequent years. My dad died when I was 10.

Some things I remember from back then. One was salvaging oil from oil cans. After I changed oil in the tractor, car, or whatever, I would lay the cans on an inclined U shaped steel fence post which served as a trough. You'd be surprised how much clean oil dripped out over a week or two. That oil was collected in a can and then used in the squirt oil cans around the farm. I still drip oil from plastic bottles to use in squirt cans, although the newer plastic bottles don't retain near as much oil film as the old steel cans did.

The second story of our house was hot in the summer. I found an old motor with a fan and mounted it in a wood frame and propped it up in the open window to circulate air at night. Sure didn't want to get my fingers close to the running fan as there was no guard on it!

The one thing that makes me shudder yet today when I think back on it is cutting firewood. Starting at age 12 to 14 my two year younger brother and I would take a Homelite chain saw and go into the timber on the farm and saw down dead pine trees. We cut them into lengths and pulled them to the house where we cut them into blocks using a buzz saw. Here are some pictures from an old farm demo day celebration with that very same saw. Maybe the realization that one slip up and we could be instantly killed is what kept us on our toes and safe. The tractor you see in the background of the first pic is similar to the one we had to power the saw. These are two of my brothers and one nephew.