Do you remember when...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Station wagons with kid-sized seats that folded up out of the rear bed.

Superman/ Action comics were 15 cents. Batman was a self-cliche of the costumed hero genre.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas all aired for the very first time.

Peanuts was topical enough to be considered philosophy or social commentary.

Dr. Seuss books were the thing young children learned to read by.

No one had ever been to the moon, but we were working on it.

The only time you could watch cartoons on TV was Saturday morning and more briefly Sunday morning. Every fall you looked forward to what the new lineup would be.

TV shows stayed on the same day and time for their entire run. You planned your week by what shows would be on that evening.

TVs took several seconds to warm up. If you had a color TV, your parents forbade you to sit closer than six feet to it.

TV was confusing at the neighbor’s house; none of the shows were on the right channel (they had cable).

You went “downtown” to go shopping.

Walter Cronkite anchored the CBS evening news.

When Coca-Cola was first marketed in quart bottles, they were glass.

When gas first exceeded $1.00 a gallon, none of the pumps could be set that high. Gas was sold by the half-gallon for awhile.

You could get plastic mini-records in boxes of cereal that would really play on a turntable. In fact it was rare for a box of cereal to not having something in it. Mom got her dishtowels out of boxes of powdered detergent.

An amazing technofuture awaited us in the twenty-first century!

The Pill (captial P) was still a hot-button item of controversy. For an unmarried woman to use them was practically announcing that she was promiscuous.

People bought super-thin “onionskin” paper to write airmail letters on.

42

This thread is great. I haven’t thought of most of these things in decades.

  • Watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with a bunch of other little girls and screaming and going nuts like the teenagers did.
  • Topo Gigio
  • My mother grumbling about us watching Laugh-in and saying “you bet your bippie” and “Verrry Eeen-ter-es-ting, but stupid” whenever we had the chance. Tiny Tim and Tiptoe through the Tulips, Ernestine and Edith Ann and white gogo boots.
  • Telephone operators that used big switchboards and plugs to connect calls.
  • Pneumatic tubes used to deliver paperwork around a building
  • Mimeograph machines with the nasty smell
  • Bra Burning

ETA: And everything that Lumpy just posted. I’m still laughing.

43

Buckskin Bill on Channel 9 from Baton Rouge!

Some cartoon show on Channel 6 (maybe Channel 4) from New Orleans–had a guy hosting, kids seated in bleachers in the studio, mostly Popeye cartoons, and at the end, the kids in the studio audience always got Popeye’s Fried Chicken.

44

Just two more for now.

Remember smelling the mimeographed paper used for school handouts? Ahhh.

Remember hearing the alarm and getting under your desk at school?

45

Pharmeceutical uppers (Biphetamine, Excatrol, Preludin) and downers (Placidyl and various barbiturates).

Those bogus pharmeceutical uppers made to look just like the real ones but containing only caffiene and ephedrine, sold in the back pages of High Times and the lower-grade skin mags.
'Ludes, which were not at all the same as other downers.

Black and white horror comics magazines for 35 to 75 cents in drugstores and newsstands. Some were gory and schlocky, some quite good and some (notably those from Skywald Publishing) full of incredibly bizarre artwork from South American artists.

Putting a matchbook cover under the turntable when it got worn out and started playing albums too fast. Putting a quarter on the needle cartridge to keep it from skipping.

So-called 'THC powder" (invariably PCP). So-called ‘chocolate’ and ‘strawberry’ ‘mescaline’ (usually a mix of weak acid and PCP).

Crumbly brown Colombian reefer that cost $40 an oz and smelled slightly ammonia-like. $20 oz’s of pool-table-green homegrown.

It was a big deal for a man to have one ear pierced. There were contradictory interpretations of which ear a straight guy could have done.

Movies rated M for “Mature audiences”, or GP (meant PG).

Flavored rolling papers

Pot poisoned with US Government herbicides (paraquat).

National Lampoon, High Times and Heavy Metal were actually interesting and worthwhile to read; HT especially published articles on a wide range of subjects.

Cigarette vending machines.

Floppy suede hats.

Small pets sold in dime stores.

It was once a very big deal for a kid to have his/her own phone or TV set.

Those dumb-ass shoes with the toes higher than the heels.

There were actually two or three rock’n’roll mags that sold nationally and covered undergroundish music and were fairly cool. I liked Creem and Circus best.

46

Oooooh! One more:

I remember and miss the times when DJs would name the record an artist for all songs played on the radio.

47

Computer nostalgia:

I remember punch cards and cassette tapes
5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks
Monochrome screens
Running programs on DOS
Dialing BBS’s on my modem

48

Or you got your spiritual fix from Kahlil Gibran while sitting in a beanbag chair under your Desiderata poster.

Garter belts and nylon hose with seams

Spinners attached to hubcaps
Suicide knobs on steering wheels

Bad boys wearing motorcycle boots, aka engineer boots, some with little chains on them, and a pack of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve of a white tee-shirt. When did tee-shirts start coming in colors? Late 60’s maybe?

Mood rings

49

I remember when an E-ticket was a paper ticket that got you onto the best rides at Disneyland (Matterhorn, Space Mountain), not a boring printed piece of paper with your flight information on it.

50

Those were Top Value stamps.

In addition to Top Value and Green Stamps, my mother saved the coupons that came on the back of packages of Belaire and Raleigh cigarettes. We used to joke, “Look at the lovely coffin I bought with my Belaire coupons!”

I remember the kind of Coke machine that was like a chest cooler, and the bottles hung in a metal frame with rails by their necks. You put in a dime, picked your flavor, then slid the bottle along the rails to get it out. Your dime caused a “gate” at the end of the rail to open, so you could slide the bottle off the rail at the end.

I have some very bad news. I was in a K-Mart today. Leg warmers are back. (I actually almost bought a pair, because they are the bomb for keeping your ankles warm in a drafty house.)

51

Remember craft and decor from the 70’s? Wood-grain contact paper, paint kits to “antique” your furniture, and bottle cutters to make vases and lamps from wine bottles. The candle stuck in the neck of a bottle of Leibfraumilch was for hippies – their parents had the bottle cutters.

Or liquor bottles with colored water in them.

52

Chuckles candy.
A good nigger (Martin Luther King) and a bad nigger (Malcom X, Muhmed Ali) this was in Nebraska
Monks burning themselves to protest the war.
Afros
A computer programmed with paper tape.
Our cabin with a little hand pump to put water in the sink.
Evel Knevel
Riding in a car on the back deck of the rear window.
Putting cards in the spoke of our bikes to make that ‘motorcycle’ sound
Wheatback pennies
Nuns that would hit us
Fallout shelters
Mark Spitz
Bobby Kenedy getting shot
John Wayne coming out with new movies
Blue Addidas tennis shoe with over-the-calf socks and short shorts on guys
Candy cigarettes

53

I remember a few other things too:

Fizzies

Chewing Wax

Seeing cars, trucks, etc. (that were commonplace then), but would be collectors items now or in museums now.

Seeing aircraft flying over (that were commonplace then), but would belong in an airshow or museum now.

54

Walking to school
The 55mph speedlimit
Finding the magazines in the back of dad’s toolbox
Pong to be played on your TV at home
I had a friend in third grade who was prescribed snuff for his hyperactivity

SSG Schwartz

55

Lining up at school for a polio vaccination – Wiki says the Salk vaccine wasn’t licensed until 1962, but I’d swear I was vaccinated well before that. Maybe we were guinea pigs.

I remember mastoiditis too – rare today because of antibiotics for ear infections, but “mastoid infection” was scary for parents and kids in the 50’s.

Clearasil

Prell, White Rain, Breck, and Halo shampoo
Ipana toothpaste

Soda crackers in tins

Coffee in metal cans that were opened with a key (like sardine cans). How many people cut themselves on the lids? Millions, probably.

56

It was on the inside front cover of every schoolbook I saw for years and years.

The neat rubberstamped rectangle inked with serious black text and decorated with a half dozen or so scribbled, scrawled and sloppy little kid signatures The older the book was, the more names would be there

The stamped text was all capital letters at the top. A WEST VIRGINIA FREE TEXTBOOK FOR WHITE SCHOOLS. I swear, until I was in the fourth or fifth grade I thought it meant the color the schoolhouse was painted.

Then there were the lines where you were supposed to write your name. Most of the schoolbooks we had were fairly old and all the lines had been filled in already, by long gone kids who would always be strangers to you.

The box at the bottom enjoined all students who were issued this textbook *“not to draw, write or mark in it, or deface it in any way and to give it the best possible care until it is returned.”
*
I could understand that part, but why did it matter what color the schoolhouse was painted? I often wondered about this from Grades 1 to 4 , but didn’t care to ask – my teachers didn’t tend to like me muxh, and the other kids made enough fun of me already without me asking silly questions in class.

Eventually I figured out what the stamp meant. Of course. This was the middle 1960s and stuff had started being different. Sometimes it was on TV, on the six-o’clock news. Even in Pocahontas County.

57

Non-homogenized milk: there would be cream at the top of a glass gallon jug of milk.

When I was six years old, I remember walking two blocks up the street to buy cigarettes for my mother.

The public library had a machine that would punch the date the book was due back on a card that would fit in a sleeve on the back cover of the book. But the weird thing the machine would cut out part book’s card.

Size B, dry cell batteries- They were really large batteries, about the size of a 16 oz can of beer. They were used for transistor radios-- I think- and science projects.
The local weather forecast on The Today Show used to run on a scroll during the break. It would show the city, call letters, high temperature & forecast for the day. But I was always disappointed that they never showed the small town that I lived in on the scroll. And oh yeah, the music they played over it was “Misty”, though I am not sure I recognized the tune at the time.

My grandfather used to “roll his own”-- cigarettes, that is.

And if I am remembering correctly, federal labor laws were a little different back in the day. The female Office Manager at the grocery store where I worked could not legally work more than 40 hours per week.

Not sure that anyone has mentioned hearing the Roman Catholic Mass in Latin. And you had to fast for three hours if you wanted to take Holy Communion. It was later changed to just one hour, but I can remember my mother saying it used to be that you had to fast before midnight.

58

It looks as if there are several posters my age here, but I haven’t seen this mentioned: Does anyone remember “surfer’s crosses?” They were imitation Iron Crosses with a surfer on them. This would have been in the mid '60s. If you remember them, you know what I mean without further explanation.

Also, what about Rat Finks? Or troll dolls? I know that Mimi on “Drew Carey” had troll dolls, but I remember when you could buy them out of gum machines.

Sinclair gas stations had the blow-up dinosaurs. Enco (or Esso depending on where you lived) had the tiger tail you could hang out of your gas tank. And, Gulf (I think) had the paper Lunar Landing Modules that you could punch out and make one of your own. You also could get drinking glasses at most gas stations with a fill-up.

Dolly Parton also advertised a full-size bath towel with every box of Breeze.

59

“Atsa lotta pasta!”

The Bay City Bombers

Free breakfast for mom on Mother’s Day at McDonalds, or a free burger for each A for the grade school kids.

And I too, remember going to buy my dad his smokes as young as six years old.

SSG Schwartz

60

We can’t forget candy cigarettes. Also it was a big thing when the penney’s catalog came out and you searched through the toys to make your christmas list. I also remember seeing an invitation for my mothers class reunion which asked, Remember when pot was something you cooked in and gay just meant happy? She’s in her eighties now so that’s a little before my time.