I think that’s why we were smarter than today’s kids. We were always stoned from sniffing mimiograph fluid before and during a test.
Ok gang…
Switching on a light in your room was done by pulling a string (Mom would get pi$$ed if you hit it and got it hung up!)
GE College Bowl, Ted Mack Amateur Hour
Remember the first house you went in that had carpet?
Going to the “Ice house” to get ice to make homemade ice cream (with a crank no-less)?
Throwing gasoline on wasp nests and runnin like hell.
Searching the neighborhood to find some “good” wheels for a push car.
Cruisin around with 1 beer for 4 hours and never finishing it.
Getting a set of 4 recapped tires for $28.00 (installed and balanced)
Thinking someone 40 years old had 1 foot in the grave.
Putting clothespins on your bike to make a “groovy” sound.
Getting upset that you could only get 1 sugar cube of Polio vaccine?
Tie your quarter in your “hanky” so you wouldn’t lose it for school lunch money.
Lookin over your shoulder to see if it was Ok to curse.
How did we get this far?
Cosmo Spacely, George Jetson’s boss.
He also did Hardy Har-Har (a hyena, if I’m not mistaken) in the Lippy the Lion cartoon, Captain Caveman, Secret Squirrel, and some parrot for a commercial about razor blades (Chorus: “Mister, how are ya fixed for blades?” parrot: “Do you have plenty?”)
And a whole bunch more.
~~Baloo
The “chicken” from the The Friendly Giant was Rusty the Rooster. The giraffe was Jerome.
Creepy Crawlers – really cool with glow in the dark goo
High handle bars, banana seats, & sissy bars
Estes rockets
Tinker Toys
Speed Racer – don’t forget racer X
Six pages in, and I can’t believe this one hasn’t been mentioned yet (forgive me if it has)…
Conelrad. (or was it Konelrad?)—AM radio dials were marked by little triangles, indicating the frequencies you were to tune to in case of nuclear attack. (this presupposes AM radio and dial tuning, of course).
The equivalent in 20 years will be “do you remember when speedometers had the “55” highlighted, 'cuz that was the national speed limit?”
It’ll be kind of funny trying to explain how the speedometers only went up to 85 for several years. The manufacturers were afraid congress would pass a law because some folks thought having a speedometer that went much higher than the national speed limit would encourage speeding.
~~Baloo
I must’ve drunk 850 gallons of Funny Face drinks; my insides are permanently stained. The original lineup included Chinese Cherry (my fave) and Injun Orange; changed to Choo-Choo Cherry and Jolly Ollie Orange.
I sent in $5 and a bunch of empty packets for a Goofy Grape wrist watch, which turned my wrist green.
When I was in elementary school, one of the fad toys was green slime in a trash can. I dropped my slime into some sand and was heartbroken.
There was once a Grinch Halloween special with a character named “Ukariah” (sp?). No one except me and my sister remembers this.
There are also Charlie Brown holiday specials that never get shown anymore - the Thanksgiving one, in which Charlie Brown serves popcorn, pretzels, and jelly beans (where were the parents?) and the Easter one, in which Marcie cannot figure out how to make Easter eggs. She breaks the eggs into boiling water, puts them in a toaster, etc etc. No one remembers these either!
…the following items have not come up:
MOTORCYCLES
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Had to be kick-started. Ever try to kick-start a big Harley on a cold morning?
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Had no turn signals. And the one headlight was feeble.
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Had no disc brakes. Some bikes’ brakes were so weak, you needed nearly as much space to stop as a small car did.
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Every engine was either a single or a twin.
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Except for BMWs, every bike used a chain.
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Only outlaws rode bikes (or so the common wisdom went). This changed forever when Honda came out with their small bikes advertised with the slogan, “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda.” This was around 1962. After years of owning either a Harley or an Indian or a Triumph or a BSA, my Dad bought a Honda 200cc street bike in 1963 (or so) and remained loyal to Japanese bikes till he died (except for a one-year fling with a BMW in the 70s).
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Every bike was a street bike. Yamaha changed this in the 60s with their small-displacement, big-geared dirt bikes. Dad bought a small, yellow Yamaha dirt bike in '65 that would haul him up nearly any hill that was less than vertical.
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From the 60s to the 80s, you could buy a bike with a two-stroke engine. (Like Dad’s yellow Yamaha.) (Besides dirt bikes, they were popular with the high-speed crowd. The Yamaha 350cc two-stroke street-legal racer was one of the most popular bikes ever sold.) Then the guv’mint said, “They cause too much air pollution,” and bikes went back to four-stroke engines. (In 1973, IIRC, Suzuki sold a bike with a rotary engine, just like Mazdas used to have. It did not sell well.)
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Almost all bikers were white men.
AMUSEMENT PARKS -
Almost every park had just one roller coaster. If it had two, the second coaster was for kids only.
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Nearly all roller coasters were wooden. (Notable exception: The world-famous Coney Island Cyclone has a wooden track, but a steel structure.)
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No roller coaster was more than 100 feet tall till 1973, when Six Flags Over Georgia built the Great American Scream Machine, which was a whopping 105 feet tall. (At Kings Island, Ohio, they just opened Son of Beast. At 218 feet, it’s the tallest wooden coaster in the world. And it has a loop.)
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No roller coaster went upside down till Knott’s Berry Farm built the Corkscrew in 1975.
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Amusement parks were located either at the beach or at the end of trolley lines or both, like Coney Island.
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Each ride required a separate admission or ticket for each ride. But it usually only cost a nickel or a dime.
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Beer was sold at most parks.
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Men went to parks wearing their best clothes, in shirt, tie, slacks and polished leather shoes. Women wore dresses.
BASEBALL -
Before 1961, there were only sixteen major-league baseball teams. (There are now thirty.)
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Before the Dodgers and Giants moved to California, the western-most teams were the St. Louis Cardinals and the St. Louis Browns. (Both St. Louis teams played in the same stadium.) The southern-most team was the Washington Nationals (AKA the Senators.) (Or perhaps the Cincinnati Reds was the southern-most. What are the respective latitudes for Cincinnati and Washington, D.C.?) (The St. Louis Browns were a terrible American League team that eventually left the city and became the Baltimore Orioles.)
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Teams traveled by rail until 1958. Jet travel is what made coast-to-coast baseball feasible.
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People wore their best clothes to ball games. (What did they think it was, an amusement park?)
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At one time, no stadium had lights and all ball games, including the World Series, were played during the day. People would listen to the games on the radio at school and at work. The radio announcers became as well-known as the players.
MISCELLANEOUS
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Our first VCR had no remote control.
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We once had a party-line telephone. Our neighbor’s phone sometimes rang as much as ten times in one day.
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The first digital watches had LED displays. You had to push a button to see the time. And that was ALL it did. No alarm, no calculator, no stopwatch, no day-and-date, no storing phone numbers, no TV remote control.
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Shoes were either leather or canvas, with either rubber or leather soles.
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In the 60s, my grandparents lived in a house that did not have an indoor bathroom. They bathed in the kitchen with a metal tub filled with water heated on the gas stove. The toilet was outside. Water came from a well pumped by a windmill.
Anyone remember the Bowery Boys (and the many previous incarnations, going back to the movie and play “Dead End”?)Then what were “Slip” Mahoney’s and “Sach” Jones’ real names (Not Leo Gorce and Huntz Hall, but the names of the Characters)? Bonus points for BOTH of “Slip’s” middle names.
Leo Gorcey’s character was Terrence Mahoney, and Huntz Hall played Horace Debussey Jones…
**
Wasn’t the Corkscrew at Magic Mountain?
uh - make that Terrence Aloysius Mahoney… came to me in a flash over lunch…
Zenster You’ve forced me to do something I detest…CHEAT.
Are any of these Mel Blanc contributions the two you want?
Woody Woodpecker’s laugh?
The voices on Cobwebs and Nuts ? Mygawd. This was 1933!
The roles on Benny’s show: The “Si-Sy-Si” Mexican ?
Professor LeBlanc?
Polly the parrot
But surely Fred Flintstone has been the most heard, as Mann Slaughter said.
Roller skates that clamped to your street shoes and were tightened with a key (that was always getting lost).
Cherry coke.
Pepsi with peanuts in it.
Wooden yoyos with waxed strings.
Harley Davidson and Indian motorcycles with the gear shift on the tank. Indian spelled it ‘Motocycle’.
1955: the first Chevy V8. 283 CI.
Blatz beer (are they still around?)
Joe Stalin: considered the worlds biggest asshole.
Persimmon pie and sassafrass tea.
Serutan. Natures spelled backward.
Iodine applied to road rash.
Jeeps - the REAL ones made by Willis for the Army, not the yuppiefied wannabe-mobiles of today.
‘Poppin’ Johnnies’ Two cylinder, John Deere tractors
Girls wearing chantilly lace and pop beads. They ain’t been no prettier.
Cinarama. ‘Giant’ with Liz was probably the best of it.
3-D flicks.
The Three Stooges, proving that immortality exists!
Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Lightning Hopkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Fats Domino, Muddy Waters, Stringbean, Grandpa Jones (the original one) Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Kitty Wells, Lena Horn, Woody Guthri (This machine kills fascists), and far too many more.
I CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE OF THIS FREAKIN’ NOSTALGIA!!! Curse you, Baloo!
Ook! I hate to do it, because I enjoy your posts, filthy, but this is the Straight Dope board…
You are correct that 1955 was the first model year that Chevies had V-8’s; they were 265 in.³. The 283 appeared with the 1957 model year.
You are right!
Was so busy remembering that I forgot some details. A common affliction for old farts like me.
When I finally get alzhimers, it won’t matter. Nobody’ll be able to tell the difference.
Thanks for the touch-up.
I mentioned this thread to my mom, who is a boomer, and she remembers:
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Wringer washing machines
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Bottles of Pepsi for five cents (that were bigger than Cokes, if she remembers correctly).
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That Ajax commercial where the woman is singing “Ajax, the foaming cleanser…” while she’s cleaning out the toilet. (Comment: Perhaps I’m a bit of a grump, but I don’t sing while I’m cleaning out the toilet. Maybe “Whistle While You Work” would help.)
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Going to school on Monday, and everybody having seen Ed Sullivan the night before.
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Going to a big teen protest after the local radio stations pulled The Beatles off the air for being too subversive, or something.
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Everybody finding an excuse to go visiting when the first TV set came into the neighborhood.
DKW wrote:
Do you mean PC-DOS, or <shudder> DOS/VSE?
'Way back when, when you said “DOS” to a computer professional, you always meant DOS/VSE, which was one of the main competing operating systems for the IBM Mainframe.
Anybody remember IBM mainframes? They sat on special raised floors through which their miles and miles of cabling ran, and had to be in special temperature-controlled rooms. Their instruction set had no stack. “Disk drives” were special luxury items used to “spool” outgoing printer data so the computer could be free to do other things while a print job was going on. The notion of putting actual FILES onto a disk drive for permanent storage was ludicrous – everybody knew files were stored on punched cards or paper tape.
Furthermore, these disk drives were the size and shape of a washing machine, and the actual disk packs looked like ceramic birthday cakes. If you were clever, you could program the read/write arm of the disk drive to move back-and-forth in such a way that the whole disk drive would lurch forward, as though it were walking. Late at night, you and your buddies could hold disk drive races.
Lorenzo Jones, Just plain Bill, Young Widow Brown, and the other radio soapers that my grandmother was addicted to.
Fox shotguns
Plowing with a mule (I’ve done it).
Drugstore soda fountains.
Nash automobiles, and Studebakers that you couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going.
First 200+ mph on a motorcycle at Bonneville: Triumph streamliner. Sorry, I forget the year.
Vincent Black Shadow.
Cushman motor scooters. They were all over the place.
Also little, fat-assed Vespas. These are still around.
Whizzer Motorbikes. You could get a kit to convert your Schwinn or Coloumbia.
Pot heads were called ‘Vipers’.
Horrer flicks had dismal special effects, but we loved them, anyway.
Monroe and Mansfield. One OD’d and the other lost her head.
David Bradley garden tractors, the fore-runner of Troy-bilt.
Dynamite available by the stick at feed and some hardware stores.
The debut of MAD. It was just another comic book, but what, me worry? We loved it, our parents hated it. Has anything changed?
Flat tops and duck tails, and Wild Root Creame Oil.
“Wash yer duds with Super Suds!”
“Nine out of ten doctors who smoke prefer Camels.”
Coffee, cigarettes, masturbation will stunt your growth.
Dipping up a big drink of water out of a stream without worrying about pollution.
Now, I hope I can leave this alone.