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When my mom did that stuff we used to turn the radio volume all the way up and turn the windshield wipers on so it would scare the Hell out of her when she started the car.

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This is such a blast from the past...GSP being an outdoor mall and the mega Santa Claus they had in the front, Bambergers is where we got all our school clothes and Tab ruled! I grew up on the NY side and we did most of our shopping there or Nanuet Mall. I think we stopped going to GSP when Paramus Park opened.

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It took 45 minutes to d/l over a 28.8 modem

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Bambergers? So that would make you like, what? 65 years old?

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Wow, Croft...That was fun reading. thx

my mom and her siblings used to play in the garbage dumps in bayonne and hide her little sisters ring in the trash.

on mischief night, before eggs, shaving cream, and nair were used, they would go to this guy charlie\'s corner store and soap up bad words on his window after writing \"cheap\" in front of charlies with the soap.

they would swim the kill van kull to staten island and back. they would retreat when "shit tide" passed by at 5pm.

my dads family were poor, and even though there were six of them, they all had a very good family which passed on to my family and how me and my brother were raised. i\'m very thankful for that.

both of my grandfathers fought in world war II and the vietnam war. many of my uncles and my father continued the tradition and joined the marines, air force, and navy.

when i was a kid in the 80's, we would do group digs on prospect street, before they cemented over the dirt patches and areas that once housed very large trees. we climbed in many of those trees and on top of the railroad houses and garages on waverly st and reservoir avenue.

my brother's generation were big on climbing in the reservoir. many of them didn't make it.

blowing up fireworks was a big past time in the summer. we lived for m80\'s and roman candles. one of my closest friends blew up his fingers with jumping jacks. my brother's shoulder was badly burned when someone threw a jumping jack on his shirt near christ hospital.

for fun as kids, we would tell "henny" the celebrity of the heights to go into ambucar on new york avenue and watch him walk out with a stretcher or ride in a wheel chair in his prom dress. yes, we were mean.

i remember having a pool and having all of the neighborhood kids come over to swim. when 6pm hit, they went down the block to use this kid anthony for his pool because it was deeper.

fire hydrants weren\'t fun when the fire department put sprinkler caps on them. they were only fun when we illegally took the cap off and wrecked everyone\'s water on the block. my mother hated doing laundry during those days. brown underwear and socks were never my thing either.

pershing field little league was my life from the time i was 6 until i was 17. i lived to pitch that ball. high school softball and eventually college softball were never that fun. i always hated running laps for punishment and tryouts because running to me was never as important as knowing how to play the game.

in the winter, i skated at pershing field ice rink every single day with my friends from st. nicks.

i miss the days of riding bikes, scooters, skateboards (which i broke my arm doing) and rollerblades. i never could skate on those damn quad skates and still don\'t understand how current rollergirls can do it.

i wish i could revert to life before the internet, college, and the work force.

even though i was an 80's kid, i can relate to a lot of these things. nothing beat scraping up change and sharing a clinton's iced tea with 3 of my friends and a bag of ridgies sour cream & onion chips when they still came in the green bag. walking to grammar school in the morning a little early so we could sneak an egg mcmuffin at the "new" mcdonalds on central avenue was always a treat. man did those things hurt during the first few hours of school.

i remember my mom would give me a dollar every day to buy milk and a bag of chips with my lunch. that dollar lasted me until after school when i'd hit up tuffies (now central liquors) and play air hockey with my classmates white people dealt "dope" outside. those were the "bad guys."

pizza by the park and the mortal kombat machine were another hangout of mine. i would come home from school sometimes after 5pm, no questions asked, no cell phones, no immediate dangers.

i made friends with whatever kids lived around the corner from me. the old people on waverly st. hated us for playing touch football in the street. it was a slice of heaven when someone was given an official sized football. we could barely even hold the thing but the idea of it excited us.

basketball with a milkcrate on a telephone pole was another treat until someone in the neighborhood became angry with the noise of kids playing all day.

super soakers, zap its, and imitation super soakers were a vital part of summer. i still have a super soaker laying around. it works well when curbing the dog's barking.

sunday church was a chore, but i always went. as i got older i stopped going. i went to midnight mass this year with my entire family only to notice that the church was half empty. when i was a kid going to st. nicks, you had to get there early to get a seat.

the bar up the street, mcdunna's, was always full of umpires from pershing field. usually they were passed out cold on the bar. we would sneak in and use the shuffleboard table until the bartender threw us out realizing there was no guardian there for us.

we got into street fights where the only weapon we had were our fists. usually a day later we'd make up and drink iced tea together on one of our porches. when other kids tried to steal our bikes, we put up a fight and always kept our belongings. now, you never know who's carrying a gun.

beepers were cool. they were so cool that the corner stores stocked toys and fake beepers. i bought the whole display of them for $10 and brought them to school. we'd set them off at the same time and the teacher never knew who had them.

big extravagant pencil boxes were a sign of who was more spoiled. dress down days were another sign. i hated dress down days. i had no sense of style. gym class was another. i never had cool kicks.

we didn't get the internet until i was in high school. i learned how to build an ibm pc from watching my dad build computers and write his own dos programs.

i spent a lot of summer time in pennsylvania. i didn't get along with any of the kids up there because i was "too rough around the edges" for them. they didn't understand the concept of walking to school. i spent those summers alone, riding an old moped, swinging on a tire swing, playing basketball in a gravel driveway, or mowing the lawn with a ride on montgomery ward tractor. it made me feel special, because at 10 years old i was driving. not only was i driving, but i was driving a tractor with a clutch. i drive a manual car in jersey city now. it's a piece of cake.

roosevelt lanes in jersey city was the place to be for me. everyone knows that bowl rite was the place to be if you were broke and wanted to bowl. when roosevelt closed, a part of my childhood died.

hamilton park was a high school hangout. we would rollerblade on that big cement pyramid thing. i hear they fenced it in now. bummer.

you could go anywhere in pershing field and find our skate wax on the ledges. i never did learn to grind on a rail. i didn't even own "aggressive" skates. i destroyed whatever skates i had trying.

during softball, we lived for joe's italian ices. i sometimes wonder if he's still around. maybe now that i have a dog to walk i'll take the trek up and watch a little league softball game and reminisce.

great stroll down memory lane. sorry i am an 80's jersey city kid.

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That just made me a laugh out loud.

My mom used to drive us to the Garden State Plaza (when it was an outdoor mall) in her Grand Prix, smoking her Vantage cigs with the windows up and drinking her Tab all the way, and then leave us in the car in the parking lot while she went to Bambergers.

Grew up in the seventies. My father actually cut the seatbelts out of the car because they were a nuisance.

YES! Aspirin, twinkies, bikes!!!! The good stuff!

No credit from me with this list - yes, I did get it from an email but simply wanted to share.

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LOL Yeah - I actually received this exact email a couple of months ago from my 70 year old aunt who learned how to use the PC and the Web a couple of years ago.

Love it!

Good riddance. Those times were highly overrated.

Except, maybe for some good music in the 60s, 70s, and THE 80s!!!

Well, it is sad for me to see the number of adults in their 50s and 60s who are battling cancer, heart disease and diabetes. We young mothers want different for our kids. I really don't want to spend my golden years in the hospital.

So, while you may think we are ninnies for worrying about silly stuff like asbestos and lead poisoning, we have good reason.

Thats soo true!

Great memories of growing up at that time, I hate today's way of doing things. This is how we survived here in Jersey City, there was no time to rant about sillyness.

Did an elderly relative forward this to you - and everyone on their contact list - through their AOL account?

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1920's, 30's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!

1. First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.

2. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

3. Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

4. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks some of us took hitchhiking.

5. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

6. Riding in the back of a pick-up or truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

7. We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

8. Take away food was limited to sandwiches mom made that we took outside, no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC, Subway or kebabs.

9. Even though most of the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death!

10. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

11. We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Fruit Tingles and some fire crackers to blow up frogs and lizards with.

12. We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

13. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

14. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and cubby houses and played in creek beds with matchbox cars.

15. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape or DVD movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

16. We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no Lawsuits from these accidents.

Only girls had pierced ears!

17. We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

18. You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross buns at Easter time.......no really!

19. We were given BB guns and sling shots for our 10th birthdays.

20. We drank milk laced with Strontium 90 from cows that had eaten grass covered in nuclear fallout from the atomic testing in Arizona

21. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

22. Mom didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!

23. Baseball had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

24. Our teachers used to belt us with big sticks and leather straps and bully's always ruled the playground at school.

25. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

26. Our parents got married before they had children and didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade'.....

27. This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

28. The past 70 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

29. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned - HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

30. You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

PS -If you find this hard to read, it's because your eyes are shot at your age !