O Tempora!

I’m an early Baby Boomer. I grew up with lead everywhere, which must explain my stupidity.

When I was born, nearly all gasoline contained lead. I remember how I liked the smell of gasoline fumes and exhaust fumes. My dad told me that these fumes would make me sick. I didn’t intentionally sniff the stuff after I learned that. But a person has to breathe, so I probably got an average amount of lead from automotive emissions.

When I was little, all paint was oil-based and about half of the paint contained lead. I remember being about five and seeing painters use an electric coil to heat paint to the point of smoking before they scraped the paint off. I remember the smell of burning paint.

House gutters were soldered together by hand 60 years ago. I remember watching a workman do this. He used some kind of little stove to heat his iron, then joined the sheet metal and melted the solder into the joints. I thought this was very cool. And of course, I was exposed to some lead in the air.

Tinsel was once metal instead of plastic. Some of that tinsel was made of lead. I can remember lead tinsel from when I was about eight. The tinsel had to be lead – it was heavy and soft, and it melted and smoked when I dropped it across the tracks for my model train. I think the first time that happened, it was accidental, but it was so much fun to watch that I often did it intentionally.

During the same period as the tinsel experiments, my friends and I thought guns were great. We weren’t allowed near any real guns – my parents wouldn’t have one, and the other parents, if they had guns, certainly kept their children away from them. But we got vicarious satisfaction from collecting used bullets. Close to our neighborhood were shooting ranges related to a military school. We often went to these locations to gather the discarded brass casings. We also liked to dig in the target areas for the slugs, which were full of lead.

Copper plumbing used lead-containing solder until 1986. I don’t know what kinds of pipes were used in any of the homes I had as child, but if there were copper pipes, they were joined with lead-based solder.

Ink used to print books contained lead. I’ve always been an avid reader, so if there was lead in these poisonous publications, I absorbed more than the average child. My parents probably should have bought a TV instead of these vile tomes.

I was apparently exposed to a great deal of lead as a child. So I must be stupid.