What are you memories from when you were 16 ?

Discussion in 'Free Thoughts' started by Challenger78, Oct 21, 2007.

  1. Challenger78 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,536
    Just curious as to what people mostly remember as to what life was like when you were 16 ?.

    Sorry about the spelling..was up at 3.. for no apparent reason.
     
    Last edited: Oct 21, 2007
  2. Guest Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    I was in High School working on my 1932 Ford Roadster in metal shop for my class project trying to get by with my other school subjects, dating a few girls, drinking beer, racing my motorcycle, getting drunk, having fun, working and not worrying much about anything.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    Last edited: Oct 21, 2007
  4. Guest Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    25,817
    16 and never been kissed. I was too shy to worry about it and I was too busy going to church 3x a week to date.
     
  6. Guest Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    That's what you told your parents, but what did you really do???

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  8. Challenger78 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,536
    lol.. 16 and never been kissed, I don't think that enters into teenager's mind these days. Now its more like, 16.. so when am i gonna get laid ?
     
  9. Nickelodeon Banned Banned

    Messages:
    10,581
    Same old shit.
     
  10. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    25,817
    ??? I was with my parents. My most disobedient thing was not making my bed, which I got grounded for. I had a very very strict overprotective upbringing, which in no way prepared me for college.
     
  11. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    19,083
    hummm, I don't remember. I remember more about when I was 5 or 7
     
  12. superstring01 Moderator

    Messages:
    12,110
    School. Sex. TV. Parties.

    The usual.

    ~String
     
  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    1959-60, my senior year in high school. (Yeah I had skipped a grade but that's another story.) Two years since the launch of Sputnik started the Space Race.

    We science and math majors were heroes, the future of the country. It was cool to be smart, we all got to be on the "junior varsity" tennis team to dispatch our obligation to take physical education classes, which were compulsory in those days. My science fair project was a demonstration of heliotropism, a plant growing upside-down in a container with a light at the bottom.

    I had learned to play the guitar the previous year and was amusing my friends and schoolmates as a wannabe folksinger.

    I had my first girlfriend. No, almost nobody had sex in their high school years in those days. She was a big girl and therefore the sousaphone player in the school band. I sat with her at all the football and basketball games. There was always a dance afterwards and I managed to always go despite my parents' overly sheltering attitude toward childrearing.

    I got my driver's license, which had no conditions for new drivers back then. I didn't have a car of my own, but I got to drive my mother's: A 300cc BMW Isetta, one of the silliest vehicles ever produced with a single bench seat, a single door that opened in front, no synchromesh, and a top speed of about 49mph.

    Rock and roll had only been around for a couple of years and it was all fresh and new and wonderful, after growing up with Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper had just died the previous spring, and we were still in shock. Little did we know that was the first of many plane crashes that would take the lives of rock stars. But Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and many other early rock stars were in top form. Everyone had been wondering whether it would be the piano or the tenor saxophone that would go on to become the defining instrument of rock music--but Chuck Berry's and Dwayne Eddy's revolutionary guitar picking stole it from both of them, and primitive hot guitar licks were all over the radio.

    I also developed a love of country & western music. Coming from a family in which emotions were never expressed until they boiled out as anger, I was touched by the way those singers so casually talked about love and joy and pain and regret.

    There was lots of great stuff on TV. "Maverick," "77 Sunset Strip," "I Love Lucy," the Ed Sullivan Show. Lots of sitcoms and mysteries and westerns and variety shows.

    My parents and I went to the drive-in movie a couple of times a month. They showed something like four features and I could usually stay awake to the end. I don't remember the movies very well. Other nights we stayed up late playing Scrabble or card games. My father dragged me out the next morning to play tennis.

    I had learned Esperanto from a library book and had my first international pen-pal, a girl in Quebec who knew no English.

    I still had my first dog, and even though I've had dozens of pets since then and my wife and I now have thirteen dogs, I still miss him.

    This was my eighth year of living in the boondocks of Arizona, not in one of its pathetic little "cities" but several miles outside the city limits in the middle of the desert, closer to an Indian reservation. With a driver's license, this was the first year I was able to socialize with other kids outside of school hours or school dances. My dog had been just about my only friend for a long time.

    I hated that place. Having originally come from Chicago, America's second largest city with its museums and tall buildings and animated Christmas displays in store windows and hundreds of kids to play with, I was trapped in a crap-hole where there was nothing to do, nobody to do it with, and the temperature was above 100 (37C) three months out of the year and above 90 (32C) for six months. (Houses and cars simply did not have air conditioning yet.) At the end of my 16th year (my birthday is in the summer, between school years) I ESCAPED! I got to go off to college in Los Angeles. When I got off the train in the big city, it was like that scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the world suddenly turns into Technicolor.

    I have never gone back to Arizona except the very northern part where the weather is bearable. I have no friends there, my best friend moved to California too. So did my parents. Still, that last year in Arizona, my sixteenth year, was a rather good one. I've had many worse years since then.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Looking back, I realize now that the world was at peace, a peace it has not known since then. We all did "duck and cover" nuclear-attack drills in school so they made us all feel like we were on the brink of war with the Russians, but there were no actual wars going on. The occasional uprising in a Soviet satellite country and some hostilities in a distant little place nobody had ever heard of called French Indochina, but from our perspective the world was at peace.

    Perhaps that's what makes it seem like such a good year, in retrospect.

    Sorry for the rambling. This is more than any of you would care to read and I can already picture Max's scathing response. But it was cathartic to write it. Thanks for the opportunity.
     
  14. Challenger78 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,536
    Anytime, I just turned 16 myself, thats why i was wondering how my experiences are different from others.

    Quite interesting from the responses here, sex and beer seem to be the same though....
     
  15. adam2314 Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    409
    16 ???

    1955.. finished ROYAL NAVY BOYS TRAINING SHIP.

    No one that ever " did " RN. TRAINING SHIP will ever forget the hell that they had just come through..

    Went in boys .. Came out MEN..

    Joined my first Warship. HMS DIANA..

    Aaaah 16 !!!.

    The stories that i can tell

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    ))
     
  16. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    What were 50,000 American troops doing in South Korea?
     
  17. tablariddim forexU2 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,795
    16 in 1968/69, my last year at school, I spent most the time learning to play guitar and dreaming of becoming a rock god. I caught the tail end and in fact the peak of 'flower power'. I saw some great bands perform for free in Hyde Park, legends that are now held in awe by those that remember them, but were hardly known at the time. I never drank or took drugs, never had a girlfriend, wasn't allowed to hang out after school and in fact was a pretty lonely boy.
     
  18. sandy Banned Banned

    Messages:
    7,926
    Driving, being approached by MENSA after the SAT's and ACT's, concerts, work, fun, deciding on med school, having a Jesus-freak boyfriend when I wasn't quite there yet, being young, hot and carefree.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  19. P. BOOM! Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    122
    The Challenger accident! LOL
     
  20. P. BOOM! Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    122
    Hoping that 1,000,000 North Koreans were not on their way south, just like now!
     
  21. Carcano Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,865
    The last gasp of my idyllic childhood...before everything got all confused.
     
  22. Tyler Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,888
    Getting head from blond girls with big chests, playing a whole bunch of my new american series strat, first introduction to Frege and symbolic logic, smoked too much dope, drank too much beer, taught guitar, gave up cello, lost about 20 lbs. and grew a few inches.

    That about sums it up.
     
  23. draqon Banned Banned

    Messages:
    35,006
    well I am 20 now...my memories when I was 16? parents controlled me like I was a puppet...several thoughts a day on how to kill myself...while at Disney World my parents left me alone to go one my own while they enjoyed the restaurants...so I decided to go hang myself using shoelaces in the back of EPCOT attraction. Never did do it, got thinking of how future might get better. 16...constant working, constant homework, no fun, no life.
     

Share This Page