My dad had a remote control. Voice activated. “Get up and change the channel” got the kid closest to the TV to get out of the chair / off the floor and turn the knob. If one wasn’t quick enough, they’d hear “I said!” which was usually right before, “do I need to get my belt?”
And seatbelts? isn’t that just another name for mom’s arms?
The nuns in elementary school used to encourage us to smell them, hot off the press. That probably wasn’t a good idea. Nor was it a good to ride our bikes behind the bug spray guy in the summer time, weaving in and out of the spray. I think they used DDT, spraying out the back of trucks driving thru the neighborhoods in the warmer months.
When I packed the family car to head off to college, the only ‘electronics’ I had were a hand held hair dryer, a suitcase record player, a clock radio, and a high intensity desk lamp.
I had a small manual typewriter inherited from my grandad, along with carbon paper so I could make copies of my term papers. Although I had a calculator to help with homework, I was under no circumstances allowed to bring it to class. I was allowed to bring my slide rule, also inherited from my grandad.
My boyfriend, who also attended the same college, drove us both down. Underclassmen weren’t allowed cars at school, so he had to drive it back home a week later and take the Greyhound bus back to school. During our trip down, I could cuddle up against him on the bench seat (no seat belts existed) and thanks to a gas war, we could fill up the tank on the V-8 for about 23 cents/gallon. Fifty-five mph speed limits didn’t exist yet. In fact, in rural areas, signs stated “Pleass drive at a reasonable and proper speed”. Therefore, we drove 85 most of the way, making what would later be a 4-5 hour trip in a bit over 3 hours. The Interstate was in the process of being constructed in our flyover state, so we made these fast trip times on 2 lane state roads, flying past the occasional piece of farm machinery when the passing line was intermittent or lagging along behind it when the lines were solid.
When we arrived we would each call our parents from a bank of pay phones, using no change at all. If you dropped the coins in an adjacent machine and held the handset close to it, the phone operator would hear the coins rattling and think you had paid.
Jeans looked and fit better.
If you wanted to learn a piece of music from a recording, you used vinyl (and later cassettes) and, at a minimum, had to very carefully drop the stylus (needle) into place every time to hear the part you wanted to learn. Not too bad if there’s a lever to raise and lower the tone arm, but still a single-shot arrangement (so no looping and you sure as hell couldn’t play along as you listened). You might even weigh down the cartridge (with a stack of coins) to drag on the disk and slow the music for easier (?) study.
You’d come across old coins in your change.
Humor was coarser (racist jokes, etc.)
The bank (and there was only one in town) opened at 10 AM and closed at 3 PM, Monday through Friday. They were also open one or two Saturdays a month for a few hours. There were no ATMs, but there was a slot through which you could deposit cash and checks. If they didn’t like the color of your skin or your accent you couldn’t get a mortgage.
There were no Internet retailers of course, but there were mail-order catalogs. Allow 4 to 6 weeks for shipping. Yes, I said weeks. There was no FedEx, UPS was a bit player, and without any competition to speak of, the Post Office was a lot slower than it is today.
French fries were fried in tallow and lard, and they actually tasted good.
Cars were easier to fix yourself, but they also broke down a lot more often than modern cars. In all my years of driving I’ve needed to be towed only once. My father’s cars weren’t any older or junkier or worse maintained than mine but when I was growing up it seemed like he needed towing about once every two years.
Very few married women with children worked outside the home, almost none worked full time.
To find a book in the library, you had to look in the physical card catalog. To find a magazine article, you might look in the multi-volume series called Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. To find a newspaper article, The New York Times index. If you wanted to buy a book not in stock at your local bookshop (assuming you were lucky enough to have a local bookshop), they could special order it for you if they could find it in Books in Print. For books that were out of print, you’d have to visit used book shops and scour their shelves more in hope than expectation of finding a copy.
Before airline deregulation in the late 1970s, airlines could not compete on price so they competed on service and comfort. Travel in coach class was similar in cost (adjusted for inflation) and comfort to today’s business class.
In the year I started school, only two states outlawed corporal punishment in public schools. In my school in New York, misbehaving kids would be sent to the principal to be paddled. Somehow it worked out that misbehaving white boys from middle-class backgrounds and girls never got paddled no matter how badly they misbehaved. Meanwhile the threshold for black and poor whites boys was fairly low.
Most kids were free range. Parent-planned play groups would have been “WTF? Just go outside and come home when it gets dark.”
Creative car seating: we would fight over who got to lay on the back window ledge. We actually cut the seatbelts out of the car cuz they were uncomfortable. This reminds me that auto benchseats have gone extinct.
Shit didn’t work. You were lucky to make 75k in a big American rustbucket car. The early VCRs cost a month’s salary, weighed 100lbs, and only occasionally worked right. Videotapes degraded quickly.
I still tell gas attendants “unleaded.” 
In my part of the world, cable didn’t exist. We got five antenna channels and often had to climb on the roof and adjust the antenna to even get five.
Every elementary school day began with the principal saying a prayer over the PA.
People smoked just about everywhere. Planes, stores, restaurants, offices.
It seemed like divorce was more rare, I remember kids whispered about it if another kid had divorced parents. Domestic violence was more accepted, and people hitting their kids was considered their own business, for the most part.
Women would admire and coo over the babies of strangers, and this was welcomed by the mom. I saw it all the time as a little girl, it seems unthinkable now.
When you were going on a trip, you went to Triple A and got a TripTik. This was a very exciting event!
Traffic killed four times the number of people it kills these days and there was less of it, so per mile it was even more dangerous.
Posts about phones which don’t mention the biggest difference between calling in the landline world and cell world: in landline world, you never called people - you called locations with the expectation/hope that the person you are looking for was near that phone.
Things were largely crap back then. Poorly made, broke down a lot.
The world was both a lot more uptight and less professional. You’d wear a suit to work and get drunk/tipsy during a 2 hour lunch. Now you can wear jeans, and a two hour lunch (much less the freedom to openly drink in the middle of your shift) is never seen.
Yeah, what’s up with jeans anyway?? Those bell-bottomed jeans fit my 1970 body a lot better than 2017 jeans fit my current body. :dubious: Could it be me? Nah, no way!
Your dentist or Hygenist would not put on gloves before examining your teeth.
In cities, properties by the rivers were still not premium. It was all abandoned or slowly being abandoned factories along with barely used rail lines and the scrube they accrue.
Bikes were 3 speed, 7 speed an 10 speed road bikes or some kind of single speed street bike with a funky banana seat. Mountain bikes just were not around yet. We took our bikes offroad anyway. In the 70s have a a10 speed was a source of pride.
Radio was still mostly AM-based. FM would be ascendant in the late 70s but I recall a lot of cars not having FM radios.
My experience with computers was in the late 70s with a printout based games that I rarely got to play with or a friend who had a Commodore Pet.
Video arcades in the 70s were lucrative enough that downtown Philly could support about 6-8 of them in a 8 block radius. If you went to Atlantic City the boardwalk was covered with arcades, most of which had ancient opto-mechanical games.
If you missed an episode of a favorite TV show, unless that TV show had summer reruns, it was gone forever and you’d never get another chance (at least that’s what we thought).
I agree. I’ve noticed that jeans are now made with notoriously tiny waist sizes that bear no relationship to the actual size number claimed. Due to this conspiracy, it’s necessary for me to buy jeans many sizes larger than the size I know that I am. I’m convinced that the Great Global Jeans Conspiracy™ is a long-standing practical joke being played by kids on us shapely mature adults.
I only want to point out the beauty of that statement without context, that is all.
But yes, I used to love to smell them, too. Speaking in context.
38 is the new 32.
Oops, my bad. I need to read for comprehension: you were talking about the purchase of TWO packs.
TV’s If you had one, it was probably black and white, Color TVs were EX PEN SIV.
The price sounds silly today but back then, when an average guy made 4 to 5k a year a 500 dollar TV was nuts.
They did in fact have remote controls, if you had the dough for a fancy TV.
Not an electric remote, a mechanical remote, it made different frequency high pitched tones.
TV Repairman was a good job back then.
And you got an awesome set of tools (no pun intended) and a tool box with a mirror.
Old School TV’s were complicated things with strange adjustments and the fear of God living behind the back cover (Big Nasty flyback transformer)
Radios had Tubes, not all, there was solid state, but bigger ones and nicer ones tended to still have tubes, and as mentioned stores had testers you could test your tubes in.
Cars i think had more character and more detail, more metal and a hell of a lot less plastic.
They say they are safer now, kind of odd as i knew less people then that died in them.
Maybe we were just safer?
They lasted longer, then again we drove less, no one put 192,000 miles on their car in the 1st 3 years except maybe a truck driver.
Seat Belts? some cars did not even have them, they were optional.
Yet i don’t remember launching people out the windshield being a common thing, again maybe we were just safer? less busy less in a hurry.
Gas 23 cents a gallon?? ugh highway robbery i tell ya!!
Glass bottle of coke, 10 cents. 10oz bottle, they were still popular then.
No one ran around drinking 96oz big gulps
People walked a lot, unless you lived someplace where it wasnt possible.
Walk to the grocery store, walk to the hardware store etc.
Businesses delivered to homes.
I mean like the Dairy delivered milk and eggs and butter, butcher delivered meat, some grocery stores delivered.
TV Dinners were BIGGER, and they came in metal trays, and the potatoes had a piece of real butter on them.
They may or may not have tasted any better.
Kids went outside.
It wasn’t raining buckets, GET OUT!
Get out or do chores.
The phone was this sturdy thick plastic thing that you had to try to break.
It was attached to the wall, permanently by a cord (no RJ11 back then)
It had a loud clanging bell, anyone calling after 9pm better be dying, or they will be.
You sat where the phone was to use it.
You watched TV when the show was on or you did not watch it.
11:59pm the TV station was probably going off the air.
All things depending so might the radio station.
Sunday night, Marlin was sure to sit back safely and tell you why Jim is running his ass off to keep from being run over by the rhino.
A little kid could make a decent living (For necessities like comic books, bubble gum, baseball cards, etc) from collecting unwanted pop bottles.
Your Dad knew how to actually fix your bicycle.
I dont care if he was an accountant at Macys, he magically knew how to fix a bike, and the lawn mower, and the sink.
The TV? yea forget it, not so much. Mancard did not cover TV’s
I think we ate a damned lot less.
Not that we were starving or underfed at all, im saying i think we tended not to sit around stuffing our faces for lack of something better to do.
I think we ate better too, and fast food was only an occasional thing, it was special.
Most average families did stuff together, and actually liked it, and did not spend a lot doing it.
Schools had real libraries with real books, that seems to be a non thing now?
Parents in general were tougher, and overall i think the kids were happier for it.
You got your shoes fixed!
No tennis shoes were disposable, but your good leather shoes, you got new soles put on and such. We didn’t have any plastic shoes that i remember?
Not much was open 24/7 no walmart shopping at 2am, but that was no big deal, you planned accordingly.
William Shatner and Leonard Nemoy made record albums
This may not be a good thing actually now that i think about it.
Everything was not perfect, it never has been, but it was sure a heck of a lot less complicated, and monetary inflation had not gotten so over bloated as it has now.
Seat belts were mandatory starting in the '68 model year, and we available starting at least in 1964. For purposes of the OP’s “the 60s and 70s” that’s about 3/4 of the period.
Now whether you actually used them, well, I can’t answer that. But they were there.
And for all you people saying the old chestnuts “we never used helmets/seatbelts/common sense and we didn’t die”, I assure, other people did. They just aren’t around to post how they died when they went through the windshield, or got thrown out of pickup bed, or cracked their skull on a curb while riding their bikes.
Comic books were 10 cents at the start of the 60s. The “annuals” that were 80 pages cost a quarter.
ou’re thinking of ditto not mimeo. Ditto was made by writing on a white cover sheet that had something like carbon paper (Yeah I know many of you don’t know what that is except for the CC in emails which stands for “carbon copy”.) that put the purple “ink” on the back of the page you wrote on. This was then transferred to the copies by a horrible smelling liquid. Other colors were possible, but purple was used almost exclusively in most schools. Other colros were mostly for art projects.
Mimeo(graph) was made by typing on a wax stencil after disengaging the ribbon on the typewriter. This removed the wax in the image of the letter that black ink (usually) was pushed through
Though to be fair many people even then called ditto mimeo.
Yeah, this is…strange. Some stats regarding motor vehicle deaths:
In 2015 just over 35,000 Americans were killed in car crashes.
That number is less than ANY year in the 1960s or 1970s. 1960 and 1961 are only about 1000 more, but beginning in 1964 it never dropped again below 44,000.
The 1960-1979 numbers of course were in a much smaller population (180 mil in 1960, over 300 mil today) and with many fewer vehicle miles traveled (719 billion in 1960, over 3 trillion today).
So: fatalities per 100 million miles driven: the best figure in the two olden decades, 3.25 (1976), and more commonly in the 4+ range; the figure today, 1.12.
And fatalities per 100,000 people: best olden decades figure is 19.7 (1961), and other than that, 20-26; today, 11.3.
Sure, better medical care, better emergency rates, better driver training, etc., may play roles in preventing fatalities. But there’s really no argument to be made that cars were safer “back then” than they are now. In fact, the opposite is almost certainly true.
Stats from Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year - Wikipedia.