Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take
Amen
This is the prayer my mother gave every night along with her sisters in the 1920s. Many children and babies died before they woke up then so this was seen as appropriate in the 1920s in the U.S.
It wasn't until the 1950s when less children died from polio, Measles, Whooping Cough and other childhood diseases, food poisoning and accidents. Also, no one wore seat belts until around 1988 I believe in the U.S. either (except just a few people). So, children were often dying all sorts of ways in the 1950s still when I grew up. Especially teenagers would pile into a hot rod and crash into something going fast and there would be 10 or 20 kids thrown hundreds of feet through the air and usually none would survive. This was pretty normal up until the 1960s and 1970s at least when street racing became illegal in places like California and it was actually enforced and you could only run racing type cars on Race Tracks after that. So, for example, you could be arrested if you had slicks on your car in the 1970s onwards (super wide slick tires 12 to 18 inches wide to grip the road for faster takeoff when you burned rubber on fast take offs with your Hurst Shifter in the 1950s and 1960s. a Hurst shifter was a type of racing shifter and transmission built for racing. When kids tried to race with stock transmissions often the whole transmission would just fall out onto the ground because they weren't built for racing.
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