There was a lot less certainty than now that you would grow up when you were a child then. I remember being 8 years old and my 16 year old male cousin died in a car crash. He was the only one who died in the car. He was driving and went into a house and it broke his neck. He turned his head to ask if everyone was okay and died right then because his neck was broken. When I was 8 it was 1956. I remember how vulnerable I felt that my oldest male cousin was dead.
My best high school friend (before I met him) had polio and couldn't walk without leg braces until he was 6 years old. But, in junior high won the rope climb and kept the record for 25 years at that school because he ONLY used his arms (not his legs) to do the rope climb so he was very very fast. I met this friend at age 10 when I gave my newspaper route to him for the Glendale News Press. I didn't tell him then but I was starting to have seizures and could not longer do the paper route because of this change in my life. But, since they were only at night and caused by a blow to the head likely I could have still done my paper route. But, people didn't know very much about stuff like this then. Eventually, Blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy kept me out of the draft so I didn't have to go to Viet Nam. My seizures stopped suddenly when I was 15 years old and never returned.
People were dying or just missing in action a lot then. You didn't always know what happened to people they just wouldn't be there anymore. This was kind of normal for the 1950s then. People just weren't there one day and no one would know why and this was sort of the way things always were then.
I remember people were always dying young a lot in my church often in their 20s or 30s or older. People didn't believe in doctors much in the religion I was raised in so if they got sick they often just died. There was a lot more fear and ignorance then regarding almost anything so people died much more frequently at any age then from childhood, and a lot in teen years and a lot died in their 20s and 30s at every age people died a lot then.
I remember thinking as an 8 or 10 year old "Why don't more people go to doctors so they can get healed? Why are they too scared to go to a doctor?"
My father was like this too then and this was one of the reasons why he died from bone cancer that came from prostate cancer that he didn't treat soon enough. Though my father was brilliant he also had no faith in doctors at all. Neither did his father who wanted to die with his boots on like a cowboy.
There was this attitude then that hospitals would kill you so you had to take life into your own hands. My grandfather had smuggled into his hospital room cigarettes and a hand gun and used the cigarettes to re-inflate his collapsed lung from a D-9 Caterpillar tractor that turned over on him and once he had re-inflated his lung he walked out of the hospital carrying his gun if people tried to stop him. Yes. People were still like this then who were born in the late 1800s then. I think my grandad was born in the 1870s and his Dad was a Northern Civil War Captain from Kansas. People in the 1950s still from the 1800s had serious attitude. You just didn't get in their way because it wasn't safe to do that then.
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