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?
Something younger people around here don't appreciate, the blizzard we used to get really were fantastic. They were like white hurricanes that would cover the entire landscape in a sea of snow so you wouldn't be able to even see that there was a highway there, it would be all an even flood of white, or the way six foot high drifts could form so quickly it would go from nothing to blocking the highway in about forty minutes and you would have to steer the car around them and hope no one was coming the other way.
This stopped happening abruptly in the early 80s.
Another weather thing was that we could be absolutely certain it would rain on Halloween. Every year. Every single year, until 1998-99, and it hasn't happened since.
Aren't you going against the climate change meme here that climate change is responsible for any type of bad weather, including any bad winter storms ?
So here you are saying that global warming did reduce the incidence of severe and costly and deadly big snowstorms?
Locally it's had that benefit, at the expense of increasing droughts and general dryness.
Back-yard incinerators. Ours was a 50-gsllon drum, but the hoi polloi had concrete incinerators.
Trash barrel. But a trash barrel done right, two fence posts and some chicken wire, lasts alot longer than a barrel.
And not on the farm.
I remember when they banned backyard incinerators in LOs Angeles. There were protests! This will, I’m sure, amuse the people here:
https://archive.kpcc.org/programs/offramp/2014/03/13/36466/city-archives-show-how-la-banned-incinerators-to-f/
Note the picture of the protestors with the American flag and signs saying they have the constitutional right to burn their trash. It’s all about freedom, don’t you know! Just more proof that nothing has really changed.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hoi-polloi …
My father built a brick incinerator behind our garden, as well as a fireplace/grill & a swing set - a man who was director of a state office, but knew how to make or fix apparently anything we needed.
The bags in cereal boxes were basically just waxed paper. And more generally, the lack of plastic anything compared to today. Bakelite was only recently dethroned as the height of materials technology.
A separate landline for the kids. In my sepia-tinted memories of the 1970s, this was the mark of a household with disposable income.
And when the old twelve inch tv that still almost worked ended up in my room it was like Roman opulence.
Ok, here's another: manually changing the channel on a pre-digital TV. Youngsters will have seen old school TVs on, erm, TV. But none of them have experienced how changing channel actually required a bit of wrist strength.
Don't forget adjusting the antennae....ok--just hold it there so we can watch the show...
Yes. I mentioned that above and how that meant that people actually watched commercials and having a lead in to your TV show was so important to ratings. Inertia in changing the channel.
My father would sometimes scream at me to come upstairs right away when I would be down in the basement. After hurrying up the stairs ( you did not dawdle when my dad said come ) to find him on the couch in front of the TV, he tells me to change the TV channel.
Three network stations & a PBS or "educational" station & a UHF station that showed old movies and TV shows from the 50s.
And being told "don't turn the dial that fast, you'll break the knob."
And, ... breaking the knob.
I'm not sure if all TV's had this kind of tuning knob, but we had one where you tuned in a UHF channel by clicking a central knob to the UHF position (a window between channels 13 and 2) and then turning the outer dial to smoothly move around in the UHF band.
How about orange juice from frozen concentrate? I remember my mother making that. I suppose that's still on the market, but, has anybody you know used it in years and years?
We keep frozen OJ concentrate in the freezer for those occasions when we run out and are not ready to go to the store.
So, I mixed some up about a month ago or so.
If you use two cans it's fantastic.
Double the concentrate, but not the water? Doesn't sound good.
My brother (back in the 60s) would put in extra water. I think he was being frugal, but maybe there was a different reason (the voice in the back of my head says so.) Maybe he was being lazy!
I dare you to try it.
As it happens, I drank the last of the OJ this morning. So when I mix up some frozen tomorrow morning, I will try it.
Well, it was better than I anticipated. A creamy texture with the flavor not being as intense as I expected.
I stll added the rest of the water, but thank-you for the experience.
I've always put in extra water, close to half a can, most recently about a year or so ago. Otherwise the taste is too intense.
Got it! I mustn't over-interpret my lazy-ass ways as being universal.
Your lazy-ass ways?!?! I'm too lazy to go to the store.
Bing Crosby selling that Orange Juice…
Used to prefer something called "Five Alive" & don't remember the last time I saw concentrate until recently I noticed it in an Aldi store where i buy only three items regularly.
The skill everyone developed in tuning the tv set. Arguing over whose turn it was to change the channel.
Yes, fine-tuning the channel! That really was a thing.
We weren't allowed to watch The Munsters because they were normalizing weirdness.
Couldn't watch Hogan's Heros for similar reason. I thought my mom was silly at the time but a show portraying Nazis as harmless bumblers just 20 years after the holocaust is kind of shocking now
Stranger still I only recently learned that some of the German actors who played the Nazis had actually been in prison camps.
And the French guy was actually a concentration camp survivor. I tuned in to some PBS show that had him giving a tour of the camp he was in, and before I realized he had been there, I just thought that PBS had just hit maximum theoretical tackiness.
I'm pretty sure that the guy who played Klink had a cousin who survived the war in Germany because he was married to a non-Jew. Right before he was about to be rounded up, his records in Dresden were all destroyed in the fire bombing, and he survived the end of the war.
Klink was played by Werner Klemperer, son of Otto Klemperer, who was the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They were Jewish, or at least Jewish enough so far as the Nazis were concerned. Klemperer only took the role of Klink on the condition that he would be a bumbler, the show never showing him successful.
It was on German TV, and the dubbed dialogue made Klink and Schulz sound even more like idiots.
The comedy aspect had been lifted from the antics of the PoW's in movies like "Stalag 17" and "The Great Escape".
separate vhf and ufh channel ranges controlled by 2 mechanical knobs and no remote controls.
When in the mood for a movie, the only options are what's in theaters now, and how do you find out what they are? Turn to the relevant section of the print newspaper to find ads from the local movie theaters. My children don't believe any part of this.
Music emanating from AM radio. I mean, I suppose it hasn't completely vanished. But I'm just old enough to remember this being a normal way for most people to listen to top 40.
Black and white TV went off the air at midnight. First a weird black and white logo thingie then loud noise. This was when the parentals came out to see what was going on and to send us to bed.
Being able to accompany your loved ones into the boarding area at an airport, and wait with them until they boarded, pre-flight. (My grandmother headed to Florida every year, just as winter was arriving, and I have vivid memories of doing this at the old Eastern Airlines terminal at Boston Logan in the 70s).
And waiting for them at the gate when they arrived and giving them a hug when they got off the plane.
Sleepless in Seattle. Has a scene like that. Of course that is one generation back.
Drive in movies in the summer. How many of those are left.
Fighting over the Sear Christmas catalog (the "Wish Book"). Sadly, that was an infinitely more important book than the Bible for my siblings and me.
The back seat at the drive-in.....
I had a crystal radio hidden to use at night as the am radio was taken away until morning.
CB radio. Younger people may have seen it mentioned here and there. But it was a veritable boom for like, a year. Looking back, the whole phenomenon of "fads" seem more prominent and more powerful in the 1970s (perhaps the recent high-water mark for fads?).
Another, from roughly the same era: mood rings.
Certain parties used to insist the internet was 'just a fad, like CB radio' and would soon go away.
The army used to go around on maneuvres where they'd drive in convoys and practice setting up road blocks in random places.
Schlitz Beer. I'm aware it still exists. (And no doubt has been embraced by some hipster subcultures). But in my memory this was a an extremely well-known, prominent brand in America in the early 70s, vying even with Budweiser.
No seatbelts. I (being the youngest of five) spent at least four weeks of vacations riding in the very back of the station wagon with the luggage. Not even in a seat, let alone with a seatbelt!
Independence at a very young age. Certainly by six or seven (if not sooner) I would leave the house for a few hours and no one questioned where I had been or what I had been up to (not far and nothing.)
Bon fires in the fall. A huge pile of leaves in the street raked up from multiple yards and the park across the street. Apples, preped with cinnamon, wrapped in foil thrown in at the start and raked out at the end.
Playing in (or through) other people's yards. Some were just shortcuts, and some used more than others, but hide and seek sent us into other yards. A lot of model rockets got launched in front of my house, there were no boundaries while chasing those down.
yeah, the roaming around as little kids and taking neighbors yards as normal shared space to cut through was def par for the course in the 80s. we would walk a couple miles to the local pool through multiple yards, over fences and across 2 creeks on a daily basis in the summer. never once in the many years did anyone even give us a look let alone chastise us when we crossed their property.
Riding around in the back of a station wagon pre-seat belts.
Phone books. Like you could just look up someone's name, address and phone number. I remember when I moved to portland seeing Marge and Homer Groenig listed in the phone book that sat on top of my fridge!
The schoolbus driver who had a bottle of whiskey on a little shelf next to him as he drove us to school at the crack of dawn.
road navigation by AAA maps
Car safety inspections. Full service gas stations.
Avocado-green appliances.
No air conditioning. It's hard to convey how this affects all your daily activities during the summer.
No microwave ovens.
Making ice in trays with a lever to break the ice free. Later supplanted by plastic trays that flexed to free the ice.
A locally owned newspaper with real local news.
Montgomery Ward catalogs.
A local single-screen movie theater. Drive-in theaters.
The Sears Christmas catalog: looking at all the cool stuff you weren't going to get for Christmas! lol
Yes, no microwaves! My mom always had the double boiler set-up out to heat up leftovers!
Plenty of houses around “here” including mine, lack air conditioning.
Mine as well, but I was thinking more about the lack of AC in places of business.
Car inspections were ended where you live?
Where I live, safety inspections are annual, & emissions tests are required every two years.
Teachers administering corporal punishment. I had teachers who had deadly aim with pieces of chalk. Another one would grab a kid by the ears and shake him or her -- and not just for dramatic effect.
1968: In second grade I can remember a kid a year ahead of me standing in the hallway with his knuckles dripping blood and crying. I got the same teacher the next year, she slapped my ear so hard it still rings. In High School, I lit her garbage can on fire - or ran over it - every week for more than a year. I blame it on lead poisoning now. (We're on Kevin's blog 😉 )
Christmas clubs
Directory assistance
Wite-out
Little or no need for any of them anymore.
A few things that were different then and affected life In subtle and profound ways (though don’t get commented on as much as other differences):
Bigger families
Smaller homes
Middle children
One thing that young people today would find it hard to appreciate is how different it was living in a culture that shared much common ground. Today the culture is fragmented between a thousand channels and stations and platforms. Very little of what we read and watch and listen to we do with the society at large. Everyone seems to living in their own little world of subculture.
A top-rated TV show now gets 10 million to 15 million viewers, with football about the only exception. In the old days, a top show might get 40% to 50% of the viewing audience. A show like “I Love Lucy” would get 2/3 or more. A top radio station like NYC’s WABC might have gotten 1 of every 4 listeners in the ‘60s. Now a station getting 1 in 20 is doing great.
The Beatles were big back then in ways that are hard to understand if you weren’t there. They were not just their generation’s equivalent of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift or whoever the biggest music stars are now. There is no equivalent. Ed Sullivan, Walter Cronkite have no equivalent today. The impact of a show like Roots is a thing of the past.
We have more choices, and that’s good, but fewer things holding us together. Obviously, that has political implications. I don’t want to be nostalgic for the politics of yore because there was plenty wrong back in the day. But it’s hard to see how we reach a consensus without more of a shared cultural experience. Meanwhile, we need to save democracy and hope the fever burns itself out soon.
Having to carry separate phones, cameras, computers, maps, encyclopedias, music players, photo albums, newspapers with you everywhere you go. It was quite tiring.
Ubiquitous smog.
Plumes of white and blue smoke spewing from pretty much every internal combustion engine.
The sickly smell of (lead?) from exhaust.
Large glaciers in Glacier National Park and elsewhere in the northern Rockies and the Cascades. Now greatly reduced, degraded to perpetual snow fields or entirely gone.
A sense of community and shared purpose.
Christmas tree bulbs that would get so hot you'd have to turn the tree off after about an hour lest it burst into flame.
Tinsel and candle wicks made of lead.
Social clubs, from the Knights of Colombus to the Moose, Elks and Kiwanis clubs.
Weekend get-togethers for dinner and cards.
Gateway drug to Masonry. Which was the original Pizza Ping Pong.
Smoking everywhere. Just imagine the most disgusting place where someone could light up a cigarette — and, yeah, it was done there. In a car full of kids, in the university lecture room, in restaurants, on planes, and on and on.
My high school had a "smoking room" — an actual place on school grounds (partly open to the elements, but with a roof overhead) where students (I think it was limited only to juniors and seniors) were allowed to go light up.
We had nothing like that, but the teacher's lounge was an incredible health hazard.
My high school was considered incredibly progressive because half the cafeteria was a smoking section.
i recall bathrooms with ashtrays in the stalls. and there was an indoor shopping mall in DC where you could smoke until I think the mid 90s at least.