When I was a child, America was awash in the blood and lifeless bodies of the innocent victims of domestic, industrial, and public-sector accidents. Apparently, because since then, there has been a never-ending series of industry and governments safety regulations driven wholly by concern for the helpless and hapless gentle American citizen.
Hah!
... driven entirely by attorneys for potential defendants of liability lawsuits brought by attorneys for potential litigants.
Whew! That feels better.
When I was a tad, as I have mentioned above, there were no seat belts, air bags, impact-resistant windshileds, padded dashboards, or child safety seats in cars.
There were (virtually) no highways with flush shoulders, lane markings, road-edge lines, or safety railings.
There was no OSHA.
There were no seals on food in bottles, cans, or anything else. That came about due to a true threat, from the "Tylenol Killer," a single instance of a nut case who poisoned unsold bottles of tylenol sold in capsule form. One guy. Imagine.
And from that flowed safety caps, then child-proof caps, then arthritis-friendly child-proof caps. And caplets. And sealed foil capsule containers.
When I was starting architectural practice, a legal stair was 8" maximum in rise and 9" minimum in run. Anywhere. And the railings had to be at least 30" high, and not be able to pass an 8" sphere (so kids didn't wedge through and plummet down the stairs.) Then, it went to 7" maximum rise and 10" minimum run, with 6" gaps in the rail, rails to be 36" high. Now, 6" rise, 11" run, with 4" gaps. 36" high, but 42" at landings. All of this is because, of course, Americans have gotten much shorter in the legs, yet taller, more top-heavy, and all-in-all, stupider.
I guess.
No fire/smoke alarms in houses. Nor ground-fault interupter circuits.
No grounded outlets, or three-prong plugs.
No safety glass in doors, or windows adjacent to doors.
No flame-proof clothes and jammies for kids.
No child's safety rules for toys, cribs, playpens, or anything else.
No pop-up buttons for possibly-spoiled canned or bottled foods. Just "best of luck with that."
Sitting close to a color tevee really was dangerous ... they pumped out lots of radiation.
No list of prepared-food ingedients. No date stamping of date and time of production.
There was lead in gasoline, paint, and makeup.
There was actual mercury in thermometers, and if one broke, kids would play with it.
Arsenic was sold o.t.c. for killing ants on your patio. Likewise DDT. Likewise Diazinon.
Cigarettes were, of course, not sold to minors. Well, except they could go get them for their parents. Or buy them out of machines located just about everywhere. And folks smoked everywhere ... restaurants, busses, trains, airplanes, schools, workplaces, bars, bowling alleys, and, of course, homes, Should the kiddies not get enough smoke on their own buying illicit ciggies. And virtually all cigarettes sold were "regulars," short, stubby straight-tobacco fags with no filters. Then came "kings." Then, since ladies were too sleek and sophisticated for any of that, there came Viginia Slims, 400 mm long. By then, of course, most people were smoking filtered cigarettes. Which we now know does nothing to prevent the smoking habit from killing you. Oh, well.
Cigerettes, cigars, beer, wine, and hard liquor were advertised on network television. And those were the days when most people actually watched network tevee.
But they wouldn't dream of showing a couple, even a married couple, in the same bed together. They would never show a brassiere or panties. Well, that's not really true; I remember when the cross-your-heart bra premiered, and Jane Russell was the spokes-model, she actually demonstrated it by wearing it ... over a sweater. Nothing silly or "tittilating" about that, no sir!
The word "sex" wasn't spoken on network television. Nor was "damn," "ass," or "shit." Ref. George Carlin's forbidden words routine.
There were no movies on tevee. Except, late at night, really old movies would run ... late, late, late at night. At ten o'clock. Network news was fifteen minutes long, as was local news, weather and sports. 30 minutes, total.
Canned goods all came in steel cans. No aluminum, no zip-tops. Before soda po-tops, there were snap tabs ... you know, the ones you could make a necklace out of. The ones that lay around on beaches and playgrounds waiting to lacerate your bare ffet or puncture your tires. Before that, you just used a "church key" - one of those deals with a bottle-opener one one side (now used strictly for beer from Canada) and a triangular-shaped piercing tool on the other side. This made a sharp, pointy triangular opening (you had to have two to prevent an air-lock), really great for slicing your tongue or fingers.
Cans weren't re-cycled. They were allowed to lie in city parks to rust away as nature intended.
It was normal - get this - to just throw your trash out the car window as you drove along. Or your burning cigarette butts. This was a co-dependent relationship - the burning cigs would set fire to the trash and everything would just take care of itself. Just kidding. Actually, roads looked like open, linear dumps scarred by frequent patches of scorched weeds.
Finding out if you were pregnant was not easy, and not very private. No home pregnancy kits. You had to go to the doctor and get a pregnancy test which involved injecting a female rabbit with hormoes from your urine (this would be for girls, only, mind you). If the rabbit developed symptoms of pregnancy, you were shown to be pregnant. Took a couple of weeks. Bad news for single girls (and then, for their boyfriends) was in the form of "the rabbit died," meaning the test was positive. This never made ant sense, actually, because the rabbit was killed to determine whether or not you were pregnant. It died either way. Made for a nervouse couple of weeks for couples. Not to mention for the rabbit.
Why did motor oil come in cardboard "cans" with thin metal ends that you had to puncture with a church key then use a funnel, if you didn't have one of the special combination oil-can-lid-stabber-funnels.
Milk generally wasn't homogenized ... the cream would separate and rise to the top. You had to shake it to get it back to whole milk. Although we mostly drank "skim" milk ... the liquid part below the cream after it rose. I certainly don't remember before pasteurized milk, though.
Margerine was sold as completely white sticks - it was called "oleo." It came with a little pill of color (kind of like the pill of fat that comes in dried chicken soup, but bigger) that you had to stir into the white greasy stuff to make it look somewhat more convincingly like butter. This was a favor to the milk producers by the legislators they had in their pockets so that people didn't for a moment forget this crap wasn't really butter.
No such a thing as a self-defrosting refrigerator.
No such a thing as a self-cleaning oven.
No such things as self-adjusting clutches or self-adjusting brakes.
Well enough for now.
