For the over-40 crowd: "Back in my day....."

Back in my day, we listened to music on things called record players. Concert tickets were $5 to really cool shows, and a gallon of milk cost $1.29. TV had three network stations and a few UHF stations that you picked up if your TV antenna was strong enough. Those were the days.... :P

We also didn't have the Internets, cell phones, or eBay. :P

We didn't have BACKS, either!

:grr:

:rofl: :hi:

The Four Yorkshiremen!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

:hi: Thanks, driver8! I've always loved that sketch! :rofl: :D

We typed our college papers and had to count the words, check spelling and grammar, and format them ourselves.

:yoiks: It had a correction tab and everything....and Liquid Paper was my friend.... :P

I typed my college papers on my Dad's old 1946 Smith-Corona "portable" manual typewriter. Corrections were made with a typewriter eraser, and you had to erase the carbon paper, too.

Whippersnapper.

a 1955 IBM Executive, with proportional spacing, in 1/32nds of an inch.

Cost $600 and was over a month's salary for most people. I did hunt and peck at home.

In high school I took typing and learned touch typing on a manual typewriter.

Hated it. It took a long time before computers got fast enough to keep up with me.

I could jam a Selectric after they came out. They would belch and type a hyphen.

Where did you hook up the printer?

:wtf:

Still works just fine, though the ribbon is probably dry.

I still remember the first time I wrote a grad school paper on the computer. It was amazing. I hated typing papers on the typewrtier!

I did use her old electric in high school, though.

...it was through a phone hookup to a mainframe at the nearest major university, and you communicated with the computer via a teletype (like the old wire service machines) where you and the computer took turns typing out information on roll paper.

(and I'm only 43!!)

And I'm only 37.

Didn't use a computer regularly til my senior year of college ('92). Didn't own one til I was 25. It was a second-hand Mac Classic - the cube!

and my junior high (early-mid 90s) made us take a quarter-long typing class on electric typewriters to learn to touch-type.

The first computer course I took used decks of punched cards

and people were PISSED!!

My parents bitched about gas prices.....kinda like they do now. :rofl:

and my grandfather refusing to buy gas from a gas station that charged 27 cents a gallon. He kept driving until he found a place that charged 25 cents---or less.

These same gas stations charged 10 cents for a bottle of Coke or 7-Up out of a "vending machine" that consisted of the bottles standing in crushed ice. Their necks were held in place by metal grooves. When you put a dime in, you could slide a bottle along the groove and into a spot where you could lift it out.

Candy bars were a nickel.

Comic books were a dime.

Of course, $4000 a year was considered a middle class salary, too.

All 4 corners of an intersection had a gas station - and they'd get into wars LOWERING prices! AND they pumped the gas for you, washed your windshield without hesitation, offered to check your oil and tire pressure.........

All for about $.50 per gallon during the "war".

I remember when stations were selling regular for 35 cents a gallon.

It was during a "gas war" between neighboring stations. You could scrape up enough change from the sofa cushions to drive for a week!!

HA!

Bake

being shocked that some places in rural Nevada charged a buck a gallon.

You could tell the make of a car just by looking at it. They didn't have the same design as they do today.

Unless, of course, someone had a Triumph Spitfire. :P

My H had a spitfire that we used to use to go fishing
It was a convertable....


You forgot a HUGO


lost

:hippie:

...was an event -- you'd pass it on the freeway with everyone saying "Wow, look at that!" and gaping about how anyone could make a car that small (and, yes, they were all Datsuns or Toyotas -- Honda was well-known as a good motorcycle maker).

We made fun of that thing (well, the guy was a big dork, so that didn't help our first impression of Hondas).

Ten years later, we all drove Hondas, and made fun of American cars.

there were lots of VWs, Renaults and Brit Fords as well as MGs, Healeys and Triumphs

owned one of those; the front of the car was also the door.

They opened separately from the main window.

They also had radio aerials. I remember how high-tech it was when Grandpa got a Buick with the antenna embedded in the windshield glass!

keys in the car..

And when I started smoking, cigarettes were 46 cents a pack.

Those were the days.

Carly

Honest.

:) My dad tells me about those days.

was a piece of furniture!!!!
AND YOU HAD TO GET UP
TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL

You had to buy it to match your living room



lost

...that were huge, ornate consoles with the color TV in the middle, built-in stereo speakers on each side, and a record player and radio tuner under hinged lids atop each speaker. Of course, the stereo was only for records and FM, since TV would always be mono. If you got a really expensive one, it came with a remote control that worked using ultrasonic sound waves.

While teenage "purists" mocked the console systems and dreamed of putting together a "component" stereo system -- endlessly browsing the Radio Shack or Lafayette Radio catalog for outrageously expensive (by our standards) systems with turntable (including base and cartridge), receiver (including walnut case), speakers, and the coolest thing of all: a reel-to-reel tape recorder so that you could tape all your friends' records.

I got for xmas my senior year of high school.
Damn good amp with 30 CLEAN watts. That's both channels.

Had a big Akai Reel to Reel, cassette deck, amp, mayonnaise jar lid-tuner/receiver, and speakers.

I never knew any other girls who had a component stereo and could hook it together and take it apart. Stereo entertainment consoles were for OLD PEOPLE.

...unless you lived in a huuuuuge metropolis like Los Angeles, you had three channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Period. In L.A., you were graced with several "independent" channels that would mainly show old movies, but you did have channels at 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC), 5, 7 (ABC), 9, 11, and 13 -- an embarrassment of riches. Eventually, you got the UHF bands, but they required a special new television and antenna, and reception generally was awful.

And, of course, until I was about six years old, only NBC had "color TV." I even remember the day when other channels got to use color -- checking out the TV guide to see the little "COLOR" in a box next to the listing.

some as much as a week. The tapes had to come up from the networks. This included sport events!! Try betting on a football game when the score was in the newspaper last week!

I remember our first color TV - the color was awful!

hideous clingy kind of plastic screen that was colored that you put over your black and white TV so you would have "color" TV. It started at the top with red, then yellow, green and blue. Yikes now, but my sister and I thought it was great.

It really wasn't too bad, though, because we only had three or four channels anyway.

Bake

for my first teaching job...rural school...all eight grades...was eighteen with one year of college...

The Rooskies launched Sputnik



Mickey Mantle was in his prime



Gasoline was about $.30

all kinda evened out.

Redstone

we were all gonna' die (insert tears here). My dad seemed especially big at the time...

Air raid drills at school-hiding under your desk or standing out in the hall, facing the wall. Always making sure that your head was covered. Geez, that was so scary.

which was called pot.

PS: And it had lots of seeds, that you had yo clean out of it by crushing the buds on double album covers and letting the seeds collect in the crease.

Those were the days. :rofl:

We tie-died our tee-shirts, and wore Levi Superbell jeans.
Ooooooo, the colors :-)

Edited because I don't self edit

in m back yard!!!
LOVED IT


lost

with the sides slit partway up and colored fabric filled in...and old army field-jackets, od green...and some guys wore those pointy-toed black shoes, "hards"

Just not bell bottoms. Hell, I won't even wear "relaxed fit" these days...

In fact, I was just talking earlier tonight about a meeting I have to go to tomorrow AM--on what is SUPPOSED to be a day off--and I'm thinking a tie die might be just the right touch. My way of expressing rebellion while still keeping "the man" happy, I guess.

Yep, I remember "the man."

I also remember gels that you put over the front of your black and white TV that were stripes of color.

I remember when "Danger, Will Robinson" actually meant something, Gilligan was newly stranded, and Red Skelton closed every show with "May Gawd Bless."

I remember suede. Yep, a whole lotta suede. With FRINGE.

I had a pet rock, a Lady Norelco, AND a mood ring. Oh--and I wore Skinny Dip cologne. (Gawd, did THAT stuff stink. But it still didn't stink as much as Hai Karate.)

Who me? Nah, I'm not THAT old.


Laura

(Me and hubby, then was 1970 - Copper River - check out the fringe........)

and maybe got your mom pregnant. I've said too much. Getoffmahlawn!.

Mornings if you took the Tribune, afternoons if you took the Star. Some people took both.

and the 6th-grade class used to take field-trips there...and you got your choice of an inscribed pen or an outdoor thermometer with logo.

like it is now....

Man, we had attention span back in my day...

What are we talking about....

transistor radio...from Japan. Spent a whole Summer (seemed like it, anyway) listening to Nancy Sinatra sing "The Ballad of Billie Joe", the guy who repeatedly jumped off that damn bridge...

And yes, it was Bobbie Gentry. My brother had the 45.

Used to listen for hours waiting to hear Janis Joplin sing "Me and Bobby McGee."

Nancy Sinatra sang The Boots Are Made for Walkin'....

Nancy Sinatra sang These Boots Are Made for Walkin'....

KFRC and KYA were our top 40 Bay Area stations back then...with "Dr." Don Rose...

sometimes. late, late at night we could get Wolfman Jack for down south..."Heeeyyyyy Babies"...

...since FM was only for classical and "underground" rock. (If you look back, I bet you'll find that the "Top 40" station of your youth now airs right-wing talk. :-( )

Except CKLW...

The Motor City....

They are talk, advise style...

And one is Radio Disney, almost as bad...

They actually played music before Sean Insanity took up residence there.

not hide behind a lot of noise or rapping..

Bought my albums for $2.90, my 45's for 60 cents. Gas was anywhere from 20 to 25 cents a gallon. And we LIKED it.

Yeah!!!!!

listening to the Beatles..."I wanna' Hold Your Hand" etc., and Elvis...the Pelvis...

I can still smell the Coppertone and Hawaiian Tropic...

...because playing a stereo record with a mono pickup would damage the grooves. Mono LPs were generally $1 less than stereo (MSRP of $4.98 mono, $5.98 stereo, always heavily discounted). The strategy worked well for the record companies -- people would originally have a mono rig from back in the fifties; when they made the big move to stereo, they would of course have to go out and buy new copies of all their favorite records.

Kids, of course, rarely bought albums. That was for adults, or at least college students. We bought 45s, which we stored in square cardboard boxes with a carrying handle on top of the hinged lid.

one side for mono, the other for stereo?

I still use my turntable, and my needle went bad last week, so I ordered one from the wonderful information superhighway of Al Gore, and it arrived in time for me to play records with our dinner. It has the 78 needle on the other side if you flip it. Which leads to another thing, which I was discussing with my wife...I came from a family of 5 children. When that happens, you often create your own reality of misinformation among yourselves. (Stick with me - this is germane to your original post). Anyway, all of us kids decided that LP (which was on one side of those "flip" needles) stood for "left pin". (Since one side had to be right and the other left). I think I believed this until I was about 25. Some of my siblings proabably still think that's what LP stands for.

Extended play records had two songs on each side. I have one by the Beatles.

there WEREN'T any). Instead, they played tag, dodgeball, built forts, sandlot baseball, hide 'n' seek, etc. Kids could run around the neighborhood without having to be afraid that some psycho weirdo was going to molest them (yeah, it happened, but not as much as it seems to now).

And Red Rover, Red Rover.

I'm not kidding. No love lost over that game. THey would swing their joined hands down low in order to trip me so I would fall FLAT on my face, HARD which is very dangerous.

Not to mention other forms of aggression like hitting me in the head with a basketball, etc. Ewww.

Red Light!

:woohoo:

We'd spend all our time outside doing that stuff. Every damn night, running around doing crazy stuff. Worst we ever did was throw snowballs at cars on the busy street they couldn't turn around on. Sometimes someone would come back, then the fun would really start. If the guy actually got out and chased us, that was the mother lode. "YOU GODDAMN KIDS! WAIT'LL I GET YOU!" Seems now that most of those guys were probably in on the game. If my car gets snowballed, I hit the brakes and start to back up. Boy, do those kids run!

Childhood obesity was unheard of then. Even the husky kids were just that - husky. They kept up with the wiry kids just fine.

Especially the summer nights, when mom and dad let you stay out until it got dark, sometimes even after it got dark.

Lucky Charms didn't exist yet. The Beatles hadn't landed. Big hair was mandatory. Colonel Sanders was still a young buck.

I actually saw a couple of those chained up outside a local Safeway a few days ago. I had no idea anyone still made them, although the two in question didn't exactly look new. I had to point out to my daughter what I used to ride when I was a few years older than she is now.

I don't miss a hell of a lot about "the old days," but the simplicity factor was indeed a plus.

"Poor?" When I was growing up, "poor" (which we were) meant hand-me-downs from my older cousins and NEVER eating in a restaurant. I didn't have a bicycle of my own until I was about 14, and never ate at a restaurant until about then either.

Now, "poor" means that you don't have the "unlimited minutes" plan on your cellphone, and you have to watch the TV (which is your own set, and in your own room) in REGULAR OLD format, because you're too "poor" to have a widescreen HDTV.

If that makes me an old fart, so be it.

Redstone

and she ordered for us at restaurants (about as often) because she knew how much she had in her wallet. Usually grilled cheese sandwiches.

There was no Tupperware yet but that's okay because there were no leftovers. lol

How scary was it when she first started to drive after a year of not driving? I'd bet it was REAL scary.

Redstone

lol

my boyfriend, actually still had a

Party line!!!!

remember those????
LOL


lost

at the Oakland CA Induction Center.

:rofl:

:rofl:

:D

I spent the night before at the "London Lodge" trying to eat enough bananas to get my weight up high enough to make the physical...I know, this seems counter-intuitive to many from that day...too many "Combat" episodes; (reality came real quickly after that)...wish I could get some of that weight off, now!

He was eventually discharged for stuttering and spent the remainder of his time as a company clerk because they found out he could type. That and planting ice plants somewhere in Monterey.

place for basic training in Winter...seems like it rained almost every day. And, as I was disappointed to learn, "they" don't "stay in the gym" on a rainy day :D I still remember standing in the pouring rain in January singing "Tiny Bubbles..." at the top of our lungs.
I'm glad your son made it through the whole "experience" ok. :)

were there around the same time. The world is really small, isn't it? He had nothing but good things to say about the men he lived and worked with. They gave him an honorable discharge with a medal for marksman ship even though the only weapon he handled was a Smith Corona. Crazy days.

I was only there for Basic Training, November 1972-January 1973. It was the coldest Winter in many years, as my good fortune would have it...it actually snowed on us once; snow at Monterey! Run down to the ranges at the beach and stand in the rain waiting to jump into those rifle-pits up to yer knees in water...ahhh, it's a young man's thing.

These days just jumping into the pit would probably injure something...forget the run... :D

M19, please! (That was our number.)

Redstone

I still remember it...BA6-2566...and it was a party line...

:D

WE6-1212

..only now you have to use the area code before it.

wall phone with a cone shaped ear-piece that you lifted off the side hook. 522"ring"4. 4 rings meant it was your call, not the others on your party line! And you always listened a few seconds to make sure none of the others on your party line were listening. (Late 40's, early 50's)

I can only remember a few of the word from which the letters were derived. CApitol, CLinton, MAdison, RIchmond, ATlantic

This country is the best country to be poor in on this planet. Cars, cricket cell phones, Broadband Internet,housing, food, leap, etc. I could go on.

So you could walk around the kitchen while you talked.

Those new-fangled VCR machines cost a thousand dollars, and the microwave was too big to fit on the counter.

Back in my day, we walked to school and liked it. If it was raining, we carried an umbrella. If it was snowing, we wore boots. Big, clunky boots that fit over our shoes.

Back in my day, "Don't touch that dial!" made sense. Somebody's mom could tell you to knock off the mischief you were up to without getting sued. We had banana seats on our bikes.

Back in my day, you had shredded wheat and spoon-size shredded wheat. None of this foo-foo maple and brown sugar or strawberry cream business.

Back in my day, 40 was over the hill and 60 was ancient. Everyone's grandma had gray hair and a fluffy middle. Radio stations had disk jockeys. We wrote our school papers on typewriters.

Cyberspace was unheard of, and a "cell" was something you studied in biology.

Yeah. Back in my day.

you left the phone behind.

...with the dial in the handset. A sign of being really modern was when you got your first phone with pushbuttons instead of a rotary dial.

Rotary dial, with the little "night light". A nod to my adolescence, except my phone was baby blue. :)

called Western Electric which made the phones, which had the weight, and durability, of a bowling ball.

Now they have adults doing that job driving their cars on the route. I used to leave the house at 5:00am EVERY morning and travel 10 miles on my bike in order to get my route done. I used to have to go back to the house 4 times on Sunday to resupply due to the weight. I was allowed to "collect" by myself in the evening even if it was dark out. Nobody was worried about "abductions" back in those days. Life was good in 1973!
I lived 3 miles from my High school and walked it most every day, I enjoyed the walk more than riding the school bus. NO MATTER WHAT age a child was, their parents NEVER picked them up at school unless they were in trouble.
I was able to walk through town at 12 y/o with my .22 rifle and nobody had a stroke worrying about it. McDonald's was a rare treat and the only time I was given Coca-cola was when I was seriously sick and dehydrated, the drink of choice was water or iced tea. We played outside every day of the year, we went places by ourselves, we took chances, we got hurt from time to time, we sucked it up and our friends laughed at our misfortune. Nobody worried about self esteem and being respected. We thought that was something you earned.
Times have changed and not for the better. Kids these days aren't what they were 30 years ago.

It was a busy couple of years. I wasn't NEAR as old then as I am now.

Hey, you had that BIG OLD BASKET on the front of your bike to carry those papers, didn't you? I remember those.

Redstone

I used to carry about 40 Sunday papers fully loaded. It was difficult to park the bike while you walked up to the screen door and placed the paper inside. ( A sturdy tree always helped!).

To this day I remember where I was when the news announced Saigon had fallen. I was on the way to play in a hockey game right after I had finished my route on a Saturday. I remember my Dad turning up the radio when he heard "Stand by for a special report"............ We were in my Dads Chevy (which DID NOT have seat belts or an airbag for that matter).

I used to have a crush on our paper boy....
I answered the door when he came to collect :)

nothing ever came of it!!!!LOL\

Now the deliver the paper in cars... I have NO idea who throws the paper in my driveway!
Its a friggin business...


lost

and the chocolate factory. My sister used to LOVE to go out collecting for my route and I would let her. (Less work for me)

One day she went to a house and this senior lady answered the door and she cried,"It's Mrs.Teevee!! It's Mrs.Teevee!! George,George,come quick, it's Mrs.Teevee!!

You have to be at least 18 with an insured automobile. They don't have to collect anymore either, they bill by mail now.

I hear ya about the guns too...cops caught me and 2 friends with shotguns (age about 15) hunting dove on the tracks by the pound...he laid on his horn till we turned around and came back...he then told us we couldn't be shooting dove there and suggested we go out to Stewart's property 'cause the old man didn't care if kids took guns out there...man, has that ever changed. Stewarts property is all covered with houses these days.

and some other kids got the same idea, stole our flyers and replaced them with theirs. It was brutal at the time. We did get some contacts and made some firework,mini-bike gas, comic book money!

Except for gang-dominated neighborhoods, where stray bullets are a possiblity, I would bet that kids are no more in danger of being abducted off a neighborhood street than they were in the 1950s.

Hell, kids WERE abducted off neighborhood streets and murdered in the 1950s, but those stories were NEVER given hysterical national coverage 24 hours a day. They were strictly local tragedies.

So all kids played outside, and there was safety in numbers.

Why did I hear of a shooting in California this week where one person was shot dead? It was NEAR a college but why did I hear about it in Tennessee? If you went by the "News" reports you would think there has been a massive increase in homicides. If you look at the statistics gun homicide has dropped by almost 50% from its high in "the good old days".

FEAR SELLS!

Nowadays they would get sued.

No school teacher or counselor gave a damn about MY self esteem. Other kids would shun me in PE, or hit me in the head with basketballs, and in art class they would DESTROY my artwork, so I would flunk. One time they tore my name off the corner of a poster in the hallway that I had made.

There was a poster contest that I won. Except that when they found out I was in junior high instead of high school, they refused to give me the prize. I was crushed.

I thought I was a failure for life because I came in second in the local round of the Scripps-Howard spelling bee when I was ten years old in the 7th grade.

My mother tried to imprison me in the house, and we lived in postwar suburbia where there was lots of traffic and cars. I couldn't go run around in the woods. There were no woods. She got mad at me when I "ran off" to play, as she put it.

We never took vacations. I nagged and yelled about going to Six Flags in Arlington, TX, because that was the closest amusement park. No, we couldn't go anyplace. Vacations were for rich people. People who got on a plane and went someplace on a whim were "frivolous".

I nagged and even quoted child psychologists to try to get an allowance. Didn't do any good.

I didn't get a new storebought dress until I was in high school because I threw a hissy fit. We weren't that poor. Dad drove used cadillacs and was a lawyer but his clientele was poor. Mom gave me ammonia perms that scabbed my scalp. She wanted me to look like Shirley Temple. I would come home crying when the kids laughed at me for my Shirley Temple hair. Mom continued to do this. I didnd't find out I had wavy hair until I was 19 and got a good haircut. Then in high school she wanted me to wear lipstick, and the kids made fun of me for that. I didn't get any dates if I wore makeup, so I decided it was a big farce.

We never went anywhere but grandma's where she bossed me and everybody else around. She didn't like my not eating her crummy food, she didn't like me sleeping on the floor, she didn't like the fact that I couldn't cook. Everything I did was wrong. All this was set against the background of saying occasionally "you're so smart, you'll be a doctor some day". While bitching about my lack of domesticity. I was supposed to know how to wait on a man hand and foot, because I was a girl. I wanted no part of it. Being a girl meant you were powerless and stupid, I thought.

They could not have grounded me in high school, because I had no social life. I couldn't get a date because I was smart. I was busy going to school and playing in orchestra. I didn't have a car or a driver's license, and neither did my orchestra friends. We were all too busy. I didn't get a license because I was scared of driving in the city and knew I would get killed. So I waited until I was 21 and a senior in college to get a license.

The other redneck kids would pick on me and I would go home crying. Mom did not offer me an alternative. She would not let me join the Girl Scouts. That was the only place I ever went where the other girls didn't pick on me. That's because there was adult supervision. I begged and pleaded, but no deal.

When Mom and Dad decided to get mad at me for running off, they would get a bamboo switch and run down the sidewalk screeching my name.

My friend and I would hide between the houses and laugh at them.

I alternated between complete horror and dread and laughing at them, because I could run faster than the old folks.

Like I said, mom wanted to keep me imprisoned so she could sit around and tell me what a bum my father was. I did not believe her, ever. I idolized him because he was a good man and she wanted to be a princess and eat bonbons. She didn't appreciate what she had.

What good old days?

I guess yours were better.

A woman was embarrassed if she found out her slip was showing.

(I'll bet some of the younger DUers don't know what a slip is!)

Flip-flops were worn at the beach, at the pool, and in public showers, not to the office.

If the president addressed the nation in prime time, there went your night's TV viewing. :cry:

The March of the Wooden Soldiers and The Wizard of Oz were shown on TV once a year, and we all watched them.

Oatmeal and grits were cooked in a pot on the stove, not in a microwave.

Going out for a hamburger was a treat, not a daily routine.

We only drank soda at parties and cookouts, not as a daily routine.

I'm a baby boomer and I approved this message.:D

Watching The Wizard of Oz and seasonal specials was a HUGE treat.

by Norelco...where Santa would ride the Norelco razor down the snowy hill.

Ohio, Indiana or PA?

And pop was also a treat for us during Wizard of Oz. My brother and I got to split a TALL glass bottle of Pepsi and have a bowl of popcorn.

And pop bottles were still returnable...remember the turnstiles at the grocery for bringing your cartons of glass bottles back?

:)

My friend always has a house full of visitors whenever he got off of work and on the week-ends. His five-year-old is always playing the Wizard of Oz and the adults always end up sitting down and watching it. In some cases, day after day! Hell, even I catch myself watching it every time I am over there. It seems to never get old.

not only did not have to put a ZIP code on the envelope (there weren't any), you didn't even have to write the town or state name.

You'd address the envelope as follows:

Joe Smith
123 Maple St.
Town.

Redstone

I remember seeing envelopes at my Gramma's house that were addressed to:

Lois Smith
General Delivery
Milan

back in the 1940's. They are addressed to her in Hollywood, California, (no street name), and she got them!!

...and came before the state name (that's name, not two-digit abbreviation, which came in at the same time as zips; if you wanted to use shorthand, each state had a longer abbreviation which everyone knew even though it wasn't set in stone). For example, the last line of a letter sent to me would read Los Angeles, 64, Calif. When zip codes came in, what everybody noticed was that our old zone became the last two digits of the zip, so that "64" became "90064."

Especially in the rural areas...

Your father sounds like my kind of guy!

When I was very young, in the early 60's. We actually shared our phone line with a couple other families. When you made a phone call, you picked up the receiver, and gave the operator the number you wanted to call.

and the sealed cubby hole is still there where the two units shared one phone. If you answered and it was for someone in the other unit, you would holler through the hole that the phone was for them. My Grandparents still live there and they were the first one on the block to get a push button phone and my Mother and Aunt would win radio contests because they could dial faster than everyone else.

We shared our party line with the whole neighborhood. Our party line had nine parties.

There were two "ends" of the line, and we only heard the rings for our end.

Our ring was one long. Other possibilities were one long and one short, two short, three short, and four short. That's how you could have nine parties on one line!

She is fifty something now, but her house still had the crank phone. One long, three shorts, etc. was her number.

We didn't have 24-hour "news." We booked airline tickets by calling the airline or travel agency instead of online.

of course, that job doesn't exist anymore.

Kenmore 1474

Ours was 401, and my grandparents' was 402. I remember being so excited when we got a 7-digit number, but no one could remember them!

We lived in the country, no street addresses, just rural route numbers. I see that now all the roads where I used to live have street names--bummer. What's the point of living in the country if you can't be on a country road?

My mom taught me from 1st through 3rd grade, before integration. We had 12 kids, Grades 1 though 8, in one room, and Mom was the only teacher. The mother of one of the students came in every day and fixed lunch for us. Mom and I did all the custodial work (okay, mostly her, but I helped when I wasn't practicing the piano because we didn't have one at home). The school was big to have had 12 students, and it also served as the community center. We had a dinner every month--always potlucks, but in the summer it was ice cream socials. The men would sit underneath the trees out front and crank the ice cream makers while the women fixed the rest of the dinner. We had box dinner auctions (does anybody do those any more)? They were so much fun. At Christmas we had a party with a play and poems and songs, and every family got two paper grocery sacks of goodies, one full of hard candy and the other full of nuts, as well as bags of oranges and grapefruit.

Of course, much of that was before integration. The town I grew up in was at least 75% African-American. When I started the 4th grade, we moved across the road to the "black" school, because it was newer and much nicer, even though it was much smaller. We still used the old school for community events, and it's still being used today. The community events I spoke of earlier, as you can well imagine, were all white.

But all in all it was a good childhood. People got along. If there were any racial problems, I don't remember seeing it. When we integrated, we had both black and white teachers, and they were all great. It was a nice place to grow up in.

25 cents a pack.:shrug:

would always return from a trip with a small pack of cigarettes that the airlines provided to the passengers. In first class, they would even emboss the passenger's name on the pack! My dad didn't smoke, but he'd give them to his friends who did.

They banned pipes way before they banned smoking ciggys.

And cars with children in them. Who were not wearing seatbelts. Or in car seats.

One of the characters is an usher at a movie theater at the mall, and he is telling the patrons..."Smoking upstairs and to the left..Smoking Upstairs and to the left"...early 80's I believe.

...to light up a cigarette at the bus stop -- all the other kid's jaws would drop, and they'd be looking at you as if you were really grown-up. Soon, a couple of other kids would start doing the same, and they'd gather together in a circle as the "cool group," apart from the others, always ready to quickly hide their cigarettes in case one of their fathers drove by on the way to work.

and seeing the JR.HIGH kids smoking dope and cigs. This was JR.High, and they looked like adults then. The court yard was always full of empty Marlboro packs.

back in my day

:hi:

always wore it really short, but that didn't prevent her from ironing it. She scorched her scalp more than once.

flip it over the ironing board and mom would iron it.

then there was the times that i would put it up in ponytail and roll it around an orange juice can and clip it with some bobby pins.

but, short curly hair,,,poor thing...burning her scalp

iron it. My poor friend. The "mean girls" would call her "frizz" because her hair would go from ironed to frizzy in no time. It must have been hell at a time in which long, straight, and parted in the middle was the only acceptable style - at least that's what a glance at my high school yearbook seems to indicate.

:rofl:

we bought bottled cokes out of those ice-chest-lookin'-things where the bottles were suspended on racks by their necks (10 cents)

My dad would drive around complaining 'cause he "dang-sure wasn't gonna' pay 29 cents" for a gallon of regular

The limit for trout was 10 (down from 15)

A sunday drive was considered a cheap form of family entertainment

We still had flags with 48 stars

"Lids" were 10 bucks, 4-fingers, stems and seeds included--and it was almost always brown, and made ya' laugh a lot.

The Army was looked upon with distaste (as I vividly remember when I came home from overseas)

Captain Kangaroo was big-time on the old black and white; my grandparents had a color set(Magnavox) and every Sunday night we went there, and I was subjected to heavy doses of Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller...which probably explains alot about my current therapy...

My buds and I used to hang out outside the local liquor store on Saturday night, hoping someone would buy us a case of beer if we gave them a six-pack...

Every Thursday night was official cruise-night", also known as "cruisin' the 'J'"...and if you know where that is then you know where I grew up...Saturday nights were cool, too...and the cops were pretty cool about it, which is not the same as saying no one ever got in trouble...

You could roam the hills and fish the streams around town without getting chased off by some super-rich, lawsuit-wary, out-of-town transplant...usually

A back seat full of 8-tracks...

The certainty that you were never going to die...

And washed your windshield and checked the oil and radiator. And there were gas wars. They gave stuff to the kids. Sinclair had a dinosaur.

you know, the kind that sometimes you found strange things in, like green army men, etc.

but it didn't smoke so terribly for the price

and the $40 bag of "Colombian" was killer shit :rofl:

that were PLENTY big enough to have a good time

a 4 finger "lid" for $10!

and you could get high enough and you weren't broke.

Not talking about one hit can't get off the couch stuff, just stuff you could roll up a few doobies and smoke em with your friends and you'd have a couple of hours of being high enough

those were the days!

stems and seeds included...mostly made ya' laugh alot and get the munchies...used to sneak into the fridge for my mom's chilled home-canned apricots. Oh, mannnn....

And collect the seeds in film cannisters, in case you wanted to try growing your own.

to keep working the stuff up so the seeds would roll down...I actially had the top of a shoebox that worked great...

standing with hand on the knob waiting for the older kids to decide which of the three channels to watch.

You'd graduate from high school and you would go to work, or you would go to college, an in my experience with your parents' assistance (usually student loans with mom & dad filling in the gaps). However, either way, you were pretty much on your own as far as making decisions and choices.

By the time I was 15, I would've never considered spending Spring Break with my parents...and they would've been just as miserable, as well.

Now, we have friends who have kids in college, and they're even busier with their kids' lives than they were when the rugrats were in high school. They travel nearly every other weekend to football games, parent weekends, and picking their kids up for a big spring break vacation in Jamaica.

I was glad to be out of the house when I was 17, and my parents were just as glad, hanging off the chandeliers glad, to have me out.

better in retrospect than it did at the time...the whole parents-signing-for-me-so-I-could-enlist-in-the-Army-at-17-thing has lost some of it's pain. :toast:

We went places without cars! And when we were kids, we played OUTSIDE!

And you didn't type commands on a keyboard. You typed them on a huge machine that punched holes in index cards. You put the cards in correct order in a shoe-box, and hoped you didn't trip while carrying the box across campus to the computer (which was usually down). If you spilled the cards, it took hours to put them back in correct order...

Probably why I never majored in Engineering.

Oh yeah, and we didn't have pocket calculators. We proudly clipped our slide rules to our belts to proclaim our geekhood.

(Occidental, of Jack Kemp, Terry Gilliam, and Barack Obama fame) to see "the computer", which took up the whole room, and looked pretty much like the main set of the "Time Tunnel"

There was a big bank of windows at street level, and that's where the computer was! You could see the tape reels turning!

radio we used to listen (with lots of static) to our favorite radio stations playing the same "Top 40" hits over and over again. If we wanted to hear a particular song and did not own the single or album, we had to wait until the DJ played it.

Also, we took off on our bikes or on foot to our friends' houses and our parents had no idea where we were, but they knew we'd be back by supper time. They did not feel the need to entertain us and they only drove us when the place we needed to be was not within walking distance (which was over a mile at minimum).

If our parents did need to fill up the tank, the price was around thirty-four cents a gallon, and it came with "blue chip stamps" which we pasted into books and exchanged for cookware or other household items.

And on summer nights we'd head to our local drive-in movie theatre, try to find a speaker that worked, and settle in for a double feature in the back of our parents' station wagon.

It obviously wasn't all innocent and idyllic. I remember the Watts Riots and the assassination of the Kennedys and MLK. Those were tumultuous times. I'm glad I'm old enough to have lived through them.

there was no such thing as remote control. Most people had black-and-white tee vees. Tee vee went off the air right after Johnny Carson and there was nothing but a test pattern after the national anthem.

Back in my day, my first job paid 1.80/hr. I nearly died when cigarettes went up to 1.00/pack and I swore I was gonna cut down on driving when gas went over .99/gallon.

Microwave ovens were something that someone made up for Star Trek.

and not worry about being kidnapped or molested and watch a double feature monster matinee, buy popcorn and Good and Plenties and go to Isleys and get a Skyscraper Cone all for about 60 cents.

but I do remember going to the movies on Saturday afternoons for 50 cents.

*sigh*

two movies for 35 cents. I remember the little 8 ounce bottles of Coke were about 7 cents, then they came out with Lotta Cola and RC in 16 ounce bottles for I think 10 cents. The Homemade Ice cream store that I still live close to charged 5 cents a scoop, now it's a $1.50 a scoop. Remember the old Sinclair gas pumps that had a glass on top with balls that spun around when the pump ran?

that pretty-much started coming to an end in our area when Zodiac started doing his thing...at least, we got a lot more careful about it.

I never could figure out what the other stuff meant.

color targets.

Redstone

Cigarette machines ALWAYS charged way more for smokes than the gas station or convenience stores. I paid ninety cents for cigarettes at the gas station, and it doesn't seem like it was that long ago. And I remember when cigarette machines were everywhere!

Listening to Jean Shepard on WOR.

Back in the day.

She's got freckles on her,
But she is nice...

"Springtime for Hitler and Germany"...

Get into that big processional,
Step inside the small confessional.
There the man who'd got religion'll
tell you if your sin's original...
Ave Maria, Gee it's good to see ya,
Doin't the Vatican rag...

Another Shep fan! Must have lived in NY area in your youth!

:toast: :hi:

I keyed off the wrong post (I think). I DID used to listen to my little red plastic transistor under my pillow at night, but didn't get Shep; HOWEVER, I do have several of his books. I was introduced to Mr. Shepherd in my youth, being one of the few guys in my group who actually READ the stories in Playboy (plus the pics, of course). Ahhh..."Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories"...brings back memories of my own.
:D :toast: (edit to fix smiley)

...the coolest thing was to be able to afford flying in a jet! None of those little "short-haul" aircraft, either -- a "jet" meant a 707 or DC-8 flown by big-name airlines such as Pan American or Trans-World Airlines, both sadly long gone. They seemed huge -- no one could imagine airplanes bigger than those.

But flying by jet meant you had "arrived"; it was not for nothing that trendsetters and celebrities were known as the "jet set." And the coolest was when jets started offering "in-flight movies" (either projected on a temporary screen set up at the front of the cabin, or shown on a number of black-and-white TVs hung from the luggage racks) and music channels listened to over those awful plastic-tube headsets. But, for us, it was the lap of luxury!

even on domestic flights.

Seats were five across, two on one side, three on the other, so they were also a reasonable width.

If there was a delay, the airline was extremely apologetic. On my family's trip to Europe (1967), we were supposed to fly from London to Oslo, but as we were sitting in the boarding area, a gate agent came out and said that the flight would be delayed for two hours due to mechanical problems. Therefore, she said, we were invited to follow her into a side room where we would be served lunch. They had a buffet of assorted sandwiches (on good bread), tea, and pastries.

Even back in the 1980s, I was on a flight that had to circle the airport for nearly an hour, and the pilot came on and announced free booze for everyone as well as 500 extra miles into the accounts of all the frequent fliers.

Before deregulation, you'd get hotel and meal vouchers if you were delayed overnight, even if the cause was weather related.

I recall that this changed rather suddenly, because my brother was trapped overnight at O'Hare on his way back to graduate school from Christmas break with not enough money for either a hotel or a full meal at airport prices.