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?
Carrying paper maps to everywhere in your car
Yep. The big road atlas, plus a map for every city I moved to. Later replaced by Mapquest printouts.
I still have them and prefer them to the internet.
I was totally into the AAA triptick (sp?). I'd "help" my dad navigate on long road trips. I fondly remember the detailed local info printed on the back of the maps. All you'd ever want to know about Florence, SC or Augusta, ME. Good times.
Pulling a cold can out of the cooler after a long drive to your favorite camping spot, and realizing you forgot the can opener.
Related: When pull tabs first appeared, they detached from the can and made a huge mess of the camping spots, with the potential to cut your bare feet.
I’m slightly younger (born in 1976) but I remember earning stamps from the grocery store that could be exchanged for dinnerware.
That's a good one, because it meets Kevin's test of "not seen in movies". True, every once in awhile in an old movie, you might see an S&H Green Stamps sign. But they (and their competitor, Blue Chip Stamps) have basically been memory-holed by the culture.
Other than the Brady bunch episode about it. But that’s an exception that sort of proves the rule.
I remember having a deal with my mom when I was ten years old. If would ride my bike to the A & P grocery store a couple miles away to get groceries that she needed, I got to keep the stamps. And could save them up for something at the store.
We had Rainbo Bucks, from the Rainbo Oil gas station. No idea what you could get with them.
My favorite was a question from a new vinyl collector: “I bought this double album but one disc is sides 1 and 4 and the other is sides 2 and 3. Why?”
I will guess this had to do with because on many record players LPs could be stacked on the spindle with the second one holding above while the first one played. When the first side was finished the second one would drop down right on top of it and when that finished you'd flip it, then take it off and flip the first one.
Slicing the heck out of my finger opening the top of a can of coffee. But the fresh coffee smell was delicious.
I think I'm even older (b. '57) but I remember when some phone service (my maternal grandmother's) was via what was called a "party line" wherein more than one household shared the same number and each was subject to the other's use to have an open line.
Or when you might have to get multiple operators involved to make a long distance phone call.
Or when phoning Ohio was like calling the Black Pit of the Crab Nebula.
I was also born in 57 and I remember party line. We had one when we first moved from England to rural Canada in 1968. There was always someone who liked to evesdrop on other peoples conversations.
Also, alphabetic prefixes for local phone numbers. We were on the "pyramid" exchange, so the first two digits of our 7-digit phone number were 79. It was common to give your phone number as PYN-NNNN or PYRAMID-N-NNNN instead of 79N-NNNN.
Related: waiting to make a long distance call until 11PM when the rates went down.
WATS line. a telephone line;long distance service at fixed rates for fixed zones; an acronym for wide area telephone service.
Party lines were common in rural areas (at least in Atlantic Canada, where we used to vacation) as recently as the late 70s.
Walking around the neighborhood knowing you could step in a dog mess at any moment, because there weren't scooping laws.
And dogs would often just roam about, left to their own devices.
So would the kids. “Go out and play” and you did with no adult supervision.
You were actually thrown out of the house!
For those who could handle it, being seated in a plane close to (or in) the smoking section usually meant no crying children nearby. I know of at least two people who *asked* for smoking section even though they did not smoke.
Re "things from your youth that today's youth wouldn't understand"
Okay, I'll bite. The paucity of tattoos compared to now. I continue to be astonished at how common it is. On a recent PBS cooking show, one chef had tattoos on his fingers (and arm). Not for me, thank you.
Non portable phones?
The LACK of concern over NOT being "connected" 24/7
The FAITH you put in TV News anchors that they were telling you the truth
Radio................
The lack of having to pay for listening JUST because your prefer one style of music over another.
For all us Catholics in here - the ethereal mood created by the Latin Mass?
And how about this one? "Liberries". You walked to them (normally) went to the person at the desk she told you where to look. You perused a book before "borrowing it" and bringing it home for 2 weeks. It made you READ IT. IT was more important to you then
The amount of PHYSICAL EXERTION we put into playing? Now we wear out our thumbs???
Would Drum even conduct this poll if he had to mail out 100 envelopes with our names and addresses on it?
Please - we had Dewey decimal system and the borrowing time was 3 weeks 🙂
Bookmobile! Visited weekly with two friends; we'd maximize our reading by checking out books that all of us wanted to read, then trading during the week. The librarians were our friends!
Phonebooks? The idea that you could find the phone number of 99+% of all the people in a city in one (big) book seems very strange now. Young peolpe will have heard of them but probably don't understand how useful they were.
How rare foreign travel was. Very few people travelled internationally except in the military so general understanding of other countries was based on TV, newspapers, books and movies not first hand experience.
Phone books were in Terminator
the terminator came out almost 40 years ago.
AND the phone company would charge you extra to keep your number out. Actually, even crazier, it wasn't just people's numbers that were published but their addresses. Mind-boggling. Do they still list addresses in phone books (someone, somewhere must still be publishing paper directories, right, or have they completely vanished)? Say it ain't so.
And you had to pay to keep your information OUT of the phone book. I remember an additional monthly charge.
Adjusting the vertical control on the TV set to stop the the picture from scrolling up because of a weak signal - even though the rotor is pointed in the right direction.. (b. '61)
The thrill of rotating the antenna at 3am and discovering a station 300 miles away.
I love this one!
Screwing the adapter on to the two screws on your tv and throwing a switch on this little box to get pong/Pac-Man on your tv
Some of us use sextants.
Argh.
Ha Ha, gotcha - Blotter paper cover for your desktop workspace.
Carbon paper and white out.
With ‘onionskin’ when you had to make two or more copies. Correcting a typo on the carbons was a chore.
The smell of spirit-duplicated school handouts.
b. 1948
Or the smell of Xerox machines, that couldn't have been more suspicious.
perhaps you meant the mimeographs? The blue wax transferred to white paper using a lovely smelling solvent...
I remember that as nicer than the Xerox, which seemed like it was printed by the flash from an atom bomb.
Good one.
Oh, the good old days!
Back then men were rugged individuals free of government intrusion and you could feel good about your hot dog, even while you were pulling large hunks of hair and skin and god knows what out of it.
Or when half the cereal in the cereal box was somehow outside the bag.
And there were ashtrays on every surface, and large ones filled with white sand at just about every juncture for the convenience of the passerby.
Most cooking was lard based, and you thought nothing of some pal of your dad's giving him a couple squirrels he'd blasted half to bits, stuffed full of lead shot you'd spit out at the dinner table.
And everybody was drunk most of the time, and brain damaged, and there were huge numbers of 'developmentally challenged' characters roaming about and gathering around bus stops, people who looked like they'd been drawn by Robert Crumb, with remarkably various deformities. And the sky was a grey pall that left an oily film on you as walked outside, sometimes with little hard bits of apparently ash hitting you. And this was not the bad part of town, where the sewers could sometimes overflow in the rain with a huge mass of some kind of foam that blocked the street and which put my parents into a panic when we almost drove into it and they refused to say what it was.
Ash trays everywhere. As a kid getting accidentally burned by a careless adult with a cigarette — this happened to me and more than a few friends/siblings
Ink stains on your shirt from fountain pens, thus the handy plastic pocket protector.
Calculating the answer on a test using your handy slide rule.
hey, there's an online one if you need it....
http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/virtual-slide-rule.html
more useful than the online stapler...
One of the tubes in your television burns out so your dad pulls some out of the back of the tv and you go to the local grocery store where they have a machine that tests them so you can find the one that’s bad and replace it. You put each individual tube in to the correct sockets in the machine and turn the switch and a little gage told you which tube was ok, which was weak, and which was burned out. Then you told the clerk which tubes you needed and he opened the storage drawer and got you the tubes you needed. Then you would go home with your dad and replace the tubes in the tv and it worked again.
Many memories of that exercise.
My mom always called the TV repairman, who came out and did that for her.
The TV repairman! I had forgotten about that guy.
Did there pants ever not slide down?
My mom figured the tv repairman had a terrific crush on her so she would invariably try to chat him up. It was awful.
Oh, and the smell of a hot tube set. You could tell how long since it had last been turned on by the smell of hot dust on the tubes.
Zero recollection of that. When was that happening? 1960s?
Late 50’s, early 60’s.
I remember those tube testers at the hardware store, but I don't recall ever using one.
I remember using them a few times. I don't remember ever using one successfully.
How about power switches that turned the power off, as opposed to modern ones that submit a request for a lower-power state.
Or cables that couldn't be hot-plugged without worrying about frying the electronics.
High beam switch on the floor of the car.
"Three on the tree" and "four on the floor"
A few months ago on one of the last warm days I found myself way, way far away and thought I'm this far away I might as well take the scenic route home, so I walked along the railroad tracks along the river, and, on a sort of island of rock between two sets of tracks there were two lone telephone poles with the blue glass insulators still on them, just standing there, resisting time.
Along a side street somewhere in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, there is a yard fenced by the sawed-off tops of telephone poles, the fence ‘rails’ are two crossbars on each post, each bearing a half-dozen (IIRC) of those insulators. Very creative.
One of my oldest memories was from when I was about 4 years olds, about 1969. My father was an engineer, and he bought a yellow rotary phone from overseas and he installed it himself onto our existing line. He used to tell us not to have more than one of us talk on the two lines at the same time, lest AT&T find out.
One day I'm playing on the front lawn, and two guys drive up and get out of the car. "Hello, little boy, do you have a second phone in the house?" "Yes, we have a second one in the basement!" "Oh, is it white or black?" "It's yellow!"
I told my father at dinner, and boy was he pissed! AT&T thereafter started charging us "rent" for the phone, with an extra surcharge because it was yellow! Back in the day you couldn't even own your own phone! And AT&T really did spy on you to figure out if you were cheating on your phone bill.
They could tell based on ringer impedance. The more phones on the line, the lower the impedance. So I disconnected the ringer on the unauthorized phone, and they never knew.
Winding enameled-copper wire around a toilet-paper tube as a step in making your own crystal/cat-whisker radio. And actually hearing a station with it, or maybe several at once.
The county going around spraying the weeds along the highways and roads with DDT and you were told not to go anywhere near it until it rained, and heaven forbid they might do it while you had the windows opened and didn't notice until the house was full of some weird smell.
Telephone numbers started with two letters, pronounced as a word:
WEbster 5-4836
It should be something you will rarely see in older movies and TV. So something about TV as TV mostly does not exist on TV itself.
So how about having to get up from the couch to actually walk over to the TV to change channels , and not having a remote to do so. Which is what made it so important to have a good " lead in" to a program to get ratings. The inertia to not change channels as had to make a physical effort to do so.
Also then actually having to sit through commercials because not as easy to change channels.
And how limited the TV choices were with only 3 networks and some independent channels offering not much in original programming. In a way , that was better than today with all the overwhelming number of choices that just deciding what to watch is a chore. Then so much of the nation watched much of the same shows , it did at least unite us as a culture more. I do think the greater choice allowing atomization of TV viewing programs has contributed to the big political splits where both sides do not understand the other at all.
I remember how exciting it was to get the fall TV guide issue showing the new TV schedules as that really determined what you watched. And it was a struggle deciding what to watch when two favorite TV shows were against each other . No videotaping. If you missed it, wait for reruns. People would schedule major events around TV shows.
And such a change when fox ( before fox news) finally started a fourth network. And many of their shows were more innovating and started trends that other networks copied. Because a new network was so interesting and their shows more watchable to me, the first group of fox TV shows sticks In my memory. Just off the top of my head.
Married with children.
Herman's head ( loved it)
Alien nation. ( my favorite then)
Tracey Ullman ( best comedian except maybe burnett)
Simpsons ( which started as a short on Ullman)
America's most wanted and cops
In living color
Roc ( best black sitcom ever imo)
21 jump street
Beverly hills 90210
Heathkit TV, which *did* have a remote with three buttons: On/Off, Channel Up, Channel Down. The latter two actually caused the channel dial to rotate clockwise or counter clockwise.
But growing up in the suburbs of NYC, we actually had 9, sometimes 10 or 11, channels -- 4 network (2/3 CBS, 4 NBC, 7 ABC), 3 independent (5, 9, 11), 2 PBS (13, 21), and sometimes some UHF (47, 64). Which I didn't realize until many years later was a *lot* more than most folks around the country got to see.
I grew up in ny suburbs too and was very aware of that when I visited my grandparents rural farmhouse where they could only get CBS and NBC, and those not so well.
But, even in ny area then, it really was the 3 networks and then fox for original shows . The independent channels did not have much original programming other than local shows.
There were more uhf channels than those two, I think . I remember there were a number of Puerto Rican Spanish language channels that a Puerto Rican classmate clued us all in were airing racier shows with more skin when I was an early teen and all the boys started to watch Spanish language shows.
Older people who'd grown up before cars or electrification who could talk about horses because they'd had them, but wouldn't because it made them feel old and the 1960s were so astonishingly better.
Phone things are most (painfully) memorable.
- Phone booths outside and inside restaurants.
- Making sure you always had quarters in case you needed to use one.
- Phone numbers that were 2 letters (that stood for a word) and 5 numbers, no "area codes." Mine was RO2-4894. "RO" was for "Rockwell."
- Already mentioned: the anguish of making an international phone call, dealing with overseas operators, planning what you are going to say so you can keep the cost below about $25, and trying to understand what the other person is saying through the hiss of the TransAtlantic cable. Now I touch WhatsApp on my iPhone and I can have an hour-long video chat with my daughter on the other side of the world -- for free!
Thinking you've really made it in the world when you could afford a COLOR TV!
You finally got to see Dorothy exit the house and enter the technicolor world of Oz in color instead of the whole thing being in black & White.
The local dairy would deliver milk, eggs and maybe cheese and ice cream and other frozen things, and also a 'special delivery' for dad, which was still a thing until around 1965.
The Fuller brush man actually did come to your door selling brushes.
All kinds of people would come to your door, Avon ladies and Mormons, people selling random things, loads of wood or corn.
Jim form Taxi selling a vacuum cleaner..or was it an encyclopedia?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywibBYucL5U
And as a child being able to ride your bike all around the neighborhood doing all sorts of stuff when you were 8 or 10 years old, without your mom even knowing where you were. After lunch in summer it was bye mom be back before dinner and that was fine.
Kids today are aware of that from older shows and stories but they find it hard to believe it was really true.
I remember telling my nephew that his grandma let me walk 5 blocks to kindergarten at 5 years old every day , and I was in a urban to suburban area. Got in trouble with my sis for telling him that when he was 9 and wanted more freedom.
And the big difference that younger people are aware of , but cannot really grasp actually , is not having access to a world of info at your fingertips all the time .
A few years ago when we were selling my parents house a family came to see it and the kid, around 10, asked his mom what these things were. It was the Encyclopedia Britannica.
We has world book and I almost lived inside those when I was young . And my traditional every year xmas gift each year until I was in my twenties from my parents was the new almanac.
And why is I that , now that we have such a wealth of info in the internet, that those times seem like the good days? Nostalgia of course but having to have to actually research something made it more meaningful. And the thrill of finding some difficult to find fact.
Is it because I was younger, that in thinking back upon it, it seemed like reading about the world then was like putting together a massive puzzle, where reading about it now is like trying to sift the few grains needed out of a dust storm?
Good analogy.
And , to me at least , putting together a big puzzle can be fun. While sifting a few grains out of a storm is just frustrating.