1. No dought as we grow old,we tend to romanticize the past and submerge painful memories.
2. The joy of spending hours fishing,for all boys lived a huckleberry finn existance.
3. The girls were expected to be ladylike,help their mother in the endless housework and always maintain a refined decorum and standards over and above that expected of boys.
4. Using foul language in the presence of your parents was forbidden.

The school was the primary focus of ones childhood.The 3 rs were taught in the tune of a big fat paddle with holes in it.

I remember those years in elementary school as being boring and dull.

I now realize that it was a rich learning experience,mainly because of the social interaction of the children,for we all came from different ethnic groups.

We learned,played and fought with each other,and thereby learned to live amicably together.

Life was not easy then.We lived and struggled on the farm.It is often said that hard work and genteel poverty builds character.That of course is for others to judge.

We had pain and we had joy.The lack of wealth left us with an incentive to do better.

I have always contended that if my parents had been wealthy and could have provided for the children as they would have liked,that I would not have been worth a hill of beans.

We enjoyed some good years and endured some bad years on the farm.Through all that we were guided parentally.We all attained maturity if not prosperity in good health.

We need to be grateful for our parents and grandparents..

In my adolescence I made a firm decision that when I grew up I would not remain in the area of my childhood.

I was certain that I would not be a farmer or farm laborer,for farming seemed nothing more than hard work and poverty,as well as hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

So off to the Navy I went and never moved back to the state I was born in,but I live real close now since I have retired..

 One of the reasons I left a place where the wages were few was,On many October days as the school let the kids out to help harvest Potatoes,I picked potatoes using a harness that had two hooks up front on a board and two hooks on the back for holding extra potatoe sacks.

You would place a potatoe sack on the front board with it opened up as you picked potatoes by stradling the row and shoveled the spuds into the potatoe sack with your hands.

This was a job where you would be bent over for sometime,usually until your sack had 50 pounds of potatoes in it.

Plus you would have extra sacks on the back hooks.I carried 50 extra sacks.This way you didn't have to leave your row to get more sacks.

I would try to pick 100 sacks of potatoes per day,which brought a whopping $7.

This is one reason I tell kids to get a good education and don't stop at the high school level.

Keep going until you have a masters in something that will bring you a good retirement.

I had a job that paid monthly which I earned $30 per month month at milking cows by hand.

Not a lot of cows but 8 to be precise.

I milked them in the morning and again in the evening.

I milked these cows by hand. 

After each milking I would put the milk cans in a cart and wheel the cart out to the roadside where the milk truck would stop by everyday and pick the milk cans up and would leave the same amount of empty milk cans for the next days work.

After that chore I would feed the cows and horses their hay and make sure they had water.

I usually had these chores done by 8 o'clock.

After breakfast I would go and get on a tractor and plow or plant a field for the next years crops.Or if the time of year was right I would help put hay in the stack.

This was done with a crew of 10 or more men and four or more teams of work horses,which pulled a big hay wagon.

The driver would guide the horses between two wind rows of hay while a man would be on each side of the hay wagon with a pitch fork pitching hay onto the wagon.

There would be a man on the wagon placing or stacking the hay so we could get a big load on the hay wagon.

When the wagon was loaded we would get on and ride to the hay stack,where we would unload the hay with a big fork,which was jabbed into part of the hay load and then a team of horses would pull it up into and away from the wagon and place it into the hay stack.

Then repeat the process over and over until the hay was all removed from the fields.

Then we would go to the next farmers place and do the same thing until everyones hay was stacked.

Now in the evening around 6 o'clock I would be back at the main farm milking those 8 cows again.Repeating the process over and over.

There are so many things children do not know about as the world has changed dramatically,Some for the better and some for the worse.

This is why it is important for your child to get an education.