That was after the National Anthem signoff.
Trading stamps.
Earth shoes.
My mother exercising with Jack LaLanne.
Drive in Movies… I miss them.
Jane Fonda’s workout RECORDS!
We still have some around here – long drive, but not wholly unreasonable. The last time I went was a decade ago, though.
Hey, I got a SL5000 too. Had it until a couple months ago, but I finally trashed it as it I gave up on trying to fix it. (Played poorly, didn’t record.) Not worth the shipping cost trying to sell it. Still have a couple working stereo Betas of course.
One of my cousins had a Plymouth with the button thing. Slide switch to put it in park. He souped it up, was the fastest car I ever rode in. (Pinned the speedometer.) Really cool car, except it had these buttons…
wow I remember most of this stuff, dont remember party lines though, never even heard of one til I was reading some King story.
my Grandmother had a rotary phone, those things sucked if you dialed a wrong number.
remember the phones that had a switch for either Tone Or Pulse dialing because your phone system might not be upgraded to tone yet? even better remember switching other peoples phones over to pulse when you knew they had no idea the switch was even there?
I clearly remember standing between the seats talking to my mom and aunt while going down the road…a head on would have sent me head first out the window like a missile.
buying cigarettes with a note, yeah I did that for the babysitter, the best part, she sent us to a store that was so far away on a busy ass highway that our parents woulndt allow us to walk to on our own.
Staying outside until it was too dark to see. I used to read under my covers at night, because I’d get punished if I was caught inside the house on a nice day.
Blue chip/S&H Green stamps (mentioned above).
Your Doctor smoked. You could smoke in a hospital, department store or a restaurant.
The full time mechanic at the gas station would fix your bike flat for free.
The Flinstones were on at night, and they were sponsored by Winston cigarettes.
Athletes stayed with their team until they retired.
Nobody locked their doors. Or closed their windows.
You could spend all day at the movies for a $1.00.
Ice cream at Thrifty’s was a nickel a scoop.
You could be gone for hours at a time with no questions asked, but if you wanted to trade baseball cards with your friend, you both had to ask your Mom first.
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, you took pictures of the black and white TV screen with your Polaroid.
Sodas were drank out of bottles. Cans were for Beer.
When you went someplace in your car, you waved at every single vehicle going the other way, because you knew them.
My brother needed some cash and the bank was closed. Lucky for him I worked at a gas station that took credit cards. He charged $50 to his card, I gave him $50 cash, and_we_thought_we_were_the_smartest_people_who_ever_lived. We practically invented the cash advance, man, and we did it without fees.
Were we lame or what?:rolleyes:
And pull tabs! Piles and piles of pull tabs. People would collect them and make chains out of them. Or collect them for recycling. Teachers would launch school projects to collect a million pull tabs, so the kids would understand how much a million was. Animal lovers collected them so animals wouldn’t eat them and die horribly (supposedly animals did this). Every so often rumors would circulate that you should mail all the pull tabs you could find to such & such an address, which would turn them in to buy a hospital a kidney dialysis machine, or something.
Speaking of cans, remember when only a few cans (mostly little cans of meat spread) had lids you could pull off? I’ve got about four brands of soup in my cupboard now, and all have pull-off lids. Remember when you needed a key to open a Spam can? How many years before we’re saying “Remember when you needed a can opener to open cans?”
Billboards along highways. Billboards that said “Impeach Earl Warren.”
I remember those places-they were the “fast food” places of the 1950’s. You took a ticket from a fearsome old bat, then loaded up your tray with what you wanted for lunch-the attendents then punched your ticket (with one of these hand punches that bus drivers used). You then paid with the ticket as proof of what you had.
What happened to these places-do any still remain?
Remember trick o’ treating for UNICEF?
Nope, but I remember when OTHER little kids had to! HAH hah!
Tiger tails?
The punch-out models of the lunar module from Gulf?
Surfer crosses? Does anyone remember these besides me?
“LBJ All the Way” buttons?
Every year we would hide those little boxes hoping that our mother wouldn’t make us trick or treat for UNICEF instead of for candy. She made us do it one year but bought us candy to make up for it. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out that although it would have been easier for her to put money in the UNICEF box, she wanted the neighbors to see her unselfish daughters give up their candy even if she had to bribe us to get us to do it.
And the Wishbook ruled. I wanted everything, including the toys for boys.
Can I borrow one? I have a box full of tapes I’d like to dub over. . . .
Harumph. My mother took a picture with her Brownie Hawkeye.
I remember a lot of these, which just goes to show I am getting older, like everyone else. I remember:
- ashtrays
- records - I had my very own records, Puff the Magic Dragon and some others!
- no car seats or seatbelts. My parents and I went on many a trip with me sleeping soundly way in the back of the Caprice Classic Wagon and rolling around when it stopped too hard.
- Cassette tapes, oh yes. I loved my tape recorder. I still have about 30 or 40 tapes with music I haven’t gotten yet.
- I only vaguely remember the times before ATMs, though, as by the time I got a bank account, it was different. I do remember my parents having to get cash.
- I am always proud to say I owned a typewriter before I owned a computer, and I didn’t get a computer until I was seventeen.
- I still see billboards.
- I remember rotary phones, but from India.
- Drive in Theatres are still around.
- I remember riding my bike everywhere. Even me, who was sorely overprotected.
- I also remember a beautiful time before cellphones.
And you know what? I’d never go back. I never understand people who want to be young again! I love every age of life.
Speaking of cassettes again remember trying to fix them? If the tape would come out and was damaged you could snip out the bad parts and just use scotch tape and splice the ends together. If the tape snapped on the inside it was possible to take the cassette apart untangle the mess and put it back together, if you had steady hands. I was never very good at fixing VHS tapes because as soon as you took them apart all those little spring things would blow apart. It was very difficult to put the two ends back together with all the little parts staying where they belonged.
Nowadays you see broken CD shrapnel on the side of the road.
Wait, wait – you were supposed to do one or the other? Because we always trick-or-treated for candy and wore the boxes around our neck so people would dish out some sweets and drop a few coins while they were at it.
Was that wrong? Were we not supposed to do that?