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Macrame Owls hanging on the walls.
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Golden Harvest colored appliances.
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Girls wearing frontier dresses
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Evil Kenevil trying and failing to jump the Snake River Canyon.
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Gi jOE with Kung Fu grip
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K-tel records
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Creepy Eerie and Vampirella comics by Warren Magazine.
A friend of mine that I grew up with said the other day “Remember Boom Boxes?” Yes, back in the late 70’s early 80’s before they were “Ghetto Blasters”. It was ab ig ritual every Xmas to get a new boom box. I had one with giant speakers, 2 cassette decks, an AM/FM radio and a small TV screen on it! It was so huge that I had to buy a guitar strap to sling it on. Damn thing took about ten d batteries. My friends old brother used to joke that pretty soon I’d need a liscense plate on it.
I remember when if your TV broke down you called the TV repairman. Nowadays you just go buy another TV.
Xmas gifts for kids didn’t involve the latest PC/console game. I remember being thrilled when my mom gave me a Shaker Maker. When I started buying comic books I could leave with a bag full of 'em for less than 2 bucks. They were about 15 cents each.
My cousins and I loved playing with Super Elastic Bubble Plastic. Family BBQs I remember my grandfather drinking Schaeffer beer with pull tabs on the can. I used to like Quisp cereal. If you missed an episode of your favorite show you were out of luck since you couldn’t record it. If you didn’t see a movie in the theater you might not see it all. No VCRs or Blockbuster.
I remember studying for Graphic Design. I used to run a photostat machinein my teenage years for a local magazine. I’d assist in copyfitting the text before it was laid out. We used to have to send it out to be prepared. Nowadays you can just lay it all out on your PC or mac. Cleaning out a store room at the Pentagon I found a drawer full of Formatt shading and amberlith. When I told a youn guy what amberlith was he thought I was from the stone age.
Paper dolls, and the free ones in McCall’s magazine
Doll houses and plastic people and furniture and dishes that looked like real furniture and dishes and people. (The Fisher-Price stuff is fun but it’s cartoony, not realistic.)
Jacks, but og forbid you leave them laying around
Hopscotch, drawn with chalk filched from the classroom
Fox and geese in the snow, and snow angels
One-room schoolhouses – I went to one in the mid 50’s, but it wasn’t for regular school, it was a summer Bible school program. There were once almost 12,000 one-room schoolhouses in Iowa. There are still a couple thousand, some in use but most are historical sites.
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AMC cars. My dad loved them- My mom had a Gremlin (with an 8-track tape player- I learned to drive in that car), and my dad had an AMX and later on a Javelin.
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Learning to tie your shoes and tell time were rites of passage for kids. Now they have velcro shoes and digital clocks.
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MAD Magazine, with Don Martin cartoons and movie satires.
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Pong! Dad got us that for Xmas one year, and we though it was the coolest thing ever.
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When I was in college, back in the late 70s - early 80s, I took a statistics class that actually had a COMPUTER! It was big and clunky, and it had a modem with a dial-up that you then had to stick into a rubbery thing with 2 holes in it for the earpiece and the mouthpiece. I don’t even remember what we used it for, but everyone had to learn to use it because it was the wave of the future.
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I remember our first color TV- and it was in a huge wooden cabinet. We only had one TV for a long time- whatever my dad wanted to watch is what we watched. When I was a teenager, he and my mom put a TV in their bedroom that had a remote control. You could change the channel with it, but you had to turn it on and off and adjust the volume the old fashioned way. And we only had 3 channels.
Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn! And take your velcro shoes and digital watches with you!
Guys with long hair running into SERIOUS problems with adult authority figures–parents, teachers, principals, varsity coaches, supervisors on after school jobs, you name it.
The full flowering of a process that began in the 1950s, by which younger people began to have their own music, instead of everybody of all ages listening to the same bland pop and show tunes.
This is why the Sixties matter, and why they, as a pivotal epoch don’t just go away like many younger people wish. The intergenerational tension at that time exceeded anything before or since.
My neighbor had a cushman eagle. He was the coolest guy in the neighborhood.
Plastic Jesus magnetically attached to the metal dashboard.
Clackers.
Duncan butterfly yoyo’s
Games of red rover on the playground at school.
Riding my bicycle all over town, without a helmet no less.
Kids, myself included, that rode around on bicycles throwing newspapers.
Just a few that I haven’t seen listed.
That’s nothing special. Considering the lack of major events in that state, most textbooks are still West Virginia free.
This is a nice retro site.
Wing windows on cars.
Going camping with World War II surplus stuff
The Ford Bronco
Mad Magazine was new and original
Nobody ever cussed on TV
Milk being delivered to my house every morning by the milkman. Where did all the milkmen go? They seemed to have disappeared sometime in the early 80’s?
Ha. Ha. Ha.
What I’d like to say to you right now is “Bite me” , but it would probably get me in trouble on this forum;
So instead I will courteously remind you that in most places it’s considered ungentlemanly to razz a person about his or her place of origin, or to disparage it to the person’s face .
This stuff may have been brought up already. If so, please forgive me.
A dollar’s worth of regular and check the oil.
John Cameron Swaze (sp?) Brings you the Korean War (Sunoco Five Star Extra News)
The Army-McCarthy Hearings.
The Kefauver Hearings (I respectfully decline to answer…)
The coronation of Elizabeth II (something my Canadian born Grandmother insisted that everyone watch)
An actual atomic bomb explosion on live TV.
The political party conventions of 1952 ( THE GREAAAAT STAAATE OF ALLL-AH-BAAAAHMMMMA CASTS THIRTY TWO VOTES FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ROBERT A. TAFT)
Me Bluster was blundering comic relief.
Captain Video (Army surplus flashlights as 1920s style death rays).
Tom Corbitt and the Space Cadets.
Queen for a Day (the poor woman with the saddest story gets a Maytag washing machine).
Stella Dalles, One Man’s Family, Bob and Ray, Arthus Godfrey (Ha’why ya, Ha’wht ya’, Ha’why ya’),What it Was Was Football, Grama’ Lye Soap,
Native Dancer and Silky Sullivan, Count Fleet, Citation. Trigger, Champion and Tony.
Gillett brings you the Thursday Night Fights (the main reason we got a television).
Learning to pee straight by breaking up cigarette butts floating in the toilet.
Western Union Telegrams and the horror of receiving one.
I’m Buster Brown, I live in a shoe. Here’s my dog Tige, He lives in there, too.
Page 98 in the paperback copy of Peyton Place.
Twenty-five kids in our living room at 4:30 to watch Howdy Doody.
It is just amazing how that eight inch Crosley TV changed our lives.
That reminded me of those little dashboard dogs with the heads that bobbed around.
Big baby carriages were more common than strollers and strollers were almost as big and unwieldy. Do parents still have their baby’s first shoes bronzed?
Remember you couldn’t leave them in a windowsill or on the dashboard for fear they’d magnify the sun and start a fire.
P.F. Flyers and Keds
All kids had a vaccination scar on their upper arm… smallpox?
Used to see a lot more people changing tires along the road.
PSA on TV… “It’s 10:00 O’ Clock, do you know where your children are?”
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
Boraxo sponsoring Death Valley Days with Dale Robertson
Lionel trains with the engine that would smoke
Kids could buy the glue for building plastic model cars and planes
Blacklight posters
Love American Style
3-cents first class postage.
10-cents comic books.
SNL worth watching.
Yeah for leg warmers! (Only around the house, though!)
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Cashiers who would punch in the price on the sticker and then pull down a lever. The price would pop up in the form of number ‘tabs’. Those ladies sure could move fast.
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Getting the groceries packed properly into a deep, thick, paper bag! The grocery boys could pack the canned goods with such finess.
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Go-go boots
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Afros
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Smiley face
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Cocktail parties
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Wait… some of these things are coming around again!
Egg beaters – not the fake eggs in a carton, the kitchen tool
Potato ricers – I know, they’re back (or maybe they never left gourmet kitchens), but my grandma used one in the 50’s and I never saw them again until just a few years ago when they started turning up on cooking shows
My mom made a chopping tool by cutting off the top of a Hershey’s cocoa can (when the cans were real metal). She used it to chop veggies.
Bottle openers that you screwed on to a kitchen cabinet or a wall
A cousin who’d been in prison for several years was surprised twhen a barmaid opened his bottle of beer by hand. “Dang! The wimmens got tough while I was gone!”
Not to nitpick, but wasn’t it the Bay Area Bombers in Roller Derby? Joanie Weston, the Blonde Bomber and Bob “The Bald Eagle” Hein
I remember the mimeograph smell as being very pleasant. The same with leaded fuel, “ethyl”. I seem to recall purposely breathing the odor when we got a fill up. God knows what we were breathing in.
John Cameron Swaze also did commercials for Timex watches. They would strap a Timex wristwatch to the prop of an outboard motor, and then run the motor in a tank of water. They would then pull the prop out of the tank, look at the watch and John Cameron Swaze would say"Timex, takes a licking and keeps on ticking."
I can remember donating blood at the Red Cross and not having to answer a million questions about your sex life and where you went on vacation.