What doesn’t kill us
often hurts like hell
Acidman is waxing nostalgic about his kid days, homemade toys, and kid injuries. Might be just the warning signs of impending senility, Rob, but I’m right with you.
We used to have dirt clod fights- like snowball fights only using lumps of hard yellow indiana clay. If you got hit in the arm or body, you usually had a good bruise, but if your opponent managed to catch your face, the shiner and bloody nose could last a week.
Lots of folks thought i was fat as a kid, but it was just that my face was almost always swollen from shiners or dirt clods or bee stings. Or, beaten up because of a face plant off my er, bike.
Ah, yes, the bike. Iuse the term “bike” as loosely as it can be used, for there was fairly little relationship between it and what normal folks considered bicycles; it began life as a JC Higgins, and looked something like this:
Of course, mine had almost no semblance of a seat, had been painted by a professional painter- a professional housepainter, that is, and the tires had been replaced by skinny bald racing tires which looked as though they belonged on one of Acidman’s rubber band guns. It also had this front spring deal that tended to come off and fall forward at times, jamming into the soft tarmack ahead and heeling you over the handlebars without warning. The handlebars themselves were those apehanger type that were popular on 20″ sized bikes for many years, and nicely enough, the gooseneck on the bike wouldn’t tighten down on them sufficiently, so they slipped around quite a bit, usually at the most inopportune moment. There was also a similar problem with the seat, which had long since lost it’s padding and was now a rusted shell with sharp edges lying in wait for unsuspecting kid nads. I wrapped the seat in wads of dryer lint and covered it up with a piece of vinyl from an abandoned car seat, and when it wasn’t slipping out of adjustment it was chafing my nether regions sufficiently to make gramma’s jeans seem comfy.
Oh, yes: Gramma’s jeans.
In the early part of the 80’s, buttonfly jeans began to become quite popular. hell, I wore them when I was five.
When I needed jeans, my gramma, who lived with us, would make them. I got homemade jeans for my birthday every year, and I was always pissed i didn’t get a new bike (see above) but man, I wish I had gramma around to make me a pair of jeans now. She made them out of 30 ounce denim- the type they use to make awnings. It had the consistency of 14 gauge cold rolled steel, and wore about as well. I got used to slathering on cornstarch first thing in the morning because otherwise, the jeans would chafe you until you bled. I NEVER wore a pair of those jeans out, I simply outgrew them.
Anyway, gramma didn’t know how to do zippers, so all my jeans were buttonfly, and the buttons were right out front, no flap to cover them up. The heavy metal buttons she used were actually South Bend Indiana bus tokens, too damned tough to ever wear out. And, they had only ass pockets, no front pockets, that being another job too tough for gramma, and useless to me. She was bright enough to give the pockets some extra room so I could fill them with kidstuff.
Well, I never had homemade jeans (even though my grandmother was a seamstress at one point in her life, interestingly enough), but I had a very similar bicycle… One of those Schwinn Sting-Rays, a hand-me-down from one of my older cousins (which, of course, was a hand-me-down from another cousin, and so on, and so forth)…
The seat never stayed up no matter how hard you tightened the screw; the handlebars would, indeed, rotate at the WORST possible moment (like just after you’ve achieved escape velocity over a 3′ tall homebuilt jump at the bottom of a VERY steep hill…)
I’m going to have to find a Sting-Ray for my boy…
Where in Indiana did you grow up? I started out in Vincennes. I had kinfolk living up in Sullivan County as well as in Knox, went to the Farm every holiday and had corncob and dirtclod fights all summer long. My Grandpa Reel said we were wusses (not in those words) because HE had bb gun fights and made calcium Carbide bombs to really make trench warfare in the back forty. He grew up around and became a coal miner in the soft coal shafts around Bicknell. Took me to a mine when I was fifteen, to show me how it was down the shaft. He started mining when he was twelve or fifteen (different versions exist)and married at 17. His life revolved around farming, mining, bakeing and hunting.
Grandpa Reel would be 101, if he’d lived, and all of the farm is under a strip mine reclaimation. project. Some days I think I feel like the White Russian Imperial survivors must have felt; looking back at a past not only gone but utterly erased.
Odd, the things that bubble up?
JD
Store bought for me, but MY grandma, I was told made her own underwear out of burlap bags. Thee was a name for them, that I forgit. Seemes like the worse material possible to me, but those folks really knew how to get value out of a dollar. Grandma raised a family of five and a child taken in during the depression. I’m sure lots of familys have similar stories about their depression era grandparents, but most people are lacking in the departmen today, IMHO.