Tooth powder. Damn, I miss that stuff. We used to scrub off all the enamel right down to the pulp, and that’s the way we liked it!
The Thrifty Drug Store ice cream counter had single, double and triple scoop cones for 5, 10, and 15 cents respectively.
Their ice cream was good, too! There was a taste comparison done years ago, and the Thrifty brand ice cream beat out most of the premium brands.
Twice when I was a kid the family made the trek to Ohio to visit my mom’s family in a 1954(?) Ford station wagon – two adults, four kids, and a geriatric dachshund. With the luggage strapped to the roof and covered with an canvas tarp.
I saw an actual cig vending machine in a bar a few years ago.
Or Blue Chip Stamps.
Fotomat! Oh, kids these days will never know the agony of having that one roll of film when you met your favorite celebrity (e.g. Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor Who) disappear into the ether. And trust me, a free roll of film does nothing to damp the pain.
Briefcase Full of Blues. Being a live album, they couldn’t reshuffle the tracks to avoid the KA-CHUNK!!
Star Wars and other Galactic Funk by Meco was sheer agony to listen to on eight track. The Star Wars suite ran for about fifteen minutes and was interrupted right in the middle by a track change.
How many quarters do those take these days?
.
I remember when the machine at a local restaurant went up to 8 quarters! At the time I thought “Who carries that many coins in their pocket?”
I bought a Kansas album on 8-track. I grew tired of it and taped The Cars’ first album over it using a college roommate’s high-end 8-track deck. It was amazing- the change in tracks in the middle of the songs was nearly unnoticeable compared to the prerecorded albums.
A month or two ago, there was an ad in the free section of the Valdosta, Georgia Craigslist. It was for a Linotype, complete, free for the taking. I would love to have one as a decoration in my house somewhere but the cost of hiring people to move that thing for me would certainly be prohibitive.
BTW, the pics showed it was really not a Linotype, but an Intertype ( a competitor that arose after Ottmar’s patents expired).
You should have done it! I’ve moved several Linotypes at very minimal cost, mostly the cost of a rental truck and pizza for the helpers. Dunno if I’d want one in the house though. Lead and asbestos are not the best to have in the living room. Plus the machines smell like old grease and whale oil.
My machine was an Intertype as well. I could kill the thread by posting the list of 100 improvements that made the Intertype the better machine vs the Linotype, but I will restrain myself.
Filmstrips and the record to play the audio. The AV monitor got to advance the filmstrip and set up the movie projector. A coveted job!
It was 25, 50, 75 cents when I was a kid.
[Raises hand]
At my high school, the Chemistry Lab Assistants also had to be the A/V Patrol (I guess one kind of geek should automatically be all types of geek?).
But it was covetable…
Instead of a study hall, we got experiments ready and repackaged dangerous chemical compounds, but we also took those 16mm movie projectors to different classrooms and threaded them jusssst ssso…and it’s stuttering again, let me make that little loop of film a little bigger and… it’s Macbeth for the sixteenth time that month! (Seriously, I can quote almost every line, but that was okay, because I came to appreciate the play).
But the great thing is, we had golden ticket hall passes, and could roam wherever in our copious free time. Ahh, the joys of nerd-dom.
Oh my God, this. In 1996, my best friend and I got into a very heated discussion over one line in Gangsta’s Paradise and ended up calling half a dozen other friends to vindicate what we’d heard.
Also, making mix tapes with songs you’d taped off the radio, and cursing the DJs who talked over the beginning or the end.
Going back even further, when “The Sign” by Ace of Base came out, I didn’t even have a tape player, much less a stereo with two tape decks and/or a CD player so I could make mix tapes, but I was the only kid in my group who had a nifty little radio. We’d turn it on, tune it to KIIS FM, extend the telescoping antenna, and position it just right until we didn’t hear static. And when The Song was on, we called everyone over and huddled around listening, swaying silently to the beat.
My paternal grandfather died of TB back in the 30s. My father had visited him on his deathbed, and it was thought that I may have dormant TB. Somehow there was a misunderstanding about this, and I was told to NEVER get a chest x-ray, or it would activate the TB. I wasn’t until well into my adulthood that I got that straightened out.
I still have a sheet of them.
Anyone else remember bookmobiles? One stopped in my neighborhood once a week. Loved it.
(How did I miss this last week?)
The album cover or inner sleeve works only if me or a friend had bought the album - and even then, most albums didn’t have the lyrics. But the vast majority of popular songs were heard only on the radio. So my options were to hope that my songs would appear in Hit Parader magazine, or on sheet music in the music stores.
When the internet first became popular, the search engines were not nearly as flexible as today. (Remember Alta Vista?) But they worked great if you had a few words that you could put into quotes and it would search for those exact words. So if another part of the song was clearly audible, it was a perfect scenario for finding the lyrics to the rest of the song.
a black and white switch on your video game system…
what the initials “KMC” meant on the black and white tv dad pulled out of the garage sos you could play atari in your room
If we misbehaved at school, they took us to the headteacher, who hit us with a stick
One of the high points of the week was when the bookmobile came to the Darlington & Murray intersection, a three minute walk from my house.