I used to know people’s phone numbers. The other day I had to give someone my gf’s phone number, but my phone wasn’t handy. I had no idea what her number was, even though I text to that number multiple times a day.
I’ve been watching the old Perry Mason series. They think of phone numbers as “Hollywood 5-3254”.
Yes! I can still remember my best friend’s and my grandma’s old landline numbers from when I was a kid, but I don’t know anyone’s current cell phone numbers.
For landlines, almost all telephone exchanges (the three number prefixes) started as letters.
I love researching what they were. The landlines in our neighborhood start with 272 or 233. Back in the day, that was “BRoadway 2” (named after a street that was later renamed Main St.), or “CEntral 3”. That one’s amusing because our old downtown area is no longer central; thanks to the expansion on the western side, we’ve been called “eastenders” since the 60s.
Here (Chicago) it was 976-1616 for time, and I think 976-1212 for weather. Note that they were 976 numbers, so they triggered an extra charge. Speaking of, I can’t remember hearing an ad for a 976 number since probably the 80s or early 90s at the latest.
Ah, the good old days, when casual child abuse was the norm.
As long as you knew your place, that is. If you were a black kid going to a newly integrated school or drinking from the white water fountain, or a woman wearing a crew cut and ‘men’s’ clothing, or an interracial or gay couple trying to have dinner as a couple, somehow you wouldn’t have this experience people being politer and nicer to you.
Along those lines, I’m glad that the behavior of treating ‘politeness’ as something that is only accorded to people who conform to certain narrow social expectations for their demographic has subsided. In most places today, you don’t get away with calling black men ‘boy’ while expecting a ‘sir’ from them or groping single women as long as you wink at them while you do it. There’s a lot of ‘people were so nice’ that really, really wasn’t.
I remember that when I was growing up (in North Carolina in the 80s) non-smoking sections started becoming common, but weren’t universal until the 90s. Then by the 2000s pretty much everywhere in the larger cities was non-smoking indoors except for bars, it was a very sudden shift. That’s one thing that stands out in movies from the early 80s or before, like the Christopher Reeves Superman movies - you’ll see ashtrays at every desk, often built-in to them, and that came to a full stop rather rapidly.
I pretty much only use paper checks for exceptional circumstances now. Contractors tend to prefer checks over credit, and big things like car and house loans use them, but nothing that recurs regularly. Technically my mortgage and utilities use checks, but it’s all electronic withdrawals from an account, not paper.
Remember when Cracker Barrel made customers walk through the smoking section to get to the non-smoking section? Good >cough< times.
So many times the nonsmoking section was just a little area with a rope divider and a sign, nothing that actually kept the clouds of smoke from wafting in. I know a lot of people with asthma or smoke allergies who just had to avoid eating out because they couldn’t get a genuine ‘no cigarette smoke in my face’ zone to eat in.
Things mighta been different in NC (because big tobacco) but the smoking segregation happened long before the 80’s in my world (Chi, WI, L.A.) I remember non smoking sections on planes! Planes! One time on a family trip we ended up in the non smoking section on a plane and my mother (a professional smoker) complained and the stewardess picked the “non smoking section” placard off the back of the seat in front of us and moved it to the row behind us and, voila, we were in the smoking section.
mc
I miss the "old " TV Guide as well. By “old” I mean the digest sized version that had localized listings for 24 hours of TV for seven days a week. The current version is mostly useless to use find programs to watch.
Yeah, it was definitely tobacco, though I’m not sure how much was ‘big tobacco’ (as in the major cigarette companies) versus relatively small tobacco farmers. The state grew a lot of it, and anything anti-smoking was thought of as essentially shooting yourself in the foot. It would be like High Point, a major furniture center, deciding to pass zoning laws to limit how much furniture people put in their houses, it just didn’t make sense to a lot of people. I distinctly remember my sex education/health teacher talking about how he would encourage the management of restaurants to adopt this new idea of non-smoking sections, and how many times they’d really catch on for non smoking customers.
I was in a dive bar/restaurant near Pittsburgh on Saturday that is smoker friendly, as in signage that reads “SMOKERS WELCOME”. We were definitely in Allegheny County, and I thought all places that served food had to be no-smoking. We both took showers that night to wash off the smell, haven’t had to do that in years.
Suburbia in ye olde days (circa 50’s, 60’s) was peppered with kids playing pick-up sports during the day and up to shenanigans at night, with just 2 interruptions: moms calling “DINNER!” at 6-ish and making curfew at bedtime. Miss the first, you go hungry. Miss the second, you get whooped.
Families had lots of kids back then and the kids had free reign of the neighborhood. Parents didn’t sequester their kids in the house for protection, they kicked them outside to stay out of their hair.
Pets also had free reign of the neighborhood. A house cat? What the hell kind of breed is that?
It was a big hodgepodge of kids and pets cavorting with each other in harmony, or sometimes in pitched battle.
Of course all this free-wheeling chaos didn’t come without a few hiccups:
*Hey, what’s that squashed in the road over there?
Aw, that’s Binky…he was a good ol’ cat.
Hey, whats that big lump squashed in the road up ahead?
Aw, that’s Billy…he was a good ol’ kid. *
Buses and airplanes used to have smoking sections in the back. And at one time any woman smoking on the street was seen as “loose.”
Newspapers used to be nearly ubiquitous- you’d find them, or parts of them everywhere- waiting rooms, bus/train stops, bathrooms, pretty much anywhere had to spend any amount of time would probably have that day’s newspaper handy. And people would read them
While I still see people getting the paper in their yard, seeing them elsewhere in the wild is almost non-existent these days. As a matter of fact, when my sons were born, I had to go HUNT down newspaper copies of the day they were born (in case they’re curious when they’re older), while in years prior to that, it would have been a matter of just picking one up at a machine, convenience store, gas station, etc…
Are you sure it wasn’t KLondike 5-? KL-5 maps to good old 555. While HOllywood-5 maps to 465.
In Play It Again, Sam, Tony Roberts’ character is always using a pay phone to call his office to let them know where he was and tells them the pay phone number. Lot of KL-5’s IIRC.
Or a suitcase with wheels.
Yeah, we would’ve thought that was some kind of pansy snowflake move.
What would we have thought of my coworker who has a rolling briefcase?
The CD slot in so many car stereos is not needed by so many people that “mech-less” stereos are commonly sold. No CD slot, certainly no tape slot.
And in addition, most of these people don’t use the radio either. From the point of view of someone from the 70s/80s they’d wonder what you use it for if none of those.
And then there’s the touch screen thing. Um, where’s all the knobs?