I seem to remember pay phones had some mechanism that allowed the operator to provide change into the little metal compartment on the bottom left side. Many kids (adults too I’m sure) couldn’t walk by a pay phone without checking the compartment for uncollected change.
It could be that they didn’t really make change, they could only refund whatever coins you just inserted.
I’m 69 to set my frame of reference.
We played Little League baseball. I know the LLWS is still a thing, but neither the town I grew up in nor where I live today has LL baseball.
Baseball was on TV on Saturday on NBC (with Tony Kubek and Joe Garagiola) and your local team broadcast SOME games (like maybe 5 or 6 a month) over the air.
There was no scorebug for baseball or for that matter football. Every once in a while, the count would appear on the screen but otherwise the only time the score appeared was between innings showing R-H-E for each team. In football, no computer-generated on the field first down lines. If they wanted to show time remaining, they cut to a shot of the scoreboard.
You read the Sunday sports section to see everyone’s batting average and other statistics. You looked at batting average, home runs, and RBIs. Nobody ever dreamed of the abomination that is WAR.
You want to play ball (other than LL)- you get on your bike with your bat and glove (and maybe a ball) and go from house to house to round up players. We had a nearby vacant field where we played most of your games. The bases were either scraps of cardboard or a rag that we might find. We umped ourselves and really never argued calls. No walks, if you didn’t swing you ran back and tossed the ball back to the pitcher.
It was a big fucking deal if your college team was on ABC Saturday football. If the game was really really important, the Goodyear Blimp would fly overhead.
Movies on television were NBC Saturday Night At The Movies and the like. If you missed it, you missed it- no DVR or pausing live tv for a bathroom break.
Hot lunch at school was 40 cents or you bought a strip of 5 for $2. A carton of milk (even had chocolate milk!) was a nickel. When fish sticks were served, a little paper cup of tartar sauce came with it.
At school, the boys invariably wore jeans with a button-up shirt. So did the girls on some days, on other days they dressed like Marcia Brady with minis, heels, and hose. Nobody but nobody would even dream of wearing shorts to school.
When movies were shown in school, a 16mm film projector was used. Nerds like me could get certified to set up the movies when the teacher didn’t know how.
and don’t forget “film strips,” They were a staple in our elementary and junior high. In later years they came with a built in cassette player that would auto-advance the frames.
Vagrants discovered they could shove a wadded-up piece of paper up the slot so the phone would “fail” to deliver change, then come by later to harvest it.
I remember similar sentiments during my first year of University in 1995 (in the north of the UK, where things were cheaper) when the price for a pint in the student bar went over one pound for the first time.
I once had a copy of this, no idea what I did with it but it was a great guide to now-vanished features of 20th century life:
I was going to mention the film strips but forgot. As I recall, a lot of the time the strip would not advance when the recording beeped so the teacher had to manually advance the strip when the beep sounded. Sort of like caveman Powerpoint.
In the early days, there was a beep to tell the teacher (or designated student) to advance the frame. Over time, the more “modern” ones would advance automatically on the beep (or, as you say, were supposed to)
Living in the country, the ‘general stores’ back then would frequently have big glass jars full of cookies that you could buy. Usually they were a little hard, so even though you could eat them as crunchy, some people would blow thru them to soften them up a little.
Ditto masters — oh, the smell! Makes you want to float down the hall like a cartoon dog.
Cassettes? Our church had one with an attached record player. The record narrated the frames. There was a beep that let the projectionist know when to crank up the next frame. I used to tell my sophomores we were going to have a burlesque show and watch a film strip!! (That was in a high school, not church.)
The late model dittos just used methanol as the solvent. Not really aromatic.
The best 16 mm films in school were the two reel National Geographic movies. They took up the whole class.
From Slate’s recent interview with Frankie Muniz of Malcom in the Middle:
INTERVIEWER: …I had been thinking that Malcolm really was one of the last shows to capture childhood before social media, this idea that you had to entertain yourselves and get up to your own trouble.
MUNIZ: I think of my childhood in the ’90s, riding bikes, being in the woods until 10 p.m., just doing whatever. But now, with my son—he turns 5 on Sunday, and I don’t let him go in the front yard without us being out there watching! It’s just a different time.
Makes me wonder if we’ll see 40-year-olds in 2056 looking back on the 2020s as a golden age of unsupervised free-range childhood…
I can also remember little read-along storybooks, which came with a 45 rpm record. The narrator on the record would read the story, and there would be a beep or a bell sound to let you know when it was time to turn the page.
When I was young, I used to fly to see my relatives. I paid for my ticket at the gate, in cash. No ID needed.
Ahh, so you have the good cats.
Dog poop was both much more prevalent and white colored. People put glass bottles filled with water on their lawns to attempt to avoid the former.
We had this record player/filmstrip TV that played ridiculous short versions of classic stories. One was the Wizard of Oz where they told the story in under 4 minutes.
Somewhat the reverse for me. When I was a kid in 1960s Toronto, there was no Little League baseball, and no organized soccer, football, or basketball, outside of games that might be played at gym class at school. What there was, was organized hockey. Tyro, Peewee, Midget, Bantam, and a few other age classifications that I’ve forgotten. If you wanted to play anything else, it was going to be a pickup game in the park, and it wasn’t going to be organized into any sort of league.
Today, I’m glad to see that there are many organized sports for kids in Canada. Soccer is popular, and the NFL (surprisingly, not the CFL) is developing high school and other football for Canadian kids. And yes, we now have Little League baseball. If I was a kid today, I’d have plenty of choices if I wanted to play organized sports that are not hockey.
I first traveled overseas in 1981 and suitcases didn’t have wheels.
I had to move from one place in Japan to another, and was given bad directions, and had to take both my fully loaded suitcases a long distance.
Even in my younger adulthood, that was still the case. I remember once picking up a 22-caliber CO2 pellet gun at someplace like K-Mart because I thought target practice would be fun. They looked exactly like real guns and were actually fairly powerful in their own right, and were just piled up in a huge heap as an advertised sale item. Today all that stuff would be in locked cabinets and require ID to purchase. As for actual guns, that’s a whole 'nuther level of bureaucracy and licensing, and not one that I ever need or want to visit.