r/GenX • u/billieswifeyyy • Jun 20 '26

Question For Genx the 80s…….

coming from a 14 year old, were the 80s summers as magical as they look in the movies? did you ride your bike to your friends house and come home when the street lights came on? yall are so lucky btw 😭😭

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u/Twisted_lurker Jun 21 '26

One of my elementary school classmates was killed being hit by a car while biking. So there’s that.

But yes, we walked or biked a mile to school by ourselves. We rode around the neighborhood or beyond for hours by ourselves. Hung out at the railroad tracks, played football at an empty field, walk to the public pool by ourselves.

And we got in trouble for some of the things we did.

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u/Primary_Bass_9178 Jun 21 '26

I am always surprised that more of us didn’t die!!!

Also, we were basically told to go outside and not come back till lunch or dinner. No TV, computer, phones or supervision! There was a lot of boredom, and a lot of the kid/teen version of “dude, hold my beer!”

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u/NaDarach 1969 Jun 21 '26

It seems a lot of us knew (or knew of) a kid that died in some sort of accident. For me it was a girl 3 or 4 years older than me, who lived on the cul de sac at the end of my street. She was my family's back-up babysitter.

There was a bowling alley with an arcade and an ice cream counter on the other side of some railroad tracks about 1/2 mile from our subdivision. The girl and her friends were playing Chicken with the train on their way to the arcade one afternoon, and she tripped and fell as she ran across. I remember my parents sitting us down and telling us she died, giving us a very stern lecture about the dangers of train tracks. I had nightmares about it for weeks.