Your old man bought a 409 Super Sport? Damn. Mine bought a Lancer.

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
You were one of the cool kids if you had an STP sticker on your binder (I never did. )

Somehow or another, my next oldest brother and I acquired a couple dozen of those and stuck them everywhere...and I mean everywhere.

Dad was not amused.

Thanks for that memory.

Our first color TV looked like this. No remote.

My sister playing a Simon & Garfunkel record on the hi-fi.

I can still remember her sitting next to the speakers with a tape recorder recording it on cassette and getting mad at me for making noise.

Rode the streetcar to the movies on Saturday where we paid 9 cents for two movies with the newsreel and cartoon in between. What TV? We'd go down to the appliance store after it closed and stand on the sidewalk so we could watch the wrestling (Gorgeous George, Tony Rocca, etc.) through the window. More often, we'd listen to the radio... George Burns & Gracie Allen, Amos & Andy, The Shadow, The Thin Man or Dragnet.

Roller skates had clamps and you used a skate key to clamp them to your shoes... or you took them apart and screwed each half to the front and back of a 2x4, nailed an orange crate to the top and you had a scooter. No McDonalds until I was a teenager. I smoked in high school and cigs were $2 a carton, not a pack, a carton! Gas was 25 cents a gallon.

Captain Kangaroo

Batman on TV with the ONLY real Batmobile


Three channels, NBC, ABC, CBS then eventually FOX.

Black Sheep Squadron, A-Team (TV), Wonder Woman with Linda Carter,

Letting the TV warm up before the picture came on the screen

Party line telephones (rotary dial)

Pop cans with pull tabs that you threw away

Being able to draw pictures of guns, bombs, fighter jets etc and not get kicked of school

Leaded gasoline at full service stations, bias ply tires, the 'new' halogen headlights

1976 Bicentennial

Blizzard of '78

When Boy Scouts were boys only

The Miracle on Ice

My first recollection of TV was watching the Gemini space walk.

I also remember the Jack in the Box drive thru and the "talking clown". (living in Imperial Beach CA), and watching "Car 54 Where Are You" as a favorite show, as well as "Gumby and Pokey" and "Davey and Goliath".

I remember getting up so early all that was on the TV was the test pattern and the "prayer and National Anthem" when broadcast day was finished.

And I remember watching the "glowing dot" when the TV was turned off, taking a few minutes to disappear, and stared at it until it was gone.

I remember MLK being assasinated, Bobby Kennedy being assinated. Having the TV wheeled into my classroom for the Moon Landing, Nuclear bomb drills in Elementary school. The Bussing and integration of schools. My Mother finally getting her drivers license in her mid 30's in the late 60's. Major Matt Mason, Spider Man, Batman, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and Vietnam. My Army Neighbor 3 doors down coming back with a Vietnamese wife and her 2 boys. No one spoke about that other than the new kids who joined the neighborhood to play with. Riding Bikes and street hockey. (All from the North Shore of Boston). Then we moved to NH. Suddenly it was woods and out doors. Then the 70's.

Moses, parting the red sea. Pet trilobite. Schoolmates are in cases in anthropology museums now.

Eve. She served one hell of an apple.

Stream of consciousness...

Black and white TV, and not allowed to watch it much. Rotary telephones. Milk delivered by the milkman and eggs by the egg man. Walked to/from school, or rode our bikes, unless it was pouring down rain. We played outside after school, or all day long in the summertime, until the street lights came on. Then you heard mothers and fathers all over the neighbourhood calling their children to come home. (And you best heed it!) Children were to be seen and not heard. Adults were addressed as "ma'm," "sir," "Mrs." or "Mr." and you didn't sass them or you'd pay the price. You ate what was put in front of you. You passed a grade, made it up in summer school or you were held back. You didn't touch your parents' stuff without permission. You kept your hands off other peoples' stuff without permission. The Good Humor ice cream man drove the streets dressed in a clean, neatly-pressed white Good Humor uniform, driving a white Good Humor truck, ringing bells. When we heard the bells we'd run to our mothers asking for ice cream money. We were usually in bed by seven or eight o'clock on school nights. Later in the summertime, when we were out of school. The teacher was to be obeyed, the principal to be feared. We played cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, war, and hide and seek. We had cap guns, air guns, and sling-shots. We roller-skated on the sidewalks and in our driveways. We did chores for allowance money. Shovelled snow in the wintertime. Cut lawns in the summertime. Had newspaper routes. We dealt with bullies by either fighting back or avoiding them. Or taking our lumps when we could do neither. Our bicycles had one speed. We collected baseball cards and clipped the less-desirable duplicates to our bikes to make them sound like motorcycles. We bought penny candy at the corner store. We went out trick-or-treating on Halloween after it started getting dark, because nothing's scary to anybody when it's still light outside. The whole family ate dinner together every night. We climbed trees. We played "ring the doorbell" on the neighbours, but not too often because getting caught meant big trouble. Dad worked and mom stayed home to make a home and tend to the children. We built snow forts in the wintertime, had snowball fights and made skating rinks in our back yards.

We were, by and large, happy children.

I remember when Disneyland opened. Five miles away from the house. I remember some of my 1954-1955 kindergarten. I remember the 56 conventions. I remember the hate of Military school 1956-57. I remember the Dodgers moving to LA. Love the Dodgers to this day....but it is different today.

even though you plugged it in, you called it the ice box.

instead of google, you called the library with your questions.

coupons? how about stamps.

the bell dinged and someone filled your tank.

I'm very much a child of the 80's and look back on my decade with great nostalgia. It was a time where so many technologies were in flux. I can remember being the remote for the TV (which was still a big wooden console) but I can also remember our first cable box. The old Jensen with a long wire to the TV and the 2 rows of buttons with the rotary dial on the side. If you pressed the right combination, you could get the dirty channels (it actually worked, but don't tell my parents LOL)! I remember playing pong on my friends Atari and also my very first computer, An Atari 800. My parents bought me a game for Christmas but the Atari didn't have enough memory to run it so I had to wait till my birthday for dad to buy me the 256k memory card I needed to make it work. God bless my dad, IIRC that card was like $600 at the time. It was ridiculous.

I remember playing video games for hours at the arcades, my first beeper (which I found in a pile of junk when cleaning out the house on my last move), payphones going from 10 cents to 25 cents, then on to the early cell phones when they went mainstream and looked like your cordless home phone, the first video MTV ever played and sitting there just draw dropped thinking this was the coolest thing ever.

My first apple computer (a IIgs) an the dual disc drives with the "new" 3.5 inch floppy disc, my dad bringing home the first laptop I ever saw (it was a Toshiba with an amber monochrome screen and thick as a phone book).

I remember using this crazy attachment for the phone and computer called a modem and hooking it to the phone line so I could dial some number that gave me access to a place to ask a technical question about some accessory for my computer since that was the only customer support this company had. I guess that was my very first experience with the internet.

I remember when the Charles Chip truck would come around…
When Trigger wasn’t stuffed.
When Political Correctness existed, but it didn’t rule the world.
Going with my parents to S&H Green Stamp store to turn in filled-books for “prizes”.
When we moved to a new place our family was on a party line- and we had a business.
You answered the phone and had no idea who was calling.
Got my first BB gun (Crosman M1 Carbine) at 9 and my first 22LR at 10 years old.
Got my first boat (skiff) at 10 years old. (grew up on the water).
Learned to type on a manual typewriter with no correction.
When you stopped at a gas station, usually two people would come out. One would fill the gas, the other would clean your windshield and check the fluids. (Maps were free)
Idiot mittens.
Tang.
Sea Monkeys.
Jumping Beans.
Hitting a SuperBall with a baseball bat. (I.E. how to lose a SuperBall)
Those little wooden gliders they used to sell at the dime store.
When you saved camera film/pictures for “special” occasions.
When the first KFC and McDonalds opened in our area. (Heck, when they opened, period).
Toy guns looked as good as real guns. (Johnny Eagle Lieutenant .45… ooooh.)
Played Army with my friends and pine cones were the best grenades.
Building model airplanes from balsa and tissue-paper
Bought my own car for $65 and fixed it up myself..
Starting model gas airplanes with your finger.
Mattel Thing Maker (390 °F), Vac-u-form and wood-burning sets. Back when a toy got to several hundred degrees and if you got burned it was your fault.

When there was a new song you liked you’d buy it on a 45 and play it on the record player. Big Wheels, bikes with banana seats, toys in Happy Meals, 16 ounce soda bottles for .25 cents, getting gasoline from the gas station in milk jugs (which would slowly disintegrate), Black and white TVs with 4 or 5 stations and dial station knobs, metal lunch boxes with your favorite super hero or tv show on it, tube socks with colored stripes at the top, leisure suits, homes with no a/c and summers with temps in the high 90’s. Asteroids on Atari, Intellivision, I barely recall green stamp booklets, opening savings accounts at banks and getting neat stuff (I got an Uncle Sam bank in 76, I wish I still had that), introduction of the Ugly Stick, Pong, Head to Head Football/Baseball, watching the original Batman, Superman and alone Ranger before school.

I'm not old. I'm 37.

Two service stations on opposite sides of the street having a "gas war". It got down to 10 cents a gallon for regular. Leaded regular, of course. Cheapest gas I recall when I started driving was 27.9/gallon. If you were a big shooter and had lots of compression, the tank got filled with Sunoco 260.

AM radio stations going of the air in the evening. Ice cream treats were sold in open ended bags. Canned soft drinks required a hole puncher and had a seam up the side. The guys who rode their bicycle collecting bottles to sell for deposit.
Stores were closed on Sunday. The TV weather guy used a felt board. The TV stations changed to weather girls.

Weather person on TV often hosted the afternoon movie or cartoon show. Many cities had Bozo the Clown afternoon shows.

I am old enough to remember all the stuff already listed.

Plus, I also remember sitting along the E/W German border watching them watch us. or the new Years eve event when we took to the field in response to an "attack" by the East Germans. They came screaming up to the border, and stopped. Turned around and went home (laughing) while the whole 7th army went crazy trying to get out of the Kaserns to the assembly areas.

I remember all the old TV issues, some of which I/we experienced in Germany.

Yup, 10 cent gasoline and soft drinks.

Picking cherries at 3 cents a pound to earn enough money to buy my clothes and school books, at age 14-15. Just to name a few.

I remember B36s flying over Lewiston from the AB in Spokane. You could hear them long before you actually got to see them overhead.

I remember the incredible display of "airmanship" by AF pilots along the Clearwater river when the war ended. Saw one of them actually do a loop around a bridge deck.

371 in dog years...

Hot Shoppes with Pappy Parker Fried Chicken

Pops bought a 69 VW Bug ew that seemed to go to the VW shop about once a month. Every car had lap belts.

My first job was an Exxon pump jockey and every car had a carburetor

Sunoco football stamp collection book

Playing “war” in the neighborhood with all manner of realistic looking toy guns (I was almost always a sniper up in the trees)

Touch football in the street- “CAR”!

Staying out playing in the summer until dark without mom and dad worrying or sending the cops to look for me and my brother.

Riding bikes all day- see above.

And the ice cream man with real bells.