Depends on what neighborhood, don’t you think? In my town, there hasn’t been a child abduction by a non-relative in . . . forever.
Same here. We have my grandparents’ graduation announcements from Blanktown’s* Colored High School. I can’t even imagine a town having two seperate schools because of racism.
*obviously not the real name of the towns.
I also have to agree about computers and the internet. By the time I was old enough to write long papers, my school had several computers and printers to use (if you didn’t have your own). It must have been really hard to slack off and wait until the last minute to do an assignment, way back when you had to leave your home to look things up and then write the paper by hand.
My dad likes to reminisce about the days when normal folks used to do jobs like cashiering. “Normal” meaning smart people who nowadays would have a professional, middle-class job, who’s verbal and mathematical skills are at or above average.
It irritates me when he goes on about this, because it sounds old-foggity and mean. But I think he’s also right, in a way. People who are smart, who could handle all the work that cashiers used to do, don’t go into these occupations any more because college is more accessible. Combined with the fact that technology makes the job easier (when was the last time your cashier didn’t use a machine to make change?) and you’re left with an industry dominated by folks who aren’t smart.
One thing about old timey racism is how incredibly PETTY it could be. You can’t go to this restaurant, we don’t serve your kind. You can’t ride in this section of the bus, your kind has a separate section. You can’t drink from a regular water fountain, your kind has a separate water fountain.
I mean, I can kinda understand racism, and looking down on blacks and not wanting to associate with them and having sections of town and different schools for different races and so forth, sectarianism of that sort is all too common. But separate water fountains? That’s just pathetic.
Similarly, people used to use cash much more frequently than many people now do. At one point, when a company issued payroll, they actually paid the week’s wages in cash (so that robbing the payroll actually netted you real money). People paid their rent and most purchases using cash. Now I get paid via direct deposit, pay bills via electronic funds transfers and pay for stuff via a credit card, so that it might take me a month or more before I’ve spent a hundred bucks in cash, even though I might have a couple thousand dollars in other transactions.
You know what really made my realize how petty and senseless segregation was? I saw a pitcher of an old military. The toilet consited of a large metal box with a dozen holes (guys would’ve sat back to back). One seat was colored red. Talk about petty and pointless.
It wasn’t that bad but it did require some experience. I worked in a supermarket back in the late 1980’s until 1991. Ordering was done 3 times a week and someone just walked around with electronic handheld ordering device and keyed in each product code that was listed on the shelf tag followed by the number of cases desired. When done, the device attached to a modem that contacted the warehouse to place the order. It took experience because you didn’t want to fill up the shelves because that was expensive. You had to know yourself the sales rate of every product. It still worked ok though. The system before that was just the paper version of that.
I recall when VHS was a fairly new technology, and it wasn’t uncommon to rent the VCR as well at the video store. Before they bought one, my parents rented a VCR and Wizard of Oz for my sister and I to watch when we were little.
I also remember that cable wasn’t available in our area until I was like 8 or so (I’m 27 now). That “age” I lived in as a kid seems so far removed from the one my kids live in now. There’s just so much more visual media available to them that’s hard to keep track of.
True. As a kid in the 70’s your televsion viewing consisted of a couple of morning shows (Captain Kangaroo, Great Space Coaster), some after school cartoons on UHF (Hanna Barbara, Warner Brothers), Saturday morning cartoons (the holy grail of kids tv prime-time), seasonal specials (Rankin-Bass, Peanuts), Sunday nights Wonderful World of Disney, and maybe Zoom or the Electric Company on PBS.
No vhs or dvd movies, no cartoon network, no nickelodeon, no disney channel.
YOU WATCHED WHAT THEY SHOWED AND YOU LIKED IT!!!
The lack of, then rareness of remote controls; I remember being so impressed that my well off in-laws had one.
Calculators; I remember when my Dad’s $200 was impressive. Reading old sci-fi where everyone uses slide rules while running an interplanetary culture really dates those stories.
Reading about the crusade against left handedness; I find the fact that people even cared to be bizarre.
Racism, of the level and extremity that it existed in the past.
Women being held as inferior, and forbidden to do so many things. Abuse towards them being acceptable. Even more, women being irrelevent and passive, save as a romantic interest.
You saw a what of a what?
A picture of an old military toilet :smack: .
Thanks for the childhood flashback. I’d wake up early Saturdays to watch the hell out of some awesome cartoons. My family usually watched Wonderful World of Disney as well (I forgot about that one!). And then, like you mentioned, we’d watch the same seasonal specials year after year.
It’s different now: Does your 3 year old want to watch Spongebob at 1:30 on a Tuesday? Well, if you don’t happen to have some on DVD, there’s almost certainly a block of episodes already on the TV. At the very least you could watch some clips on the internet. Besides, who cares, there’s a bunch of other channels with programming just for kids, including a network that’s nothing but cartoons!
Sure. I was thinking of neighborhoods that don’t have much of a crime rate at all to be concerned about - especially the suburban idylls that people seem to want so much to live in. When I was a kid (70s), nobody thought twice under those circumstances to let their kids run around outside all day, unsupervised. Thse days that just doesn’t happen, unless a parent wants to be pegged as irresponsible.
Now granted, another thing very different at that time was the sheer number of stay-home moms who could look out the window and keep an eye on things. I’m sure it was a comfort to my mom that if I screwed up, Mrs. Hogan down the street would tell her all about it. 
Not so weird for me since I grew up with it, but I bet there are folks here who would be a little baffled by phone numbers given as PEnnsylvania 6-5000, OLinville 3-3513, FAirbanks 5-9592, etc. Or how a party line worked.
Just how did they work? 
Was it like having multiple extensions in a house? Did everyone have the same phone number?
The way it was explained to me, all calls to people in the party line loop had to be routed through an operator, who would then ring the phone at the correct customer’s house. BUT - anybody who was in the loop could pick up their phones and listen in on other people’s conversations. (Now that I think of it, that’s probably the origin of the phrase “in the loop” for being informed.) I’m not sure if there was actually once outside number that went directly to the operator, though; maybe someone else recalls.
I lived in an urban enough area not to have to deal with this, but I had a college classmate in the mid-80s who was from a rural area and still had a party line at home.
To add more info–yes, it was similar to having extensions in the same house, but each number had a unique ring. For example, house #1 might have 1 long ring; house #2 would have 2 short rings; house #3 would have 1 long and 1 short, etc.
You had to train yourself and your family to only answer on your ring. At any time, you could pick up the phone and listen in on the other parties on your line. Even though it was considered very rude, people did it all the time.
When you wanted to place a call, you had to pick up the phone to see if it was in use before you could call out. Most places had a law (or at least company policy) that if you needed to use to phone for an emergency, such as calling the police or fire department, you could pick up the phone and state that you had an emergency, and the others would be required to hang up. Of course, abuse of this practice was frowned on, and in some cases penalized.
Party Lines were really, really odd and were being phased out when I was a kid.
We lived in the burbs and had our own line. But I remember visiting my grandparents who lived in the city. I ran to the phone to call my parents and when I lifted the receiver there were a couple ladies on the other end chatting away. At 7 years old I was thinking “WTF is going on? Is someone else in the house?” I listened in for a couple seconds then the ladies stopped and one of them said “Excuse me! We’re on the line right now!” I just hung up and backed away slowly from the phone. Then I ran to grandma and yelled “Grandma! Grandma! There’s people talking on your phone!”
She just responded with the “duh, it’s the party line” like it was common knowledge.
ZipperJJ said it for me. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get my mind around segregation. Everything I read and study indicates that it was a BIG FREAKIN’ DEAL when black people were allowed to go to school with white people. There were large quantities of people allegedly opposed to this. To the best of my recollection, it wasn’t even a unanimous decision on behalf of the Supreme Court.
That is just mind-boggling to me.
Porn. Used to be if you wanted to watch porn, you went to some dank and sticky noisome fleapit that reeked of jizz and lysol, and sat with a bunch of seedy old guys studiously avoiding each other {for the most part} while watching a battered old print of The Devil In Miss Jones. That and skin mags were your nekkid lady watching options - and forget nekkid men watching options. Now? Whatever you can think of you can probably get in a couple of mouse clicks: a veritable pornucopia of filth.