No Seatbelts during the 1950s at all. So, when my mother was learning to drive I was about 6 years old and she was driving a column shift 1941 Buick that was really powerful for racing that my Dad's brother had owned before he didn't come back from being a pilot in world war II. So, my Dad kept this car in honor of his little brother, Tommy. So, I remember my mother hitting a mailbox and being thrown into the front window of the car from the front passenger seat and crying and my mother having to fix the bloody cheek and to promise not to tell Dad what had happened to me or the neighbor's mail box. She had trouble with the column shift and the clutch then. So, in 1956 (2 years later) Dad bought a 1956 brand new Century Buick with an automatic transmission so Mom would have an easier time of it driving.
When I was 2 years old my Dad would just throw me in the back seat of the 1941 Buick and I would stand up behind his driver's seat. The only problem was that I would fall down sometimes on corners and bang the side of my head on the window winder. It was a 2 door car so he didn't have to lock me in from opening the door. A lot of kids on 4 door cars died when they opened the car doors then because they weren't locked at high speed. This is just the life children lived then. It was just normal. And on top of this children were to be seen and not heard. So, often even if something bad was happening unless you are crying or screaming no one would pay attention to you. I tried to never cry around my father at all from age 1 or 2 or he wouldn't take me seriously. I had to be very macho in order to have him be around me.
So, by age 4 I was like a "little man" in many ways and very responsible so I could be around my Dad. At age 8 my grandmother gave me my Dad's .22 rifle and bullets to keep in my room to protect the family from varmints and bad people. It was an honor to be given a rifle and bullets because it meant you were deemed responsible enough for this to happen by everyone in your family.
So, between 4 to 8 years old I had to become a little adult in every way. This is a tradition of at least 400 years here in the U.S. which lasted at least until the Viet Nam War when everything changed.
Dad always wanted me to grow up very quickly so when I was 4 he let me steer the car on long trips on straightaways. So, I would sit in his lap and learn to steer the car so by the time I was 6 or 8 years old he let me drive the 1956 Buick by myself on a back road with no one there. He even wanted me to experience what it was like to be alone a car at age 8 and let me drive a ways by myself and he got out of the car.
He was happy I was ballzy enough to do this even at 6 or 8 years old. Because of this experience growing up I also tried this with my 8 years old stepson who was and is ballzy like me and my Dad but he almost wrecked the 1971 Westfalia VW Camper Van driving it alone across a dry lake in California. I stopped him by standing in front of the vehicle before he drove it into a 5 foot deep hole in the dry lake so I had to risk my own life then to stop the vehicle but it all worked out in the end so all's well that ends well I guess.
The way people are today they all would have been pretty much called "Sissies" then because of how difficult life was then compared to now in so many ways. However, just as natural selection was at hard work then it is at hard work worldwide through the pandemic now. So, people who don't have "The Right Stuff" are being thinned out right and left.
What is the right stuff?
I would say it is the ability to study the pandemic enough to survive it or to know someone who has studied the pandemic enough to survive it. Anyone else who isn't in one of these two categories might not survive the next 5 years here on earth.
For example, I have talked to a lot of very intelligent people but I find if they haven't studied about the pandemic enough they say all sorts of crazy things about it that have no basis in fact at all.
For example, from black people and from some hispanics I heard odd things like Black people saying that Black people couldn't get it and only Asian and White people could get it.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The actual truth is that blacks and native Americans are dying from this at at least 2.6 times the rate of white people!
This is a really scary statistic and shows how ignorance of the truth can actually kill you or your friends or your relatives in this pandemic.
And the highest rates of death so far in the U.S. have been on Indian Reservations like the Navajo nation in Arizona and other places like this. Why?
Because families are often multi-generational (up to 4 generations under the same roof) on reservations) so if a younger person goes to visit someone then some or all the elders of the family might die.
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