Lost in Space and then Star Trek
Cards in the spokes for sure
First color tv
Dad got a Cougar XR7 with the coolest tail lights
My aunt and two cousins came to live with us when my Uncle was in Vietnam for 2 years

I remember talking with my grandmother back when she was alive. She was born before 1900. We talked quite a bit about the changes she has seen in her lifetime. First electric appliance, first car, first airplane, space travel, computers and electronics, etc. The advances she must have seen over her life must have been amazing. The rate of change in society and technology over the past 150 years is unbelievable.

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I can remember my Dad getting out of the VA hospital in 1948 after being wounded in 1944. He was inpatient and then outpatient and impatient. Then we moved from S Dakota to Tucson and had two TV stations and a antenna on the roof.
I remember the introduction of soft Ice Cream and later Chocolate dipped cones.

When I was a kid, milk was still being delivered from the dairy in glass bottles. Phone calls were a dime, there was penny candy and packs of baseball cards were a nickel - with good bubble gum. I watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, live. We drove to McD’s in my dad’s 65 Impala. And of course, I watched all the NASA launches I could on the TV. The black and white one with vacuum tubes. We must have been well off, we got 4 channels!

Eh, you young en's. Pop bottles didn't go from 2 cents to 10 until the 1970s. I felt lucky my dad got a 283 in his chev. There was no way he'd spring for a 409. Even the low horse version. We did have a cousin who sprung for a Bonneville, the one with 3 duces, a 421. He liked to travel on his vacations. One year he almost got a ticket on the Ohio turnpike. They gave you a time stamp when you got on and then stamped it again when you got off. His problem was he liked his right foot action. So they got off and ate lunch. Then got back on and drove to the exit. He got a royal ass reaming from the OSP guy. He was only 10 miles over.

I used to walk the local roads looking for pop bottles. I had a knapsack. It was nothing to pick up 20 cents worth at 2 cents each.

Back in those days my dad hated unions. Mostly because of the trouble they caused for anyone not a member. But I liked them because of their summer picnics. They were just slobs and tossed the empties into the parks bushes. Yes, they did that on Sunday's. We often "slept out" on Sunday night so we could hit the park early (first). It was nothing for us to come down with $$ in deposit money. Of course we divided it up and shared.

Dad was cheap (to say the least). We got a 57 chevy when everyone else got a 60 or 61. Then a 61 when everyone else got a 65 and so on. The TV thing was funny. His hobby was fixing them. No, not color, black and white. Grey really. I did get to see the moon walk in color. My now wife, then girlfriend's father had color. Not good color, but better than what we had. Colors weren't real good. If you lived out in the burbs, it really wasn't possible to get good reception except maybe one channel.

Sure, you could get reception. Until a car or truck came down the road or an airplane flew over. The tube tester was my personal turf. The guy in the drug store was tolerant and let me test for as long as I needed to. Hitting the jackpot involved one of our richest neighbors buying a new color set and tossing the old one out by the curb. I'd pull all the tubes and test them.

Dad's workbench had a couple of huge drawers. EAch stuffed with scavenged tubes that tested good. We didn't buy new tubes, we just replaced nasty old ones with less nasty.



Come home time was when the street lights came on. Dad was lenient. He'd give me maybe 5 minutes to get home. And then I'd better be winded and sweating from running for all I was worth.

I remember the first landing on the moon. As a kid, we wondered if the Vietnam War would still be ongoing when we turned 18, and if so whether we would be drafted or not. I remember duck and cover at school and in jr. high touring the under ground tunnels at school (an old high school originally0 where civil defense supplies were stored.

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
Our first color TV looked like this. No remote.

Yep. Looks a lot like the one my neighbor got. They were the first folks on our street to get a color TV. I remember that a number of other neighbors stopped by and asked to take a look.

They were also the only house on our street that had air conditioning (a big window unit). I considered them to be the rich folks.

I remember staying up to watch the Moon Landing. My dad worked at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids Iowa where part of the Lunar Module was made. I remember him being gone for several days during the Apollo 13 incident (helping with everything to do with the Lunar Module).

I remember moving to St. Louis and finding all kinds of programs on channel 30 (UHF, none of our tvs had a UHF antenna). I was the remote and antenna adjuster. I remember not having AC in Iowa, it got hot but not humid. I remember my first experience with window AC units when we moved to St. Louis MO, where it was hot and humid.

Before we moved to St. Louis, I remember listening to Cardinal games with Jack Buck: Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and others. Didn't play much football while living in Iowa and other places. Played a lot of baseball and basketball. After we moved to St. Louis I got interested in football and the Big Red. It was Air Coryell with Jim Hart, Mel Gray, Pat Tilly (my favorite receiver with ok speed with great quick, great routes, and excellent hands), Jim Otis, Jackie Smith, Dan Diedorf, and Conrad Dobler.

I remember the Vietnam War years. I remember some of the family friends going to Vietnam. Some didn't come back, some did come back, and others came back but it took years for them to recover, if they didn't commit suicide by bottle or drugs before then. The war was served up with dinner time every night with a running casualty count.

I remember the Beatles, followed by the Rolling Stones, followed by The Who, followed by CCR, followed by Led Zepplin, followed by the Eagles and Bob Seger. Add in REO Speedwagon, Boston, Styx,Rush and the other great bands in 1970. I remember getting last minute and I do mean last minute tickets to a Rolling Stone concert in 1978. My buddy and I ended sitting in the middle of a biker gang; here we are suburban white boys with blue jeans, Rolling Stone t-shirts, and freaking white Nike tennis shoes with the red swoop. Talk about a cultural experience.

I can remember jokes in the Reader's Digest that would be considered racist today.

Looking for vendors or ammo deals in Shotgun News.
Searching through that huge Numrich catalog for parts.
Waiting weeks for a catalog to order parts and the longer wait for parts.
No 1-800 numbers.

Sea Monkeys and X-Ray glasses for sale in the back of comic books, with the request in the ad to not pay for your order with postage stamps.

5-speed Stingray bike with a banana street that I rode until all hours. I remember saving up and buying a "headlight" for it, and staying out way past curfew until it was dark enough I could see the dim light on the road to get home!

One of my earlier memories is getting "timeout" and having to watch the JFK funeral on TV. Yes, black and white, and I was the remote as well.

The most exiting thing on a Summer day was a SONIC BOOM!

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:
My first recollection of TV was watching the Gemini space walk.

My first television recollection involves Diana Rigg in a leather catsuit.

I lived in Africa. The television station only rain three or 4 nights a week and then only for a few hours most of which were after my mandatory bedtime. So I watched what my parents watched. My parents watched The Avengers.

Things that I remember include:
- Coming home to a poorly desegregated Virginia.
- To get a McDonald's style hamburger in London you went to a place called Wimpy's. It was the only place we found McDonald's style hamburgers.
- Watching MIG-15 and -17 fighters flying over Lagos, Nigeria during the Biafran Civil War.
- Meeting President William Tubman of Liberia and Vice President Hubert Humphrey of the United States of America.
- Flying on a Convair 440 from Rabat to Rota, and the Boeing 707 from JFK to Roberts Field in Liberia on the outbound leg and from London to JFK on the return leg.
- Having our next door neighbors in Liberia freaking completely out over war breaking out all around their
small nation of Israel. The folks next door were from the Israeli embassy security team.
- Meeting three American Green Berets who were sent to Liberia on a "Training Mission." They like to run on the beach from the embassy to the ELWA mission a distance of about 7 miles. Our house was the first place they knew they could get safe water to drink on the return, so they always stopped.

And many of the other milestones people mentioned, Apollo 11, the murders of Senator Kennedy and Dr. King, etc.

As for the question of whether I am old, I call upon a great philosopher...

"For an apricot, yes. For a head of lettuce, even more so. For a mountain, I have not even begun in years. For a man, I am just right."

4 digit phone #2486 and it was a party line, milk delivered to a metal box by our front door.

There are two schools of thought. But I am technically as old as my tongue, and a little bit older than my teeth....

There, someone finally mentioned the party line. Thought it would never happen. I didn't have a girl friend so I didn't worry about someone listening in.

I hated our couch. We had a 2nd one that was, I think, Scandinavian style. I like it so I always sat on it. Brought my now wife (only 49 years) home to meet the parents. They were relieved, figuring I'd always be a batchelor. I was maybe 20. She stupidly came in and sat on the hated couch. Guess it was time she figured out how hard headed I was.

We had a buddy down the street. His dad was a bartender. It was how we got fireworks. All our parents hated him for supplying us. Someone mentioned above M80s. We also got silver salutes and real cherry bombs. It was my introduction to cigarette fuses. Once we saw a bum picking up butts out of the street. My mother even said "I hope you never do that". Except I'd been doing it in June for a few years. The cigarette didn't need to be full length. I didn't need a 15 minute fuse, 5 being long enough to get away to stop and watch from a safe distance.

Blowing up garbage cans was fun. An M80 would launch the can as high as the house. An older sort of rusty one might come back to earth split wide open. We rationalized it by saying the owner should have bought a new one. We did them a favor. We made a tennis ball launcher, too. Hanging out by the tennis courts, we would find a half dozen down in the weeds. Usually scuffed up really well. The players would hit them there to just get rid of them. The right size pipe would allow one guy to light the fuse and drop it in the pipe. The other guy would drop the ball in. It was how we learned to catch fly balls. A silver salute would launch it out of sight. Then everyone would put their baseball glove on and wait for the "reentry". We were too poor to waste a good baseball.

Inchy firecrackers didn't have the power to launch even a golf ball. Dull. Back then cops were pricks. They'd try to catch us. They were slow old men. That didn't like to run. Besides we knew all the trails down in the woods. We took the ones without blackberry bushes. The cops also hated it when we'd sleep out. We'd be good kids and go to bed early. Then we'd wake up after our parents came to check on us. We'd cover a lot of turf between midnight and 5 AM.

I remember sitting on the 50 at Lambeau Field and watching Bart Starr shred a defense.

RIP Bart.

many things affected what i ate as a kid. always remember crisco oil. into the shopping cart it went, week in and week out.

of course this was after ancel keys' flawed seven countries study touting his (again, flawed) diet-lipid-heart disease hypothesis which influenced the governments low fat dogma which survives (and continues to kill) to this day.

i even remember margarine as a kid (aka trans fat / hydrogenated vegetable oil). we still have omega 6 seed oils (especially fast food and restaurant food).

crisco? yup.

there were still grills cooking up your bacon and eggs using lard, so it wasn't all bad.

Running/riding your bike behind the DDT Mosquito spraying truck...