My experience was breaking my parents electric clock and then taking it apart when I was two and sticking wires in electric outlets and getting shocked and crying to ride with my father in his weasel (which was basically an army tank without the turret in the snow and him driving down a steep snow covered hill and banging my head on the dashboard and me crying and him giving me to my Mom because I was only 3 or 4 years old. I also remember at age 2 or 3 riding with my father in the car and I would stand up on the back seat and hold the driver's seat to pretend I was driving the car instead of my Dad but when he went around the corner too fast I would fall and hit my head on the window winder. But, I wouldn't cry because I had already learned if I cried that my father would give me to my mother (who wasn't in the car at that point) but I still wouldn't cry no matter what happened because I wanted to spend more time with my father because he worked all the time and I didn't see him much.
The other strange thing is this is so far back in Seattle (Lake Forest Park) that this is before red, yellow and green light signals on streets. What they had then was mechanical arms like you still have at train track crossings which went ONLY from Go to Stop so people often crashed when it switched from Go to stop with out the yellow lights then. I think California might have started the green, Yellow and red light then on traffic lights at some point. But, in 1950 and 1951 when I was 2 or 3 years old they didn't exist in the state of Washington where I was a little boy then.
Most cars were stick shifts then and Air conditioners were in less than 1% to 5% of cars then too.
When we moved to California my mother had never driven a car before. So, she was learning to drive my father's car which had belonged to his brother when he was alive which was a 1941 Century Buick that he and my Dad's brother raced on the streets with. But, Mom was having difficulty with the clutch and the column shift which means the manual shifter was on the steering wheel like many automatic transmission cars now. So, the clutch was hard for her so one day she ran over our neighbors mailbox and this threw me into the front window of the car when I was 5 or 6 years old because I was sitting next to her. Luckily, I didn't go through the front window I only banged up my face and lips.
This was pretty normal getting banged up or shocked or falling down things without guardrails or whatever. So, you had to be fairly tough to survive all this or you just weren't around anymore.
Children were much more expendable then before the Viet Nam War. So, if you weren't fairly physically tough you didn't survive what was happening then and many children didn't.
Here's what an Army Weasel looked like then:
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