But it was much much worse when my mother grew up. You can hear it in the prayer she was taught as a child. This was the most normal Christian prayer then in the 1920s for children.
Original version
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen
So, in my mother's era children never knew whether they were going to grow up or not or die in the process. So, maybe up to 1 in 2 children likely might die between gestation birth and all that and age 20.
It was even worse before that.
So, my introduction into the world brought whooping cough that I almost died from at 2. My Best friend in Junior High and High School had polio and had to wear leg braces until he was 6 years old. By Junior high school 7th grade we walked for miles and hiked together but he also held the record for the rope climb. He didn't use his legs at all. He just sat on the Gym Floor and kept his legs in that position all the way to the top and ONLY used his arms which is why his rope climb record in Junior High stood for 25 years regarding how fast he did the rope climb. However, it was dangerous if he missed a hand hold because he had no legs wrapped around the rope to catch him if he missed a fast hand hold.
The 1950s had a lot of crazy men still alive from world war II with extreme PTSD. But, they didn't call it that. I think they still called it "Battle Fatigue" still at that point and most didn't get psychological help and many or most died that couldn't find a way psychologically forward. So, many children and wives were tortured by these men with PTSD from World War II then.
At the time I just thought these guys were completely crazy but thought crazy men were normal. So, even though at times they would beat me (children must be seen and not heard) I learned to live with the beatings from crazy men in those days that were not my parents.
I might not even have spoken with my parents about stuff like this because I didn't want my parents to be harmed either. So,I had to not only protect myself from harm I also had to protect my parents from harm too. (in how I looked at things then).
So, by age 4 I had to be "A little man all grown up" protecting my mother and grandmothers. My father and grandfather could protect themselves and sometimes even protect me.
I remember my grandfather one day when I walked a few acres away at age 3 or 4 from our house on my grandfather's land. I walked too close to a hornet's nest and they all stung me many many times. I ran back to my grandfather's land screaming and he got gasoline and something to light it with and made me watch him burn up the hornet's nest with the hornets inside.
I really loved my grandfather that day because he was protecting me.
If hornets threatened my children on my property I did the same thing always too. Or when rattlesnakes came too close to where my children lived they were over also. I got out a pistol and shot them usually before they crawled into an open door or window. But now, I haven't shot a gun in likely 30 years at this point as I never really liked killing anything (even though I can in an emergency because boys in the 1950s were ALWAYS trained to kill in emergencies). We each (every boy I knew that could be trusted with a gun) had one in his bedroom and had bullets too (usually a .22 rifle with a box of 100 .22 long rifle shells that we all kept in our bedrooms for emergencies.
This was a tradition that goes back at least 400 years here in the U.S. and possibly further back if you go to Europe were most people came from here in the U.S.
We were worried about being nuked in the 1950s too. The teachers were required to have us crawl under our desks at school at least once a month. So, we were tested in how fast we could crawl under our desks without hurting ourselves by bumping our heads or arms on the metal parts of our desks.
The dark humor for boys around all this was: "Yes. Bend over and Kiss your Ass Goodbye." Which is gallows humor for our chances of surviving a nuclear attack then.
We all knew no one on was going to survive a direct nuclear attack from Russia but we all knew one day it would happen and many or all of us would die.
Or, if we didn't die that way, we were going to grow up and as boys be drafted and sent somewhere and be killed there in some stupid war.
So, this was our future as public school kids. Since World War I was 1916 to 1918 and World War II was 20 years later basically from 1938 to 1945 we all knew we likely were going to die in another war with nukes by the 1960s or 1970s.
It was pretty obvious to all of us then.
IF you were raised rich your parents might buy you out of the draft like with Trump. But most of us knew we didn't have that kind of political pull to get away with that.
And YET-
Here I am at age 70 almost 71 and still alive and healthy and riding my KLR 650 Dualsport motorcycle with a 4 wheel drive Tundra and my wife has a good car too, and I look around and wonder "What happened to all those terrifying days while I was growing up?"
So, as terrifying as they all were then in the 1950s, the Only really scary thing to me now is Trump.
Trump is the scariest single person on earth right now. You might say it's Putin or Xi but they are not nuts like Trump is. You might say "He's crazy like a fox!" But I would say he's just plain crazy in regard to how many people are dying and going to jail around him.
So, how did I survive until now?
1. White privilege-don't underestimate just how powerful it is to be raised white and educated in colleges here in the U.S. Try going to India and meeting people who were never educated at all and then think about what this all means.
2. 8 years of college studying Computer Science, Computer programming and computer Data Processing, Psychology, Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology and some Social Science Research as well.
The college courses I took in some ways saved my young life between 21 and 25 years of age.
3. learning to redesign my personality and how I viewed the world and learning to reparent myself for a different world than my parents grew up in and thereby learning how to teach my children how to travel the world and how to reinvent themselves too. Most of them have college degrees too now so they teach me new things all the time. They are all now 23 to 44 years of age.
But, I must admit that the ONLY real reason I'm still alive is because God wants me to be alive for his purposes.
By God's Grace
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