Yeah, my Mom had a clicker - it went to a maximum of $20, 'cause of course groceries would be less than that!
I remember the sarcastic phrase “That, and a dime, will buy me a cup of coffee.”
You’ll certainly never hear that at Starbuck’s.
TV Guide would tell you if a show was a repeat.
Here ya go:
And the grapefruit was so bitter you covered the halves with sugar before eating them the next day!
Oh, yeah.
I had one of these, back in the early '70s. Used it all the time.
He’s talking about one of these.
I used to have one.
I’ve got you all beat: I had to do all that addition in my head.
That must give you quite the feeling of power.
TV Guide being digest-sized with localized listings.
(They stopped in 2005.)
The TV Guide was for moneybags who could afford 25 cents a week. What we called TV Guide was about the size and thickness of a comic book and was tucked inside the funny pages of the Sunday paper.
When I was in Grade 5, I had a teacher who wanted us all to be able to do mental arithmetic. Every morning, when we walked into the classroom, there would be a few arithmetic problems on the board that we were supposed to figure out until/while class got going. Pencils and papers were not allowed; your desk had to be clear of all materials. And once the national anthem and the morning announcements were over, he would ask us what the answers were to the problems on the board. He chose members of the class at random, so you had to be on top of your game.
No matter how much we grumbled about the daily exercise in mental arithmetic then, the lessons learned have served me well in the many years since. To this day, I can do arithmetic in my head, including such things as figuring out roughly what today’s grocery tab will be as I collect items in the store, and calculating sales taxes on top of the advertised price of goods. In other ways, it has also helped me calculate probable pays from the odds displayed at the horserace track, and it has come in handy at the crap table.
Being able to do mental arithmetic is a good skill to have.
I thought of this when I was creating my yearly Christmas picture card. Download the pictures from your phone, pick out a card and plop the pictures in the spaces. The cards were at my door 3 days later.
When my mom did this in the 60s she had to start the process in October. She’d buy film and flash cubes for her Kodak Instamatic. She would use the whole roll of film because she didn’t want to waste it. You could always count on the flash cube flying off the camera at least twice. Then she’d bring the film in to have it processed. Two weeks later she’d pick up the pictures, decide which one was going to be on the card (at this point there had better be one that looked good or the process would have to be started all over again) and then bring it back to have the cards made. Another two weeks and she’d have the cards. AND she had to do all of this while hauling 3 little kids around WHEN she could find a ride, because she didn’t drive at that time! But she did it for quite a few years.
Us too, I was always puzzled that people bought the TV Guide when a perfectly fine version came in the paper. I remember marking the shows I wanted to watch and arguing with my sister who wanted to watch That Girl reruns instead of Star Trek.
Sadly, child and domestic abuse was known and talked about, but never reported, even by teachers.
I’ve talked about this before. We’d go to school with obvious welts and bruises, and the only thing asked was “What you did???”. Sometimes the answer was “Nothing” and we’d all nod in understanding. Sometimes it was that Dad came home drunk and beat everyone. Again, we’d all just nod and just say Oh.
I was told I was lucky because my Dad only used his dress belt on me, while others talked about being whipped with cowboy belts, a razor strop or sometimes fists.
One of my friends came to school with a broken arm and gave some story about how he broke it. Rumor was his Dad broke it. Again, silence from everyone.
When I asked my Dad why he didn’t drink, he told me, “You want me to come home and give you dirty lickin’s like the other Dads?”
My Mom would spend hours on the phone with my Aunties or sit on the steps with our neighbor listening to their stories of their husband’s abuse.
She’s tell some of the story to my sisters, and they would in turn talk about how the neighbor children got it even worse when their Dad came home drunk, which was often.
We had milk delivery through most of my childhood. We had an insulated box outside our back door (which meant the milkman had to go through the breezeway (between house and garage), down a walkway to the back door, and up to steps to the box. Several houses in our neighborhood actually had a little compartment, about table height, built into the house: the milkman would open the outside door, swap out the bottles, then you could open the inside part to bring the milk inside. That would be useful nowadays for small packages!
The houses in question were all built in the 1950s.
As far as stuff someone younger wouldn’t recognize:
- True dial phones (as recently as 25 years ago, we had to pay MORE per month to have touchtone service, which was considered silly even then as the phone company saved on equipment).
- Phone books, directory assistance, and operators
- Long-distance calls (not sure if any place charges extra for that any more)
- Hell, land lines: we maintain one, but my daughter doesn’t have one at her apartment.
They are indeed!
I don’t have a landline anymore, but my cell carrier gives me free long distance in all 50 states. I have to pay for international calls.
My land line (as well as my cell) has been doing that for years.
One of the things I don’t miss is trying to properly allocate charges for the month’s phone bill among multiple housemates; let alone among multiple housemates plus the farm business, including with in some cases both farm and personal calls being made to the same number.