Household life in the 1960s-1970s

going outside to play.

No microwaves. If you wanted to heat up a frozen "tv dinner," it took close to an hour!

We worried about long distance phone call charges.

[quote]We worried about long distance phone call charges.

In England you were charged by the minute for local calls.

Long distance (trunk calls) - you'd hear a beep every three minutes.

In many places outside of London we still has 3 digit phone numbers, until the 90s.

Touch Tone didn't really take off until the 90s.

Being gay instead of "genderqueer"

[quote]we had a set-top device where you moved the dial and the antenna moved in whatever direction you'd selected.

We didn't even have a set-top device. We had an antenna that was stuck in the ground and went all the way up as tall as the house. When we wanted to change reception, we had to go outside and physically twist the pole to change the direction.

When I was very little, late 60s, we had a party line. You would sometimes pick up the phone and hear someone else talking. I got a lot of kicks out of listening to other people's conversations until my mother would come by and see me on the phone.

We didn't have a phone answering machine until the mid-1980s.

No ATMs. My father would have to rush to the bank on his lunch hour every Friday to get cash. My father was good with money, so we never ran out over the weekend, but there was always that fear. But I do remember my mother being very careful when she grocery shopped on Saturday morning because it was a huge embarrassment if you had more groceries than money. And back before scanners, they couldn't just swipe the charge back off. They had to get on the microphone and call for customer service and when they did that everyone in the store looked over at the person who either 1) had a bad credit card or 2) had more groceries than money.

Speaking of credit cards, whenever the purchase was above a certain limit the clerk/cashier would have to call in (yup a phone call) to have the transaction approved.

I also remember some grocery stores would have their own “cheque”signature card program, that allowed verified customers to pay by personal cheque rather than cash - couldn’t buy groceries with a credit card either.

Prior to computers, if you used a credit card, say in Sears, the cashier would pull out this booklet of all the bad credit card numbers and run down this long list of numbers to see if your card was on the list.

[quote]No ATMs. My father would have to rush to the bank on his lunch hour every Friday to get cash. My father was good with money, so we never ran out over the weekend, but there was always that fear. But I do remember my mother being very careful when she grocery shopped on Saturday morning because it was a huge embarrassment if you had more groceries than money. And back before scanners, they couldn't just swipe the charge back off. They had to get on the microphone and call for customer service and when they did that everyone in the store looked over at the person who either 1) had a bad credit card or 2) had more groceries than money.

What about checks? I always had a spare check in my wallet.

No television after midnight or thereabouts. Last thing shown was the national anthem, then just a blank screen.

Plus, the tv was a massive piece of furniture. Took up one whole wall of the room. All wood, with metallic threaded cloth covering the speakers. Oh, yeah - it also had a “hi-fi” in it.

My parents always wrote checks at the grocery store and would get $40 or $50 back.

They also knew they could do it on Thursday night if payday was Friday, because it used to take 3-4 days for a check to clear. Now they take it out right away (in some cases).

There were actual knobs on the TV to change channels.

The TV still takes up too much room, R9, it's just all visual now.

I remember we had regular soda deliveries. Wooden cases of big bottles. I think the brand was Hoffman? Anyone remember that? Seemed like most families did that then.

[quote]What about checks? I always had a spare check in my wallet.

My mother changed grocery stores a lot depending on what she had seen in the sales paper and coupons that she had. She finally settled down to using one grocery store and got a check cashing card. But when we were little, we would play a guessing game as to which grocery store my mother was going to shop at. There were four that she rotated around depending on what they had on sale. When Shop Rite had their "can-can" sale, she would swoop in and buy up canned goods for months.

We had a milkbox on our front porch. I think the milk deliveres stopped coming before I was in first grade, but when I was little we got milk, butter and cheese at least twice a week.

The vegetable cart man was still around on Saturdays in the summer well up until the early 80's, and the swill man stopped coming sometime in the early 70's.

We did too r14. I wish I had that metal milkbox today. We used to stand on it, throw rocks at it, hide stuff in it.

Also, we had the Watkins man come about once a month. He would sell my mother Watkins Vanilla and some spices like cinnamon. He would always give us kids little mints. We would even figure out what houses he was going to visit, so we could run over to that house and get the free mint. I once hung outside the house of a couple who had no children just to get the mint. We thought we were so smart that the Watkins man didn't recognize us from house to house.

We would walk to the bus stop and wait for the school bus each day no matter what the weather. No such thing as parents driving you to school or waiting with you at the bus stop in the car if it was freezing cold or raining. Parents of kindergarten or 1st grade kids would walk with their kids the first few days of school but after that they were on their own.

If the tv stopped working a guy would come to change the picture tube.

Growing up in the 70s, a lot of people still smoked. It was even permissible to smoke in supermarkets and discount stores.

No seat belt laws. And a few people used child safety seats, but they were designed mostly so little kids could see out the window, not to keep them safe. We also rode around in truck beds.

God, the milkbox! I’m definitely feeling old now. I remember I used to bug my mom to let me write the little notes we’d roll up and slip in the top of the empty bottle telling him what to leave. I could never understand why we couldn’t get egg nog in the summer.

"Had a discussion with millennials yesterday morning"

This. Never. Happened.

Millennials will not speak to anyone over 35.

We used a pencil to dial the phone.

Growing up where I did, many older houses still had coal burning furnaces for heat. My grandparents' home had a coal furnace well into the 1980s, so someone would periodically have to go to the basement and add coal to the furnace!

Yeah, we had a covered ceramic cigarette dish in the living room - just for guests. We’d always offer them a smoke.

We actually knew our neighbors and even socialized with them. Neighbors were friends. Nowadays we're a nation of strangers.

No color TV until the mid 60's and you had to wait for the "set" to warm up. Most homes only have one TV. No calculators, dishwashers were not common until the 70's, mom had to defrost the freezer, tap water was okay to drink (no bottled water), few air conditioners in homes, some homes still used coal or sawdust to fuel their furnace.

Oh, yes, r26, no calculators. I remember going into a department store when calculators first came out and they were kept in glass cases like jewelry and they had priced tags like $500 and $600. Now you can buy one for 99 cents.

There was no recycling and no composting. You just threw everything away. Trash cans were metal and there was a lot of noise on the day of trash collection. The only things you didn't throw away were the glass bottles that soda came in, if you had paid a deposit on the bottles. You could get your money back from the deposit if you brought them back. But usually you just returned them, bought the same thing, and didn't have to pay the deposit again. This could go on endlessly, until "No deposit, no return" became popular.

You could decide at the last minute to stay overnight at a friend's house and it was no big deal, as long as the parents knew where you were. Parents trusted their kids more then. Nowadays it takes a scheduled "play date" and probably a signed contract.

Everyone smoked! Ashtrays and lighters everywhere.

Things that would get Child Protective Services after you nowadays, like my mother leaving me in the front seat of her car when I was little while she went inside a shop. After exiting the car she'd lean in through the open window, point at the dashboard and snarl "Don't touch anything!"

r17, I was 10 in 1975; as a latch key kid, I used to take the El in Chicago all the time to go to school and back, I was generally left alone to my own devices, so used to wander around the northside of the city- from Skokie to Old Town. I think there was a mother that was criticized about letting her 10 year old son ride the NYC Metro subway by himself a couple of years ago.

If someone called you just as you were picking up the phone to make a call to someone, the phone wouldn't ring. You just picked up the phone and there they were. You wouldn't hear a dial tone. This happened to me maybe 3 times in 20 years. You pick up the phone and there's someone you know on the line already. It was an odd feeling.

Although air conditioning had been around for several years, we had three window units in our house, and the people in the neighborhood thought we had money (1967)! Only the wealthy had central air conditioning in their homes in the 1960s and a lot of people couldn't even afford the high electricity bills from window units. People just roasted in the summer.

We had cable in the 70s. You must've lived in a retarded area.

People used to burn piles of leaves in the fall. Although it was environmentally unsound, the smell in the air was fantastic!

I graduated from high school in 1968. We walked home from school, about two miles, car pooled in the morning. Watched soap operas after school, Dark Shadows and All My Children. Talked on the phone for hours using the rotary phone. Walked back and forth to friends' houses. Made "phony" phone calls. Searched for unusual names in the phone book, called them and asked silly questions, like when calling the Forest family, "can I talk to a tree?"One day my friend and I called up dozens of people and taped them saying "Hello" before we hung up. The tape recorder was a giant box, we played back the numerous "Hellos" and laughed historically.

Helped mom with chores, washed and dried dishes in front of an open window over the sink. No dishwasher. Fridge had a small ice box. Mom rarely bought soda or other treats. Fast food was a rarity. It was a scandal when a Hunts Donut shop opened nearby and we could see the neon sign from our front yard. "An eyesore!" Dad declared. We ate healthy home-cooked meals, mom cooked every night. My parents had a cup of coffee every night after dinner. Dessert most nights, too. Home made pies or cakes, mom did a lot of baking. She made home-made french fries, too. They were great. One summer when I was 15 I made my own french fries at 11 PM and settled in to watch Steve Allen on TV. I was skinny as a rail, even with all those fries. Later got hooked on Johnny Carson.

Went to school games, pizza parlors after, and the ice cream parlor in the afternoon. Numerous trips to the beach where guys surfed. Took buses downtown and hung out in the big stores and hotels watching people, had a treat at the Woolworth's counter, bought candy from candy counter. Walked everywhere. Lazed around with friends, talking, just hanging out. Saw Janis Joplin perform live in 1967, along with other notables at concerts in San Francisco where I lived. Watched many friends turn into hippies and drug aficionados as the 60s drew to a close. Tried pot in 1968, got monumentally high, but being a nerd, focused on school and went to college.

Art major, graduated college in 1972 into a colorful, crazy world of advertising and art shows and renaissance faires and sexual experimentation. Career, travel, and dating were major interests. Didn't have computers or internet, didn't know what we were missing.

[quote]We had cable in the 70s. You must've lived in a retarded area.

We lived in an area where the cable company didn't feel like running the cable, so we didn't have it. They kept saying that the houses weren't close enough together to make it worth their investment to run cable.

[quote]There was no recycling and no composting. You just threw everything away

No, there was a huge recycling movement in the 70s and 60s. The scouts had paper drives in every suburb. We had a man that used to drive by and go through garbage to get cans and paper and my mother had me label the garbage bag for him, so he wouldn't be in front of our house.

r37

You could've paid for it. Even today in areas of Chicago and NYC there are some cost prohibitive areas, but if you pay for it, the cable company will provide service. Not worth it unless your rich.

No r39, we couldn't. The cable company flat out said they wouldn't run the cables because it was too expensive to lay miles of cables for the limited number of houses in our neighborhood.

[quote]no calculators. I remember going into a department store when calculators first came out and they were kept in glass cases like jewelry and they had priced tags like $500 and $600.

They fell fast, I got one in 1972 and it cost me $25. And in two years, it was a throw away model at $2.00. Bowmar was put out of business by Texas Instruments.

I saw my first microwave oven in about 1971. It was a rare marvel. A deli had one near my school. We were all afraid of getting zapped by the microwaves but eventually my parents got one in the mid 70s. We had one TV which did not run programming 24/7. Programming stopped at midnight.

You could kill Vietnamese and it was legal.

Sitting at a table with friends or family, having a meal and actually conversing with one another.

R25

Rover , Red Rover send ______ ovah!

Mother May I?

Got pink-eye swimming in Lake Erie

Mom left the stereo in the living room on all day, tuned to the beautifully soporific easy listening radio station ("All Music... All the Time").

Dinner at a restaurant was for adults. For children it was a rare treat and a big deal, so my brother and I had to be on our absolute best behavior. My mother kept ballpoint pens and little spiral-bound notepads inside her purse, and I would draw while waiting for our order to arrive (I guess this is the 1960s-70s equivalent of handing your iPhone to your kid to keep her quiet).

Going to people's houses for dinner, all the children would play in the basement

r47 reminds me, there were certain radio stations that played everything. You could tune in and hear Kiss followed by Barbra Streisand followed by Alice Cooper followed by Olivia Newton-John followed by Lynn Anderson followed by one of those comic songs like "The Streak".

simple banking took forever

We had a milkman, but also Charles Chips junk food delivered as well.

My father would say to us on a Saturday , "Go out and play and don't come back until dinner." It was a day off for him.

He would likely be arrested for that nowadays.

r48, that is SO true. Except where I lived from April to October, kids remained outside!! Ha! We would run around and try to catch lightening bugs. But we rarely went inside to the living room of anyone's house. That was always for company.

And r52, it was the same for us. Especially in the Summer. We would get on our bikes and ride out about 10 am. And our parents had no idea where we were. Sometimes we would come back for lunch or someone's mother would make us sandwiches, but we were gone until about 5:00 pm.

[quote]Being gay instead of "genderqueer"

Oh honey -- no. Being a fruit, a pansy, a faggot, a queer, a nelly, a sissy ... instead of "gay."

R51 in KC we had Guys Nuts (and Chips) delivered

Vinyl roofs on cars. Loose pillow, bordello-like interiors of the Big Three full sized cars. Power windows were standard only on Lincolns and Cadillacs.

I liked those triangular windows on the driver and passenger side windows. You could turn it to get the breeze on your face because no one had air conditioning in their cars.

I remember going to the County Fair in the early 70s. And there was a gay rights organization with a booth set up. There was a guy sitting there with a paper bag over his head and a sign in front of him said, "This could be your brother or neighbor or best friend." We all howled with laughter because we were trying to guess if it was one of our teachers, whom we all assumed to be gay.

R56, don't forget opera windows!

Yes r57, vent windows..

Whitewall tires (which cost extra.) Federal Excise Tax on tires.

Charles Chips deliveries and Good Humor ice cream trucks roamed the neighborhood.

Block parties

Occasionally eating dinner in the living room on squeaky TV trays

Saturday morning cartoons!

Long distance calls on a weekday were VERY expensive! Calling your retired folks in FL for a few minutes would cost around $20 which bought a lot of groceries back then. Sunday afternoons were the cheap rate.

Hide and Seek, as well as Kick the Can, were the primary games.

I thought it was a huge deal when my parents gave me a hand held hairdryer for Christmas. Now when I went to feather my hair, I didn't have to wait for my older brother to finish, and he often ran the hairdryer so hot that it would automatically shut off until it cooled down. Several years later, Consumer Reports listed all the hairdryers that used asbestos and almost every one of those handheld dryers were listed.

This thread is a winner.

Please keep posting your memories.

I put on my Christmas list: orange and yellow shag carpeting and matching bedspreads and curtains for my bedroom that I shared with my brother.

It would have looked great but she told me "boys don't ask for those things..."

CUNT

This thread is making me homesick.

We used to get the frozen juice concentrates and mix them in a pitcher and stir it with a wooden spoon. We kids would deliberately add less water than we were supposed to so it would be sweeter.

I babysat for kids when I was 10. My mom had a big palette of Helena Rubinstein eyeshadows that was the most glamorous thing I ever laid my hands on. We ran around the neighborhood until it was time for dinner.

Another small thing that’s changed is that kids wouldn’t get braces unless their teeth were really jacked, and not until junior high or high school. My third grader has several friends who are getting them. Kids who still have baby teeth. What’s that all about??

[quote]Long distance calls on a weekday were VERY expensive! Calling your retired folks in FL for a few minutes would cost around $20 which bought a lot of groceries back then. Sunday afternoons were the cheap rate.

And many times you had to dial several times because you would get a message that said, "All lines are currently busy." So many people called during the cheap rates that all the lines would be in use. I remember my mother calling our grandparents in Alabama at 9:00 pm one night because she couldn't get through. It was like a holiday weekend. My grandmother panicked and thought something bad had happened because nobody called at 9:00 pm. But my mother couldn't get through.

Going over to someone's house to play and being told by the parents to stay out of the living room. These people often had plastic-covered furniture and lampshades, which looked very creepy. What were people getting up to that necessitated plastic covers over everything?

I used to jack off with Crisco shortening but I was careful not to leave any finger marks in the can.

You would NEVER call adults by their first name. It was always Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones. My mom had a few good friends who we’d call by their first names.

It was considered rude to take off your shoes in someone else’s home, unless you were very familiar with them. Maybe. Now it’s rude not to.

Avon lipstick samples in tiny white capsules. And they were tiny. Good for one lip application.

You wrote letters. Had to put them in an envelope, put a stamp on them, take them to the mailbox or post office and wait days/weeks for a response.

there was recycling and composting---people who had lived through the Depression and/or WWII often composted. The Boy Scouts or other charity-type groups would pick-up newspapers (usually saved in paper grocery bags. Other kinds of recycling took off in the 70s.

Not everyplace had cable and often the number of channels wasn't much more than what you got over the air. Pay-tv as it was called (the ancestor of HBO)was in its infancy and only available in a few test markets.

R70 wins thread..Now closed!

My mom had a very strict rule about not eating in front of the television. I do it now when I visit (bowl if ice cream not a full diner), but she doesn't like it much.

Answering machines, let alone voice mail, were not common. Doctors used answering services, where gals took messages, which were checked on. Everything else, you weren't home, you missed it.

Block parties sound rather odd. Who organized them?

AND the family dog lived outside. People had doghouses for them! Maybe when it was really cold they would be allowed into the garage or basement. No one would let a dog on their bed or the sofa. Perhaps your eccentric great-aunt would have a chihuahua or toy poodle that had a bed in the kitchen but that was considered odd and unsanitary. Dogs were for guarding your home.

Not that I begrudge animals their improved status or treatment.

Christmas Club accounts at the bank.

All of your schoolwork was in longhand (cursive!) unless you were fortunate enough to have access to a typewriter.

Paper Drives

Not really household, but related to everyday life. Sometime in the early sixties, my college roommate and I drove from Massachusetts to Florida for winter break. Someplace in the Deep South we stopped for gas, which you were incapable of pumping yourself, by the way. I stayed in the car while he went around the side of the building and whenhe returned, I went off in the same direction.

Attendant: “You. Use the one inside.” Puzzled I did as he asked. It was not until I was back in the car that I realized that this had been my first and only experience with segregated toilets.

Before Call Waiting you could dial the operator and ask that she interrupt a call in progress if you had been trying to reach someone and his or her line was busy. This was supposed to be reserved for emergencies, but there was something of an illicit thrill in calling the operator and initiating the emergency breakthrough (plus it served the person right for being on the goddamned phone too long).

[quote]Block parties sound rather odd. Who organized them?

We had one during the Bicentennial. I don't remember who organized it.

I remember McDonalds *constantly* pushing kids to have backyard carnivals to prevent muscular dystrophy. They had kits they would send you that told you how to set up one of those carnivals. My parents, who were party poopers, never let us get one of those kits.

The living rooms had plastic over the furniture and nobody was ever allowed in those rooms.

We thought the TV gave off X rays so we weren't allowed to sit on the floor in front of the TV.

We were sent out to play on the weekends but after we did work around the house. My brothers and I would help my dad outside for a couple of hours every Saturday and my sisters would clean inside with my mom. We were all contributing members of the household from about age 5 up. Same with all the other kids in the neighborhood. We'd usually meet up after lunch and play outside, whether that was playing baseball, kickball, shooting hoops, exploring in the woods, riding bikes (often in the woods), sledding, ice skating and ice hockey. No parents at all. My Catholic parents liked to go to 5 pm Mass on Saturday and all the kids would be dragged there, in jeans and not so clean, but it beat having to get dressed up and going early on Sunday morning before breakfast. My parents liked to sleep in on Sundays, my dad would go out for bagels and my mom would make a big late breakfast, which would be my second breakfast after a bowl of Cap'n Crunch or Frosted Flakes. Then they would linger over the Sunday paper for hours and we would be free to do whatever we wanted all day. My mom would make a nice dinner, sometimes my grandmother and/or aunts, uncles, cousins would join but it would always wrap up by 6. Then it was bath and pjs and ready for Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and The Wonderful World of Walt Disney.

Today's society is so kid-centric, I can't see my parents every willingly give up their weekends for things like travel sports teams, or dragging us off shopping or to restaurants. We were happy to be outside and it didn't cost anyone anything.

Many drug and hardware stores had one of these.

[quote]I realized that this had been my first and only experience with segregated toilets.

My grandparents lived in Alabama and one time when we were visiting they had to take me to the doctor. At the doctor's office, there was a white door and a colored door and they both led to the same waiting room. I think the whites were expected to sit on one side of the waiting room and the non-whites on the other side. But people just sat wherever there was an empty chair.

Shoe Stores used to use x-ray machines to see if your foot fit in a shoe.

r86, you were luck you were Catholic.

I was raised in an Evangelical church. We had to get up on Sunday morning, everyone bathed and dressed in suits (even when we were little we had to wear tiny children sized ties). Sunday school, then Morning Worship. We went home to Sunday dinner that my mother had hoped had cooked while we were in church (there was a timer on the stove that turned on automatically). Then after that, we were expected to lay down and take a nap. And everyone slept like they were dead! Nobody called, nobody visited. You didn't interrupt Sunday afternoon nap. Then we had to get up and go back to church on Sunday night. My mother hated when the Pastor's wife would invite us to their house for Sunday lunch because it interrupted the Sunday nap. You didn't mess with Sunday nap in our house.

The parents would drive all of us over to the house of someone they knew, either friends or cousins or something. It seemed to take forever to get there. Us kids were expected to automatically be friends with their kids. It was awkward at first, a bi standoffish because we didn't know them. But someone suggested we play a game and there were a lot of games in those days. We slowly became immersed in the game and it started to become fun. Meanwhile the adults had their drinks and the wives got dinner ready. When dinner was ready we had to suspend the game and decided to leave everything exactly as it was and come back to it. We couldn't wait until we had finished dinner and were "excused from the table" so we could get back to the game. By the time the evening was over we felt like best friends. We didn't like leaving but promised we would come over again next week, even though that wasn't our decision. The drive back home, even though it was the same distance and time, seemed to go by muck more quickly.

Middle class families and below had one car. If Mom needed it during the day then she either had to drive Dad to work in the morning (and pick him up at night) or Dad had to arrange to "car pool". Mom needed the car because most wives didn't work. Contrary to all the movies now made about the era the parents virtually never lent the car to teenagers on Friday or Saturday night. The kids either walked or mostly rode bikes. Today people in Spandex whiz by on expensive bicycles but I literally can't recall the last time I saw teenagers going by on ordinary bicycles.

The "aspirational" goal of many families wasn't possessions but education for their children. Most parents were at best high school graduates and the majority didn't have that. They grew up in Depression and War and wanted better for their children. To have their child go to college was the ultimate validation of them as parents.

R91 I remember for me how terribly long it took for me to warm up to other kids but then eventually it turned fun

If the neighbors went on a summer vacation, their house would be dark for 2 weeks and would be considered as "haunted" during that time, by the rest of us kids. We were afraid to go near it. On a summer evening someone would say, "the Cunningham's house smells like grape Kool-Aid!" or something like that, so we would be challenged to go all the way up to the windows in the dark to smell it. Sure enough, the house actually did smell like grape Kool-Aid. But some kid would scream, thinking they saw a ghost in the house, and we'd all get scared and run away from the house screaming.

[quote]AND the family dog lived outside. People had doghouses for them!

Poor your dog. Our dogs and cats lived inside.

Cats lived inside and looked out with disdain on the dog in the backyard.

[quote] I remember we had regular soda deliveries. Wooden cases of big bottles. I think the brand was Hoffman? Anyone remember that?

♬ “The prettiest girl I ever saw…was sipping Hoffman’s through a straw.” ♬

Are you from New Jersey, r12?

[quote] We had cable in the 70s. You must've lived in a retarded area.

Did you live in PA, r34?

we had to actually walk to the television to change the channel.

we didn't use trash bags until the late 60's when Glad came out with them. Before that we used either paper bags or just threw the trash in the garbage can.

A slice of pizza and a coke were 25¢. McDonald's Hamburger, French Fries and a Coke were 35¢.

Most households had only one car

families ate meals together

you were tethered to the phone and if you had a really long cord could actually walk to the other side of the room with the mouthpiece. If a line was busy for too long that you were trying to call you could call the operator and ask her to check the line to see if it was off the hook.

[quote] You could kill Vietnamese and it was legal.

R43 Dead baby soup.

Our "console TV broke when I was 8 or 9, but because my parents couldn't a new one, we were without TV for a good 6 months. Then we got a smaller TV, and where do you think the new TV went? Right on top of the old console, which my mother couldn't bear to thorw out, because it had been so expensive back when they bought it, and it was literally a piece of furniture.

Oh yes r91 and I hated when we had to go over to houses that had drippy kids. One time, the kids suggest we play Scrabble and my older brother was looking over the games and said, "Do you have Battleship or Don't Break The Ice." Games weren't meant to be educational. And we always had to go to birthday parties because my mother was known for giving nice gifts. We even went to birthday parties of kids we didn't even know.

My mom was from the south and when she met and married my dad in the 50s and moved up north she was appalled that dogs lived inside. Until my dad found a little poodle-type dog, lost in a rainstorm and brought him home. That dog became my mom's first (and probably favorite) child, and made a dog lover out of her. She willingly put up with a menagerie of dogs, cats, hamsters, parakeets, lizards, turtles over the years.

In our house, the dog slept on the enclosed porch, next to the dryer. And then when the dog died, the cat slept on the porch. But the cat was allowed inside the house during the day.

R97

That ditty is vaguely familiar; I spent the 60s and 70s in NJ. NOW I have the f'ing Palisades Amusement Park ad stuck in my head! My mom saw their huge swimming pool on screen as a festering sewer of disease.

Big day for us was when the Christmas catalogs from Sears or Montgomery Wards would arrive. Catalog items would be sent to the catalog store for pickup rather than be delivered to our house. Of course I looked at the men's underwear and would get a boner.

Kids would try to adopt any living thing they found to be their pet. Lizards, mice, frogs, injured birds, tarantulas, etc. But it was always removed from its natural habitat so it never lived very long. A girl I knew kept a fly as a pet, in a little box, and of course it lived only 3 days.

I remember my mom putting these stamps into a booklet but I don't remember what she got for them. Also, Raleigh cigarettes had the same thing. It's hazy but besides milk I also seem to remember cupcake deliveries for some reason (might have imagined that one).

We could not wait for the Honey Dipper man to make his monthly rounds,

Most TV stations signed off at 1:00 am, not midnight. The NBC affiliate ran the 90 minute Tonight Show after the news and the other station, the CBS affiliate ran an old movie, often called some variant of The Late Show. If you were really lucky, your town might have a station of the new network, ABC. That's right, many if not most areas had only 2 or 3 stations.

The stations actually signed off too. They'd play an old battered film of a traditional arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner accompanied by a visual of the flag fluttering in the wind. Then a voice would identify the station followed by a "test pattern" for several minutes.

Because of The Late Show, and the afternoon Dialing for Dollars movie, many old film stars had a resurgence in popularity. People like W.C. Fields, Astaire and Rogers, Louise Rainer, Ronald Colman, etc., who had largely forgotten were seen by a new generation. This led to a new appreciation of older films and their directors and many colleges began film studies. And a nostalgia for things '30s and '40s became popular for most of the 1970s.

Color TVs were 5 to 10 times more expensive than black and white and so only a few families had them. It was always a great treat to visit a friend who had a color TV.

The more expensive TVs had remote controls. But the remotes were connected to the TV with a thick wire or cable. You had to be careful not to trip over the remote cord when you walked across the room.

Cigarettes were 25 cents a pack and you could buy them everywhere out of vending machines. And I mean everywhere. The machines were in hotels, churches, restaurants, doctors' waiting rooms. Everybody could smoke anywhere and they did: movie theaters, restaurants, the office. Office bathrooms were dim from the heavy haze of smoke.

And Green Stamps.

Yes, R48! I was notorious for forcing other children (mostly girls in my parents' circle) into choreographed dance numbers. A cousin reminds me of the Blues Brothers version of Minnie The Moocher". She still knows every word. I even made her go "borrow" her mother's pearls.

Good times.

Mom smoked and drank through each of her pregnancies. Don't recall people talking about drawbacks.

The classic RCA Indian Head Test Pattern, used everywhere in the 1950s and '60s, before color TV became common:

If the TV image started to go wonky my father would go over and bang on the side of the Magnavox and that would usually clear it up. It was probably just a loose tube.

If it really was a bad tube, he'd bring the old one down to the television repair shop and come back with a new tube.

Clotheslines. We hung out laundry out to dry.

We were too poor to get a dryer for most of my childhood. The towels were always stiff.

A dryer was a luxury.

Our neighbors were the first family on the block to have a color TV. They invited us to come over to watch the broadcast of "The Wizard of Oz" as we only had a black-and-white TV. It was the first time I had seen color TV. When the movie changed from black-and-white to color we all went "oohh!" I was 5. When the Wicked With came on the screen with her green face I ran out of the room.

And dishwashers. We washed and dried our dishes by hand.

My mother has a beautiful LG dishwasher now and still does the dishes by hand.

Dishwashers and dryers were common by the 60s, although some people had portable dishwashers rather than built-ins. TVs began having remote control in the 60s and it wasn't a high cost option.

We had a sandbox in the backyard. Then the neighborhood cats discovered it.

Our car had plastic slipcovers and no air conditioning. You had to peel yourself off the seats in the summertime.

Banks were open from 10:00 to 3:00. Hence the phrase banker's hours. No ATMs until the 70's.

We moved into a house in the early 70s that had a dishwasher. My parents weren't used to having one, so when it broke early on we never had it fixed. I don't think we had a dryer in the previous house, but did in this one - gas not electric.

There were no vaccines for measles, mumps or chicken pox. It was important to have these "childhood diseases" while you were still a child, as it gave you lifetime immunity and having them as an adult could cause serious complication, especially mumps. Having mumps as an adult male could cause sterility.

So whenever one of us came down with one them, mother would bundle us all together in her and Daddy's big bed and we had to sleep together and stay in bed together until we were all sick. That way she had 3 sick kids to take care of at the same time but that was better than all 3 of us having each one one at a time. And we all got as much vanilla ice cream as we wanted which kept the moaning and whining down.

Some families would send their kids over to sleep with the neighbors kids when they were sick to expose them.

Mumps, measles and chickenpox vaccines were around at the beginning of the 60s.

Mid to late 60s

My mom was hot on that stuff and I had the chicken pox and mumps both.

I was born in 1951, r124. And actually going through the disease meant you never had to have booster shot.

We had one of those portable dishwashers eventually. So Mom would roll it up to the sink at night, hook it up to the water spout and put the draining hose down the sink.

Every family had a little red Radio Flyer wagon, unless you had the one with the high wooden sides.

We had a special rake for the shag carpet.

[quote] We had cable in the 70s. You must've lived in a retarded area.

We had cable as an option, but my father was so cheap he squeaked when he walked. I'm sure he still has his first nickel.

I do appreciate your warm and thoughtful reply, R34. You are cordially invited to lick me where I shit.

Hi, R97. No, not New Jersey. Long Island.

I know it's been covered many times in their own threads but I always think about department stores - that there were so many, and that there were so many choices.

Even to some degree still in the 80s and 90s.

Now there's only a handful of stores, and they all have all the same brands at every store.

Another thing I remember. There were mailboxes everywhere. Every few blocks. Now when I need to send something in the mail I often stick it in my bag and end up forgetting that I have it.

Plus, a lot of those were the little boxes here go up in a square stone post.

We had a dining room but we very rarely used it. Most meals were eaten at the kitchen table.

r12 I grew up on the Island in the 50's/60's and never heard of them. of course we weren't allowed to drink soda though

Plus, my father had a rule that whatever I didn’t eat at dinner was going to be my next morning’s breakfast. Yes, he was a bit of a tyrant.

Another of his rules: A child never says “he” or “she” in referring to his parents. He said it showed a lack of respect. It was always “Mom” or “ my mother.”

My mother used to decorate at Christmas with Xmas cards. She'd tape them to the picture window in the shape of a Christmas tree. It was a big deal to get a lot of Christmas cards.

It was a bitch scraping off all that scotch tape after the holidays but worth it because everyone knew we were popular.

R91 you perfectly described many a Sunday when I was growing up

Nobody shopped on Sunday because stores were not open on Sundays. If you needed to go shopping, you'd go on Saturday, and even then department stores closed at 5:30. And they would be closed on holidays.

Department stores had huge toy departments where mothers used to park the kids while they went shopping, usually under the watchful eye of some stern matronly saleswoman who wore glasses on a ribbon and would chide you if you got too unruly.

Big city department stores were open one or two evenings a week. Even small suburban towns had lively business districts with local merchants, a locally-owned department store, and maybe a JC Penney or Montgomery Ward.

Toilet paper came in colors !!!! blue, pink, purple and some were 2 ply.

R138, in the 70's our mother didn't want us in the grocery store when she did the weekly shopping so we were free to roam around the other 4-5 stores in the strip mall. I'd check out the Playgirl mags at the magazine shop and then go over to the K Mart to shoplift patches for my jeans jacket.

r134, we ate all meals at the kitchen table except on holidays or when we had company until we got too big to squeeze all seven of us around the kitchen table. But by then, the older kids often had jobs or sports or weekend plans and Sunday dinners were usually the only times we ate as a family anymore. And my father also used to go ballistic if I referred to my mother as "she". But it was usually when I was complaining about some injustice "she" inflicted upon me, so I am sure I was using a whiny or angry tone.

R116 that was my exact introduction to color TV as well. Invited to neighbors for Wizard of OZ.

When my parents decided to redecorate the kitchen they put up a light over the dining table that looked exactly like this. The new wallpaper had chickens on it. We thought it was awesome.

We had a "hi fi set" and my parents listened to stuff like the soundtrack from GiGi, Flight of the Bumblebee, and the Katchaturian Sabre Dance. Sometimes you had to balance a nickel on the needle. The TV was b/w and there was a portable plastic radio. I remember being shocked when I went to visit my "rich" cousin and they had a console with the radio, TV and stereo inside. Amazing.

^ I believe the saloon in every TV western had one of those.

A holdover from when not everyone had a telephone, there were these fire alarm pull boxes on downtown street corners. I remember them being removed in the mid-70s.

R144 while we had this playing on the hifi

Anyone have to "duck n cover?" So stupid. They'd line us up against the gym wall and I remember thinking this wall will kill us all when the bomb drops.

R148, in the 60's we had those but didn't go down to the gym. We got under our flimsy desks.

The nickel or dime on the arm of the turntable trick actually worked well. But with long-term use it caused your records to wear out much faster.

R147, I was listening to his recording of Kismet with Robert Merrill, Regina Reznick and Mantovani's Orchestra just this morning! He's long been a favorite. Gorgeous voice.

My Mother had no name. All her credit cards and bank checks were in my Father's name, and when she signed a check it was Mrs. John Smith, never Betty Smith.

Speaking of checks, everyone used "counter checks." The stores would have a drawer with blank checks from all the local banks, and if you banked at the 1st National they would hand you a blank check and you would just fill it out and sign your name. The bank would figure out who you were from looking at the signature.

The banks also had Christmas Club Accounts, special savings accounts where you deposited $2.50 or $5 or whatever per week during the year so when Christmas rolled around you would have enough to buy presents. As I recall if your Christmas Club account was big enough the bank threw in some crappy free gift like a set of cheap steak knives.

Dads that could take apart anything, fix it, then put it back together.

Big families were not at all unusual. Not talking Duggar-level, but four, five, six, seven kids was normal. There were two families with nine kids each on my street. In the early 70s a young couple moved in across the street. They had a toddler and a baby. I kept waiting for them to have more kids, like everyone else, but they stopped after just the two. I guess that is attributable to the availability of birth control.

I remember having a lamp in our living room very similar to this one (less ornate and more yellow-y shades.)

Grocery stores also had other programs. My mother bought a full set of encyclopedia(s) one week at a time. We rarely used them but she displayed them proudly. "Funk and Wagnalls", she'd boast to guests.

Saturday morning chores, then all day out playing or fighting with friends and enemies. Every block had about 15 to 20 kids that ran around until the street lights went out. Few people had dryers, so everyone had a porch where they hung out their laundry. We all really did know the color of each other's underwear.

[quote]Department stores had huge toy departments where mothers used to park the kids while they went shopping, usually under the watchful eye of some stern matronly saleswoman who wore glasses on a ribbon and would chide you if you got too unruly.

So funny.

We in England still had the local corner shop or several. You knew the WHITE COUPLE who ran them and called them Mr & Mrs...

If you stepped out of line or were rude they'd tell you off and inform your mother. If you went in and spent too much money on candy they'd get suspicious and inform your mother - which is what happened to my brother. "Tony came in with a ten shilling note and spent it on sweets!" Big drama - where did Tony get the ten shilling note?

Also, being England, there's always be a corner shop (what you'd call a "general store") - run by an "old misery" and you'd only go in there if the other places were shut. Everyone called his shop "old misery".

Everything was shut on Sundays in London. The whole city was dead. You could walk down the middle of the street, everywhere.

You had shops that sold sweets (candy) only. Sweet shops! Wall to wall jars of candy which they'd weigh for you by the quarter pound.

This is a typical London sweet shop in 1968 >

courtesy cards.

R151 that is true. When my father died I had to put my mother on my American Express card so she had something in her name and could use it for emergencies.

The yearly Sound of Music and Wizard of Oz broadcasts on TV were a big freaking deal to a little kid like me.

It was practically the only time control of our sole TV could be wrested away from my Dad.

As someone mentioned upthread, my parents had to make sure they had enough cash for the weekend, including gas and errands. Only major purchases like furniture were done by check and NOTHING was to go on the credit card.

I'd go grocery shopping with my mother on Saturday, and she'd call out the total of her cart every time she put something in. It was my job to remember that number so she didn't go over her budget.

I took it very seriously.

I also remember Gone With The Wind being a huge deal on tv. And movies that said, "With limited commercial interruption."

I remember our old pharmacy had penny candy tins and a small corner with a small selection of booze and smokes, along with a few small containers of milk.

It had a little setup for milkshakes and ice cream. The other section was greeting cards, pantyhose, and lipstick.

R155! I remember the Funk and Wagnalls animal encyclopedias! The first one had a penguin on it, IIRC.

Earrings were long and dangly.

Caftans were floor length and patterned and textured.

Saturday morning chores and then walking downtown by myself to see the local "Kiddie Matinee." There was live pre-movie entertainment like a clown and a local high school rock band. The films were great: usually classic 1950s sci-fi like The Incredible Shrinking Man, Them, The Blob, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, etc. One morning it was the original German film (dubbed) about The Trapp Family Singers that The Sound of Music was based on. Everybody else hated it but little baby show queen me was thrilled.

And admission was five bottle caps!

Has anyone mentioned the soda counters in drug stores yet?

& hotel coffee shops - I miss hotel coffee shops.

Adults played cards: pinochle, rummy, Rook, poker. Kids played board games. Every year at Christmas, all the kids in my family got a little envelope with money and a board game. New ones came out every year and were advertised on t.v.

I remember actually being excited to go eat at McDonalds.

I grew up in rural North Carolina. The colored people weren't allowed to sit there.

My parents didn't have much money, but my father was kind of a techie, so we had HBO the minute it was available in the area.

They only broadcast for eight hours a day, I believe, for a long time.

As one of four brothers, after the last day of school we'd get shaved haircuts in the back yard because, well, it's summer. Before the first day of school my father would march us all down to the barber to get a proper haircut for school.

Barber shops then were male bastions and there were Playboy magazines in the waiting area. We were told under no uncertain terms to not look at them. Meanwhile my father would be leafing through them.

Our school haircuts were sharply parted on the side and tight on the sides. Not unlike what you see nowadays.

Everyone's mother cooked from Betty Crocker or Joy of Cooking. We all ate the same messes like American Chop Suey or Meatloaf with ketchup on top.

[quote]I remember actually being excited to go eat at McDonalds.

Me too. (#metoo)

They were more exciting when they were orange and yellow and red and your burger came in a polystyrene box.

mmmm, meatloaf with ketchup on top! With mashed potatoes and canned greenbeans. Definitely a staple when I was growing up.

[quote] Big drama - where did Tony get the ten shilling note?

Don't leave us hanging R157, where DID Tony get the 10 shilling note?

Turning tricks behind the local Sainsbury's

Your family doctor would make a house call if necessary.

[quote]Barber shops then were male bastions and there were Playboy magazines in the waiting area. We were told under no uncertain terms to not look at them

I remember this.

Brylcreem and hair tonic and Durex in glass display boxes.

What is it? Is it an antenna? Is it a sprinkler?

No! It's a "Hills Hoist," portable clothesline. Very popular where we lived back in the 50s.

R176, I was wondering this too

[quote]Don't leave us hanging [R157], where DID Tony get the 10 shilling note?

I think he must have nicked it from my parents.

My parents were ways finding stashes of candy under his bed. They'd confiscate it and then eat it in front of the TV.

As I said above, I grew up in rural North Carolina and Gone With the Wind was considered the finest historical documentary ever made. And damnyankee was one word.

Room Mothers.

R179 and to our mothers' dismay, running thru they sheets as they dried!

I remember as a child in the late 1960s getting vaccinated, and I'm fairly sure it was a shot for both measles and mumps, and a separate shot for tuberculosis at a different time. We also received the Sabin vaccine for polio, which was just a sugar cube with a red liquid in it, which we ate, rather than a shot. I'm not sure if we had a vaccine for chicken pox by then.

Report cards where the teacher actually said what she thought of you! I've saved my school report cards and some of those teachers didn't have very nice comments. I should sue!

My fourth grade teacher wrote that I was too interested in dramatics. I was a show queen even in fourth grade!

R186 I know .I thought I was an angel and good student. evidently not! But I never got too much guff from my folks as I wasn't failing or anything

My elementary school graded us on conduct. It was on its own line on report cards, along with the other subjects. Not throwaway grades, either. If you cut up too much or talked back, you would get marked down.

We also got graded on handwriting.

Now it's a Solar Clothes Dryer!

AKA, penmanship

And now for a different type of memory...

99.9% of children got whacked by their parents, and some by their grandparents and aunts and uncles as well.

Most adults smoked and if you lived in a cold climate, the windows were always closed. They also smoked in cars with children in them.

The food was absolute shit - bologna sandwiches on white bread, mac n cheese, tuna casseroles, jello molds, instant mashed potatoes, tv dinners, canned spaghetti, Nescafe. (And my father was a corporate exec, big house, cars, vacation house, etc)

[quote]Report cards where the teacher actually said what she thought of you! I've saved my school report cards and some of those teachers didn't have very nice comments.

I kept mine for a long time and then burned them.

I still have one from Christmas Term, 1969 - I was only six (you call this first grade, I think) - the "head-mistress" wrote "David's a little too full of himself".

I'd also get "David talks too much!! and can be disruptive in class, disturbing those around him"

I remember my father announcing to the family "Talks too much!"

R191 ..and PB&J

And chores. We had chores. I did laundry for the family starting at age 7. We did the dishes and helped clean on Saturday morning. I also did babysitting for spending money.

I am ashamed to say that I don’t force my kids to do regular chores. If something needs to be done, I really have to crack the whip to get them to do it. This is my failing as a parent.

Since I was the youngest, I got hand-me-downs. I remember The Golden Book Encyclopedias.

Davy Crockett hats.

r192, I'm in the same boat. Several of mine say "Talks too much." My 3rd Grade teacher thought she was so smart. She made me move my desk from around my male friends into a group of girls that I didn't hang with. By the end of the day, I was asking them what the name of their nail polish color was, whose picture did they have on their lunchbox and if they watched The Brady Bunch. I guess I should have been a talk show host.

Screw you, Mrs. R. I will NOT be quiet.

Rides in the back of my father's pickup truck on hot summer days. It was heaven.

[quote] Report cards where the teacher actually said what she thought of you! I've saved my school report cards and some of those teachers didn't have very nice comments. I should sue!

Like R192 I burned all my report cards when i found them after my mother died

By the 1980s, ATMs were common... but being able to USE one that wasn't in your hometown was FAR from guaranteed. As late as 1986 or so, I remember going to an ATM in Atlanta Airport & being unable to get cash because my bank was only a member of one of the two national networks (Plus or Cirrus), and the one at the airport was only associated with the OTHER one. 2-3 years before THAT, my ATM card only worked at my literal bank's ATMs & the ATMs at Publix.

Travelers' Cheques sucked, but it was suicidal to travel without them until the very late 80s or early 90s, because you could NEVER safely take for granted that you'd be able to easily get cash from a random ATM at your destination at 11pm on Saturday night... though by that point, you *could* usually find at least one ATM or branch within 10-25 miles that accepted your card if you called customer service.

I hope it's different nowadays but there were a lot of crap teachers back then.

Yes, penmanship. We wrote in cursive, which I don't think any young people can do these days.

My neighbors were the ones that always had the latest thing when it was available. Like cable. And VCRs (first Betamax and then a VHS, though the first one was the kind that opened at the top.) The latest boombix.

best seat ever.

Men & women had hair on their junk.

Variety.

Best seat ever, r203, unless you get carsick easily (like me).

And r134/136 "Another of his rules: A child never says “he” or “she” in referring to his parents. He said it showed a lack of respect. It was always “Mom” or “ my mother.” " -- Yes! I thought my father was the only domestic tyrant who insisted on that, but I guess it was more common than I thought.

My parents would faint if they heard the way our children talk to us.

Cigarettes tasted good, like a cigarette should.

I was able to buy cigarettes as a child in the 70s. Granted, they could tell it was for my mom since few 7 year old boys smoked Virginia Slims, but still, they'd sell it.

My BFF's first job at 16 when he could drive was to pick up his mom's weekly liquor order.

Physical Education was a required class for all students once you reached middle school, or as we called it then, Jr. High. You were graded on it. Before class, in the locker room, you to had to pull your gym shorts down to the knee to prove you were wearing the required jockstrap. Showering nude in the communal gang showers was required at the end of class. You had to be really quick so you you wouldn't be late to your next class.

(Our PE instructor hated the school's science teacher and most of us in my class had her class immediately after. He would regularly not dismiss class until there simply wasn't enough time to shower and dress and get to her class on time. It got us demerits for being late to class and being in the hallway during class without a pass and pissed the Hell out of her. He was a real sadistic asshole all the way around and reveled in all the trouble he caused everybody.)

You never talked back to or sassed your teachers, you were never in the halls without a pass during class time and you observed the dress code, which for boys was slacks and a nice shirt. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt to school would get you sent home to change. Do it again and you were suspended. A third time and you were expelled.

BTW, gym class was as hot as it sounds and every day was a terror, afraid I'd get a hard-on in the shower. Had many close calls.

[quote]I hope it's different nowadays but there were a lot of crap teachers back then.

And they all taught at my school. We had a lot of nasty teachers. I hated all of mine until 6th Grade.

Thank you Miss B for being nice to me in 6th Grade. Your niceness helped me to really engage with what you were teaching.

We had asbestos flooring in our house and our heat was in the cement foundation so the we were always barefoot. In the summer the floor was cold and in the winter the floor was warm.

The overall cheapness of the era. Tightwads. I respect it though. We weren't poor. My father was an executive. I grew up in 7 bedroom house with a pool and tennis courts. Yet my parents were still as cheap as any other family. "Don't open the door of the refrigerator until you know what you want." We heard that kind of shit all the time. My fathers favorite was a strike card on leaving the light on. If he caught you three times leaving the light on in the bedroom you lost your lightbulb for a few days. My mom would even clip coupons and go store to store for that week's bargains. My mother would tag sale too. "One man's junk is another man's treasure."

[quote]I was able to buy cigarettes as a child in the 70s.

Everyone could. Most diners and gas stations had a machine with pull levers and as long as you had coins, you could buy cigarettes. In our town, they even had a cigarette machine in the front of the grocery store, right by the bubble gum machines. I used to stand there and pull the levers because I was bored and nobody in our family smoked.

R211 OMG. We had the same father???? LOL

the cheapness was leftovers from the depression. if the parents didn't go thru it the grandparents did. People wanted to be ready just in case it happened again.

If your favorite TV show was canceled, you'd never see it again. If you loved a certain movie, once it left the theaters you'd never see it again unless it came on TV (and then you'd never see it again).

VCR's came out in the1970s and to me that was the real game changer.

Oh and BTW, All My Children wasn't around in 1968, it premiered in 1970.

Every boy in my neighborhood had cap guns (mid70s), or toy machine guns that looked like the real thing. God, today you would be mauled down by the police for carrying those around on the street.

My mother and a lot of mothers were big coupon clippers in the 1970s. My mother clipped them and kept them in an index card box and sometimes gave them to other mothers if it wasn't something she wanted. They all went apeshit when one of those rags like The National Enquirer ran a story about a mother who bought $100 worth of groceries and because she had coupons only paid something like $2. From that point on, my mother was dragging in crap we didn't even eat because she had a coupon for it.

Yeah, most of our parents had grown up in the Great Depression or the War and my mother's mantra like many others was "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

R212, I talked about the ubiquity of cigarettes and the vending machines that sold them for a quarter. Some doctors had them in their waiting rooms.

Oh yes, r237,cap guns and playing cowboys and Indians. We'd fight over who had to be the bad Injuns.

[quote]Every boy in my neighborhood had cap guns

I lost my gun for a little while and so I had to shoot my caps by laying them on the sidewalk and rubbing a stone against them. I finally found my gun again, so didn't need the stone anymore.

Wax coke bottles. You bit the end off and drank some strange liquid. Then you chewed the wax and sometimes swallowed it.

Candy cigarettes. You blew on the end and a bit of smoke (powered sugar?) came out the end. You then crunched on the cigarette.

Then Wacky Packs came along. Their cards spoofed current products on the market. Like "Cover Girl" was "Cover Ghoul" and they had a piece of hard gum that you chewed.

With some exceptions that you'd expect, like a TV, and even those not so bad, we had real food in every food store. We didn't have to go organic to not get poison or Frankenfoods, more lab experiments that food. Just your average inexpensive grocery, supermarket, butcher, bakery, restaurant had real food. People ate plenty but I don't remember seeing people walking around the streets eating and drinking, except maybe at fairs and places like that. Very few were really fat and most of us had 3 good squares a day with plenty of carbs, mostly white carbs too and usually dessert for lunch and dinner or sugar in our cereal in the morning.

Real food doesn't make you fat. I've come to that conclusion. My grandfather had 6 meals a day, real meals, not 3 meals cut in half and he was skinny as could be till he died at 89. Those were meals with meat, beef, pork, eggs, desserts, tons of potatoes and supermarket white bread, butter, cream, the works. Cows ate grass like cows back then and other animals ate what nature intended.

R219, I used to light my caps on fire with a match.

Some truth to that R221. I think because mothers cooked.

I'm progressive and pro-feminist, but I do think we lost some things as a culture without having one parent at home. And eating home cooked food was one of them.

I wasn't allowed to say "Huh?" If I ever did, the response was, "Pull a pig's tail and he says 'huh'."

Whenever we said "Hey!" Mama would say "Straw's much cheaper."

Charge-a-plates

Nobody's mother worked outside the home

Ladybug and Villager clothing was de rigeur for the junior high school miss

Banlons for the fellas

Flip flops were a new kind of shoes (also known as tam tams and zories)

You could buy pet mice and goldfish at the local Woolworth's

All the moms drank Tab and Metrecal

Do they still do school pictures today? The one of the biggest sins a child could commit would be to some how fuck up picture day.

If you lived on Long Island you couldn't get away from this jingle for Robert Hall.

When I get nostalgic these are some of my favorite types of pictures to look at. There were six kids in our family. In a cedar chest my mother saved every school picture and report card. I'm so glad she did.

My report card always said I was a bright child who could achieve much more if I applied myself . . . right up until I dropped out of high school.

McDonald's gift certificates!

Riding in the bottom of the shopping cart, when it was easy for a kid to fit underneath the basket.

[quote]"One man's junk is another man's treasure."

That is so true!

Cruising the strip with your buds and a bottle of Thunderbird.

I loved this breakfast cereal:

My buddies and I used to have a camping night on the weekends. It was in the woods right next to our subdivision so it wasn't exactly an adventure but we thought it was.

We'd steal booze from our parents, bring our sleeping bags and build a big campfire.

Masturbating with my pillow.

Tonsillectomies were very common.

[quote]Every boy in my neighborhood had cap guns (mid70s), or toy machine guns that looked like the real thing. God, today you would be mauled down by the police for carrying those around on the street.

When Goldfinger came out a kid in my 8th grade class thought it would be cool to bring his father's Beretta to school. He had a shoulder holster and everything, just like James Bond, and he wore it under a blue blazer. He had it for a couple days showing everyone his fast draw until one of the girls ratted him out.

The principal confiscated it, called his father in, took the pistol out of his desk drawer, handed it to the father and told him to make sure the kid never brought it back to school. That's it. Nothing else happened. End of story.

R238 and the supposed payoff to entice us was ICE CREAM afterwards!

r229, I love those class pictures! I remember being annoyed at a girl classmate who must have forgotten it was picture day and she wore a sweatshirt, corduroys and sneakers. ON PICTURE DAY! And they put her in the front row! I was such a MARY! even back then.

And the kids who got tonsillectomies got time off from school! We were totally jealous!

R105 r131, here's the Hoffman bottle in Newark overlooking Rt. 22 and the Parkway. I guess they delivered to LI from Newark. I know the commercial played on NYC AM radio.

New Jersey, too, r228.

Everyone used to leave the keys in their cars on our dead end street. My favorite thing to do was start them and leave them running. Then people started taking their keys. I was four so I didn't get punished.

When the Sears Christmas Wish Book came out, my siblings and I would fight about who got to look at it first. We spent hours and hours looking at every single page of the catalog. My mom made us each write out a Christmas list of what we wanted, and then transcribed all our lists into a little spiral bound notebook that she kept in her purse at all times. My strategy was usually to put at least one item on the list that was a stretch (something I would be unlikely to actually get, but not so outrageous that it was out of the question). Every once in a while the top item on the list actually was received and it was like magic. For at least a couple of years, I referenced the catalog page numbers next to the items on my list for convenience, and made sure to specify color when applicable.

Christmas and summer vacation times were like magic. We did nothing in particular and used our imagination a lot. Like several posters upthread, we sometimes left the house in the morning after breakfast, came home for lunch, and then were out running all over until dinner time. None of the moms worked outside the house and I think they all coordinated as secret "lookouts" for each other from the kitchen window because occasionally someone's mom would call over to the house we were near and the mom in that house would yell out the window that their mom was calling and telling them to come home now.

On holidays kids could buy fire crackers and light them off in engenious and dangerour ways. My friend, Ricky Despard's family got the first TV on the street. One night I came home late from watching and my parents met me at the door and angryly told me i couldn't watch TV at Ricky's anymore. Then they took me into the living room to see the new 21" TV. Ricky's was only 17" National Geographic Magazines was the porno magazine for young teens. Steal them from the dentist's office. The very short gym shorts. Carrying a bulky zippered binder to and from high school. No back-packs then. 3 black ball candies for a dollar. The 56/57 Chevy that any teen boy could repair. Cars with fins.

[quote]Ladybug and Villager clothing was de rigeur for the junior high school miss. Banlons for the fellas.

Girls wore Ladybug and Villager in my high school, too, but BanLon was for greaser boys. It was not the male equivalent of Ladybug/Villager. My sweaters were from Alan Paine, my shirts from Gant, Hathaway, and Lacoste.

Do you remember the weird guy who would post on these threads "I was 67 in 1963"?

For some reason our little midwestern town had cable very early on but it wasn't modern cable of course with the 500 channels. It just meant you paid to have a cable hooked up to your house and TV and you got all the available channels in your area. Since we lived equal distance from several TV markets, we had a full dial of options, meaning the UHF dial from 2 to 13 (though Channel 8 was the local clock/weather channel that just showed exactly that...a clock and a thermometer. One time, a huge spider walked across the clock.)

So, since Hee Haw was a popular Saturday night syndicated staple, EVERY TV market showed it. My town was in the middle of 5 markets so Hee Haw was on five out of 11 possible channels from 6pm to 7pm. And, they could be off by fractions of a second so you could quickly change the channel from Hee Haw on Channel 2 (St Joe) to Hee Haw on Channel 3 (Omaha) and get a cool stuttering effect.

But, only if your dad wasn't around to catch you "messing with the TV".

I agree R247. The cars from that era were great. I remember this one from my childhood. It had tail fins and a push button transmission.

Collect call from Hildegarde will you accept the charges.

No.

MOM GRANDMA MADE IT HOME!

[quote]I agree [R247]. The cars from that era were great. I remember this one from my childhood. It had tail fins and a push button transmission

I was just looking at some film set in Chile. They have all the dreary silver and black lookalike cars you see everywhere in the world now.

We had the Gigi album, as well as that classical record advertised on TV (Polyvetsian Dance by Borodin, etc.). The stereo was in the downstairs spare bedroom, which we took to referring to as the Music Room to sound hoity-toity.

In the New Jersey suburbs, each town of any size had its own toy store. So, I don't recall anything about buying toys at an actual department store.

We had any candy stores as well, where I believe the prices were by weight, but wouldn't swear to it.

My parents had to get a Sears credit card back in the late 60s to replace our furnace, as my dad just didn't have enough spare cash to pay for an entire new one right away. Many, many years later I discovered that said account was now on MY credit report (dad was a Jr, and me a 3rd); when I told the credit company, they said they would not remove it as Sears objected!

I went to a private school K - 8, where we were required to do Sports from fifth through eighth grades. We all showered together with the teacher coaches. Exciting in one sense, but horrifying in another. For report cards, the Headmaster would hand them out individually one by one; we would be called up to the teacher's desk where he sat, receiving comments that the entire class would hear.

My folks didn't get color TV or cable until the 1980s, when another family hold out had finally given in also.

The excitement in the neighborhood when a serviceman would return home.

My dog ate Alpo and my cat ate kal-kan in the 70s.

[quote]I also remember some grocery stores would have their own “cheque”signature card program

My dad had a Walmart check cashing card from the 1960s from an Arkansas store. The card had a store number on it, I think it was store #5. By the 1990s employees were freaking out about the card because it was so old, and the manager was always called on us when Dad tried to write a check.

Eventually every cash register at Walmart in town had a list of something like 10 old guys with old check cashing cards, "No need to call the manager, their cards are approved."

I hated going to Walmart because of that. Always a damn ordeal.

Speaking of crazy local TV in the 1970s, one time a channel in Springfield MO ran the Emergency Broadcast System test but used the tape for an actual emergency. It was apparently just some dude who put the wrong tape on to play. Doing things manually caused just a ton of errors.

Where I lived we only had two TV channels, NBC and CBS. Because there was no local ABC affiliate, one of the two aired Dark Shadows in the afternoon since it was so popular. I suppose that would be unusual now to have a network affiliate air another network's shows, but I think there was more flexibility for the affiliates back then.

Back then, there were rural stations that were dual-affiliates.

It was acceptable to be a racist.

R191 describes my childhood. My dad was a teacher and he had big wooden paddles in his room to use on students who acted up. In the 80s schools started frowning on that so he brought them home and used them on me. Both parents smoked and I still have serious health problems from it. My doctor's parents were the same so at least he understands.

I also can't take amoxicillin anymore because they gave me so many shots of it in the 1970s and 1980s that it no longer works. Apparently that's common with GenXers.

We had a TV repairman who came by to fix the tubes a lot. So much so that I think he and Mom were having a fling.

I remember when Mom learned that dyed toilet paper was bad for the bits, but you couldn't find white TP, so she had to make do with white that had little blue or pink flowers on it.

I would disagree R251. The cars from that era were shoddy messes that required constant maintenance. Frequent oil-changes and tune-ups, and the bodywork started rusting after a couple of years. It was common for people to trade in their cars after only two years, since any longer than that the cars rapidly became junk. There were auto repair garages everywhere to keep up with the demand.

[quote]I grew up in rural North Carolina. The colored people weren't allowed to sit there.

Colored people weren't allowed to sit in North Carolina? This explains so much about Mayberry.

I realize how easy it is to get caught up in the warm glow of nostalgia, but reading this thread I think people take for granted how much better and easier life is now than back then. Just about everything then required more effort, more time, and was less convenient. Many manufactured goods, not just cars, were shoddier and required frequent repairs. When was the last time you heard of a TV repairman?

"Gas man!" yelled out before entering your basement to check the meter

R229, they still take those photos at my kids’ school. I never buy the school picture package (it’s all online now) because I am a cheap-ass bitch, but for some reason they give you the class photo for free. They are adorable.

R266? WTF are you talking about? You don't hear about them because all the shit they make now is made to break or be obsolete and unusable. We kept an old black and white TV in the family until digital. The folks have now gone through about 5 models since the B&W disappeared. Clothes now are shitty, and at least you, yourself, could fix a car if you had some mechanical aptitude. Now you have to have it hooked up to a computer and at a damned dealership. Just ask i-phone repairmen about the new models.

R266, I agree about the labor and effort, but I disagree about the shoddiness. I think most things were made better. My dad had a refrigerator from the 1950s in his house until the mid-90s. It was a behemoth but it never stopped working. It was demolished along with his house, still functional. There’s not a refrigerator manufactured today that would last 45 years. My mother has the same Electrolux vacuum cleaner that we had growing up, and I’m 47. We call it Bessie. It’s banged up and looks like a UFO mated with an alligator, but it still works better than any plastic piece of shit now. I think she hoards the bags.

I can’t speak for cars, but appliances are made to be obsolete now. People just junk stuff instead of fixing it.

Milk delivered to your backdoor 2 or 3 mornings a week in big glass quart bottles. In the summer, all the neighborhood kids would beg the milkman for some of the crushed ice in his truck that kept the milk cold. Since husbands had often left for work, the milkman got all the discrete side action he wanted.

Freshness/Expiration dates did not appear on food products until the early 70s. It used to be a woman's duty to know--through touch, smell, and heft--whether something was fresh. We've lost a lot of that art.

Walking to and from school when the weather was warm - no fear of pedophiles. Well I went to a Catholic grade school and one of the 7th grade teachers was a former priest who liked to get 12 year old boys to visit him for weekends at his camp. Our parents let us go - and this creep smoked pot with us and some of the boys vanished with him for hours on end. I told my mother when I got home and she never let me do that again. But no one reported this guy. Sorry I went off on another direction with this.

Any millennials was to weigh in on how this time compares to your upbringing!

Grew up in Outer Boro NYC in the late 60's / 70's. We had milk and Charle's Chips delivered, Hoffman's soda was a cheap brand that people would buy in cans for family event parties (along with a sheet cake) - they always included off flavors like grape & black cherry.

We would shop at local low end dept stores like Korvette's and Grant's (which sill had an ice cream counter) we would hang out in the pet dept and look at the gerbils and turtles while mom shopped. Most of our clothes came from the Sears Cataloge. As did all of Christmas - I used to think Santa printed up The Wish Book,

The neighborhood had a knife grinder that would come by in a truck. Besides ice cream, there were kids rides on trucks as well - a mini ferris wheel and a whip - it must have cost a dime and you got an unfrozen freeze-pop (the colored water in the flat plastic tube) when you got off the ride.

We also had a block party for the Bi-Centennial - which I was obsessed with - remember the "200 Years Ago Today" spots that ran every night on CBS for about 3 years prior? We got up early to watch OP sail, an then later that night went back to see the fireworks in the Harbor - and I think went to church because I'm pretty sure it fell on a Sunday. Though we would usually go to mass on sat nights and then stop at the bagel store on the way home and get a dozen for dinner.

[quote]Hoffman's soda was a cheap brand that people would buy in cans for family event parties (along with a sheet cake) - they always included off flavors like grape & black cherry.

Loved Black Cherry and Cream sodas.

r275 Bicentennial Minutes! I vowed to watch every one--and got bored after a month.

We had a woods in our back yard. A tree had fallen and was a bridge we played on. There was a swinging vine. And you stayed outside until dark in the summer, played Ghost in the Graveyard and Kick The Can. You do not see kids outside now, day or night.

I had one of these in my bedroom.

Miss Jessica Tandy doing the Bicentennial Minute.

Some wizenheimer thought it would be cool to try and make us learn on Saturday morning when we were watching cartoons.

R278, and watching the fireflies come out at sunset.

R275 I was 8 during the bicentennial and was obsessed. My drawing won an honorable mention in a Kellogg's contest and was featured among several on the back of a Kellogg's cereal box. It was of Betsy Roth sewing the American flag 🇺🇸. We bought a box of Apple Jacks but my parents didn't alert the media about my outstanding patriotic artwork.

R123 My mom sent me to sleep at my friend's house when they got chicken pox. I never got chicken pox and then got them at 65 years old. Had whooping cough at 63.

Fruit Float...my favorite dessert in a can!

I caught chicken pox from my older brother. I've also had shingles which they say is a remnant of chicken pox.

When our color tv got a bit older, we had to tinker with the horizontal and vertical hold controls on the back of the set in order to get the picture to "settle." Sometimes you had to mess with the brightness, sharpness, and contrast, as well. This would be fine if you had somebody to tell you when the picture was good enough, but if you were by yourself, you had to hold a mirror out to reflect the screen back to you. Thank god we don't have to deal with this shit anymore.

Hi R275 I grew up in Brooklyn during the same period and remember all the same things!

Back then, your switched the TV on and had to wait for it to "warm up." But changing the channel was instantaneous.

Today the TV has Instant On but when you switch channels you have wait for it to tune in on each channel.

This thread is timely. My dad was talking about this stuff last week.

Apparently, my grandmother would literally kick all the kids(7 kids with 6 being boys) out in the morning and you were not allowed to come back until dinner. This meant going to the bathroom outside.

If anyone acted up, they got the switch they had to pick out.

My greatparents lived on a farm in rural Nebraska that had an outhouse. All the food was from their farm. 3 hearty meals a day and no one was overweight.

My mom had a little MG convertible when I was a toddler. She said one time she turned the corner too fast, the door popped open and she had to grab me by the arm to keep me from falling out. No carseat of course.

In the '70s and '80s, Mike Douglas would regularly feature teen heartthobs on his show. Well, in these pre-VCR days, my boy-crazy sisters would run out and buy a pack of blank audio cassette tapes, load one into a tape recorder, bring it up against the tv speaker and hit the play & record buttons. Then they'd sit there and vigilantly watch to see if it was time to flip the cassette over. Many times we'd forget they were recording and have loud conversations in the background.

They would also do this with radio interviews long before we got a stereo with built in cassette deck.

We would always go to Walt Disney movies-one in summer, then one during Christmas.

R291 My sister paid me a quarter an episode to audio tape the Hardy Boys - a year or two before VCRs if I remember. She had to work until 9 so she'd miss them, but she could listen when she got home.

Regarding cars from the 50s-60s, it was a big deal if/when the odometer turned 100,000. I remember our old Chevy wagon (with the rear facing seat) doing it on the Geo. Washington Bridge and we cheered as the numbers turned over. We got a Renault Dauphine (alternative to VW Bug) which was the biggest piece of crap to roll off an assembly line. Also, they used to leave the worst car crashes outside the local garage to warn people that death was just around the corner. A while back they took a 1959 Chevy and a 2009 Chevy and crashed them into each other to show how far we've come.

R252!!! Yes!!!!

I can top (out-phag) you guys: I didn't get home from school until after 4, so I would put the portable TV in my room and a cassette tape recorder with a 120 minute tape, 60 per side, set to turn on with a pair of burglar lights between 3 and 4 pm. to record Another World. VCRs were a few years away.

I used "Butch Wax" to push up the front of my crew cut.

There was a six-foot circle of death around the color TV. If you sat closer you'd die from radiation poisoning.

I was butch, back then

I used to know the number for the recorded time and temperature by heart because that was the only way to get the true time. I also knew the number for Dial a Prayer ("This is Pastor Schwambach...") and would call it some times because I was bored and wanted to play with the telephone.

Manufactured goods are one of the least important things in life to some people, R266. There were times when people were more real, and life was more about spending time together and making the best of (and appreciating) what you had. Those times and experiences are far more precious than anything you can buy online or in any store.

R296, in about 1976 I bought a radio-cassette recorder (from RadioShack, for about $150 - 1970's dollars!, a small fortune for a 15yr old) that received VHF frequencies so I could audiotape General Hospital. I had it attached to an old on/off timer - the one my folks used when we went on vacation to turn on a light in the front room so it looked as if someone was home. It would record on a 120 minute cassette if I couldn't get home fast enough to watch

R266, all things today need repairs, but today, we simply dispose of them. That’s the only difference.

I don't know. I've had the same Whirlpool dishwasher for 20 years. Still works great.

[quote][R278], and watching the fireflies come out at sunset.

Apparently they're struggling to survive due to the horrendous LED street lights taking over the world.

[quote]There was a six-foot circle of death around the color TV. If you sat closer you'd die from radiation poisoning.

Not just color, we learned about the dangers of the B&W sets too. In about 2nd grade the teacher set up a cardboard box fake tv and then measured off the minimum distance we should sit from it. Any closer and our eyes would be ruined.

We were one of the first on the block to get a touch-tone phone - the Contempra - what a name! I believe it was installed in our new house when we moved in, 1971. I was musical, was studying piano, and I started playing all my piano pieces on the phone using the push buttons. Little did I know it was imprinting on my brain.

To this day, I do not use a personal phone book, I hear the numbers. I have experimented, and if someone else dials the phone and I can't see what numbers they are dialing, if I am listening to the receiver I can almost always tell them correctly what number they dialed.

[quote]I used to know the number for the recorded time and temperature by heart because that was the only way to get the true time.

In New York it was N-E-R-V-O-U-S then it became some number I can't remember 936-1616, I think.

[quote] I also knew the number for Dial a Prayer ("This is Pastor Schwambach...") and would call it some times because I was bored and wanted to play with the telephone.

CIrcle 6- something or other

There was also a New York report number on what was going on in The Big Apple - it would start with the first line of "New York, New York".

[quote]To this day, I do not use a personal phone book, I hear the numbers. I have experimented, and if someone else dials the phone and I can't see what numbers they are dialing, if I am listening to the receiver I can almost always tell them correctly what number they dialed.

That's amazing. You must be very musical.

There was a songbook.

The Monkees play The Touch Tone Symphony, 1968.

We dialed 853-1212 to get the Time Lady. "At the tone the time will be... 8 o'clock and thirty seconds." Boooop!

In Phoenix dialing a certain number gave you the time and temperature in downtown.

In Orange, California, if you dialed 6156 then hung up, your phone would ring. This was a way of testing your phone.

You always got a dial tone, even if there was a power outage to the whole city. The phone company had their own power.

Going trick-or-treating on Halloween until we were so tired we could barely walk home. We had pillowcases to collect the candy. We finally gave up around 11:30, then went home to sort the mountain of candy. There were very few decorations; mostly just a jack-o-lantern at each door. Nowadays there are elaborate decorations but trick-or-treating ends around 8:00.

Thanks, R309, I had forgotten about that book! My older brother had it; I think that's what started it for me.

Not sure about you other "boomers" out there in DLland, but to me it feels as if we are all sitting around the fireplace having a drink and sharing things from our past households. I think all those households had much more in common with each other than people nowadays.

Does anyone remember their first cinematic experience? Mine was in '65, The Sound of Music, and I was five yrs old.

Thanks to all the contributors, this thread is filling up fast.

Mine was either that or Mary Poppins. I'm the same age as you. But I couldn't make sense of movies as a kid. TV shows, no problem. But movies baffled me. I couldn't figure out the story.

[quote][R296], in about 1976 I bought a radio-cassette recorder

Funny you should mention this.

Last Saturday I went to Portobello Road and a guy on a stall there had my nifty little tape player from 1976. It was such a flashback seeing it.

My mother brought it back for me from America at my request - but of course it wouldn't work on the mains in England - so I had to buy expensive batteries for all the time I had it - which was expensive for a twelve year old and a pain in the ass. But as someone said, these kinds of purchases were major and you kept them for years until they'd no longer worked.

AH, here it is - except my mother bought me one in boring white.

OMG! there was a commercial!

Anyone else remember them?

[quote]I was 8 during the bicentennial and was obsessed. My drawing won an honorable mention in a Kellogg's contest and was featured among several on the back of a Kellogg's cereal box. It was of Betsy Roth sewing the American flag 🇺🇸. We bought a box of Apple Jacks but my parents didn't alert the media about my outstanding patriotic artwork.

Today they'd give you your reality series.

[quote]A holdover from when not everyone had a telephone, there were these fire alarm pull boxes on downtown street corners. I remember them being removed in the mid-70s.

They were also in residential neighborhoods in my town, but had to be deactivated by the mid-1960s due to continuous false alarms. Heh-heh.

A Jewel Tea man came to my parents house twice a month until they sold the house in 1994.

Through the Cold War era some neighborhoods had these air raid sirens atop yellow poles, to warn in case of attack. They would test them now and then. But the nuclear missiles never did arrive. Sorry this isn't "household life" but it's related to everyday life in that time era.

I don't think this was a widespread practice, but in the 1950's any house in my home town that had central air conditioning had two separate electric meters, one for the house and one for the central air. The A/C was a luxury and was charged a higher rate by the utility company.

First cinematic experience - either Bambi or Davy Crockett. How I cried when Bambi's mother was killed! Children respected adults then. If a neighbor or a policeman told you what to do, you obeyed. You saw policemen on the beat all the time. I remember the great days of AM radio, DJs like Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack. In Boston, we had Arnie Ginsburg. The new Top Ten countdown was a big deal. I remember Beatlemania vividly. Later on, the hippie movement, which was fantastic. Taking the T to Boyleston Street to hang out in Boston Commons or the Public Gardens (still the loveliest park I have ever seen, and I live in Europe now) to smoke dope. Marijuana was so weak back then, you could smoke half a dozen joints and still drive a car without a problem. We had a summer house in Nantasket, right on the water. How I loved Paragon Park. Now only the carousel is left..

Plastic ice-cream containers on your head to stop magpies attacking you when you rode your bike with big handlebars that had plastic streamers coming out of the handles....true story...i wish i still had that bike to ride to work...

We had a Postman (most did), a Milkman, the Fishmonger (NEVER the FishMan), a KnifeSharpenerMan, a DryCleanerMan, an EggMan and probably others I don't recall.

Funny thing: the last one was the only one that my mum always answered the door wearing her housecoat and nightie I am the only one of six in the family with blue eyes, and the joke now is that I am the EggMan's bastard!

It was more than just the blue eyes, r324.

You could do this with phones without breaking it.

I grew up on a neighbourhood with very large households . I,was Born in 1954 and i was,16 before we had our first tv in B/W . Radio we had earlier . I Loved to read . Everyone played outside . I went to school with my bike . I live in Belgium btw .it was not always so lovely all the time but i’m glad i grew up in the sixties and,seventies .

[quote]it was not always so lovely all the time but i’m glad i grew up in the sixties and,seventies .

I'm not. I'd pick now over those times.

1970: Press power button on TV. Sound within a second, pic in 3 or 4, slowly stabilizing & brightening as tubes warmed up.

1980: Press power button on TV. Instant-on, stable pic before you had time to lift finger from button.

1990: Press power button on cable box remote. TV turns on, but takes 2-3 seconds because those damn nature nazis bitched about energy use. Channel changes are still instantaneous.

2000: Press power button on programmable remote. Wait a few seconds for color wheel on shiny new DLP HDTV to spin up. Changing channels now takes 2-5 goddamn seconds. FML.

2010: TV is now LCD. Pressing power button initiates bootup of TV's embedded 0S. Then 3-5 seconds of HDCP handshaking. Changing channels now takes 5-10 seconds. What the GODDAMN fuck?!?

2020: TV is now an 'app' that has to be launched... and adds a few more seconds to the already-absurdly-long startup time. The stream SOMEHOW also stutters & glitches even though you have goddamn gigabit fiber you're paying $200/month to get. Changing channels is now so painfully slow, you treat it like a commercial... trigger the macro on the remote, then go piss & visit the kitchen while the Roku reassures itself that you haven't defeated the HDCP copy protection since the last time it checked... 200 milliseconds ago...

Ah, sweet progress...

Appliances were solid and worked. You would see appliances from every decade still working in the 70's.

IN the suburbs, we played outside all year and were forced outside, too, like a dog. Dogs and cats roamed free, like kids. In the summer we were forced outside after dinner until dark. When we were a bit older - out the door until whenever the curfew was - 10, 11, 12.

We had many different outside activities - those requiring equipment of some sort from elaborate to quite basic, and activities that required no material or maybe bikes, or a kickball. that kids raised small monies for charity and for their organized groups.

There were types, like on the Little Rascals, which was quite ancient by our time. There were wise crackers, rich pretty girl (not that rich), a bully or 2, sensitive types, hardscrabble types, future brainiacs and future car washers, jocks, theatrical or artistic types, etc etc etc. Everyone put up with each other.

Yes, we were free range kids too.

R329 - that is so true. TV is a pain in the ass now.

I wonder what would happen now if you took a neighborhood with kids and threw them all outside everyday. Would they drop like flies, many grisly accidents and deaths? Or would they figure out how to entertain themselves and stay safe? I mean we boys did some pretty dangerous things in potentially dangerous settings. There were occasional accidents.

there were active quarries. There was the big river and steep river banks. Forrests. Some of the places we rode our bikes and swam and hung out and later had keg parties, etc, were sketchy.

I am a millennial and have found this thread riveting! Keep them coming.

My parents sent me to a child psychologist when I was 10. because they thought I might turn out gay. His prescription: spend more time with my dad. After he'd pick me up from the shrink, Dad and I would have "me time." He'd buy me an ice cream soda and we'd see a movie. I remember seeing "The Blob" and thinking (later) how appropriate it was to my situation. My encroaching homosexuality was the fearful Blob and they were doing everything they could to keep it from getting into the house.

R57, those were called wing windows.

We used to clothespin playing cards to the spokes of our bicycle wheels so that they made noise when we rode our bikes.

We were poor, but we knew the tricks to be flash.

I held my cassette player up to the TV speaker to record “The Love Boat”. One of my favorites was a musical number of Ann Miller singing and dancing to “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain & Tenile. I then, of course, learned the choreography myself and put on shows for the family in the living room.

R337, KA-WEEN!!! 😊

To check your telephone line you could dial 611 and hangup. Your phone would ring back. We used to play tricks on my older sister and make the phone ring. "It's for you" "No it isn't you dialed 611" "OK I'll just hang it up". She'd always come running. You had to make sure you were out of phone cord range when you laughed at her. Getting hit with that phone receiver was painful. I remember 9PM being the curfew for telephone calls. My dad would just come to the phone and hang it up if you were still on it.

Every gayling acts out the Diana Ross version of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" in front of a mirror at some point.

R339 Ours was 550-dial tone-7.

R334 I think my parents got the same advice. Around 10-11 my dad suddenly tried to be my BFF for about a year. Which mostly consisted of him trying to get me to play every sport invented and/or join him in the garage to learn how to build things. I was terrible at both.

Pizza delivery was still a new concept where I lived, except for Dominos and they sucked. So when we wanted pizza we had to go to a proper pizza restaurant like Godfathers, Shakeys, Pizza Inn, Pizza Hut (when it was still a sitdown restaurant). They were always darkly lit with dark wood walls, lots of alcove seating and red glass candles on the table. You’d have to order a whole pizza and the wait seemed FOREVER as a child. To pass the time, they’d usually have a large projection TV and / or a small arcade. I remember when PacMan came out and playing it at the Godfather’s Pizza we’d usually go to. Then of course the whole country got PacMan Fever.

When you had to amuse yourself completely with you own imagination you came up with some funny shit. Me and my sister used to play newsroom. We'd write our copy, drag out a desk and tack up a map behind us and read the news. OMG I remember "throwing it over" to someone playing the weatherman. If it was nightly news I was Jessica Savitch. If it was a morning show I was Sandy Hill.

I recall pizza parlors being designed like that, not the generic overly lit fast food joints like now

It was a lot easier to spend countless hours outdoors back then because there really wasn't a whole lot to do indoors, unless you liked to read or play boardgames or listen to your records. There were only 3 to 5 tv stations back then, no computers or smart phones, no VCRs, and therefore, no library of movies at your disposal. During our summer breaks, we'd exhaust all our indoor options and got easily bored staying home.

"I wonder what would happen now if you took a neighborhood with kids and threw them all outside everyday."

(Suburban) kids today don't have time for free outdoor play, r332, since they're being driven from judo to ballet to sports all afternoon, and then they spend the rest of their evenings doing "enriching" things from Baby Einstein to Khan Academy.

Not that any kid today would set foot outside the house without their smartphone anyway, and then even if they're outside, they're just sitting next to each other playing Call to Arms or watching Youtube videos.

Make a sandwich. The cold cuts aren't a snack.

Long distance phone calls were expensive and the signal was weak if it was really a long distance. You had to listen carefully. When we called the relatives on the other side of the country, the family would gather around the phone and we would take turns saying hello.

My sister later worked for the phone company and explained to me that long distance rates basically subsidized the local phone service. Local basic service rates were kept artificially low so that everyone could have a phone.

You could dial "0" and get a live operator. But people would ask all kinds of inane questions. They started charging extra for operator-assisted calls. Later on you could dial 411 to get to "Information" but people would ask stupid stuff like how to fry an egg. Later they changed it to "Directory Assistance" and then they started charging you for calling that.

Then the Bell System got broken up and all of that went out the window...

I spent lots of time with my dad especially as a boy, and I was good at sports and mechanical things, and I was still a little flamer. I was a multi-tasker. This was the 60s and 70s. Most of the neighborhood crowd would insult me every once and awhile and call me a girl or a fag but nobody shunned me and I still did all the same stuff with them. I dont remember it being that traumatic as a boy. It was confusing to myself in HS but before 15 or so, everyone took a fairy boy in stride. That's my memory.

Back in the early 70s you could put some kind of code into a pay phone and get free long distance calls. Anyone remember that? The code was spread by word of mouth. Later, I went to visit a friend in another city and his mother told me she had been contacted by the phone company who asked her if they knew who I was. Luckily she didn't bust me.

R345, we were not allowed to go to a pizza parlor. My mother thought that since the windows were colored glass that one could not see through, there must be something wrong going on in there.

Thinking back, I was so mean to my best friend who was also my next door neighbor. She was a girl named Anne and a year older than I. Whenever I’d get tired of playing I’d tell her I’d be right back and go inside, then never come back out. I’d delight in watching her through the window, after about 30 minutes she’d finally give up and skulk home. Poor thing never caught on.

Later on, I’d become best friends with another girl, Jill, who was a couple streets over. We were in the same class and she hated Anne. She turned me against her and invented a new name for her: “Bronto” because she was a big girl and had a long neck like a brontosaurus.

I moved away and lost touch with both girls. A few years ago I tried to track them down and discovered Jill did time in the pen for embezzlement, and Anne committed suicide after her husband left her.

R352 = Marley Love Hudson

In my dorm it was a telephone credit card number that was supposedly stolen from Dow Chemical ( you know, Napalm and all that so we didn't feel bad using it). It was written next to the pay phone in the hall, and it worked all year. I can't imagine how many thousands of dollars the dorm ran up on that number.

Nothing ever happened though.

I was a horny 15-year-old when I called up the town queen and asked him if we could have sex. I wanted to know what it was all about. Not great. And the next day he told people at school and then everyone knew. I began to be bullied by one of the high school football players. He'd grab me by the shirt and push me up against the lockers..."You look like a fag. I bet you're a fag." A year after high school I was in a gay bar in NYC and guess who walked in. He actually apologized, asked me to dance, and about 15 years later later died from AIDS.

R354, I don't get it. I don't watch soaps.

R355, in our dorm we somehow jumped the circuit with a paperclip and never had to pay for a call. I am not sure how that worked, but it did.

r324 My brother and I would fight who would go to the door when the "dry cleaning' man came to our house for the weekly pick-up. It was such a big deal to say, "Nothing this week thank you." You felt like you were twenty years old.

One of Donna Hudson's favorite putdowns of Jake was that he liked pizza, R357.

Miniature golf was popular and there were small courses here and there, usually with a theme. Not like the behemoth places now. We often went to Holo Wai Miniature Golf, which had a theme of Hawai'i and Tikis and water features including a waterfall you could walk behind. They also had a game room with the earliest generation of electronic arcade games.

Does anyone remember Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor? It was the height of nostalgia, all red flocked wallpaper and waiters in Styrofoam straw boaters. They had huge sundaes all of which came with little plastic animals that hung from the side of the glass . There was The Trough which was a double banana split. If you finished the entire thing, you got a ribbon that said, "I made a pig of myself at Farrell's". For birthday parties you could order an enormous Sundae that was everything in the house. It came on a stretcher, and the waiters ran the thing around the restaurant while a siren blared.

I have heard that someone tries to revive them recently, but I don't know if it was a success.

R362 we had similar ice cream parlors called “Swensen’s”. They had a Victorian theme and were a big deal, usually a long wait to get a table. Long gone now.

[quote]Does anyone remember Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor?

[quote]we had similar ice cream parlors called “Swensen’s”.

Didn't both of them open stores in DC in the 1980s, Farrell's @ Mazza and Swensen's in an I Street office building?

r362 We had one in our local mall, and it was a treat to go there. Their ice cream floats, if I remember correctly (circa 75-76) were huge. I remember ordering one and my father was so mad at the price he said if I didn't eat it all, he'd ram it down my throat.

Smell you, swells. We made do with Dairy Queen, Carvel, Friendly's and HoJo's. Baskin Robbins was only for the trashiest of trash and "drug dealers".

Until I got to about sixth grade I had a Carvel chocolate crunch cake every birthday. It always had Tweety Bird on it like I insisted. Those cakes were the bomb.

Ahhh Carvel! I was addicted to their hot fudge sundaes. I still go over there once in a while and have one. Great memories.

Until about 1976 we lived on an RFD route. Free mail for us. If we put it in the mailbox and put the little flag up we could mail it without a stamp. The mailman would just use an ink stamp on it.

Back in the 50's refrigerators had actual latches to keep the door closed, and it was a real problem when little kids crawled in and shut the door because there was no way to open them from the inside, and they would die of suffocation. We watched a film strip about it in grade school.

I just remember how many local places there were. Local stores, local shops and restaurants.

Pittsburgh was famous for Isaly's, a little deli known for its ham ("chip chop").

Now everywhere has the same: Target, Subway, McDs, Kohls, Walmart, whatever chain restaurants. Nothing local - except for the restaurants immigrants have opened in a strip mall, either Asian or Mexican.

R367, you must have had kids actually attend your BD parties. I insisted on German Chocolate or Lady Baltimore cake. Needless to say, my invitations were not the hot ticket.

Do kids even have party decorations anymore? We would go to the Hallmark store and buy the whole lot: honey comb tissue centerpiece, paper table cloth, nut cups (remember nut cups?), plates, napkins, etc. My brother always had Snoopy. I always had Raggedy Andy. There were no goody bags.

[quote] I insisted on German Chocolate or Lady Baltimore cake. Needless to say, my invitations were not the hot ticket.

I would much rather have attended your birthday fête, R372, than have gone to some Carvel crapfest.

I loved Japanese paper lanterns. We had a concrete slab/patio in our backyard and my mom would string up lanterns for parties and somehow turn it into a wonderland.

I can't remember my first movie but remember going to see West Side Story 10 times when I was 12. the matinee was 75¢ and I walked to get there which was about 2 miles each way.

I remember department stores had fancy wrapping for an additional charge. Oh, I so wanted one of those fancy wrapped packages, but my mom said they were too expensive. Considering what a bitch my mother was, I am surprised that she did not have them wrap an empty box for me.

Department stores would always give you a box for your clothing items, which Mother always saved to repurpose at Christmas.

In fact, stores gave you so many things to make your experience nice. Now they expect you to ring the items up yourself and pay for the bag too.

R377, And, you respected that by dressing up to go to a better department store. Obviously, not Sears or JC Penny, but if you went to Bullocks, I Magnin, or The Broadway, you dressed for the occasion. I always had to wear my blue wool suit.short trousers, knee socks, shirt with a Peter Pan collar. We wold sit on gold bamboo chairs while my mother was shown suits worn by live models. If my mother ordered a suit, we would have to return for at least one, if not two fittings. My reward was to go to the department store tea room; they all had tea rooms, not cafes or restaurants; and have an open-faced roast beef sandwich and a sundae made of vanilla ice cream molded into the shape of a cow and drizzled with chocolate sauce.

R378, I loved going to department store tea rooms with my mom. Truly a vanished world!

International long distance calls used to have a strange delay that made normal conversation difficult. You had to speak slowly and pause a great deal or else you'd get strange feedback and interference.

Oh R370. The memories. Was there any more riveting entertainment medium than the film strip? I think not.

We had an above ground pool and for some reason we dumped the water out every year - we had a creek next to our yard. So every new summer we'd use the garden hose to fill the pool up - which took forever. We'd then have to skim the pool every morning because we had tall trees over part of the pool and I loved the sound the chlorine machine used to make when it turned on.

We use to get vaccinated at the elementary school cafeteria in long lines waiting for a strange looking hypodermic needle that left a round scar on everyone's shoulder for years.

One thing a friend pointed out to me about 15 years ago - and it has only gotten more true - in the 70s kids basically lived in an adult world - we were well taken care of, even quite spoiled compared to our parent’s Depression / WWII childhoods - but our parents lives didn’t completely revolve around ours - we had feet, bikes & the bus to get to school & activities, and were left to our own devices for much of our day.

The broader culture reflected this as well - aside from sat am cartoons & educational stuff on PBS (Zoom, Electric Company, Hodge Podge Lodge) there wasn’t a ton of stuff that was geared only for kids. So we mostly watched re-runs of “aincient” adult stuff - 50s / 60’s stcoms & old Hollywood movies - including some silents. There were no Nickelodeon or Disney channels with crappy kid-coms on 24 / 7

As a result we were pop culturally literate about the decades before we were born in a way my millennial nephews aren’t . Much of that was accidental - even with only 3 network & 3 local channels (in NYC) that was a lot of time to fill without that much old content to fill it. In 1975 there were only about 25 years of old tv & 45 years of sound movies to rebroadcast - so we watched everyone from Laurel & Hardy to the Andrews Sisters perform. Our sense of the timeline may have been a bit vague - because WWII happend, like, a million years ago, right - but we could do a fake Boogie Woogie.

One last observation - dad was born in 33, me 63, oldest nephew 93 - we loved the Little Rascals growing up - even though they were so old they seem to have taken place in an alternate universe - so when the nephew was born I bought him the entire LR series (restored! On vhs!) - and he loved them. But watching them with him I realized they were actually made when my dad was a kid & The Brady Bunch would be as distant from nephew’s childhood as the LR was from mine.

At the time , aside from the styles, the deeper structure of American Life - suburban family style- had seemed to have changed less from the 60’s to the 90’s then from the 30’s to the 60’s - but that’s before the Internet really got going. We seem to be In the middle of another cultural upheaval as deep as the postwar period - and when my nephew has a kid in the next 10 years I bet that re-runs of 90s stuff will seem as unfathomably alien to them as the Little Rascals did to me.

Good thread.

I just looked up r372's Lady Baltimore cake - it looks disgustingly sweet to me; I'd much prefer r367's simple, creamy Carvel ice cream cake for my birthday (those dark crunchies in the middle were always yummy).

And r378, if your mother got her suits modeled by live models and fitted at the department store, you definitely grew up upper-crust. My mother (educated, but European) made a lot of her own and our clothes. Of course, we hated it because our clothes were different from what everyone else was wearing.

[quote] BTW, gym class was as hot as it sounds and every day was a terror, afraid I'd get a hard-on in the shower. Had many close calls.

Happened to me only once. Don't know why I got hard (does a 13 year-old need a reason?) but when the time came to hit the showers the damn thing wouldn't go down. I pretended to have a knot in my shoelaces while everyone else headed for the showers and the coach yelled for me to 'get the lead out'. So I took a deep breath, shucked off my shorts and bounced into the shower. The cold water did the trick, but I am forever grateful to my fellow 7th graders for not saying a word.

Having said that, it was no big deal to take group showers in school, at the local swimming pool, in summer camp. Unlike now, when even at the gym, men go to great lengths to avoid being seen naked. My high school didn't even have individual urinals, you all pissed into a long trough.

R383 here again - not only were we watching old movies from the 30’s - the 60’s but within them were the nostalgia and revivals of even older decades - think of all the movies set in the “Gay 90’s” and the occasional “Minstrel Show” number in a 40’s musical. Variety shows on tv were essentially Vaudiuvlle - and in early 30’s movies you would actually see old vaudeville acts - so we grew up absorbing this weird web of outdated entertainment tropes and styles without realizing it.

Somehow I managed to get out of showers in gym class throughout middle school and high school. In middle school they were forced at random a few times during the semester, and I'd always have a "problem" remembering my lock combination, by the time I got it open showers were turned off. Of course I got points taken off my grade. I think I'm the only kid I know who got a "C" in gym class all those years. Ruined my GPA!

Seems so barbaric to force kids to get naked with their classmates. Is it even done anymore now?

Radio DJ and a listener on the air:

I like the music you play, but you gotta stop talking before the songs end! It ruins my (cassette) recordings!

Silence.

You’re not supposed to record the songs. It’s AGAINST THE LAW.

Silence. *Click*

R384, actually, we were upper middle class. It was usual for department stores to purchase couture designs to make on their own. My mother had a lot of "Chanel for Bullocks Pasadena" type suits. Fittings were not unusual. If you didn't have them done at the department store, you had a woman in town who did your alterations. Very few women actually wore clothing off the rack. Many women made their own clothing, not because it was cheaper, but because one got a better fit. It was far easier to make from scratch than to take everything apart and start over.

Fashion shows and models were common through the 1970s. I used to love the models who would wander the store with a card that describe the garment and their somewhat robotic comment " Ladies Better Dresses, 4th floor. Available in Navy, Grey, and Camel."

Just an FYI, my godmother and her family, whom we were very close to, shopped at JC Penny, Sear, and Montgomery Ward. It was another world, yet economically, we were not that far apart.

[quote]Oh [R370]. The memories. Was there any more riveting entertainment medium than the film strip? I think not.

In third grade I sat in the prime spot to set up the filmstrip projector, so I became the operator, carefully timing the film to the beep on the accompanying record. Mrs Kirby smoked like a chimney and filmstrips were her ticket to 15 minutes in the teacher's lounge, so we watched a LOT of filmstrips that year.

If we weren't watching filmstrips she turned us loose with SRA's, those little cardboard readers with individual stories you read and then answered questions. Easy ones were your primary colors, but at the back of the box were exotic colors like teal and mauve with much more interesting stories. I still remember the one about that Valley in Alaska where vegetables grow to giant size because of the unique soil and climate, and they have carrots the size of your arm.

Telephone answering machines were the high tech electronic devices in the early 70’s. They had tiny magnetic tape cartridges one for recording your incoming messages and one for your outgoing message. These tape cartridges got tangled and had to be replaced frequently.

Going with Mom to the bank with her passbook. As kids we couldn't wait to get our own. There was something very satisfying about seeing your balance grow with each deposit. Now I check my balances on line. It's not nearly as much fun.

Mom made our clothes (this was the 70s) so we had frequent trips to Dover Upholstery for patterns (Butterick! McCalls!) and fabric. Mom kept a "button basket" from all the extras. When a button popped off, she went to the button basket for a replacement.

My Mom used to get a monthly magazine (not sure which one) that had knitting and crocheting patterns. My sister and I had the most stylish Barbies because my Mom would knit their clothes. I remember her buying sport yarn and various knitting needles. She taught us how to knit and crochet.

Mom cooked dinner 6 nights a week. We had "junk food" on Saturdays only. Roast beef, mashed potatoes and green beans were a favorite. Mom could COOK!

Being "locked" out of the house on sunny Saturday mornings because Mom was washing the floors on her hands and knees followed by waxing them. Everything was taken out of the room for cleaning. On TV, everyone is "Swiffering" AROUND their furniture.

When Mom would make a cake, she would give the batter to my Dad during a sporting event. He'd be so mad at what he was watching, he would mix the batter in no time! No electric beaters for us.

Rick kids in New York were always calling information. My father would say "Look it up in the book!"

Also I remember my friends were always using phones in the street - they'd dial zero then the number and tell the operator to charge it to their number.

Has any one mentioned living rooms? A very misleading name, because they were very rarely used and off limits to children. They were decidedly for company only. Ours had white wool carpeting, which my mother pointed out to everyone. Apparently wool carpeting was very much a luxury and white wool carpeting was the ne plus ultra. Ours has a pale blue glass ashtray and matching lighter, with pale blue velvet cover matchboxes. Nobody was allowed to use them. My mother would die before she would allow smoking in the house.

R392, the magazine was probably Workbasket.

I am curious how the kids at school reacted to your homemade doll clothing. My introduction to just how evil girls can be was in the second grade. The girls had a hierarchy regarding Barbies. The girls who had store bought clothes were hat the top. The girls who had handmade clothes were the untouchables. Oddly, you could have a Barbie knockoff and store bought clothes and be higher than a girl with a real Barbie and homemade clothes. I think it sad because I now realize how wonderful some of the clothes were: silk blouses with jacket linings to match, etc.

One of our local UHF channels always signed off with a song called "Good Night, Sleep Tight"... they'd show a short film of an older man sitting on a park bench watching his dog while the sun set in the background...it always mad me sad, like the world was shutting down for the night.

My summer job in high school and college in the late-70s and early 80s was as a bank teller. Our branch was branch 8, so all accounts started 08-xxxx. We had the signature cards for when the account as opened. Once a day or so, we would get a call from another branch to verify a signature. This was before fax machines were prevalent, so we'd put the card on a round cylinder that would spin in a machine and transmit a facsimile of the signature card to another spinning cylinder via the phone line.

To look up the quarterly interest on the passbook savings accounts (yes, actual paper booklets) we'd call into central bank computer and get the interest from a HAL-9000 automated voice. In 1982, our branch got a real computer (which was called the CRT for Cathode Ray Tube) that would let us see account/interest information in on a screen. We still had to used the cylinder/phone system for paperwork.

I hated processing Christmas Club payments. I also hated processing the Monday morning deposit bags when the Catholic church bags would be mostly $1 bills (with an occasional $5) from the collection.

R395, our friends were jealous of the handmade Barbie outfits. There was no way our Barbies would be wearing the same clothes as the others. In the 70s there weren't yet alot of different outfits for Barbie to wear. We weren't rich so it wasn't like we were ashamed.

I remember one out fit my Mom made. It was a 3 piece pantsuit in a sienna brown-esque color - jacket, pants and spaghetti-strapped top underneath. My Mom put a snap on the jacket!

[quote] We wold sit on gold bamboo chairs while my mother was shown suits worn by live models.

Are you sure you weren't at the Don Loper say-LON? Did you see the lovely Mrs. Richard Carlson?

For you other New York area olds, I recall watching Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? on the 4:30 movie as a youngster while cooking up some batches of creepy crawlers.

r397, I forgot about the church collection baskets. My mom would always have a check in a church-issued envelope. She used to treat it as an attendance record, if she didn't have a check she wouldn't get credit for throwing in cash. We'd always get change to throw in when the basket came by. Our church also had a clicker button that you would hit on your way in if you planned to receive Communion, I guess it was important to someone to prepare an accurate amount of Communion wafers. My brothers and I would click it dozens of times.

I rarely went shopping as a kid except for shoes, which we got at a shoe store. Feet would get measured and I would get a pair of Buster Brown oxfords and a pair of sneakers. My mother bought all of my clothes until I was a teenager. When I was a boy I wore Toughskin jeans with built in kneepads from Sears or JC Penney (out of the catalog).

Another New York area old here, R400, but what is "cooking up some batches of creepy crawlers"?

R402, Creepy Crawlers was one of those dangerous toys that would never be made today. There were metal molds that were heated on a built in hot plate. You poured in "Goo" and the stuff set as it cooked. The finished product was a rubbery item. Creepy Crawlers were insects and worms. I had a set that made Troll heads that you could put on pencils. It really was a great toy that was killed by child safety laws.

[quote]I rarely went shopping as a kid except for shoes, which we got at a shoe store. Feet would get measured and I would get a pair of Buster Brown oxfords and a pair of sneakers.

Remember the Red Goose shoes that came with the little plastic egg full of toys? I mean, I assume that's what was in them--my Mother was far too cheap to every buy me a pair.

Back to school shopping took about 2 hours. We went to Cars and Montgomery Wards and bought about 4 pairs of pants and 6 shirts. That was my wardrobe for the year. Oh, and a winter coat. I remember the year when Sears had them on sale and every kid in my class showed up wearing one of those parkas like Kenny from Southpark wears.

Yes, some of the toys we had were probably made from toxic chemicals like Creepy Crawlers, Shrinky Dinks and I think it was called Magic Bubble? You'd put a bit of goop at the end of a straw and blow into it and it would make a psychedelic colored bubble you could bob around. It smelled horrible. I loved the way Silly Putty smelled. And Colorforms.

r403, did they glow in the dark? I vaguely remember the commercial advertising them.

LOL r405. I loved those bubble making straws. I used to make all different sizes.

Waiting for a theatrical released film to debut on television!

They also made an edible version of Creepy Crawlers, similar to gummi worms.

R405 Super Elastic Bubble Plastic

I loved Magic Bubble! The smell was part of the attraction, somehow. I also had the Fisher Price Sesame Street playset with the little people and played with it until a shamefully late age.

Most kids had a set of World Book encyclopedias at home. In the 1970s, we still had the red 1966 version, but that was okay, because there wasn't really a lot of new information to add. Everything new could be fit in a single volume, which the World Book people would mail to our house (the 1975 yearbook, 1976, 1977, etc.) If you didn't have encyclopedias, you had to go to the library to write your reports.

We also had a set of Childcraft encyclopedias, organized by subject matter. Their annual updates were the best, since they were based on a single theme (math, dogs, Native Americans, insects).

Anyone remember the Hot Wheels garages and city sets? There was also a carwash. I used to set them up in a dirt patch in the backyard then flood it, like in a catastrophe movie. I was a weird kid.

Yeah. I never made Creepy Crawlers. I have had an aversion to plastic since forever. I couldn't stand dolls or GI Joes or even drinking out of something plastic.

We stopped using Mr. Bubble bubble bath because it gave my brother and I a nasty rash on our penises. My mother even had us write a letter to the company that made it telling them why.

I loved the Automat. It would take me forever to decide which item looked the best to eat and so many choices.

[quote]When I was a boy I wore Toughskin jeans with built in kneepads

Weren't you a little young to be giving blowjobs?

Spoolies

R415, did not have Automats in SoCal, we has Swedish Smorgasbords. They probably were no different than Old Country Buffet or Golden Corral today. I loved them because they had at least five different kinds of Jell-O. I also though Swedish meatballs had to be the classiest things ever.

We also has Polynesian restaurants. These were the best. They all had an elaborate waterfall made of lava with plastic tropical flowers. We got elaborate fruit drinks with paper parasols in Tiki head mugs. The meals were loaded with sugar. Some of them still had floor shows. I am sure my dad liked the show girls, but I loved the guys playing with fire.

Love this thread kinda like the "Dialing the phone with a pencil" thread.

School clothes shopping at the end of August. Robert Hall or J C Penneys.

Coming home after school and changing into our "play clothes."

Getting a brand new outfit for Easter. Pretty pink or lavender dresses worn with white anklets with lace and brand new, bright and shiny Mary Janes! For that matter, dying Easter eggs was always messy, fun and stinky. We would always dye a dozen eggs. By Tuesday, we'd had enough of hard boiled eggs for breakfast and egg salad sandwiches for lunch. I don't remember having deviled eggs as a kid.

I was a free range kid but must have watched a fair bit of TV because I remember the old shows. I think we played outside for like an hour after school and then came in. In the Northeast it gets dark at 4:00 in early winter. Batman used to come on at 4:00. My dad and older brothers controlled the TV at night. I do remember watching Little House on the Prairie with my mom and sister on the little TV in my parents' bedroom and my brothers making fun of me for liking it. In the mid 70s we finished our basement, complete with a bar, pool table, and a new TV, so I was able to watch more TV there in relative peace. Plus my older siblings were starting to leave the nest.

It was impossible to find a floor polish where you didn't end up with waxy yellow build-up.

Sunday night for the Wonderful World of Disney. Even granny would watch in between highballs.

I remember having to drive forty-five minutes with my parents to a chain restaurant called "Wing-Wah" for Chinese food because there wasn't any Chinese food around our area in the 1960s.

I'm old enough to remember a lot of the things mentioned in this thread, but young enough to remember the beginning of the end of free-range kids. I spent a lot of time outside on my bike as a kid, but one time--around 1984 or so--I was playing with my friends and stayed out after dark. When I finally made it home, my distraught mother gave me the first and last belt-whipping of my childhood. Had welts on my ass for a couple of days afterwards.

This was during the missing children hysteria. I lived in Florida, and I guess Mom had visions of Adam Walsh dancing in her head.

I never stayed out after dark again, until I became a teenager and got a curfew. I seem to remember a cultural shift during the mid-to-late 80s where playing outside became less of a thing, perhaps because of the advent of video games, VCRs, multiple TV households, and general concerns over safety.

The Tylenol tampering deaths in 1982 was a turning point for "free-range kids" mentioned above. I remember it happened right before Halloween, and it brought about countless scares of razor blades in apples, poisoned Halloween candy, etc. This marked the end of our innocence.

The Eaton Patz kidnapping / murder in 1979 was one of the reasons for the shift as well. It got tons of tabloid coverage here in NYC and I think the early 24 / 7 news cycle. The dad was a professional photographer - so, as he said in an interview decades later, he had dozens of high quality pictures of a cute white kid & the media just ate them up.

[quote]Eaton Patz

Etan Patz

Life was fizzier then.

Is it any coincidence that all those kidnapping kids stories were being massively publicized at the same time whole industries were gearing their products towards those now latch-key kids? I see the end of the free range days as a result of moms going to work due to the rise in real estate prices and the stagnation of wages. Dad didn't make enough for those 4 to 5 kid families anymore and had to take a second job or send mom out.

r424, r425, 60s and 70s. not 80s. you sack of dog shit!

Etan sure had a shitty haircut.

R430, you are nearly correct. The error wasn't that people needed to go to work, though. The influx of working women in the 1980s was primarily upper middle class women with a certain disposable income already, not hand-to-mouth couples. Companies needed to increase profits which they could do by hiring women for the same job at lower salaries. Also, women in the workplace was a jump start to the economy because they needed special clothing (remember "Dressed for Success"), spent more on hair and makeup, bought self help books and took seminars, spent more on eating out, more on childcare, and spent more on toys, etc, to lessen their guilt, etc. I worked in the toy industry. The social engineering was truly ugly.

[quote]I see the end of the free range days as a result of moms going to work due to the rise in real estate prices and the stagnation of wages.

r430, a bigger part was feminism. Feminists made stay at home mothers feel like they were unworthy. They were only worthy if they left the home and did something for someone outside their family.

r431 I was talking about the 1960s you fucking moron.

Women also had to go to work because of increasing divorce rates. My mother always worked and I knew few other kids whose mothers worked until I started high school in 1980.

my mom made me eat boiled cabbage all of the time!

1960s-'70s, the best era for Pinball. I grew fascinated with pinball machines at about age six; continued my attempt at mastery, and then with first the WHO and then Elton John the song "Pinball Wizard" I was spending at least half my allowance and earnings from my paper route on pinball machines at both the bowling alley and corner store. Good Times.

Paper routes! And back when our city still had an evening edition paper, it was my job after school from 6th -8th grade. Made good money for a preteen!

High school juniors and seniors could take bus driving as their first period class and drove the school buses for the elementary schools. That would NEVER fly today.

How about this, R431? When I was a small child in the SEVENTIES, I played outside a lot. Then a strange cultural shift happened a few years later (in another decade WHICH SHALL NOT BE NAMED), which made things much different from the SEVENTIES.

Does that work, fucktard? Or do you want to continue being a loudmouthed cunt?

In the NYC metro area there was The Million Dollar Movie on tv, it would show the same movie every night for a week. They did this to compete with the movie theaters. I watched Jean Cocteaus Beauty and the Beast every night I loved that movie.

Coming home after junior high I'd grab some grape juice (no soft drinks, God forbid, Coke was viewed as akin to heroin in my house) and a banana and go upstairs to my parents' bedroom where Mom would iron my father's shirts. I'd sit on the bed and we'd watch The Mike Douglas Show then The David Frost Show. Such glamour! I loved show biz. To this day, the smell of a hot iron conjures all kinds of images of Monti Rock the third or Jack Douglas and Reiko.

Staying home sick from school meant I got to spend the day in my parents' bed and watch I Love Lucy, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, The Ghost & Mrs Muir, Love American Style, Family Affair, That Girl. It made up for being sick.

Pepsi and Coca Cola in glass bottles in 8 packs. Taking them back to the Pony Keg(!) and getting a discount.

Drug stores that had diners in the back like Woolworths - where you could get submarine sandwiches which were so damn good.

Your mother and sisters using hair spray - tons of it.

Actually, what I remember about Woolworth lunch counters were the spiced apple rings that were the garnish. I don't remember subs. I remember BLTs or grilled cheese on white toast, a bag of potato chips in a red/white/and blue bag, and the apple ring. I assume red dye #2 was their demise, as they were bright red.

R392 Your mom sounds fabulous!

Female here. I remember hitchhiking everywhere. in the late 60s. My parents knew, too and were cool with it. We all did it. When did that end?

Of course when "department store tearooms" were mentioned upthread I had a slightly different memory.

Marbled walls in the mens' room and lots of....well, that's another thread, I'm sure!

R422 I know.

R385, I had that problem with hardons, except it was for the two weeks of swimming P.E. Our school was fortunate enough to have an on-site indoor pool, and two weeks were devoted to watersports - lol. It was 1976, Mark Spitz had just come off winning seven (?) gold Olympic medals, and that pic of him in his speedo with all seven medals around his neck got me super hard, no problem. Every time I put a speedo on I got a huge, sixteen year old stiffie, and I was quite well hung by that point.

So I anticipated problems with classmates, P.E. was segregated M-F, and the first day I attempted to go to the pool, but of course I got hard. In the locker room I panicked while walking hard to the pool, and told the coach I had to use the bathroom, then proceeded to skip class. I continued to do so for the next nine classes - I hung out in the library instead. Parents got wind of what I had done and imagine my shame trying to explain.

In high school showers were optional, only about 4-6 of the jocks took showers after P.E. Showers, however, were mandatory after class in grades 7-8. I still remember who had hair, who didn't, the one or two who were intact, and all the excitement and shame of showering together in a 100 sq ft shower with 15-20 classmates.

R406, my older brother and I had the Creepy Crawlers set from Mattel, and one could buy optional mold trays and goop. If I recall it was called Goopity-Goop, and that's when I think of when I hear of Paltrow's website. Anyhow, bro had a shrunken head and skeleton that he made around Hallowe'en, and indeed it was with a glow in the dark goop. I remember many burns I received from being an impatient and curious six yr old.

Incidentally, I came across a vintage first year issue set on eBay in original box (there were later versions in the late 60s early 70s). Included were never used full bottles of goop; who knows if it would still work after fifty years sealed, I was curious so I bid. I was disappointed to lose, as it went for almost US$200!

R424 made me think of my bikes in the 60's.....first was a classic red Schwinn, with fat white walled tires. Second was far more exciting:

The "Spyder" from Sears, OMG I was so excited to get one in yellow!

[quote] Coke was viewed as akin to heroin in my house

Mine too. I gather from this that you were refined, tasteful, and lovely people.

Mother fucker! Mother Fucker!

Anyone remember Flavor Straws? They turned your milk bright pink. My mother would get them for a way to make me drink milk. I can still remember that taste. Not good but I didn’t know that then.

Bleh. My parents were the working poor. We had powdered milk for half my childhood. To try and make it more palatable, there was something called Nestles’ Quik. A nearly as disgusting powder flavoured like chocolate or strawberry. Yuck.

R303, were those Sears jackets circa 1972? I think there’s a pic of me around that year wearing that jacket as well.

Tupperware was a big deal. They are still made to last forever. The most important kitchen item for a kid was the popsicle makers. Pour your kool aid into the caps, and put the stick handle in to freeze. Voila!

Nestle Quik was awesome. A spoonful in milk was a nice before bed treat.

[quote]It was 1976, Mark Spitz had just come off winning seven (?) gold Olympic medals.

Wasn't that 1972?

Hasbro brought us Leggy....the anorexic doll!

I had to put up with these DREADFUL hillbillies that lived next door

[quote] I remember going into a department store when calculators first came out and they were kept in glass cases like jewelry and they had priced tags like $500 and $600. Now you can buy one for 99 cents.

Funny you mentioned this. I recently put about $2.00 worth of batteries into an old calculator of mine and when I was at the dollar store I realized I could've just bought a new one for a buck!

[quote]Actually, what I remember about Woolworth lunch counters

What you really mean to say, is "It was nice not to sit with negros"

Kenner brought us Dusty.....the fashion doll for....um....athletic girls.

R86 and R110, thank you for bringing back the memories of my entire childhood!

Films were popular in our History and Social Studies classes, including "The Twisted Cross" (a documentary about the Nazis) and "Why Man Creates" (a film by Saul Bass which won an Oscar in 1968).

Seeing films in HS of the Holocaust, which today's kids would probably not ever see in school.

R468, we got Johnny Tremain. Also, the educational videos with the Bil Baird Marionettes. I loved those.

I had a Garrett Clayton build as a kid, with normal torso and big thighs and booty. Fortunately, my pants were only "husky" and not fat sized.

They were horrific weren't they, r469?

R461, thank you for the correction. I am surprised that it affected me at 12, I thought it occurred later.

Soda and beer cans used to have these sharp pull off tabs. People would leave them lying around and occasionally you could cut yourself on one. The edges could be really sharp - cut your finger sharp. They used to get rusty too.

An actual hazard and we just accepted it. People would collect them and make art out of them.

R324 - pinball machines were illegal in most big cities until 1973 or 74. So I don't think there were a lot around in the 1960s.

My grandma used to come on Saturdays and spent the whole afternoon mending and stitching old socks over and over. She still insisted to do that in the 90s and could not understand why we chose then to simply buy new ones and throw the old ones away.

R101 When our big console TV broke and we got a smaller one, my dad just took out the screen and the electronics from the old TV and placed the new smaller TV in the opening, it was pretty close in size so it actually looked pretty good.

No cell phones, tablets, computers.

Walked everywhere.

Transistor radios.

Hi-Fi vinyl record players.

[quote]Soda and beer cans used to have these sharp pull off tabs.

Honey, before tabs, we had to use church key can openers for soda and beer cans. I showed one to a millennial once and he had NO idea what it was or what it was for.

My mom worked a full time job, yet she managed to make a full meal every weekday, and had it on the table @ 5:15pm.

Sunday dinners were @ 1:00pm, always a great Italian meal.

Mine too r480. She's is 80 now and shakes her head at all the meal ingredient delivery services we have today.

Who remembers the "Our Mr. Sun" series of "educational" movies, featuring Dr. Frank Baxter and Eddie Albert? They were part of the Bell (telephone) science series. Another popular classroom entry was "Hemo the Magnificent," which featured the lovely MR. Richard Carlson. The first four in the series were actually directed by Frank Capra.

With respect, r475, pinball machines were commonplace in the 60s and 70s in Canada.

Pinball machines were quite common in California, too. I have no idea what r475 is talking about.

There were pinball machines in my dorm and the student union in Pittsburgh in 1970.

Holy shit, I can't believe there's almost 500 replies in two days!

70's home décor was the worst. Fake wood paneling, so ugly and depressing and too much orange everywhere.

But the orange was sooooo cheery!

Poppy orange, r488......poppy orange

Orange is not cheery. It's butt-motherfucking-ugly, like harvest gold and brown. I don't mind avocado (which never really looked like avocados).

My two older sisters'(slightly preteen idol was Ms. Cissy Davis. They just thought she was the most sophisticated thing ever. Plus they loved the underlying morose of her past. The way only preteen girls can.

Posts up above talked about mothers having to be careful what they put in the cart at the store, but I missed if anyone mentioned one of these. Being a brainy kid, it was my job to keep track of how much Mom had in the cart.

OMG the grocery store clicker. YOU WIN YOU WIN YOU WIN.

My grandmother used one, R492. My father did it in his head, to the penny.

We were middle class but frugally budgeted middle class. I am surprised at some areas of my expenditures today where I respect sensible frugality and others not at all. I buy very expensive booze, though look for good deals on it. I won't buy expensive socks, underwear, t-shirts, ever, but will spend a fortune on shoes, sporting goods.

R492 for a while some grocery carts had those clickers attached to the handle.

r492, I remember banks giving those away for free as promotional gimmicks. They'd open a new bank branch and give those away.

Banks gave away good things too like electric appliances. These days you can't even get a lousy calendar. Although I can get lollipops and dog biscuits. I'd rather get a toaster.

Or a crystal bowl r498.....

In the late 60s some banks were giving these lunar piggy banks. Real or fake, that moon landing was a really big deal.

Anyone remember the safety films they showed in gymnasiums? I remember one that was about bus safety. The kids were all misbehaving, loud, not staying seated etc.... Then one kid puts a mouse in front of the bus drivers face, she passes out and they all go careening down a hill. My friend and I got in trouble for bursting out in laughter. Good times.

R475 is correct, pinball was illegal in many big cities until the 1970's, NYC and Los Angeles being the best known examples. It was a carry-over from the 1940's when pinballs (pre-flipper) were mostly gambling machines. The invention of the flipper turned them into a game of skill, but the laws stayed on the books.

In some places (like Wisconsin) they were legal as long as you couldn't win a free game so the manufacturers made special versions that gave extra balls instead of free games. Collectors love those machines.

hmmmm, pinball machines illegal and guns not? Me thinks Canada got and still has it right!

A a crystal bowl would have been nice too R499. They did give really good stuff, like those day's top of the line blenders. Waffle makers, steak knife sets, nice ones. There would be a table in the back with the various appliances you could choose from and pick up and check out before you started an account and the interest was way better than today's. Most families never even heard of CDs. They got decent enough interest on a savings account and of course you got a bank book in a case with each savings account. I don't remember if they offered gifts or checking accounts.

FAST food was considered a treat and not a good substitute for a regular dinner. My Mom wore dresses and nylons. My Dad wore a hat. A dress hat. People would dress up to go to the movies or on an airplane. Having a 400 lb Zenith color TV was the bomb.

Watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in the 60s.

We always got dressed up for Church in our "Sunday Best."

And you better be dressed up to go to a funeral home.

Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill was 99¢ for a full size bottle.

Champale

Dollar movies that had 2 feature films.

Duz Soap with free glass inside- And Breeze had towels and wash cloths.

R35 yes, all the dads in our neighborhood did that too. They had a ritual, every year on one autumn Saturday, where they'd all rake the leaves into the curbside of the street (though we didn't have curbs, per se) and burn the leaves, two long snakes on either side of the long street.

They'd stand around shooting the breeze for hours, monitoring the slow burn. My best friend/next door neighbor and I would jump across the smoky burning piles, just for the hell of it, while joking with our dads.

At some point, we'd wrap several baking potatoes each into a sheath of aluminium foil and tuck them into the hot embers. You had to time it right; you'd either get a delicious, perfectly cooked baked potato with a delicious smoky aroma or a burnt dud. The anticipation was the thing - if it was a perfect potato that was just a grand finale.

Am I the only one here who was a GenX child in the 70s, but literally had videogames going literally all the way back to kindergarten?

My dad got an Odyssey 300 for Christmas in 1976.

My parents bought me an Atari 2600 for Christmas in 1977 (though it was obvious that I was a mere pretense, and my dad wanted it for himself).

By Christmas 1978, I had around 10 games for it, including Super Breakout (which was the hot Christmas 1978 game to die for).

For Christmas 1979, I got an Odyssey2.

For Christmas 1980, "the family" (read: my Dad) got an Atari 800, and my dad gave me a shit ton of games for the Odyssey2 to distract me until I went back to school so he could have the computer all to himself. By summer, though, I was the Atari 800's primary user.

Moving on to Christmas in the 80s... Intellivision (1981), Colecovision (1982), Commodore Vic 20 (1983), Commodore 64 (1984), color monitor & floppy drive for c64 (1985), and the grand prize of all... my first Amiga (A1000, 1986).

Millennials were NOT the first "digital natives". Plenty of GenX kids grew up with computers and videogames too. The only difference is, when WE were kids, having videogames and/or a computer MEANT something. Millennials were just the first generation to have computers "by default".

Pong

Blue Chp Stamps, S&H Green Stamps

Getting up on Saturday morning, turning the tv on, and seeing only static because tv stations hadn’t started broadcasting for the day. Then the US national anthem would play while a video of a waving flag played, followed by “Oh Canada” to a video of a Canadian flag. Then finally, cartoons!

R513, My first video game console was an Atari 2600, and I didn't get that until 1982, when I was in junior high school. My parents were very old school. They did adult things and rarely made time for technological gadgets and toys.

I was born in '76 and always had video games. I was coding when I was seven years old in TI-BASIC too. I had a book of programs that let you create rudimentary graphics and things like a database of the presidents, etc.

These brats today! We were the real digital natives. We nearly had to write code to make the computer turn on. AND WE LIKED IT!

Amusing update... after I got the Odyssey2 in 1979, the Atari mostly sat gathering dust for 2 years... until Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, and Defender gave me a good reason to dust it off.

Technically, those games all existed for the Atari 800... but in all honesty, the Atari 800 versions weren't really much better (and were a LOT harder). Atari 400/800 games didn't really become GOOD until the c64 raised the bar & floppy drives became affordable (before Atari matched Commodore's $250 price, Atari floppy drives were OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive). And by that point, I had a c64, and the c64 versions were usually the best available (so it was moot).

When the grandparents, aunts and uncles or family friends gave us an especially nice gift, we were required to send a handwritten thank you note.

For all those who remember past decades, learn about the Mandela Effect online and see if what you remember has changed.

For anybody who hasn't seen what kind of stuff people with way too much free time have written for the Atari 2600 LATELY, check out this video.

Yes, this is the same 40 year old Atari 2600 we had as kids... with much, much better development and debugging tools ;-)

Another cool one

A sad commentary on modern video games... "If Pac Man (for the Atari 2600) were released today"

I vividly remember collectible drinking glasses from various fast food outlets, and the campaigns my siblings and I would undertake to persuade my mom to visit often enough during the giveaway period in order to collect them all. As others have pointed out, a trip to a fast food place then was a treat, not something that happened every week, and it was WORK to get all of those glasses. When we were trying to collect all of Star Wars glasses from Burger King, we were focused, united, and determined as we had never been before. And we succeeded - I still have two of them.

Has there ever been such a bittersweet thread? So many things I’d forgotten about! I miss that simpler world. But now is better in so many ways.

The post-Phys Ed shower stories really struck a chord for me.. First day of class in Grade 9, my new friend Jim asks me “Why are you staring at my cock?” (That should have been a clue, though I didn’t figure out I was gay until a few months later when I saw Peter Lupus naked in Playgirl!) Decades ago now, but I can still remember every cock in that gym class.

When Barclay's Bank opened in our area, the gave out large Troll Doll banks if you opened an account. My father opened two so I could get a boy and a girl.

My first computer was made of paper. It was for learning how computers work.

People had electric organs in their homes. There were electric organ stores at the mall!

I remember those bikes, well, r453, although I never knew what they were called (for some reason, I always thought that they might be called "banana" bikes because of the shape of the seat)! They were so cool, but I was far too small to get one. I wish they still made them, they look like they'd be comfortable, since you'd be able to sit upright and even rest your back. Sigh!

And r474, I was one of the kids who collected those pull-off tabs to make chains and stuff with. Their edges weren't really sharp enough to give you a real cut, and I still mourn their disappearance.

watching my grandmother use Rose Milk lotion after she washed dishes. I used to ask for some and I'd rub it all over my body. I loved the smell of Rose Milk!

[quote]I was one of the kids who collected those pull-off tabs to make chains and stuff with. Their edges weren't really sharp enough to give you a real cut, and I still mourn their disappearance.

But it was really annoying if you broke one off before it opened. Sometimes the little pull tab would break off from the metal enclosure. Then you had to get out a sharp object and jam it open.

Movie theaters had "Loges" where you could smoke while watching the movie.

Rosebud

[quote]Millennials were NOT the first "digital natives". Plenty of GenX kids grew up with computers and videogames too. The only difference is, when WE were kids, having videogames and/or a computer MEANT something. Millennials were just the first generation to have computers "by default".

This is true. My dad was a math teacher and took computer classes in 1978 and 1979 -- I still have his textbooks. Friends had game consoles and TRS-80 computers in the late 1970s.

I've been watching an old video game show called "Starcade" lately and am always surprised at how good those games looked for being 1983 or so.

60 year old Boomer here.

In high school we had a tiny computer lab, but in college I took some programming courses. I was horrible at it.

I've tried to block the memory, but if I remember correctly, you'd write your flow chart, then you'd go to a machine and each command was entered on a keyboard which created a punch card. The you'd take all your punch cards, wrap them with a rubber band and put them in an 'inbox' outside the computer lab. Then you'd go get lunch, or a beer, or whatever and come back hours later to see if your program was done. 99 times out of 100, for me at least, it bombed, so you'd have to go through all those cards and find your mistake, fix it and do it all over again.

I don’t want this thread to ever end. I could read these all day; keep them coming! Is it possible to be nostalgic for a time before I was born?!

The Beatles released a new LP on Capitol or Apple during each of my teen years.

My father worked as a computer programmer starting in the 60s. Sometimes on Saturday, he'd have to go in to work and so he'd take me. I sit at the keypunch console and type up a bunch of punchcards with my name and address on them and pretend they were my business cards. Punch cards were all over the place and I wish I had kept one or two of them for keepsakes. You don't realize in the moment what you might miss 40 years later.

We were free-range kids, but we had an outdoor dinner bell, so we couldn't be anywhere out of range of hearing my mother call us in for dinner. Our subdivision had no fences between yards so you could be most anywhere on the block and run directly home in 2 minutes.

Love this thread. Was in grade school in mid/late-70's, Dallas suburbs. I remember so vividly playing in the neighborhood of suburban sprawl, even after dark, with groups of friends playing Hide and Seek or Bloody Murder (or 'Bloody Mary') or Spinning States. We would get daring and play "ring and run" on houses (ring their front doorbell and then run and hide). Our playground was just an interconnected maze of rows of very new houses on concrete streets with sidewalks and curbs and storm drains. Every structure around us was prefab and new. People generally left their front porch lights on before going to bed and there were tall streetlights at every corner (junebugs would collect under them and we'd play with those, gross!) We'd draw in the streets with bricks from houses being built, which you could break and use like chalk (would wash away when it rained). There were huge round concrete sewer tunnels you could enter at the edge of neighborhood clusters emptying into a creek. They'd almost always be dry except for a trickle in the bottom so we'd get flashlights and walk through those, probably for a mile (seemed like), sometimes doing it in the daytime and emerging out of curb water drain thing through the manhole cover in a strange neighborhood we didn't know while strangers mowing their lawns stared at us. I remember Saturday nights eating hamburgers (dad cooked on the charcol grill outside) and tater tots and canned baked beans on TV trays in front of the massive wood "Entertainment Console" which had out TV in it. We'd watch Wonderful World of Disney and Mutual of Omaha and Bob Newhart Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and others, then we'd sneak downstairs and peek through the kitchen to watch snippets of The Carol Burnett Show because we had to go to bed by the time that was on. Occasionally a movie my parents loved would come on like What's Up Doc? or Take The Money and Run and we'd all watch it. If a favorite movie like Wizard of Oz or Logan's Run was going to be broadcast on TV you'd sit with your eyeballs glued to the screen so as not to miss a single second (no streaming, or even VCRs!). In my room I or my friends would play with Legos endlessly (just multi colored and shaped blocks you had to creative use to make crudely-shaped things, nothing was shaped like something) which I kept in a large cylindrical cardboard ice cream container from Baskin Robbins I somehow got. I'd pour them out onto a little rug I had in the middle of the room that was a Stop sign (on top of wall-to-wall carpeting). Or weird plastic interconnected puzzles, or weird wooden puzzle things you operated with knobs that had metal marbles you'd work through mazes, or stare at my black-light "Mind Maze" poster or M.C. Escher prints, I think later I had Micro-Nots (Naughts?) and loved them, but mostly read Mad, Cracked, Crazy and Starlog magazines (I'd slowly collected from newsstands at 7-11 or the occasional trip to the mall…which were still up and coming in our area and a rare treat back then, and would soon take per our adolescent lives). Or Dynamite or Bananas magazines bought from school through Schoolastic Book Club. I'd read the same issues over and over (especially Mad). Or I'd listen to records on my little plastic record player, no rock records, more like Captain & Tennille and Carpenters and John Denver and Chic (disco was big, which was almost like gimmick-y children's music if you think about it… like 'Le Freak' and 'Disco Duck') and the Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Star Wars soundtracks, or K-Tel compilations, maybe Kiss if your parents allowed it. New wave and punk was still years away for us. Sundays were church all day. Neighborhoods and the whole world seemed more vivid and calmer and quieter back then. Special stuff was rare so it seemed more special. You had to create your own excitement among all the calm.

R541, you also had paragraphs. Use them. They are your friend.

R447, R392 here. Yes, Mom was totally awesome. She was a child of the 30s (1933 to be exact). Her Mom, my grandmother, was a homemaker with 4 kids, just like my Mom. My Mom learned everything she could from her Mom. My grandparents were poor (being black in the 30s) but their kids didn't know how poor. The same was sort of true of my parents. We weren't European trips at spring break like some of my friends but we did have an above-ground swimming pool. My Dad put it together himself; we even drove to Brooklyn NY for a missing part!

Fucking Dementia took Mom in 2016. It was so sad as her memory failed her. We would cook Sunday dinner and Mom would sit in the kitchen and watch or ask to help. Sometimes she would say, "I used to be able to remember how to do all this stuff and now I don't." It was heartbreaking.

I don't want to end this post on a sad note so I'll add another memory. Collecting dishes! Mom would go to Hess, I think to collect service for 4 of dinner and salad plates and coffee cups and saucers. Another memory, - GAS LINES!! In NJ, gas was rationed. License plates ending in even numbers got gas on even numbered days, odd numbers on odd dates. If you had vanity plates, you were allowed gas on odd numbered days.

We used to play wiffleball or kickball in the street, and the at bat (or kick) team would also be the car lookout, waiting until a car was about 20 feet away and then yelling "Car" so we'd all clear the street.

In the summer, the Good Humor truck would come down my street around 7 pm every night. I used to get a Bomb pop or a Toasted Almond. We also had a Hood truck that came around but much more sporadically. Two hippies drove that truck and they were selling weed out of it, making it very popular with the older kids. I liked the rainbow snow cones.

Remember paper fortune tellers? Someone would make one and we would play this with friends. I don't know why I remember this.

r469

Because they don't show fiction in school anymore.

R545

The girls in grade school did that. I was too busy pining away for the Mystery Date "dud"!

The girls had those in grammar school, r545. They called them cootie catchers.

We had Mr. Softee ice cream truck in the summer. Kids on our street alone would guarantee his truck being there an hour. Those bubble gum cards sold on the truck had pictures from Dark Shadows and I think we got our baseball cards there too. I would try to get every player from our home team and would be so po'd when I'd miss one.

Our little clique in the third grade started to build the "monster models" kits. They were cheap plastic models you put together with model glue, and everything went swimmingly until I had two more models than the rest of them and then all jealous hell broke loose.

I think Mr. Softee went out of business once Viagra was introduced.

[quote]I realize how easy it is to get caught up in the warm glow of nostalgia, but reading this thread I think people take for granted how much better and easier life is now than back then. Just about everything then required more effort, more time, and was less convenient. Many manufactured goods, not just cars, were shoddier and required frequent repairs. When was the last time you heard of a TV repairman?

This has really made me think, and I disagree. There's no right or wrong answer here, it will come down to your personal preference. I agree that things may be more convenient today, but I think you appreciated things more back in the day, precisely because you did have to work for them.

I'm not a Luddite, I appreciate the convenience of smartphones, internet, home computers, etc. But back in the 70s/80s you weren't frustrated that you didn't have the conveniences today. You just dealt with your current reality. TV busted? Go outside, play a game, read a book.

Also, expectations were different. My parents are amazed that when I'm home on the weekend or away on vacation, there's an unspoken understanding that I'm still checking office emails, or available for calls. Back in those days, there was no expectation that you were tethered to your corporate America job. With all of the advancements we've made, societal expectations have evolved too where there seems to be more pressure, more rushing around. The entire country's appears to have ADD, we can't unplug from our devices.

I'm glad I grew up when I did. Simpler times.

Cars ran on leaded "regular" gas. I still remember my father saying, "Fill it up with Regular."

My father had a cousin who was really cheap. As cars started changing over to unleaded, my father's cousin bought an attachment to put on the gas nozzle so that he could still pump leaded gas (which was cheaper) rather than using the unleaded gas that his car's tank was designed for.

[quote]70's home décor was the worst. Fake wood paneling, so ugly and depressing and too much orange everywhere.

I prefer the grays of today PLUS black furniture.

Multi-line phones - they'd would actually RING while you were on the phone.

It was not uncommon for a person to work for 30+ years at the same company.

ORIGAMI

In W'ern Mass, we had the Ding Dong Cart.

Dad worked full time, mom part time, 3 nights a week. One car. Dad had to be home to drive mom to her job, because he needed the car at night in case there was an emergency. (Which always made my mother sigh, because she was home all day without a car, no worry of "emergency".)

Had the big console TV, and big console Hi Fi. That was definitely "furniture". Five room house for family of 5, Living room, kitchen, and three bedrooms (although my bedroom was the size of a walk-in closet today). One bathroom. It was a big deal in the 80s when we added a dining room off the kitchen. The dog wasn't allowed in there.

No cable, just had the antenna on the roof like the OP. Change the channels by hand... which meant that when dad was on the couch watching, he'd call one of the kids in from playing or doing homework to change the channel. Which sucked if he didn't know what he wanted to watch..."Change it to channel 8...wait there, no, go back to channel 3." Finally got a small black and white in my parents room in the late 70s, so my dad watched on the color, and the kids watched on the black and white, and my mom went to whichever interested her the most.

Groceries were delivered from the corner market, the milkman came twice a week with milk and OJ... and ice cream during the holidays! Always had homemade dinners, and even when mom worked, she made the dinner for dad to give to the kids. I remember mom planning the dinner menu a week in advance so she'd know what to order from the store. Fast food was a special occasion, and eating out was almost never. Eating in front of the tv on TV trays was a treat too, and only when dad was going out at night with his buddies or a lodge meeting.

One phone, a rotary dial wall phone in the kitchen. Party line, and you only had to dial 5 numbers if calling within the city. Had a chore list on the refrigerator - whose turn is it to do the dishes? Whose turn to walk the dog? Had to earn that $2 weekly allowance!!

The Frau favorite home party pastime was Tri-Chem which was basically using stinky markers to color in pictures like The Last Supper.

Also, in the area where I lived, ceramics became a big thing. You couldn't go into anyone's house without seeing a ceramic rabbit or horse that the mother had made.

A lot of you have mentioned gas stations in the past... how it was generally only full-service back in the day, collecting freebies like sets of glasses for being a loyal customer, and so on. It made me think about how it was the norm when we stopped to fill the tank, they would automatically check the oil unless my dad said not to bother. They’d also check the water level in the radiator. There was no charge for any of that.

I was also remembering how much more stylish the gas stations were. They had charming architecture; they looked like little houses.

Other brands were popular then, too. Does anyone else remember the Flying A? It had a red-and-white logo with wings.

[quote]Dad had to be home to drive mom to her job, because he needed the car at night in case there was an emergency. (Which always made my mother sigh, because she was home all day without a car, no worry of "emergency".)

My mother did the same sigh. My father worked 3 miles away from our home. He took the car everyday unless my mother needed it for doctor's appointments or to run to school to help with something. My mother would sigh because the car was sitting all day in a parking lot three miles away and my father worked with several people that drove past our house on their way home.

r560, for us it was also an automatic wash of the front windshield, which would piss my father off if they didn't do a good job because it left streaks on the window. As kids, we thought it was a classy gas station if the gas guy also washed the back windshield.

A friend of my grandparents used to own a gas station in their small town. My grandmother had a deal with this friend. He'd bring food in for dinner and my grandmother would cook it and serve it, so he was almost always there for dinner. He was a single guy and I often wondered if he was gay but too shy to be out. Anyway, my grandmother would stop by the gas station and he'd open the soda machine and give us all a bunch of free soda. When I was about 5, I thought that was the coolest thing that he could have a free soda anytime he wanted one. Nobody bothered to impress on me that the man owned his own very successful business.

You used to be able to do a little something to your phone to make it ring (dial a certain number, then push the hang-up lever like 3 times). As kids, we used to delight in this ‘trick’ ... until about the third time when the operator would come on and scold you for playing with the phone.

R563, someone upthread mentioned 6-1-1. I never knew about this trick. It would have enriched my childhood experience greatly!

My next door neighbors used to buy Funny Face drink mix (Jolly Olly Orange, Choo Choo Cherry, Rootin' Tootin' Raspberry), but my mother neverliked us drinking so much sugar, so we would sneak to the other side of my neighbors house to drink it. Like we were sneaking alcohol. We did used to get Coke (I think my dad made my mom get it) but if the kids had a glass of Coke after school it had to be half Coke/half water. Bleh.

We'll need a Part II soon!

Goofy Grape!

Staying at my grandparents' house in the 70's:

- The Lawrence Welk show - it was torture to have to sit through this show - was it only one night per week? Because my memory is that is was on all the time. Torturous.

- Hamburger Night was every Saturday night. They were too cheap to buy regular hamburger buns. We ate them on sliced white bread. And we liked it.

- Off-brand sodas and drinks, like Wyler's Fruit Punch, Diet-Rite soda, etc.

[quote]someone upthread mentioned 6-1-1. I never knew about this trick. It would have enriched my childhood experience greatly!

We knew about it, but the problem was that it gave a different ring than a normal call. The rings were shorter. So after you'd pulled the gag a couple of times, people caught on.

We had relatives come visit us from out of state and we pulled the gag on one of our cousins. He was too stupid to realize that nobody would be calling our house and asking for him. I feel bad now about tricking him like that.

My mom actually had Tupperware parties.

She sold Avon too.

My great aunt was always into her figure, and drank diet soda. On the bad visits, she'd serve us Tab. On the good visits she'd serve Pepsi Light with Lemon, which was tolerable only in comparison to Tab.

At the end of her life (1988?) she was wasting away to nothing, getting her to eat was like pulling teeth. While never formally diagnosed I'm sure she was anorexic, but still drinking her diet soda.

Every year, we'd go to the beach for two weeks in August. For some reason one of my memories was that we would pack the night before and load up the car, so on Saturday morning we could wake up at the crack of dawn, jump in the car, and go. The packing experience was always tense because my father wanted to limit how much we took with us, and we'd have to bring what we wanted to take and lay it out on my parents bed before he started packing everything. (So I could only bring two of my stuffed animals, 4 comic books, and between the three kids we could bring two board games, one of which was Monopoly because my father would insist on that.)

My mother would pack up so many housewares too - bed sheets, so kitchen utensils and cookware, etc. My recollection was that the rental house had those things, but my mother wanted our stuff with her.

We were a weird family.

DoodleArt®, anyone??? This pre-dated the millennial colouring fad by at least 25 years.

I begged for one for xmas, and received the one about the zodiac (which I cannot find online). They came in two sizes, both retailed in white tubes. Included in the tube was the poster-sized colouring sheet (the other size was 11x13 if I recall) and included were magic markers (felt-tipped pens) to use for colouring. Mine took me months to complete, and my mother was so proud of my actually finishing an "art project" that she took it to an expensive art shop and had it professionally, and expensively, framed.

No sooner had I finished the first gift I ran out and picked up the one called "The Jungle " (see link - it's identical to the original and actually the tube is even reminiscent). This one took me a year or two to complete, and was proudly framed and both hung side-by-side with honour in our rarely used living room, as if they were original works of art!

From the same website, which has other examples of original posters: " With over 60 hours of doodling fun per poster, DoodleArt® makes a fantastic family activity, kids project or hobby for anyone of any skill level. Once completed your DoodleArt® poster makes a great piece of art that can stand the test of time. All our posters are the original images that were so successful when they were first created in 1972. Don't be fooled by imitations, these are the Original DoodleArt®. the same website, which has other examples of original posters."

Miss Eden doing more than just Jeannie on TV.....

I remember being at a friends house during the recession in the 70s and his dad got laid off. His mom had been out applying for jobs. The phone rang, the mother answered and it was a boy calling for one of the daughters. The mother said she couldn't come to the phone and she would call him back. After she hung up the mother said no one could use the phone for the rest of the week, she needed to keep the line open in case one of the job prospects tried to call her back.

Another big difference is that back then, children were the cheap labor that illegal immigrants are today. I had a paper route from age 11 and started mowing lawns at 13, and built up a decent business by the time I was done with school. I worked in a retail store distribution center, a moving company and did some construction starting at 16. My sister babysat starting at 12 and was a McChick in high school. This was an upper middle-class suburb and everyone had an after school/weekend job. I still managed to find time for sports, get good grades and have something of a social life.

Bell Labs science kits were distributed free to high schools. My favorite was Crystals and Light.

Phone numbers had what were called extensions like ST-5308. The ST in my case stood for Stadium. There were no zip codes. No 800 numbers.

LOLA !!! They were better than Popsicles but not as good as a Fudgicle or a Creamsicle. I remember these LOLAs from the late 60s/early 70s. Fruit flavoured chipped ice in a triangular package, and my favourite was lemon. You'd snip a small opening in one corner and slowly suck out the melting chipped sweet liquid on a hot summer day.

Link shows 80s version, on first pane for me.........

I had a Gilbert chemistry set, and a geology set, and a microscope set, and a telescope set, and a Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronic experiment kit.

Barbara Roberts set the bar rather high.....

Betsy McCall paper dolls in every issue of McCall's magazine

There was never music playing in stores. I remember our big local department store (Hutzler's) had a bell/chime system to contact store personnel. Very soothing.

Speaking of department stores, does anyone remember the notions department?

Going downtown to see the Christmas windows in the department stores was a HUGE deal. We'd go at night so we'd see them illuminated, very glamorous.

The first skateboards (around '66?), made of wood.

Going downtown to see first run movies at the huge movie palaces ... where I saw Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and much later Boys in the Band. It felt special to see these films before they came to the suburban theaters.

Smiley face buttons

Petit-pants (bloomers worn over underpants)

Barbie, Ken, Skipper, Scooter, Midge, and Alan

My first introduction to Manhattan was through What's My Life and I've Got a Secret. So chic and sophisticated.

R414, What do you blame the rash on your penis now on ?

R420, Your mom did not want any satanic foods in the house.

Driving around to look at Christmas lights. My dad taking us to the drive-in for a milkshake.

[quote]Diet-Rite soda

My grandma and her sisters drank this all the time. Only they were Southern so the pronunciation was something like Diiiiaht-Riiiight.

We grew up suburban middle-class in the 1960s, but we did have two cars. We had the newspaper delivered every morning. My father would get up first, plug in the Presto percolator, and get in the shower.

All dressed in a starched white shirt, suit pants, and tie, he'd have a bowl of something healthy like Wheaties or All-Bran, then pour himself a cup of black coffee and light a cigarette while he read the paper. If he saw something he thought my mother would be interested in (a review of a play or a restaurant), he'd take a pen and circle it.

He'd put on his suit coat, give my mother a kiss, and leave the house at the same time and take the same train to work. Then he'd take the same train home from work, almost every day for over 30 years. On rare occasions my mother and a friend would go downtown shopping or to a matinee and meet the husbands afterward for dinner. The next day there would be matchbooks from places like Trader Vic's or the Tonga Room on the coffee table.

As my dad lay dying from cancer (at 67, thanks to all those cigarettes), he told us he had no regrets, that he had a wonderful life. To him (as with many veterans who grew up during the depression), a family, good job, and a house in the suburbs was all they could ever have asked for.

I still have the morning paper delivered and I find some sort of strange pleasure getting my morning news the same way my dad did (and probably his father too).

I love this thread.

[Quote]When we were trying to collect all of Star Wars glasses from Burger King, we were focused, united, and determined as we had never been before. And we succeeded - I still have two of them.

You are awesome, R525.

And R583, your dad sounds like a great guy. They don't make them like that anymore.

I loved my Spirograph.

[quote] I had a Gilbert chemistry set

My brother had a chemistry set from America, like that, but a different make. Who else made them?

It had a miniature pickled toad in a bottle - or something like that. I took it to school to show my science teacher. He said "Thank you very much" and kept it. Even remembering it now I want to say "I brought this to show you, not for keeps, you bastard!"

[quote]I loved my Spirograph.

You must have been a nerd.

The one with paint was much cooler - it spun round and you squeezed the paint and it splattered onto the paper, what was that called?

But for how long r585, how long?

Thread 2 created.

Watching the documentary about blue eyed/brown eyed children being discriminated against and wondering what green eyed children did during the experiment?

[quote]The one with paint was much cooler - it spun round and you squeezed the paint and it splattered onto the paper, what was that called?

A mess.

It was Spin*Art

[quote]The one with paint was much cooler - it spun round and you squeezed the paint and it splattered onto the paper, what was that called?

Jackson Pollock?

My rock tumbler was fun.

I also collected stamps.

Have we got all the way to 594 replies and nobody mentioned mood rings?

Unless you. lived in Nevada or had a race track nearby there was no legal gambling except maybe charity bingo. Instead, there were Stag Nights at private clubs like the VFW or the American Legion where they would break out everything from slot machines to roulette wheels and have gambling for the members. It wasn't legal, but generally the law looked the other way if they kept it quiet. In some places the biggest offenders were the Catholic Churches--I remember a few in Chicago with full blown casinos where the priests dealt the blackjack and off duty Chicago cops provided security at the door.

Oh, and there were bookies. Almost every factory and office had their bookie who would make the rounds every week. A sheet would magically appear with all the odds for the week's games and he would show up to take the bets and payoff the winners about Thursday. I know guys who bet above their heads, but I never heard of anyone getting roughed up or suffering any real consequences because of it. About the worst that would happen was that the bookie would cut them off, and there was quite a stigma attached to that.

Oh....well, r595, I will.

Mood rings

When my 6th grade teacher, Mr Sheehan, couldn't bother to teach he used to make us watch a film.

After some angst he'd finally get the film threaded on the projector and away we'd go. When the film started and the "focus" image came on, some smartass would always say "fuck us" and we'd all laugh. But we actually loved the films.

Bajour!

598? Can someone start a new thread?

R600, see R589 above. I'm thoroughly enjoying this thread as well!