THE DIRT ROAD WONDER – Child Services Would Have Arrested My Mama

Nobody thought anything about asking a kid to drive across the farm to another field…she just had to be old enough to reach the pedals and see over the dash.

I don’t remember learning to drive.

When I was about 14, the family I babysat for decided to go to the beach for a week.

They left me their other car to take the boys to get their Boy Scout physicals and take them to the cafe when they wanted to go.

No one ever questioned it, and of course everyone knew I was too young to be driving legally.

Cars didn’t have seatbelts back then, and I liked to ride in the back window over the back seat.

When mama would put on breaks, I would just roll down onto the back seat.

Children would stand up in the front seat beside their mother when they were driving.

They also liked to stand on the back floorboard and put their elbows on the back of the front seat.

When seat belts first came out some folks cut them out of their cars.

The road in front of our store at Old Salem didn’t have much traffic on it, except on Saturday.

I loved to skate and sometimes I would skate out on the road when no cars were coming.

When they were repairing the viaduct over the railroad on the cut off between Old Salem and Highway 27, I would put on my roller skates and skate from the top to the bottom.

The kids in the neighborhood loved having that road closed.

This skating was fine until I went head over heels and skidded down the pavement.

Mama put so much Mercurochrome on me after that, that I looked like a tomato.

Then there were the guns.

Daddy gave me my first .22 rifle when I was 10-years-old.

When I was a teenager, the rabbits were eating up Daddy’s bean crop, so he took four of us teenagers in the back of the pickup truck to the bean field with .22 rifles to thin out the rabbit population.

The boys would also drive pickup trucks to school with gun racks in the back window with a gun in it.

When school was out, they would go deer hunting.

To top it off, most boys carried a pocketknife, but no one was stupid enough to bring a gun or a knife into the school...at that time kids still got paddled in the principal’s office when they needed it.

We didn’t have swimming lessons back then, and the way most of us learned to swim was when we got

thrown in.

I learned to swim at Silver Lake when I was pushed off the dock.

I guess they would have come and rescued us if we were actually drowning, but we got the hang of it really quick.

I can just see the headlines today, PARENT ARRESTED FOR THROWING A KID IN THE LAKE.

I don’t think the child labor laws were around because I went to work in tobacco when I was 13-years-old.

My neighborhood friends also worked there and we liked making our own money.

I made $3 a day, $15 dollars a week, and I thought that was a lot of money.

I went to work when I was almost 15 during the Christmas holidays.

I wrapped Christmas presents for the Hub store in Tallahassee.

A group of us teens worked there that season, so one parent would drive us over and another parent would come pick us up after our shifts.

They didn’t let us kids drive ourselves there…I wonder if its because the Tallahassee police would not have been as lenient on underage drivers as our police chief, Mr. John Blount, was.

It’s a wonder we made it to adulthood but there was one thing those hard times taught us, and that was to not to be afraid of anything.

‘Till next time keep on the sunny side. gwynnkidd@gmail.com

THE DIRT ROAD WONDER – Child Services Would Have Arrested My Mama

CAT TALES – Who Done It?

Obituary: Charles Kirk Turner

Obituary: Charles Kirk Turner

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CAT TALES – Who Done It?

Obituary: Charles Kirk Turner

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