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Something Light: I remember when
I’ve been pondering lately how different the world will be for my daughter compared to what it was like when I was growing up. Will she ever believe that I remember a time when gasoline cost less than $1 a gallon, or that I used to buy a big freshly-baked donut for a quarter? Will she be shocked that I was 10 before I first logged onto the Internet, or that I survived 25 years without an iPod or cell phone? I can already hear it: “Mom, you’re sooo old!”
How about you: I remember when _______________.
Topic: Just for Fun, WorldMagBlog
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back to top56 Comments to “Something Light: I remember when”
My kids can’t imagine that PCs used to have a single, black, command-line (e.g. DOS) “window”. Of course, computers without a user interface at all as well as the idea of no computer in the home is just crazy.
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I remember getting gas at $0.60 and I’m just 22…
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I remember when you had to have a forklift to move your cell phone…
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I remember my first auto. I filled the tank on $5.00.
I just purchased a new cell phone. The first one didn’t have the ability to text message or take pictures, etc., etc. The new one is smaller than the palm of my hand.
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I remember putting $1.00 in the gas tank and driving for a week. We sure had alot of fun on that dollar!
I remember one phone in the house and the cord that was about 1 foot long!
I remember singing along with a song on the radio and our son told me, “That must be a very old song Mom, you know all the words.”
No seat belts in cars, no child safety seats, no bike helmets, the list could go on.
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My new Porsche (1968 912) was under $4,000.
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I remember workin for a magazine and typing on an IBM Selectric. Giving the hard copy to an editor who produced another hard copy. Then the article was typeset on a typesetter the size of Zamboni. The article was then cut with an exacto knife, run over a waxer and placed on boards to get camera ready. Photos and artwork were pieced ont he same way.
The mag I work for now is, of course, all computer generated and arrives at the printers on a CD.
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Not everything goes up in price. I remember when I bought my first “real” computer (one that ran on Windows instead of DOS), and it was well over $1000, which didn’t include a monitor or printer (we just bought a new computer a couple months ago for $350).
I also remember when my mom bought me a “computer” for my birthday back in the early ’80s: a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (anybody remember those?). It had a mammoth 16 KB (that’s right, KB) memory. You had to save everything on cassette tape and that didn’t work half the time. Later I bought a Radio Shack Color Computer (the “CoCo”) and added a floppy drive for more reliable storage (and so I could play Zork, of course!). The drive cost about $300.
I also remember (I’m going in reverse time again) having an Atari 2600 video game system. The graphics are awful by today’s standards but it was fun. My wife even bought me an “Atari Classics” PC game a few years ago that features many of the classic 2600 games as well as several arcade games (they all come on a single CD-ROM). Best game I ever got.
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# 3 and 4:
MiM and NJL: I remember when having a 45 minute a month plan for a cell phone was considered a “great deal.”
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My brother once bought gas for 10.9¢/gallon! Usually it was 15-20¢ growing up. During the first shortage of ’73, my dad said he would stop buying it if it went over 30¢.
I remember when riding the school bus was a privilege, and that you only rode it if you lived more than a mile or two from school. The rest walked or rode bicycles.
I remember 6¢ postage stamps and rotary dial telephones (touch tone cost extra).
I was the remote for our old Packard-Bell black and white TV. We only got 4 channels on the rabbit ears as cable was years in the future. Then, since we lived in a large city, once cable came the only cable channel we could get was HBO.
I could go on, but I’ll leave it for the other “old-timers”.
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#7: Adios, I remember the Selectric. That was the “coveted” typewriter when I took typing in HS. There were only 5 in the class and the teacher would shuffle us so that everyone had a turn on the good typewriters. The rest of the time we were using ones that looked like they came out of army surplus (but at least they were electric).
I remember using a manual typewriter to write a paper in HS, an electric to write a paper early in college, and then finally getting to use computers at college to type papers in my junior and senior year. Most of the time they were IBM clones running WordPerfect; I did get to use a Mac a few times and thought they were cool because they had all the neat fonts and you could actually read the screen (black letters on a white background instead of white letters on a blue monochrome background).
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Sorry for multiple posts, but reading everyone’s comments keeps bringing back memories.
#10: Peter L, I also remember rotary phones. My mom still had one until a few years ago when we bought her a new one for Christmas and finally talked her into getting the phone company to come and take the old one out (she had lived in that house since 1968, and was paying the phone company something like $1 a month for the use of it; wanna figure out how much that phone wound up costing her?).
I also remember growing up on a party line. You shared the phone line with three or four other neighbors. If you picked up the phone and someone was talking on it, you had to wait until they were finished before you could make a call.
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I remember going through college without a word processor or laptop. We took notes in a spiral-bound notebook and wrote out our papers in the same kind of book–by hand. If a paragraph needed to be moved, you literally cut (with scissors) and pasted (with the new, state-of-the-art, glue stick.) Afterwards you borrowed a typewriter and hoped not to make any mistakes because if you did you had to worry about making a hole in the paper with a typewriter eraser. Also, if you wanted to keep a copy for yourself, you had to use carbon paper. Do they even still make that?
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Oh, TJ- Party lines! Yes, I remember those. I lived one winter in a mountain town in Arizona and had a 12 party line! Most of those were summer-only residents, so most of the year I only had two or three others on the line (though it seemed like I had it all to myself).
I love the reminiscing about computers, especially the old DOS based ones. And one of my friends had the old kind with cassette tape memory (I think he had a Tandy). It took twenty minutes to load the Star Trek game popular back then.
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I must be old, because I remember most of the above.
I remember we were on a party line when we first moved out here in the country thirty years ago. We were happy, because there were six party lines and we only had one neighbor on ours.
I remember my sister-in-law leaving an old computer at her mother’s, so that the grandchildren could learn basic on it and get somewhat computer savvy. She started on key punch cards.
I remember when a price-war developed on gas and we picked it up for 19 cents/gallon.
I remember when drive-in movies were a cheap and fun way to spend an evening with lots of friends.
I remember when I was happy because our long distance cost was down to .18/minute when my oldest daughter was in college. We could get it for around.04 when the last child went. Even that was more than the internet, which we had by then.
I remember when our neighbor got the first color television in the neighborhood. I remember we had to go over to see, “The Wizard of Oz”, so we could see when it changed to color. Sometimes the reds would be too much and it had to be manually adjusted to more green and vice-versa.
OK,I’ll let someone else take over now.
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I remember buying gas for 25¢.
I remember when the first family on our block got a color TV. The whole neighborhood went over to see it. We had a B&W until high school.
When I was little (in Germany) we had milk delivered in cans by a horse drawn cart. Later, in the US, our milk was delivered in bottles to our front steps.
I was in there when the Berlin wall went up and I was there when it came down.
Our VW bug didn’t have a gas gauge. When you ran out of gas you turned a lever and that gave you another 25 miles.
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KI – the first show we watched on our neighbor’s color TV was Wizard of Oz too!
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I remember classmates eager to get papers still damp from the mimeograph machine – something about the smell, I guess. I remember cranking out copies on the machine myself as a teacher. And I remember being nervous using the new-fangled Xerox machine the first time.
We never had a party line, but we grew up using black rotary telephones. The first phone I bought myself as an adult was a beige rotary phone. (My sister recently found one in a closet, and tried to explain to her son how they work – and why we still speak of “dialing” a phone number.)
I remember my parents buying fish a lot because it was cheaper as well as healthier than meat. And they rarely bought pork, because it was too high in fat and cost more than chicken.
I remember walking to school carrying a stack of books. No one used backpacks or any kind of bag (except if it was raining maybe). I first saw backpacks used for something other than backpacking when I was about 20.
We never had a color TV growing up, because they were too expensive, and my mother worried about the unhealthy radiation from them. (I was amazed to find out, as an adult, what color some cartoon characters were.) We got two channels, CBS and NBC. CBS came in well because it was VHF, while NBC came in less well because it was UHF. On a good day we could get a very staticky ABC, which was also UHF.
I remember when Happy Meals came out and thought it was a silly idea. I remember the first time I saw someone use a TV remote and thought it was even sillier. I remember when VCR’s came out and thought they were a big waste of money.
I remember being trained to use the telex machine in my first office job – then a year later they got a fax machine, which seemed even more complicated – but I didn’t have to use it because someone else was trained on it.
I remember hearing a talk on the differences between the Republican and Democrat parties, and thinking those small theoretical differences didn’t seem like a big deal, and people like my parents voted based on the candidate himself, not the party.
I remember being able to guess a adult’s age by the color (or lack of it) of his or her hair.
I remember trying weird new foods like yogurt (my mother bought her own yogurt-maker before the supermarkets started carrying it), Pringles, and kiwi fruits.
I remember getting milk delivered to our back door, and buying fruits and vegetables from a truck out in the street.
I remember the checkout clerk at the supermarket pressing keys to ring up the price that was on a tag stuck to the item, and having to do math in her head to make change.
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In high school we had huge bags full of the greatest confetti. It was all the little bits of paper punched out of cards and paper tape from the computer lab.
I remember our first calculator. It was huge and expensive, but so amazing.
I remember riding my bike to the local dairy to get an ice cream.
I remember playing kick-the-can or sardines throughout the whole neighborhood, only coming home when it was suppertime.
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Grandma, my “child safety seat” hooked over the back of the front seat, I had my own steering wheel with a little button horn. Had there been an accident, I would have gone flying!
The Selectric was an excellent typewriter, and I remember working at a law firm when the first one to have memory came out!
Party lines — I had forgotten about them.
We had the milk man, the bread man, and the fresh vegetable truck (in the summer).
I remember the Automat in NYC! I loved to put the nickles in to get a piece of cake. When I was little, I didn’t understand that there were people behind those doors refilling the shelves from the other side. The Automat was amazing to me.
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I remember walking up the street to the little corner store and spending my 10¢ allowance on candy or a small toy.
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Has anyone mentioned the crank telephone? Our number was 2-F-3. That amounted to three shorts. (You turned the crank 3 short turns. If you had a long in the number, ei., short, long short, you cranked it steady for about 3 turns) To make a long distance call you had to call the operator (one long) to have her put you through. You had to yell into the phone and I always thought you could go outside and yell and they would hear you better.
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I remember my brother and I installed running water into my Granny’s house in 1984. She was 84 years old. She wouldn’t let us take out the hand pump for the well in the kitchen even though we had to unhook it to get the electric submersible pump in. Yep, couldn’t get running water until the electricity came in! She died in the house she was born in 10 years later.
I remember when the first telephone lines came in the hills. They were all party lines and there were 4-6 different rings on them for the 4-6 different families that used the same line. It was common to pick up someone else’s call by mistake and you would have to apologize and they would have to redial. My Dad got rid of his party line 10 years ago. Everyone complained about the phone ringing and ringing (and would keep on ringing until the caller hung up) for someone else when they were not home. Imagine that!. What a hoot. After the 15 th ring someone else on the line would would pick up the call and say “what’s wrong with you? The Galloways are not home after the 3rd ring you idiot.” Everyone knew who else was on their party line by answering calls for someone else when they were not home and finding out. Then the adult, kids couldn’t answer the phone since it wasn’t a play thing, would take a message and have the kids deliver it by hand to whoever wasn’t home! This was routine for us kids and we liked riding over to where ever on our bikes because usually the people were at home but out of earshot of the phone ringing. You would always get at least a cookie for delivering the message.
We were long gone from the hills when the first real PC came out. It was an Apple II (ours was serial number 26) and cost $4,500 with 16 kb of RAM but we ordered it out with the fully loaded 64 kb of RAM on a separate card we had to install. Hard drives didn’t exist yet, the small floppy drives didn’t exist yet so we got the huge 71/2″ floppy drive. We later got the first hard drive (10MB) made by IBM that cost $1,500. Never ever thought we would ever need more RAM or Hard Drive.
You didn’t have to worry about buying software since none existed and you had to write all your software yourself. The language was AppleSoft Basic and no manual came for it with the computer when you bought it since they were still writing it. We burned up the telephone lines with “the Woz” at Apple to get the syntax right. We had no idea he was the brains and founded the company with Steve Jobs. A couple of months later we paid $40 for the manual when it became available. It was so much easier to use than Fortan or Cobal and you didn’t have to punch cards anymore when you wrote programs. You traded programs on these huge floppies with other Nerdy Types that they wrote. The Apple II did come with the original Pong though – the only game that existed. This was 1978.
I am convinced that as technology becomes easier to use, we dumb down our kids and others while the technology becomes controlled by fewer and fewer people who have become evil
.
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NJL,
My safety seat was my mothers arm flung at me when she stopped quick!
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I remember all of that stuff.
I remember the grandparent who was alive for both the start of the automobile age and the first moon landing.
My kids now think I lived in the middle ages. Things are accelerating rather rapidly.
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Kristin, you should never ask a 78 year old man what he remembers. Some of you have already mentioned gas, etc. But whoever mentioned a “Happy Meal” reminds me that the first McDonalds didn’t have places to sit, nor restrooms.
But to answer a question my granddaughter, Becky, asked; “No I was not here when God made the first rainbow.”
Some random memories, trying not to repeat and in no order:
I came home from the American Theater in Charleston (about a mile from home, I was 11) and heard that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor. (Word processor says “Japs” is not a word. It was THE word then. Apologies to whomever is offended. My son works for a Japanese company.) I had seen “Belle Starr” with Randolph Scott and Gene Tireney.
I remember when I heard about the atom bomb. It then occurred to me than that I wouldn’t be in that war. I always thought I would.
I remember seeing, for the first time, the cleavage in a woman’s breast. We see more than that in dresses worn to church now. But this woman was on a bus, evidently going to a party. The bus was crowded and both of us were standing. I couldn’t help but look.
Along the same line, In “Gone With the Wind”, Rhett Butler said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” He cussed, right there in the picture show.
I used to listen to clear channel 50,000 watt WSM on Saturday night. I heard Hank Williams, and Hank Snow and Minnie Pearl, and I don’t know what all. And WCKY, out of Cincinnati played country all night. I picked them up over Greenland once. (Our radios didn’t pick up broadcast band, but WCKY was on the edge.)
I used to wear coat and tie to football games. I bought Elvera a (I think) chrysanthemum with a “C” on it for the only football game she has seen.
I used to stand up on the bus to give a lady my seat.
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#24 As a kid I always stood up behind the front seat. We got in an accident and both my parents were injured. I flew around, but was fine.
Today, airbags knock the stuffing out of you in a fender bender, breaking ribs, noses and sometimes necks. Progress!
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I remember when McDonald’s came to town. Hamburgers were 12 cents. It was McDonald’s #2. Still there, the oldest one.
I remember when we got our first TV, a Packard Bell, black and white. I didn’t like Howdy Doody.
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“I am convinced that as technology becomes easier to use, we dumb down our kids and others while the technology becomes controlled by fewer and fewer people who have become evil.”
Mwwwuaaahh-haaa-hhaaa-haaa!
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When my niece now pushing 30 was 4, she exclaimed one day that there was no dishwasher in my mother’s kitchen. She couldn’t comprehend this and asked “Oma, how do you live?”
MIM, did you also collect empty bottles for the deposit so you could go to the corner store? In other words, do you remember when a bag of chips cost a nickel? (Your dime reminded me of the Hostess cupcake with the white swiggle on top of the chocolate icing, cream inside.)
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Xion, when I was a kid, I did the same thing. I stood on the hump in the middle of the back seat. (I was short.) My father always took the scenic, country route on vacation (the “old” road, interstates were just being built) and there were dips in those country roads and I enjoyed going up and down — until one dip was real deep and I hit my head.
My parents bought their first tv because I had late night feedings. I’ve never NOT had tv, and can’t imagine not having it.
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#27
Xion,
I remember lying down in the back seat to sleep on long trips. I also remember sitting turned around playing cards on the back seat with my sister and a friend, when we got in an accident. The men who came running to help called an ambulance because they saw blood on someone’s face (I can’t even remember which one of us it was), but it turned out to be nothing but a lip bitten upon the shock of impact – and after half an hour the ambulance hadn’t come so they called to cancel it.)
I do appreciate air bags, however, having walked away from a headon collision (which left the other driver, who caused it, semi-conscious with a concussion and a face covered with cuts from broken glass). I went to the chiropractor a couple times but that was all the treatment I needed. And I suspect many kids of our generation who went seatbelt-less were not so lucky. One of my parents’ friends was a woman who had lost her eyesight in a car accident, as a young woman, due to not having a seatbelt.
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NJL, without TV, you sat around and listened to the radio. In some ways, it was better. You had to have imagination to follow, “I Love A Mystery” or “Lets Pretend”. On Sunday nights, we would listen to Gene Autry, “Melody Ranch”, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, etc. They were really funny in those days, and didn’t insult anyone.
We got our news from Walter Wenchell. The media, in those days, wanted us to win.
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I remember we finally got a color TV in the 80’s. I remember, prior to that, the color was so awful on some TVs (I would watch at a friend’s house, for instance) that it would make me nauseous. It was worse than eating Thin Mints.
As a senior in HS, one of the local radio stations rewarded the “top students” (why’d they ever pick me?) with a breakfast banquet and gifts from local merchants. This was 1985, and I’d only rented a handful of movies (along with the VCR; remember when they used to rent those too?) before. Well, a local video store gave a free one year membership (remember when video stores used to charge for that?). Most of what the store rented, btw, was BetaMax.
For my 18th birthday, my parents bought me a VCR (VHS format, thankfully). It was purchased at the local TG&Y store (anyone remember those? they were big in the small town South until Wal-Mart rolled into town). I think it cost around $300. It didn’t even have a “real” remote control; the remote had a long black wire that ran to the VCR. Talk about redneck.
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I remember having to reserve a punch card machine in order to create a program for my Fortran class. It always seemed that the only slots open in the lab were at 2am. Then you brought your boxes of punched cards to the computer room and when you came back hours later you found out if the program worked or if you needed to reserve a machine to punch more cards. In my senior year they introduced a new class in Basic.
I remember riding in the back of my dad’s Rambler station wagon.
I remember the dark day when the cost of a box of Lemonheads went from 5 cents to 10 cents.
I remember selling the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in the businesses and bars on San Fernando Road. The cost of the paper was a dime and I got to keep three cents out of that. I’d sell about 75 papers a day.
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I remember when McDonald’s added ice cream cones and chicken McNuggests to its menu. I remember my dad saying “I still remember when…” I remember my sister stocking up on candy bars whenever she found them on sale for a nickel (maybe it was a dime?). I remember penny bubble gum in gum machines. (And sometimes you had a bonus toy.)
I remember rotary phones that were attached to the wall; we had to cut the phone cord at the wall when we moved, and take the phone back to the phone company, because it belonged to them.
I remember teachers handing out mimeographed papers (blue ink) and asking for help from the boy in the class who could load the film into the projector.
I remember when a brother thought he was hot stuff because he had a car phone . . . and voice mail instead of an answering machine . . . and three-way calling when it was new enough that my sister (who worked for him) would make prank calls by calling a “Senior” and a “Junior” in the phone book and letting them talk until they got into an inevitable argument about who had called whom, and why, and which one was losing his memory because he forgot that he was the one who made the call.
The earliest stamp I remember was 13 cents; the earliest presidential election, Ford vs. Carter. I was born before man walked on the moon (by just a year and some months). When I was a child, parents spanked children.
I remember when Dad could point out the Big Dipper from our backyard in Phoenix (in other words, we could see far more stars). I remember when public libraries were safe places for children. (And ours had a cage full of hamsters and an aquarium of fish.) I remember when some cities in California had so much smog that your car was gray when you got back home. I remember when you could tell at a glance which state a car was from because of the distinctive colors of each state’s license plates.
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Do any of you know how to use a slide rule? I have two of them. Can students today look up trig functions or logarithms? Can they interpolate?
I used to change oil every 1000 mi. I didn’t have an oil filter on my ‘50 Chevy.
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Chas,
My sister used a slide rule in her math classes in high school. She finally had to buy a calculator when she went to college because they required it (she went to an engineering school). I have the slide rule, though I can’t remember how to do anything except multiplication (by the time I got to high school they were using calculators, though I did all my work longhand except in chemistry, where the calculator was required).
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Chas: no slide rules for me (engineer at 22). There’s no need to look up trig functions anymore as you get more accurate results from any piece of machinery you may need. I can interpolate in my head pretty well, though (tables in the back of my thermodynamics book…)
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Xion: I suppose “Wizard of Oz” was one of the first things colorized for tv. Many shows must have still been in black and white for awhile.
I remember when clerks counted out change from the total, instead of a machine telling them how much to hand back.
I remember my children standing on the front seat of our car; being nursed by me in the front seat of the car and sleeping on the seat or floor in the back. I have a picture of the two oldest sleeping with their heads on the hump. For the longest time my arm would automatically go out when we needed to brake.
I remember we were not allowed to take the youngest home from the hospital after her birth, until we had a seat in the car, correctly installed. It was sooooo hot outside and we had a hard time getting it all done correctly.
My sister always wore seat belts until one day she was only going a couple of blocks. She slid on ice and hurt her teeth badly. She said never again without a belt.
My youngest daughter was recently talking to me on a phone and become furious to see someone driving down her neighborhood with a toddler on the front seat. What foolishness!
I remember when almost everyone used their directionals or blinkers as we called them. Today it seems very difficult for some people to make that little effort. It is automatic for me.
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I remember b & w TV with just 2 channels and you had to walk over to the TV to change it. After midnight there was only a test pattern with an Indian chief that displayed right after the star spangled banner. Phone number exchanges began with words. Ours was Butler something or other.
I remember being able to name every car on the road. There weren’t as many manufacturers and you could tell them apart at a distance.
Computerized tests were taken with number 2 pencils and transcribed to punch cards which were sent to white lab-coated priests of the IBM Mainframe who returned your results months later.
I also remember air raid drills in elementary school to prepare us for a Russian Thermonuclear assualt on P.S. 33.
We had a pump attached to the kitchen sink to draw well water, and still had an outhouse although indoor plumbing had just been installed for our one bathroom. I had two sisters so I didn’t get to see the inside of it much.
Only poor kids wore jeans to school.
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KI writes: “Xion: I suppose “Wizard of Oz” was one of the first things colorized for tv.”
It was a movie in 1939, always like that. But it was a treat for me when we finally got a color tv to see the transition.
I remember my father going up on the roof to adjust the antenna, and I really remember my mother wanting to change where the tv sat in the living room. This required my father boring another hole in the floor to bring up the antenna. He built the house and considered drilling holes in his floors (or picture hangers in his walls) as blasphemy.
Ken, where did they take you, or did they have to crawl under your desk for the air raids? I was such a believer that when the siren went off at noon on Saturdays, my teddy and I went under the dining room table.
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I knew some people in Westfield, Mass., who had a rotor on their antenna. They could receive Boston, Hartford or Albany. I was impressed.
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Oh, the air raid drills. I do remember those. I believe we went and sat in an inner hallway.
NJ: I should have said it was probably one of the few things on tv with color at the time.
I remember when girls were first allowed to wear slacks to school, instead of a dress or skirt.
I remember the thrill when we got a third tv channel and then a fourth!
I remember the first time I went out to eat in a nice restaurant. I was in 8th grade. I had won tickets to “The Love Bug” and my mother dropped my sister and I off to see it. I suppose she went shopping. We then went out to eat. Going out was just not something whole families did often then.
My husband remembers the first house he lived in with electricity. He was in 2nd grade!
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Chas,
My dad was an electrical engineer (Georgia Tech, ‘60) and he taught me how to do square roots on his slide rule. Wouldn’t be able to do it now, though.
I remember 10-cent pay phones, 10-cent candy bars and 10-cent deposits on soda pop bottles. My parents, naturally being older than me, remember all of the above costing a nickel.
I also remember our first VCR (a Betamax!), which we got in January 1978.
Remember Nixon’s great 55 mph law?
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Chas, we also had a huge rooftop antenna and a rotary control for it. We could get stations out of both Savannah and Augusta.
I remember once, when teaching high school, a bunch of (older) teachers in the lounge were reminiscing about where they were when Kennedy was shot. After a while, I informed them that my parents hadn’t even met when Kennedy was assassinated.
Yesterday, Cameron and I stopped by a local Graeter’s ice cream shop for an anniversary treat (I had the raspberry chocolate chip if anyone’s interested, and it was great!). The girl behind the register was especially friendly and the radio station in the store was tuned to a classics station. They were playing REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It.” This poor girl (she was all of about 15 or 16) was not familiar with the song, though she thought she remembered seeing the name of the band on her brother’s ipod (I remember when Walkmans were all the rage). Next, U2’s “Mysterious Ways” came on, and she thought she might have heard of U2. Cameron and I sat down at a table that had a picture of Ronald Reagan with a word balloon saying, “Mr. Graeter, give me a scoop of ice cream.” I asked the girl if she knew the reference. She instantly said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” I was impressed.
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I can also give left turn, right turn and stop hand signals. I can drive a car with gearshift and clutch. It’s amazing how many useless things I can do.
I was at work in Maryland when Kennedy was shot. We all stood around listing to the broadcast on the intercom. They let us go early. Nothing was being done. Some began to think something else was behind it when Oswald was shot. Some still do. I think we’ll never know.
In the 1940’s the Battery in Charleston didn’t have the lights they have now. Sailors used to bring their girls there to court. I would sell peanuts there, five cents a bag. I got two cents. I could make a dollar a night. Those guys and girls are in their eighties now and their great grands would never believe what those old folks did.
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Does anyone remember that you could drop a nickle in a pay phone and if you timed it right, you could hit the coin return button as the coin fell inside and you would get your nickle back in the return slot and the telephone would work for a local call too! Never paid for a call. I forget who taught me that trick and I wish i could remember.
Everyone darned socks over a light bulb and sewed ironed patches onto jeans when they got torn. Later they came out with iron on patches All the boys jeans were too short because they outgrew them leg wise before they were worn out and no one could get new ones until they worn out or you had a younger brother to hand them down to. No one wore shoes in the summer time – not even flip flops which had not been invented yet.
The best desert then and now is hand churned home made vanilla ice cream and home made chocolate sauce.
When beer cans came out they were made of unlined steel and my dad and uncles wouldn’t drink the stuff out of them even after they lined the cans with some kind of primer to take the metal taste out of the beer. Us kids were told we couldn’t drink beer until we could bend a steel beer can over using one hand. We practiced real hard and before you know it, we could bend them, but still no beer came our way.
I will never forget the first time my Grandmother went into a grocery store in the big city of Topeka, Kansas. Everything was a marvel as it was for all of us at one time or another when you go to big city for the first time. She was most stunned by the new frozen veggies that came in a paper box when we didn’t have anything but an ice box at home. She couldn’t even talk she was so stunned. When we got in the car and started driving off she said something to my Mom in low voice that I’m sure was unprintable, what ever it was, but they laughed and laughed about it. I’ve always wondered what was so funny.
Tooth paste did not come in a tub, most folks didn’t have many teeth anyway. Shaving cream didn’t come in a can and razors were all straight or double edged.
You always were losing the key to your roller skates but everyone had one so all was never lost for long.
You took a bath every Saturday night in a steel tub whether you needed it or not. Well, sometimes you went two weeks in the winter if it was real cold.
I switched from structural engineeering to Architecture just at the thought of having to spend the rest of my life behind a drawing board chained to it with a slide rule. I was bored to tears and it was one of the best and worst decisions I ever made. Never used a slide rule again. I showed my daughter my collection of various slide rules when she was younger and, when I asked her what she thought they were, she knew what they were called which stunned me. Then she said “How do you play them?” and my faith in youth was restored
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I remember playing hopscotch and jacks. I remember listening to 45’s on my best friend’s portable record player that closed up like a suitcase. (Oh, how I coveted that phonograph.)
TJ- So glad you finally got the Graeter’s raspberry chip. Word on the street is that we’re getting a Graeter’s in the Denver area, and that it’s Oprah’s favorite, for whatever that’s worth.
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I’m 31: I remember $.67 gasoline and bottled milk. I remember our first computer in the early 80’s that plugged into your television set. I also remember my dad saying BetaMax would become the VCR of the future because it was superior quality. He was right about the latter but not the former.
We hid under our desks for post-Cold War drills.
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For air raids the protocol kept changing. First, under our desks, next in an interior hallway. Then some smart teacher noticed the high glass windows and since a direct hit with an H-Bomb that would vaporize the school would also likely send shards of glass on our precious heads, they sent us out in front of the school where we crouched in terror with our arms crossed over our heads and our faces pressed into the the sidewalk where amused pedestrians stepped around us. We didn’t know why, but we knew the Russians were evil.
The milk man came and left full bottles in the metal box on the porch after he took the empties away. Imagine that! We recycled before recycling was cool! Once a week the coal truck would stop in front of the house and deliver a load of coal down a chute into the coal cellar next to the furnace.
In the summer time we’d run alongside the street sprinkler truck to get wet. We had no idea how to open a hydrant.
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Chas #33 “The media, in those days, wanted us to win.”
LOL! That’s a good one!
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I remember when I could…. um…
What were we talking about?
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I remember the next door neighbor shooting a rabbit that had been raiding his garden. Shot him with a .22 rifle and had him for dinner.
And my parents going square dancing on a Saturday night (Mom made her and Dad matching sky blue outfits with black piping.) They’d hire a teen-age girl to baby sit us six kids, or later, when we moved to the same town Grandma lived in, she’d watch us. Since I was the oldest, she’d let me stay up late with her and pop popcorn and make homemade eggnog (I never got salmonella from the raw eggs) and watch old black and white monster movies on our black and white TV.
A chocolate malt at the dairy was a quarter. Or you could put the quarter in a pinball machine and play three games. Or buy a pack of 500? 1000? BB’s for your Daisy Red Ryder down at one of the five and dime stores on the town square.
The only businesses on the edge of town were the car and farm equipment lots. All the other businesses, even lumberyards, were near the town square.
And you could buy sulfur and saltpeter at the drug store. ‘Course, if you were a 12 year old boy, they wouldn’t sell ‘em BOTH to you. You’d have to buy just one, then walk down the street to the OTHER drug store and buy the other one, then go home and grind up a charcoal briquette to complete the shopping list of ingredients for gunpowder.
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I remember people sitting outside on their steps visiting in the evening in the summer. It was steps, not porches, on our street of apartment buildings.
…when the neighborhood music was the ice cream truck and not the “thump, thump, thump” of the speakers in the car of the neighborhood barbarian.
…when I could drive down the street without wishing my kids couldn’t read the bumper sticker or symbol on the car in front of us.
Ladies wore hats to church.
Men opened doors for women.
Thinking I was soooo cool in my new saddle shoes.
Grandma making root beer on hot summer days.
(Horrors) Running down the street with the other neighborhood kids behind the city truck that came around spraying for mosquitos once or twice/summer. The vehicle went slow enough that we could run in and out of the cloud.
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Oh, those old days before safety in cars was so important! Not only did we stand in the car, when we were older we knelt on the back seat facing behind us. In the station wagon, we would leave the back window rolled down for air, then hang our heads out for the extra breeze. I rode all the way from Tucson, AZ to NYC in the back of a Ford Falcon station wagon with the back window all or most of the way down (except when it was raining, then Dad had to stop the car and someone by a back door would run around to crank the window shut). We had no A/C in the car, so the July heat was beyond miserable for my cousin and me (the two smallest on the trip) to bear w/out the window down.
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