Every once in a while a meme returns to Twitter for a few days about things from your youth that today's youth wouldn't understand. The answers always seem to be things like dial telephones and stick shifts, which are kind of ridiculous. Kids know about these things because they see them in movies and TV. I mean, I understand all about sextants even though nobody uses them anymore.
The real answer needs to be something that's subtle enough that it never gets explicitly mentioned in period pieces. But those are hard to think of! They're mostly subtle enough that all of us oldsters have forgotten about them too.
For example, there's the sinking horror of boarding an airplane and discovering that your no-smoking seat is in the very last row of the no-smoking section. (Since smokers are concentrated in the smoking section, it means you're right next to a huge plume of concentrated smoke.)
But even that isn't very good. What we really need are things that were routine parts of your life in the '60s or '70s but were never important enough to think about or mention. They were like water to a fish.
This is surprisingly challenging. Any ideas, fellow oldsters?
Waiting until evenings or weekends to make long distance phone calls.
I remember vacuum tubes in TVs and the tube testers in the hardware store. I was in the Army during the early 70's doing repair work on missiles and launchers; the missile guidance systems that I worked on had vacuum tubes (called peanut tubes.)
That was my job as a teen in the '60s: Keep the TV working. That damn 5U4GB with the bad socket! I had to reach in the back, and wiggle the tube juuuuuust right, till I heard this sort of grinding glass sound, and the set would run till someone turned it off. I couldn't leave the house without "fixing the TV" or I'd catch it when I got back. Good times...
For the Brits on here:
The old currency - threepenny bits, half-crowns and ten bob notes.
Bus conductors who collected fares on the bus.
Corona soft drinks in recyclable bottles - including the flavour dandelion and burdock.
Strongly want to ask what the dandelion tasted like.
Starting a car in icy weather. It was an art to get the engine to catch a little and get a little warmed up then you let it rest a bit and then tried again. If you just turned the key and held it the battery would run down before the engine started.
Also, pumping the gas pedal to inject more gas into the carburetor. If you pumped the pedal too much the carburetor would "flood" and you would have to wait a while for it to evaporate till you could start the car.
Rolling the car window up or down with a hand crank.
Most cars were left unlocked.
When we were kids and our parents would drive us around we would sit on the floor in the back seat and play games. No seat belts.
At grade school for music class the nun would roll in a pump organ. She would sit at it and push foot pedals to pump air through this while she played songs.
Jump starting a car (manual transmission) by getting it rolling and popping the clutch.
My kids have done that.
School buses...
Wing windows. Who needs air conditioning?
My '74 VW Beetle cabin environment required the wing window in all seasons.
Airconditioners that you had to turn off in the dessert or the car would over heat.
Or turning on the heat in the desert to act as auxiliary engine cooling.
Re: Rolling the car window up or down with a hand crank.
Something I still do with my 2015 Jeep Wrangler.
WATS lines. Wide Area Telephone Service lines used to make calls all over the contiguous United States. I was a college concert promoter at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, from 1968 through 1971. We had four lines for the entire college. I used to wait until late night to call talent bookers on the West Coast.
A dime to insert in the March of Dimes poster with the slots to hold the dimes.
A penny for the gumball machine or peanut machine.
The phrase "I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts", back when a doughnut (now a "donut") cost significantly less than a dollar, instead of more.
Long Distance charges. Seriously, the entire world has a huge refund coming for that shit...
S&H Green Stamps. Top Value Stamps.
That 20-lb Sears catalog.
Those 20-lb phone books.
Phone books at all...
Having to have actual money on you if you went into a store.
Coal yards. (They also sold kindling).
Coin-op bagged-coal vending machines. No, I'm not kidding.
Soda in screw-top cans. (Super Coola!)
Fountain/cartridge pens with a wide range of colors were HOT in the mid '60s. Wonder if they've ever made a comeback? I bet the kids'd be all over that shit. Assuming they actually have to write anything down these days...
Re: Long Distance charges.
As late as 1991 when my father died I recall fretting over what my phone bill would be since I had lots of people to call in parts distant with the news. And good grief, when I was growing up there was a town just a very few miles down the road which was long distance because it was on some other phone exchange. Meanwhile up north in Charlevoix Michigan you only had to dial the last five numbers to call anyone in town since everyone in town had the same first two digits in their number.
I miss 10-10-321.
In grade school we used fountain pens, maybe from fourth or fifth grade on. What a pain. All my shirts were stained with ink. Ink came in little plastic tubes you would insert into the pen. To save money we'd try to refill them at home. What a mess.
Not having the internet made so many things so different:
-Now you have access to information about nearly anything (even really obscure stuff), but pre-internet, you had to either have reference books or go to the library.
-Now an immense amount of media from nearly every time period is at your fingertips, including books, music, movies, paintings, etc. But pre-internet, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to either listen to the radio (which was limited, and there were fewer radio stations) or listen to your own music collection, which, being a physical thing, was likely far more limited. Same thing with movies or books. You had access to a very small number of titles. Being able to see famous paintings was possible only if you had an art book or you went to the museum. And so on and so forth.
-So many things we do today using the internet were a lot harder: buying tickets (events, travel, whatever), finding phone numbers for services, making appointments, etc.
-Access to things like articles, op eds, depended on which magazines you subscribed to or which papers you had delivered to your door, again unless you went to the library, which not that many people did even then. So the range of opinions any one person was exposed to was much smaller, often limited to what your parents and friends said.
Waiting to get film developed.
having to change the film in a camera.
Slides.
slide racks.
Slide shows, replete with slides inserted backwards or upside down
Stereoscopes.
Super-8 movies
actual picture albums
dark room
light box
winding a watch (or clock)
dial up modems
film breaks during movies
transistor radios
You can load up by watching a few episodes of "Mad Men". Start with everyone smoking and drinking all the time, and stroking out around 60.
Candy stores that actually made their own candy. There was one downtown and you could smell the caramel halfway down the block.
1940 to 1972 -- the expectation of being drafted.
Copy machines producing negative images.
Detroit Iron -- got into a restored '66 Chevy. When it started up I asked "Is it supposed to sound like this?" It did.
Air mail, and Aerogrammes to save postage.
Alastair Cooke described overseas surface mail as letters being dropped into a ship's hold. When the hold was full, the ship sailed.
Pre-interstate, when all the highways were blue.
Nuns.
TV Guide was the popular magazine in the country during the early 1970s. In particular what everyone knew how to read was the page formatting and style.
So I'm thinking what'd be immediately recognizable would be 1970s page listings. You can see some here
https://www.facebook.com/tvgscans/
Trying to hot-rod the TV by opening the back, taking out the tubes and testing them on the tester at the drug store, and buying replacements for the weak ones.
Cleaning off the metal contacts on the tuner with alcohol to get better reception.
Rotating the antenna electrically using the bakelite box by the TV to get better reception.
(I inherited a 30' tower with a still working antenna from the 70's. Pulls in 50 channels and sub-channels, 42 of which are bearable--5 sub-channels for the locals PBS alone.)
Many show old shows, and for you SoCal types, "Perry Mason" is a gold mine/ time machine. Registrations on the steering columns save a lot of time for Paul Drake . . . Snazzy sport coats, driving a ragtop, always ready for a dame or a steak; Paul Drake: all that is man.
Also, everybody in Perry Mason’s and Paul Drake’s time kept a gun in their glove compartment and didn’t lock the car doors when they parked.
I've been rereading the Perry Mason books. Yeah, definitely registrations on the steering wheel, unlocked cars in the earlier ones. There was also the assumption that women had to manage "wolves", asshole men, at work.
I was 10 and under in the 60s. Your audience is freaking old. In the 70s... I lived in L.A. and got sore throats from the smog. Does that still happen?
And oil was 5% of the economy so when one major oil producer half way around the world turned down the faucet, huge economic disruptions resulted.
Reading books. Before the internet, reading four books a week was not unreasonable.
Black and white TV. Wiggling the TV antennas to get a better picture.
Star Trek and I Love Lucy on weeknights; Wild Kingdom and Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night.
Listening to the opening of Pink Floyd's "Money".
Slicks of heaven knows what in the harbor with maybe some boxes floating in it, or a half sunk barrel.
Your car had a grill on the front of it that was always stuffed full of dead insects, and sometimes a bird.
* Nylons --> pantyhose --> ???
* Hairspray/aerosol cans
* No instant replay or "chalkboard"
* Babysitting my little sister at age 9 or 10
* Using travel agents
* Hours on hold waiting to talk to some corporate entity
* Overhead projectors
* Gym uniform--mine was a polyester one-piece
* Waiting for a kind stranger if your car breaks down--or being the kind stranger--when no one had cell phones
* Jello qualifying as a salad (with or without the grated carrot)
* Mailing bill payments--and writing checks
* Keeping track of checks in that little register book
* Oranges with a wonderful rich taste
* Oranges being the most exotic fruit available
When I think back, what strikes me most is how much more time everything took. Pre-arranging to meet someone, somewhere, anxiety about missing them, trying to reconnect. Requesting information by mail, and waiting days or weeks to get it back. Having to go places in person to get stuff done. And having to work within fixed schedules way more.
Oranges no longer have any taste at all, aside from acid.
And whoever invented the empty banana, a thing that fills in the space where a banana should be, is an enemy of humanity.
Here in California I get oranges at the farmers market which are absolutely wonderful.
Just found this place which sells Gros Michel bananas. Ultra expensive, I’ll have to think hard about this. But I’ve wondered about their taste for many years, so maybe I’ll break down just once:
https://miamifruit.org/products/gros-michel-banana-box-pre-order?_pos=1&_sid=ef2eecd86&_ss=r
!
I remember the Gros Michel. It tasted like banana, unlike the Cavendish.
I am sorely tempted also, but I can't imagine ordering bananas.
If I'm ever in Florida, though, I'd go out of my way to find this place.
Freeway rest stops where the facilities were just noisome communal outhouses.
A husband-and-wife team of artists, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen - he's 92 now, she died a decade or so ago - became famous for their giant sculptures of ordinary objects. Many are of things still used - a shuttle-cock, an ice cream cone, a lipstick, a garden trowel.
But a few are of things that my children could not recognize when we saw them together: a typewriter eraser, a flatiron, a diaper pin.
Yow. I remember Oldenberg's stuff. This was the Brillo box school of art. The guy who actually designed the Brillo box was amused.
How about separate doors and bathrooms for colored people? There was a recent article in the Seattle Times answering a reader question about a sealed off entrance at the Moore Theater. It was the colored people's entrance. I'm sure you can find lots of these depending on where you look. I was at a university in the South some years back and noticed that they had student and faculty bathrooms. I was informed that they were originally white and colored.
I just found out this past year that the town I grew up in was a sunset town less than a decade before I was born. I was very surprised. I had never once heard it mentioned.
Way back when, soft drinks were made with real products. Vernors and root beer and ginger ale and others were made with real plant products. Not the artificially flavored water you get today.
When we were sick we would get hot Vernors as a tonic.
To keep track of your friends phone numbers you had to chisel them into large rocks by hand.
Collect calls with real operators. We watched a movie (War Games) with our kid recently where the Matthew Broderick calls from a pay phone and thanks the operator. My kid couldn't believe it was a real person and not Siri.
Can't believe nobody has mentioned taping a nickel or a quarter to the tone arm of a record player to power through all those scratches (or beer stains) on an LP. Or shoving a paper matchbook cover down the side of an 8-track to keep it from getting the slows (remember 8-tracks? Hell, remember paper matchbooks ?)
Taping music off the radio, so your favourite song would have a bit in the middle:
"Hey, watcha doin', man?"
"Shut up, man, I'm tapin' a song!"
I remember, when I was very young, that they used to show repeats on TV unedited. I can’t say for sure how universal this was, but at least for the holiday specials, I watched them every year and then starting around the mid 70s maybe, there seemed to be parts missing. I don’t know exactly when this started. Could have been ‘73 or ‘74 that things changed, but I was very puzzled why I remembered things that were not in the shows.
I’d mention to my friends at school that things were missing, but they’d just say, “I just saw that and there was no scene like that.” I’d again point out that it must have been cut out and they’d say, “No. They wouldn’t do that.” Of course they did do that. Apparently they used to put in 10 minutes of commercials per hour and this changed to 15 minutes. So they cut 5 minutes from most hour shows and 2.5 minutes from half hour shows. They figured no one would notice and apparently many people didn’t.
I’m too young to be sure that the other network shows were shown uncut when they were rerun on other channels. I suspect that originally they were shown uncut, but can’t be sure.
One other thing I remember is people would occasionally ask, “What are you?” or “Where is your family from?” Because everyone’s family was originally from somewhere other than America. It was just curiosity or a way to break the ice. And you’d rattle off some countries. Seemed like one of the most American things to ask.
Of course thanks to wokeness, we now know that it is in fact one of the worst, most racist things anyone can ask another person. And we are all better off for realizing this.
Getting out of your seat to change the channel. And related, smacking the TV and/or aerial around when it started to roll.
This one is regional, but turning your headlights on in the daytime whenever you go to downtown Chattanooga.
History class that stopped just before the Civil Rights movement. That's probably regional as well. My biology teacher spent 2 minutes on evolution and another 2 minutes on creationism.
White courtesy phones.
Courtesy.
1. Rushing to get to the bank before noon on Saturday to withdraw some cash. Otherwise, I'd have no spending money until Monday.
2. Looking in the morning newspaper to see what my stocks did the day before.
3. Not having anywhere to leave comments like this.
Paper straws.
Card Catalogs
A couple of months ago in Morocco I bought a can of soda and went to open it: by George, it had a pull tab. I showed it to some youngsters and they were astounded.
Defrosting the freezer. It was a major disruption in the kitchen, removing all the frozen food, putting a pan of hot water in there, replacing the hot water at least once, packing towels around the base of the refrigerator to stanch the inevitable flow of water from the melting ice. But it had to be done. Modern refrigerators are miraculous.
Also, party lines.
Typewriters
Gum. Chewing gum and bubble gum used to be everywhere. There were nonstop ads on TV, and infinite cultural tropes about what kind of person you were if you chewed chewing vs. bubble gum, and what kind of person you were if you told someone to stop chewing gum, etc. Not to mention the tropes about used gum wads being stuck to everything, or stepping in gum on the sidewalk. Gum is still around, but has basically disappeared from culture. Similar to smoking, except everyone remarks that smoking is not a thing anymore, and no one remarks on gum.