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?
One incontrovertible conclusion from all these numerous replies is that so many of us here are OLD.
And guarantee that the younger commenters here are mostly just reading at laughing at all of us.
When I first saw how many comments there were I had the same reaction; returning, I think the number has increased by 20.
I admit to nostalgia mostly for a pre-Fox era, one in which fake reality shows were of no interest - other than Welles' radio program frightening citizens about a fictional invasion.
1. Dial tones. Movies generally got them wrong for dramatic effect, with a character hearing the tone when the other person hung up. Odd, since everyone watching at the time knew that you only heard a dial tone before dialing and never after a hang-up. After a hang-up you'd get silence and if you kept the phone off the hook after a minute or so you'd hear the irritating dead line stutter tone.
2. Summer reruns. Which you needed because if you missed an episode the first time around you had no way to see it until the summer.
IIRC, dial tone behavior depended upon whether you initiated or received the call. In one of those cases (can't recall which), you could even hang up the phone, run to another line in the house and pick it up and continue talking if you made it in less that ~30 seconds. I'm guessing it must have been the receiving end since I remember doing this, and otherwise why wouldn't I have just made the call from the phone I wanted to use?
The average person was mostly on the thin size. Not anymore.
Wonder if comments about how people used to have to get out of their seats to change channels explain that phenomenon.
The enormous amount of dog shit on city sidewalks and elsewhere, because there was no expectation that anybody would pick up a steaming mound of their dog's extrusions. I remember the before and after when NYC enacted its pooper scooper law around 1980 (or maybe it just prominently stated it intention to enforce its existing laws -- I honestly don't know the details). I remember thinking that this was preposterous, but it worked. Visiting my grandparents in Brooklyn was astonishing. Gone was the minefield of dog doo on every residential sidewalk.
Now it is a universal expectation that you will pick up after your dog. Failure to do so is a clear social transgression. That's a huge change, and one that I've never seen portrayed in popular culture.
Also gum and cigarette butts, and general litter.
A huge change, that people born after the sixties have a hard time beIieving. I was born in 1951 and I remember the original campaign, "Every Litter Bit Hurts," which I just looked up and was in 1963. As a cynical 12 year old I was certain it would never work. On car trips we, like everyone, tossed out the window banana skins, coke bottles, empty bags the hamburgers had come in, obviously my parents' cigarettes, everything, The shoulders of the nation's highways were covered in trash. Walking down the sidewalks people would just drop candy wrappers or empty coke cans as they walked. It seemed impossible this would change. And then it did.
1. The manual choke knob on a car. (You could call it that and nobody would snicker).
2. Sewing machines being ubiquitous, passed down from generation to generation.
3. Fixing a shoe at the cobbler's being significanlty cheaper than buying cheap new shoes.
4. Kids waiting for dad to finish the newspaper so they could read the comics at the back.
5. Waiting for a song on the radio with your finger on the RECORD button of the cassette player, ready to record it to tape (you'll only remember this if you were skint).
Hey, I go to a cobbler who can put a new heel on a shoe for $20, or a new bottom for something like $50. So #3 isn't gone at all.
Have to admit I remember the rest. I can still remember the feeling I had the first time I had an all-electronic path for recording from a tuner, which while still imperfect at least didn't require absolute silence in the room
Honestly, it's tv that is the one for me. I can still remember that first startled moment encountering a VCR and realising that I could watch a program *again*. Or, better still, not have to be home at the exact time it was broadcast. (Over here in the UK, we didn't even have 'summer reruns'!)
Nowadays, almost the entirety of tv history* is available somewhere at the touch of an icon.
*apart, of course, from those shows that were notoriously wiped, for what seemed like good reasons at the time. As a fan of Doctor Who, this is still painful.
A couple of weeks ago I caught the very first ever episode of "Coronation Street." (1960 or thereabouts, IIRC) on Youtube. So, that one, at least, has been saved for posterity. It was excellent TV, too, I might add.
In the US, having three networks and usually three channels. You might get different news and syndicated shows in a fringe area between cities, but three networks--PBS didn't start until the late 60's.
I looked up TV listings in NYC in the mid-60's to compare them to the local offerings; I think they had a total of five channels max in the media capital of the nation.
We could get the Canadian station out of Windsor where I grew up (near Detroit). And we had to UHF stations: PBS and Channel 50 which showed endless old movies and old TV shows (e.g., Lucy, The Honeymooners, etc.)
On a good day we could pull in the three network stations from Toledo too.
Doctor house calls. With a black bag.
We have a mobile vet. That's close, right?
Making your own ice cubes from a tray, that needed to be carefully filled from the kitchen tap then gently placed inside the freezer without spilling. A few hours later, the tray might be emptied into a designated bucket, then refilled.
We still did this until we moved in October. I don't trust ice makers, since one froze on me and brought down the garage ceiling.
Yeah, I last did this two months ago at an airb&b.
Recently saw an old-fashioned metal tray with handle that breaks the ice cubes up; might have been in a Vermont Country Store catalog . Only $24.99!
Oh heck I do that today because the ice maker on my stupid Samsung fridge stopped working after a month and after two services calls worked for about a month and died thereafter so I gave up.
Car cigarette lighters?
TV signoff
Car cigarette lighters?
TV signoff flag symbolism with star spangled banner, america the beautiful, or off we go into the wild blue yonder?
The Christophers sect show?
Dieters notebook in one of the women's magazines which I assumed was a diary from a girl named Deeter.
Being able after sunset to tune in KOMA Oklahoma City for the top AM hits.
Waxing the bottom of your wooden skis. Before using your long thongs to bind your leather boots onto the skis.
"KOMA in Oklahoma" was the bane of my early radio DJ career (in 1959). I was on KEOS in Flagstaff, a daytime station, and had to listen to KOMA at night to hear what my listeners would be calling for in the morning. It was said that KOMA, at 50KW clear channel, tied its ground cables from the tower to the Santa Fe railroad tracks so the signal would go even further. Not that anyone believed it...or did they?
A plastic holder with room for a dime, labeled "My Emergency Dime."
Mimeograph machines, where you'd make a master and then put it on a drum and make as many duplicates as you needed. And the duplicator fluid they used that, to quote Generation X, smelled like the future.
Time clocks in the office for punching in when you arrived (though I think this shows up on period shows).
Smallpox vaccine scars. I'm not sure I can find mine any more.
When our neighbor got the first color TV in the neighborhood, I remember visiting with a magnifying glass to see if it really made yellow out of red and green dots.
Schwinn bicycles that weighed almost as much as the kid riding it. They were made of the heaviest steel.
Searching your change looking for pre-1965 quarters and dimes made of real silver.
Named phone exchanges: "My phone number is HUnter-7-7322."
Calling home from college by making a collect call home, letting it ring exactly twice and then hanging up, which signaled your parents to call you directly for far less.
Also, just phone numbers without area codes.
Ours was LIncoln 7-5141
Viking 5-8385.
A few people have already mentioned television in one way or another (and probably in the way that I'm about to, but there are a lot of comments here and I haven't read them all ...), but with 500 channel cable ubiquitous and (even more) watch on demand services broadly available, there is no longer the communal experience of most of the people you know having watched the same television program you did the night before.
For television series, this mostly just removes a topic of conversation that most people will be able to participate in, but it also applies to news: when I was young, just about everyone watched Walter Cronkite on CBS' evening news fairly religiously. This gave you the news topics of the day.
Now even among reasonable news outlets, they often headline different stories, and of course there is the fascist propaganda networks that broadcast mostly just completely stupid stuff. There are no common news topics of the day.
While the Cronkite near-monopoly limited what was recognized as important -- which is generally bad -- I think the loss of a basis for conversation about news topics is a far bigger loss.
The other thing is those cloth loop hand driers in public restrooms: I think in my entire life I only saw two where the cloth was actually clean enough that I used it; the rest of the time I'd just make a face and dry my hands on my pants.
(For you youngsters, these were fixtures on public restroom walls near the sinks, very much like paper towel dispensers, except that instead of one use paper towels, you'd have this cloth loop that you were supposed to pull on to get a fresh patch of cloth to dry your hands on ... except that the loop wasn't very long, so after about five uses you were back on a patch that someone had used before, and if there was a schedule for replacing the cloth, I was never aware of it being followed. So you'd have this filthy patch of cloth presented to you that, if you were like me, you didn't dare touch, let alone rub your hands all over.)
I had entirely forgotten those godawful things.
"Spending a penny" ... (or nickel)
We used to collect pop bottles by the side of the road to get enough money for candy. Penny candy was common, really good chocolate bars were a nickel or a dime. I think bottles paid mostly 2 cents, the large bottles were a nickel.
Needing to plan when and where to meet well in advance: without answering machines or cell phones, it was much harder to make or change plans same-day.
There was a way with the pay phone that you could make a call for a nickel when it should have required a dime. You dropped in the nickel and hit the coin return with the handset. If you timed it right it would send the chime for the dime and you could make your call. Not that I ever did this personally ...
When my twin brothers were in high school, they were on the track and cross country teams. Their practices didn't end at a predictable time, so they would use a pay phone to call home to be picked up. But as soon as someone answered, they'd yell "HELP" and hang up. This got them their dime (quarter?) back.
Unfortunately, nobody thought to clue me in to this scheme, and when I answered the phone and heard "HELP", I told my parents it was a crank call. My brothers had a long wait that day.
Of course, even when the plan worked, my brothers either had to make the call early so they weren't just twiddling their thumbs, or they had time to kill in creative ways. They did a lot of the latter, including exploring the utility corridors under the school.
None of these behaviors are likely to happen today.
The cars were just so bad. They were uncomfortable, unreliable, stinking, ugly machines that wouldn't last 100k miles and required constant maintenance. Young people just have no idea.
Truth!
The lack of supervision for kids. What is today known as "free range parenting" used to be just the way you raised kids. It was perfectly normal to shove them (us) out the door to play outside until dinnertime, and "play dates" consisted of walking your own damn self to your friend's house until it was time to come back.
One of the neighbor kids asked if he could eat with us. Mom called down and talked to his mom, who said "You might as well let him; we've already eaten here."
Milkman delivering milk. Eggman delivering eggs.
Waste removal was different. We had an underground covered cannister for food waste. Garbage collectors would pull out of the ground and empty into the most reeking truck you can imagine (it held nothing but food waste). Non-food-waste trash had to be taken to the town dump periodically.
Yes, indeed! I was rather horrified to learn that that food waste from the in-ground containers was fed to pigs. Aauugh!
My city is, ostensibly, sending our food waste, which we are required to separated from the rest of the garbage, to pigs. Or rather the city’s contractor is feeding them.
We also had a truck delivering bread house-by-house.
We had a little door in the kitchen wall for milk. My mom would put the empties in there and the milkman would open the door from the outside to swap them for full ones.
Once we got locked out and I, being small, was able to wriggle through that and get into the house to unlock the door.
My grandfather was a Star Milkman, delivering for Hood’s for 20 years
I could have written that myself, though I went through that milk door more than once.
Probably alredy mentioned but a few for me:
1. repairing rather than replacing appliances;
2. having to wear a sport coat and tie for those special events such as a commercial plane flight somewhere or going to out to eat as a family at any place 'nice';
3. the size of closets (and the limited wardrobe most had)
Best
As a youngster in the early 1950s, I remember X-ray machines in shoe stores. You could check the fit of a pair of shoes by standing at the machine, shaped like a speaker's rostrum, with your feet sticking under it, and peer down at a cathode ray tube where you could see the the bones of your toes and a ghostly outline of the new shoes you were wearing.
And I bet they didn’t have you wear a lead apron to shield you from the radiation. Maybe that’s what happened to TFG!
Saturday morning cartoons
Somehow, this ALWAYS happened to me. I'd end up wetting a napkin in my beverage and spreading it out over my face, to try and reduce the tobacco stink. In those innocent pre-laptop days, seats also leaned back and I did that, too. It helped a little.
So many things to respond to. But, it made me think that one of Kevin's biggest "prophet in the wilderness" moments is missed in everything we try to communicate about the olden days - lead.
There was just so much psychosis and violence that is simply inexplicable to our modern world. Going out to "raise hell" any random night, brawls after ball games, "cruising" (literally slowly driving big V8s in a sea of car exhaust - lead, lead, lead - up and down the street for hours), rapacious sexuality, crazy behavior of every sort.
It was a combination of American Graffiti, James Dean, Badlands, and Apocalypse Now.
Terrifying ... Exhilirating ... LEAD
Water Picks. Electric typewriters that weighed about 30 pounds and would vibrate so hard they nearly shook the whole house. Shag carpeting. Conversion vans. Returnable soda bottles. Juice that came in 32 oz cans. A water bottle that you kept in the refrigerator and that everyone in the family drank out of (or was this just my family?).
You mean water chilling in a bottle that people poured into glasses? Or everyone took swigs out of the same bottle? If it's the latter, I suspect it was just your family.
Hawaiian Punch, --does that still exist?
Not canceled. Yet.
I hope Conor Friedersdorf & Kevin Drum get some solace in that.
Litter. Or, more precisely, the freedom to litter. Eventually the government responded with the famous tribal chief tear ad.
Tabletop lighters.
Coming home when the streetlights came on.
Faith in the power structure.
Writing actual thank you letters with pen(cil) and paper.
Amalgam fillings.
Artisan ash trays on coffee tables.
"Eenie meenie miney moe, catch a .... by the toe..."
We said it a million times without ever thinking about what it meant. It was just syllables.
We said “tiger.” We knew the other was a racial and inappropriate. We were all “Caucasians.”
Not following the whole (194) list I probably missed someone mentioning this but one "fond" memory was "trading stamps" given with purchases at gas stations (where the clerk would pump the gas for you) and grocery stores, etc. S&H and others held forth with prizes for completed cards filled with stamps. Or, if you used the same station over and over, they often had their own reward for a full card, like a free fill up (10 gallons at $0.25/gallon). Chains would usually have their own stamps. Ah, affinity marketing's ealy days.
Test patters on tv when the shows went off the air at night.
Immediately getting your US Keds or Converse All-Stars dirty when you bought them, so you'd look like an athlete and not a sissy.
All appliances, from the tv to the washer to the car, being fixable by my dad.
A dad who could fix everything.
Knowing, when you called a friend, not just what room he was in but what chair he was sitting in.
Knowing phone numbers by heart.
All the adults smoking.
One's parents drinking coffee, or a cocktail, or milk for dinner.
Cooties? Do kids still think the opposite sex has them?
Thinking no-iron polyester shirts were incredibly cool. Way way better than cotton.
Thinking Tang was cool, because it was astronaut juice.
Thinking the future was cool, because flying cars and the Jetsons.
Thinking Porsches were squat ugly cars, not nearly as beautiful as American cars.
Thinking (correctly) that American cars were the coolest in the world.
Stuff made in Japan was cheap crap.
Flying was glamorous and you got dressed up for it.
Patches on jeans to cover the holes...
We would carry around books with all the phone numbers we needed in them. Sometimes they were small and black, and thus the chatter about a "little black book" with the numbers of all the women some guy had.