Things from my youth you'd never see today...

I used to go down to the store to buy cigarettes for my mother.

My school had a rifle team - they'd bring their guns to school on match days.

My college used to throw a big beer bust for incoming freshmen (and I was a bartender in the campus bar).

None of the moms in my neighborhood had jobs. Only one of them drove a car.

President Nixon ride in a convertible in our small town's Fourth of July parade.

Women frequently went to the market with curlers in their hair, wearing housecoats.

Housecoats.

Once, all the neighborhood kids had to push the fire truck to get it started.

My public school offered free art, music, chorus and band classes. And French, German, Spanish and Italian.

Department stores had ashtrays.

Thank you space program :hi:

oh and rap stars (with their pants up)

The kid wearing a helmet- beaten.

Leaded gas

clap your hands... oh wait.

:o

with the visual. Flap your hands up near your shoulders.

You are going to Hell. (If there really were a Hell, that is.) :evilgrin:

like THAT'S news to me.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History charged no admission.

Movie houses had a Loge.

For an entire year! Granted, in the sixties $50 went a lot further than it does now, but that was still cheap. Lower income students could easily get scholarships, and for the rest of us there was work/study. Community colleges cost something like $15, and came with a student ID that got you lots of discounts - and made it worth the effort to sign up for a single course there if you weren't already in school. This graduating with a mountain of debt phenomenon seems to be a relatively recent thing.

They had to close the balcony in the movie theaters during the Saturday matinées (do they even have those any more?). It was just too tempting for a kid to drop jujubes and pour soda on those below. Other times, those balconies were where teens went to make out.

...you could smoke in that balcony. :D

tuition was fairly reasonable...It wasn't free, but a middle class family could probably afford it.

Search lights advertising when a new business opened.

Sonic booms (things from my youth you never HEAR today).

I'd hear multiple booms per day. A Fighter Interceptor Group was stationed at the AFB and had all sorts of toys inclusing this one:

I miss tubes :cry: :cry: :cry:

and gas under $1 a gallon.

Gee thanks Thomas Midgley.

and check your fluid levels for free after they pumped gas into your tank for you.

Edit to add... and wash your front and rear windows too.

not only Dept. stores had ashtrays
you could smoke in the hospital....

in your room

kids running around at night
playing games and screaming.... having a great time


lost

Leaving the doors unlocked
when you ran to the store.

Leaving your car unlocked no
matter where we went in town.

I recall the women with curlers
and little kids buying cigs for
their moms too.

Most of the time. And I don't live in Canada. Really.

My car's a POS anyway, and after the second time I had to pay for a new window to replace the one the thieves smashed, I just leave it open. The radio doesn't work, and nothing in there would cost as much to replace as a window. Help yourself to my junk mail and coffee cups. You're welcome.

Home door does get locked though. My safety counts, and my dog would probably just wag her tail and try to lick any intruder to death. The cat would demand to be fed.

Fekkin' addicts will
steal anything not
nailed down. x(

Speaking as one geezer to another.
;-)

whew

I remembered candy cigarettes and bubble gum cigars.

:hi:

Fighting...

All the time...

The milkman delivering milk to your home.

our Drive-in theater here just closed a few weeks ago.

I almost never went there, but it was nice to know it was there.

There is still one about 50 miles from here, though.

I think that was something the dairy lobby got passed.
Just post WWII.
Oleo came in a pure white block.
Looked like lard.
There was a packet of orange die that you mixed with it to make it look yellow.

They were a sort of sled, only with wheels, for areas where it didn't snow. Kids lay on their bellies and steered down the sidewalks of San Francisco and Berkeley, where I grew up. No brakes, as I recall - you were supposed to steer your way out of trouble. Those things had to be the biggest Kid Killers in the world: they made lawn darts look benign. I always wanted one, but my parents had more sense. I've actually found them for sale on on eBay, in case anyone is suicidal enough to try it:



Oh, and I remember smoking areas in movies. And drive-in movies, where you hung those heavy metal speakers in the window...and sneaking one or two kids in the trunk in high school.

And cruising The Strip a la American Graffiti. We were the "grinds" in the beat-up VW.

Honest.
:evilgrin:

2 cents, I think.

You can still get
them here, don't
think they are 2
cents any more.

:hi:

:D

RL

that you'd never see today.

We had jarts - never thought anything about them. Creepy crawlers - a rubber kit with metal molds that would get way hot. Vacuu-forms - also way hot. Wood burning kits. Chemistry sets where you could actually blow stuff up.

Hrm... now I wonder if my parents weren't trying to kill us.

A mom was a mom. Anything you did anywhere would get you yelled at or worse, AND you knew word would get back to your own Mom.

I lived in a town where everyone's mom knew everyone else's mom. Couldn't get away with squat. Had to be careful about what you did at school & what you said about what your friends did....after you left the room, your mom would call that kid's mom....

dg

Mine had purple paint.

Box suppers--the women would prepare a boxed meal for two and fancy it all up, and the men would bid on them. The winner got to have dinner with the lady who owned the box.

Stuffed animals that had transistor radios in them.

And I think my cousin still drives into town in her curlers and nightgown, but, of course, she still has the same hairstyle she had in high school in the 50s and lives in the same town she grew up in.

:shrug:

As a young child I used to STAND next to my mom as she drove, sucking my thumb and playing with her hair. When she had to stop short her arm would fly out to prevent me from hitting the windshield.

Oh, and my dad used to smoke in the car.

When I was little, I don't know if they even existed yet. If they did, they may have only been in high end cars, I don't know.

Skateboards with metal wheels. If you ran over a tiny pebble,
the skateboard would stop instantly.

And for some odd reason, that phrase seems to go thru my head a lot-- strange!

What about "AYDS" weight loss product-- that disappeared rapidly once the disease came on the scene!

I remember the "diet lunch" being a bare hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese, and some tomato.

they steam the plant beds with them to jump start the seeds .(incidentally, the early turnip greens, mustard greens, radishes, lettuces, spinach and tomatoes often are steamed in the plant beds along with the tobacco seeds.) This is normally done in late February in Kentucky, when it is still cold.

The beds are framed with railroad ties, muslin is nailed across the top of the beds and the steam engine drives up the outside of the bed and the steam shoots out of the bottom of the engine into the ground and warms it up. The width of the bed is designed to be just about 2 inches narrower than the distance between those two humongeous wheels on the back of the engine. The plants grow under the muslin, which protects from late frost until they are ready to set in the field or garden.

I used to love watching the farmers steam the plant beds.

The picture I posted was from about 1962.

Thanks for that description and illuminating post.

:hi:

usually the farmers shared them..the steamer would be towed from farm to farm. Or, several farmers would pool into one plant bed.

They are very noisy.

We went to a Steam Tractor "rally" in Newburgh, Indiana once. There were quite a few engines there, all spiffed up for show, much prettier than the ones I remember from my childhood.

Hell, I'll give you one anyway.

some time ago. It may be a few days so I will bookmark the thread for reference purposes.

We are talking 1983?

but girls had to wear dresses to school :grr:

warning that someone inside had a communicable disease

trick or treating three or more days before halloween

Everybody had ashtrays on their coffee tables in their homes.

My mom would give me a quarter and send me to the bakery to get a large loaf of bread.

There were sonic booms that would make the windows rattle.

We would get all dressed up to go downtown shopping.

Instead of a credit card, my mom had this metal thing called a "Charge-A-Plate" she used at the department stores.

All the moms wore dresses during the day. They'd wear aprons when working in the kitchen. Nobody wore blue jeans except little boys.

We kids would hang out at the drugstore and read comic books (which were .15 apiece), and they didn't chase us away.

The grownups would have cocktail parties, and everybody smoked, and drank highballs and martinis. They seemed very sophisticated to us kids, who would watch and listen from the top of the stairs.

:thumbsup:

Was it just me, or did the batteries in those things seem to drain almost immediately?

Yep, I had my feet x-rayed numerous times at shoe stores in Georgia in the late fifties and early sixties.

This was back before ripped, ragged, unrepaired jeans were cool. I don't have a problem with the ragged, holes-in-the-knees look; I'm just sayin'...

The more elaborate the design on your patch, the better, or cooler, or whatever. They used to come in cereal boxes sometimes.

I've got a picture somewhere of me and my brother, about seven and five, respectively, wearing jeans with matching knee patches.

We had both!

But I've got a pic of my dad as a teenager with his jeans pegged back up nearly to his knees! That one was a laugher! :-)

I never knew.

Anyway, in the early 60s we were stylin' 6-year olds. :hi:

We had 'em!

Record players that played only 78s
78rpm records, which were the size of LPs, only heavier. They turned really fast and had room for one song on each side. A record album was literally an album, with paper envelopes for each record.
Soap operas on the radio
Everyone walking to school, except for the kids who rode their bikes
No women on newscasts, no black people on TV except as servants or on "Amos and Andy"
Going to a family-owned restaurant and getting a full meal for less than a dollar
Tank model bicycles
TV sets that had to "warm up" before they turned on and had a white point of light in the middle of the screen for a long time after you turned them off
Bathing suits with "modesty panels" on them
Girls being required to wear dresses to school, while boys were required to wear long pants (no jeans or sweats) and a shirt with buttons, tucked in, with a belt.
A new and exciting food invention: TV dinners!
An exciting food that was new to Minnesota: pizza on a cardboardy crust, sold at Woolworths for 15 cents a slice
You could still travel around much of the country by train
Flying was expensive and an adventure, for which you dressed up. The seats were four or five across, with plenty of leg room, and there was always food, even on the shortest flights. The plane had a smoking section.

The few environmentally conscious people drinking from these cans would invariably toss the loose pop-top into the can as they were drinking it, and then had to make sure they didn't end up cutting their tongue before they got done with it!

Teachers could smack the kiddies upside the back of the head.

She would never have been caught dead in the grocery store in curlers and a housecoat, let alone without a fresh coat of lipstick.

And kids used to follow the mosquito fogger on their bikes :scared:

These days, as dark as they are environmentally speaking, I see more butterflies and dragonflies and bald eagles and songbirds.
Just this morning I saw a killdeer a couple of blocks from my house. I never saw them around here when I was a kid. :D

drug stores with soda fountains

electronics kits

pencils with real carbon in the leads

English Racer bicycles

other bicycles with playing cards clothespinned in the spokes

Tester's cement for model airplanes

Brylcreem, which reminds me-- a whole lot of other stuff I'd rather not remember

I'm so glad I found that in the attic...

:hi:

:cry: I remember how exciting it was that he came to our town, I was all of six years of age. Although I didn't get to see him, except on the news, it was a very important day for our city.

So, was shocked (even at 6) that he had his head blown off in Big D.

I remember holding a grudge against Dallas for a very long time. Like the whole city was responsible for his assassination.

Kennedy's speech in Fort Worth: there are 2 parts

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=084_1195743619

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7e1_1195745955

String to play cat's cradle etc. and the stetchable bands you used to play it with your feet called chinese jump rope.

The ancestor of pop rocks. They were alka-seltzer type tablets that you were supposed to drop in a glass of water to make carbonated soda. But we kids always popped those in our mouths and then ran around dripping foam and pretending we had rabies.

hairdryers the size of a canister vacuum!

Being brought up catholic...a women or girl NEVER entered a church without a hat or mantilla on her head....

mikey_the_rat

In S America they used them as hunting weapons. In the US we gave them to 5 yr old to play with.

School clothes and school shoes
Fast food as a rare treat
Cartoons only on Saturday morning
TV test pattern

And



"This is a test of the Emergency Broadacst System ..." BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!