Ice. Before we got those new-fangled plastic ice cube trays, we had the metal ones with the levered mechanism in the middle. In theory, you pulled on the lever and it freed up the ice cubes. In practice, it shattered all the ice cubes, and you ended up with a bunch of chipped ice. 
Oh, gawd, my mother made me wear those when I first got my period. I begged her to let me use the pads that stuck to your underwear, but no luck. The clip dug into my buttcrack and hurt like you wouldn’t believe. I wanted to cry one day in math class. Then when I was 13, my mother went to Prague for several months for research, and I told my father to get the stick-to-your-underwear pads. And he did. Oh, the relief!
I do. We got lots of stuff from them.
A lot has been written in this thread about kids having less freedom these days than they used to, and in a bunch of ways that’s exactly true.
Around the corner from me is a dead end street maybe 150 yards long. On this block there lives a mom and her middle school aged daughter. Every afternoon Mom drives to the end of the block and meets daughter at the bus stop. Then they drive home. Not sure which house is theirs, but it is of course at most 150 yards from the end of the street.
I keep saying to myself, “Well, the kid must have a hidden disability.” And she might. But in my travels around the county, I see other parents doing pretty much the same thing, only in more rural and suburban areas where they are not driving to the end of a dead-end street, but to the end of their driveways. And this regardless of the weather. There can’t be that many kids with hidden disabilities in this area–can there?
Anyway, I don’t recall this sort of thing from my childhood. Hey, I walked five blocks home from first grade without parental accompaniment.
That being said, the increasing limitations on where kids go on their own is, in my experiene anyway, a class-based thing. I don’t see many middle-class 10-year-olds cruising myneighborhood on their bikes at nine at night–but if I go a couple blocks over, where the incomes are lower and the families are more likely to be headed by single parents, it’s noticeably more common. In the poorest school district in my area, where there are no school buses, I see middle school kids walking home a mile or more from the school. The woman around the corner would no doubt have a conniption fit.
My grandmother still has an old rollaway dishwasher. I doubt it gets any use now, though. She only ever used it for cleaning up after big occasions and even then she didn’t get much use out of it (she would only put dishes in it after they were scraped and scrubbed to near-perfection).
I remember those. I also remember that you dared not touch a full frozen tray if your hands were wet–like they might be after, say, filling up the empty tray. If your hands were wet, they would stick to the frozen tray.
I remember when you could buy packs of cigarettes out of a vending machine.
When I was a kid in the 60s, comic books were 12¢. And candy bars were a nickel.
I remember when the picture went bad on our TV, my dad would pull the back off the set and see which tubes looked bad. Then he’d take them to the drug store, which had a machine for testing tubes. He’d buy new tubes, bring them home, put them in the TV, and usually it would work again.
I remember they would announce before the beginning of the movie, “The first 22 minutes of this film (the opening scenes set in Kansas) will be shown in black-and-white. If you are watching on a color television, please do not adjust your set.”
Big ass bushes. Good luck even finding a clit in there, never mind getting any traction on it. Sometimes the quaalude would be wearing off by then for crissakes.
Never mind the kid - I’m stuck on the picture of a grown-ass adult getting in their car for a frikkin 150 metre trip EVER! Geez.
And the buses stop on every corner where I live, which is brutal when you get stuck behind one.
In the early 60s there was Sing Along with Mitch. Mitch Miller was a conductor who led a men’s chorus in old timey songs. Lyrics displayed on the screen and people sang along at home. Mitch’s peppy arm movements were famous.
Somewhat popular but was killed off since most viewers were too old and advertisers didn’t like that demo. (Completely unlike today! :rolleyes:)
Enjoy a video.
Can’t imagine a major network putting on a whole show like that now.
With no cell phones or email, you had to call the house of the girl you wanted to date.
Most mothers were cool about it. Some fathers were a little less so, and little brothers were the worst, especially when they were listening in on the other extension.
Long distance calls were only for emergencies, special holidays and deaths. We had out of state aunts and uncles and my parents wouldn’t call them even every year.
The minstrel show bit, and the way Miller praised the history of such shows, is cringe worthy. At least they weren’t in blackface, which I fully expected when he announced it.
Variety shows on TV:
Carol Burnett
Sonny & Cher
Glen Campbell
Bobby Darin…
Ed Sullivan
Dean Martin (and the Golddiggers)
The Hollywood Palace
The Smothers Brothers
Nope. In our house, we collected S&H Green Stamps. And we had a store close by where we could personally trade in our books of stamps for the items in the catalog.
Ice makers still work like that today. Only, I don’t have to reach into the tray, as mine has an ice dispenser in the freezer door.
It was like an early form of karaoke.
The British show Black and White Minstrels *was *in blackface. When I was stationed in Germany, I went on vacation to the UK, and turned on a TV and that show was on. And this was the 70s. I thought it was creepy as heck.
A clip from the last episode, from 1978:
