Of all the things I could list one stands above the rest:
I was in Germany in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down- I had just graduated from high school that summer and a bunch of my friends and I piled in the car and drove to Berlin…some things change the way you see the world forever.
Postage stamps costing 3 cents. They were purple.
Ditto 3 cents for a half pint of milk at school. For another penny you could get chocolate, but my mother never let me have it.
Somebody down the street got a television. We wanted one, too, but Mom said they would be better and cheaper in a couple of years. She was right on that.
“Duck and cover” air raid drills in school. Fallout shelters. Mom said both of those were silly, because if an atomic bomb fell on us, the former would be of no use, and you wouldn’t want to come out of your shelter afterwards anyway.
Elvis - Teddy Bear #1.
Cars from the '40s still on the road.
Electric busses.
Cars came standard with “three on the tree”.
Panel trucks.
Milkmen.
Door to door salesmen (Fuller Brush, Electolux, etc.)
School/Business had windows that opened.
Inkwells.
School clocks run buy compressed air.
Death of Marilyn Monroe.
Do Wop music.
Every so often finding a fertile egg in your dozen.
Fizzies.
Flash Gordon.
Yeah… That was YOU! LOL… I remember making it from Kansas out to LA when I was in college, driving my g/f home. We went to Disney Land, while I was there, and went on “Small World” … I was SOoooo confused! I’d never Been to Disney Land, but This ride… and That Music, that stuck in my head, that was Soooo familar… Deja Vu’? … then Suddenly remembering having seen it at the World’s Fair. The SAME World’s Fair where Mama Bell Rolled out the Concept of Push Button Phones! With a Big display to show people how much faster and easier it was to dial with push buttons, than with the rotery …
ah… back in the days…
Thought of a few other things:
[ul]
[li]Clackers - these things [/li][li]Land of the Lost - Mashall, Will, and Holly! And don’t forget Cha-Ka and the Sleestaks![/li][li]Otter pops[/li][li]Bicycles with banana seats[/li][li]Gas rationing lines - sold Kool Aid to the drivers lined up on my street for the neighborhood gas station[/li][li]Library bookmobiles[/li][li]Soft drinks in glass bottles[/li][li]Lemon Twisters[/li][li]Eager Beaver Reading Club[/li][/ul]
My first thought: Tom Seaver was on “Captain Kangaroo”? 
Was The Well of Loneliness on the reading list?
I remember FOOD STICKS snacks
Fruit Float by Libbey’s (some kind of jello concoction in a can)
I barely remember Neil Armstrong walking on the moon
I remember the Dating Game
I got to thinking about this thread yesterday, and remembered when The Mickey Mouse Club premiered in the fall of 1955 (I was four years old at the time). Of course, they put it on opposite Howdy Doody. Prior to that time, I was blissfully unconflicted at 4:00 in the afternoon (or whenever it came on); I just watched Howdy Doody. But I remember my heart sinking after that first time watching Mickey Mouse and then telling my mother that now I wanted to watch Howdy Doody, and learning that Howdy Doody was over and that from now on I would have to make a choice between the two! The burden on my four-year old psyche was very heavy indeed!
b. 1971
Okay, these are mostly lite (tastes great, less filling) memories from when I was a small fry:
I remember being frustrated that no one besides Big Bird ever saw Mr. Snuffleupagus.
Land of the Lost was so cool.
Candy cigarettes … I wasn’t allowed to get them, though.
Having only three channels–and no remote.
Oh, and elementary-school-specific memories:
Copied worksheets; the print was a blotchy purple. I think the correct term is mimeograph.
Friendship pins made of safety pins and three-pronged plastic beads.
Technology memories:
I remember the first computer I ever saw. One of my (much) older brothers had it; it used cassette tapes as media. And I think I played Pong on it.
Atari PacMan
And when I started driving, I remember gas was well under a dollar.
Let’s see how far I can go before giving away my age:
My first post.
(big time gap here)
Losing my virginity.
My first beer.
When being a geek was nerdy.
When car clocks started working.
When Jupiter had 12 moons.
When every guy I knew had a crush on Valerie Bourti, uh, Bournoulli, uh, the younger sister in *One Day At A Time *
Helping my dad run his ditto machine. And thinking they smelled good. (He was a prof at a small college.)
When gasoline smelled good.
When color TV was a big deal.
Wishing we got UHF so we could watch Ultraman
Armstrong landing on the moon. And wondering why adults seemed so amazed.
Eating at McDonalds for the first time, and asking what 2001 was.
Howdy Doody
Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation
Eisenhower’s first inauguration
Milton Berle in drag
First stereo LPs
Milk delivery trucks with big blocks of ice
Our 1952 red Nash Rambler convertible
Windshields that were divided in the middle
Old women wearing all black, with buttoned shoes
Live TV
Shoe laces that kept breaking
Eggs with 2 or 3 yolks
Washing machines with wringers
The first supermarkets
Elvis on Ed Sullivan
All the old '50s sci-fi movies
Men always wearing hats
Women getting all dressed up (heels, hats & gloves) to go shopping downtown
Women’s hats with veils and feathers
Thinking 1960 was way in the future
Every woman being compared to Marilyn Monroe
Beatniks
The first polio vaccines
Our b&w TV with a 14" round screen
TV sets that had magnifiers in front of the screen
The first color sets
My 3rd grade teacher getting drafted for the Korean War
Sinking of the Andrea Doria
Streetcars
Wooden escalators
Elevator operators
Black blackboards
Poodle skirts & bobbie socks & white bucks & DAs & saddle shoes
The Pledge of Allegiance without “under God”
Telephone party lines
Needing an operator to call long distance
The first freeways
Computers that filled an entire building
Getting 4 shopping bags full of candy for Halloween
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
Bucky Beaver
All-white Miss America pageants
All-white sitcoms
Original Mickey Mouse Club
Opening of Disneyland
Newsreels and cartoons at movies
Grace Kelly’s marriage to Prince Ranier
Live TV commercials
Fuller Brush salesmen
Forced school desegregation in the South
The USSR invading Hungary
Buster Brown xray machines in shoe stores
The entire universe consisted of the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies
Jupiter had 12 moons, Saturn had 9
3-cent stamps
Seeing a double feature movie for 25 cents
Mary Martin as Peter Pan
The House of Wax, in 3D
Cinerama
The $64,000 Question
Indian head pennies, buffalo nickels and mercury dimes in pocket change
“Gay” meant happy
I’m only a couple of miles from there.
Ok, go back to your thread now.
Being at the hospital to have my tonsils removed, just before I started school. I had a “Metal Men” comic book.
Seeing my grandmother sitting on the edge of the tub, making strained sounds. Later, when I went to use the bathroom, I saw feces in the tub. I never said a word about what I had seen, and I was too young to know that her mind had been going bad for several years.
My first day of school. No one told me where I was supposed to go (i.e., which bus to get on) after school let out. I was walking aimlessly crying my little eyes out. A friend of my older brother saw me, and hustled me to the right bus. Why my brother or older sister didn’t, I never knew.
My older sister waking me up to tell me that “Senator Kennedy’s been killed!” I was only 7, and had no idea who Senator Kennedy was.
My fourth grade teacher didn’t show up for class one day. A classmate and I walked over to the office after about a half-hour and said, “Our teacher hasn’t shown up yet.” The office staff said, “We know.” The principal sat in and subbed that day. Our teacher (close to retirement age, and the absolute meanest teacher I ever had) had had a stroke and died six weeks into the school year.
The transistion (as the result of forced busing) between 4th and 5th grade. We went from about 80/20 White/Black ratio to 70/30 Black/White ratio. I also remember my older brother telling me he’d prefer I sit with other White people on the bus, and one time he came over, took me by the arm and re-seated me because I was sitting with a Black person.
Doing what my uncle called “rambling around old houses.” Legally, I think it’s called “breaking and entering.” At the least it was trespassing, and probably burglary.
Riding on the tractor with my uncle, as we would tow his boat three miles to the river to go fishing.
I do not remember the first moon landing. My uncle and I were probably fishing or rambling around old houses.
My sixth-grade teacher asking the class, “Do you know what earth-shaking event just recently happened?” None of us knew. The answer: Khrushchev had just died. Don’t know what that was so “earth-shaking” then, though. He had been out of power for years. Regardless, we were all to young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, and had no idea who he was.
In the seventh grade, while standing and reciting a poem in front of class, my underwear fell off (there was a reason), slid down my pants leg, and ended up around my shoe. The classmates that could see what happened absoluted erupted in howling laughter. I continued with my poem, and when finished very discretely leaned over, picked up my undies, balled them inside my hand, then tossed them inside my desk when I got back to it.
Cartoons like He-Man, Silver Hawks, She-ra, Wuzzles, Care Bears, Rainbow Bright, and ThunderCats.
Being nearly crushed and hyperventilationg by my mom on Christmas Eve b/c i kept sneaking out of my room and damn near caught my parents putting presents under the tree. She pinned me down while my dad finished the presents and stuff.
Getting a quiz back in computer programming class where i received a score of -1/10. Yes that’s a negative since i got -5 for bad handwriting.
[slight hijack]
In addition to the earlier memories I posted, here’s an interesting one that I think will transcend age, at least for some of us.
Remember that feeling at the beginning of the school year, like the year ahead was full of exciting unknowns? (I know, I’m a geek.) I miss that feeling.
[/slight hijack]
I remember one morning, sitting in my first grade classroom, when a woman (possibly the secretary from the main office) stepped in and asked the teacher if she had “heard the news”. Mrs. Gaskall replied, “Yes, it’s terrible, isn’t it”.
At recess, I saw the secretary, and asked what the news was. She told me that President Kennedy had been shot. I was saddened to hear this, but only marginally so, because if I had previously thought at all about President Kennedy, I had thought of him as being back around President Washington’s time.
I remember the next three days watching the TV coverage of the assasination and the funeral. I remember watching the cassion with the casket being drawn by horses in the funeral procession. I remember the riderless horse. I remember the New York Philharmonic orchestra playing a concert to an empty Carnegie Hall. I rember watching a news piece about President Harding’s body being taken back to his home state by train, stopping at various points along the way. I remember the Herblock cartoon of the Lincoln statue with his face in his hands.
I remember the grief of the nation.
It didn’t blow up. It was just a minor accident.
Slight hijack here, but my brother was mentioning something that the first George Bush and Jimmy Carter were the masterminds of his assassignation (SP?). Is this true? Can anyone speculate?
“When being a geek was nerdy.”
Sorry to disillusion anyone, but it still is.
I remember:
“The following program is brought to you in living color” (cue the peacock).
Bullfights on television
Beer cans that had no pulltab. You had to have a church key to open them.
“Live…from Miami Beach…its the Jackie Gleason Show!” My dad thought the June Taylor Dancers were the hottest thing on TV. He was probably right.