How Many Kids Fit in a 1950s Family Car?

As you know, I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1950.

My grandparents on my mother's side lived in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Goldsboro is about 130some odd miles from Greensboro, North Carolina.

So we would travel from Greensboro to Goldsboro.

That was our go to place.

That was where we did holidays, that was where we did summers.

So we mostly went down to Goldsboro.

And sometimes they would come and spend a few days or spend a holiday with us up here in Greensboro.

When I say they, I'm talking about my grandmother, my grandfather and my aunt.

And so I got a call from my younger brother the other day, and he said, you know, I was just sitting here thinking about those trips we used to make to Goldsboro.

He said, how did we all do that?

How did we do that?

Because we didn't have a big car.

We didn't have what they call a station wagon or anything like that.

We had just had a little car.

But there would be so many of us going back and forth.

How did all of us fit in that car?

And when I thought about it, I said, well, yeah, because there was at least two people would come from Goldsboro to get us.

Because let me stop right here and let you know, we didn't have a car, okay?

We didn't have a car until my sister turned 16.

That's when she took driver's edge at high school and got her license.

So my sister, when she turned 16, was the first person in our immediate family to have a driver's license.

And it was at that time that we got a car.

So we were dependent on other people taking us places or we would just walk.

We did a lot of walking, and sometimes people would offer us rides, but mostly we just walked every place we went.

So when they would come to get us to take us back to Goldsboro, there would be at least two people, if not three.

So sometimes there were three adult people riding in a car, coming to Greensboro, getting us two adults and four kids.

So now you got eight or nine people in a very small car.

And my brother is saying, how do we do that?

And I said, well, you have to remember there was no such thing as seatbelts.

So wherever you were, that's where wherever you could fit, you would fit.

If it meant you had to sit on somebody's lap, if it meant you had to lay across laps, if it meant you sat on the floor.

I can remember, in fact, the brother that was calling me, I was.

Can remember when he was little, a lot of times he would be sitting in the backseat, on the floor of the car.

Um, people had no problem holding babies.

I remember adults holding babies in their arms, Backseat or front seat, it was no big deal.

I remember seeing people knowing people riding in the bed of trucks, children in the bed of trucks, and riding down the highway like that.

And it was not.

Nobody thought anything about it.

It was just how we lived.

It was about getting as many people as we could from point A to point B.

And so we didn't think about it.

We just piled in.

I remember sometimes after school, a parent in our community who had a car would go to the school to pick up their child.

And while they were there, they would tell everybody who was living near them in their community.

They'd say, get in the car.

And so a lot of times that was a lot of kids piling in the car and like I said, sitting on laps, laying across, squeezed in, just whatever you had to do to get in the car.

And again, we didn't think about it.

And so my brother was saying, well, yeah, today, because he was saying, I was out shopping for my grandson's a.

A.

A car seat.

He said, so all the little children today have to have their own seat.

I said, yeah, that's right.

They got to have their own seat, and everybody has to have their own seat belt.

So there are only so many people, legally, that you're supposed to put in a car to go somewhere.

I said, but when we were doing it, we just piled the people in and it was.

We were good to go.

We didn't even think about it.

And I said, you know, another thing, I'm.

I went to visit my daughter, and I went to see my grandchildren playing in the park.

They wanted to show me riding their.

How they were riding their bicycles and skating and all this stuff.

So I went there and, oh, my God, I was taken aback when I got to the park and I saw all these kids with helmets.

I mean, serious helmets, and they had knee guards, elbow guards, wrist guards.

Oh, my God, they were guarded up.

And it got me to thinking about when we were kids, we didn't do any of that.

We would put on our shorts and whatever, and we would just go out and we would just ride and skate, and we would.

Of course, we would fall down, bust our knee open, bust our arm open, cry, go inside.

Our mamas was spread with something that was real stingy.

We would cry even more.

She put some band aids on our stuff.

We get up, go back out and do it all over again.

But we didn't have any Protective gear.

In fact, when I was a child, I didn't even know what that was or there was such a thing.

I also remember riding around the block where we would say to our parents, can we ride around the block?

And they say, yeah, but only around the block.

And so today I'm thinking, ride around the block?

Are you kidding me?

Because we were very young and we would ride around the block.

And today I cringe at the thought of letting a child ride around the block.

Actually just get out of my eyesight where I can't see them when I can't see my grandchildren, when I'm babysitting.

Oh my God, I almost have a heart attack if I don't know.

They could be behind a tree or something.

But if I can't see them, I almost lose my mind.

And I'm just thinking about how carefree we lived.

But we were pretty much happy.

And that's what we knew.

We didn't know any better.

And so that's how we lived.

We would go to the park.

There was a park near us.

The closest park to us was about, I'm going to say, about three blocks from my house.

And they had of course, some playground equipment down there.

Especially in the summer.

There'd be stuff for us to do down there.

But I remember my favorite thing was this thing called the Merry Go Round.

Now it's not the Merry Go Round.

Like if you ask a little kid today what a merry go round is, they're going to tell you something with the horses and it goes around and plays this sweet music.

Now this thing was we called the Merry Go Round was this piece of equipment that was round and at various intervals there you would had.

It had handles for you to hold onto.

And the idea was to get it going really fast.

Now to get it going real fast, somebody had to be on the ground and they had to run and push it, push it, push it and make it go spin, spin, spin fast, fast, fast.

And you would just be holding on for dear life.

And the idea was to hold on.

So you did.

It was so easy to spin off that thing and just fly away.

And there were some people that got thrown off and they got patched up and would come back.

But it was such a, I think about it now.

Oh my God, that was such a dangerous piece of equipment.

But we loved it.

I had a love hate relationship with it.

I was scared of it at the same time.

But it was such a thrill, the ride on it.

And we did that and again it was okay.

No one Thought anything about that.

Now I do remember also being very young and being home alone.

Actually, I loved being home alone.

I wasn't home alone a lot, but there were times that I was because my mother would be working and we would come home when we got out of school and we'd have to let ourselves in.

And I remember sometimes I was the first one home.

I also remember one time my mother had a situation where she needed someone to babysit my younger brother who was a baby.

And I was that person who she said, I need you to stay out of school today because you need to babysit for me today.

I was in elementary school, so we were given a lot of responsibilities.

We were, we just lived.

We didn't have this fear.

We didn't have all these things in place like we do today.

I'm sure that today a lot of kids sometimes are home alone.

Of course, it's very much on the down low because that is frowned upon and it is a scary thought.

But I think about now a lot of the things that we did and that we were allowed to do.

I cringe at the thought and I'm oh, I just feel like, oh, God, I could never today, I could never do that or allow my child to do that.

But in those days, it seemed like that was.

That was just called life.

That was just called living.

We also, when we went to the store, there were times when we didn't bother to lock our front door.

If it was summertime, sometimes we wouldn't even close the inside door, you know, it was just the screen door there.

And we'd go to the store and come back and everything would still be intact.

I remember going when we had a car and seeing people with cars go to the store.

Nobody was really concerned about locking their car like they are today.

In fact, I remember sometimes in the summer, people would have their windows rolled down, pull up at a spot, park, go in, do some shopping and come back.

And the car would still be there, and everything in the car would still be there.

One of the things that I think was real important and why we were able to have a lot of the carefreeness that we did is because we had a sense of community.

I know that we all knew for several blocks, if not just many blocks, we all knew each other.

Who's.

We knew the names.

We didn't know somebody's name.

We knew them by sight.

We knew who they were or we knew who their child was.

And so especially in our, like two to three blocks where we lived, everybody knew each other, and there was no busing.

So we all went to the same schools according to the grade level that we were in.

We all walked to school together, and we walked home together.

And so there was a big sense of community.

And so I guess having a kid ride around the block didn't feel like a big deal because everybody knew everybody, and pretty much everybody was watching out for everybody.

I know that if me, my sister, or one of my brothers did something that was out of line before we got back home, my mother already knew about it.

And so it was that kind of thing.

So, yeah, there were times when things didn't turn out so well.

Again, I thank the community that we had at that time.

And I think the community played a big part in the way.

In the fact that we were able to be so open and to have so much fun and to live so carefree was because we had a sense of community, and we knew that we all were looking out for each other.

And on top of that, sometimes when I think about those days and some of the things that we did, I think, well, you know what?

I guess it was just also a bunch of angels putting in a lot of overtime, overseeing all of the things that we did and how we lived and got us from that point to where we are today.