In memory of sports journalist Mike Gibson, who was a columnist with The Australian Women’s Weekly back in the 1980’s, The Weekly will republish some of his famous columns online this week.
This one was originally published in August 1985. It was a very different time. Have a read:
People keep telling you how tough it is being a kid and having to grow up today.
Maybe it is. I’m not sure.
Heck, when I was a kid growing up, it was a breeze.
Climbing up trees and falling out of them, going down to the beach looking for crabs in those little rock-pools, playing footy with your mates, listening to Bobby and Betty Bluegum on the radio, taking your girlfriend to the movies to see Debbie Reynolds and Rock Hudson, borrowing the keys to your old man’s car.
Maybe we didn’t sit around all the time analysing how tough it was growing up then. Maybe we just got on with it. All I know is, it was fun.
When I was a kid growing up, we all seemed to have the same sort of interests. We were all on each other’s wavelength, so to speak. We all hated castor oil and trigonometry.
We all loved Marilyn Monroe and Lew Hoad. We all knew what happened to the girl down the street when her bike-chain snapped and she pranged it and broke her leg.
We all know why those kids who’d been nicking things from Coles finally had to go down to the cop shop. We all knew what was on at the flicks next Saturday, where the best waves were that afternoon after school, and that Digby Richards’ band was playing at the local hall on Friday night.
Maybe it was the naivete of childhood, the wonder of teenage, the lack of experience, but we all had so much in common then. Which is why, as I grow older, it never ceases to intrigue me, the way our lives and philosophies take so many wide and extremely varied turnings.
My wife and I, in our 40s, have friends we grew up with, whose attitudes today would be 40 years apart.
Truly.
Some of them carry on and think like they are in their mid-20s. Mention “The Boss” and they think of Bruce Springsteen, not the guy on $50,000 a year with the big desk and the ulcers.
Their outfit is jeans and enthusiasm and the latest in fads, and, if sometimes they come on a little desperate, so what the heck, they’re still hanging in there saying life’s still just rock and roll.
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, contemporaries, old school-friends, people we grew up with, who could be 65. They were old by the time they hit 30. Ten years ago, they started counting the days till they retire.
They wouldn’t let their daughters wear lipstick till they were 16. They paid off their home by the time they reached 43. He plays bowls, they’ve got a weekender up the coast, and it wasn’t till last year they went on a trip overseas. He’s worked at the same place for the last 17 years. She went back to work once the children started school, and she’s got her own bank account with $20,000 in it – just in case.
She’s waiting for Sidney Poitier to make his next movie. The last time they went to the movies was to see “Dr Zhivago”. They haven’t been to a new restaurant in five years, and he says they don’t make footballers like Ron Barassi and Johnny Raper anymore. And maybe they don’t, not that he’d really know because he hasn’t been to see a big game in 20 years.
Looking around at people you know, people you maybe meet after a few years break, it is hard to believe that what seems like only a few years’ break, it is hard to believe that what seems like only a few years before, we had shared the same perspectives. Once upon a time when we were young, it was hand in hand, last in lousy as we jumped off that top tower into the big swimming-pool of life.
I guess that’s what life is. That’s why you meet an old school chum and find it impossible to reconcile the man with the young feller you once knocked around with.
Funny thing is, I guess they’re thinking the same thing about you.
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