I’m doing this nowadays ever since I cut the cable, and still want to watch local broadcast stations with a digital antenna. The noise is annoying in a different way.
That’s why double albums would have Side 4 on the back of Side 1. And triple albums (like the $2 Warner Brothers samplers) had Sides 1&6, 2&5, then 3&4.
eta: Oops, didn’t see that Railer13 had mentioned that.
Well, I can add that I gave my wife a flat 12x12" present for our 33 1/3 anniversary, and she didn’t get it.
Drunk driving was OK, sort of. I mean, everybody agreed it was dangerous, but people didn’t criticize each other for it, because it could happen to anybody. “Don’t call somebody out for driving drunk, because next time, all the fingers could just as well be pointing at you!!” Somehow the idea that we can all opt not to do it just didn’t occur to people. The deaths and injuries and damages were a shame and all, but what could we do? Sometimes it happens!
Thanks to MADD for this bit of horror getting changed. Some drunk driving certainly still happens, but we don’t normalize and excuse it, and that’s a big improvement.
I must be older than you. I remember when “One for the road” was a common expression. (Never said it myself, as I was way too young, but it was common enough in movies.)
Amen
MAPSCO books - one of those giant fold-out maps sectioned off into a spiral bound book. You had to follow the letters/numbers at the edges, once your route wandered off a particular page.
Were giant maps easy to use? No. (Especially not the re-folding part. I have vague childhood memories of my parents having EPIC roadside arguments about the damn map.)
Were the MAPSCO books better? Not really.
And don’t forget Charles Atlas!
And then there was a company which would cover a page with a couple of dozen ads for various novelties like joy buzzers, x-ray spex, etx.
We called it “the ka-chunk ka-chunk machine”.
My schools used mimeographs and ditto machines. My dad’s office used a thermal copier.
I remember the sea monkey ads, but these were ads for actual MONKEYS.
One of my college girlfriends (this was in the mid '80s) was from suburban St. Paul, MN, and when I’d go up there to see her, we’d head out to visit places in the Twin Cities. Her family had one of those map books for the area, which I found incredibly useful.
When I moved to Chicago in '89, I invested in a large fold-out Rand McNally map of the Chicago area, which again, was invaluable in the pre-Mapquest, pre-smartphone era.
There were still thermal printers around in my workplace’s offices when I started.
Smoking was everywhere. High school students who were old enough to smoke legally kept pushing for an area in the school to be designated a students’ smoking lounge
Weren’t there also ads for live baby alligators? Leave It to Beaver had an episode where Beav and Wally bought one and ended up giving it to a zoo or someplace before it got too big.
A very early (mid-1950s) issue of Mad had a parody ad section with an entry, “Live alligators! Surprise your friends! And enemies”.
Like this?
YES, thank you. And I should have also mentioned the one for a “dog in a teacup”.
It turns out the one I remembered was a scam: (Sorry for the clickbait on the second link, but it was the only image I could link to).
Now - back to the OP’s question…
Sitting with siblings around the radio listening to a serial. (Dick Barton, Special Agent and Lost in Space were favourites)
Listening to Radio Luxembourg’s top 20 in bed at midnight on a Saturday with headphones attached to a crystal set.
My china dishes came from a gas station.
Can’t tell you from personal experience, but I’ve been told 16 2/3 RPM was for spoken language records(?). Like the Charles Berlitz (Yes, the guy that wrote the Bermuda Triangle books) foreign language records – required no high fidelity.
Ugliest baby in the history of animation.
Monkeys? Hell, you could order war surplus rifles through the mail, at least until shortly after November 1963.
Those full service gas stations were staffed with friendly young men in white caps and coveralls, who also wore rings with blades on the inside. “Clean your windshield and check under the hood mister?” They did brisk business in replacement fan belts and wiper blades.
And if you stopped at one particular LA gas station, they’d flush out your crank case too.
Growing up in the (then) far suburbs, cars in the summer would get loaded with bugs. As in bugs on the windshield and in the grill. As a nerdy kid, I used to actually check out the front grill of our cars for cool butterflies, dragonflies, wasps, beetles and whatnot. There was almost always something noteworthy in there. Cleaning the dead bugs off the windshield was a regular task.
These days, with heavy modern pesticide use, I barely get a bug on the car. I commute an hour each way, every day through mostly exurban farmland, fields and towns and maybe once a week get an annoying splotch on my windshield where a bug smushed into it. Nothing like it used to be.
When I was 6, my brother went away to college in North Carolina. When we visited him, I saw ‘whites only’ water coolers. Had to ask my dad what that meant.
I am going to nominate whiskey for sale in the pharmacy. I saw this as recently as the mid-70s in Boston. They had half-pint bottles high on the shelf. I think this was a way to get around the blue laws at the time, i.e. the package stores were closed on Sunday. “For medicinal purposes,” ha ha.
Japanese beetles and lightning bugs (Fireflies).
When I was a kid, ladybugs were actually red and black! Not these stupid orange Asian things that invaded and displaced the good ones.