Just one. You had to walk up the hill to get to school - but coming home was easy peezy. Except the day I got my brand new Schwinn bike that was a bit too big for me and on the way home the hill was steep enough that whatever the hell I weighed was not enough to bring the bike to a stop, so my runaway bike actually did not stop at the end of the street - but went through - and across - the street into a neighboring ball field.
Fortunately, while there was traffic coming in both directions I was untouched going through the intersection. To be fair to long-ago prosecutors, I did come pretty close to dying that day.
Shit, a few years later when I was on safety patrol in Kansas during a blizzard the school let us stand out in the zero degree /high winds with my whistle and my buddy’s stop sign on a wooden pole. by the time it dawned on them that maybe they should bring us back in we all had frostbite on our faces.
In a whole lot of ways, the good old days were moronic. Everything is a balance, and the pendulum has swung too far the other side. Letting us run around unsupervised during the summer from morning to when it got dark put me in several circumstances that could’ve been serious injury or fatality producing. I fortunately missed that experience, but it was probably the golden age of pedophilia because nobody was watching the kids.
Now, of course, the kids have all been taken and they are gone.