Being a kid in the 60's.....

[fortyshooter]

we didn't know how great we had it. For a kid with a paper route or with lawn cutting jobs buying a burger,fries, and a shake no big deal.
Now a retired old man in 2023....do I really need to spend that 20 bucks?

[Vaquero]

I agree man, it was a great childhood.
Shoot a buddy and I would ride our bikes and pick up soda bottles,
turn 'em in at the little store down the rode. Get candy sodas snacks whatever.

RP

[fortyshooter]

Survived several years of this fun but can I get any disability for it today?

[BrokenolMarine]

I got $1 a week for allowance for most of my late 60s life, and as a youngster I earned extra money by mowing lawns with a cheapo push mower, edging walks, trimming hedges and doing other odd jobs for the neighborhood elderly who admired my work ethic and attention to detail. I rarely said no to any task. I used the money to fund my hot wheels addiction, and to buy school clothes of my choice. (My parents said "When you pay for them you can choose what you wear." By buying my own, my sister had a bigger budget as well.

We were the kids who did our chores then disappeared until the street lights came on, free to roam the neighborhood. Parents didn't worry because the Neighborhood raised the kids. I ran with kids from my block or my church. We followed the rules, and we stuck together.

[BrokenolMarine]

My mom insisted I hand her $1 every time I came home from a job, since the mower was the family mower. She said wear and tear was expensive. I didn't like it, but I didn't have a mower and ... I was still making $3 to $4 per yard. (I mowed our yard free, but I got a $1 a week year round.) The second year I was allowed to mow, the mower died. Mom went into her dresser and came out with an envelope with all those dollars and we went to Kmart and bought a new mower. This time a better one with the tall wheels in the back... much easier to mow with. Easier to start too. I didn't bat an eye at the $1 I handed over any more, I understood.

[fortyshooter]

First mower I used helping Dad was our reel mower. You got a good work out pushing that especially a kid! Next was a new 3.5 HP B&S gas mower and my older brother told Dad it would run better with the muffler replaced with a short piece of straight pipe!

[Cowboy Gun Fan]

We sure had it great. Same here, Paper Route and Lawn Cutting jobs.

Of course my own house was no charge, lol. It was one of my chores.

Bought my first car with that money I made.

[daytime dave]

I grew up in the country and the paper was delivered by car to a box next to the mailbox. We had acres to mow and Dad or I would mow with a riding mower. Our push mowers were usually of a cheap variety that came from who knows which store. When they died, they were pushed into the barn. Every decade, dad would get rid of the one or two we had acumulated. We inhereted my grandfathers reel mowers. They were surely a work out. One time, that's the only mower that worked. (We didn't mow the acres with that. Suprisingly, we decided that time to only mow a very small section.)
If I rode my bike around the "block" it was 4.5 miles start to finish. Usually we were driven to friends homes until we were able to bike long distances.
Of all the tractors my father had, we never used one in the winter to plow the driveway. Shovel by hand was the order of the day. It was usually a half day affair.
For a chores reward, I would usually get a plastic model plane kit from my fathers immense collection. We didn't eat in town often, but did once in a while. Ice cream cones came from the freezer and cupboard. We didn't have many odd jobs in the neighborhood to make money, but once as a teenager I helped the neighbor with hay, only to find out I was allergic to the baled hay. We didn't hay ourselves.
My father would bring me Matchbox cars and trucks if he went to town and that was great. When we were old enough to go, as long as we had done our chores and helped around the house, we were allowed to pick something small to get.
My mother picked my clothes always. Sometimes it was downright embarrassing. It got a lot better when she started working at a local department store when my sister and I could come home from school on our own.
Most everyone else was pretty much the same. We all did what we were supposed to do. The neighbors all knew each other and hosted events at each others homes.
Candy and snacks were metered out by my mother. We always had some at the house. Fast food was a rarity for us, which I don't miss now.

It was a nice childhood to grow up in the country. To this day, some of my childhood friends and aquaintences still live in the old neighborhood, close to their parents. They help one another still. I'm glad to have returned to the country lifestyle in my later life, although not near the old neighborhood.

Thanks for that picture of the mosquito fogger forty, I remember a truck going around the neighborhood each summer for years. We had to go inside when it came by our house. Probably was a good idea.

Great topic forty.

[rickhem]

I had the paper route too, delivered riding my Schwinn Sting Ray. Prior to that my allowance was 25¢ per week. I'd buy a candy bar at the little store on my way back to school after lunch, right up until there was sales tax and I had to pay 6¢ for the candy bar.
We'd ride our bikes to the DQ in town and buy a small Mr. Misty for 10¢, then go into the dining room and eat pickle slices from the fixins table.
My whole block would chase that mosquito truck for blocks (which explains a lot) and never gave it a second thought.
My big extra money job was shoveling snow. I liked to work alone, so all the money was mine, and I'd only get corner houses so I could charge more. Too many friends would stand around not shoveling and want half of the $$.
Every haircut was a crewcut, and neighbors would give us 50¢ to ride our bikes to the store for cigarettes for them, and we got to keep the change!
Simpler times for sure.

[fortyshooter]

I had the paper route too, delivered riding my Schwinn Sting Ray. Prior to that my allowance was 25¢ per week. I'd buy a candy bar at the little store on my way back to school after lunch, right up until there was sales tax and I had to pay 6¢ for the candy bar.
We'd ride our bikes to the DQ in town and buy a small Mr. Misty for 10¢, then go into the dining room and eat pickle slices from the fixins table.
My whole block would chase that mosquito truck for blocks (which explains a lot) and never gave it a second thought.
My big extra money job was shoveling snow. I liked to work alone, so all the money was mine, and I'd only get corner houses so I could charge more. Too many friends would stand around not shoveling and want half of the $$.
Every haircut was a crewcut, and neighbors would give us 50¢ to ride our bikes to the store for cigarettes for them, and we got to keep the change!
Simpler times for sure.

Yep....my 26 inch delivery bike was a hand down with the route from my brother. It was a neighborhood route with 125 papers. I sold my 1965 Schwinn Sting Ray and paid the rest out of my route savings to buy a cool 1967 coppertone metalic Schwinn 5 speed Sting Ray. That was the cruiser and collection bike. We had a Schwinn bike shop right in town.

[BrokenolMarine]

I remember getting the dollar to go down and get the haircut. Sitting in the barbershop all alone, listening to the grownups talk while you read the Field and Stream Magazines or the Popular Sciences, all years old, but sneaking a glance at that corner table where the men's magazines were. You never actually had the nerve to pick one up and look, Mr. Mack would have tossed you in the street. But, the covers were something to see. Remember back then the magazine racks in the stores had everything but the titles covered with a thin wooden shield. The men would pull it up and whistle at the cover and then drop it back real quick or fold it over and take it to the register. We were boys, and curious, but there were other things to do... like jumping the drainage ditch on our bikes, or gigging mullet and flounder from the bridges.

[Mags]

Lived in a new subdivision right on the edge of town. Open terrain all the way to the mountains a couple blocks away. With friends would walk down the street with our BB guns and a sack of cans an bottles to shoot at. Can't do that walk today. The police would be on you within half a block.

In another town and a few years younger I'd walk to the local mom/pop corner store with a nickel or two to buy cap gun caps or a Hershey bar.

[rickhem]

Yep....my 26 inch delivery bike was a hand down with the route from my brother. It was a neighborhood route with 125 papers. I sold my 1965 Schwinn Sting Ray and paid the rest out of my route savings to buy a cool 1967 coppertone metalic Schwinn 5 speed Sting Ray. That was the cruiser and collection bike. We had a Schwinn bike shop right in town.

Mine was the plain old coaster brake Sting Ray. I had buddies that had the other versions with the smaller front wheel. I think they had names like Orange Crate, and Lemon Peeler. My sister got a girls version called the Lil Chick I think. That one had the sparkly things at the ends of the hand grips on the handlebars. Great bikes.

That paper route taught a few lessons early. My route had three houses that were a few blocks away from where all the other houses were. These three houses were down a big hill and it was a pain to ride back up after delivering their papers. One house was this older Asian family, and they would always pay me with exact change. It was 40¢ per week, and they'd give me a quarter, a dime and a nickel, never a tip. Another house was one that never paid, and I'd get 4 or 5 weeks behind with them, and that cut into the measly profit I got for delivering. The third house were nice people that always gave me at least a quarter tip. One day while delivering to the bulk area of my route, a guy stops me and takes a paper, and tells me to add his house to the route. I had no extra papers, so at that point, I made the financial decision that those three houses weren't going to be a part of my route anymore. I felt a little bad for the two regular customers, but even at that young age, I realized that I was losing money on those three, and with them being so far away from the normal route, easy decision.

[rickhem]

One more quick story. Probably this was very early 70s, but a similar theme.
My dad had a Red Ryder that he got when he was 11, which was in 1941. We used to shoot in the basement with that occasionally, and it shot pretty hard for what it was. So fast forward to me being about 12 or 13, and my dad says I can take it to "the meadows" if I want, along with some friends that all had Crosman 760s. That became an every Saturday activity back then. He had a few conditions for me though, I had to have a case for it, and it couldn't come out of the case until I got to the meadows.
(For an explanation, I grew up in suburban North Jersey, and the Hackensack River and it's tidal flats were what we called "the meadows". It was covered with landfills, and dumps, and tons of tiny little streams that swelled and emptied with the tides. This was all part of the area where Giants Stadium, and now MetLife Stadium are now, but a bit further south and further out into the weeds.)
So the case for the Red Ryder became a little project that my mom and my sister did. It was just a tube with a zipper on one end, no padding, but it checked that box. Keeping it in the case was easy at first, although my route to get to the meadows from my house was directly across a huge catholic cemetery, which was almost 1/3 of the whole town. Back then, there were way less gravesites and acres and acres of open land, but my dad was clear that I could only shoot once we got out into the meadows. So one day a couple buddies and I were walking through the cemetery on our way to the meadows, only me having a BB gun, and we diverted to walk along the stream in the cemetery a bit. I decided to tempt fate and I took the Red Ryder out, and poured the entire little milk carton of BBs into that thing, I think it was 750 of them, which made it much heavier and had a satisfying sound when you shook it. Not two minutes later we hear the blip-blip of a police siren and there are two cops calling us over to their car. I tried to hide the Red Ryder, but they were watching us shoot, so that didn't work. I figured they'd take it and I'd have to tell me dad what happened. Instead of taking it, they made us sit there by the police car while those two guys shot up every single BB we had, which took almost an hour. They were shooting at birds, squirrels, whatever, and finally gave me back the empty rifle and told us to never let them catch us there with that rifle again. I somehow doubt that would have been the scenario today if that same thing happened. I never made that mistake again.

[Hatchdog]

Like others on here, as a kid in the 60’s I mowed lawns and shoveled snow and then moved on to paper routes. At age 15 I went to work at a neighborhood pharmacy/variety store part time during the school year and full time in the summer. Loved that job mostly because I worked for a wonderful boss who was very good to me and was a great teacher.

In the 60’s and 70’s Spokane had this incredible bike shop called Columbia Cycle and Hobby. This store was a Schwinn bike dealer and also had a huge selection of Matchbox and Hot Wheel cars. And in the basement there were three slot car tracks. Talk about a kids dream place, kinda like going to Disneyland. Loved that store. With my paper route money I bought a Schwinn Continental 10 speed which was an upgrade from the base model the Variety as I recall. I thought I was a pretty big deal riding around on the Continental. I had a couple of buddies with 10 speeds and we used to go bike camping quite a bit. Different times then.

You guys will probably remember doing collections for your paper route customers. I would have to collect the monthly fee and would go out in the evening after dinner to do my collections. Then on Saturday morning I would have to take the bus downtown to the paper office and pay my bill. In the winter I would be out in the dark doing my collections and today I would not allow my kid to do this. Walking around in the dark with a pocket full of cash.

[BrokenolMarine]

One of the kids in the neighborhood had a paper route, and he always bragged about his business. But, he had to get up every day, pick up the papers, roll them and deliver them, make collections and he often got stiffed by 1 in 10 customers because he had a large route and was always adding customers to make more money. I did my odd jobs, year round. (Central Florida, nice weather most of the time.) If we had crappy weather I got more work from my "Elderly" customers picking up deadfall and raking leaves. We agreed on the cost and they paid the same day because I was reliable and did good work, and I NEVER came back if they didn't pay right away. A lot of my customers gave me drinks and snacks or even lunch on big jobs. I did have ONE friend I used on the large jobs but swore him to secrecy as I didn't want the others in our groups horning in on the business or stealing my customers. (A couple of them would have done so in a heartbeat.) One guy tried to start up his own "Handyboy" business, but he was lazy, did a poor job and had an attitude. Word gets around fast in the neighborhoods. They would simply say, "We have someone already.

That early experience carried on throughout my adult life. Do the job well, give honest work for the money, and the boss will never even think of your name if cuts have to be made....

[dave77]

I was a paperboy for a several years in the mid 60's, hated doing the collections. $6 month but surprising how many people made you come back several times to be paid. Not while I was delivering but later on the local paper started doing the billing, you don't pay in advance, you don't get your paper. Was great to switch to a weekly paycheck job but my school work definitely suffered as I worked until 2 AM most days.

Small local papers are struggling to stay in business, ours has cut back to 4 days a week and is a lot less pages than it used to be, they just recently got rid of all paperboys/girls and mobile deliverers and turned it over to USPS, I guess it's cheaper. I can skim through the daily paper now in 5 or 10 minutes but like to keep up on local news. I like a physical newspaper but may switch to the digital only version for half the price.

[CT_Shooter]

I was a paperboy in the sixties, too.

Sadly, boxes of candy like Good and Plenty, Good and Fruity, and Sugar Babies cost a nickle each and I passed a small market on my route. I'd spend a quarter and buy five boxes which I emptied into my pockets and ate as I delivered the papers.

Happily, I recently spent $42K on dental implants, a great investment. Then, the candy cost a nickle per box; I wish I knew the price I was actually paying!

That aside, it was a great time to be a kid. We rode our bikes for miles -- all over town -- and the only rule was to be home for dinner. After dinner, my three brothers and I were right back outside playing. Fishing a nearby river, skateboarding down a steep road (I had a homemade one, first in town), playing sandlot or backyard baseball with other kids, or just goofing around in nearby woods. Great memories.

[BrokenolMarine]

Yup. Our house had one of the biggest side yards in the neighborhood, so a lot of the playing was done in the yard, so we didn't have much grass. My stepdad whined about that, but my mom told him not to complain. "Most of the time if we want to know where the kids are, we just look out the dining room window and there they are, with ten other kids." We would go off and play though... there was a large park about two miles or so from our house (In Tampa) called Lowery Park. They had a B52 Bomber on static display, a Hook and Ladder Fire Engine, a Train Engine, the latter two available for kids to climb on and pretend to drive and operate. There was a small zoo with all kinds of animals and attractions, gardens, and a boat ramp on the river.

Bored? We'd go down to the boat ramp and help the boaters who wanted it to launch and recover and sometimes get tips. We all had Zebco Rod and reel combos tied to our bikes and cheap pocket tackle boxes so we could fish. Boy Scout canteens meant we didn't have to buy drinks, and a couple cold hot dogs in a baggie took care of lunch. Man, those were the days...

[Vaquero]

I remember getting the dollar to go down and get the haircut. Sitting in the barbershop all alone, listening to the grownups talk while you read the Field and Stream Magazines or the Popular Sciences, all years old, but sneaking a glance at that corner table where the men's magazines were. You never actually had the nerve to pick one up and look, Mr. Mack would have tossed you in the street. But, the covers were something to see. Remember back then the magazine racks in the stores had everything but the titles covered with a thin wooden shield. The men would pull it up and whistle at the cover and then drop it back real quick or fold it over and take it to the register. We were boys, and curious, but there were other things to do... like jumping the drainage ditch on our bikes, or gigging mullet and flounder from the bridges.

I remember walking to get a haircut.
Had to walk to the end of the street probably 3/8's of a mile,
the store and feed mill were just across the hwy here.
Then we turned right down beside the hwy., over the RR bridge.
Which on occasion I would jump up and walk the concrete safety rail, 40 ft. at the center, instead of the walkway.
About another 1/4 mile and the barber shop was on a second floor over a beer joint.
Not sure how old I was for sure when we started going by ourselves, my 3 yo younger brother and I.

RP