Remember when the TV would go out, and your Dad would take the back off, pull out all of the tubes, go down to the local store and test them to see which ones were bad? I always went with him because there was nothing else to do, since we only had ONE TV !!!
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Ok…first car was a '76 Ford Granada. (you can’t convince me that Granada is not Spanish for “Ugly Box on Wheels”)
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I had a fantastic collection of 8-track tapes. Used to listen to RUSH 2112 and click back to hear the opening track when it would click to the text track.
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Sleestaks scared the crap outta me.
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No cable. 4 channels and one was PBS. If the President was on, your evening was screwed! Of course…no remote.
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Was proud owner of a pong/tank game that would burn an image into your Curtis Mathis if you left it on. (that is pre-Atari 2600 kids)
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Pop-Rocks.
you can still buy them all over the place. just thought you might like to know
We never did the “duck and cover” in the '70s, but we had the yellow-and-black “FALLOUT SHELTER” signs high up on the school walls. I remember wondering what it meant. What was falling out of what??
We had a Civil Defense post building well into the '70s at least, and occasional air-raid siren tests.
There was a series on The History Channel hosted by Richard Dreyfuss about the twentieth century, with real people talking about their experiences. Julia Child learning to drive a very early car … a completely serious Dick Clark talking about how his older brother died in WW II because of FDR’s compromises with Churchill and Stalin … and someone from '60s rock talking about the “duck and cover” stuff as a kid, and how there were a few kids tumbling to the fact that this “wasn’t gonna cut it” if the real thing happened. I wish that series were on tape.
cheezit wrote:
Then again, back then you were considered a “filthy rich moneybags” if you had a 5-figure income. (Nowadays, even the poverty line, which the Reagan administration set artificially low, is in the 5-figure range.)
*Riccochet Rabbit
*Wonder Twins–“Wonder Twin powers… ACTIVATE!”
*Space 1999
*Cars with bench seats
*Creating a BASIC program so large my TRS-80 ran out of memory
*TI-99 acetate keyboard
*Gas prices “really getting up there” upon hitting 64 cents/gallon
*odd/even gas days
*“CHiPs” a prime-time, cutting-edge show
*Two words: Oscar Goldman
*Cost of stamps “really getting up there” upon hitting 17 cents each
*The world before Costco/Target/Price Club: Gemco, Fedco, and hell on earth… Zody’s
*Dodgers in Penant Race
*The world before HBO/Showtime/Starz: The Z Channel
*Radios touting themselves as “All Transistor”
*vacuum tube testing machines in drug stores
*Photocopier?! Try a mimeograph, pal!
*Fax Machine?! Try a teletype, pal!
*Modems with cups to place the phone’s handset into
Oh, Sweet Baby Jesus, I could go on and on…
How bout when they made CJ Jeeps… geez now you have Wranglers and that’s it!
Pocket radios often touted the number of transistors. Perhaps a holdover from mechanical watches where the number of a jewels was sometimes a measure of the movement’s quality. There are almost no moderately priced mechanical watches any more but I wear a nice self winding Seiko.
Matt Groening has been running his “1969 Diary” in the Life in Hell strip and makes several mentions of going down to get radio tubes tested. I remember that from the old Rexall drug store when it still had a soda fountain/lunch counter. TV repair man was a lucrative occupation then.
What about World Series baseball games being played during the day (on weekdays no less)? Our elementary school gym teacher had a radio in his office so we knew we could get updates if we could get to him. Recess was a good time to catch a few minutes of the games.
“About the Beatle-Boot era, I would say - I was in junior high school, and it became the fashion to wear taps on your shoe soles so that you went clackety-clackety-clack down all the polished halls. School officials hated it because they scuffed up the floors something terrible and tried to ban them. A lot of parents, like mine, wouldn’t let their kids wear them. The kids sometimes got their comeuppance because it also made your shoe soles slippery, and I saw more than one guy fall smack on his ass.”
I remember those! They were popular among the “burn-outs” (druggies) in junior high school.
Patty
Remember that show with the character named Winkie Dink? You got this piece of vinyl to put over the TV screen so that you could draw with crayons on it to help old Winky. Every TV set from that vintage had these faint lines on it because kids young enough to watch the show were too young to remember to put the vinyl sheet up, so they drew on the glass. Those TV’s got hot enough to melt the wax into the glass, and as far as I know you could never get them clean again.
Other things:
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Having a big can of lighter fluid around the house because every adult smoked constantly and used Zippo lighters. They would dry out in a couple of days even if you didn’t use them.
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Rambler station wagons with push-button transmissions.
You could roll down the window, open the tailgate, and sit on it with your feet dangling above the road while the car was driving down the highway. Ours had a luggage rack, so we could stand up holding the rack as we drove 70mph down those Texas highways, getting bugs in our teeth. -
Trying to get the computer to reboot with a paper tape that was worn out, after keying the tape reading instructions from the front panel, and having the tape reader eat the tape. At 4AM.
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Eating Fizzies tablets.
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12 and 14 year old kids with driver’s licenses.
Veb -
My brother and I spent a lot of time carving "Z"s on each other with branches. We loved that show.
Fast forward three and a half decades to this last May. For our parents’ joint 80th birthday celebration, the family is spending a long weekend in Napa Valley in a winery’s guesthouse that had formerly been one of Lillian (Mrs. Walt) Disney’s vacation homes. In the entry hall hanging on the wall is a Warhol Mickey Mouse, and gasp on a stand is Zorro’s saddle! Throughout that weekend I would gravitate back to it and just look (well, yes, and touch, too).
err, make that FOUR-plus decades. Durn braincell depletion!
Marathon bars are now called Snickers (I think to bring them into line with the US). What you’re describing are called Curly Wurlys in the UK.
I LOVE THIS THREAD!
'Kay, so I’m British and still a child (at heart at least!) so loads of this stuff I haven’t a clue about, but there are things I remember - even if it’s only cos others have told me about them.
I still have a radio (2 in fact!)with a needle pointing to the frequency (including FM) complete with nail varnish marking my fave station.
The one thing that stays in my mind from my childhood is free milk in school. Crates of half (maybe quarter) pint bottles, sat on the windowsill in the sun all morning (yuk, warm milk) waiting for us to drink them with blue straws.
Strangely enough, I do still like milk!
At the tender age of 37 here are some of the things that still stand out…
Banana Seats, gear shifters between the handle bars and the seat and sissy bars on bikes (called Apple Crates and Cherry Bombs)
Pop Rocks (vile candy but we all believed the Mikey story…)
Reruns of the Little Rascals and the Three Stooges on UHF stations on Sunday mornings.
Pong (and the Sears 4 in 1 game console with two versions of Breakout and two versions of Pong)
When video games really could damage the picture tube on TV’s.
Commodore 64’s
When nudity in movies was controversial (and usually only found in foreign films)
Top loader VCR’s with the huge cassettes.
The RCA video disc player with the discs that were bigger then LP records.
Watching the Watergate hearings during the day at my small Catholic Grade School.
Watching the Viet Nam POW’s getting off the plane.
The peppy TV commercial with the folksy sounding young lady singing “VD is for everyone, not just…….”
Reel to Reel tape recorders and pre recorded tapes by real bands. Columbia House used to sell them.
I remember the days before Windows…when our state-of-the-art computer had DOS, and 80 megs of memory - and that was A LOT. WordPerfect 5.1 where all the fonts looked the same on the screen unless you clicked on “WYSIWYG”. We had Prodigy Classic too and when the Internet got popular we couldn’t get it because our computer wasn’t powerful enough.
We actually had a TV with knobs…it was color, but that’s besides the point. And much as it may amaze you, since the clicker broke, we actually STILL get up to change the channels!
Fruit cups still have those lethal pull rings…MP3’s take 1/2 an hour to download…in my basement we still have a pair of roller skates with keys - that we use…my elementary school had a playground made out of wood and metal and the tire swing was made out of an actual tire…heck, I remember the early days of Nickelodeon!
shimmery
and…at my school we still have the floppy disks that are floppy
shimmery
p.s.
I went trick-or-treating last halloween! until 10!
No Sunday morning cartoons where I lived. All 3 channels had chuch services, but oh those gospel choirs. They sure could sing. Other music memories: Porter Waggoner - that hair! The Jackson 5. Seeing/hearing ZZ Top as the house band at a bar way out the river road (which never checked IDs). Stadium or arena concerts were $5. in advance, $6. at the door, and would last 5 or 6 hours, or all day and half the night. Seeing the Allman Bros. at the superdome in '73 when a famous psychic said it would collapse. Seeing the Greatful Dead play at the Sanger in '83, a fine old small New Orleans theatre (which was also the last time I saw any REAL LSD…) The way the arena would immediately fill up with “fragrant” smoke when the lights went off at rock concerts, maybe one reason I am enjoying being reminded of things long forgotten - like those t-shirts with the ugly monster trucks on them, those funky candy cigarettes, playing “war” after school…Thanks for the nostalgia trip, people…
Topo Gigio.
Jeez. I’m 23 and I knew that.