Riding in the middle of the front bench seat between your mom and dad.
Squeezing 6 or 7 kids in a car to go to the movies. Seatbelts? Heh.
Speaking of which, holding your 3 y.o. sister in the car so she wouldn’t cut up. Car seats were for infants…
Riding in the back of a pickup truck to the beach. Dad probably had a fresh beer between his knees, because he could, plus…
No cupholders, except maybe in Grandma’s Cadillac. But there were cigarette lighters and ashtrays in the back to fiddle with.
Although, there were vans with truly comfy seats, curtained windows, and tray tables like an airplane.
And, hooking clunky speakers to your roll down window at the drive-in theater. Or your tray at the root beer stand.
Gosh, I must be* so old*. :rolleyes: At 26 years old I remember a decent amount of of these things from my own childhood. I’d still be called a “kid” by anybody over 50.
Considering my parents still use rotary phones and have a TV with push-buttons to this day (amongst many other examples) I suppose my childhood is a product of growing up with “old fogeys”.
They had to buy a push button phone at one point so they could get through prompters, but they just listen with the rotary phone and press the button on the push phone when necessary.
TV dinners: You had to wait about 30 minutes for them to cook, and they looked nothing like the package. The food was partitioned on an aluminum tray with compartments. You took your chances with Mexican dinners, particularly the refried beans.
Phone cords: They were typically about 3 feet long, and if you weren’t careful, you’d yank your phone out of the wall. You could get the long ones if you wanted to walk around while talking on the phone, but they frequently twisted up into a Gordian knot of curlicue cable. Never understood why they had to be coiled.
Typesetting and layout: Before desktop publishing, you had to get some machine to output wax paper strips of text and line them up on a master sheet with a straight edge. You then had to take each page of text to a dark room and have a floor-mounted camera take a negative. You then had to take each negative, tape them behind stripper paper, and cut away the paper over the text. You then had to opaque the spots so the printed version wouldn’t look like it grew mold. Then you developed a plate, mounted the plate on a printing press, stacked all the single pages into separate piles, and collate them in page order. Nowadays all you have to do is send a PDF to a machine and you’re done.
Having to manually enter the price of things into a cash register and then the cashier had to figure out the change himself. Oh, and looking up the sales tax on a card that was kept in a drawer under the cash register.
“Bubbeleh, that little laser pointer you have there? The one you got at the dollar store? When I was your age, that laser would have been bigger than my arm and cost a few thousand dollars. Also, there were no dollar stores.”
My first job in retail, when I was sixteen, I drove my boss crazy by not using the card. but Virginia had 4% sales tax, so it was easy: 4 cents for every dollar. All I had to do was remember at what point the cutoff was for cents, but that never changed.
Also remember: We Give Green Stamps!
Also: a pencil with an eraser point on one end and a brush on the other. What mysterious object could this be, I asked my son when I was cleaning out my mom’s stuff for her move and found one from her days as a secretary.
Actually having to get up (or having someone else get up) to adjust ANYTHING on the TV.
I was Dad’s remote control for many years.
“Boy, get up and turn the TV up.”
“Get over here and tune channel 5.”
“While you’re there, fiddle with the rabbit ears…no, the other way…better. Perfect. No, wait, it went to crap when you let go. Hang on to those antennas until the end of this scoring drive.”
A kid today if he/she were so inclined (somewhat doubtful) could pull up radio stations from virtually anywhere in the world on the internet.
But somehow that would be missing the station drift, static and the thrill of listening through the hash to a distant AM or shortwave station.
As a kid in northeastern Ohio, I could sometimes pull in a Dallas-Fort Worth station (at around 820 on the AM dial, as I recall). In fact, now that I’m remembering it, this was an NBC affiliate, and there was another NBC affiliate in another city at 830. So if conditions were right, I could tune between them and listen to the top of the hour news and get an echo effect on the newsman’s voice due to the geographical separation of the two stations’ signals.
And for a brief period of time in the early 70s, knowing whether your license plate was odd or even, so you knew if you could get gas that day.
And do you guys remember the flag system, where the station would fly a green flag if it had both [del]regular and unleaded gas?[/del]
EETA: faulty memory. As a kid, i thought that’s what it meant. Turns out it was gas for everyone. Yellow was gas for commercial vehicles only. red was no gas at all.
Oh my God. My father lived to collect S&H Green Stamps. Then he’d call us into the kitchen to wet the stamps and paste them in the book. (Zzzzzzz . . .) Then he’d bitch because he didn’t like the cheap crap in the redemption catalog.
