For me, the sound of childhood is ________

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In which Dopers discuss sounds that transport them back to childhood.

For me it’s a sewing machine. My mother was a seamstress; for the first fifteen years or so of my life she supplemented the family income by taking in sewing jobs, and also made clothes for each of her children as well. I can’t remember a time in my childhood when I wasn’t aware of her spending at least an hour in any given day at her machine. Or, for that matter, one of my siblings screeching “OW! I got a stickpin stuck in my foot again!”

To which my mother always replied, “So why are you walking around barefoot in my sewing room?”

:smiley:

My sister has decided that my sort-of-stepdaughter needs to learn how to sew, so she’s come over to teach her. I just heard that sound and was immediately transported by to the 70s.

Anyway, that’s me. What sound takes you back to childhood.

2

Mine isn’t nearly so poetic. I think maybe the theme song from G-Force. Or one of my brothers screaming “Raaar!”

3

Whenever I go to visit my mother on the old family farm, and hear the screen door slam, I am 9 all over again!

Other sounds that do it:
Bug Zappers
Tractors
Cows mooing
Frogs down at the marsh in the spring
& hearing any song from the early to mid 70s. “Seasons in the Sun” was the first one that popped in my head.

4

The sound of kids playing outside. I grew up in the '50s, in a typical “Beaver Cleaver” suburb (well, except for the racism, sexism, anti-semitism and homophobia). There was very little traffic on our street, and there were always kids playing.

And my mother, singing along with the “old standards” radio station, while in the kitchen.

5

The theme song from The Jetsons.

A noisy old polluting lawn mower, like the cheesey one my dad used for decades and refused to replace.

A peculiar shrieking squawk that I can recall even now, of our homemade barbecue grill’s crank which lowered the coal bed down. My dad made the 'cue from old parts and cement blocks. I don’t know why he never greased the crank.

A six-note melody that my dad invented to “whistle the kids in” at dusk. I haven’t thought of that in years.

6

Cicadas and train whistles.

7

Even more than the Thundercats theme, the Silverhawks theme.

Coffee brewing. My parents current coffeepot doesn’t seem to make any noise at all.

8

semi-circular-spray sprinklers that go tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-**SHPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPTTT**

the motor of a 70s VW camper van as heard from the way-back seat

robins talking to each other in the evening

9

Yes, and the mourning doves? too.

But the one that instantly makes me about 10 years old? A baseball game on the TV, especially if it’s the Cubs. Throw in the light of a summer afternoon, and I just know there’s an oscillating fan going somewhere.

10

sewing machine as well for me, (although the machine hated me). i got rid of the machine its self, but kept the sewing cabinet/table because of the squeak of the top drawer. i’ve heard that squeak so much growing up.

the sounds of scissors cutting material on a wood table. that is a really odd sound. you have the hhhhhaaaaruuuuuuf of the material, with the snick of the blades, with a bit of a wood thunk.

11

Schoolhouse Rock

12

Bob-whites and whipporwills, I think. I haven’t heard a bob-white in ages. I read once that it’s one of the birds that’s disappearing due to its being so adapted to rural farmland (not the natural state of things either) and rural farmland giving way to exurbia.

13

Oh, I LOVE to hear robins late in the day!!! I walked to church in the early evening occasionally with my grandmother, and even today when I hear robins ‘cheery-upping,’ I think of her.

  • Thunderstorms in the afternoon after a hot day. There don’t seem to be as many thunderstorms as there used to be.

  • Sunday morning polka fest on the radio!

14

CAR!

15

-Hockey Night in Canada theme song

-Skateboards on a pebbly road

-The fog horn

-Chainsaws, oddly enough. (Our neighbours to either side of us seemed to spend all summer cutting firewood and hacking up trees.)

And probably the sound of the ocean too, but I since I still live within minutes of it I tend to block the noise out. I guess I won’t really know about that one until I go and come back.

16

The sound of a kettle on the stove in a silent room (my grandmother prepared for herself an herb tea every evening, while knitting or doing something similar).

17

Bugs Bunny

‘Captain Scarlet’
(be nice or I’ll post a link to an MP3 of ‘Marina’ from ‘Stingray’)

Chet Huntley’s gray old face on a fading B&W set after football games on Saturdays.

“Old Days” by Chicago.

18

Playing card clothespinned to a bicycle frame so it hit the spokes and replicated the sound of a motorcycle engine.

Well, to an eight year old at least.

19

Hmmm, many sounds I would now associate with childhood are sounds I only remember from childhood (growing up in the mid- to late 1970s). I doubt I’ll ever hear them again in life (and finding them on a recording somewhere would be pretty tough, though probably not impossible).

The sound of the channel changer on our old console TV. The kind you had to walk over and twist with your hand. Ka-chunk… Ka-chunk. You could even rotate the dial halfway between frequencies and get something weird on the screen.

Similarly, the sound of turning off that old console TV. The picture would quickly shink into a bright, tiny glowing dot in the center of the tube, along with an almost otherwise indescribable “zwwwippp” kind of sound.

The sound of putting a needle on a record. Yeah, if you’re an audiophile with one of those hydraulically descending automatic arm turntables, or just have a really soft touch, you wouldn’t hear it; but I was a kid with a portable 45 RPM record player. I do still hear this as it is sampled at the beginning of a song I have on my iPod “gym workout” playlist, Where It’s At by Beck. It brings me back every time.

The sound of a steam radiator hissing at night, with the heat pipes clanging occasionally. Sssssss-tink. Ssssss-tink. Glong-long-long-glongggg… tink. While my parents still live in the house I grew up in, they changed their heating system a few years ago so I no longer hear this. My own house (all of ten blocks away) is also steam heated, but it’s dead quiet. Guess they had some kind of leak all those years.

Those bong… bong… bong… tones I used to hear in department stores. The patterns would pause, and then repeat again. I think Cecil even wrote a column about them once, explaining how they were a kind of paging system used by the managers to summon/direct sales clerks to various places in the store. Now I guess they have wireless radios or cell phones.

Going a bit later to my teenage/young adult years, I get nostalgic for the sound of an impact printer: either a high speed dot matrix or a daisy wheel printer. In college, printing something on the laser printers cost 10 cents per page after a certain number of free pages (20 per week I think it was), so all draft copies were sent to the dot matrix printer in “draft mode”, which printed faster but with less resolution. The print head moved back and forth so fast the whole thing shook like it was fixing to take a walk. BZZZT-BZZZT! BZZZT-BZZT! And printing out computer code, which doesn’t take up a full page width with text for every line, would go even faster: BZZT-BZT-B-B-B-BZZZZZT! (Those lines with nothing but a curly brace would be the “B” sounding ones; the longer BZZZZT rows would be the code I annotated with a descriptive comment, well-trained programmer that I am.)

At an office I worked at they had a daisy-wheel printer that printed pages that looked like they’d been typed up in a typewriter. Because there was, in fact, a ball with typeset letters on it and an ink ribbon, just like an electric typewriter would have, and when printing it sounded like a machine gun firing. Rat-tat-tatatatatata-tat-at.

20

Mourning doves (summer) and “Carol of the Bells” (winter).

Mourning doves nested in a neighbor’s back yard in our little town out on the Colorado prairie when I was a kid. I first heard them when I was six, on a cool, quiet summer morning between first and second grades. It was the first summer I really enjoyed because it was after my first full year of school. I have always equated that sound ("coo-coo-ROOOoooo) with those absolutely carefree days of that summer, and all the childhood summers after it. To this day, when I hear a mourning dove on a summer morning, I am transported back to that place and time.

During those same years, the onset of the Christmas season (before I became an Episcopalian and learned about Advent) was signaled when my parents put up the Christmas tree, usually a week after Thanksgiving. When the tree was decorated, Mother would get out her favorite Christmas record album and put it on the hi-fi. The first cut on the album was “Carol of the Bells.” Every time I hear that music, I am a wide-eyed boy marveling at the unsurpassed beauty of a shimmering, tinsel–strewn tree alight with color.