This may be the first in a series since I think there are quite a few more mind-blowing, now-obvious life-threatening hazards that existed in my (and most kid's back then) home that well should have seen me in my bright-red plaid suit and crushed-velvet clip-on bow tie, laid out peacefully in a tiny coffin, long before the dawning of the 1980s.
We'll start out mild enough. Aspirin seems innocuous enough a drug, and it mostly is if taken correctly in adults, but we now know that it reacts quite differently on the systems of little children. It wasn't until the 1980s that the connection between Reye syndrome and aspirin use by children under twelve was identified. When I was a kid, this was the go-to tasty pills we'd be given to munch on for anything from a headache, fever, sore tummy, pain from a scrapped knee, you name it. Well, actually, come to think of it, I think we got Alka-Seltzer for upset stomach which actually was not, even then, recommended for use by children since it had not just "child safe" doses of aspirin but adult levels. Yikes! (I'll give my parents benefit of the doubt and say that in the case of the Alka-Seltzer, they may well have just used one wafer in water and let us drink just a sip, so...)
As much as St. Joseph Children's Aspirin was the internal panacea med, Mercurochrome was the topical. Cuts, scrapes, even unbroken blisters (incase they bust) would be painted with this bright red fluid, applied with this weird little glass wand built into the screw-on cap. I read just now while getting this pic that some my age recall being a kid in the '70s and having this applied to wounds and they say it stung like the dickens. I don't remember that. I thought it didn't hurt, but looking closer at the labeling, I do see that the tincture was over 60% alcohol so, yeah, maybe it did. But that's not the bad part. It's the "mercuro" part of its name that should make you have concerns since, yup, that stands for mercury. Yes, let's put liquid mercury directly into an open cut, thus having it enter right into our blood stream. Good times, good times.
Why buy Coppertone or other such expensive suntan lotions when taking the family to the beach, or, laying out by the pool? Every household, whether there was a baby in the house or not, usually had Johnson's Baby Oil. Way before Diddy, it had many much more innocent uses. And iodine, like the above mentioned mercurochrome, was another wonderful, and widely-available topical antiseptic in every medicine cabinet. Combining the two made a cheap and easy, suntan oil to slather all over, head to toe, to get that nice movie star tan. And I guess it was thought it had protective qualities too since it was used on us kids. But, of course, not only does in not provide even one SPF, it actually helps magnify the UV rays causing more potential for skin burn and, as we now know, possible risk of skin cancer.
Hey there was more to worry about back in the day than the shit you took for an ache, a scrape or sunbathing, there were everyday things like a simple little chore my parents made us kids do... change fuses whenever one burned out. And in our, even by the 1970s, over 50-year-old house with a probably just as old electrical system, that happened frequently. The house was not professionally built. You could tell. And whoever built it in the 1930s probably didn't conceive a need for the modern 1970s electrified family wanting to run microwave ovens, CB radios, 8-track tape players and Atari 2600 game systems on Zenith color television sets. "Michael, the fuse blew out again, go change it!" I'd go down to the basement, to the dark corner where the ancient fuse box was, hunt for a fresh fuse from one of the little cardboard boxes of them nearby, unscrew the dead one (having found it out by feeling the tops of all the fuses to see which one was hot, since it just blew), and screw in the new one... all while the main power was all still quite live and if my fingers were wet and got too close to the metal threads, who knows how many amps would have coursed through my little body before I was totally electrocuted?
This pic looks like it could have been snapped by me back in the '70s in the basement of that Pearl Street house. It's exactly the same. That white stuff wrapped around those pipes? You know it, asbestos. And I specifically remember many of the edges were flaking and would rain dust down every time I'd hit my head on them as I tried to pass under since I was tall and the basement clearance wasn't the best. I never knew the hazard. I never held my breath in horror at the stuff I could be inhaling. I even had my bedroom down there for a good year or two by my late teens!
How the hell did I survive the '70s?!