Computers were monstrous, mysterious machines owned by large corporations and universities.
Television was black-and-white, and there were five channels to choose from. Reception (ie. picture quality) was always unwatchably terrible by today’s standards.
Gas stations had signs with two digits (cents) to list the price per gallon.
I turn 70 this year. It was better to be 20 in the 70s than to be 70 in the 20s.
In addition to most of the previous comments from my contemporaries (I’m 78):
Anyone who suggested that a kid might die from eating peanut butter would have been referred for a sanity hearing.
(I came across one theory that peanut allergies only started manifesting themselves when dry roasting became the norm, the idea being that the process changed the nut’s makeup somehow. Superficially plausible, but I have no idea whether it was ever researched.)
I’m 70. This was the case when I was a contestant on Jeopardy! at age 35. (The 35th anniversary of my appearance is next week.)
When I was a kid, there were no seat belts in the front seats of most cars, either.
Where and when was television better than it is now?
When I was a kid there were liberal Republicans that my (Democratic) parents were happy to vote for.
Going to the movies cost 35 cents for kids.
A gallon of gas was 30 cents.
Oh, my! The smoke. I was somewhat embarrassed when teachers and some of my fellow students assumed I smoked because I smelled like tobacco because my parents smoked. Smoke was absolutely everywhere but I also remember as it started to die out in public spaces. There were a lot of restaurants in my neck of the woods that banned smoking before the city passed a no-smoking ordinance.
Yeah. My memories of grade school is that teachers and administrators were either unable or unwilling to do anything to help me if I was being picked on. Worse than that, when I did defend myself, either verbally or physically, I was bound to be punished for it. I still remember my mother telling my elementery school prinicple, “I’ve been complaining all year that he’s being bullied, but now that he fought back you want to punish him?” I’m hoping schools have improved since then.
I distinctly remember a lack of safety. Riding in the bed of an pickup or the back of a station wagon, not wearing a seatbelt in general (the one time we were in an accident it was a miracle us kids had ours on), nobody wore helmets while on a bike, and playground equipment was even dangerous.
It wasn’t all bad of course. I remember being rather independent even at a young age. I could leave the house and explore my surroundings, there were other kids nearby to play with, and my summer days and weekend weren’t filled with wall-to-wall structured activities. Of course all my friendships were formed and maintained through face-to-face interactions which I think is superior to text.
Also 48 (born 1977).
One big one from my childhood in the UK is my primary school (elementary school in US parlance) they had an official sort of backup playground that was a disused railway line! Not somewhere kids would sneak into unofficially. Like, they were happy for you to run around on there to your hearts content at playtime. It didn’t have any tracks at that point (it had been disused for decades) but it was a a bunch of steep embankments completely overgrown with brambles and trees.
Sadly not only is that no longer the case, I noticed when I drove past when I visit my parents, the kids are now confined to a small area completely fenced in less than half the playground area we used to enjoy (in addition to the entire freaking disused railway line)
When I was a kid (late 1950s, early 60s) my parents – who were basically lower middle class and never had much money – were nevertheless able to not only own their own home in a nice neighbourhood, but also to own a country cottage where I spent all my summers as a kid. This was partly due to a lot of self-sacrifice on their part, but also because those kinds of properties had not become as outrageously overpriced as they are today.
The country cottage, in particular, which was profoundly influential in my life and instilled in me a deep love of nature, was at the time considered merely a rustic home in the country, not the hoity-toity status symbol that such things are today and where even the land alone costs a fortune, especially if it’s near a lake. Those summers were really wonderful times and I’m profoundly grateful to my parents for providing that experience for me and my brother. So many lovely memories of those summer days and summer nights!
Yeah same here,.though as I was a big kid it was generally emotional not physical bullying. It’s not an issue now because people don’t tend to harass you to your face in the adult world, or at least a lot less. You are also far more able to cope with it as an adult, yeah some people may hate me and say shit about me IDGAF
I do wonder now I have kids of my own how much things have changed. Like they talk a lot about preventing bullying and it’s acknowledged as a bad thing (which it barely was in my day), but has that changed anything? Particularly for emotional bullying (I think any kind of physical violence or the threat of it, is taken very seriously.)
Mum and Dad would take their own saucepans to the Chinese restaurant if they wanted to get takeaway - there were no plastic or foam takeaway containers.
As alluded to in earlier posts: really lax regard to safety while driving in cars.
By the time I was a kid (late '60s, early '70s), cars had safety belts (but often, only lap belts) in both front and back, but few people used them, and the belts were often stuffed between the seat and the back.
We often rode in the “wayback” of my aunts’ station wagons, just rolling around back there…and sometimes with the back window open, in the summer, for “ventilation.”
We also rode (short distances, on city streets, not highways) in the open back of my father’s pickup truck. And, on one fishing trip I went on with my dad, my uncle, and my cousin, my cousin and I did the entire ride (two hours each way) in the back of my uncle’s pickup, on the highway – which did have a “cap”, but no belts, no heat, etc. It was cold, so we were bundled up, and we brought my little tape player, so we could listen to music on the way.
When I was a teenager @ boarding school say 3rd Form (14/15yo) we were allowed 40c per week for pocket money and (though I didn’t smoke) there was a brand Albany Trims IIRC that cost 28c per pack of 20. A retail pack now costs upward of $40 with the huge federal excises which started back then. Smoking rates at school plummeted and became a habit only to kids whose parents offered supplementary funds.
Half-penny candy, 4 channels, AM radio, drive-in movies, exchanging an empty jug for a full jar of root beer at the A&W, avocado green appliances, wood paneling and shag carpet in the converted basement, Captain Puget, J.P. Patches, Brakeman Bill and Crazy Donkey, Stan Boreson, Wunda Wunda, cars without seatbelts, bikes without brakes and airplanes with ashtrays.
I’m going to get on my soapbox and geek out a little here.
College football was a hyper-regional sport and it was at its absolute best. Fans were not perpetually obsessed with a college football playoff or the national championship.
The important Bowl games were on New Years Day. After they were over, there was no big championship trophy presentation, just a bowl trophy. The next day the newspaper came out with an AP Poll and a Coaches Poll declaring a final ranking. This was how we learned about the national champ (or champs). It gave everyone a few days of water cooler conversations and the radio talk guys got some cycles out of it. That was all. And it was great. If there was a split champ, we had more to debate.
Almost every college team spent the offseason trying not to win the national title, but to win their conference title. There were a dozen of those, and for the most part, every team had a legitimate shot to win it. Every fan had a reason to be excited each offseason. No one felt like cannon fodder, no one was being scheduled just to bolster a CFP resume. If you were a Big Ten or PAC-10 team your goal for the year was to win the Rose Bowl. That was the thing you dreamt about as a kid. If you happened to be really dominant and you went undefeated, maybe you got national title consideration and that was a nice cherry on top, but the bowl game was still the core memory.
Ever since fans got twisted by the media into obsessing over who would be the national champ, college football has gotten worse and worse every decade. More kids in Pennsylvania care about Notre Dame, Alabama and Texas than they do about Pitt. Same everywhere, there’s no reason why random people in all 50 States should spend their weekends decked out in some SEC schools colors when they’ve never set foot in the state, let alone on campus.
/ranr
When I was applying for my first jobs as a teenager (1972 ish), the newspaper printed several pages of classified ads.
Those ads were divided into separate sections labelled “help wanted-men” and “help wanted-women”.
Nearly all TV stations signed off around midnight, and did not sign back on until the next morning, typically around 7 a.m. Before signing off, most stations in our town would have a PA announcer say, “This concludes our broadcast day,” they’d play the National Anthem, and then go to a test pattern.
Also, really clumsy tokenism. Even as a kid I noticed how many shows had The Woman, The Black Guy, The Asian Guy, and so on; and that’d be pretty much their entire characterization too. That was how I labeled them in my head, they were so generic; “Oh, it’s the Black Guy and The Woman”.
If a pre-teenager can notice something like that, you’re being very clumsy about it.
No,no,no…
It was called avocado green.
And it was a status symbol of sorts..super modern.
Shag carpet in the living room , and the appliances in the kitchen, all in avocado green.
At age 38, I’m probably one of the younger ones in this thread.
It’s been said that the 1990s are for the Millennials for the 1950s were for the Boomers or pre-Boomers; the golden decade that is remembered a bit more fondly than it ought to be. Certainly, for me, the 1990s were the happiest time. Flying was much more carefree pre-9/11; people could go all the way to the boarding gates to send someone off or greet them as they deplaned. I was homeschooled and was lucky enough to avoid the stress of formal schooling. America’s image was at its highest peak in modern times; it was seen by many of my peers in Taiwan (when I first moved to Taiwan) as the No. 1 nation people wanted to live in or have citizenship of. It was the last decade in which America could be viewed as a mostly-legit-good nation rather than a war aggressor. Now, the fact that leaded gasoline was still used was a big downside, but global warming hadn’t really kicked in yet, so environmentally I guess it kinds of balances out. People seemed a lot simpler, more direct, less burdened or complex, more optimistic. Oh, and as a Cowboys fan, it was the last decade Dallas was ever a real Super Bowl contender.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, after school meant one thing: go outside. The neighborhood was full of kids, cats, and dogs. Families were generally larger, and indoor pets were rare. Moms shooed us out the door after school, and we stayed out until we were called in for dinner. Then, once dinner was over, it was back outside again til dark—then homework (phooey!).
We got into plenty of trouble, sure, but we had a blast. And somewhere in all that roaming, scheming, and playing, we learned independence, toughness, and a few survival skills along the way.
When I was about 14 (1988-1989), our physical education teacher would stand in front of the gym shower after class and stare at us with his arms crossed and his jaw clenched.
Even in those less enlightened times, we thought it was not normal.
But we wouldn’t ever have considered reporting him. He was the teacher, you know.