Fun pub discussion last night - things your kids will never know or experience

[titaniumsalute]

I enjoy some random bar stool diplomacy. Last night we engaged in the "What will your kids never know or experience" discussion.

Some good ones include:

An alarm clock where the numbers flip versus digital
Smoking on an airline
Rest Areas with old outhouse holes in the ground
Records
Record players
8 Tracks
Party Line phone systems
Rotary dial phones


What are some fun things you grew up with that kids now will never experience?

[get the red out]

1. Out all day in the summer

Running around the sub-division with my friends all day during the summer with our Mom's just trusting that if they couldn't see us, someone elses Mom probably could. We all were expected to survive and did exactly that.

[titaniumsalute]

3. Man that is a good one...

We didn't have video games and with 5 or 6 channels of soaps there wasn't anything for kids to watch on TV. Unless it was raining we were outside playing HARD. When dad's LOUD whistle blew it was time for dinner. If you didn't come...you didn't eat.

[JimDandy]

39. Yep we had to be within distance of my dad's piercing whistle.

He used only his lips and you could hear it 3-5 blocks away depending on how still the air was!

[beveeheart]

74. It was my girlfriend's mother's piercing whistle that we listened for 3 blocks away.

[KT2000]

181. it was my mom's boat whistle - loud! n/t

[FSogol]

8. I raised both of my sons as free-range kids.

Horrified neighbors used to call and report, your son walked home from school! Gasp!

[AnotherMcIntosh]

126. Too funny.

[WinkyDink]

324. We HAD to walk, in my day! With crossing guards, of course!

[Romulox]

138. Amen. We rode our bikes *everywhere*, then threw them down in the front yard overnight...

Haven't seen a 10 or 12 year old riding a bike in years.

[susanna]

191. I couldn't be separated from my bike in the summer.

Me and my friends traveled from one end of our little town to another and thought nothing of it. As long as I was home by suppertime...

[ashling]

262. We used to go on "bike hikes" in the summer.

My dad had "cocktail parties" for a group from work. He would rent a black and white portable t.v. with rabbit ears for us to watch in the back.

Sometimes we would put in an appearance and then stay in the back, but I can also remember singing The Road to Mandalay at the Hammond Organ with them. There were some neat folks, but smelled strongly of gin LOL

I remember us boys standing in line to talk to my aunt Helen and grandmother on the phone. We each got a minute or two.

I remember actually learning stuff in school. I teach community college now and a lot of these kids out of high school never learned how to spell, write, or think critically.

I remember when a pay phone cost a dime and a 6 oz coke cost a nickle.

A Haircut was 25 cents . . .in a real honest to God barber's chair.

I remember telephone exchanges . . we were Sherwood _ _ _ and then Homestead.

Postal addresses didn't have zip codes, but zones (2 digits)

I remember $.05 stamps and even $.03 stamps

Gasoline price wars . . . $,25, no $.24, no $.22 ..... $.12 a gal.

[dchill]

307. You must be just a little older than me.

I remember when a pay phone cost a dime, but 10 oz Coke was all there was - it was a dime, too. And a dime was real money. Wow.

Do you remember Bun candy bars and Sen-sen breath mints? (Yuck to the latter.)

(I'm 61 years bold. The last real barber haircut I got was xx years ago - it cost .75.)

I "got in on" the first draft lottery (1969?) - my number was 300!)

[ashling]

345. No, I'm only 60

Remember how things hit in waves. What was cool on the west coast came slightly later to the mid-west etc. It depended a lot on where you grew up.

[SheilaT]

414. I'm surprised you remember before zip codes.

They came about in 1962 or 63, and I clearly recall all the confusion they caused at first.

[ashling]

422. We were in postal zone 55

they adde3 digits to make it 77055

[SheilaT]

433. Interesting. Only some larger cities, if I recall correctly,

had postal zones. It's nice they could keep your zone 55 as part of your zip.

[ashling]

440. I think you are probably right about the zones

at least urban areas. We were in Houston Texas.

[PoliticalBiker]

409. Ahhh the Gas Wars!

Fill you tank... 20-25gal for $10 or less

440cuin hot rod cars

Stoplight to stoplight drags... and a lot of cops would watch just to make sure things didn't get out of hand.

Out door A&W's with rollerskate clad waitresses

[ashling]

423. Must have been a looser dress code where you were

All the waitresses where I lived wore more than just roller skates

[SheilaT]

447. Ahh, I've never ever owned a car with a gas tank that

took more than 10, maybe 11 gallons of gas and then only if I've had the low gas light on for a while.

In the mid-60's I owned a 59 VW. Convertable. No gas gauge, just the old spare tank thing. It also had a manual choke which I sometimes miss. Anyway, as best I can recall, I'd pay attention to my odometer when I got gas, and at about 200 miles would fill up again. We were having gas wars back then. Gas would be as low as 15 cents per gallon. I never spent as much as two dollars on a tank of gas. I seem to recall always spending exactly $1.70. Sigh.

Oh, and I only ran out of gas once.

[glowing]

241. Well, come on over to my neighborhood.

The kids run around up and down the st (dead end so it's relatively safe). If they r in front of o e parents home, good enough.. Trustworthy people. And they ride bikes, set up baseball, 4 square, toss the football, ok nerf guns are an add on and they do play video games, but for honest to God, 1/2 of my child's bike and scooter collection is sitting on my front porch because no one takes it and he hates putting things up he'll use again the next day.

It's kind of a treasure trove to find in FL. Not too many places I've been or lived down here that I would ever dream would give him some of the freedoms I had living in the country in VT.

[Romulox]

347. Sounds really nice! I enjoyed reading your post. nt

[Laura PourMeADrink]

185. YES....and we had to come in at night when the street light came on

[gkhouston]

300. LOL, we could play in the backyard until 10 if it was summer.

But we had to wash our feet before bed. I got very good at standing on one foot while washing the other in the downstairs bathroom sink.

[Ligyron]

340. Me too!

My Mom used to make me sit on the washer over the laundry sink and Clorox the grass stains off my continuously bare feet before I was allowed to enter the house. Hey! Remember those metal ice cube trays with the silly handle you used to break the ice out? What a pain.

[gkhouston]

380. Metal ice cube trays! Yes!

Is it just me or does it seem like those things stuck to your skin more than plastic trays? These days, we have a few old plastic trays for freezing broth cubes. Can't tell you the last time I used an ice tray for ice.

[RC]

393. A separate handle, or integrated with the tray?

[Rider3]

426. integrated with the tray...

but I liked the other kind better. I had trouble with the integrated kind! How funny to remember this!

[RC]

442. I liked the separate handle better also.

The integrated handle sometimes had trouble getting all the cubes loose.

[Romulox]

348. Yep. That was our rule, too. nt

[ChisolmTrailDem]

367. At ten years old I was an amateur astronomer...

...so I got to go out looooong after dark in the summertime, lol.

[HiPointDem]

192. +1 10-mile bike rides, on our own, to a local lake. day-long wanderings through the local woods.

as pre-teens. no helmets.

bunches of kids riding in the back of open pickups. going to the drive-in in the back of a pick-up and watching the show covered with blankets. making our own skateboards from random pieces of wood & skate wheels and being pulled on the things from the back of a car. everybody walking several miles to school, through residential housing and a utility pipeline at a time when *no one's* parents drove them to school, and going to high school at a time when few to no kids had cars.

using a crank phone at summer camp, the only communication with the outside world -- it went to the ranger station. going to a camp that you had to hike into. using a party line.

the mass culture experience, where everyone gets the same news, watches the same tv shows, has the same cultural references. living in a working class neighborhood where almost all the parents work for the same company.

the experience of rising prosperity and seemingly wide-open futures that was the space age.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

311. thanks ! Had forgotten about the homemade skate boards ! And so true about walking everywhere

and few having cars (mostly whom we called "greasers&quot

We grew up in Connecticut and at 11-12 years old we were riding the train into NYC, all by ourselves, taking the subway, roaming around, everywhere. At 16 we were down there at the bar in Grand Central Station, drinking rusty nails, because the drinking age was 18 and no one carded you.

[musette_sf]

390. at 16 we were at the local bowling alley

drinking Cuba Libres, because the drinking age was 18 and no one carded you

rip Leemark Lanes

[dixiegrrrrl]

354. "the mass culture experience, where everyone gets the same news, watches the same tv shows, "

You make such a good point.
There were only 3 tv stations...CBS, NBC,ABC.
Walter Cronkite was at CBS, that was the news we watched.
and the parents controlled the one black and white tv in the house.

"us kids" did not watch news, of course, we were too busy doing "other stuff"
EXCEPT
The Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination. Then, everyone was glued to the screen.

The tv was in a console, it was a piece of living room furniture, and there was a ceramic figurine on top..something about you could not have a tv with a bare top, I guess, it had to have a doily and some kind of "decoration".
For years my Mom had a ceramic black panther on top of the doily.

You had to get up and walk over the tv and manually change the channel.
Usually a kid was told to do it, while the adults sat on a couch or chair and smoked and drank coffee.

Everybody smoked almost everywhere, including on tv shows and there were lots of tobacco commercials.
Your parents would say, with a cigarette in their mouth.." don't you kids smoke when you get older".

Riiight.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

475. So funny..."some kind of ceramic figure" with a doily. haha. It also reminded me that everyone

had to have a box of Kleenix on the rear dashboard (don't know what the name is) and a crocheted toilet paper cover in the bath.

[dixiegrrrrl]

483. "a crocheted toilet paper cover in the bath."

Never saw those.
I did see the toilet tank and seat covered with some kind of material that matched the rug in front of the toilet.
Surprised there wasn't another damned ceramic cat on the tank...

[Laura PourMeADrink]

490. OMG here's a pic of TV with ceramics on it

[Laura PourMeADrink]

491. hahaha Crocheted Toilet Paper cover pic !

[dixiegrrrrl]

495. OMG...I DO rememeber those!

And hated them. It was like having to unwrap a present every time you needed the paper.
And that tv brought back memories.
Till she died in 1983, my Gram owned a huge Magnavox tv console with radion and 78 rpm record player in it.
And she had kept a lot of 78's all nicely tucked away in one corner of it.
I heard music on that thing till I was past 30.
The miracle was that it all worked for all those decades.
I think one of my uncles, who was a electronics nut, may have kept it in working order for her.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

371. Take away the crank phone at summer camp...

...and you've described my childhood. We rode our bikes all over town. The towns I lived in though were towns, not cities. So our bike rides often included both town and country cruising.

[spinbaby]

315. I read an article once about roaming kids

I wish I could find it today. It showed how the range of children has decreased over the years--in the 19th century, for instance, it was nothing for a child to walk miles to go fishing.

I know that in the 1920s, my father dropped out of school at the age of 13 and traveled around Europe on a bike. My mother says that in the 1930s her parents routinely put the children to bed before going out for the night and it was perfectly acceptable.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

372. When I was a kid in the late '60s and into the '70s my range

was much, much further than even my parents knew. It was not unusual for me to be miles from home down to the river or riding with friends to the sandpits where we rode our bikes off 10 foot sand cliffs into the piled-up sand below.

There was literally no limit to how far I could go as long as I was back home when I supposed to be.

[Art_from_Ark]

450. I used to ride my Buzz bike to neighboring towns

One day when I was 8 years old, I decided I was going to go to Oklahoma, which was about 35 road miles away. I pedaled about 8 miles to a neighboring town, where I asked some old guy in the street for directions to Oklahoma. "Oh, it's a far piece from here," he said. "On that little bike of yours, it would take a day or two, maybe longer." So I gave up and rode back home.

These days, if an 8-year-old kid alone on a bike did that, someone would freak out and call the cops.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

466. We had our adventures, didn't we? And if a kid did that today, not only

would someone freak out and call the cops, there may even be an Amber Alert.

[HiPointDem]

406. so different. i think the historical perspective is important to have, to keep people

from getting too obsessive and fanatical about child-rearing practices and other things as well.

it's interesting how what was normal in the previous generation or too comes back to our generation in the form of status markers -- e.g. organic food, 'free range kids,' etc.

[The Blue Flower]

334. Collecting soda bottles to sell for 2 cents each

I'm 63. I don't think anyone has mentioned being able to pick up extra money by collecting tossed-out glass bottles and taking them back to the store for a refund. I'd use what I got to buy a moon pie and RC Cola at the 7-11. I also remember party lines.

[sarge43]

353. Yes. After breakfast Mom would throw us out the door and lock it.

We might be allowed back in for lunch; more often a plate of something was left on the porch. In the evening we were hosed down, fed and camped in front the black and white TV for an hour or two. If we were doing it right, we wouldn't see an adult all day. Good times.

[get the red out]

356. Home for lunch!! Yes

I would get hungry then right back out. My Mom always said if I wasn't outside in the summer I was going to the Doctor because it was obvious I was getting sick.

We also built platforms in trees and climbed up there to survey our domain. No one predicting our certain death and we're all strangely alive in our late 40's now.

[sarge43]

359. I've made it to seventy and sixty years ago I pulled off some hair raising stunts n/t

[ChisolmTrailDem]

365. This is truly tragic...

Almost all of my childhood moments were filled with exploration and adventure. Nothing to keep us inside during those long summer days and we weren't afraid of anything or anyone. I remember hide & seek games that encompassed the entire neighborhood and at times would involve ten kids or more. Parents were more afraid of injuries from us kids playing than they were of child-snatchers. And we all walked to and from school, times that were just as memorable as summertime.

The one thing I lament more than anything else is that today's kids don't have near the freedom most of us had. I only hope that there are kids in some small town or village somewhere still in these United States who can have the adventures and build the memories that I did being a kid.

[dixiegrrrrl]

499. "I only hope that there are kids in some small town ..."

I am not seeing them in our small town.
I know several families with children, all the kids are home or being driven around by parents.
Even the ones on bikes are not allowed to go beyond the block.
And this is a mostly flat town where you could ride bikes to the library or the store easily, not to mention to the schools.
Some of the kids ( under 15, mostly) occasionally play outside, but only in their yards.

[Speck Tater]

2. A month with below average temperatures. nt

[ProfessorGAC]

314. Sorry, But No

Here in Chicago we just had a below average temperature October.
So, kids will still experience that.

[Speck Tater]

383. Clarification: GLOBALLY, not locally.

There are always local pockets of higher and lower temperatures. That's not what NOAA is talking about when they report that it has been nearly 28 years since the last below average month:

The average temperature across land and ocean surfaces during October was 14.63°C (58.23°F). This is 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20th century average and ties with 2008 as the fifth warmest October on record. The record warmest October occurred in 2003 and the record coldest October occurred in 1912. This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature. The last below-average month was February 1985. The last October with a below-average temperature was 1976.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/11/16/noaa_climate_october_was_332nd_straight_month_with_above_average_temperatures.html

[MichaelSoE]

328. Yep. I used to go ice skating in my youth (NJ) and one hasn't been able to skate on a lake ....

or stream in the last 15 years or more. It either never froze or never froze long enough to do it safely.

[Viking12]

496. Ice fishing on Thanksgiving

Our family spends Thanksgiving at the lake place my grandfather built. When I was a kid we ice fished 90% of the Thanksgiving weekends. Since my first child was born in 2000, we haven't had suitable ice for fishing even one year.

[wryter2000]

4. Rabbit ears

and having to get up to change the channel on the tv.

Alarm clocks and watches you had to wind up.

[JimDandy]

40. Raising and lowering the cars antenna by hand!

[VOX]

111. Wind wings! n/t

[Agschmid]

157. I had a 96 Subaru Legacy...

That I JUST replaced, and only because I wanted a new car, nothing was wrong with it. It still had the hand raise/lower antenna and at the car wash people would look at me like I was crazy Oye.

[nolabear]

97. OMG I hated those little bastards. You had to stand there and hold them just right.

Those just-barely-receivable stations always seemed to have the best stuf on and I'd go nuts trying to keep the things in the right position and squint at the snowy set. Hell, Mars comes in clearer now!

[Whisp]

118. a broomstick that was a 'remote control' for the tv

juuuuust reached from the couch for the push button tv days.

[RebelOne]

470. Yeah, kids nowadays could not live without remote controls.

I remember having to get up off the couch and turn the knobs manually to change channels.

[DollarBillHines]

123. I still wear a wind-up watch

1929 Elgin Avigo

Keeps perfect time, too.

I also do not know how to send a text message or attach a document or photo to an email.

I'm not about to learn, either, as I can pay people to do those sorts of things.

[gateley]

151. Hire me!

[DollarBillHines]

156. You betcha, gately!

I am launching a new business in January.

Who knows?, there might be some room.

[Caretha]

336. No hire me!

You're in the Tx Panhandle right?

[HiPointDem]

199. i would if i could find one for a decent price. i'd use a wind-up alarm clock, too.

i had one from the 60s and broke it by winding it too tight. man i was bummed.

[NMDemDist2]

206. enjoy!

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=vintage+wind+up+alarm+clock&_sacat=0&_odkw=3d+blu+ray+movies&_osacat=0&_from=R40

[HiPointDem]

210. thanks!

[NMDemDist2]

247. here's another ebayer to check out, i love his watches

http://www.ebay.com/sch/watchrecyclers26/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=50&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2654

read them carefully, but he's an old time watch guy who offers some lovely wind up watches at reasonable prices

[HiPointDem]

259. interesting. i wonder if he has a website, i'm not that keen on ebay. i see a watch

that would suit me fine, actually.

[friendly_iconoclast]

239. Holy shit! I have that first one:

Paid $6 for it some years ago. A little Break Free, and three new screws has it working to this very day..

[Ilsa]

255. I think I had a Baby Ben alarm clock.

Wind it up, set the alarm, horrible loud noise every morning.

[Shrike47]

137. We still have rabbit ears.

We refuse to pay for cable.

[Nevernose]

147. A student smoking section in the high school cafeteria.

Or a teacher's smoking lounge, for that matter

[HiPointDem]

200. +1. also, people smoking in the grocery store, at work, and in many public buildings.

lots of people smoking, yet that generation was the longest lived in US history.

The present generations will probably not live so long, for all their health obsessions. Because the country and the people will be poorer.

[tjwash]

219. heh...one my older memories was my dad walking into a newberrys...

...smoking a cigarette, and then just casually tossed it on the ground and ground it out with his shoe. There were hundreds of cigarette butts on the floor because everyone would do that. When they swept up the floors of the store in the mornings, there were a million little black spots on the floor.

[HiPointDem]

229. it seems so odd in retrospect, even if you lived it.

[raccoon]

373. Yeah, and people used to smoke in hospitals...incredible, it seems now. nt

[Laura PourMeADrink]

313. Newberry's....wow, that's a blast from the past !

[tjwash]

403. Yep.

The original discount store. May Co....Fedmart...hell even Gemco is gone now. Gobbled up and swallowed by giant conglomerates.

[eridani]

437. Even small towns had locally owned departmment stores

--and what they used to call 5 and 10 cent stores. Linn & Scruggs, Block ahd Kuehl, Newmans--all gone, with downtowns hollowed out by malls on the outskirts. Woolworths & Grants in addtion to Walgreens. You used to be able to buy goldfish there cheap, and little turtles with painted shells

[brewens]

308. Only the bigger corporate stores forbid smoking by checkers. At any small store the person running

the till would more often than not be smoking. I became a regular smoker right at the end of that era. For some reason I was never one to smoke everywhere. Almost never in my car and never right while I was working, even when I could. I guess that's why it always amazed me that anyone could go through two packs or more in a day. Some of those people never really smoked half of their cigarettes though. I remember seeing bartenders catch themselves with one in an ashtray at each end of the bar.

[dixiegrrrrl]

358. For some reason, smoking in public had rules for a woman.

Dunno where I got the idea, but in early 60's, when I was old enough to smoke, I had it in my head that a woman did not smoke in public unless she was sitting at a restaurent/cafe/diner.car.
Certainly not while walking around in public.


for all the cigs that our parents smoked, I am amazed that we kids did not get lung problems.

[SheilaT]

415. There was a general consensus

early on that the only women who smoked in public were prostitutes. So decent women, for a very long time, at least into the early 60's, did not smoke in public unless sitting at a restaurant, etc.

There are some urban legends out there about an American woman visiting some other country, lighting up a cigarette in public, being promptly arrested, and needing to purchase a license as a prostitute to be able to smoke without going to jail. Again, urban legend, but it's the kind of thing that kept women smokers from smoking as much when out of the house.

[dixiegrrrrl]

419. I sort of "knew" that "rule"

but for the life of me cannot point to where I was told it was a no-no.
Maybe it was from the graphics of "True Detective" etc magazine covers of a woman leaning against a lamp post with a cigarette in her mouth.

[SheilaT]

434. It was a sufficiently embedded idea in our culture,

that nice women didn't smoke outside, but hookers did as a way of signaling their profession, that probably no one ever directly told you. It was somehow just magically understood by all of us.

While I have never been a smoker, I bet that for women who smoked it was really nice when that "rule" disappeared.

[MADem]

463. Smoking at the movies! In the hospital! In the doctor's office waiting room! nt

[brewens]

306. Little ashtrays in the arms of the chairs at beauty salons. A highlight I now

regret, trying to impress the woman who cut my hair with how mature I was as a teenager smoking. I had a huge crush on her! They probably laughed after I left but I was sooo cool! LOL

[LVdem]

159. Along the same vein, listening to AM radio at night...

trying to listen for call letters from far away states.

I grew up in Central NY. I recall listening to some station from Tennessee. It was very cool...

[peachcobbler]

165. AM radio at night

In the 1950's I remember listening at night to a station in Gallatin, Tennessee that played blues by Muddy Waters, The Howling Wolf and others. About all we could hear in Texas at time was hillbilly and pop music.

[garagedoor]

220. Thought It Would Last Forever

CKLW, the motor cityyyyyyyy (sung in four part harmony) in the mid 1970s. To be uptodate with our Black songs, I listened to WKLR, the call letters of which were shouted out rhythmically by the "fly" DJ of the moment (for a while there, the kept getting killed and dumped in remote places).

[Doremus]

265. We used to listen to CKLW in Cleveland.

Something about the station's signal being stronger than most other stations... I can still hear the jingle. Thanks for the reminder.

[HiPointDem]

201. listening to lots of different kinds of things on radio, not just top 10 playlists. with

real non-canned hosts.

jazz, classical, experimental, political, old-time county/religious...

[Laura PourMeADrink]

312. OMG, yes, remember that too. WBZ Chicago - you could pick it up everywhere.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

374. I had no idea others were doing this! And this was an

activity that was indeed best done at night because during the day the interference made it impossible to hear stations in other parts of the country.

[musette_sf]

391. living in NYC

the two stations i could pick up the best at night were CKLW in Windsor ON, and WOWO in Fort Wayne IN.

back in the glorious days where the top 40 in your area wasn't the top 40 somewhere else.

my DH is from Montana, and each of us recalls 1960s hits from our respective geographies that the other one has no idea about.

[Art_from_Ark]

449. My favorite station was WWL, New Orleans

It was a good 500 miles away from my house, so the signal faded in and out on occasion, but I liked it because it played an eclectic blend of music ranging from contemporary pop to classical. The station offered a free tour guide of New Orleans, so I sent away for it, back in 1967. Included in the tour guide was the menu of one of the station's sponsor restaurants-- T. Pitari's, which offered, among other exotic dishes, hippopotamus, and turtle soup au sherry.

[DawgHouse]

501. I assumed that everyone listened to Beaker Street!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_Street

[Laura PourMeADrink]

188. with supplemental tin foil

[JHB]

5. Rabbit Ear Antennae...

...and their attendant contortions, though it has a modern analog in trying to find a good signal.

[FSogol]

6. Adjusting your car's carburetor with a screw driver until the fuel mixture "sounds right."

25 cent comic books
15 cent Popsicles
Crossing the Canada border for 10 cents without ids.
Flash cubes on cameras
Lego sets than came with no instructions
Developing Film
Meeting the pilot and sitting in his chair when flying (My 21 year old son got to do that. My 16 year old, no way.)

[JHB]

19. Cameras you had to look down into

Slides (photographic kind) and slide shows.

[bhikkhu]

235. And Polaroids

those were pretty cool, though a bit expensive.

[Canuckistanian]

271. And flashcubes

Remember those? Bad enough you needed film. Now we needed those tiny little boxes good for only FOUR pictures - then you threw them in the garbage.

I won't miss them.

[adigal]

92. Weren't those flash cubes disposable??? You just jogged my memory! Wow!

How cool were,they?

[FSogol]

512. I had a archeology course once and we were excavating a supposedly unmolested area of

Mt. Vernon (George Washington's home) where there were believed to have once been slaves quarters. After digging down 5 feet or so, all we found were used flashcubes and a muddy Barbie head.

[HiPointDem]

212. in my childhood i remember 10, then 12, then 15-cent funnybooks, & then i got

too old to care...

[annabanana]

342. omg.. the smell of a flashbulb!

a toasty, acrid kind of burnt.

[Seeking Serenity]

7. Cassettes

Big, table-top VCRs.
Betamax.
Instamatic cameras.
Milk delivery.
Charles Chips.
"Duck-and-cover" drills.

[FSogol]

10. Charles Chips is back!

http://www.charleschips.com/

(Not an owner, just a fan.)

[Laura PourMeADrink]

318. I want some....did you try and order?....they need some work on the

website, for sure. $25 for tin (assume has chips in it, doesn't say). Then nowhere does it explain how you buy refills.

[FSogol]

319. Yes, but it took 4 weeks to get, because they only make small batches

and the demand has been great. I got some for my Dad who liked them.

On this page, the cans are on the top and refills are on the bottom:

http://www.charleschips.com/shop-chips.php

(They now have a 7-10 day wait)

[Sherman A1]

453. Thanks for Posting

I remember them years ago and they were among the best!

[Panasonic]

20. Milk delivery still exists here in Colorado. It's called Royal Crest Dairy

their stuff is pretty good, but only need milk once a week.

[madamesilverspurs]

208. Grew up in Lakewood, when much of it was new,

near 6th Ave and Garrison, back in the 1950s. Milkman drove a truck that had huge blocks of ice in the back; during the summer, we'd wait for him and he'd chip off chunks of ice for us. We'd sit just inside the open back doors of that truck while he made some deliveries on foot. If I close my eyes I can still smell that ice . . .


-

[Auntie Bush]

486. How dare you! Those are MY memories!

[MADem]

331. We had a milkman who delivered milk, eggs, cottage cheese, and bread! nt

[avebury]

363. We had a bakery that had home

deliveries. They had the best chocolate chip cookies too!

[broiles]

48. Add to that milk delivery ICE delivery.

Right after WWII we got our first refrigerator. When it came all our neighbors came down to see. Big event in the neighborhood until then we had ice delivery 3 times a week. Also add to the list wringer washing machines.

[rzemanfl]

9. Car vent windows, tape recorders, correction fluid, carbon paper, fountain pens.

[titaniumsalute]

13. I was thinking crank handles in a car and...oh my gosh...physically locking a car door. NT

[FSogol]

23. I have a Jeep which has both. When I drive other people's kids around, they often do not

know how to open the window or door.

[notadmblnd]

243. I actually got trapped in my car once

the power locks wouldn't work and I forgot I had manual locks. It took me a while but I finally figured it out. But it took me about 3 years to learn that I didn't have to drive down dark roads with my brights on by continously holding the little bright light switcher stick that comes out the steering wheel. My sister finally told me that you push it forward to run with brights and I was pulling it back and holding it.

[MADem]

506. Ha--I still do both! Hand crank windows, two keys for the car; door/trunk and ignition!

Of course, the car is 26 years old...~!

[nolabear]

99. God, carbon paper. I would never have been a writer in the age of carbon paper.

[marybourg]

261. I still use correction fluid a lot. I white out all the

holidays I don't observe (from all over the world apparently) printed on my desk calendar, so I don't get confused when making appointments.

[iemitsu]

275. I was enslaved on my grandfolk's dairy farm

before they even had a car.
They had a tractor but didn't get a used Chevy until I was 12 years old (a horse and wagon took them to town). They still milked cows by hand and put up all the food they ate. It was hard work but I remember those days very fondly.

What surprised me, a couple of years ago, was my discovering that high school aged girls didn't know how to thread a needle or sew a button back onto a shirt.
I was having some students make simple dolls for a larger art project they were working on, and was taken aback to find that many of the students had never sewn anything. Three girls in one class struggled to get a thread through the eye of a needle then tied the knot just behind the eye, expecting to pull the thread through fabric that way. They did not even cut the thread from the spool so the set-up was needle, knot, thread to eternity. What were they going to sew that way?

Later, I discovered that people don't have button jars any longer. No one keeps clothing until it is good only for rags. No one cuts the buttons off worn clothes. Old clothes go to charity, thrift stores, the Goodwill, or yard sales.
I think buttons that make it through more than one generation in a family are cool.

[Kaleva]

11. Bringing guns to school during bird and deer hunting season

Going down to the bar with fellow students for a liquid lunch during high school noon hour.

Being allowed to smoke on the bus when the bus driver himself lit up a cigarette.

[cali]

12. My son is 26. He's used outhouses plenty

and an old fashioned pump. When he was little we didn't have electricity. We did have a record player.

True, he never experienced smoking on a plane (some loss) and rotary phones and and party lines, but he had a childhood that was without a lot of gadgetry.

[titaniumsalute]

15. Hi Cali

My world revolves around younger kids (8 and 14) so they missed more of this stuff than your 26 year old. I should say that we still have a VCR and Cassette deck so they know what they are BUT we don't use them.

They haven't dealt with that cassette exploding a mile long spew of loose tape inside the machine LOL.

[cali]

31. hey titaniumsalute

I don't think it's so much that your kids are a decade and some younger than my son, as it is that he grew up in a different way in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont heavily influenced by the hippie culture that still thrives here.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

190. Hi Cali....you didn't have electricity? wow.

bet that was cool. My niece goes to an alternative private school in VT and when they are seniors they all live in a log cabin dorm without electricity. I think it's the greatest. At a restaurant the other day, I saw a table of 6 teens and not a word was spoken among them, they all had their heads down on their I-Phones.

[cali]

316. It was cool. For light we had kerosene lanterns built into the walls

fridge was gas, hot water and cooking was gas- though we also had a wood cook stove, water was gravity fed.

It was beautifully quiet.

[HiPointDem]

203. the point, as i'm sure you know, is that your son's experience is no longer the

norm.

most kids of my generation came into contact with outhouses in one way or another. few do today.

[Bluenorthwest]

357. Hmmm. Of course globally flush toilets are not 'the norm' so most kids today do

come into contact with them. And of course 'Porta Potties' are outhouses, so most American kids do in fact wind up using one, if not at a work site, then at a campsite or festival site.

[HiPointDem]

408. not sure what your point is. the op is about what american kids today will not

experience that their parents did, so global comparisons have nothing to do with the op.

neither are porta-potties outhouses; they're portable chemical toilets manufactured by corporations.

outhouses were constructed by individuals, generally outside the commodified corporate economy, and were low-tech, a hole in the ground with a shelter covering it.

[arcane1]

14. Huffing mimeograph vapors

[LeftInTX]

55. LOL!! We love to tell our kids about that one

[JimDandy]

58. The great smell of freshly mimeograqphed handouts in school.

[arcane1]

59. Handed out while still warm and damp

[beveeheart]

78. My students thought that was the best thing about taking a test - the fumes from the paper.

[japple]

169. I'd give my hat & front seat in hell just to smell those purple-printed sheets again!

[gkhouston]

225. OMG, I loved that smell!

Something else that's missing... library paste. I used the term "paste-eater" in front of my 6th grader the other day and she had no clue what I was talking about.

[JimDandy]

504. Yes! Mild minty fresh smell.

And the little red plastic stick to smear the paste around. Oh what good memories this thread is bringing back for me.

[So_Blue]

252. YES!

What a treat it was to be chosen to go wait for them to be finished so you could bring them all warm back to your classroom.

[MADem]

469. If you got an opportunity to operate the "Gestetner Stenciller" you could get a noseful

of that magic elixir!

[JHB]

16. Computer command cards

The heavy-stock paper cards used to input commands and programming into computers.

I was too young to have actually used those, but close enough that they were still around in the form of "useless stuff sitting in the backs of storage rooms".

[villager]

21. That was the new "modern way" we registered for classes at Berkeley...

...circa the late 70's.

And "this computer stuff," I reasoned, "is only going to get more prevalent." Why the hell didn't I invest then, using that same logic!?

[backscatter712]

56. Floppy disks that were actually floppy.

Remember the old 5-1/4 inch floppy disks that were in a floppy paper sleeve? Or if you want to get even more old-school, 8 inch floppies!

[backscatter712]

60. Dot matrix printers that screeched as they printed.

Or "letter quality" printers that essentially printed with an electric typewriter golf-ball head, and sounded like a machine gun nest.

Oh, and paper with the sprocket strips on the sides for tractor feeding.

[backscatter712]

62. Manually typing in programs in BASIC out of a magazine, then saving them onto a cassette tape.

[liberal_at_heart]

288. Our family's first computer was a Commador 64

I loved that computer. In fact it was because of that computer that I took a programming class in high school.

[backscatter712]

293. Mine was an Atari 400.

Last edited Thu Nov 22, 2012, 03:05 AM - Edit history (1)

The really gnarly programs in the magazines were the ones written in assembly language, then assembled into a binary, converted to hexadecimal, and put in a BASIC wrapper - most of the typing consisted of hundreds of long lines of license plate numbers. And one typo meant your program crashed!

[Silent3]

361. I worked at two of those magazines

Creative Computing first, then SoftSide.

[backscatter712]

376. Some of those games were awesome.

I spent hours typing them into my Atari, then debugging them to fix the typos. Totally worth it!

[ReasonableToo]

378. Yes! We did that too!

You had to "load" before you could "run" if I remember correctly. We had a VIC 20.

[backscatter712]

379. Yep. It took fifteen minutes to load a program.

I'd type the load command into my Atari, put the tape in the player, fast-forward or rewind it to a specific counter-number, press play, then press enter on the computer to start the load. The computer would sit there, loading bytes from the tape for fifteen minutes, and hopefully, it would finish and get you back to the READY prompt so you could run your program.

Of course, after a while, tapes wear or stretch, so there were a lot of times when the load would error out.

Can't say I missed that part...

[japple]

172. Yes, I remember those 8" floppies. I thought I had died & gone to heaven

when I could type & print out a letter using a "word processor". I took typing classes in 1965 on manual typewriters. Most of my first jobs were using manuals. Got lucky in 1969 when I went to work for a company that had electrics. When the correcting IBM Selectric typewriter came out a couple of years later, it was such a huge change.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

187. you just reminded me of when we asked someone in another office to send us a copy of

a file and they sent an actual photocopy of the floppy disk

[MADem]

507. I thought those were a miracle! And when they came out with the 3 and a half inchers, I

just wondered how much more "modern" things could possibly get!

[TrogL]

145. They're called Hollerith cards

[snagglepuss]

397. I can't believe those cards have a name other than punch cards.

[madamesilverspurs]

213. "Do not bend, fold, staple or mutilate." n/t

[JHB]

238. Those instructions were widely ignored when they were "stuff in the back of the storage room"

Engineering students can fold, spindle, and mutilate EOF (end of file) cards in an amazing variety of ways.

[gkhouston]

227. Watching someone you dislike dropping a deck of cards.

Saw a guy who really annoyed me drop a smallish deck (600 cards) in a mud puddle once. Bliss.

[ProfessorGAC]

317. My First Exposure To Computers. . .

. . .in my 3rd year of high school (1972) use paper tape. Sort of a streaming program card. Had to make two copies, then roll them and clip them so they wouldn't get all frayed. That way when you reloaded them they wouldn't get stuck the reader.
Still more advanced than the stack of cards, i guess.
GAC

[JHB]

351. I don't know if "more advanced" is the right term...

...so much as "better suited" for whatever purposes that type of machine was being used for.

But, not being a historian of computing technology, I don't actually know well enough to say.

[backscatter712]

377. Now every time people hear the word "chad", they think of Florida...

Back in the day, the prank to pull was to slip a "lace card" - a punchcard with every hole punched. When it went through the card reader, it would jam it, and you'd get two hundred cards jammed into a space a quarter inch thick. The operator would then use a card knife - first to unjam the machine, then to stab the joker who fed it the lace card.

[eppur_se_muova]

494. We called those "IBM cards", because they were the only computer company.

Of course, I learned later they were really Hollerith cards, and pre-dated computers. I remember a fad of making Christmas wreaths out of them. They were, effectively, WORM memory.

[woo me with science]

17. Freedom from government intrusion into their personal communications.

A functioning Fourth Amendment.

[villager]

24. ...and reasonably predictable weather

n/t

[gcomeau]

82. Weather is more predictable than ever.

More extreme does not equal less predictable. Modern meteorological forecasting is way more accurate than it was a few decades ago.

[villager]

132. interesting point. I suppose I meant in a more "Farmer's Almanac" vein

i.e., "the seasons here are good for growing wheat," "apple trees can thrive here," etc...

[oldhippydude]

18. a slide rule..

that used to be the status symbol for geeks.. the more scales the better

[Panasonic]

25. Dad has one of those..

Could never figure out how to use it right.

[oldhippydude]

224. easy.. i can still remember...

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

49. I still have mine.

Used to keep it in a cup on my desk at work, just to establish my history of geekiness.

[meti57b]

87. I put together a nice collection of slide rules, when hand calculators first became available.

I still have the collection.

[gkhouston]

230. LOL, I won a trophy in slide rule at a math competition. Total geekdom. n/t

[Ilsa]

257. I have one. Still know how to use it

For some basic log work.

[eridani]

439. I showed mine to my nephew once

He looked at me like I'd chopped it out of flint or something.

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. Black and white photography

Involving development and print making.

[Panasonic]

27. Did that in high school in '92

Took Photography classes (3 semesters) and learned how to develop films. Interesting.

[Scootaloo]

45. Actually, it's still a hobby with a good following among younger people.

Now, if you mean "that's what we do because that's all we had," then I suppose not...

[defacto7]

454. Good old Panatonic-X ASA 64

[jeff47]

26. Encyclopedias in book form (nt)

[Panasonic]

28. World Books!

My parents still have 3 or 4 books from the '60s somewhere.

[longship]

29. Going on vacation on all two lane roads.

I did that as a kid with my two sisters and parents. We played license plate BINGO and as the evening came on would sleep in the back seat, one on the floor, one on the seat and one on the rear window shelf.

Fun times.

[dixiegrrrrl]

485. Long Sunday drives and NO freeways.

First freeway came to Seattle around 1957...58.
I clearly remember saying..." I will never drive on one of THOSE".
I was mad because my grandparents had to sell their farm to the state which planted part of the freeway thru it.
Whole little commuity wiped out.

[Systematic Chaos]

30. 3 video games or pinball machines in the lobby of every 7-11 store.

Making mix cassette tapes from the FM stations on the little stereo in your bedroom.

Sunday morning cartoons which were actually good and lasted the whole of Saturday morning.

Connecting to CompuServe on your Atari 800 or Commodore 64's blazing 300 baud modem (1200 if you were cutting edge) and watching largely useless text slowly scroll down your screen for the low, low price of $6 per hour on off-peak times. Fuck if I remember what the peak rate was.

Atari 2600 and Intellivision games being blown out of K-Mart, Kay Bee Toys and other locations for as little as $3 - $5 each. Good ones; in many cases the coolest and newest games. The market crashed hard in 1983, so it was a fire sale trying to get rid of all that overstock. If you were a video game nerd and had a few extra dollars to spend, you made out like a bandit, and some of those games go for $50 or more today.

[Seeking Serenity]

43. And floppy disks

any size.

Also forgot to mention, AOL CD-ROMs that came in the mail with x-thousand free minutes!

[Canuckistanian]

32. Ashtrays in the doctor's office

In fact, I remember ashtrays everywhere, even on elevators.

[Kaleva]

35. Yes. And if you were hospiltilized, you could smoke in your room in some sitiations.

[louis-t]

66. In the bank and the grocery store!

I still remember being angry to see butts on the floor at Krogers after the ban went into effect.

[japple]

173. Smoking in movie theatres. Smoking everywhere! SMOKING, SMOKING, SMOKING.

I've been clean for years, but might take it up again if I found out I had a terminal illness. It was one of the most pleasurable experiences I've ever had. Also the most time-consuming. It's amazing how much time I spent smoking. I probably spent years just doing nothing but smoking.

[Canuckistanian]

268. It did seem to be the national pastime back then

Even more than baseball.

I smoked once myself, but not during the 60s or 70s.

I hated it. I hated always needing it, always reaching for that pack. It was too available, too ubiquitous.

I'm glad my son will never know such a world.

[MADem]

508. Farting around online has replaced it!

The reason productivity hasn't suffered as much as one might think owing to "farting around online" is because people have substituted that for tobacco!!

[snagglepuss]

399. I never smoked buy my parents and relatives did. I remember the wide variety of ashtrays.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

194. Funny to see old clips of Senate hearings and they are all smoking

[JoePhilly]

33. Over-head projectors.

[garagedoor]

222. Art History classes

In senior yr, 1979 and later art history classes at one of the seven sister colleges. Couldn't imagine another way...

[yankeepants]

34. Having to have someone paged in a crowded store, airport, event center etc.

pre cell phone activity

[Hassin Bin Sober]

101. Oooh. Good one. Can't remember the last time I heard someone paged.

[TeamPooka]

119. I was paged for a phone call once at the Flamingo Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas

it was pretty cool, actually.
I felt very James Bond at that moment.

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

36. halloween thanksgiving and christmas being separate holiday seasons. ;-)

[gkhouston]

302. +1000. It used to be special to ride the bus downtown to see all the decorations.

They're nowhere near as pretty when they're up for two friggin' months.

[onethatcares]

37. setting the points on a distributor

with a matchbook cover as a guide.

Actually having enough room in the back seat of the car for.................................fun

drive in movie speakers.

the Ghost Buster posters placed everywhere before the first movie came out.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

52. VW Rabbit quit on us on a country road in Montana in about 1976.

Points had burned out. Hitchhiked into a nearby town, bought a set of points, came back and installed and gapped them with a Swiss Army knife, the only tool we had.

You can't fix your car with a Swiss Army knife any more...

[Thegonagle]

98. Your car doesn't burn through a set of distributor points every 20,000 miles anymore, either...

I won't miss that, and the kids won't either.

When your typically unreliable car of the era inevitably left you stranded in the middle of nowhere, accepting a ride from a stranger to a garage "back in town" was usually your best option (or you could walk a mile or 5 to the nearest house and ask to use the phone).

[Initech]

38. Places that were all field

[Kaleva]

41. Getting slapped around by a teacher, then being sent to the principal to be beaten by him.

And then to finish off a bad day, when you got home from school, you got whipped by the parents for causing trouble in school.

[Liberal_in_LA]

61. yep. Teachers could hit the kids. still can in same states.

[AverageJoe90]

244. Where did you grow up?

Must have been one crappy community. My life growing up wasn't perfect, but if I'd been in your shoes, I'd have made one last noisy and disruptive exit and permanently cut off contact with the school & the family, and hoped they'd all rot in hell with the Nazis, Stalin, et al.

[Kaleva]

248. Upper Michigan. That's the way things were done back then. At least where I lived.

I remember seeing Mrs. K knock out one mouthy older boy with one punch. She was one tough woman. I still joke with friends to this day saying I thought I was going to go bald in the 4th grade becasue Mrs. K ripped so much hair out of my head. Mr. R used to like to grab you by the short hairs near the ears and lift you out of your seat or grap your hair at the back of the head and slam your head against the desk. Mrs. J wasn't bad. She'd just slap you across the face.

[AverageJoe90]

250. I can't help but be reminded of how many blacks were often treated under slavery.

It may sound a little over the top to some, but slaves, at least on some plantations, were often whipped, beaten, etc. for even perhaps the slightest perceived offense.

By the way, I came across something interesting on Jordan Riak's NoSpank website a while back, which offers an explanation on how modern CP may have come to be. Send me a DU Mail message if you're interested.

[Blandocyte]

42. Being able to be fairly certain you weren't on some security camera

while shopping or just out having fun with friends.

There's a feeling of freedom that was there back then that I don't think they'll have now that it's common sense to assume you will appear at least one security cam at least once during the day.

[ancianita]

44. Cars with no seat belts. Escorted air travel for children. Ditto copying machines.

[backtoblue]

46. my grandkids probably won't learn cursive writing in school

[dionysus]

47. i bought a record player this summer.. it has a cassette deck, cd, and radio in it too.

[LeftInTX]

50. The typewriter, but it sure wasn't fun.

The drive in theater - along with their grindhouse flicks
Sliderulers
Airline meals
Customer service that was real customer service
Products that weren't packaged in tons of plastic

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

54. I still have my Dad's old Smith Corona portable from about 1946.

I typed all my college papers on it in the late '60s. Quite the relic, but it did the job.

[Freddie]

64. Typing your college papers

#%^*#>...my kids have no idea how lucky they are never having to do that.
Having to wait for summer reruns of you missed an episode of your favorite show.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

72. If you made a mistake (which I did, often)

you would have to erase it with a typewriter eraser, assuming you remembered to use erasable paper, and if you were also using carbon paper (because the Xerox machine at the college library, which was the size of a refrigerator and took a couple of minutes to produce one page at a nickel each, was too much of a pain in the ass to deal with, and anyhow the library closed at midnight) you also had to erase the mistake on the carbon copy. Or else you used White-Out, once that got invented, but that left messy white blots all over everything.

[Freddie]

77. I was a pretty good typist (despite hating it)

I made some extra $$ in college typing grad students' papers. No one does that anymore!

[Awknid]

100. I actually had a whole course on correcting mistakes on the typewriter!

We were taught a lot of tricks such as touching up the erasure with chalk, so it looked better!

[madamesilverspurs]

223. You got to erase? I'm retroactively jealous!

First college term paper (1966), had to be typed on non-erasable bond paper, watermark centered, upright and facing forward, all ibids and op cits properly rendered... Got it finished and in a folder in time to race to class to turn it in. On the way, I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw my work wafting away from where I'd placed it on the car roof as I fished for my keys. My kindly professor was graciously accepting of my dilemma (not new to him, I'm sure) and let me go home for the carbon copy which he noted; but I still had to retype the paper and turn it in late for a reduced grade.

-

[MADem]

509. Eaton's "Corrasable bond" paper--a modern miracle! Beat the hell out of white out! nt

[HiPointDem]

202. +1. white-out & erasable paper. when knowing how to type 30 wpm would get

you a job, & 50-60 wpm was gold.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

217. I took an IBM Standard with me to college forty years ago.

They were heavy. My dad had to bring it in my dorm room on move-in day. I was serious. I think my roommates were horrified, since that meant I was there to study, not party. I could type 80 wpm in college on an IBM Standard (the kind with separate type keys, not the Selectric with a ball). I could jam any IBM b/c I was too fast. I typed term papers for extra money.

It wasn't until about 1999 that I took a computer typing test that I could not jam.

I scored 114 Words Per Minute, and that was going back and correcting it so it was perfect!! (braggity brag) I'm a piano player. That helps A LOT.

Carbons and onionskin and erasers. In high school I took one semester of typing on a ^%$#@ manual. After that I used Mom's IBM and never looked back.

My mother, my grandmother and I all constantly wrote to each other by typing our letters.
Grandmother would type "Dearest Children" on hers and put in 2 carbons, having 3 kids.
She used an old Royal and typed with 4 fingers.
Mom and I used an IBM. I eventually got a 9-pitch Selectric
for my court reporting transcripts.

[Maw Kettle]

430. I enjoyed reading your post.

I was a medical transcriptionist for 30 years, quitting back in July. The Selectric II with correction tape was the hot new thing when I started in the field. I did transcribe a few times from the old vinyl belts and they were truly awful! That field was very good to me up until the last few years, but offshoring ruined the wages for us home-based transcriptionists and I finally hung up my earphones.

[tblue37]

260. Gas station attendants who pumped your gas and washed your windshield

while you waited:

"You can trust yoru car to the man who wears the star—the big bright Texaco staaarrrr!”

[Volaris]

51. Lawn Darts...

the heavy ones with the awesome metal tips...you could fling one of those damn things over the telphone lines in the backyard....after a while, we didn't even bother to play the actual game, we just made a game out of seeing how high we could throw them, and not getting hit when they came back down.

[Scootaloo]

53. Rather young myself, so...

- blowing into the cartridge to get the game to work
- Video rental stores
- Six hours of toy commercials posing as cartoons every saturday morning
- Pumpable shoes
- learning stuff that isn't on the SAT
- Floppy disk drives
- dial-up noises (Skrillex doesn't count!)
- Music that intentionally sounds like shit because that's what made it good
- Automobiles with right angles in the design
- 1 900 numbers for kids ("talk to the Ninja turtles! $3.99 a minute, get your parents' permission before calling!&quot
- Stores devoted wholly to comic books
- Whipping downhill at 50mph without a bike helmet and without a worry
- Landlines
- The Republican Party (hey, I'm an optimist)

[Libertas1776]

341. Automobiles...

automobiles with right angles in the design...YES, i am glad someone mention that. Haha i thought i was the only person in the world who thought about that.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

57. X-ray machines in shoe stores

before they figured out that these were bad for you. I remember looking through this viewer thing on top of the machine and seeing the insides of my feet! That was cool.

[Liberal_in_LA]

63. pulling, with all your might, an 8 track out of a stereo.

[RagAss]

65. Smoking weed that was so mild - you had to use your imagination to get stoned !!

[Cleita]

80. Maybe that's why I was never impressed with weed and

so I never used it afterwards. I said to myself, "Is that all there is?"

[JimDandy]

67. Gas station attendants.

[Scootaloo]

70. Still there in Oregon at least

[Cleita]

83. Yes, and the gas is cheaper in Oregon than it is in other states where

you have to pump your own. Go figure.

[smokey nj]

322. And in NJ too.

[JimDandy]

505. Lucky duck! The gas fumes are the worst thing about filling up.

That and pulling up the metal handle with bare hands on a freezing day. Brrr.

[beveeheart]

88. And free stuff when you bought gas.

[tblue37]

264. S&H Green Stamps--and the things you could trade them for! nt

[No Vested Interest]

305. I saved S&H green stamps

and traded them for a 2 night stay in a hotel in Washington DC.
Took family - hubby and 4 young kids and dog.
Left dog in the room while we went sightseeing.
Dog was lonely (?) and clawed the carpet loose.
Hubby taped it back when we left.

[kimbutgar]

405. And don't forget Blue chip stamps. Both my Grandmothers saved them for me and when I visited them

we would sit together and glue them in the book. Then go to the store to redeem them. I still have a manicure set I got with those stamps.

[dixiegrrrrl]

375. Free dishes that came in laundry soap boxes

and I swear I remember this...oatmeal boxes???????

[snagglepuss]

167. How about elevator operators?

[KT2000]

189. my sister's first job!

it was the employee elevator but she still had to wear heels, nice outfit and white gloves!

[RagAss]

68. Playing High School football in this....

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_s77XPQZjRl0/Sqmwuz6YSeI/AAAAAAAAEPY/iys65UyTuA4/s400/riddell+3b.jpg

[Trailrider1951]

69. Collecting soda pop bottles for the 2 or 3 cent deposit

Hey, extra candy money!

[TeamPooka]

120. now that's a business for people.

[HiPointDem]

205. for homeless people, and not much of one. stipping wires for copper, stealing bricks

= also a "business"

[mucifer]

71. On a positive note: Pretty soon all kids under 8 won't have experienced a white President

How interesting is that ?

[apocalypsehow]

73. Cruising the main drag, "American Graffiti" style.

That is a thing of the past, for two reasons:

1. Graduated drivers licenses, with multiple restrictions such as no more than one other teenager in the car, etc., are causing most teenagers to either defer getting a license or just forgoing one at all.

2. Beefed-up Loitering laws, that many municipalities are enforcing to the hilt in order to "keep kids off the streets." In my hometown, the police will physically sit in the parking lot of the "turnaround" in what was the main drag in my day, and if they see the same car cruise through twice within a certain amount of time, they'll pull it over and start writing tickets. No shit.

[TeamPooka]

116. cruising the Sunset Strip in L.A. is illegal and they will cite you.

[ejpoeta]

160. that sucks!

[Cleita]

75. Roller skates with metal wheels that clamp on to your shoes. n/t

[rzemanfl]

174. And wearing the key on a string around your neck. n/t

[DBoon]

428. in this song...

[rzemanfl]

471. Considered suggestive back in the day. n/t

[snagglepuss]

395. I still have my pair. I used to go down hills in them and to this can't i did it.

[jberryhill]

76. Segregated public schools

"Whites Only" public accommodations.

All male medical staff, lawyers and other professionals.

Polio.

Jagged edges on broken glass in car windows and storm doors.

Pull tabs slicing their feet in parks.

Lead in gasoline and house paint.

Quaaludes.

[catbyte]

79. Carbon paper. I hated that stuff, especially when one part was more used

[Cleita]

86. You reminded me of the old fashioned typewriters with the strike keys.

I really hated them.

[catbyte]

96. Yeah. I remember when the IBM Selectrics came out & you could actually change the font, lol

And electric typewriters didn't cause what amounted to trigger finger caused by smacking on keys.

[badhair77]

149. I could change the cartridge ribbon in my electric typewriter.

There was even a cartridge to put in with white out. It was a miracle. My heart sank when I dropped it in my classroom one afternoon. After being fixed the keys did not hit hard enough to make an impact on the mimeo master sheets. That was a crisis for a teacher in the 70s.

[catbyte]

179. I also remember when the first ones with a memory came out. You could save 5 whole letters

I thought that was da bomb! How times have changed.

[rzemanfl]

214. The first IBM memory typewriter cost $5,500 in the early '70s.

[catbyte]

215. WOW

[badhair77]

228. I was making $7000 a yr as a teacher then.

I don't think that fit in the budget. lol. I was thrilled when my parents bought me an electric at $150 for xmas. Yes, my only gift was something to use in my job. The year before I got a $50 cassette player to help my kids with reading. I also recorded my favorite records off my stereo so I could use it one summer at grad school. How things have changed.

[tblue37]

267. Early handheld calculators cost $200--just very

basic ones that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

People were delighted and impressed that you could do tricks and spell words with them--like entering 1134 and turning it upside down to spell "hell."

Now businesses and sales reps give better ones out as favors--like pens with a company's logo--to customers, and cheap stores sell them for a dollar or less!

[rzemanfl]

472. In 1971 I paid $750 for a used mechancial printing calculator that would multiply and divide. n/t

[So_Blue]

254. Just yesterday I found a carbon credit card receipt from 1993.

The ones they made by sliding the bar over the charge slips and across your card. There would be 2 or 3 copies made.

[snagglepuss]

81. Adjusting the Horizontol on the tv to stop those lines.

[jberryhill]

85. Bang on the side of it...

..at just the right spot, with just the right force.

If that doesn't work, then hit it hard on the top right.

Turn it off, and watch that little white dot fade out.

[snagglepuss]

90. lol You must have had the same make.

[jberryhill]

144. Now I can watch THIS in 1080i HD

[DireStrike]

91. Adjusting ANYTHING on any screen.

[gkhouston]

299. LOL, remembering overadjusting the vertical and getting a screen that rolled up

wacka-wacka-wacka like a roller shade? You could get dizzy watching it.

[treestar]

84. Relatively recent, but

big computer monitors with green screens

large hand held phones

car phones with separate numbers for the car (how cool you had to be to have one of those in the 80s)

cassette decks in the car

[snagglepuss]

89. Towels or glasses that came inside boxes of laundry detergent.

[VOX]

105. Or given to customers at a gas station with a fill-up!

[Locrian]

93. hmmmm

Putting notes on car windows to communicate with your friends (no cell phones).

No 'on line' sitting in front of a computer.

Slower pace.

Dressing up for airline flights. Comfortable flights and good food on an airline.

Ties and suits for most white collar jobs

Smoking *anywhere*.

No security cameras everywhere you go.

Watching movies in class 'backwards'.

Radios with 'radio buttons'. AM stations.

Brakes that skid when you lock them up (no anti-lock).

Manual steering and/or brakes.

Diners with real plates and silverware everywhere you travel.

[mercuryblues]

94. As my daughter

likes to call it: homemade popcorn.

[slackmaster]

95. Pre-teens being allowed to walk alone to a neighborhood store to buy milk and bread

Or go trick-or-treating on Halloween without being accompanied by an adult.

[Kaleva]

104. Or pre-teens being allowed to walk on their own to the store to buy cigarettes

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

107. When I was about 9 or so my mom would give me a quarter and send me to the bakery

to buy a loaf of bread. The bakery was only about 3 blocks away, but I had to cross a couple of busy-ish streets to get there. I was also allowed to go unaccompanied or with a friend my age to the drugstore to buy a comic book or a cherry phosphate, and to the dime store to shop for doll clothes, kiddie makeup and wax lips.

[hobbit709]

102. Black & white TVs.

[Rambis]

108. Getting up the change the channel on it also (nm)

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

114. I still have a little black and white TV.

It's the one I watched Nixon's resignation speech on - I kept it as a souvenir.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

323. And TV stations that went off the air and you woke up with the buzzing

[VOX]

103. Cap guns. Brody knobs. Chemistry sets. Leaving doors unlocked overnight...

-Insurance agents who came to your home, and knew everyone in the family.
-Doctors who made house calls
-Baby Ben Alarm clocks (wind-up mechanism)
-$3.00 tickets to a major league baseball game
-White sidewall tires
-Watching as your country puts a man on the moon
-Well built American cars
-Household-name network newscasters such as Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, etc.
-TV Westerns

[badhair77]

152. chemistry sets - wow

I desperately wanted one but my parents gave my brother one instead. He was a male, after all, although he was not allowed to use it unless they supervised. Meanwhile there were more dangerous chemicals under the sink.

I wasn't even allowed to have an Easy Bake Oven. Geesh.

[doc03]

216. I just have to disagree with the well built American cars

All cars today including American cars are 1000% better than back in the day.
They run longer, don't rust thru in less than 2 years, they are safer, practically no maintenance, power steering, air conditioning, satellite radio, power windows, doors, seats,
heated steering wheels, heated and cooled seats, I could list many more.

[SheilaT]

416. Yep. They don't make them like they used to,

thank God.

Back in the day to odometers only had 5 digits, because cars were never expected to get anywhere near 100,000 miles. And anyone who could afford it bought a new car every two or three years, because they just didn't last as long. And how long did the tires of the day last? 20,000 miles? 30,000?

[doc03]

420. I had one car that rusted thru in 18 months and I paid extra for rust-proofing

When I first started my working career I bought a new car every 3 years. If you kept a car over 50-60,000 miles they started to nickle and dime you to death. My pickup is 7 years old today and it looks and runs like new. You have to give the Japanese credit, they made the American companies wake up and build better cars or go out of business. I live in eastern Ohio hill country and you were lucky to get 15000 miles out of a set of tires. The best tires had nylon cords but until they got warmed up it was like driving on square wheels.

[SheilaT]

435. And I'm willing to bet that your pick-up has a lot more

than 50-60,000 miles.

Oh, and remember the days before safety glass? I knew a couple of people with terrible facial scars because of car accidents. Most people today wear seatbelts. Cars are designed with "crumple zones" which do just that in a crash, so plenty of car body damage is done, but far less to the humans inside.

And yes, we can thank the Japanese and the Germans (think VW) for making inexpensive and eventually good cars. I recall quite well when the earliest Japanese imports really were small and somewhat like tin cans. Their main virtue, along with the VWs, was they didn't cost much and were very economical on gas. In about 1982 a friend commented that the American manufacturers were beginning to get quite nervous about the Japanese car manufacturers because the Japanese now understood the American market, were making larger and more luxurious cars, still keeping them relatively inexpensive and fuel efficient.

And now, the American cars have caught up. We all benefit.

[dixiegrrrrl]

384. Brody knobs?????

are you talking about those knobs on the huge steering wheels?
I remember them being called .."nicky..or niki..knobs"
and being given many dire warnings of how you could break your wrist if the wheel turned too fast.

[snagglepuss]

400. Are you saying that cap guns have gone the way of the dodo?

[Kip Humphrey]

106. Never having a house key because we never locked our doors

[Kingofalldems]

109. Fountain pens

The Hopalong Cassidy Show

[BlueMan Votes]

110. We're in suburban Chicago- and our forest preserves have hole-in-the-ground 'outhouses'...

but i can't remember the last time some guy was found down in the ladies one.

[SomethingFishy]

112. Actually Vinyl records are making a comeback..

Lots of new releases are coming out on vinyl and lots of old reissues are on vinyl. Audiophiles love their vinyl.

[DBoon]

429. so do some hipsters

shops selling vinyl are now "in" among those too young to have been born when CDs took over

http://www.origamiorigami.com

[SomethingFishy]

431. I actually saw a bunch at "Fry's"

We don't have them here in Colorado but when I was in California last month I spent the better part of a day in what was the coolest store I have ever seen. Fry's Electronics".

I still have some of my old vinyl, but truth be told I prefer CD's...

[DBoon]

436. Fry's is awesome!

It is geek central.

You should try to get one in Colorado. Every town should have a Fry's.

[graham4anything]

113. Sex before AIDS came into play. and admiring someone without being hit with a sex harrasment charge

I do not know how kids today get past that.

How really do you ask someone you are just falling in love with if they have been tested?

Same with sexual harrassment. How does one even introduce themselves any more when a young teen, without worrying about oops, sexual harrassment charge?

[elfin]

115. Blackboards and chalk

Getting news and music and entertainment via RADIO.

Knowing the difference between 78's and 45's.

Family dinner time - you HAD to be there for familial reflections on the day just past and support for the day ahead. Rather then scattered sport games and practices and classes and late meetings and technology addictions interrupting this communal time.

[onethatcares]

117. S&H greenstamps

Raleigh coupons

MalloCup coupons

[DollarBillHines]

133. We were talking about Green Stamps just last night

When I was a kid, we were dirt-poor.

We had saved enough Green Stamps to fill a shoebox full of those little books. On our way to town to redeem those stamps, we stopped at my aunt's house so she could see our fine collection. As we were leaving, Mom placed the box on the roof of the car.

You know the rest.

[Neurotica]

266. I remember buying sheets for my college apartment with S&H green stamps

They came in handy. The Weis market near our home always gave S&H green stamps.

[Ezlivin]

121. Green spaces. Lots and lots of green spaces.

I watched Florida pave over or develop nearly every bit of open ground.

Here in Texas I've seen the same thing happen over the past 20 years. Absolutely huge swaths of grass and trees were replaced with subdivisions, strip malls and more roads.

[Whisp]

122. xacto knives and wax for pasting up type

in the graphics/printing biz.

[xfundy]

411. Yes! And cutting film. And making stats or veloxes.

And ordering type "tight, not touching," then cutting each headline letter apart and kerning by hand.

And penning borders, or using that damn border tape, which was never straight enough--never mind the corners! And rapidographs and the sin of not cleaning them daily.

[Whisp]

418. Letraset and when being a negative stripper

didn't mean a surly pole dancer. ;D

[billh58]

124. Party lines

and rotary dial telephones.

[Skittles]

125. life without Walmart

[ejpoeta]

161. stores being closed on sunday. or holidays.

or at night.

[snagglepuss]

164. Life without any big box stores.

[garagedoor]

236. I Remember Traveling

To White Marsh, MD while on a business trip in Baltimore just to see what a Walmart looked like. I was actually impressed. No, it wasn't Nordstroms but it was like a Kmart had exploded and somehow got cleaner. This was late 1997... A time of naivete.

[graham4anything]

127. any of the 3 Kennedy sons being alive and in the world. The football NY Jets winning Super Bowl

Watching the 1969 moon landling live time

Being alive when LBJ signed the voting rights/civil rights acts

Knowing any of my grandparents, though one did make my wedding.

[sagat]

128. Winter and snow.

[subterranean]

129. TV stations going off the air at midnight.

Or any other time.

Also, the TV test pattern.

[LeftInTX]

140. Radio stations that went off at night

Allowing WLS to blare rock n roll into rural areas.

[eridani]

441. With Larry Lujack!

Lawrence of CHICAGO!

[LeftInTX]

448. I remember him. WLS rock n roll gone and turned to talk :(

[MADem]

510. Yes, indeed--and the round ones, as well....

And of course, from the dark ages, the B/W variety....

Here's an assortment:

[lob1]

130. Glaciers.

[subterranean]

131. Hostess Twinkies.

[DollarBillHines]

134. The first time we apent $20 at the grocery store. My mother cried all the way home.

We were sooo poor.

[MicaelS]

135. The smell of freshly made ditto copies at school.

BTW, analog vinyl records and turntables are still around. Serious audiophiles prefer them to digital sound. High-end turntables sell for as much as $170,000.

Needle Doctor

[Romulox]

136. The State Recreation areas here in Michigan still feature hole-in-the-ground style

outhouses. No running water in the stalls, though often there is a pump-operated well nearby.

[just us]

139. A little older

Slide rules, abacus,fountain pens, manual lawn mower, white walls and skirts, Continental kits,foot X-ray shoe fitter, iodine and Mercurochrome, 19 cent gas and hamburgers.

[subterranean]

141. Toys in cereal boxes

[LeftInTX]

142. Gas stations that allow checks are going bye-bye

[LeftInTX]

143. Hardware stores

[HopeHoops]

146. Well, mine all know LaserDiscs, cassette tapes, vinyl records, and VCRs.

And I do have a rotary wall phone that's going back up as soon as I find it (in a box in the basement somewhere).

What they will NEVER experience are those "A-1" food bars that were popular during the Apollo missions. They don't make them anymore. On the other hand, they were sort of the human equivalent of Pupperoni snacks.

[mrsadm]

148. My favorite:

Screechy modem dialing sounds!

[jpak]

150. Paper drivers licenses (no pictures), silver coins, Fizzies, car exhaust fumes

Last edited Wed Nov 21, 2012, 09:18 PM - Edit history (1)

one room (or two room) schools.

Downtown shopping districts that sold everything you needed.

Walking to school and work.

Curfew sirens

Dial phones & Party lines.

The Fuller Brush salesman.

18 Y.O drinking age

Teachers that didn't know what weed smelled like

Drive-in movies.

[muriel_volestrangler]

154. You live in a strange world

or you don't expect to have children for many years. 'Car exhaust fumes'? When do you expect those to be gone? Walking to school and work? If car exhaust fumes disappear, there's no chance of those disappearing too.

And in Britain, I have both a paper, no-picture, driver's licence (still valid), and an 18 year old drinking age, right now.

[jpak]

158. Unadulterated car exhaust fumes - before catalytic converters

The stuff that choked you and made your eyes water.

Something kids today will never experience.

[bhikkhu]

242. You've never experienced real car exhaust fumes!

As a cyclist I may have a unique perspective, but I can ride all day in traffic now and never even think about exhaust fumes; you hardly even notice the smell of gasoline. Back in the 70's I used to ride a lot as a kid, but I'd make a beeline to the edge of town as job #1, because riding around cars meant breathing raw gas fumes; those old cars leaked and burned oil and gasoline like crazy. The few times I'd head through the busy part of town I remember coming home sick from it.

[Fumesucker]

457. I bicycle too and I can smell the occasional car go by

It's when they slow down a lot to pass and then accelerate after they get by, if they accelerate hard enough for the engine control system to go open loop then the emissions climb considerably and you can sometimes smell the exhaust fairly strongly.

[LeftInTX]

170. LOL- Curfew sirens. Never heard of that one!

Although most of us are familiar with that TV PSA:
It's 10 o'clock do you know where your children are?

[jpak]

171. 9 PM - UUURRR uhh UUUURRR uhh UUUURRR uhh

Then the cops came looking for you....

[TransitJohn]

153. The best game ever

[fishwax]

253. now that's good stuff

[greyl]

272. Lol, I had the green one. nt

[leftlibdem420]

155. Social democrats in the Republican Party...

Jim Jeffords was the last.

[badhair77]

162. filmstrips in class

long footnotes instead of endnotes in a research paper

The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature

"help wanted female"/"help wanted male" specifically listed in separate columns in the newspaper

[gkhouston]

237. Those Bell Telephone movies with the guy in the labcoat, so we'd know he was smart.

[badhair77]

246. Yes, lab coats make people look smart.

The chemistry teacher at my school always wore one when she wanted to feel better. She said it made the kids look at her in a different way. I always wanted one but my subject did not warrant it.

How about the switchboard operator. Try to even get a real person on the end of a call to a govt office or store.

[snagglepuss]

396. "filmstrip" I haven't heard that term in ages, also forgot about those gendered

ads.

[snagglepuss]

163. Sending a telegram.

[snagglepuss]

166. Department stores that sold everything and had elevator operators.

[OldDem2012]

168. Buying gasoline for 20 cents a gallon. nt.

[zazen]

175. a strong belief that one's children would be better off than their parents

Having that hope was kind of fun, while it lasted.

[graham4anything]

176. Just think...anyone under 4 years old will never see a Republican as president in America again

[slackmaster]

177. My mom once said that we wouldn't have a Republican President again for a whole generation

She said that on August 9, 1974.

My mom is a very smart lady and is usually right about most things. That was an exception.

[graham4anything]

182. Jimmy Carter would have won reelection had the Dems come together in the general

that is why in 2016 we should NOT have a primary fight that so divides the party like in 1968 and in 1980.

and ironically had we listened to Jimmy Carter, we would not need gas in our cars in 2012
and we could laugh and say our kids would never see a gas line, and odd/even gas like in New Jersey this past month during Hurricane Sandy after effects.

[JHB]

478. No, he would not have won. If you think he would have, show the numbers

If every Anderson vote gone to Carter instead (which is unlikely), it would have flipped a number of states, but Reagan still would have won 331-207:





From there you have to make a reasonable case that not "coming together" cost enough votes in the right places to make a difference. You'd have to shift 62 electoral votes, and don't count on California. Reagan won his home state by a too big a margin for it to shift to Carter under any "come together" scenario.

There's one thing that might have pushed the election in Carter's favor: that would have been bringing the Embassy hostages home, and it didn't happen. But then, that would have had nothing to do with "coming together".

Any time anyone talks about the 1980 election without mentioning the words "hostage crisis" and "Desert One", then they are not talking about the 1980 election.

I'm not exactly in favor of divisiveness, but the "division gave us 8 years of Reagan" has always struck me as finger pointing by the Democratic establishment, some of whom were responsible for that division. (Let's not forget that one of the factors in Kennedy's challenge was the fact that Washington insiders hated Carter.)

[graham4anything]

482. PA NJ Texas should have been for Carter, Florida too.

Yes there was probably reverse racism and all

but that is the point- democrats lost a race they easily could have won

Perhaps a Carter/Kennedy ticket and given Mondale a respectable way out

I blame sabatoge on the helicopters, but that is just me.

Had we tweets and other new media, betcha it would have been different

it is is probably why an outsider without connections like Jimmy Carter was will probably never get near the nomination on either side. NO FRIENDS

[LeftInTX]

204. Everyone was saying that!

Instead they came back with a vengeance

[slackmaster]

364. Yes. The GOP leveraged the patriotic fervor of the nation's bicentennial, and sold its soul to...

...the conservative religious far right. Throw in the charismatic avuncular persona of Ronald Reagan, and a monster was born.

[Cleita]

184. Lucky for them.

It seems I have had to suffer through Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush1 and Bush2 in my lifetime after FDR, Truman and Eisenhower (who as a Repub wasn't a jerk like his successors), Kennedy and LBJ. Things went downhill after LBJ with too short of respites with Carter, and Clinton. I hope I will never see another Republican before I die. Since I am almost 73, your post makes it seem hopeful that I won't.

[aikoaiko]

178. Hitchhiking.

Sticking out a thumb and catching ride.

That's something that will never be back.

[laruemtt]

273. that's the first thing i thought of

when i saw this thread!

[MineralMan]

180. I have a rotary dial phone as the main phone in my living room.

Anytime someone wants to make a call, I point them to that. I also have an old oak wall phone in the kitchen. It's really hard to dial out on it, unless you know the trick, but I often answer it, if I'm in the kitchen. Even adults have trouble talking on it, since the mic and earpiece are two separate things.

I have a genuine record player in the living room, along with a hand-cranked Victrola and more than one vacuum tube radio. Plenty of records, too, from 78 rpm ones from the 20s through the 1950s. I even have a B.B. "Blues Boy" King 78 that is a big hit with the kids. No 8-track players, but I do have a cassette deck that's still working with my stereo system. My alarm clock is a wind-up, with the bells on the top.

The very best thing of all, though, is my 1949 television set with a 6" screen. It's connected to a dvd player, and I have dvd's of early 1950s TV shows and commercials. Works great, and it's fun to watch an evening of 1950s television on it. Keeps things honest. That TV sits under the 1080p HD TV, and acts as its stand. Kids love the old cartoon dvd for that old TV set.

It's this Crosley model. Mine looks better, but I can't find my photo of it.



I love showing this stuff to my nieces and nephews and showing them how it all works. They seem to enjoy their ancient uncle's weird stuff, too.

[mrsadm]

289. Very cool!!!

[Lasher]

310. I have a rotary dial phone.

Works fine. During the recent 4 day power outage it was the only phone here that would work - until the phone lines went down too.

[tammywammy]

362. I also have a rotary phone.

My mom worked for Southwestern Bell and got an old pay phone. That was the phone in the house when I was growing up (I'm 32 now). You don't have to pay to make calls though. I got the phone from my mom and it's in my house now.

[MineralMan]

370. I always wanted a pay phone, complete with a booth.

I'd put it in my basement rec room.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

183. Roller Skates you attached to your shoes with clamps & Skate Keys

We skated everywhere in Brooklyn, NY

[Odin2005]

186. I'm 26, and assuming I have a kid in 2015 or so...

VCRs
CRT TVs and computer monitors
Life before the Internet
Audio cassette tapes
Music CDs
Floppy disks
manual car windows
dial-up internet dialing noise
Good shows on Discovery and TLC
Iomega zip drives.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

193. Being hit on the hand by a nun and having the phone ring and not knowing who it is

nuns don't hit anymore, do they?

[LadyHawkAZ]

195. Riding on the speaker shelf in the family car n/t

[KT2000]

196. White Go-Go Boots!

Tube testers at the store
Tubes!
penny candy
Whip & Chill
sleeping in the backyard during the summer
drug stores, grocery stores, hardware stores, tv stores etc. that were not part of national chains
Levi's stretchers
Starched petticoats that can stand on their own

[FSogol]

197. Clapping erasers on the brick wall of the school and all the chalk dust

Air raid sirens
Sonic booms from planes
putting baseball cards in your bike spokes
roller skates and skateboards with metal wheels

[Arctic Dave]

198. Canned television.

We used to watch TV shows that were one to two weeks old by the time we saw them in Alaska.

[Rhiannon12866]

221. When I was a kid, we only got one TV station.

We lived on the side of a mountain, so only one channel came in.

[sarcasmo]

207. 9 on 9 pick up Baseball games in the summer that last until the sun goes down.

[cprompt]

209. A teenage girls dad embarrassing you on a landline phone

It's a right of passage but my 14 year old son will never call a girls landline phone and have her dad answer "what do you want?" Or you say your name and he keeps calling you someone else. Or side thought to that having your parents pick up the phone and just start pushing buttons to dial a number while you are trying to get your flirt on.

[Agnosticsherbet]

211. Drive-in movie theaters.

[Lars39]

368. I know of at least 3 drive-ins within an hour's distance.

They're still cool.

[Honeycombe8]

218. Mimeograph papers from the schoolteachers w/blue ink. I'd huff those papers...

they smelled wonderful to me, and if freshly printed, were somewhat damp.

I was probably killing brain cells when I huffed those papers. I grew up to huff other things, unfortunately. But fortunately, that phase passed, too.

[Louisiana1976]

226. Card catalogs in libraries.

I mean the ones with the little drawers with the cards inside.

(Edited to add description.)

[madinmaryland]

279. They don't have those anymore??

F***king internets!!

[dixiegrrrrl]

385. Our library does!!!!

First time I went in there, I was so happy to see the familiar stack of library card file drawers.
But then, using them, felt slow and awkward, after having a computer for so long.
Small town library, not much has changed in 50 years.

[corkhead]

231. That win or lose, the integrity of our election system was taken for granted

those were the days

[gkhouston]

232. Kool-Aid after recess in elementary school.

The moms chipped in for the ingredients and we had it every day in the warmer months.

[Still Sensible]

233. The dimmer switch on the floor board

comes to mind

[TheMadMonk]

290. Dipswitch actually.

It 's not just about the brightness of the lights, but whether they're aimed off in the distance, or "dipped" down so as to avoid dazzling oncoming drivers.

Originally achieved by physically moving the headlamps by hand or with a lever.

[snagglepuss]

398. Great info in this thread.

[dixiegrrrrl]

386. OMG..had almost forgotten about them.

When did they go away???

[bhikkhu]

234. Waiting a year for a favorite movie to come on tv. Once.

And then waiting another year for it to show again. Once.

I was telling my kids the other day how it was - a movie would be in the theaters and we wouldn't have the money to see it, so we'd wait a whole year for it to come out on tv, and they'd show it just once, one night. If you missed it you were screwed until the next year, if you were lucky. Of course, their jaws dropped and they could hardly believe how life must have sucked before video tape, dvd, online streaming and so forth.

[liberal_at_heart]

284. when I was a kid

I would wait all year for Mickey's Christmas Carol(which by the way is very rare to see these days), Frosty, Rudolf, and Santa movies to come on tv. When it was over it was over. Then I had to wait all year again.

[jpak]

329. Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol always scared the crap out of me.

So did the tornado scene from Wizard of Oz - I would hide under the couch - lol

[badhair77]

240. party lines for the phone

As a teenager I never dreamed I'd have my own private line much less my own handheld phone, or talk on it in the car handsfree. I'm still amazed at DVD players in cars. I wish we had one of those when my son was younger.

[notadmblnd]

245. Walking over a mile to school. Bare foot, in the winter, in the snow, up hill, both ways.

[kevinbgoode1]

369. hahahaha. . .

I used to tell my nephew when he was a kid that his dad and I not only had to walk a gazillion miles in the cold and snow, but we were expected to shovel the walk the entire way for all of the rest of the kids to walk to school!!!

He never believed me, but his dad would laugh and say "that's right" . . .hahahahahaha.

[notadmblnd]

424. I think it's an old Bill Cosby line. But my mother used to tell us that

We believed her for a minute. Me and my sisters actually did walk to school. We lived right across the street. we also had to go home for lunch. that was never any fun.

[gkhouston]

249. My kid didn't know the song, "Ten tons of greasy, grimy gopher guts."

The youth of today have missed so much.

[tblue37]

269. "Ten tons"? We had "Great big gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts. . . .

On edit: The total alliteration was part of the effect.

[So_Blue]

251. Rubber cement in school....

And making rubber balls out of the dried up stuff. Loved when the teacher would take the trays filled with those little metal cans and the paint brush applicator. And the smell.

I also loved the big bowl of paste the table would have to share for tissue paper art projects - the ones where there were a bazillion squares of tissue paper, you twisted it around your finger and then glued it to some construction paper. But you all had to share the paste.

[pinto]

256. Silence.

[WinniSkipper]

258. The anticipation...

...of seeing The Wizard of Oz

[Snarkoleptic]

263. Summers on my uncle's farm.

I was 8-9 the first time I got to drive the combine, pickup truck, cub cadet.
Collecting eggs in the coop, detasseling corn, mixing concrete, frolicking in the hay-mow.
Converting the old horse tank into a defacto swimming pool.
Playing with the CB radio and walking to the general store to buy dime candies.
BB guns, fireworks, county fair to see my cousin's blue ribbon sheep (judges always seemed fixated on the rear-view).
Tennis ball cannons fueled by lighter fluid and made from soup cans taped together.
Wrist rocket sling shots.

Being a feral suburban child during the summer and disappearing for 6-8 hours without questioning.

Later, when neighboring Wisconsin raised its drinking age to 21 (from 18) and my buddies and I were grandfathered in. This led to many, many trips over the border to Lake Geneva.

[Neurotica]

270. Riding in the rear-facing seat of a wood-paneled station wagon with no seat belt

My friend's family had a station wagon and I loved going to the pool or lake with them. Riding home after swimming or canoeing, wet hair, breeze blowing...just the best.

[gkhouston]

276. Riding in the space between the second and third seat in a station wagon.

We used to fit over that all the time.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

327. We sat on the open tail gate with our legs dangling !

[laruemtt]

274. 25 cents a gallon gas. playing hopscotch on neighborhood streets.

[justabob]

360. now you can't even use sidewalk chalk

in some neighborhoods.

[BarbaRosa]

277. Saturday night at the movies on TV,

with TV dinners in metal trays that took for ever in the oven.

Hunting pop bottles to get a soda and a candy bar.

Riding my bicycle where ever I felt like it.

And yes, those metal clamp on skates.

[Mac Adams]

278. MTV

Music videos on MTV.

[SaveAmerica]

280. Recording songs from the radion to cassette tape and no one freaks!

[SaveAmerica]

281. Get a clear station by putting tin foil on the ends of the rabbit ears

and sometimes touching the foil to make it even clearer.

[liberal_at_heart]

286. I use to do that all the time

I was dirt poor growing up. Gowing to the record store(there's another one that the kids will not experience) to buy a new cassette tape was a rare treat, so I would record straight off the radio.

[SaveAmerica]

282. Doing research papers with microfiche - what google?

[DaniDubois]

283. Getting on a plane without being searched or body scanned

[aletier_v]

285. A film breaking at the theater

Locking your keys in your car

Being anonymous

Rushing to the bank every friday to cash your paycheck

Snow

Telephone booth

[Wind Dancer]

287. Great thread!

Prell shampoo!

[MrsBrady]

291. I was very little last time all that stuff was popular...

and I totally forgot about the flipping numbers on the clock radio.

[Brainstormy]

292. The popsicle man, and

making clover chains after dark, and drive in movies, and flavor straws. Hula hoop contests, collecting Elvis scatter pins, and sock hops. Candy cigarettes. And real ones at 30 cents a pack. Bomb shelters and duck and cover drills. The Beatles. The first man on the moon. First polio shot. The first, the first . . . so many, many things.

[jberryhill]

294. A pension

[liberal_at_heart]

295. sad but true

[Cresent City Kid]

296. My mother was a switchboard operator

What I remember is the rotary dial phone. I mostly used the ones with the plastic dials, but my grandfather had one with a metal dial. If the number had a bunch of 9's in it, you'd be better off walking to the person's house than trying to call.

The first computer I used was a terminal from my high school that connected by phone to what had to be a room sized computer at Tulane University, internet 1978 style. The terminal had a keyboard built into the frame of a huge dot matrix printer with green & white striped continuous form paper.

And it was the time of TV theme songs that lasted more than 15 seconds, with full credits at the end. Promotion of other shows wasn't done while the show was running. I'm currently hooked on the Me Network (digital broadcast network) that shows nothing but shows from the 60's & 70's.

I never received or sent a telegram, but they were still part of the culture.

[Spirochete]

297. Backyard burning barrels

glass vial fuel filters on automobiles
record players with a quarter on the tone arm so they wouldn't skip.
surfer crosses
tube testers

[Laura PourMeADrink]

330. Oh yea ! That burning leaf smell.

[Lugnut]

298. No indoor bathroom.

We didn't have an indoor bathroom until I was 8 years old. There was no running hot water in our house until then either. When my mother finally had to leave the old house in 1996 there was still no central heat in the place. We had a coal/gas kitchen stove and a bucket a day heater in the middle downstairs room. The upstairs bedrooms were very cold in the winter. We got our first black and white TV when I was 5. The radio was our entertainment. Somehow I managed to survive.

[dixiegrrrrl]

388. I remember waking in the morning to frost and thin ice on the window.

Neither my parents or my grandparents would have the house heat on at night , even in winter.
Most winter temps were 35-40 nightitme degrees, but there was always a brief blast of Artic air, dropping the temps to 20 or so for a week. We slept in pajamas, under piles of blanets and quilts, in small upstairs bedrooms.
In the we would wake to ice on the inside of our window.
We would run downstairs to use the bathroom, smell the morning coffee and hear the oil hearter blast on.
Non school days you could lay in bed longer, hoping the house would get warm before your bladder burst.

That scene in "A Christmas Story" where Ralphie wakes up Christmas morning to snow, and rubs the ice off the bedroom window, exactly captures the memory.

[Lugnut]

445. Most of our windows were frosted and icy during the winter.

I slept in flannel PJs on flannel sheets under a sheet blanket, a regular blanket, a wool Army blanket and a comforter. I got dressed in the morning under a blanket. We washed up before school with icy cold water at the kitchen sink. It was tough but somehow we made it.

[gkhouston]

301. Bookmobiles. These days, tough shit, take a bus or car to the nearest branch or do without.

When I was a kid, I'd walk a little over a mile to the bookmobile, twice a week.

[Bluenorthwest]

366. I was at our local Bookmobile just last month....Books To The People....

http://www.eugeneweekly.com/article/bus-books

[gkhouston]

381. Neat! n/t

[brewens]

303. Riding your bike to school with your mitt on your handlebars. n/t

[No Vested Interest]

304. Movies for 20 cents.

My Dad gave my brother & me a roll of pennies (.50), which got both of us into the movies, with >05 each for candy.

My Dad owned a penny arcade during WWII across from the Greyhound Bus station, where the soldiers on leave from Fort Knox came through on leave, etc. There was a machine where you put a penny in the slot and got a photo of a movie star - you chose male or female. The male was often a cowboy star.
Counting the pennies and rolling them into paper rolls.
Buying war stamps and war bonds at school.
Saving paper, cans, all metal for drives held frequently for the war effort.
War rationing stamps for sugar, shoes, meat. Each family member had a book for each item.

Riding the streetcar downtown then transferring to another streetcar to go to Crosley Field for a Reds baseball game. Ladies Day - .50. Get autographs of players before and after game.

Riding bike to the park. Learned the f-word for the first time from kids from the poorer section. Went home and asked my Mom what does f--- mean.

PLaying in tree-house built in the woods by neighborhood boys.
Swinging on hanging vines ion the woods.

[dchill]

309. 45 rpm 7" singles.

5-cent pack of gum
10-cent Superman comic
Pay phone booth
Hav-a-hank
Les Brown & His Band of Renown
Carlton, your doorman
Kukla, Fran & Ollie
Baker's dozen
Beatles records with a big hole.
Boy's Life
The smell of napalm in the morning

[Bonobo]

320. I'll add card catalogs. nt

[Laura PourMeADrink]

321. THE Drive-in

and those speaker boxes you put in the window...and my parents lying about how old we were since it was cheaper for little ones.

[newspeak]

389. absolutely loved the drive-ins

there are still a few left, not many, but a few. also, as a kid loved the bookmobile.

[MADem]

462. Drive ins still exist--many still have the old speakers, but they don't repair them when they break.

I know this because I seek 'em out in my travels!!!

http://www.driveinmovie.com/mainmenu.htm

[WinkyDink]

325. Some of these answers refer to "grandkids." Heh.

[Eyes of the World]

326. Clean abundant readily accessible WATER.

Not much happening without water

[MichaelSoE]

332. I haven't read every thread so this may be a dupe...pick up the phone reciever and have the operator

ask, "Number please."

The first number I remember for our house was 281. Dial phones used a name and number. The first 2 letters of the name were the digits. MUrreyhill 6 - 5656.

[Auntie Bush]

487. EM-1233 Actually I remember when it was just 1233.

Was so bummed when we had to bother dialing EM first... pain in the neck.

[NNN0LHI]

333. Classrooms without computers in them

And classrooms full of students banging away on mechanical typewriters.

That is the way it was when I went to school.

Don

[Laura PourMeADrink]

335. Birthday Party Spanking Machine

[Laura PourMeADrink]

337. Paper Bag Bookcovers

[Laura PourMeADrink]

338. Early McDonalds

[kimbutgar]

407. I so remember this game being played at birthday parties. I completely forgot until I saw your

picture. Nowadays this would be a major no-no.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

339. Stretch Armstrong

[Historic NY]

343. Manual word processor...

typewriter....with correct-o-tape & white out.

[justiceischeap]

344. $.95 Saturday matinees, no Internet, MTV actually played nothing but music videos

Recording songs off the radio onto cassette without DJs talking over the beginning and ending of the song
4 TV stations (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS)
Marlin Perkins "Wild Kingdom" (brought to you by Mutual of Omaha)

Someone else already mentioned it but TV stations going off air at night but played National Anthem before doing so

[libinnyandia]

346. I usd to tell my nieces and nephews that we had to walk uphill to school and uphill home from

school.

[Romulox]

349. Holiday Cartoon Specials after dinner, back before 24 hour cartoons/vcrs/cable. nt

[RKP5637]

350. No TV! n/t

[fredamae]

352. A few from my youth

Transister Radios

BW TV's with so much "snow" you could barely make out an image

American Bandstand

Seeing the Beatles for the very first time

Saddle Shoes and Poodle Skirts

Milking a cow(?)

Waiting for the Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog

To have "been there" the day we landed on the moon!

S&H Green Stamps!

[sarge43]

355. Cube rat stuff from a half century ago

Manual typewriters
Carbon paper
White Out
Punch cards (making and sorting of)
Adding machines
Library paste

[newspeak]

382. we didn't have the plastic like we do today

i remember drugstore soda fountains, paper straws, playing outside all day with the neighbor kids (no setting up play dates). playing was a spontaneous event, not one that was planned. going to the local mom and pop store for mom down the road-bread, milk and steak for five dollars.

i still have an 8 track tape player with 8 track tapes. also, i worked on those telephone switchboards my junior and senior year in high school.

putting our change together for gas. cruising fremont street in las vegas, cruising central street in phoenix. dancing clubs for teens in phoenix, i remember one named "the hungry eye." as teens, we had places to go and have fun.

in phoenix, many went to municipal pools, instead of private pools. some residence, like my grandparents still irrigated their lawns (if you had one). last time i flew over phoenix, it looked like almost every house had a pool. my grandmother, as a child, came to phoenix in a wagon, and told me stories of water rationing. washing was on one day, bathing another and irrigating your crops only on certain days. now, it's like a water free for all.

[aletier_v]

387. RUSH LIMBAUGH!

[RC]

392. Rotary dial phones?

You must be a youngster. Try phones with no dial of any kind. Where you pick up the handset and the operator says "Number Please" and you gave her a number such as "1520W".

Cars with no room for back seats and you got to ride on the back shelf.

[Z_I_Peevey]

394. Regularly hearing different types of music

on the A.M. radio, all jumbled up and unpredictable.

[snagglepuss]

401. Life before backpacks. Lugging textbooks home under one arm and carrying a lunch pail in the other.

[kimbutgar]

402. Drive in Theaters, reel to reel tape players, Super 8 Projectors that made the ticking sound

I found an old Super 8 projector at the Flea Market got a new lamp for it and projected the films on the wall for my mother's 90th birthday. Just seeing those films had people young and old mesmerized by the old days. Women wearing furs coats and wraps. Everyone smoking!!

[WillyT]

404. Sour Bites, From Beechnut... Man I Loved Them Little Candies...

& Rec !!!

[kimbutgar]

410. Chemistry sets with real chemicals that you could use for experiments

I had one and mixed some chemicals that burned a hole in the carpet in my room, the stink was horrible. The chemistry set was thrown away after that. I found the manual years later and some of those chemicals can't be sold over the counter like that.

[northoftheborder]

412. Me too for much of the above. I'll try not to duplicate:

Pianos in nearly everyone's house, with children and adults who could play them!

Handwriting taught as a graded class in school.

As children, our old Chevy had a back seat area big enough for both my brother and I to stand up, and not touch the back seat, the front seat, the ceiling, or the door. We made up a game called "standing alone" and kept score. Being swung against the seat, sitting down, bumping the front seat took a point off. Probably drove our parents' crazy. We had lots of games we just made up to play in the car, and at home. Our "lawn" had large bare spots which were dirt. We used to love to play in the dirt, dry or muddy. Also, the warm day in the spring when we were first allowed to go barefooted all day, everywhere, was anxiously awaited. We only put on shoes when the sidewalks were too hot, or to go to church. I think we even went barefooted at the grocery. Of course, our feet got filthy, and many scrapes and punctures ensued to our feet.

Owning only one car. Auto tires with inner tubes! Turning and stop signals done by arm out the window.

Not only milk delivery, but also the drycleaners came by to pick up and deliver clothes.

Gas stations with actual mechanics and attendants.

Our science class-room actually passed around a big ball of mercury for us to hold and experience! I'm still alive and in my right mind!

Our house had portable gas heating stoves, which was our only heat source. They were turned off at night for safety, so getting out of bed, piled with several layers of blankets and quilts, walking on that cold wood floor, smelling the gas from the recent lighting, then toasting yourself until skin turned red on the front, then turning to the back for rest of body thawing - is an unknown thing for present day children who's air is totally conditioned, summer or winter. (Many fires were started with these stoves, but fortunately we never had any incidents from the heaters.)

Our radio was on most of the time at our house. I remember Pearl Harbor and all the announcers excitedly talking about the "Japs" (I was too young to know what they were talking about). Soap operas, Lum & Abner, Lux Radio Theater, Hit Parade, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Mystery Theater, and tons more, many of which later made the transition to television. (Actually, there are online sources for listening to those old shows now.)

Some department stores had these zip lines with a container for your money or checks which went from the store clerk when you paid for your items up to the 2nd floor mezzanine, where change was made, or checks accepted, and receipt returned. No charges.

[dixiegrrrrl]

421. "zip lines with a container for your money"

Thanks for jogging my memory of that!

I remember being in a store like that, with one of my great aunts, in Seattle. I remember she wore a fox fur around her neck and a hat, skirt, jacket. She bought something and I was fascinated by the zip line bit.
This was 1950, give or take a year, and I am thinking it was the Bon Marche store.
apparently the store clerks were not trusted to ring sales.

[xfundy]

413. The little dot when the tv goes off.

Anything made in the USA.

All in the Family (though on reruns @ NickAtNite)

Real, working tools for kids

Most manually-operated tools, including most kitchen ones

Buying prepared food (or most raw foods in stores) without chemicals

Any product of real integrity without obsolesence built into it

Wind-up anything--selling batteries makes $$$!

Being able to fish without wondering whether the lake/stream/ocean is polluted

My grandma's coconut cake, made from scratch; she'd send grandpa out in the back to crack it open with a hammer, but she did the scraping herself and then grated it all by hand.

[sakabatou]

417. That modem sound

[northoftheborder]

425. Oh yes......

I don't miss that one

[savebigbird]

461. Hahahaha

That's funny!!! Every now and then the office fax machine will make that noise and everyone sort of stops what they're doing. It catches us off guard!

[Lemonwurst]

427. Jarts

On one side, a gaggle of adults drinking beer with their kids by their sides, the same on the other side, both launching weighted dart-spears at one another.

What could possibly go wrong...?

[Zorra]

432. The unbridled joy, space, and freedom of the '60s and early 70's.

This song is actually about those awesome daze.

"The Boys Of Summer"

Nobody on the road
Nobody on the beach
I feel it in the air
The summer's out of reach
Empty lake, empty streets
The sun goes down alone
I'm driving by your house
Though I know you're not home

But I can see you-
Your brown skin shinin' in the sun
You got your hair combed back and your sunglasses on, baby
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

I never will forget those nights
I wonder if it was a dream
Remember how you made me crazy?
Remember how I made you scream
Now I don't understand what happened to our love
But babe, I'm gonna get you back
I'm gonna show you what I'm made of

I can see you-
Your brown skin shinin' in the sun
I see you walking real slow and you're smilin' at everyone
I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

Out on the road today, I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said, "Don't look back. You can never look back"
I thought I knew what love was
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go but-

I can see you-
Your brown skin shinin' in the sun
You got that top pulled down and that radio on, baby
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

I can see you-
Your brown skin shinin' in the sun
You got that hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, baby
I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone

[lucca18]

438. Those were the days:

I remember "flipping" baseball cards against the garage door....I had a crush on Willie Mays!
Using bottle caps for "money". (the more you had, the richer you were).

Catching lightening bugs, and bringing them to this lady in the neighborhood where she had a refrigerator full of them in jars! (she was doing some kind of research).

Going for Sunday drives in our beautiful blue Studebaker all over Long Island and marveling how my father found his way back home.

Telephone "party-lines", and being tempted to listen.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

477. Ahhhh...lightning bugs. If you are looking to see those again....there's a beautiful B&B in VA

where you sit outside at night and watch lightening bugs

Meander Plantation - Locust Dale VA
http://www.meander.net/

From their facebook page:
Of all the many marvels at Meander, it is time for one of the most spectacular ... The annual firefly extravaganza, when literally thousands of lightning bugs hover in the grass and trees and twinkle in the darkness. It is truly a most amazing and beautiful event, one we eagerly await this time each year. Come see for yourself!

[dixiegrrrrl]

498. We are so lucky here to have fireflies.

And because we live on a small bluff, we can watch the ones at different heights.
Our "yard" is mostly woods, fireflies love the edges of woods.
Sigh..so do mosquitoes.

[LeftInTX]

443. Computers the size of a living room, requiring a special operator

They also needed special air conditioning.
You had to stand in line with your punch cards to "submit your job "

If there was an error on the punch cards, sometimes the computer would go into an "infinite loop" and spill out infinite amounts of paper. The operator would have to "cancel the job".

Dividing by zero would wreck havoc with computers too.

If you made those errors, the people waiting behind you weren't very pleased.


It was the IBM 360 at my college

[Demonaut]

444. An american made steel tonka truck

[Midwestern Democrat]

446. Most young people will not experience formal dress being the norm in their lives rather than the

very rare exception. It wasn't all that long ago that the typical white collar worker had to wear formal dress every Monday through Friday, on Sunday if they were a churchgoer, and even on Saturday if they went out to eat at a nice restaraunt. Today, a lot of men don't even wear a suit and tie when attending a funeral or a wedding.

[Drunken Irishman]

451. Hell, I'm in my 20s and haven't experienced those things.

Wait ... I think, when I was really young, my grandma had a rotary phone because I remember being baffled how it worked ... and my dad did have a record player. But smoking on airlines?!?

[Warren DeMontague]

452. Polio, Child Labor, the Civil War. The Black Plague, the Spanish Inquisition, trepanning, rickets

the fear of sabre-toothed tigers.


Okay, technically I'm not that old.

[Democracyinkind]

458. The scandal surrounding the trial of Socrates...

[Aanenin]

455. Honda 305 scrambler

with the muffler off, manual steering, oil can spouts, 4 finger lids for 10 dollars water balloon wars...

[MADem]

456. Three television stations...if you were lucky. No DVDs or videotapes or "On Demand" -- you had to

watch the show when it aired, and if there was a conflict, you had to CHOOSE.

Variety Television--it's gone the way of the dodo...we almost never see it anymore....Ed Sullivan! Suffering through Lawrence Welk!! The Carol Burnett Show! Flip Wilson!

Clever late night programming that didn't simply consist of people coming on to hawk their latest book or movie....The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson!! Dick Cavett!

And the National Anthem when stations went off the air...and that was IT. Nothing on the damn screen...go turn on the radio if you're still awake! When the first few stations started doing "The Late Late Late Show" and aired ancient movies, graveyard shift watchmen and doormen were overjoyed!

[savebigbird]

460. Where I'm from...

...the tv station would end its day with an episode of Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer. You'd know it was time for bed when you'd hear its theme music.

[dixiegrrrrl]

502. West Coast, right?

God, I remember that now.
It is still on.
He died in 2010.

[slackmaster]

465. My family moved from Kansas to California in 1962. Our Philco TV got three stations in Kansas City.

In a coastal suburb of San Diego, my parents were surprised when they first turned the old set on - There was something on every channel from 2 through 13.

2 - CBS from Los Angeles
3 - ABC in Santa Barbara
4 - NBC in Los Angeles
5 - KTLA, independent
6 - XTEV in Tijuana
7 - ABC, Los Angeles
8 - CBS San Diego
9 - Independent in Los Angeles
10 - NBC in San Diego
11 - Independent in Los Angeles
12 - XEWT in Tijuana
13 - Independent in Los Angeles

That channel lineup remained nearly unchanged for many years.

[hughee99]

468. I had this exact discussion with my daughter at Halloween when the Great Pumpkin was on.

I tried to explain how when I was little, we had to be done by the time it came on so we could watch it, and if we missed it, it wasn't on for another year. Between DVD's, the TiVo, on-demand, Netflix, and the internet, she couldn't understand how I couldn't just call it up whenever I wanted to see it. I then had to explain how none of those things were around when I was little.

She also doesn't really get the concept of having to sit through commercials.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

474. so true ! I remember very well "suffering" through Lawrence Welk..haha

[savebigbird]

459. Fun thread!

-waiting for a VHF tape to rewind
-ditto for cassette tapes
-watching the Bozo show
-eating home cooked lunch at school (it's all processed and pre-packaged now)
-playing on "dangerous" playgrounds
-rolling down car windows
-running down school hallways

[GeorgeGist]

464. pogo sticks

[white_wolf]

467. I can actually participate in this thread, God I feel old.

Anyway Dial-Up internet and the noise it made getting online.

[FirstLight]

473. GREAT thread!!!

Firstly, I am happy to say that a lot of these things are part of my kids' lives... we live in a rural Mtn town and I am very grateful I can allow some of these freedoms... like riding to a friend's house arund the corner and playing in the meadow between our houses for hours at a time. We have the old rotary phone from my teenage years and use it for emergencies when the power is out. And our old subaru had manual windows and manual 4wd...

I am loving the memories too... definitely the Radio and transistor being a big one. I remember many an evening listening to the radio station with my tape cassette primed, just waiting to hit the record button and catch it!

old school roller rinks/roller disco - that's a biggie. I was 10-12 in the late 70s...loved it when a friend would have a roller rink bday party! it was the closest id get to 'dancing' with a boy to hold hands and skate to a song... lol

being able to scrape $5 in change and fill my mustang 1/2 way...
being able to cut school because we didn't armed security...
going to the pizza parlor after school jr high and playing the jukebox, smoking cigarettes we bought from the machine in the back...
collecting newspapers from the entire neighborhood(my parents not being afraid to let me knock on random neighbor's doors), filling up my dad's station wagon and getting a grand total of $20
Actually KNOWING our neighbors, all of them. Having the sweet older lady in the neighborhood be open to us storming her backyard as part of our adventures, she even had a special drawer of kid toys for us to play with when our mom would come over for coffee...
parent's having cocktail parties and leaving the herd of kids to play board games and fight amongst themselves.

our old chevy station wagon with the bench seat
my dad drinking a beer while driving on vacation
the rear seat of the station wagon that folded down and you could look 'backwards' at the cars behind you...

[Laura PourMeADrink]

476. Did anyone else have local record shops? Ours even had a "sound booth"...we would

go in every week for the latest releases and you could take it into the booth and listen to it before you bought it

[raccoon]

479. Riding in a car with no seat belt or any restraint. Riding with a parent who is drunk as a skunk.

Driving, perhaps, because the parent is too drunk to drive.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

480. Yup...my dad still won't go fishing because he has bad memories of going to the CT shore with his

father and friends and them getting drunk and him worrying about getting them all home.

But, I don't know if cars were safer back them, or speeds slower, or what, but I have no recollections of anyone dying from drunk driving growing up

[raccoon]

488. Part of the reason might have been less people, less cars, less traffic. Remember when

most families had one car?

[Laura PourMeADrink]

489. true...and I guess depending on where you lived mattered a lot too. Like a lot of

people here said, they walked everywhere. If you lived in an urban area or populated suburb with lots of sidewalks and buses, you just walked home from parties or bars too.

[dixiegrrrrl]

497. I do not remember my Mom or her sisters ever driving a car!

Come to think of it.
Mom never learned to drive.Nor did Grandma, or Mom's sister who was a few years older.
Hmmm..had not thought about it in that way.
They all grew up in a world where the men did the driving, made the money, and women more or less stayed home.

I am starting to realize how important tv must have been to all those captive women.

[lbrtbell]

481. Actually....

Those are all things I'm glad I'll never experience again!

[Laura PourMeADrink]

493. I actually do think it was better to have the phone ring and not know who it is or to get

an actual letter rather than an email. Just because voice mail, call screening, emails, voice mails have added a significant amount of stress in people's lives.....the stress of having to respond immediately. I read something not too long ago about how fax and email changed everything in the workplace, creating more stress to expedite when often it wasn't necessary to expedite.

[alp227]

484. As a millenial i am GLAD i will never experience smoking on an airline.

I don't want other passengers blowing their smoke in my face. And don't call it an accident if someone is irresponsible with a lighter!

[Laura PourMeADrink]

492. No worries, they reserved the back 5 rows of the plane for smokers

[DawgHouse]

500. My teacher had to quit teaching school once she started "showing".

And she was MARRIED!

I also remember that girls could not wear pants to school when I started 1st grade. I recall a strange girdle type thing with snaps that I used to wear that held my stockings up. It was uncomfortable but the only way to keep legs warm in the fall and winter.

Fortunately by the time I entered 3rd or 4th grade, pants were okay and when I entered 6th grade, they even let girls wear shorts (of proper length) during the last few weeks of school. I was born in 61.

[MADem]

511. The boys took SHOP CLASS, the GIRLS took HOME ECONOMICS....

Later, they allowed the boys to learn the cooking and sewing, and the girls to learn the auto mechanics, but that happened after my time...!

[clydefrand]

503. Well, at 77 (going on 78), so lets see:

(in a small town in the hills of Virginia.)At about 5, lived at top of very steep hill, used to roller skate (used key), used at broom stick to set on to act as a brake. Also, there was a tree down over the hill that big and tall and someone had tied a rope to one of the limbs, so we would get up the hill as far as the rope would reach and then swing WAY out.
As time went on, used to climb tall saplings as close to the top as we could, then lean way out and ride the tree down to the ground.
I did grow up with in-door plumbing, and a phone (you called an operator to make your call).
Oh, at 3 years old, a 3 yr. old girl came over to play under our back porch. She had to pee, so I got
my first looky-see.
We finally got dial phone when I was about 10 or so. We had mail delivered twice a day, monday thru saturday. Got milk delivered to the door 3 times a week. We had a car until I was about 3, my parents got there next car in 1955. I got a bicycle for 12th birthday. We lived, at this point, on a hill so steep, most
cars couldn't drive up the hill, had to come up a less steep hill a block away. Got to where I could ride that bike straight up that hill, the one side of the handle bar brooke off, so rode it until I went in the Army in 1953, even the steep hill in front of the house.
Summer times, stayed out late, we wherever we wanted, AND NEVER DID ANYTHING WRONG because
the parents would know about it before you got home.
Oh, well, enough old memories. Got lots more, just can't remember them any more, else I'd write a book.