And then there were food products that they just don’t have anymore.
“Thick & Frosty” was this frozen glop you put in the bottom of a glass, pour in some milk and stir with a fork and it instantly turned into a milk shake.
“Spoon Candy” was pudding that got covered with a hard candy shell. It was like eating a chocolate bar with a pudding center. Really good.
“Jello 1-2-3” was a 3 layer Jello dessert. One of the layers was a weird foam, like eating fruit flavored bubble bath bubbles.
Big Johns Beans-n-Fixins" was a can of baked beans with another smaller can attached to the top that had the 'fixins", tomatoes, onions, etc..
All of these things discontinued in the 70’s or early 80’s.
I saw my great aunt off on the SS United States sometime in the late '50s, and we were definitely on the ship. When we cruised in the late '70s and early '80s there were no metal detectors to pass when you got on.
I’m watching the first season the Burns and Allen show, from just before I was born. (They somehow kept the dinosaurs off the set.) The ads were integrated into the show.
I applied for college in 1969. Since you had to type each form, which were all different, and send it in with some money, people did not apply to dozens of colleges. My big New York high school had a limit of 3 plus city college which was a simple one page form. In the early 1980s our HR people responded to each applicant, even with a no, and they didn’t get all that many. By the time I retired it was all on line, each company is flooded with applicants, and they all fired half their HR departments so there was no one left to respond anyhow. I understand it is even worse now.
Definitely no seat belts in the first couple of cars I rode in. When they taught you how to buckle your seat belt on a plane, lots of people had never done it before. Very few people used credit cards. Mostly cash or checks.
Decent meals on airplanes.
When I was in college you could get on the Eastern Shuttle from Boston to NY without a ticket, and paid on the plane.
And on the real downside, racism and sexism were pretty much standard and accepted. Blatant use of slurs was considered low class, but more subtle use of slurs was done by I’d say most non-minorities.
I’ve heard two contradictory claims about that: that such phones were discontinued because of street dealing in drugs; but also that the police had open tap warrants on those phones and the drug dealers knew it and avoided using them.
If a neighbor was on the phone you had to wait to receive or place a call. If you pick up the phone and hear someone talking, you just hung up.
Same in your own home. Perhaps and upstairs and downstairs phone. All you had to do to talk to ‘grandma’ was pick up the other phone and three would be on the line.
I mis a lot of things, but am lucky to be alive. That I recognize.
Another one I thought of this morning, when I heard an ad for a casino: legal gambling.
When I was a kid, legal gambling in the U.S. consisted largely of:
Betting at horse tracks and dog tracks
Casinos in Nevada
Church bingo
Lotteries in a few states
It’s exploded since then. Nearly all states have lotteries, nearly all states have legal casinos, and a majority of states have now legalized sports gambling.
Unless you were the widow who lived down the road from us. Our party line was such that everybody heard the phone ring, and each house had a different ring pattern. (Ours was one long ring followed by one short ring.) She would hear the phone ring, wait a few seconds, and then pick up the phone to listen to the conversation.
Let me clarify: some form of casino gambling is legal in nearly all states. In some states, only Native American tribes may operate casinos; in other states, private, non-tribal entities (Bally, Caesar’s Palace, etc.) may operate casinos. But there are only a handful of states in which no one can operate a casino.
According to this site, some form of casino gambling is legal in 43 states. Commercial (i.e., non-tribal) casinos are legal in 27 states, and tribal casinos are legal in 30 states; in a fair number of states, both varieties are legal.
I was still regularly using pay phones (and telephone calling cards) while traveling for business through the late 1990s, in order to call home, as well as for checking my work voicemail and making business calls, while I was at airports. Banks of pay phones at places like airports were still very common at that point, as cell phone penetration was still below 50% until after 2000.
Most of my family growing up were secondary public school music teachers. The repertoire and choral structure 50 years ago involved singers in robes performing formal music on risers. Apparently all the secondary school choirs in my area are now show choirs. My aunts and uncles now speak with derision of ‘Show choirs! Hah!’ Yet the show choirs do add to my nieces and nephews’ adolescent lives so I begrudgingly approve and foster my enthusiasm for them.
Same here except for me it doesn’t suck, it’s my favorite time of the “day.” Quiet, peaceful, cat-cuddling time.
In my case, I figure it’s a holdover from having been a paperboy. I think children delivering newspapers is another relic of yesteryear. I never understood why it was an exception to labor laws, but in my experience it was a better arrangement than some geezer cruising by trying to porch papers out of the sunroof of a rusty Plymouth.