Hogan’s Heroes. My earliest memory. Sad.
One of the moon shots.
Terrorism at the Munich Olympics.
Nixon resigns.
President Ford and his WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign.
Assassination attempts on Ford.
Bicentennial.
President Carter elected.
Iran hostage crisis.
We were taught in first grade how to dial the phone and what to do if our call was an emergency and someone else was using the line.
I only needed to remember the last four digits of phone numbers because that was all I needed to dial. In fact, if I dialed all seven the call often didn’t go through.
Lining up for the little paper cup with the sugar cube in it. (Polio vaccine) The whole family went, even my Nana. I was old enough to pick up on the fact that it was important, but I didn’t really understand why.
The truck with the x-ray machine came to town about once a year and it was a smart thing to get the chest x-ray.
Oh, and that smallpox scar? I remember an episode of Love Boat where the “wild man” was discovered to be a hoax because he had the scar. You really wanted the vaccination to “take” the first time around, because otherwise you’d have to do it again.
Our doctor would stop in on his way home to check on us, if he knew we were sick. And there was always that bottle of white, chalky, nasty-minty medicine in the cabinet for when we threw up. (For years that was the smell of nausea for me.) We’d get it refilled at the doctor’s office.
Saturday night line-up on TV as follows:
Room 222
Mary Tyler Moore
Bob Newhart Show (the first one)
Carol Burnett Show
----news------(make popcorn here)
Love, American Style, then, a few years later:
Saturday Night Live!
Collecting for UNICEF with an orange box that we folded ourselves on Halloween.
Girl Scouts that actually camped–outside in tents.
Knee socks–we called them “opaques”.
Disney matinees (Escape From Witch Mountain etc) cost $0.75
TAB was a very popular drink
Tang came on the market–with Spacesticks–yum!
Apollo landing at school–we got to watch TV at school! Very exciting.
Contact lenses were invented
StingRay bikes (Orange Crates et al)–Schwinn was THE name in bikes…
Getting shot with the vaccine gun for polio, smallpox etc. Scared the hell outta me!
Turning out lights, conserving water, gas lines from the OPEC energy crisis
Finding out what MIA meant, after seeing my older sibs and their friends wearing bracelets.
Typing out every paper in college, all the different types of paper, white-out, erasable paper etc…
TouchTone was a brand–and we had dial at home. My kids didn’t know how to use the old dial phone we ran across the other day(!)
Bang and Olufsen turntables, with Jensen speakers and ?
8 track tapes
The annoying noise AOL modems used to make, and the horror of getting kicked offline by an incoming phone call. Then the thrill of getting a separate phone line.
Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite, which of course (commercials painstakingly explained to us) were the same channel, as opposed to a network of what, 300?
TVs with 13 channels, and cable when it was something not everybody had, and only a few channels.
Milk in school cost a penny.
The brand-new 707.
Jack Kennedy’s funeral on the brand-new color TV.
Dial telephones, made of metal.
My Dad wearing a hat to work in the morning.
My Mom’s Chrysler Imperial with a push-button transmission.
Wondering what they would call the Phillips 66 gas station next year.
The first interstate highway near our house. Lots of scary ‘Wrong Way’ signs on exit ramps.
Skyjacking planes to Cuba to help Fidel with the sugar harvest.
The first moon landing in the middle of the night on the east coast.
The F-4 Phantom was a ‘hot jet.’
Nixon’s resignation on TV.
The Draft.
My first pair of green Army fatigues. (Permanent press combat uniforms?)
Army tanks with large white stars painted on them.
Radio shows: One Man’s Family, Baby Snooks, Gangbusters, Beulah, Arthur Godfrey, Grand Slam, Let’s Pretend
Johnny Mercer’s “Accentuate the Positive”
TV Shows: Pride of the Family, the Life of Riley, My Little Margie, I Remember Mama, Molly Goldberg, Pinky Lee, Molly Bee
Comic books: Millie the Model, A Date with Judy
Books: Wait for Marcy, Marcy Catches Up, A Man for Marcy, Double Date
Sleeping with a fan on and my head at the foot of the bed near the open window
babydoll pajamas
bunking parties, tacky parties, come-as-you-are parties
Avon perfumes: Daisies Won’t Tell, Nearness, Occur, Here’s My Heart, Cotillion, To a Wild Rose, Persian Wood
The McCarthy Hearings (That’s when I first learned that adults outside of the family got mad at each other.)
Crying whenever I heard the seagulls at the beginning of Ebb Tide.
pinafores, princess slips, white gloves, polishing white shoes, checking that the seams in my hose were straight, veils on hats, orchids on my shoulder on Easter, red roses on my shoulder on Mother’s Day, wearing rubberbands to keep by bobby socks up, spit curls, “your slip is showing.”
seeing a satellite for the first time as it moved through the sky – maybe it was Sputnik
Perry Como’s sweaters
Music: The Platters’ “Only You,” Presley’s “You’re So Young and Beautiful,” Johnny Mathis’s “Wild is the Wind”
I remember 3 cent stamps and 1 cent postcards.
An old woman invited a bunch of us in to watch a 10" black and white TV. WOW!
I still live too far out for cable, but that’s another thread. I remember listening to the radio and ordering rings from Sky King.
I remember when credit cards came out. Diners Club was the first. I also remember getting S&H stamps for using a credit card or cash.
I remember when the only news you saw instead of read or heard was at the movies. I remember ticker tapes, but that isn’t related.
I remember Uncle Miltie on TV, but before that Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio.
I remember when the moon was made out of cheese. The more advanced idea was it depicted two lovers kissing.
Bobby sox and men wore hats.
Girls wore scarfs tied under their chins.
I remember being glad the teacher used a paddle, but promised not to tell my folks.
I remember when there wasn’t any orginized sports before you got to high school.
Once they organized a father/son baseball game and I hated it. The fathers wanted to tell us how to play, which was dumb.
[ul][li]I remember WWII. We lived near Wright/Patterson Field (the Air Force was part of the Army) and we had to have practice blackouts. That wasn’t too bad, since we were listening to the radio.[/li][li]I remember when the atom bombs were dropped. I remember the sound barrier being broken and heard it happen soon afterward since Chuck was based at Wright/Patterson.[/li][li]I remember the first ball-point pens and first calculators. Both cost much much more than you’d believe.[/li][li]I remember Hi-Fi, but stereo soon made it obsolete. Oh, and the records that broke easily.[/li][li] I remember when you could only get orange juice in season. People would come home from Florida with wild stories of getting all you could drink for 50 cents at roadside stands.[/li][li]California was on the other side of the world. My grandmother took me there when I was seven. It took a week on the train to get there. I was the only kid I ever knew that had been there. My relatives would send us jelly from there on Christmas.[/li][li]During Christmas vacation in college I worked for the US Post Office delivering mail. The regular carrier sorted the mail and I did his route 3 times every day except on Sunday for a week. I bet you didn’t know people ever sent that many Christmas cards. I was glad when Christmas came because my feet hurt so bad.[/li][li]In elementary school I rode my bike to school (over a mile), but in high school I was too old for a bike so I walked a little farther to high school. My senior year I drove a car to school, but only because I saved enough of my money to buy it, including the insurance.[/ul] [/li]That ain’t all, but I’ll quit there.
Mandatory VD education–back when they only discussed two kinds. And the teachers saying they would take us to the public health clinic themselves if any of us thought we had VD.
We didn’t have nuclear war drills (though we had fire drills and tornado drills.) A kid in one of my classes stated that our town (Lexington, KY) was 50th on the list of towns Russia would bomb. He didn’t say where he found this information, nor did any of the rest of us ask if he even knew what he was talking about.
My mother remembers nuke drills and my father remembers thinking his neighbor was a commy back during the Red Scare. He and his friends snuck over one night and searched the neighbor’s garbage can for evidence. As far as I know they didn’t find any.
We didn’t get television in Australia until 1956 and it was the highlight of our week to get into our PJs on Saturday night, after dinner, and troop down the street to the neighbour’s house. We’d sit in rapt attention watching a 17" b & w screen. I can’t remember what we watched but we were enthralled.
Public telephones had an ear thingy which was separate from the mouthpiece so us little children (no one was a ‘kid’ in those days’ would have to climb onto the shelf next to the phone, put our four large, brown pennies onto the slot and twist our small bods around so we could talk into the mouthpiece.
One year Santa brought me a crystal set. What a magical invention that was. Last Christmas I got an MP3 player. 
the point of this was…?
Bosda, I think Skylab was the satellite that was falling out of the sky and they weren’t sure where it would land. trublmakr’s dad was probably trying to keep them safe?
And damn, kniz, you’re old! 
I remember when Phil Collins was part of a group, and Wham!, and when the country group Alabama was huge.
I remember when AIDS first came out.
So Skylab didn’t fall on him and kill him. :smack:
I grew up in the Pittsburgh area. I remember stuff like…
One For the Thumb in '81!!
The Terrible Towel
The Steel Curtain
Franco’s Army
And more generically:
Farrah Fawcett-Majors (and her hair)
My Dorothy Hamill haircut
The Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman dolls (I belonged to the Lindsay Wagner Fan Club.)
KISS was eeeeeeeeeee-ville
Not to mention Alice Cooper
The Muppet Show, guest starring the cast of Star Wars
Being allowed to stay up late to watch the 1976 Olympics
Nadia’s perfect 10’s
Le Car
The K Car
Going to the roller rink on Sundays after church
“This show brought to you…in COLOR” with the little peacock that would walk out and spread its tail.
And so much more
FWIW I have the vaccination scar, as do my mother and brother. He was born in 1974. Maybe my hometown was a backwater?
I remember:
Unleaded gas and full service being the only way gas stations worked. I liked watching the guy squeegee the windshield.
Orange crush came in little brown bottles and had actual orange pulp.
The advent of the new, permanently attached pop-tops on soda cans. Too young to remember them appearing on beer cans.
Scratch n’ Sniff stickers. What a stupid concept.
Godawful 70’s fashions. The first time.
Loving my Atari 2600 and coveting my friends’ Intelllivision.
Colecovision
Digital watches and adults moaning that kids would never be able to tell time on a regular clock.
That hot new singer, Madonna.
Hearing about Reagan getting shot while I was on my way home from school.
My Great Uncle asking me if I listened to “that jungle music.” Man, was HE old.
The principal announcing the Challenger disaster during my 10th-grade science class.
That’s a cool coincidence. I lived in ol’ Peeville from ‘69 to ‘73.
It is interesting to gauge how old the various Dopers are by their responses. There are a lot of memories being dredged up by this thread. Too many times I’ve thought “Wait, that’s not old enough to be mentioned in this thread” and then remembering it was 20 years ago. 
Some random additions:
GI Joe
The thrill of the whole space race.
Seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen movie theater (there weren’t any other kinds).
Going to Target in Duluth when there were only a few of them in the country, and all in Minnesota
In college typing out computer punch cards for batch programming in Fortran
Did you attend the Episcopalian church? We might have met in Sunday school. I was one of the altarboys.
I remember what an E-ticket ride was.
Speaking of the Olympics…
I remember the track runner with her incredibly long fingernails, boycotting the event in Moscow, and Kerri Strug landing on her sprained ankle to nail the womens all-around in gymnastics and having to be carried to the podium by her coach.
I remember when there was only one 60 Minutes, the premier of Friends, and who shot J.R. I remember when Hugh Downs was on 20/20. I remember Tiannenmen (sp) Square, mainly because I worked at a CBS affiliate then and we had to screen calls from angry viewers upset that we interrupted Dallas. The people have no concept of “network” vs. “affiliate.” IIRC, CBS did eventually re-air the last ten minutes of that particular episode.
Same here, but it seems a bit earlier. From home, I remember:
Funny you should mention that… I have a niece that is 4 now. She asked what time it was, so I replied “Can you tell time?” She said “Yes!”, so I showed her my watch… an analog watch (with hands), she just looked at me baffled.
My thoughts…
Dialup modems, at 300baud. Text only.
Internet at college, in the computer lab, lon the VAX system, text only.
1/2 the freshman engineering students, all taking Fortran, and waiting for access to the 10 workstations in the Nuclear Engineering building to compile, and turn in our programs.
Bringing my Apple IIe to college, and feeling pretty good, as I had hooked up my VCR as a tuner to the color monitor. (one of the few of both, VCR and color tv, on my dorm floor)
5 1/4" diskettes, no hard drive in that Apple IIe.
8" Floppy Disks on the Wang mini-frame computer in the high school computer lab. I was the only one in the school who had touched it in years, and likely the only one that knew anything about it, and that wasn’t saying much.
Doing a report on blood in 1984, interviewing some folks at the hospital bloodbank, and finding out about HIV for the first time.
Having some ahem questionable relations in college, and not really worrying about any infections. :rolleyes: (Dumb, as things were “spreading” then)
My first cell phone (6 pounds, with a 1 pound battery). Wondering how I’d use 100 minutes a month!
The people have no concept of “nighttime soap opera that was already on its last legs” vs. “moment that will be in history books 100 years from now” either.