In my day, we [blanked].

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Got up to change the channel on the TV.

Were excited when we first got cable.

Were even more excited when we first heard about a new channel that showed uncut movies with no commercials and actually showed nudity and swearing.

Thought Pong was the greatest invention ever, and the best Xmas present we ever got. It was a game you could actually play on your TV.

Roamed around town all day long without ever telling our parents where we were going (we wouldn’t have had any idea when we set off out the door anyway).

Routinely bounced around in the back of a station wagon with no belts or restraints.

Were accustomed to seeing people smoke in stores, restaurants, airplanes, buses…pretty much anywhere, and no one thought twice about it.

When I was a small child in Lousiana, it was not only normal for parents to spank orswitch their kids, it was normal for adults in the neighborhood to spank other people’s kids if they caught you up to no good.

We had to pick out our own switches to get whipped with, and don’t think we could get away with finding something really thin and wispy either.

Watched Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies in their first run in theaters.

Knew that all big tits were real.

Could fill up a gas tank for five bucks.

Never heard of AIDS.

In the early 80’s, one of my brothers played me a record by some guy named Kurtis Blow, and said he was doing some new kind of music called rap. I thought it sounded ridiculous, thought it was a fad and a novelty and confidently predicted that it wouldn’t last a year.

Remember when the biggest sex symbol in the US was Brooke Shields, who was like 16 at the time. It never occurred to me to think that was creepy that the culture and the media had so overtly sexualized a teenage girl until many years later.

22

Dressed up for the first day and the last day of schools, even though we wore jeans (dungarees) the rest of the time.

Went to a neighbor’s to watch the first color TV on the block and saw purple snow and multi-colored ghosts.

Had AM radios with little triangles at 640 and 1240 on the dial so we could find the CONELRAD stations when the Russians attacked.

Played 45’s on a portable record player. The hi-fi was reserved for our parents’ parties.

Sat in the way-back in the family station wagon without a seat, much less seat belts.

Understood from an early age that a long-distance phone call was very expensive and getting one meant either very good or very bad news.

Tied a towel around our necks and tried to fly just like George Reeves in The Adventures of Superman.

Knew something big was going on when our parents started talking in the language from the old country.

23

Learned in school how to use the library card catalog.

Always had change in case we needed to make a call from a pay phone.

Had haircuts like Dorothy Hamill. (OK, maybe that was just me.)

24

Still happens. MiniWhatsit spent about half an hour fretfully deciding which perfectly matching outfit and hair bow she would wear to her first day of kindergarten, this year.

25

Dressed up to fly in an airplane too. If you were flying you put on your Sunday best.

26

-we didn’t have fancy internet porn. It was steal a penthouse from a friend’s dad, or settle for scrambled porn on the Spice channel. :slight_smile:

27

[ul]
[li]Went to the airport to watch planes take off and land[/li][li]Bought our records at the used record store[/li][li]Recorded our own music off the radio using small reel-to-reel tape recorders with a microphone placed in front of the radio’s speaker (when I was about 12, I actually called a DJ and asked him to play my favorite song without talking over the end of it)[/li][li]Planned evenings around air times of our favorite shows[/li][li](as others have mentioned) Took off into the woods with a friend at dawn on Saturday to catch snakes, telling Mom you’d be home by dinnertime[/li][li]Watched a cartoon before the movie in the theater[/li][/ul]

28

Camped out in canvas tents
Took a peanut butter sandwich and some cookies out for a day of hiking in the snake-infested canyon with mom’s blessing (age seven and up)
Went to the drive-in in our pajamas with a grocery bag of homemade popcorn
Rushed home from Girl Scouts to catch “Dark Shadows” on TV (Quentin was the dreamiest!)
Didn’t understand what was so wonderful about Oz, since on our TV Dorothy stepped out of the farmhouse into a black and white landscape

29

Said things like “Dig?” and “Groovey” and flashed the peace sign.
Stayed far away from people who were alone and talking out loud.
Turned our car’s head lights on and off with a knob.
Going to a place to buy burgers, fries and hot dogs and eating them in the car was a treat.
We didn’t have calculators to do math, we either did it in our heads or on paper.
I remember playing a record that was on the back of a cereal box too.
Yes, Quentin was the dreamiest!

30

During this time she appeared in print ads in jeans, bent at the waist, buttoning her shirt which was billowing in the wind, with the copy “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.”

That image ranked at the top of my spank bank for a long time.

31

Listened to the national anthem before the cartoons that came before the movie in the theater.

32

-Cut out and folded together cardboard models of the Lunar Lander from the back of cereal boxes. (Age 4 & up)

-routinely took guns to school, during hunting season. The guns remained locked in our cars until after school. (Age 15 and up)

-Routinely hunted or went shooting alone (age 12 and up)

-were subject to corporal punishment from pretty much any adult–and if your parents found out about it, you got another spanking at home.

-did not swear at or near adults.

-Played “Captain America” with garbage can lids as our “Mighty Shield”.

-Hated Nixon, largely because his stupid boring Watergate stuff pre-empted after-school cartoons.

-did not realize Miss Kitty was probably a prostitute

33

Was it Davy Jones or Bobby Sherman?

34

I remember listening to records that were shipped inside Mad Magazine, I think I remember one of burping to music but I’m not positive. Weird.

I used to lay on the kitchen floor in front of the heater vent to ‘blow dry’ my hair before school. My mom had one of those table-top hard plastic hood dryers but I had long straight hair (didn’t everybody in 1972?) so that was less than helpful.

Jeezo petes, I’m nostalgic today, must be the season change. I wish more than anything that I was about 10 and going for a bike ride on the dirt roads I grew up on, just for today.

35

Yup. The name of the song was “It’s a Gas!”

36

In my day, we had to look things up in a printed dictionary or encyclopedia. If your family didn’t have them, you had to go to a library.

In my day, to find old newspaper or magazine articles, you had to go to the library and read through them or microfilm copies. And that’s only if your library had them.

(And as an aside, between Google Books, Amazon’s “search inside”, my library’s online access to newspapers, and the rest of the Web, the comparative ease of finding out definitive facts or obscure things is beyond miraculous. It pisses me off tremendously that people, including on many occasions the media and political campaigns, don’t even think of Googling. And worse yet, the mere suggestion that someone look something up is considered quite rude.)

In my day, we programmers had to look up computer information in manuals. Each of us had a small collection of manuals that we needed for frequent access. Single copies of other manuals were kept in an unattended library room, and occasionally a manual would go missing permanently, i.e., taken by someone for their own private use.

37

In my day, we…

Well, we just “we ed” because we didnt have anything after the we.

All we had were in, my, day, and we… and we were damn glad to even have them!

38

My father worked for the phone company, so we had that one phone, but it was white and it had a lo-n-n-ng cord.

Let’s see what else…

[ul]
[li]Played with big blobs of mercury in our bare hands[/li][li]Carefully guarded that spirally-looking thing to play 45s on the record player. If you lost or broke it, someone had to go seemingly away to South Nowhere to get another from the hi-fi shop.[/li][li]Never heard of bicycle helmets[/li][li]Rarely saw motorcycle helmets[/li][li]Ate sandwiches with mayo at picnics and didn’t die[/li][li]Crammed ten people into the station wagon with only the driver wearing a seat belt, and that was only because the car had a loud buzzer that went off if the driver’s seat belt wasn’t on[/li][li]Filled that station wagon’s tank with leaded gas[/li][/ul]

39

We had a three digit phone number and it was a party line with the neighbours.
We watched the dot disappear after the TV at granny’s was turned off.
We got sent to the pub to have the soda siphon filled for the adults whiskey.

My neighbour (he’s about sixty) was over today and there’s a small yellow bird dancing in the garden. What’s that bird called locally I asked. We used to call it breakfast he replied.

40

…wrote letters to friends and family instead of calling or emailing them.

…actually used the library to do research for schoolworks.

…pilots flew without GPS or any other shiny computer driven gizmos in the plane.