Email
PrintThe Way We Were
Most parents would agree that child rearing in the 1960s and ‘70s was the golden era of raising children. For our family, it was a middle class culture whose building blocks were faith, family and a go-with-the-flow approach that would be anathema to most parents today.
Moms fed kids a steady diet of Spam, Vienna sausages, creamed chipped beef on toast, fruit cocktail in a can, powdered milk, and vegetables dripping in pesticides, herbicides and other toxins long since banned.
The drink of choice? Kool-Aid, exploding with sugar. We ate frozen Tony’s Pizza with a billion additives and zero real cheese. Miracle Whip, Velveeta, real butter, and trans fat oleo were part of almost every meal. Expiration dates? Decades away.
Environmentally we were a product of the times, too. Our house was wall-to-wall shag carpeting that was a sponge to cigarette smoke. And as described in an earlier column, my siblings and I chased the mosquito truck through the subdivision, counting the mosquitoes that dropped dead at the first whiff of the DDT.
Without question, however—even in small town western Kansas—changes and challenges were on the horizon in the early 1970s. I remember distinctly the day the Vietnam draft lottery was broadcast on television, and my older sister having friends over to intently watch the process.
The year was 1972. There were other issues closer to home. My mother’s fourth pregnancy was a difficult one; she delivered brother Marty a month premature. So when Mom became pregnant again at age 37 it was, for her parents, unsettling. Jacob and Olga Goering were Mennonites from Kingman, Kan. Mom had one sibling. Dad, Catholic, had 11 brothers and sisters. Five children served to crystallize cultural distinctions rooted in two very different faiths.
Through our upbringing, my parents raised us to be healthy, happy and safe and something else—industrious. My kid brother, for instance, at age 13, tossed newspapers. The rest of us were equally independent and self-reliant.
I recently came across a book that embraces old-school parenting. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think by Bryan Caplan. His book explains how contemporary parents work too hard to make their children turn out “good.” His primary takeaway—health, happiness, success, character and values—they inherently run in families. Often large families.
On that note, the Larry and Ramona Keenan family, captured in this circa-1961 photograph, was typical of most.
The way we were? The luckiest kids on the planet.
