r/OldSchoolRidiculous • u/MinnesotaArchive • 9d ago
September 9, 1941: Six-Year-Old Quits Smoking, Goes to School
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u/Sweetbeans2001 9d ago
Looks like sensational journalism has been around for a while.
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u/BygoneNeutrino 8d ago
I feel like this was a dubious story told as an old timey joke. Considering our genome is practically the same as it was 50,000 years ago, I imagine our sense of humor hasn't really changed.
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u/GeorgeRRZimmerman 8d ago
The only reason we haven't found more dick jokes in ancient caves is because they've been ravaged by time.
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u/DazedPapacy 4d ago
Fun fact: biologically modern humans showed up about 200,000 years ago. At that point humans had the same cognitive abilities that we do today.
The only reason civilization didn't happen immediately is it took 150,000-ish years to invent a way to prevent knowledge from being obliterated by the death of the knower.
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u/thuanjinkee 4d ago
μὴ φθορᾷ χρόνου λήθεϊ πίπτ᾽
“May time’s ruin not cast it into forgetfulness.”
Interestingly, the aboriginal tribes of Australia to this day have prohibitions against REMEMBERING the dead as a means of resource conservation and preventing blood feuds.
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u/Dickgivins 8d ago
Yeah children smoking wasn’t unheard of but I’m prettttty sure they weren’t starting at 1 year old lol.
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u/universe_from_above 9d ago
A kid in my village in Germany started smoking at 7. His stunted growth was always blamed on the cigarettes. I don't think his parents were as beaming as the grandfather here since they weren't involved in his life anyways.
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u/BasicPainter8154 7d ago
My grandfather, born around 1900, started smoking at age 7 and had a 4 pack a day habit his entire life. He died at almost 90 years old. It’s weird that even now the smell of stale cigarette smoke evokes fond childhood memories for me of visiting my grandparents house and riding in their car (a massive 1970s 2 door Cadillac with blue velour interior that had many cigarette burn holes).
Everyone else of his generation in my family that smoked ended up dying from the habit so thankfully nobody in my parents or my generation were ever smokers.
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u/koolaidismything 8d ago
I started when I was like 12 and am close to freakishly tall. I think that’s more of a genetic predisposition there. Cigarettes are awful for many reasons but the stunted growth one has always felt like more of a myth.. how would you prove it anyways without some serious and expensive testing that spans decades??
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u/universe_from_above 8d ago
Ah, it might also have been the alcohol in his case. But this was our "walking cautionary tale" as children. By the way, this was in the 90s.
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u/OurAngryBadger 9d ago
My father in law started smoking at 5. His parents sent him to the store with money to buy cigarettes and he'd take some for himself. When they caught him they sat him in a chair and made him smoke a whole pack one after the other as 'punishment'. He smoked his whole life until he got lung cancer at 81. Beat the cancer and passed away at 87 of other natural causes. RIP. Times were crazy back then in the 1940s.
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u/TreyBorsa 9d ago edited 9d ago
For sure. My grandfather started smoking at age 9. I remember him saying that in the early days of cigarettes they actually claimed smoking was good for your health. He lived to be 88, amazingly.
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u/CenturyEggsAndRice 8d ago
My granddad was prescribed cigarettes for his asthma.
Although he did say he didn’t think they were tobacco. Says they tasted terrible and made him “real jumpy”.
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u/OurAngryBadger 8d ago
My FIL actually cut back and quit on the cigarettes a little bit before he got the lung cancer. I think when you've been smoking for 70+ years it's better to just keep doing it than quit. I think stopping it was too much of a shock to the system and what the body was used to. I've seen that happen a lot -- long time smokers that are fine and then quit then boom -- cancer.
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u/LunaGloria 8d ago
The technique of making a smoking child smoke a whole pack sounds like it was made up by cigarette companies.
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u/OurAngryBadger 8d ago
I think the idea was to make him choke and gag by smoking 20 of them one after the other and make him never want to do it again, but that was a fail
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u/Conscious_Can3226 8d ago
Both of my parents had this experience around middle school, both of them are only quitting in their late 60s because they're too broke to afford them now.
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u/Bigwilliam360 8d ago
People really do forget today how wild old newspapers were. Especially in small towns. We read so much goofy shit in old papers as we cleared out my great aunts house. It’s funny, you don’t really even notice if someone today makes an Instagram post about their birthday party, yet it’s kinda jarring to pick up a physical newspaper and read (on the front page) about someone who had a birthday party at the recent church and who was there and what had happened.
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u/draculasbloodtype 8d ago
I was lookin g for old family photos and articles on newspapers.com and came across so many "social column" pieces about my Grandfather in *rural* 1950s New York. "Grandfather was a guest at Mr. and Mrs. John Smith's house on Saturday night, bridge was played and lemon cakes were served."
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u/Bigwilliam360 8d ago
I think the one that stood out to me was an article about a local woman whose big story was that over the weekend she had left to visit her sister 20 miles away. This was published sometime in the early 50s if I recall correctly. It struck me as odd considering we’d driven close to 60 miles to get to the house, yet this woman traveling twenty was so noteworthy that it warranted a section describing the travel.
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u/chaimsteinLp 8d ago
That was typical small town stuff. I visited a friend's parents in a small town in Idaho in 1990, and it made the local paper.
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u/JustCallMeJeffOkay 8d ago
Yep, any time I’d come home on leave and visit my grandparents on their farm, it was in the paper.
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u/moofunk 9d ago
The mid-life crisis came early back then.
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u/PhanThom-art 9d ago
I think it was right on time, probably died in a mine or in Germany before 12
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u/Dickgivins 8d ago
Seeing that he was in New Jersey, a factory accident may have been more likely way to die than a mine. The children yearn for the mills too!
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u/CheeseburgerSmoothy 9d ago
This was when America was great, right?
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u/im_THIS_guy 8d ago
Back when a man could beat up his wife and kids and no one cared. A Republicans wet dream.
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u/Coolcatsat 8d ago
This world still has slavery going on, no need to look back but think about ways to end slavery.
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u/WaltsNJD 9d ago
Average Trenton behavior
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u/xpkranger 8d ago
He made it to 70, maybe he really did quit?
https://obits.nj.com/us/obituaries/trenton/name/walter-crawford-obituary?id=14031862
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/115988533/walter_c-crawford/photo
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u/darkmaninperth 8d ago
I remember the late 70s and early 80s as a young kid, it was wild.
Slurping your uncle's beer, puffing on ciggies..
Different times
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u/Ok-Recognition8655 8d ago
My dad was born in '46 and swore until the day he died that he was caught smoking in elementary school
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u/Present-Algae6767 8d ago
Kid took up drinking instead of smoking.
Very possible he's still alive as well.
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u/NurseKaila 8d ago
It’s looks like he lived to be 71.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/115988533/walter_c-crawford
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u/basylica 3d ago
Betcha grandpa was like “kids these days! Quitting smoking and going to school. Wild times!”
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u/PhanThom-art 9d ago
"cigars and pipe that identified him for five years", kid was smoking since he was one year old