Image credit: Robert Pearson.

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: The good old days really were better, at least for kids

Jul 31, 2021 | 6:44 AM

A LONG TIME AGO, in a town far away…. a group of young men came together to fight tyranny and oppression wherever they found it. I was one.

Actually, it wasn’t all that far away — the South Okanagan, and I was eight. The group was the Blackhawk Club, a half dozen neighbourhood kids who, by today’s standards, were deprived. They had no cellphones, no laptops, no video games and no Internet. They didn’t even have TV. But they had a sense of curiosity and honour.

I was reminded of them earlier this summer when a former club member posted a photo on a Facebook page that focuses on community history and reminiscences about Oliver.

The photo shows six shirtless kids holding our Blackhawk flag, which consisted of a black hawk on a circle background (which was yellow, though the picture is black and white). The scrawny little one on the right, sitting on the ground, is me. Standing next to me is my 12-year-old brother, Bernie.

No, this ambitious club wasn’t named after the great war chief Black Hawk of the Sauk nation, nor after the hockey team. Rather, it followed in the footsteps of one of the most popular comic book heroes of the day — the leader of the Blackhawk Squadron, a group of ace World War II fighter pilots who had no superpowers but put their incredible aerobatic skills to work fighting Nazis and other bad guys.

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Blackhawk was the code name of leader Janos Prohaska, a.k.a. Bart Hawk. Like angry, vengeful hawks, the squadron emerged from their island fortress in their Grumman XF5F Skyrockets to swoop down upon the enemies of justice as they screamed “Hawk-a-a-a,” their dreaded rallying cry.

At the time, Blackhawk comics were second in popularity only to Superman. Since we didn’t have access to any Grumman Skyrockets, and didn’t have a secret island, we had to make do. We turned a cleaned-out chick coop into a clubhouse in which we held meetings. We collected dues but you had to be elected to hold membership — my first foray into politics.

According to Robert Pearson, who posted the picture, we communicated secret plans with invisible writing, which was revealed by applying milk.

That’s what growing up in small-town B.C. was like — kids making their own fun. This is the part where I’m supposed to say that young people today have it easy with their mobile phones and Sony PlayStations, that we had it tough in our day.

But I’m not going to. Sure, I like to say we walked six miles to school every day in the driving snow, uphill both ways. We did wear hand-me-down clothing and got the strap in school if we got in trouble.

Instead of TV, we listened to Doris Day and Perry Como and Dragnet on a big console-style radio in a corner of the living room. When television did arrive, it consisted of one very snowy black-and-white channel, which later expanded to three with slightly better reception on the rooftop antenna. Sunday nights were about Bonanza and Ed Sullivan.

Doctors made house calls. Dr. Stebnick, an honorary Blackhawk who paid his $2 dues, came, and checked me out at home when I came down with an excruciating pain in my side. He didn’t have all the fancy multi-million-dollar equipment doctors have now, but he knew when an

appendix was about to rupture, and he operated that same night up at the hospital, knocking me out with ether.

There were no helicopter parents. Playtime was unscheduled, unstructured, and unsupervised. After school, we played in the neighbourhood until it was time for dinner, at which time a chorus of voices could be heard up and down the street as our moms called us in. When we got a little older, we got bicycles (without helmets) if we were lucky, and then worked on old jalopies. Schools didn’t have dress codes. We swam in the lakes and played golf on a course with sand greens.

Life wasn’t totally without stress. We had to do chores and we went through the polio scare — a very real threat — and practiced hiding under our school desks lest the Russians go nuclear on us (those desks must have been very strong). The first murder in town didn’t happen until many years later — 1972.

Traditional wisdom is that kids are way better off today than they used to be but I challenge that. I sympathize with kids today. They face incredible social pressures and high expectations. They’re every bit as smart as we were but studies show the current generation suffers more anxiety and depression than ever before.

I doubt the Blackhawk Club found much tyranny and oppression in sleepy little Oliver but in our low-tech world we did have one very important thing going for us — we were allowed to be kids. The good old days really were better.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.