Absolutely. It was even (for men) a status symbol to be a little out of shape. Comedian Alan King did a routine decrying the small, brief fitness craze of the 1950s. That spare tire around his middle, King declared, showed that when there was hard work to be done, he could afford to hire someone to do it. The emphasis on being fit made no sense to him: “Are we going to *wrestle *the communists?” Admittedly, there was more pressure on women to at least look fit, whether achieved by dieting or wearing constricting undergarments.
A bigger fitness craze began in earnest around 1980. Baby boomers metabolisms were slowing down. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fame made it less weird to lift weights. Running, especially distance running, became much more common. I remember when a middle aged civil servant in my hometown ran marathons. It was unheard of. Everybody thought the guy was Superman. But within a few years, it was no big deal.
IMO the emergence of older people in good shape increased the aversion to non-fit people walking around scantily clad.
I was at the Sprawl Mart yesterday and noticed a couple racks of them past the checkouts. The Sprawltons doesn’t waste resources on something that doesn’t sell.
Back in the day I had a “hand held device” that played music that I could listen to when I was outside. Now, while walking the dog (out in the country) I have a hand held device that plays music, including songs I listened to back in the day (including Out in the Country).
Back then it was a transister radio, today it’s an iPhone and iTunes.
Agreed. I hit my teens in the 60s. Girls my age used to have smiles on their faces ALL the time. Now I see teen aged girls and they all look like they just ate something really bitter.
People were politer and nicer to each other back then, too. I miss that.
Paper maps have advantages over computer ones in some ways.
If one wants to be generally oriented over a significant area, as opposed to just finding the way to a specific address, that’s much easier to do on paper maps. They can be spread out over a larger area, so one can see how locations relate to each other without having the smaller details disappear. Whenever I set a computer map to let me see a larger area, the street names and then entire smaller streets disappear from the map; I can see the detail or the broader picture, but not both at the same time, as I can on a paper map.
Atlases are somewhere half inbetween – even large ones don’t have the space available of any individual foldable paper map, but on the other hand they have it all organized and together for a much wider area, so it’s not necessary to shuffle through a dozen or two dozen separate paper maps which keep changing relative positions all over the table (and, if you’re like me, the floor.)
Probably the ideal is to have all versions available, computer maps and GPS voices and individual paper maps and an atlas. And a globe, while we’re at it. They all show different things, and are more or less useful in different situations.
In the town where my office is, the “mailman” isn’t a uniformed USPS worker – she’s an apparently independent contractor who drives around delivering the mail in her own car. She’s definitely not hip to the raised flag on the mailbox meaning outgoing mail. Fortunately, the post office is only a block away from the office.
(Slight hijack: why is there a mailbox in front of the post office? You’re there!!
My employer stopped advertising in the yellow pages about five years ago. Said she didn’t see the point in this day and age.
Ah, the Thomas Bros. Guide. My faithful companion in my early driving days.
The other day, my employer said she needed to find an address. “I’ll look on MapQuest.”
MapQuest.
The look I gave her caused her to burst out laughing. She said I looked at her as if she suggested using a dowsing rod and a Ouija board.
I too have found the curation of what is important on a given scale to be a useful feature of physical maps. Seeing the bigger picture on the other hand is more of an advantage except when you have a small device.
I only got a wireless internet-enabled smartphone in the middle of my last road trip vacation so I’m not sure what I’m going to do for my next one. I print out maps from Google for the specific places I want to go to and then have to write on them in pen if anything is confusingly labelled, and then rely on an atlas for the big picture. It remains to be seen if I will find it worth my time to do that now that I can just use my smartphone except when I need to look at it while driving.
Just thought of this one yesterday. On Reddit, which skews young (though not nearly as much as it did 5 years ago) there was a picture of the bleachers in Wrigley Field. The top comment on the pic was someone asking: “Why isn’t that one guy wearing a shirt???”, as if it were a shocking thing to see.
Back when I was a kid in Chicago, if the weather was good you would see half the men in the bleachers shirtless. I was there a couple of times when I felt odd for keeping my shirt on.
I used to run on a trail after work and there was a man who was older (60s probably, early 70s at the oldest) who would roller blade almost every day. He’s the only person I’ve seen 'blading in ages.
And now we have the obligatory shirtless dude at almost every sporting event. Extra points if it’s not appropriate for the weather at all (lookin at you Packer fan in January)
Remember the police MAN and the fire MAN and the mail MAN? When women first started doing these jobs, it seemed totally amazing. I remember calling the police for my friend and, when a woman showing up, her 7 year old son asking “Are you the police?”
These days, it’s not even a thought when a police officer, a fire fighter or a letter carrier turns out to be a woman.
Remember when you could eat whatever you felt like eating and didn’t have people commenting on your food choices, which are none of their damn business anyways?
I miss those days.
All the local buses have a sign saying no smoking, no food or drink, and radios silent. Today, nobody would think of smoking on a bus, and who has a radio anymore (though I have heard drivers telling people to turn it down or use an earplug for their device). And I don’t see how they can outlaw coffee drinkers, particularly on the early morning buses.
Remember help-wanted ads categorized as “help wanted: male” and “help wanted: female”?
That was entirely standard continuing into the 1970’s. I think it went away sometime in the 80’s.
– I’ve never followed sports that much; but I don’t think the girls’ teams, even to the extent that they existed, got anywhere near the same news coverage as the boys’.
And yes: boys and men didn’t shave anything but their faces. Girls and women shaved their legs from the knees down, and armpits. Nobody shaved their crotches! That would have been considered really weird.
It’s funny because the scriptwriters for American Hustle forgot this. My memory is a bit hazy, but Bradley Cooper calls somebody, argues with them, then asks “where are you?”… and I’m thinking, “But, Bradley, you called him. You should know exactly where he is!” And he should have known this (well, maybe not the specific office#, but he knows what building/business he calls) - it’s how calls were made in 1979.
"Let me call around, see if I can find… " is a sentence uttered maybe 20 times a day now, but it was uttered millions of times daily back in the 70s, because that’s how you found a particular person to call - by calling places, and seeing if they were there.
