Crinolins, those stiff slips that made your skirt puffy.
B&W TV, with dials, no remotes.
Mimeographs
Candy cigarettes & wax lips
Jack LaLane on TV in the mornings.
Barbie dolls that didn’t have anything bendable, they could only move their heads, arms and legs. and there was no Ken yet.
Age: 47
Buckets on the floor because my grade school leaked in the rain.
The tang of formaldehyde from dissecting sharks on Dauphin Island in Mobile Bay, on a class trip in the grade school gifted program.
Cicadas all chorusing in unison in the dim summer evening.
Programming in GW-BASIC on my dad’s Tandy 1000 in his office in the basement. I couldn’t have been older than seven.
Seeing the sky glow green in among the dark gray clouds and knowing nothing could stop the tornado.
Being trapped in a dark Maid-Rite cafe that was already subsiding into the ground while the windows glowed blank white and the sky roared rain right on top of you.
The brown minivan with the sliding door, which was replaced by the red suburban.
Staying up too late reading Usenet posts and stumbling across spammed chapters of insanity from a novel called “The Trance-Formation Of America” at three in the morning when everyone else is asleep.
Big cable boxes with red LED channel numbers and channel listings on a sticker on the top of the box.
Derleth, 31
For anyone reading… make sure to add 10 years to everyone’s age or subtract 10 from Derleth’s
Damn. I honestly didn’t realize this was a zombie somehow.
Had an Atari 2600; I don’t remember how many joysticks I wore out. The home versions of arcade games were crap (Pac Man, anyone?), and yet we found them immensely entertaining. These days, the games you can play on PCs far outweigh arcade games in terms of complexity and graphics.
Followed it up with a Commodore 64, including a dot-matrix printer, and a turtle-speedDatasette tape drive for storage, followed up by a gigantic (but “much quicker”) 1541 disk drive. You could fit a whole 170 KB on a disk! These days, I can hold a lightning-fast multi-terabyte hard drive in the palm of my hand.
I remember a toy where you’d squirt a blob of goop from a metal tube onto your fingers, said blob being composed of a significant quantity of organic solvent and some other materials; you’d roll it around for a bit to get it to firm up, then you’d stick a straw in it and blow it up to make giant bubbles; the solvent would evaporate as the bubble expanded, resulting in a slightly durable plaything. Just found it: Super Elastic Bubble Plastic!
My dad worked for a medical supply company, so our homemade go carts were fitted with high-quality hospital gurney wheels: metal, with a shock-absorbing band of grippy polyurethane around the rim, and ball bearings at the hub.
I remember some sort of natural gas supply problem in Erie, PA in the mid 1970’s (prior to '77); our family turned the heat way down in the house, shut off the heat altogether to the bedrooms, and we all slept together in sleeping bags in the family room for a while.
Rotary-dial telephones. By the 1980s you could get touch-tone service for an extra fee, but my parents preferred to save money. At one point we had push-button phones that could switch between touch-tone mode and pulse mode (emulating a rotary dial phone). You’d use pulse mode to call up a long-distance service, and then switch to touch-tone mode to enter your account number and the long distance number you wanted to call.
Pumping the accelerator pedal on your car to set the choke and get a couple of squirts of fuel down the carburetor throat before you turned the key to start it (and then lightly tapping the pedal again a little after the start to get it to come down off of high idle/choke).
Age: 47
I was born in 75, but to add to some of the above:
Going down to the corner grocery store (which was actually in the middle of the block) and being able to buy stuff on credit (not credit card, just a ledger the shopkeeper would track, like a bar tab) as an 8-year-old. Not only that, but they’d even sell cigarettes to me when my mom asked me to run out and get her some. I think the latter seems particularly unfathomable in this day and age.
My grandmother’s milk, in inner city Milwaukee, delivered by a horse-drawn milk wagon.
Static on the radio when there was thunder nearby.
The man who delivered ice to people who still had non-electric ice boxes, giving us kids chunks of ice on hot summer days.
Mom getting dressed up, in heels and a hat, to walk to the grocery store, and the man who delivered the groceries later in the side car of his motorcycle. If Mom wasn’t home yet, he’d come in the back door, and put things in the fridge.
World War Two – blackout drills, recycling cans, gas rationing. After the war, block-long lines of ladies waiting to buy nylon stockings.
Most of what I remember has been posted but I will add:
Telephone requiring one to turn a crank and tell the operator to whom one wished to speak.
Gasoline at $0.20 per gallon
All these posts, all these years and yet no one has pointed out that “things you remember as a child” makes no sense. I can “remember things from when I was a child”, but I cannot “remember as a child”.
It makes perfectly fine sense to me and tens of thousands of other people. “I remember as a child” is a pretty normal construction for starting a sentence about childhood memories. Maybe the construction doesn’t work in your dialect, but it’s unremarkable in mine and apparently most of the other posters here.
Looks like even Googling “define as” lists it as a valid construction:
I remember air raid drills in school. And a city wide air raid drill during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Being taken to the auditorium to watch Mercury launches on 2 huge 19" B/W televisions on tall wheeled stands in front of the stage.
The smell of mimeographed papers.
Comic books had just gone up to 12¢.
The milkman brought your dairy products to your doorstep.
Walking to school once you got cleared by your parents to cross the street by yourself. Before that, they paid some 5th or 6th grade neighbor girl a quarter a week to walk you to and from school.
My dad’s 55 Hudson with a 3 on the tree and a deck under the rear window I could sleep on.
Dad’s 60 Dodge Dart with the push button auto tranny and fins on the rear fenders.
Hell, cars with fins.
Brylcream and Vitalis.
Double edge safety razors.
The little white dot in the middle of the b/w tv screen until the tubes warmed up.
Having to adjust the vertical hold on the same television.
Saturday morning cartoons.
Playing soldier.
Wall ball, curb ball, wire ball.
Sting ray bikes. The top of the line was a Schwinn Apple Krate.
Rowlf the Dog on the Jimmy Dean Show.
Topo Gigio on Ed Sullivan.
The Joe’s Bar sketch on the Jackie Gleason Show.
Sing Along With Mitch Miller.
Mom watching The Secret Storm and The Edge Of Night.
An old timer came around once a week on a flat bed truck that had a merry go round on it.
Good Humor and later Mr Softee came around.
You walked places and nobody thought anything special about it.
The whole class running to the windows to watch when a fire engine drove by.
Getting vaccinations at school. It was a relief when we could take them via sugar cubes.
The Twist
Locally produced children’s programming.
Cars with window glass, not safety glass
(yes, they were before my time - barely)
Wire wheels
In the desert, you had a canvas bag on the bumper for water - it would sweat water, and the evaporation cooled it.
Speaking of water and canvas: sleeping in canvas tents meant that you couldn’t touch the canvas - if you poked it you would start a drip.
(yes kids, the canvas had NOT been treated with waterproofing - and canvas was the only fabric which was possibly waterproof. Spray-on waterproofing was 30 years in the future)
B-52’s on ready alert (fueled and loaded for Moscow) were parked behind a single chain-link fence a few dozen yards from the public road. WPAFB.
Not surprisingly, given the location: “Duck and Cover” for nuclear war. Yes kids, just curl up under that flimsy desk and you’ll be fine!
Ink well holes in student desks.
Fluoroscopes in the shoe store and doctor’s office.
I will never forget coming home from school and my mom had a bought a brand new Nintendo for us. Mario Bros and duck hunt were god in those days. Also my first fitted hat that I stoke. Lastly my pair of larry johnson basket shoes my mom bought for me for seventh grade basketball. Name brand things were so important to me when I was a kid. Lol.
I remember many, almost most of the things listed so far,
I’ll add playing pinball, then video games and hanging out at the 7-11
standing in the coal bin and making sure the 5 tons of coal we ordered every October was loaded correctly and adding the door slats as the level rose toward the full mark
lighting the furnace in November, filling the stoker, sometimes twice a night if it was extra cold and once in the morning, taking the clinkers out of the firebox and putting them in metal 5-gallon buckets
The Atari Pong console
My first computer, commodore 64 and the game books full of programs in basic you hand jammed into the computer
the family car, a 71 International-Harvester Travelal
Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle”
Grandma and Grandpa’s green wooden screendoor with the spring that closed it and squirrels climbing & hanging on it cause Grandpa fed them
8-track player and in the car too!:eek:
5 tons of coal for one house?
Cars with roll down windows
Very few people had computers
Or cell phones
Or cable/satellite TV
Antennas on the roof of the house you could rotate with a dial inside the house
It being a big deal when you got a car with a CD player
School projects on floppy discs
Before my time, but still shocks people when I tell them I still use things like this
Electronics that have don’t have prongs slightly different sizes
Cloth covered cords on lamps
Houses full of asbestos and lead paint
30 years old
Earliest memory:
A goat going amok and fucking up my grandfather’s banana tree.
62 years old and most everything has already been covered.
On the less plesent side, I remember having the Measles and Mumps and CHicken Pox, and the worry over Polio, and being taken to get vaccinated (took my Mom and two nurses to hold me still; I did not and still do not like needles being poked into me) and running to get our neighbor because my brother was convulsin (he got better).
And now most of those diseases are gone or rare, and any anti-vaxxers are warned to steer clear of me.
But yeah, rotary-dialed phones and roll-down windows and how exciting (and frustrating) our very first color TV was and going to baseball doubleheaders and the first time I flew in a jet plane (United Airlines Caravelle) and the Chevy Bel Air my parents bought, and crying because Kennedy beat Nixon (hey, I was 6 at the time; I got better too).