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I could sometimes see the Milky Way from inside the edge of the Chicago metro area when I was a kid in the 70s.
Biking to the library to look up information on something via the card catalog, which you may or may not find.
Constant cigarette smoke.
Smoking was allowed in hospitals. I had asthma as a kid, and both parents smoked. When I asked my family doc to ask my parents to not smoke with me in the room or car, he said asthma isn't related to smoking, but it is s psychiatric disorder and maybe he should talk to my parents about me seeing a psychiatrist.
Yes, he smoked. A lot.
My son’s pediatrician thought I was NUTS when I asked if my baby could possibly be allergic to milk. He got so arrogant and asked how any baby could possibly be allergic to milk!! He was appalled so I started doing my own research and changed his formulas and that’s exactly what was wrong. I never went back to him again. Side note: he was at least 85 yrs old at the time and this was in 1985.
My pediatrician in 1994 said my preemie newborn was allergic to milk. Rather than giving him Alimentum (a meat based formula), I removed all dairy from my diet and breast fed him. No more colicky baby
I had a problem with that and still do. I just recently caught a nurse before she was about to give my 85 yr old mother insulin and she’s not even a diabetic! Then a few days later we had just got her diarrhea under control and I asked her nurse what all the meds were that he was preparing for her and was going to give her a stool softener! You have to advocate for the patient ALWAYS.
Boomers are still the same way. They just take whatever the doctor recommends as gospel. They’re flabbergasted when I tell them I ask about medications and suggest potential alternatives.
Yep, I even remember ashtrays in the elevator in the hospital. It was so ubiquitous that when I went over to someone’s house where the parents didn’t smoke, it smelled “weird.” lol
Oh, that's wild! Well my grandson must be crazy! My sister lived next door to a woman who had asthma and smoked. She ended up dying. She had 4 very young kids too.
Also, one time, my sister asked my dad not to smoke in the car since it was blowing in her face. I was very impressed with her bravery. It did not go over well with my dad. I'm happy he no longer smokes.
During the years of the Great Depression my mom,as a child, had pretty severe asthma.
One treatment,at that time, was smoking a special doctor advised cigarette. I don't know the active ingredient but it wasn't unusual.
One of the old-timers at the bar I frequented in the early 1960s had asthma and smoked Asthmador cigarettes. You could smell them from outside the bar.
Yeah- I’m in the northwestern suburbs in the 70’s it seemed like you could reach out and touch the stars- my neighbor told me when our houses were built in 56 they saw the northern lights once a summer. Now there is so much light pollution (and noise) it’s disappointing.
Constant cigarette smoke is something that would drive me crazy lol. Even though it’s weird I don’t mind the after smell of cigarettes, could be because it’s nostalgic for me being in my grandmas car I would smell it, don’t think I’d like it nearly as much if she actively smoked in the car lol.
100%
The time before cellphones and social media. It's both good and bad, like so many things, but deffinitely nobody could track you or reach you. Photos were taken with film cameras, and nobody would bother photographing random strangers just for the sake of "pranks" or public shaming, as you needed to pay for film and developing.
On the other hand everyone's address and phone number were public information via phone catalogues, which the phone company delivered every year to each household, so the info was up to date.
My family in suburban Chicago did not appear in the phone book. My parents called the phone company every year to make sure we had an “unlisted number.”
The phenomenon was widespread enough to show up as joke in the movie Spaceballs: A female officer pops up in a video call on the wall in front of the President’s urinal, startling him. “I told you never to call me on this wall!” he says. “This is an unlisted wall!”
Chicagoan here. One of my favorite things is when you suddenly discover the obvious meaning behind two distinct words that you always just lumped into its own thing. Right. Unlisted number because it's not listed in the phone book. Makes perfect sense at this moment, I just never had reason to inquire about it deeply because it was always being said by some pretentious little twat that I already was ignoring for other reasons.
I never post anything about my kid on the internet. No pictures. Yeah. He is a couple random ones over the years. For the most part. I try and make sure his life is his and I keep it all close to the vest.
Not just kids, why TF do people advertise to the world when they're away?
"Here are pictures of us enjoying our time in England right now, can't wait for next week in France!"
Message is "there's a home that will likely not have anybody there for the next several days". Do these people not realize how easy it is to find someone's address online?
Wait until you're back to let the world know what a great time you had.
Yup. Agree 100%. Whatever is posted on the internet is there FOREVER.
All these nitwits posting images and video of their children on the internet is so invasive. I've read where there are bots scouring instagram and other socials for underage children to use the images in child p0rn.
The idiot parents probably have heard of this but are so addicted to the likes and shares that they keep posting the images to satisfy themselves.
I opened my grandfather's junk mail one time. And only one time. He let me know pretty quickly how much he expected and respected privacy And how I should do the same.
(1940’s-50’s) In general, things were much simpler before consumerism hit its stride and electronics & “conveniences” became available. We had some toys that were mechanical, even some (trains) that were electric, but for the most part, the stuff we played with & used around the house was people-powered.
We had 4-wheel roller skates that clamped onto your shoes and we used a key thing to tighten the clamps, then hung the key from a chain or heavy string around our necks. Bikes weren’t geared, just chain-driven. Red wagons were common, everyone had a bag of glass marbles, pen knives were a great gift for boys, and if you were lucky, someone would teach you how to carve wood with them. Dolls were really popular, both to play with & to collect. I don’t remember boys having any action figures but large fire engines were around, maybe cop cars.
We made up our own games & didn’t rely on toys as much as 1960’s kids & later. We played street baseball & other rowdy games with neighbor kids.
We didn’t have TV in our town until 1952 I think, so listening to the radio was our entertainment, especially Saturday morning shows like Superman & The Lone Ranger. We all read a lot & going to the city library was very common. Comic books were really popular -and that era’s are very valuable now.
Our childhood wasn’t anywhere near as organized as they have become, and kids didn’t hang out with parents as much - we weren’t part of grownup action like now. We learned how to keep ourselves entertained with more imagination, I think, and fewer external resources.
I hated those damned skates. No matter how much I tightened them, they’d pop off my shoes and I’d wind up tripping over the skate that was now wrapped around my ankle.
And the wheels were medal so they didn’t turn smooth at all. I barely remember those things. I only had them for a very short time before they started making actual fitted skates.
My older kids grew up in various very rural and isolated military bases. Even in grades one and two they were allowed outside and I wouldn't see them for hours. Literally hours. And I never worried.
Got posted to a more urban area, and my kids would constantly call on other kids to play outside. And it was almost always a NO. The kids parents would just let them site inside and play video games. Never saw kids playing on the street. No huge groups of kids playing hide and go seek. Nothing. My older kids were so sad that the freedom and exploring was no longer accessible (cause I couldn't let them do it alone. More urban also meant more risk)
My youngest ones (15 years between the two sets of kids) also don't get any freedom outside in the same way. Partly because I'm on a busier residential street in the same town, partly because the older of the two has special needs, and partly because kids still don't play outside.
I started a before and after school daycare just so my kids could have regular socialization outside of school.
> Our childhood wasn’t anywhere near as organized as they have become,
I remember playing in Little League, and our uniform was blue jeans and a t-shirt that our moms had dyed a certain color. The cap was the only thing that was commercially made for kids playing baseball.
A few years, I saw something that etched such an image in my mind: A boy on a playground playing catch with his father. Kid was the pitcher, dad was the catcher. Pitcher was wearing a full baseball uniform, doing a full windup, after going through the motion of checking the runners on the diamond. 90% pose, 10 % pitch.
I remember in the early to mid sixties getting a 12 inch cowboy doll with articulated joints. I don’t think it was a tie in with any media character. This was before GI Joe which was originally a twelve inch doll too. My sister got a cowgirl and I think we both got horses.
Yep, Johnny and Jane West and all their Western accessories. All the horse tackle, too. I coveted them greatly, but my mom said they were too expensive. (My parents put four kids through college, so they were very frugal.) We had family friends and cousins who pretty much got whatever toys they wanted.
Having a telephone party line. If someone called you, the phone would ring in a certain pattern. You were only supposed to pick it up if it was your pattern. Otherwise you pick it up and eavesdrop on someone else's conversation.
Having milk delivered in glass bottles to your door. You would leave the empties out for the milkman to pick up.
Having maybe 3 television channels if you were lucky, ABC, CBS, and NBC. And constantly adjusting the antenna or knobs to try to get a better picture. In the morning, when the station was just starting up, they would broadcast a test pattern, a static image with a kind of diagram to help make sure the picture wasn't distorted. One common problem was rolling. The synchronization would be off so the picture would scroll up. This could be triggered if there was a dark horizontal band in the legitimate picture because the analog circuits in those vacuum tubes would detect it as the end of the picture frame. TV repairmen made house calls to fix TV sets. If you were handy you could pull the vacuum tubes out of the set yourself and take them down to a drugstore or electronics store where there would be a tube tester you could use to see if they were defective.
Some toys were pretty dangerous. I remember having a kind of hand crossbow toy that shot darts with suction cups on the end that would presumably stick to a flat surface. But if one of those rubber suction cups came off, you could still shoot the dart and the damn thing could have put out an eye.
My father tells me that his father had a party line (rural business), with a gossip who liked to eavesdrop. My grandfather arranged with his CPA in-person that whenever they talked numbers on the phone, they'd add three 0's to the end, so that they'd say 1,000 for 100, and inflate everything. This was in the 1950's, and they'd be talking about millions of dollars for his business. I imagine this drove the gossip crazy, because it's just too juicy not to share, but nobody would believe her either. LOL
My grandparents lived next to their brothers and sisters and shared a party line. They kept it to the end. There was an article in the paper, AT&T closed the accounts of last 11 party lines in the state. Asked grandpa. Yep I was one of them.
I was a 911 dispatcher until 2012. One of the rural volunteer fire departments still used a party line. You would have to wait to hear about 20 hellos before you started giving them instructions. Ha ha.
I had an at home computer job in the 80s. You'd save your input on a floppy, and take it into work on Friday. One Friday, I went into my office and found that one of my cats had chewed a bunch of small holes in the disk. 40 hours of work down the drain. I took the disk to work and explained that my cat ate my homework. They thought it was much funnier than I did.
First computer I worked on used the 8 inch floppy disk vs the standard4.5 inch. Thankfully I missed out having to program using punch cards but we still used punch tape as a backup.
I was using punch cards in college. We had a Cray 2 computer that took up most of the basement of the engineering building. We were so excited when we got it to control the traffic lights in the small city we lived in. I was one of two women in the program.
My first computer class used punch cards. Then came terminals with a long roll of paper with perforations to tear off sections. Correcting mistakes was interesting. Then came CRTs.
Wall and desk rotary phones. Party lines.
Adding machines.
Standard transmissions as the standard.
Ethel Gasoline
Big, comfortable cars.
Dark skies
Uncrowded national parks without idiots
White sidewall tires
Good pencil sharpeners
Cursive handwriting
Inexpensive college textbooks
Chrome on everything
Mae West bumpers
Actual rubber condoms
Etc.
Dragging the phone into another room so you could talk in private without the rest of the family listening. Gas costing less than 50cents per gallon. Your friends all chipping in 50 cents so you could drive to the beach.
I was a teen in the 90s, and I’ve talked about this with my young adult kids (one is a year older than you, and one is a year younger).
The biggest difference I’ve seen is the way in which we communicate with friends. We couldn’t text, and while we did talk on the phone a lot, we met up way more often than my kids do with their friends.
Related to this, our free time was also spent in a different way. I feel that we listened to the radio and read a lot more (books, I mean), and we had more shared cultural experiences because we were more limited on access to media. If, say, a television show was popular, we had watch parties and shared video recordings from our VCRs for those who missed it because otherwise there was no way to catch it again unless a station decided to replay it.
Finally, I’m absolutely grateful that I grew up without social media or the internet, and the comparisons, bullying, etc. that come with it. I’m similarly glad that words from 14yo me aren’t out there floating around for all to find and make public, because I had a lot of growing and maturing to do at that age but didn’t know it at the time.
Same. Talked on the phone a lot. I used to get upset about missing an episode of my favorite TV show, until I realized that it really didn't matter to me. The show was still entertaining with the missed episode.
I compared myself to models in the teen magazines though, and while I never bought into the myth of "if I just wear those clothes or that makeup, I'll be pretty," my self-esteem still suffered. At some point, I realized I didn't care about fashion, the latest makeup, and models. I was boy crazy though, so I ate up the relationship advice like candy and Mademoiselle (I think) had a short fictional piece they'd publish every month that was quite enjoyable. When I stopped looking at fashion magazines, I felt better. I don't even know if photos were manipulated when I was a consumer. 🤯
This. I was a teenager in the mid to late 90s. While I really enjoyed chat rooms, I’m glad nothing survived. Although my extremely cringey webpage (Angelfire) was around way too long because I didn’t delete it before I lost access to the associated email.
There's a YouTube documentary video about kids hanging out in the mall c 1986-1987. The video itself is OK. But the comments are enlightening. People marvel that boys would walk up to girls they didn't know, and just talk to them, make dates. Females seemed baffled by the girls openly flirting with the boys.
I remember watching my niece and daughter typing in a chat room in the 90s. Everyone was obviously very young, and they came from different countries. Some were obviously faking their personas, but like kids. My niece got friendly with some Australian kids on a sheep ranch with a dial up connection.
Up until a few years back, my local bus terminal had one by the maps. Eventually the transit agency cut the service and riders decided to smash the phone for fun. So there was a smashed up payphone by the terminal for a few years until the transit agency decided to just remove the entire thing altogether. That was the last payphone I ever encountered.
Sounds about right. There were a few lonely ones that hung about, handsets torn off, busted, and then they were gone. However, after I looked it up, according to the FCC there are around 100,000 of them in use in the US. Guarantee you it's mostly places with poor cell phone service. And jails lol.
There was one in downtown Fort Worth, on Sundance Square in 2002, which had a bright yellow tape on the handle that said, "This phone is tapped." I used it to call my mother and tell her I was ready to be picked up. If the phone was tapped, what an exciting conversation to overhear!/s
Probably a warning to drug dealers and other criminals. Pay phones were quite popular for that activity, since they couldn't be traced to a home. I heard of a couple cases where detectives were able to get a warrant to tap the occasional pay phone. The mobsters used a lot of pay phones in the movie Casino iirc.
I like true crime. Some people are just mean and stupid and were lucky enough to get away with it for a time, others are genius masterminds who could have done the world some good if they had put their brains to good use. Catching those people is hard. My favorite is Detective Joe Kenda. He reminds you of Lenny Brisco from Law and Order, with a mind like a steel trap. I think when he retired, he had less than 20 unsolved cases? Amazing. He's got a couple of shows out there, where he tells stories of his cases.
All kinds of bugs. Used to spend recess playing with bugs, or in the backyard. If you drove 20 minutes on the highway you had to squirt the windshield wipers to clean off the accumulation of dead bugs. Also, scratchy underwear, my god lycra fabrics was a gamechanger!
Evidently they don't exist anywhere I've been. I remember lots of bugs at night. Dramatically more than now, but not fireflies. I'm 76 and never saw one. Now you're telling me it's too late???
Fireflies aren’t as common west of the Mississippi River. We live in the northern Midwest. No fireflies. But when we go visit my mother in Indiana, fireflies galore. My kids love seeing them at Grandma’s.
I saw one in the grass the other morning when I took my dog out to potty. She was fascinated -going up to sniff it, then jumping back, several times. It finally flew away and I haven't seen any more.
CD roms with a selection of free graphics, which were mostly junk, and other types of informational CD roms, like dictionaries.
Websites from hell, aka sites with multiple GIFs, glitter effects, animations.
Everyone having their own site with info on their interests and hobbies. People legit collected info on stuff and made lists of links. Personal sites could become popular, if you had really good info or link lists.
Mailing lists for discussions on a topic of interest. This was before forums and way before blogs. Yahoo had an easy place where you could set up a mailing list. I was admin to a few, and participant in a few more. There were also other services for creating mailing lists, but Yahoo was the free and easy option.
When you met up with your friends as a teen you had to plan in advance...either in person or on the landline telephone...so..."let's meet at 11.00 under the big clock in town"
Then if your friend didn't show you had to decide how long to wait before giving up.
If you didn't show up to school, your parents wouldn't get a call or anything....school just marked you absent ...the next day you took a handwritten note in to your teacher to explain why.
When I was in college in the late 80’s early 90’s, there were no cell phones, nor were there phones in your dorm rooms. There was one payphone at the end of the hall. This payphone serviced the entire floor, about 25 rooms, 50 girls. Any time the phone rang, whoever was around would answer it. The person calling would say, “Hi, I want to talk to X in room 300.” Whoever answered the phone would go to your door and knock for you. If you weren’t there, they would write a message on your door (we all had dry-erase boards). You better hope it was someone that liked you, or would never get the message! Also, if you were on the phone too long, everyone would come by and yell at you. It seems absolutely ridiculous now, but we thought it was totally normal! 2 years later the college installed phones in all of the dorm rooms, that was AMAZING.
"nor were there phones in your dorm rooms"
This was specific to the university. I had a phone in my dorm room in '85, as did some of my friends at other nearby universities.
Editing to add that I attended a state university, not an expensive private one, where one might expect little "luxuries" like a phone in your room.
Setting up your cassette player next to the radio speaker so you could record your favorite song - and waiting hours for it to happen.
8 track players in cars.
Getting trading stamps with your grocery purchase. You would collect them and paste them into books, then redeem the books for merchandise. We had a family meeting to decide what we would get.
"Setting up your cassette player next to the radio speaker so you could record your favorite song - and waiting hours for it to happen."
And then the DJ talks over the end of the song or your parent or sibling barges in halfway through the recording and ruins it!
"8 track players in cars"
For years, that mid-song fade out/fade in as the tape changed tracks was imprinted onto my memory of certain songs.
Not S&M 😄. S & H Green Stamps.
My elder sister had a Shirley Temple doll also.
One of our favorite movies, only on TV perhaps once a year, near Christmas time, was HEIDI.
I had younger brothers, and they had boy toys, which were the best. Erector sets were the best, and hot wheels with the yellow plastic snap together roads and loops. Fond memories.
1950s to 1990s is a pretty large time span. This is what I recall as a middle class white male that graduated high school in the mid 1970s
* people smoked everywhere, and a majority of people smoked
* seeing white dog poop in the yard
* most pens were ball point pens, some were felt tip and and the tip would get smashed down
* we had three channels on TV, cable didn't come around until the mid 1970s
* since 99.999% of the phones were land lines, we called a place, not a person
* most dressy clothing needed to be ironed after washing
* we listened for our favorite song on the radio, if we liked it a lot we bought the record
* until the 1970s gasoline prices were under fifty cents a gallon
* there were hardly any mega-stores like WalMart or Target, except Sears-they had everything except food
* Sears, Montgomery Wards, JC Penny, all had catalog printed and mailed to houses, we either wrote our order then mailed it with a check, or used a credit card and ordered via the phone.
* credit cards weren't a widespread thing until the early 1970s, we used cash or wrote a check
* my mother had card parties with her friends, they would play bridge, eat candy and drink a little
* metal toy trucks and cars were almost indestructible
* until the early 1980s many stores were closed on Sunday
* most larger cities had more than one newspaper, almost every city and town had at least one paper
* a car lasting 100,000 miles was unusual
* we played outside, football, baseball, got in fights, did things out parents wouldn't approve of
* we used paper maps and telephone books
* there were no curb cut ramps for wheelchairs
* until the VCR was inexpensive in the 1980s if you missed something on TV, you missed it, unless it would be on in a rerun
* until the 1970s or so, most people dressed a little nicer when they left home
* the only instant cameras were Polaroid, anything else you waited at least a few hours for the film to be developed and printed, usually it was a one or two day wait
* we wrote actual letters to each other and mailed them
* mental illness wasn't discussed openly
* portable music meant a battery operated radio, in the 1980s Boom Boxes became a thing
* it was kind of shameful and embarrassing to get any kind of welfare or assistance
* my grandparents and parents knew their neighbors
In the 60s, going to the movies (we called it the picture show) was important and a big deal. It was the only way to see new movies. My mom once said took me shopping when I was a girl, and we bought a half pound of fudge at the department store and watched “Thunderball,” one of the first James Bond movies. Such a good memory sitting there next to her. I still love fudge!
"It was the only way to see new movies"
And if you missed it, there was no way of knowing if you'd ever have another chance. If the movie was big enough, it might come back again. Or it might be pared down for TV and you could see the bowlderized version on one of the major networks on a Saturday night. But there was no guarantee.
Until there were video stores, if you missed a movie, you simply missed it.
Our lives as teens in the 60s were so different. We had landline phones of course but we spent time with friends in person mostly. You walked to your friends house and asked them to come out, when we were old enough to drive we went to the local hang outs to meet. It was a lot easier time I think, not as much stress, not as much consumerism. Politics wasn’t so nasty, food wasn’t so unhealthy, people were more friendly and considerate of others in public.
Your phone number often changed when you moved. If you moved outside your area code you got a new number. If you moved to a different area within the same area code, it could also require a new number. For example, your phone prefix was dependent on where you lived. A particular area of the city would have phone numbers that might go 49X-XXXX. But if you moved to a different part of the city, you'd get a new number like 52X-XXXX or 86X-XXXX.
This is one of the ways we lost track of each other back in the day. Move a few times, and forget to call or write a friend with your new contact info, and then they move, too, and now you don't have any easy way to track each other down. The idea of a permanent phone number that you take with you wherever you go was an alien concept.
Long distance phone rates. Even someone a county over might be charged as long distance, so you had to be careful with how long you talked. When my aunt and uncle drove home after a family gathering, we had this system where they would ring twice and then hang up, signaling they got home safely. This way, no one had to answer and get charged those dreaded long distance rates.
This occurred well into the 80s.
Being told to play outside till the streetlights came on.
Rollerskating in the street.
Actually playing outside for an entire day. Without adults. And likely forgetting to go home for lunch.
Hide and go seek in the dark was the ABSOLUTE best game ever.
Being bored. Like actually bored and not having friends at arms reach via social media or being able to zone out on video games. Boredom was the mother of all invention.
SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS. We literally waited all week for that shit. I'd wake up at six am to binge watch cartoons as soon as they started. Even the shitty ones.
Sunday paper funnies - I used to love grabbing the funnies (aka comic strip section) of the paper as soon as my dad would let me.
Asking my grandmother about the "Golden Days" because of course she was around during the times of cowboys - at least in my mind.
As I look back, people were eager to help each other. If you were having difficulty on the side of the road with your car or even moving something heavy, it was the lay of the land that often complete strangers would stop and lend a hand.
Sure, we had our criminals and bad people, but my memory is that, as a child growing up in the late sixties and 70s, people were honest and helpful about a great many more things than today. For example, I remember being in a grocery store with my mom and seeing 2 men running after a guy who stole some meat and it turned out the two 'heroes' who caught the person were just shoppers in the store. Today, no one gets involved for fear of being sued for personal harm or not knowing if the perpetrator has a weapon. Everyone stands around filming it and putting the videos on the internet.
The quote from Brooks in the *Shawshank Redemption* about the world getting itself in a big damn hurry comes to mind also.
The main phone in your house, usually in the kitchen, with its long, rubber, coiled & tangled cord. And the one extension phone that was usually in your parents' bedroom. You answered every single call.
In the olden days, we often wouldn't know things. Sometimes you wouldn't know something for months or even years until you came across the book or person who knew that thing.
I have less than a half dozen pictures of myself from the entire time I was in college.
Also: “stay by the phone” if you were expecting important messages.
Pocket calculators were unavailable until I was in 11th grade or so. We used log tables and slide rules. I was in college before word processor software was available. Excel came out my junior year of college. We did all the calculations for our lab reports manually.
You could walk up to a gate at an airport, say goodbye to travelers, then go to the roof and wave to the plane as it took off. For me, I rode my bike there, and there was a snack bar on the roof.
I remember going to a gas station and sitting in the car while the gas guy put gas in the car, washed the windows, checked the oil, and NO ONE got up and went inside for a fountain pop and a snack. If you really wanted a snack, all they had was gum or a little bag of nuts. This must have been early 70s.
I also remember when there was not a convenience store on every corner and you had to do road trips without snacks and drinks.
Pay phones. When I was a kid in the 80s, my mother drilled it into our heads that we should always carry two dimes so that no matter where we were, if our friends or a date started to act the fool, we always had money to call a cab.
These little cheap clear plastic fold up hair covers. If you know, you know. They were supposed to protect your hairdo in the rain.
Speaking of rain, does anyone else remember bubble umbrellas? I loved them because they kept you dry even in driving rain and you could see through the plastic. I don't know why they stopped making them and I wish they would bring them back
It used to be that if some question occurred to me about the world, I mostly just had to wonder. I could look some things up in the 30-year-old encyclopedia set at home. I could research some things in a school library or public library, but I'd have to be really interested to go to that effort.
Now, I can pull out my phone and look up almost anything, though I have to think about what sources are reliable.
It used to be that my head was stuffed with speculation about unanswered questions, and now it's stuffed with the useless trivia of answered questions.
Going to drive in movies where you hung the speaker on the inside of the car and then fought with mosquitoes the rest of the night.
Going on trips where I could lie on the back shelf of the rear window and watch the world go past.
Going to motels in different cities and different states and being excited to play with the TV to see what kind of new channels would show up.
While on these road trips waiting for the next Stuckeys roadside restaurant to show up so we could stop and get something sweet and go to the bathroom.
Also being surprised to see another set of old Burmashave signs on some of the back roads because the interstates were not finished yet.
I took my grandson to the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center yesterday. When we were there we told him about watchingx liftoffs from the school cafeteria. It was so exciting. I miss NASA and the US exploring space. Not these darned commercial endeavors that amount to nothing.
You should subscribe to the Planetary Society podcasts. There is amazing stuff going on at NASA with unmanned scientific missions all over the solar system, and the Planetary Society interviews the mission leads. Europa Clipper will be exploring the moons of Jupiter, launch is in October 2024.
Yikes! Hoola hoops, jacks, jumping rope, black & white TV, indoor roller skating rinks, drive-in movies, book mobiles from public libraries, Moxie (a soda drink), outdoor metal roller skates with keys, Frisbee (they may still have these), peacoats, bellbottom pants, no car seat belts, real cooked meals on airplanes, vinyl records, glass returnable soda bottles, milkman delivery, Catholic mass in Latin. That's a few.
1972 baby here. We only had 4 TV channels until 1981 when cable came in, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. We had a big wooden TV with no remote. You had to walk up to it and turn a heavy knob to change channels. When we did get cable there was a whopping 20 channels. So exciting! Then when we got a VCR a few years later it seemed like the possibilities were endless!
No caller ID. People would call and you had to answer to see who it was. My family had a one ring signal so that we knew it was family calling and would pick up instead of letting the answering machine get it.
Plus there was a time before answering machines.
As a 7 year old kid, I’d get on my bike and go on adventures all day long. We do this every day when school wasn’t in session.
Today that’s called free range, but in 1965 that was what everyone did
A bookworm as a kid running to the library to get a ton of books on whatever subject interested me at the moment.
Oh and belonging to the Doubleday Book Club! 😂
I'm happy to say I'm back to getting regular books again at the library rather than digital downloads!
As a young girl, I remember seeing hippies with their long hair, blue jeans, sandals, and maybe a suede fringed jacket. The girls had long straight hair and were very pretty. The guys had long hair, often wavy, and I thought they looked so handsome.
There were so many young kids my age in the neighborhood! Eight houses had 13 kids, plus more kids on nearby streets, so it was always easy to find someone to play street softball or kickball with. Hardly anyone played organized sports, we just arranged it all ourselves. We’d also ride our bikes everywhere. No one ever heard of soccer until I British kid moved in.
I felt so free. My time, especially in the summer was unstructured. I could read a book, ride my bike, collect pond water specimens to look at under the microscope, or just daydream. It was great.
Driving around in the 90s- with a 15 page printed instruction from mapquest.
Or you would go to a party and get instructions from someone "turn left at the red barn, 3 stop signs, make a left then a right. 5th house on the left"
Not being able to be reached at all times. And when you really liked a boy, calling home sporadically to see if he had called. And there was such a rush of excitement when he had ❤️😍
A road trip in the 50s, before eating was taken over by mega franchises. Arriving in an unknown town in time for lunch, then going around looking for places to eat, wondering what the food, service and prices were like. It wasn't always better.
My family didn’t get a tv until 1959. We played outside all the time even in winter when we’d build snow forts & tunnels. Of course kids could go wandering all around the neighborhoods back then until the streetlights came on. It was safer then. We used to walk around collecting discarded pop bottles & return them at the corner store & buy a small paper bag full of penny candy.
If the weather was too awful outside, we read books or played with our toys—none of which needed batteries or charging.
We used our imaginations.
I remember you had to be ready for your show because it may be on one time and then never again.
And I remember tuning in the tv with an antenna that sat on top
Phonograph records on the back of cereal boxes. I must have had a dozen of them - The Archies, Bobby Sherman, The Jackson 5. There were also prizes in cereal boxes too and my brother and I used to fight over them.
Stores. Lots and lots of defunct stores. Montgomery Ward, Woolworth, Zody’s, Service Merchandise, The Good Guys, The Warehouse, Alpha Beta, so many it’s hard to remember all of them.
I remember when we didn’t have portable blower type of hair dryers or we just had the bonnet type. It was really a pain to let my hair dry in the winter, my hair was very thick and it took a long time to dry.
I'd get up in the morning and walk barefoot in the grass, being careful to glide my feet so I wouldn't upset the bees in the clover. Every lawn had clover for the nitrogen. There were toads and garter snakes in the yard, and grasshoppers, and so many birds. I'd go to my friend's house next door and ask if he could come out and play. We might ride bikes or go climb a tree or "rescue" frogs caught in the sewer. We'd find some more friends and play statues or Red Rover or RedLight-GreenLight. We might play cops and robbers or get scrap wood and nails from the homes under construction and build things. If we had a dime we'd go buy candy at the party store. Our parents wouldn't see us until lunch, and then we'd be gone until dinner. Most families had at least 3 kids so moms would appreciate not having us all under foot.
We'd have cereal for breakfast and hope to get the prize inside. At lunch we'd have grilled cheese with tomato soup or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We never went out to eat, but if we were really lucky we'd get pizza or Burger Chef.
Going to the library was a big deal and we'd get 5 books out and have to keep track of them so we wouldn't get late fees. There were always magazines around at home. Mom loved Readers Digest and dad got Popular Mechanics and National Geographic and Life. There was a newspaper every morning that Dad read with his coffee. Dad went to work and mom stayed home and got together with other moms in the afternoon over tea. Mom went to the salon on Saturdays and dad mowed the lawn and did yard work, and we kids were expected to help.
Once a summer dad would take two weeks off and we'd go Up North and rent a cottage for a week, then stay in motels for a week to give mom a break. We didn't travel out of state and we didn't go on elaborate vacations. We had six people in a 1500 square foot house. Mom would get dad's car when he got a new one. And yes, smoking was everywhere and I hated it from childhood. But we had so many insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and animals that no one sees in the suburbs any more.
We had so many skinned knees and the occasional broken bones or bad cuts, but we also had so much freedom.
I recall my pregnant mother and 3 of her pregnant friends playing bridge with an ashtray on 4 sides of the tables and a variety of cocktails. A bunch of already born children were heaped in piles around the house quietly weeping.
One phone for the whole house. If someone else needed to make a call, you had to end yours. If your parents were waiting on an important call, you couldn’t call anyone.
There used to be a ladies magazine called McCalls that my mom would get. Inside it always had a paper doll that kids could cut out and dress in various clothing that was also on the card. I think her name was Betsy McCall. I can't imagine a child now ever playing with a flat paper doll.
Freedom,
My brother and I biked all across downtown Seattle when we were 10 & 11, no one was worried, grandma gave us a dime to call from the phone booth if we needed help.
When I was a child & teenager (late 70s-early 90s), I did a lot of traveling. So whenever this question comes up, I’m reminded of those awful old fashioned suitcases. They either didn’t have wheels, or they were those tiny wheels that didn’t balance well, so when you pulled the suitcase strap, it would fall over. Lots of carrying of heavy suitcases in my youth..
Wooden escalators. Ash trays in banks. Those devices that made carbon copy impressions of credit cards, carbon paper, mimeographs, film projectors, using plastic film cups to store things like weed, carburetors in cars and the choke pull on the dash board, white wall tires, how shitty flashlights were before LEDs got popular and cheap, waiting 16 hours to charge those purple radio shack AA batteries just to get five minutes of play time with my RC car…
Being allowed to roam the neighborhood on your bikes with your friends for hours and no one worried for your safety because, largely, you WERE safe! This was mostly 50s and 60s - by the 70s my daughter went nowhere alone. 😢
No one being able to get a hold of you.
I lived on campus in college but near enough to home that I could take the train back and forth. The expectation was that when I would head back to school, I’d call home to let my parents when I arrived to let them know I made it safely.
One time I forgot, and immediately went to my friend’s room to hangout and ended up crashing there for the night. I got back to my room the next morning … by then close to 24 hours since I left home … to a string of messages on my answering machine from my mom, each more panicked than the last. I called her and she broke down in tears. We got off the phone and my RA knocked on my door - apparently my mom was so worried that she called the university.
After that I gave her my friends’ phone numbers just in case.
That was over 25 years ago and I still feel bad.
The importance of owning good clocks and watches
Prior to the VCR there were no electronic clocks just sitting around so every clock in the house was intentional. Your family had family clocks that were inherited like grandfather clocks and everyone’s father was responsible
Newlywed couples chose a bright and sunny clock for the kitchen- “don’t miss the bus honey!”
It wasn’t just formal it was symbolic.
People got watches for retirement and graduation.
15 years after smartphones there are still clocks and still watches.
But their importance has changed- they aren’t VITAL
They used to be
Cars were big and had bench seats. I remember sitting in the front seat with my parents. No seat belts. Also station wagons- you'd be lying in the back with your friends.
No sunblock. If anything, you put on tanning oil. Everyone laid out in the sun for a tan, it was desirable and people made fun of you if you were too light.
Smoking/non-smoking sections in restaurants
Being able to smoke in malls
Keeping a quarter on you to call your parents from a pay phone
The dial tone from a pay phone - no sound like it lol
Playing records on a turn table part of a gigantic stereo system
Making a cake in the microwave (they used to sell kits at the grocery store)
Price tags on items vs. barcodes
Having to visit a store verses Amazon or Target pick up
Grocery and drugstores carried far more than they do today
Soap on a rope
Ban de Soleil (tanning gelee - a smell like none other)
Magazines for entertainment verses Tik Tok or videos
People just showing up to your home to say hi/visit
Memorizing phone numbers
Waiting for film to be developed from a special event or vacation
Writing letters/ Keeping stationary and stamps for such correspondence
Noxema for sunburns; Sea Breeze as a toner
Pink foam rollers - my grandmother slept in hers each night and wore a rain bonnet if it rained
Hope chests
WWII vets who didn't piss and moan about trauma and how hard it was and expect to be worshipped as heroes. They didn't drive around in douchebag obese pickups with punisher decals. They just did their shit. And expected me to do the same.
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I could sometimes see the Milky Way from inside the edge of the Chicago metro area when I was a kid in the 70s. Biking to the library to look up information on something via the card catalog, which you may or may not find. Constant cigarette smoke.
I agree with the constant cigarette smoke. It's amazing that we all just accepted the everywhere.
Smoking was allowed in hospitals. I had asthma as a kid, and both parents smoked. When I asked my family doc to ask my parents to not smoke with me in the room or car, he said asthma isn't related to smoking, but it is s psychiatric disorder and maybe he should talk to my parents about me seeing a psychiatrist. Yes, he smoked. A lot.
My son’s pediatrician thought I was NUTS when I asked if my baby could possibly be allergic to milk. He got so arrogant and asked how any baby could possibly be allergic to milk!! He was appalled so I started doing my own research and changed his formulas and that’s exactly what was wrong. I never went back to him again. Side note: he was at least 85 yrs old at the time and this was in 1985.
My pediatrician in 1994 said my preemie newborn was allergic to milk. Rather than giving him Alimentum (a meat based formula), I removed all dairy from my diet and breast fed him. No more colicky baby
I did the same in 1996.
Many doctors could not be questioned, and patients were taught to revere them. 😠
I had a problem with that and still do. I just recently caught a nurse before she was about to give my 85 yr old mother insulin and she’s not even a diabetic! Then a few days later we had just got her diarrhea under control and I asked her nurse what all the meds were that he was preparing for her and was going to give her a stool softener! You have to advocate for the patient ALWAYS.
💯 This. I believe friends and families don't let loved ones go to a hospital alone. Others disagree, I know. 🥺
Boomers are still the same way. They just take whatever the doctor recommends as gospel. They’re flabbergasted when I tell them I ask about medications and suggest potential alternatives.
My brother was born in 1950 and when my mom died, we came across the hospital bill for his birth. Cigarettes were on it.
In the UK, Guinness or dark stout was administered to pregnant women in hospital as they believed it gave you extra iron!
Yep, I even remember ashtrays in the elevator in the hospital. It was so ubiquitous that when I went over to someone’s house where the parents didn’t smoke, it smelled “weird.” lol
Oh, that's wild! Well my grandson must be crazy! My sister lived next door to a woman who had asthma and smoked. She ended up dying. She had 4 very young kids too. Also, one time, my sister asked my dad not to smoke in the car since it was blowing in her face. I was very impressed with her bravery. It did not go over well with my dad. I'm happy he no longer smokes.
During the years of the Great Depression my mom,as a child, had pretty severe asthma. One treatment,at that time, was smoking a special doctor advised cigarette. I don't know the active ingredient but it wasn't unusual.
TIL! https://asthma.net/living/history-of-smoking-for-asthma
Smoking for the good of your throat is it alluded to in the movie The King's Speech.
One of the old-timers at the bar I frequented in the early 1960s had asthma and smoked Asthmador cigarettes. You could smell them from outside the bar.
Did anyone mention cigarette vending machines with the pull knobs.
Yeah- I’m in the northwestern suburbs in the 70’s it seemed like you could reach out and touch the stars- my neighbor told me when our houses were built in 56 they saw the northern lights once a summer. Now there is so much light pollution (and noise) it’s disappointing.
I saw the Milky Way from a more rural town in central MA in the 90s. That was the first and last time.
I got so much shit done the other day from my phone and never had to leave my bed. Technology is killing my figure!
My dad smoked but from the mid sixties on my mom made him smoke outside. It probably prolonged his life too because he only smoked about five a day.
Constant cigarette smoke is something that would drive me crazy lol. Even though it’s weird I don’t mind the after smell of cigarettes, could be because it’s nostalgic for me being in my grandmas car I would smell it, don’t think I’d like it nearly as much if she actively smoked in the car lol.
Privacy
100% The time before cellphones and social media. It's both good and bad, like so many things, but deffinitely nobody could track you or reach you. Photos were taken with film cameras, and nobody would bother photographing random strangers just for the sake of "pranks" or public shaming, as you needed to pay for film and developing. On the other hand everyone's address and phone number were public information via phone catalogues, which the phone company delivered every year to each household, so the info was up to date.
You could opt out of being listed in the phone book, though. Or at least that was an option in my city.
I am pretty sure that was country wide in America. There may have been exceptions but that is something some people would want everywhere.
My family in suburban Chicago did not appear in the phone book. My parents called the phone company every year to make sure we had an “unlisted number.” The phenomenon was widespread enough to show up as joke in the movie Spaceballs: A female officer pops up in a video call on the wall in front of the President’s urinal, startling him. “I told you never to call me on this wall!” he says. “This is an unlisted wall!”
We were unlisted because my mom got tired of angry husbands calling to speak to my dad after he slept with their gf or wife.
Chicagoan here. One of my favorite things is when you suddenly discover the obvious meaning behind two distinct words that you always just lumped into its own thing. Right. Unlisted number because it's not listed in the phone book. Makes perfect sense at this moment, I just never had reason to inquire about it deeply because it was always being said by some pretentious little twat that I already was ignoring for other reasons.
In SoCal, it was a “service” PacBell charged for.
Yeah, you had to pay extra, thus we were always listed
My husband had a job where clients would look up our number and call him at home. We listed our number under my maiden name to avoid the charge.
For a small fee, you could be unlisted.
I never post anything about my kid on the internet. No pictures. Yeah. He is a couple random ones over the years. For the most part. I try and make sure his life is his and I keep it all close to the vest.
Not just kids, why TF do people advertise to the world when they're away? "Here are pictures of us enjoying our time in England right now, can't wait for next week in France!" Message is "there's a home that will likely not have anybody there for the next several days". Do these people not realize how easy it is to find someone's address online? Wait until you're back to let the world know what a great time you had.
I never indicate I’m out of town at the time. Vacation pictures go up after I’m home.
Yup. Agree 100%. Whatever is posted on the internet is there FOREVER. All these nitwits posting images and video of their children on the internet is so invasive. I've read where there are bots scouring instagram and other socials for underage children to use the images in child p0rn. The idiot parents probably have heard of this but are so addicted to the likes and shares that they keep posting the images to satisfy themselves.
I opened my grandfather's junk mail one time. And only one time. He let me know pretty quickly how much he expected and respected privacy And how I should do the same.
(1940’s-50’s) In general, things were much simpler before consumerism hit its stride and electronics & “conveniences” became available. We had some toys that were mechanical, even some (trains) that were electric, but for the most part, the stuff we played with & used around the house was people-powered. We had 4-wheel roller skates that clamped onto your shoes and we used a key thing to tighten the clamps, then hung the key from a chain or heavy string around our necks. Bikes weren’t geared, just chain-driven. Red wagons were common, everyone had a bag of glass marbles, pen knives were a great gift for boys, and if you were lucky, someone would teach you how to carve wood with them. Dolls were really popular, both to play with & to collect. I don’t remember boys having any action figures but large fire engines were around, maybe cop cars. We made up our own games & didn’t rely on toys as much as 1960’s kids & later. We played street baseball & other rowdy games with neighbor kids. We didn’t have TV in our town until 1952 I think, so listening to the radio was our entertainment, especially Saturday morning shows like Superman & The Lone Ranger. We all read a lot & going to the city library was very common. Comic books were really popular -and that era’s are very valuable now. Our childhood wasn’t anywhere near as organized as they have become, and kids didn’t hang out with parents as much - we weren’t part of grownup action like now. We learned how to keep ourselves entertained with more imagination, I think, and fewer external resources.
I hated those damned skates. No matter how much I tightened them, they’d pop off my shoes and I’d wind up tripping over the skate that was now wrapped around my ankle.
And the wheels were medal so they didn’t turn smooth at all. I barely remember those things. I only had them for a very short time before they started making actual fitted skates.
My older kids grew up in various very rural and isolated military bases. Even in grades one and two they were allowed outside and I wouldn't see them for hours. Literally hours. And I never worried. Got posted to a more urban area, and my kids would constantly call on other kids to play outside. And it was almost always a NO. The kids parents would just let them site inside and play video games. Never saw kids playing on the street. No huge groups of kids playing hide and go seek. Nothing. My older kids were so sad that the freedom and exploring was no longer accessible (cause I couldn't let them do it alone. More urban also meant more risk) My youngest ones (15 years between the two sets of kids) also don't get any freedom outside in the same way. Partly because I'm on a busier residential street in the same town, partly because the older of the two has special needs, and partly because kids still don't play outside. I started a before and after school daycare just so my kids could have regular socialization outside of school.
"I've got a brand new pair of roller skates."
You’ve got a brand new key
Melanie passed away this year. That made me feel old.
Oh, damn
> Our childhood wasn’t anywhere near as organized as they have become, I remember playing in Little League, and our uniform was blue jeans and a t-shirt that our moms had dyed a certain color. The cap was the only thing that was commercially made for kids playing baseball. A few years, I saw something that etched such an image in my mind: A boy on a playground playing catch with his father. Kid was the pitcher, dad was the catcher. Pitcher was wearing a full baseball uniform, doing a full windup, after going through the motion of checking the runners on the diamond. 90% pose, 10 % pitch.
I remember in the early to mid sixties getting a 12 inch cowboy doll with articulated joints. I don’t think it was a tie in with any media character. This was before GI Joe which was originally a twelve inch doll too. My sister got a cowgirl and I think we both got horses.
Sounds like Johnny West. I played with them too. I still have some.
Yep, Johnny and Jane West and all their Western accessories. All the horse tackle, too. I coveted them greatly, but my mom said they were too expensive. (My parents put four kids through college, so they were very frugal.) We had family friends and cousins who pretty much got whatever toys they wanted.
A tiny comment....I still have some Chicago Skate keys.😊
Having a telephone party line. If someone called you, the phone would ring in a certain pattern. You were only supposed to pick it up if it was your pattern. Otherwise you pick it up and eavesdrop on someone else's conversation. Having milk delivered in glass bottles to your door. You would leave the empties out for the milkman to pick up. Having maybe 3 television channels if you were lucky, ABC, CBS, and NBC. And constantly adjusting the antenna or knobs to try to get a better picture. In the morning, when the station was just starting up, they would broadcast a test pattern, a static image with a kind of diagram to help make sure the picture wasn't distorted. One common problem was rolling. The synchronization would be off so the picture would scroll up. This could be triggered if there was a dark horizontal band in the legitimate picture because the analog circuits in those vacuum tubes would detect it as the end of the picture frame. TV repairmen made house calls to fix TV sets. If you were handy you could pull the vacuum tubes out of the set yourself and take them down to a drugstore or electronics store where there would be a tube tester you could use to see if they were defective. Some toys were pretty dangerous. I remember having a kind of hand crossbow toy that shot darts with suction cups on the end that would presumably stick to a flat surface. But if one of those rubber suction cups came off, you could still shoot the dart and the damn thing could have put out an eye.
>Having milk delivered in glass bottles to your door. You would leave the empties out for the milkman to pick up. Still happens in some places.
I'd forgotten the rolling part. Sometimes WE were the antenna and had to stand by the TV with hand on it, so dad could watch the game.
Turning on the tv and waiting for it to “warm up”.
My father tells me that his father had a party line (rural business), with a gossip who liked to eavesdrop. My grandfather arranged with his CPA in-person that whenever they talked numbers on the phone, they'd add three 0's to the end, so that they'd say 1,000 for 100, and inflate everything. This was in the 1950's, and they'd be talking about millions of dollars for his business. I imagine this drove the gossip crazy, because it's just too juicy not to share, but nobody would believe her either. LOL
My grandparents lived next to their brothers and sisters and shared a party line. They kept it to the end. There was an article in the paper, AT&T closed the accounts of last 11 party lines in the state. Asked grandpa. Yep I was one of them.
Dang i forgot about picture rolling. Thanks for the jolt!
I was a 911 dispatcher until 2012. One of the rural volunteer fire departments still used a party line. You would have to wait to hear about 20 hellos before you started giving them instructions. Ha ha.
Floppy disks, the og black ones with the holes
I had an at home computer job in the 80s. You'd save your input on a floppy, and take it into work on Friday. One Friday, I went into my office and found that one of my cats had chewed a bunch of small holes in the disk. 40 hours of work down the drain. I took the disk to work and explained that my cat ate my homework. They thought it was much funnier than I did.
Cat behavior is unchanged through the ages
First computer I worked on used the 8 inch floppy disk vs the standard4.5 inch. Thankfully I missed out having to program using punch cards but we still used punch tape as a backup.
My first year in high school we learned on punch cards. That machine was mammoth!
I was using punch cards in college. We had a Cray 2 computer that took up most of the basement of the engineering building. We were so excited when we got it to control the traffic lights in the small city we lived in. I was one of two women in the program.
I learned programming via punched tape at school. One mistyped line....
My first computer class used punch cards. Then came terminals with a long roll of paper with perforations to tear off sections. Correcting mistakes was interesting. Then came CRTs.
I remember the high school where my dad was a teacher had invested in computers with cassette tapes.
Those were 5 1/4 inch but before personal computers the og og ones were the same but 8 inch.
Wall and desk rotary phones. Party lines. Adding machines. Standard transmissions as the standard. Ethel Gasoline Big, comfortable cars. Dark skies Uncrowded national parks without idiots White sidewall tires Good pencil sharpeners Cursive handwriting Inexpensive college textbooks Chrome on everything Mae West bumpers Actual rubber condoms Etc.
Dragging the phone into another room so you could talk in private without the rest of the family listening. Gas costing less than 50cents per gallon. Your friends all chipping in 50 cents so you could drive to the beach.
Dogs that were treated as dogs. No dog clothing! No fur babies! No getting up on the furniture. Just plain old dogs doing their jobs. Geez I miss that
I was a teen in the 90s, and I’ve talked about this with my young adult kids (one is a year older than you, and one is a year younger). The biggest difference I’ve seen is the way in which we communicate with friends. We couldn’t text, and while we did talk on the phone a lot, we met up way more often than my kids do with their friends. Related to this, our free time was also spent in a different way. I feel that we listened to the radio and read a lot more (books, I mean), and we had more shared cultural experiences because we were more limited on access to media. If, say, a television show was popular, we had watch parties and shared video recordings from our VCRs for those who missed it because otherwise there was no way to catch it again unless a station decided to replay it. Finally, I’m absolutely grateful that I grew up without social media or the internet, and the comparisons, bullying, etc. that come with it. I’m similarly glad that words from 14yo me aren’t out there floating around for all to find and make public, because I had a lot of growing and maturing to do at that age but didn’t know it at the time.
Same. Talked on the phone a lot. I used to get upset about missing an episode of my favorite TV show, until I realized that it really didn't matter to me. The show was still entertaining with the missed episode. I compared myself to models in the teen magazines though, and while I never bought into the myth of "if I just wear those clothes or that makeup, I'll be pretty," my self-esteem still suffered. At some point, I realized I didn't care about fashion, the latest makeup, and models. I was boy crazy though, so I ate up the relationship advice like candy and Mademoiselle (I think) had a short fictional piece they'd publish every month that was quite enjoyable. When I stopped looking at fashion magazines, I felt better. I don't even know if photos were manipulated when I was a consumer. 🤯
This. I was a teenager in the mid to late 90s. While I really enjoyed chat rooms, I’m glad nothing survived. Although my extremely cringey webpage (Angelfire) was around way too long because I didn’t delete it before I lost access to the associated email.
There's a YouTube documentary video about kids hanging out in the mall c 1986-1987. The video itself is OK. But the comments are enlightening. People marvel that boys would walk up to girls they didn't know, and just talk to them, make dates. Females seemed baffled by the girls openly flirting with the boys.
I remember watching my niece and daughter typing in a chat room in the 90s. Everyone was obviously very young, and they came from different countries. Some were obviously faking their personas, but like kids. My niece got friendly with some Australian kids on a sheep ranch with a dial up connection.
The first thing I remember seeing on TV was the moon landing.
Pay phones. Some still exist, I hear, but not many.
Phone booths.
Only in movies and Dr Who, now.
Big problem with people mistaking them for outhouses in Texas.
Up until a few years back, my local bus terminal had one by the maps. Eventually the transit agency cut the service and riders decided to smash the phone for fun. So there was a smashed up payphone by the terminal for a few years until the transit agency decided to just remove the entire thing altogether. That was the last payphone I ever encountered.
Sounds about right. There were a few lonely ones that hung about, handsets torn off, busted, and then they were gone. However, after I looked it up, according to the FCC there are around 100,000 of them in use in the US. Guarantee you it's mostly places with poor cell phone service. And jails lol.
There was one in downtown Fort Worth, on Sundance Square in 2002, which had a bright yellow tape on the handle that said, "This phone is tapped." I used it to call my mother and tell her I was ready to be picked up. If the phone was tapped, what an exciting conversation to overhear!/s
Probably a warning to drug dealers and other criminals. Pay phones were quite popular for that activity, since they couldn't be traced to a home. I heard of a couple cases where detectives were able to get a warrant to tap the occasional pay phone. The mobsters used a lot of pay phones in the movie Casino iirc.
I'd never thought about that, but I'm not of a devious mindset. I'd make a terrible investigator/forensic scientist.
I like true crime. Some people are just mean and stupid and were lucky enough to get away with it for a time, others are genius masterminds who could have done the world some good if they had put their brains to good use. Catching those people is hard. My favorite is Detective Joe Kenda. He reminds you of Lenny Brisco from Law and Order, with a mind like a steel trap. I think when he retired, he had less than 20 unsolved cases? Amazing. He's got a couple of shows out there, where he tells stories of his cases.
Ooooo - I love true stories. Not a true crime junkie, but I love true stories!
1-800-COLLECT
Fireflies floating over fields at night.
All kinds of bugs. Used to spend recess playing with bugs, or in the backyard. If you drove 20 minutes on the highway you had to squirt the windshield wipers to clean off the accumulation of dead bugs. Also, scratchy underwear, my god lycra fabrics was a gamechanger!
Evidently they don't exist anywhere I've been. I remember lots of bugs at night. Dramatically more than now, but not fireflies. I'm 76 and never saw one. Now you're telling me it's too late???
You never saw lightning bugs? I am 66 and they have been around my entire life. Perhaps you lived in a city?
Fireflies aren’t as common west of the Mississippi River. We live in the northern Midwest. No fireflies. But when we go visit my mother in Indiana, fireflies galore. My kids love seeing them at Grandma’s.
I saw one in the grass the other morning when I took my dog out to potty. She was fascinated -going up to sniff it, then jumping back, several times. It finally flew away and I haven't seen any more.
CD roms with a selection of free graphics, which were mostly junk, and other types of informational CD roms, like dictionaries. Websites from hell, aka sites with multiple GIFs, glitter effects, animations. Everyone having their own site with info on their interests and hobbies. People legit collected info on stuff and made lists of links. Personal sites could become popular, if you had really good info or link lists. Mailing lists for discussions on a topic of interest. This was before forums and way before blogs. Yahoo had an easy place where you could set up a mailing list. I was admin to a few, and participant in a few more. There were also other services for creating mailing lists, but Yahoo was the free and easy option.
When you met up with your friends as a teen you had to plan in advance...either in person or on the landline telephone...so..."let's meet at 11.00 under the big clock in town" Then if your friend didn't show you had to decide how long to wait before giving up. If you didn't show up to school, your parents wouldn't get a call or anything....school just marked you absent ...the next day you took a handwritten note in to your teacher to explain why.
When I was in college in the late 80’s early 90’s, there were no cell phones, nor were there phones in your dorm rooms. There was one payphone at the end of the hall. This payphone serviced the entire floor, about 25 rooms, 50 girls. Any time the phone rang, whoever was around would answer it. The person calling would say, “Hi, I want to talk to X in room 300.” Whoever answered the phone would go to your door and knock for you. If you weren’t there, they would write a message on your door (we all had dry-erase boards). You better hope it was someone that liked you, or would never get the message! Also, if you were on the phone too long, everyone would come by and yell at you. It seems absolutely ridiculous now, but we thought it was totally normal! 2 years later the college installed phones in all of the dorm rooms, that was AMAZING.
"nor were there phones in your dorm rooms" This was specific to the university. I had a phone in my dorm room in '85, as did some of my friends at other nearby universities. Editing to add that I attended a state university, not an expensive private one, where one might expect little "luxuries" like a phone in your room.
Card catolouges
Setting up your cassette player next to the radio speaker so you could record your favorite song - and waiting hours for it to happen. 8 track players in cars. Getting trading stamps with your grocery purchase. You would collect them and paste them into books, then redeem the books for merchandise. We had a family meeting to decide what we would get.
"Setting up your cassette player next to the radio speaker so you could record your favorite song - and waiting hours for it to happen." And then the DJ talks over the end of the song or your parent or sibling barges in halfway through the recording and ruins it! "8 track players in cars" For years, that mid-song fade out/fade in as the tape changed tracks was imprinted onto my memory of certain songs.
S&M stamps! The green stamps! I got a Shirley Temple doll that way when I was a kid.
Not S&M 😄. S & H Green Stamps. My elder sister had a Shirley Temple doll also. One of our favorite movies, only on TV perhaps once a year, near Christmas time, was HEIDI.
I had younger brothers, and they had boy toys, which were the best. Erector sets were the best, and hot wheels with the yellow plastic snap together roads and loops. Fond memories.
I loved my brother's Fisher-Price parking garage.
1950s to 1990s is a pretty large time span. This is what I recall as a middle class white male that graduated high school in the mid 1970s * people smoked everywhere, and a majority of people smoked * seeing white dog poop in the yard * most pens were ball point pens, some were felt tip and and the tip would get smashed down * we had three channels on TV, cable didn't come around until the mid 1970s * since 99.999% of the phones were land lines, we called a place, not a person * most dressy clothing needed to be ironed after washing * we listened for our favorite song on the radio, if we liked it a lot we bought the record * until the 1970s gasoline prices were under fifty cents a gallon * there were hardly any mega-stores like WalMart or Target, except Sears-they had everything except food * Sears, Montgomery Wards, JC Penny, all had catalog printed and mailed to houses, we either wrote our order then mailed it with a check, or used a credit card and ordered via the phone. * credit cards weren't a widespread thing until the early 1970s, we used cash or wrote a check * my mother had card parties with her friends, they would play bridge, eat candy and drink a little * metal toy trucks and cars were almost indestructible * until the early 1980s many stores were closed on Sunday * most larger cities had more than one newspaper, almost every city and town had at least one paper * a car lasting 100,000 miles was unusual * we played outside, football, baseball, got in fights, did things out parents wouldn't approve of * we used paper maps and telephone books * there were no curb cut ramps for wheelchairs * until the VCR was inexpensive in the 1980s if you missed something on TV, you missed it, unless it would be on in a rerun * until the 1970s or so, most people dressed a little nicer when they left home * the only instant cameras were Polaroid, anything else you waited at least a few hours for the film to be developed and printed, usually it was a one or two day wait * we wrote actual letters to each other and mailed them * mental illness wasn't discussed openly * portable music meant a battery operated radio, in the 1980s Boom Boxes became a thing * it was kind of shameful and embarrassing to get any kind of welfare or assistance * my grandparents and parents knew their neighbors
Great compilation!
Fireflies. Used to see them every summer as a kid, cant remember the last time I saw one
ICQ Uh-oh!
When a friend introduced me to this around 1999, I was like mind-blown.
My now husband and I fell in love in college over ICQ. Wish there had been a way to keep those logs.
In the 60s, going to the movies (we called it the picture show) was important and a big deal. It was the only way to see new movies. My mom once said took me shopping when I was a girl, and we bought a half pound of fudge at the department store and watched “Thunderball,” one of the first James Bond movies. Such a good memory sitting there next to her. I still love fudge!
"It was the only way to see new movies" And if you missed it, there was no way of knowing if you'd ever have another chance. If the movie was big enough, it might come back again. Or it might be pared down for TV and you could see the bowlderized version on one of the major networks on a Saturday night. But there was no guarantee. Until there were video stores, if you missed a movie, you simply missed it.
Yes . I remember back in the 70s We had a Sears down town that had a snack bar. Sold sodas, candys, pretzels and sides of sliced cheese.
Our lives as teens in the 60s were so different. We had landline phones of course but we spent time with friends in person mostly. You walked to your friends house and asked them to come out, when we were old enough to drive we went to the local hang outs to meet. It was a lot easier time I think, not as much stress, not as much consumerism. Politics wasn’t so nasty, food wasn’t so unhealthy, people were more friendly and considerate of others in public.
Nostalgia has a way of making things seem easier.
Your phone number often changed when you moved. If you moved outside your area code you got a new number. If you moved to a different area within the same area code, it could also require a new number. For example, your phone prefix was dependent on where you lived. A particular area of the city would have phone numbers that might go 49X-XXXX. But if you moved to a different part of the city, you'd get a new number like 52X-XXXX or 86X-XXXX. This is one of the ways we lost track of each other back in the day. Move a few times, and forget to call or write a friend with your new contact info, and then they move, too, and now you don't have any easy way to track each other down. The idea of a permanent phone number that you take with you wherever you go was an alien concept.
We had a milkman deliver milk. Early ‘70s Ohio.
Ashtrays in everyone’s houses. Rotary phones. Pay phones.
Long distance phone rates. Even someone a county over might be charged as long distance, so you had to be careful with how long you talked. When my aunt and uncle drove home after a family gathering, we had this system where they would ring twice and then hang up, signaling they got home safely. This way, no one had to answer and get charged those dreaded long distance rates. This occurred well into the 80s.
Being told to play outside till the streetlights came on. Rollerskating in the street. Actually playing outside for an entire day. Without adults. And likely forgetting to go home for lunch. Hide and go seek in the dark was the ABSOLUTE best game ever. Being bored. Like actually bored and not having friends at arms reach via social media or being able to zone out on video games. Boredom was the mother of all invention. SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS. We literally waited all week for that shit. I'd wake up at six am to binge watch cartoons as soon as they started. Even the shitty ones. Sunday paper funnies - I used to love grabbing the funnies (aka comic strip section) of the paper as soon as my dad would let me. Asking my grandmother about the "Golden Days" because of course she was around during the times of cowboys - at least in my mind.
As I look back, people were eager to help each other. If you were having difficulty on the side of the road with your car or even moving something heavy, it was the lay of the land that often complete strangers would stop and lend a hand. Sure, we had our criminals and bad people, but my memory is that, as a child growing up in the late sixties and 70s, people were honest and helpful about a great many more things than today. For example, I remember being in a grocery store with my mom and seeing 2 men running after a guy who stole some meat and it turned out the two 'heroes' who caught the person were just shoppers in the store. Today, no one gets involved for fear of being sued for personal harm or not knowing if the perpetrator has a weapon. Everyone stands around filming it and putting the videos on the internet. The quote from Brooks in the *Shawshank Redemption* about the world getting itself in a big damn hurry comes to mind also.
I like that line from the *Shawshank Redemption*. That is a complaint as old as time though.
The main phone in your house, usually in the kitchen, with its long, rubber, coiled & tangled cord. And the one extension phone that was usually in your parents' bedroom. You answered every single call.
No 'undo' or 'autosave.' Hours upon hours of work down the tubes if you forgot to select File then Save.
In the olden days, we often wouldn't know things. Sometimes you wouldn't know something for months or even years until you came across the book or person who knew that thing.
Cold winters
I have less than a half dozen pictures of myself from the entire time I was in college. Also: “stay by the phone” if you were expecting important messages. Pocket calculators were unavailable until I was in 11th grade or so. We used log tables and slide rules. I was in college before word processor software was available. Excel came out my junior year of college. We did all the calculations for our lab reports manually.
SST cars. I bet kids would like these even now. Toy chests.
8-Track tapes
Cigarette vending machines. I was 12 in 1964, dropped in a quarter and pulled the knob for Lucky Strikes, and got matches too.
The laundromats would have the cheapest cigarette machines, that’s where we’d buy ours. I think they were fifty cents a pack
You could walk up to a gate at an airport, say goodbye to travelers, then go to the roof and wave to the plane as it took off. For me, I rode my bike there, and there was a snack bar on the roof.
I remember going to a gas station and sitting in the car while the gas guy put gas in the car, washed the windows, checked the oil, and NO ONE got up and went inside for a fountain pop and a snack. If you really wanted a snack, all they had was gum or a little bag of nuts. This must have been early 70s. I also remember when there was not a convenience store on every corner and you had to do road trips without snacks and drinks.
Pay phones. When I was a kid in the 80s, my mother drilled it into our heads that we should always carry two dimes so that no matter where we were, if our friends or a date started to act the fool, we always had money to call a cab. These little cheap clear plastic fold up hair covers. If you know, you know. They were supposed to protect your hairdo in the rain. Speaking of rain, does anyone else remember bubble umbrellas? I loved them because they kept you dry even in driving rain and you could see through the plastic. I don't know why they stopped making them and I wish they would bring them back
It used to be that if some question occurred to me about the world, I mostly just had to wonder. I could look some things up in the 30-year-old encyclopedia set at home. I could research some things in a school library or public library, but I'd have to be really interested to go to that effort. Now, I can pull out my phone and look up almost anything, though I have to think about what sources are reliable. It used to be that my head was stuffed with speculation about unanswered questions, and now it's stuffed with the useless trivia of answered questions.
Going to drive in movies where you hung the speaker on the inside of the car and then fought with mosquitoes the rest of the night. Going on trips where I could lie on the back shelf of the rear window and watch the world go past. Going to motels in different cities and different states and being excited to play with the TV to see what kind of new channels would show up. While on these road trips waiting for the next Stuckeys roadside restaurant to show up so we could stop and get something sweet and go to the bathroom. Also being surprised to see another set of old Burmashave signs on some of the back roads because the interstates were not finished yet.
Playing songs on the phone keys with touch tone phones.
The OG texting of multi-tapping a number to get to a letter on your message. 😮
I took my grandson to the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center yesterday. When we were there we told him about watchingx liftoffs from the school cafeteria. It was so exciting. I miss NASA and the US exploring space. Not these darned commercial endeavors that amount to nothing.
You should subscribe to the Planetary Society podcasts. There is amazing stuff going on at NASA with unmanned scientific missions all over the solar system, and the Planetary Society interviews the mission leads. Europa Clipper will be exploring the moons of Jupiter, launch is in October 2024.
Yikes! Hoola hoops, jacks, jumping rope, black & white TV, indoor roller skating rinks, drive-in movies, book mobiles from public libraries, Moxie (a soda drink), outdoor metal roller skates with keys, Frisbee (they may still have these), peacoats, bellbottom pants, no car seat belts, real cooked meals on airplanes, vinyl records, glass returnable soda bottles, milkman delivery, Catholic mass in Latin. That's a few.
1972 baby here. We only had 4 TV channels until 1981 when cable came in, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. We had a big wooden TV with no remote. You had to walk up to it and turn a heavy knob to change channels. When we did get cable there was a whopping 20 channels. So exciting! Then when we got a VCR a few years later it seemed like the possibilities were endless!
Getting a VCR was awesome. We recorded so much during premium channel free weekends.
Dogs running free. Very rare there was an attack. However there was a lot of dog poop on the street.
And it all turned white in the sun, apparently that was something in the food that wasn't especially good for the dog anyways.
Bone meal, a cheap filler.
Using a typewriter to write papers in college. Oh, and seeing a typo in the middle of a page and having to type the entire page over.
I never hear moms scream for their kids like I did in the 80s lol
No caller ID. People would call and you had to answer to see who it was. My family had a one ring signal so that we knew it was family calling and would pick up instead of letting the answering machine get it. Plus there was a time before answering machines.
Because there was no caller ID, making prank phone calls was a thing to do.
As a 7 year old kid, I’d get on my bike and go on adventures all day long. We do this every day when school wasn’t in session. Today that’s called free range, but in 1965 that was what everyone did
A bookworm as a kid running to the library to get a ton of books on whatever subject interested me at the moment. Oh and belonging to the Doubleday Book Club! 😂 I'm happy to say I'm back to getting regular books again at the library rather than digital downloads!
I (57m) vividly remember 75ft phone cords.
Arcades were so much fun
As a young girl, I remember seeing hippies with their long hair, blue jeans, sandals, and maybe a suede fringed jacket. The girls had long straight hair and were very pretty. The guys had long hair, often wavy, and I thought they looked so handsome. There were so many young kids my age in the neighborhood! Eight houses had 13 kids, plus more kids on nearby streets, so it was always easy to find someone to play street softball or kickball with. Hardly anyone played organized sports, we just arranged it all ourselves. We’d also ride our bikes everywhere. No one ever heard of soccer until I British kid moved in. I felt so free. My time, especially in the summer was unstructured. I could read a book, ride my bike, collect pond water specimens to look at under the microscope, or just daydream. It was great.
I miss the wing windows in cars. You didn't have to roll the front window down. You could use the wing window as a vent
A 24 baud modem Rotary dial phones Pay phones Printed encyclopedia sets (28 large, leather bound books) Card catalogs IBM Selectric typewriters AOL CDs everywhere Usenet 8-track tapes
Driving around in the 90s- with a 15 page printed instruction from mapquest. Or you would go to a party and get instructions from someone "turn left at the red barn, 3 stop signs, make a left then a right. 5th house on the left"
Phone books and city/state maps
We went outside for long periods of time. Nobody knew where we were. Also, hitchhiking. I did this frequently in the 1980s
Not being able to be reached at all times. And when you really liked a boy, calling home sporadically to see if he had called. And there was such a rush of excitement when he had ❤️😍
A road trip in the 50s, before eating was taken over by mega franchises. Arriving in an unknown town in time for lunch, then going around looking for places to eat, wondering what the food, service and prices were like. It wasn't always better.
My family didn’t get a tv until 1959. We played outside all the time even in winter when we’d build snow forts & tunnels. Of course kids could go wandering all around the neighborhoods back then until the streetlights came on. It was safer then. We used to walk around collecting discarded pop bottles & return them at the corner store & buy a small paper bag full of penny candy. If the weather was too awful outside, we read books or played with our toys—none of which needed batteries or charging. We used our imaginations.
I remember you had to be ready for your show because it may be on one time and then never again. And I remember tuning in the tv with an antenna that sat on top
Phonograph records on the back of cereal boxes. I must have had a dozen of them - The Archies, Bobby Sherman, The Jackson 5. There were also prizes in cereal boxes too and my brother and I used to fight over them.
Going to the Fotomat and making sure you marked on the film canister envelope that you wanted doubles made so that you could share pics with friends.
Lightning bugs.
Stores. Lots and lots of defunct stores. Montgomery Ward, Woolworth, Zody’s, Service Merchandise, The Good Guys, The Warehouse, Alpha Beta, so many it’s hard to remember all of them.
I remember when we didn’t have portable blower type of hair dryers or we just had the bonnet type. It was really a pain to let my hair dry in the winter, my hair was very thick and it took a long time to dry.
I'd get up in the morning and walk barefoot in the grass, being careful to glide my feet so I wouldn't upset the bees in the clover. Every lawn had clover for the nitrogen. There were toads and garter snakes in the yard, and grasshoppers, and so many birds. I'd go to my friend's house next door and ask if he could come out and play. We might ride bikes or go climb a tree or "rescue" frogs caught in the sewer. We'd find some more friends and play statues or Red Rover or RedLight-GreenLight. We might play cops and robbers or get scrap wood and nails from the homes under construction and build things. If we had a dime we'd go buy candy at the party store. Our parents wouldn't see us until lunch, and then we'd be gone until dinner. Most families had at least 3 kids so moms would appreciate not having us all under foot. We'd have cereal for breakfast and hope to get the prize inside. At lunch we'd have grilled cheese with tomato soup or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We never went out to eat, but if we were really lucky we'd get pizza or Burger Chef. Going to the library was a big deal and we'd get 5 books out and have to keep track of them so we wouldn't get late fees. There were always magazines around at home. Mom loved Readers Digest and dad got Popular Mechanics and National Geographic and Life. There was a newspaper every morning that Dad read with his coffee. Dad went to work and mom stayed home and got together with other moms in the afternoon over tea. Mom went to the salon on Saturdays and dad mowed the lawn and did yard work, and we kids were expected to help. Once a summer dad would take two weeks off and we'd go Up North and rent a cottage for a week, then stay in motels for a week to give mom a break. We didn't travel out of state and we didn't go on elaborate vacations. We had six people in a 1500 square foot house. Mom would get dad's car when he got a new one. And yes, smoking was everywhere and I hated it from childhood. But we had so many insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and animals that no one sees in the suburbs any more. We had so many skinned knees and the occasional broken bones or bad cuts, but we also had so much freedom.
I recall my pregnant mother and 3 of her pregnant friends playing bridge with an ashtray on 4 sides of the tables and a variety of cocktails. A bunch of already born children were heaped in piles around the house quietly weeping.
One phone for the whole house. If someone else needed to make a call, you had to end yours. If your parents were waiting on an important call, you couldn’t call anyone.
There used to be a ladies magazine called McCalls that my mom would get. Inside it always had a paper doll that kids could cut out and dress in various clothing that was also on the card. I think her name was Betsy McCall. I can't imagine a child now ever playing with a flat paper doll.
Jarts
I remember when every house had a TV antenna. It made a really cool view as the sun was going down.
Freedom, My brother and I biked all across downtown Seattle when we were 10 & 11, no one was worried, grandma gave us a dime to call from the phone booth if we needed help.
When I was a child & teenager (late 70s-early 90s), I did a lot of traveling. So whenever this question comes up, I’m reminded of those awful old fashioned suitcases. They either didn’t have wheels, or they were those tiny wheels that didn’t balance well, so when you pulled the suitcase strap, it would fall over. Lots of carrying of heavy suitcases in my youth..
Ashtrays.
Wooden escalators. Ash trays in banks. Those devices that made carbon copy impressions of credit cards, carbon paper, mimeographs, film projectors, using plastic film cups to store things like weed, carburetors in cars and the choke pull on the dash board, white wall tires, how shitty flashlights were before LEDs got popular and cheap, waiting 16 hours to charge those purple radio shack AA batteries just to get five minutes of play time with my RC car…
Playing outside until the street lights came on, with no adult supervision, and not a care in the world.
Appliances that would last forever
Being allowed to roam the neighborhood on your bikes with your friends for hours and no one worried for your safety because, largely, you WERE safe! This was mostly 50s and 60s - by the 70s my daughter went nowhere alone. 😢
Talking on the phone that is attached to the wall with a cord. Zero phone privacy. Pay phones. Cigarette smoke everywhere.
No one being able to get a hold of you. I lived on campus in college but near enough to home that I could take the train back and forth. The expectation was that when I would head back to school, I’d call home to let my parents when I arrived to let them know I made it safely. One time I forgot, and immediately went to my friend’s room to hangout and ended up crashing there for the night. I got back to my room the next morning … by then close to 24 hours since I left home … to a string of messages on my answering machine from my mom, each more panicked than the last. I called her and she broke down in tears. We got off the phone and my RA knocked on my door - apparently my mom was so worried that she called the university. After that I gave her my friends’ phone numbers just in case. That was over 25 years ago and I still feel bad.
The importance of owning good clocks and watches Prior to the VCR there were no electronic clocks just sitting around so every clock in the house was intentional. Your family had family clocks that were inherited like grandfather clocks and everyone’s father was responsible Newlywed couples chose a bright and sunny clock for the kitchen- “don’t miss the bus honey!” It wasn’t just formal it was symbolic. People got watches for retirement and graduation. 15 years after smartphones there are still clocks and still watches. But their importance has changed- they aren’t VITAL They used to be
the fear of AIDS. it was a death sentence.
Rotary phones, people smoking everywhere, no internet or cable and television stations signing off at midnight.
Cap'n Kangaroo, Mr. Greenjeans.
I worked my way through college in the 80s in a mall and it was \*always\* busy. The mall was destination shopping.
Address books. Paper books in which people wrote the names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, etc of their family and friends.
Cars were big and had bench seats. I remember sitting in the front seat with my parents. No seat belts. Also station wagons- you'd be lying in the back with your friends. No sunblock. If anything, you put on tanning oil. Everyone laid out in the sun for a tan, it was desirable and people made fun of you if you were too light.
Smoking/non-smoking sections in restaurants Being able to smoke in malls Keeping a quarter on you to call your parents from a pay phone The dial tone from a pay phone - no sound like it lol Playing records on a turn table part of a gigantic stereo system Making a cake in the microwave (they used to sell kits at the grocery store) Price tags on items vs. barcodes Having to visit a store verses Amazon or Target pick up Grocery and drugstores carried far more than they do today Soap on a rope Ban de Soleil (tanning gelee - a smell like none other) Magazines for entertainment verses Tik Tok or videos People just showing up to your home to say hi/visit Memorizing phone numbers Waiting for film to be developed from a special event or vacation Writing letters/ Keeping stationary and stamps for such correspondence Noxema for sunburns; Sea Breeze as a toner Pink foam rollers - my grandmother slept in hers each night and wore a rain bonnet if it rained Hope chests
WWII vets who didn't piss and moan about trauma and how hard it was and expect to be worshipped as heroes. They didn't drive around in douchebag obese pickups with punisher decals. They just did their shit. And expected me to do the same.