A light hearted look at growing up in the 70's and 80's as a kid.

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#2808536 6-Nov-2021 17:08

elpenguino:

Really? Happy with all your haircuts from those days? :-)

What’s a haircut? (Aucklander)

This talk of pyrotechnics reminds me of my late father. He was a qualified quarryman and had an explosives licence. He decided to use “some jelly” to remove a stubborn stump on the farm. Miscalculated slightly and sent the stump flying up into the air. It landed about 2 metres away from the tray of the tractor and he turned to me and said “Damn I meant for it to land in the back-tray”. I was only about 7 at the time so thought he meant it. Would have been an interesting explanation to the insurance company if it had landed on the tractor.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

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#2808548 6-Nov-2021 17:46

JaseNZ:
I first started getting into punk music for a little while until I found my way into heavy metal and Bon Scott.

I got into metal without RWP. I wired up an entire computer (Vero Speedwire on a triple Eurocard) to AC/DC's Fly on the Wall, coming close to wearing out the tape in locations.

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#2808549 6-Nov-2021 17:48

Dingbatt:
elpenguino:

Really? Happy with all your haircuts from those days? :-)

What’s a haircut? (Aucklander)

What's hair?

JaseNZ

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#2808551 6-Nov-2021 17:55

Anybody else remember those Longish sort of razor blade with a comb on them for hair cuts.

I can remember it hurting like hell like it was pulling your hair out.

I think it was this.

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding : Ice cream man , Ice cream man

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#2808597 6-Nov-2021 22:12

I was home for half term from boarding school, aged about 12 in the late 70's.

My parents had some building work being done at home, so there was all sorts of stuff around. A friend and I climbed a tree at the bottom of the garden and banged a couple of nails in an X on top of a thick branch and ran a length of spare electrical flex we found through it. To one end, we tied a discarded bucket. We filled the bucket with bricks (being so young we probably barely weighed 8 stone wet) as a counterweight and jumped off the branch holding the other end.

Result: controlled descent fun!

Until...yours truly goes for his Nth turn and the handle comes out of the bucket. Gravity inserted itself at that point and I plummeted about 15 feet to the ground landing on my back bent over an old metal washtub that was upside down in the grass.

Further result: Mother dials 999 and I end up in an ambulance going to A&E for examination to determine if I have a spinal injury...! I did not but man that HURT!

elpenguino

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#2808607 6-Nov-2021 23:23

Geektastic:

Further result: Mother dials 999 and I end up in an ambulance going to A&E for examination to determine if I have a spinal injury...! I did not but man that HURT!

Yes, if you didn't end up in A&E as a kid you weren't trying hard enough .

In my case it was a bike spill at the bottom of a hill. The hill just looks like a bit of a rise as an adult.

The spill wasn't all bad - I had a wart on my knee as a kid and that's gone now.

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

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#2808610 6-Nov-2021 23:44

Racing my mate down a hill he was on a ten speed (he was envied) I was on a purple raleigh 20 giving it everything I had next thing I realised I was laying on the road skinned hand's knees.

The dynamo on the front fork had slipped down and gone into the spokes and I went over the handle bars.

Managed to get home, bike was still usable once I got it out of the spokes.

Mom just poured dettol over everything and dad just said thats not getting you out of your chores boy.

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding : Ice cream man , Ice cream man

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#2808612 6-Nov-2021 23:47

eracode:
eracode:

I was a kid in 1950s and that was before TV in NZ, let alone video tape. We used to listen to the radio in the evening. Monday night was a favourite because we could listen to Life with Dexter, an Aussie sit-com.

What's funny looking back is that as little kids we really didn't have much idea about what TV would be like because we had never seen it. When we found out that TV was coming to NZ, we all thought that it would literally be like radio with pictures. I can clearly remember talking with kids at school about how great it was going to be watching Life with Dexter with pictures to go with the sound.

Exactly why I used to clean the front of the radio because naturally that’s where the picture would be beamed when TV arrived.

This has been the most entertaining thread on GZ. Wonderful memories and lots of laughs.

As a kid, going to the Tip with the younger boy next door was such a treat. We would rummage for 'treasure' and bits of wood to bring back and build trolleys with his older brother's ball bearing wheels, to pull our stuffed potato sack Guy Fawkes to the Tramway Hotel at 6pm waiting outside for the drunks to come out while we shook our tin and shouted penny for the guy. We made a fair amount of cash.(Our parents thought we were standing outside the corner dairy, we were smart enough to lie). We made fizzers out of our spent double happies, you bent them in half and lit them again where they broke and they fizzed, in my case right into my thumb.I vividly remember the pain.

Life was so free and simple, we grew up well adjusted with a can-do attitude minus the constraints of safety rules or political correctness. It’s sad that kids will never again experience that kind of innocent freedom. Fond memories.

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#2808614 7-Nov-2021 00:08

I used to scrounge around for fizzy bottle's you used to be able to take them to the dairy and swap them for money , Used to swap 2 bottles and get 8 cents which was enough to buy a popsicle from memory.

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding : Ice cream man , Ice cream man

elpenguino

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#2808615 7-Nov-2021 00:14

JaseNZ:

I used to scrounge around for fizzy bottle's you used to be able to take them to the dairy and swap them for money , Used to swap 2 bottles and get 8 cents which was enough to buy a popsicle from memory.

I know, great scheme for funding a lolly habit.

There weren't too many bottles lying round !

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

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#2808637 7-Nov-2021 07:21

Geektastic:
I was home for half term from boarding school, aged about 12 in the late 70's.

My parents had some building work being done at home, so there was all sorts of stuff around. A friend and I climbed a tree at the bottom of the garden and banged a couple of nails in an X on top of a thick branch and ran a length of spare electrical flex we found through it. To one end, we tied a discarded bucket. We filled the bucket with bricks (being so young we probably barely weighed 8 stone wet) as a counterweight and jumped off the branch holding the other end.

That was never going to end well.

Your education should have included “The Bricklayer’s Lament” a tale performed by Gerard Hoffnung at the Oxford Union, 4 December 1958.

Bung

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#2808642 7-Nov-2021 07:56

elpenguino:
I know, great scheme for funding a lolly habit.

There weren't too many bottles lying round !

At the end of the 60's we got the petrol money for 2 trips around the South Island by collecting beer bottles on Sunday mornings for 2 or 3 months. There were a couple of streets off Aro St in Welly full of student flats. After a couple of visits we had them trained to leave the bottles outside so they wouldn't have to wake up.

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#2808655 7-Nov-2021 08:56

Bung:
elpenguino:
I know, great scheme for funding a lolly habit.

There weren't too many bottles lying round !

At the end of the 60's we got the petrol money for 2 trips around the South Island by collecting beer bottles on Sunday mornings for 2 or 3 months. There were a couple of streets off Aro St in Welly full of student flats. After a couple of visits we had them trained to leave the bottles outside so they wouldn't have to wake up.

There Greta Thunberg...We were ahead of our time and the inventors of recycling ;)

Sometimes you see pictures of kids in poorer countries scavenging among the piles of rubbish and there is a collective cry of horror, but looking back as kids the rubbish tip was our greatest resource and being asked if we wanted a drive there made us as happy as being asked if you wanted to be taken for a swim.

There were also bottles there to be collected which helped pay for Saturday matinee. So if you had a shilling (10 cents) front seats were 9 pennies which left 3 pennies for sweets. Back seats cost a shilling...no sweets and pointless to buy when you could buy a sucker and sit up real close to watch the next episode ofThe Lone Ranger and Tonto gun down the baddies.

Nostalgia.

Bung

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#2808665 7-Nov-2021 09:31

Our local theatre had a cupboard with 3 or 4 brooms. If you could get onto 1 of those you'd get a free ticket to next Saturday's matinee and all the wrapped lollies you could find. The rest (Snifters & Jaffas) had been thrown about during the film and weren't that safe.

neb

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#2808962 7-Nov-2021 17:56

While everyone is rhapsodising about how great it was growing up as a kid in the 70s and early 80s, let's not forget what it would have been like for parents who weren't isolated from living in a Soviet-bloc-style economy: The government ran one third of everything (or at least in the 1970s one third of the workforce worked for the government or government enterprises), and what it didn't do itself it regulated: Price controls, import controls, wage controls, trade barriers, etc. Because they were protected from any competition, local companies could charge whatever they wanted and build any rubbish they wanted and you still had to buy it from them. The "locally-built" (meaning foreign-made and then hammered together with a mallet somewhere to qualify as locally-built) brand new car you've just driven off the lot broke down at the end of the street? Hope you paid for a service contract! It took months to get a phone line put it. The wharfies went on strike every year at Christmas along with the Cook Straight ferry operators, and many times during the year as well. Even when they weren't on strike, it could take months to get anything unloaded (I remember Father Neb coming home once with a load of desperately-needed machine tools pleased as punch that he'd been able to find some wharfies to bribe to unload them after only two weeks of waiting). And to get them you had to organise friends and neighbours to drive in convoys from one post office to another with everyone buying $3 (I think) money orders so you could get the items in from overseas. I was looking at a newspaper my sister-in-law had saved for some reason from the early 80s and it seemed like the entire paper was nothing but strikes starting, strikes ongoing, or strikes ending. And the ads, things like "after six months wait we've got a shipment of X in, remember to queue up early and bring your coupons".

So yeah, it may have been great being a kid, but until the reforms in the mid-80s it was crap being an adult.

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