Do you remember….
- All the girls had ugly gym uniforms?
- It took five minutes for the TV to warm up?
- Nearly everyone’s Mom was at home when the kids got home from school?
- Nobody owned a purebred dog?
- When a quarter was a decent allowance?
- You’d reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?
- Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?
- All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done every day and wore high heels?
- You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time? And you didn’t pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?
- Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?
- It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents?
- They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed. And they did it!
- When a 57 Chevy was everyone’s dream car…to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady?
- No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked?
- Lying on your back in the grass with your friends? …. and saying things like, ‘That cloud looks like a… ‘?
- Playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?
- Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?
- And with all our progress, don’t you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace, and share it with the children of today.
- When being sent to the principals office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home.
- Basically we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn’t because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat! But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.. .as well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games, Hula Hoops, bowling and visits to the pool, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
Didn’t that feel good, just to go back and say, ‘Yeah, I remember that’?
How Many Of These Do You Remember?
- Candy cigarettes
- Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside.
- Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles.
- Coffee shops with Table Side Jukeboxes.
- Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum.
- Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.
- Newsreels before the movie.
- P.F. Fliers.
- Telephone numbers with a word prefix…(Raymond 4-601).
- Party lines.
- Peashooters.
- Howdy Dowdy.
- Hi-Fi’s & 45 RPM records.
- 78 RPM records!
- Green Stamps.
- Mimeograph paper.
- The Fort Apache Play Set.
- Nancy Drew
- The Hardy Boys
- Laurel and Hardy
- Howdy Doody
- The Peanut Gallery
- The Lone Ranger
- The Shadow Knows
- Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk
Do You Remember a Time When..
- Decisions were made by going ‘eeny-meeny-miney-moe’?
- Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, ‘Do Over!’?
- ‘Race issue’ meant arguing about who ran the fastest?
- Catching The Fireflies Could Happily Occupy An Entire Evening?
- It wasn’t odd to have two or three ‘Best Friends’?
- The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was ‘cooties’?
- Having a Weapon in School meant being caught with a Slingshot?
- Saturday morning cartoons weren’t 30-minute commercials for action figures?
- ‘Oly-oly-oxen-free’ made perfect sense?
- Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?
- The Worst Embarrassment was being picked last for a team?
- War was a card game?
- Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?
- Taking drugs meant orange – flavored chewable aspirin?
- Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?
Thanks Gene
yes I remember those and I would love to go back to those years
Yes, I remember most of them and yes, I’d like to see some of it again. But we’re looking at the unicorns and rainbows from those times. We mustn’t forget Viet Nam, multiple assassinations, race riots, Cuban Missle Crisis (anyone remember “Duck and Cover” drills in school to protect yourself from nuclear attack?), no Civil Rights Amendment, enforced segregation, etc. that had roots in the late 50’s, early 60’s. A black friend of mine (no, he says he’s not African-American, he’s black) commented once that my memories and his could never be the same. Doesn’t stop us from being close friends because of our commonality now.
Ummmm…didn’t mean to rain on everyone’s parade. Should I take a mulligan on that one?
I’m about 2 decades too young to remember most of these things, but I’m sure my parents do. Oddly enough, until about 6 months ago you could still buy candy cigarettes at some convenience stores in Saint Paul. Until one of the TV stations found out after a teenager(!) complained that her younger sibling had bought some, or something like that. Then everybody found out and the city banned the sale of candy cigarettes. The general reaction was surprise that they were still made at all.
I remember most of that stuff.
I remember leaving the house early in the morn and spending the entire day riding bikes, exploring, swimming, climbing trees, damming creeks, laughing, eating candy & redpop for lunch, and not coming back home till suppertime, and nobody needed to worry about anything.
And I agree with rev’s 1st comment.
Ah, no.
Ah, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be! (Wish that was original, but no.)
revrick315: I had the same thoughts. But it is good to be able to remember and acknowledge that there were good things in the fabric of our lives, even though simple. And I think it’s fundamental that humans everywhere and in all times try to make the best of their situation, given limits, of course. E.g., the people we met in the African countryside, whose lives define the term “subsistence,” seemed as happy and content as anyone I’ve ever encountered.
At 64 years old, I remember all of these. But I also remember a lot of things that we now so take for granted that we never think of them not being around. How about air conditioning, microwave ovens, TV’s in every home (told you I was old), school buses, good frozen food, and on and on. Like DJ, I too remember leaving home on my bike and being gone all day, miles away from home and nobody worried. We never locked our doors either.
I remember not only everyone’s house being unlocked but in some the TV was always on. Even when no one was home.
I also remember riding my bike all the way to the other side of town to shoot at the only rifle range. Bet a kid couldn’t go five blocks with a slung rifle today.
My own list based on my life. I was born in 85
do you remember a time when……
a 14 kbs modem was too expensive
floppy’s were how you loaded programs on your computer
computers didnt have graphics
when someone called your internet would die
you could smoke in bars
when your local bookstore didnt have the book you couldnt just order it
3.50 would buy you a pack of usa golds
people didnt call there president hitler
cars were made out of metal
I was thinking the same thing, RevRick … reminded me of the last 2 minutes of this comedy bit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBtOGLnSFHU
Dry cell batteries leaked and ruined your flashlight.
Copping a feel was a major chore, what with girdles and all.
this is so gay. old people suck.
Well, in Japan:
Most male teachers still do wear neckties every day. Some even still wear suits (except in summer because most schools don’t have air conditioning)
a lot of kids still play sports with no adults around
you can still buy candy cigarettes
you can still buy wax bottles with some kind of juice in them
our neighbor gets glass bottles of milk delivered to their door, and yes they have cardboard tabs
decisions are made, not with eeny-meeny but with rock-paper-scissors or jan-ken-pon (even adults still do this)
kids still catch bugs in the summer time (my younger one has some kind of mutant grasshopper in his ‘bug basket’ at the moment)
I remember a bunch of these even though I graduated from high school the year isiah was born. Now I feel old…
As for the phone numbers starting with words, here is a link about that and includes an effort to save that information for all you fellow trivia junkies (disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this website, I just found it): http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html
According to their database, my hometown’s exchange was SUnset (the capital letters became numbers when the names were dropped for all digit phone numbers); seems appropriate since one of my goals growing up was to leave it (it was a small town with not much to do).
I told you I was a trivia junkie.
I remember when McD’s only had guys working at it.
when I was 6 me and my 4 year old brother would catch fireflies in mayo jars. On Saturdays (without parent supervision) we would walk to the old train tracks and follow them for about an hour and walk home. I was picked last for a sports team once, i think we had the word “cooties” in school, we had war, The Hardy Boys, and my uncle had a glass bottle coke machine in his house.