Friday Fun Question
Sep 10 2010
A fellow rescuer and I were chatting this morning and I can’t remember how the subject came up, but we realized we both had families that not only made us get up and change the TV channel…but also stand there holding the antenna because that made the picture come in more clearly!
So, totally not horse related (though it could be) … share your funny when-I-was-a-kid stories and let’s freak out the younger generation today 
We need a lighter topic – I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of looking at starved horses. (Except for Grace, who makes me happy to look at because she’s picking up weight — Grace’s fan page on Facebook is here for those who haven’t seen it yet)
We need a lighter topic – I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of looking at starved horses. (Except for Grace, who makes me happy to look at because she’s picking up weight — Grace’s fan page on Facebook is here for those who haven’t seen it yet)
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Let me see…. We could NOT use calculators in school we actually had to figure out everything ourselves. There wasn’t any drive-through anythings….the closest thing we had was a restaurant where you could park and a waitress would take your order and deliver your food. On the upside though, we had drive-in movies…that was awesome!
No ATMs, you had to know the bank hours, wait in line to see a teller and keep a bank book updated. If you wanted to contact someone far away, you usually wrote a letter, stamped it and stuck it in a mailbox. Long distance calls were usually pretty expensive and brief. You could smoke on airplanes and there was no security before boarding….but we had MEALS on the flight, those were the best.
Last but not least… we had NO SLURPEES. Nope, they weren’t invented yet!
I miss the chocolate chip cookies on Midwest Express!
Oh man, drive in movies… I miss them so much! I remember mom and dad piling us in the car with our own snacks and pop, getting to play in the little playground until the movie started, then piling into lawn chairs in front of the car to watch a double feature. Saw both Jaws and Star Wars at the drive in as a kid!
And then later as older teenagers meeting up with your friends and partying in the last row *instead* of watching the movies… lol!
We still have a drive-in theater. One of the very last, but it’s running first-run movies. Every night, there’s a line of cars waiting to get in. Not dead yet!
I lived with my Grandma and Grandpa when I was 3 years old. Mema and Popa didn’t have any teeth but they did have a pit toilet and thunderpots. I thought that all grandparents should be toothless and I was frightened of flush toilets until I was 4 years old (I’m 51 BTW, but my family is from Themiddleofbumfuknowhere, NM).
My Grampa (yes, I know, I spell it weird) did this to all three of his daughters, and Mom did it to use a kids. When out of a trip in the countryside / forest / whatever, if we kids started collecting rocks, bringing them up to her and asking what kind of rock we had, the answer was always “Leaverite.” When I asked what Leaverite was, the answer was always “leave ‘er right there!” I later found out it’s a slang term for a rock that may look interesting or of value, but isn’t.
My brother and I also had to get up and change the channel. Then we’d get the, “While you’re up, can you …?” line. Our dad always wanted us to take stuff to the trash for him. His favorite was apple cores. He was always stuffing chewed up apple cores in our hands.
On a more positive note, my brother got in trouble one day and got permanent doggy-duty. I think he was skipping class (in second grade), so he had to pick up all the dog crap out of the yard for the rest of the dogs’ lives. Great news for me! Those dogs lived to be over 16 years old – my brother sure got his punishment!
I freaked a kid out 15 years ago by telling him that we used to have to walk into the bank between 9:00 & 2:00 PM with a check in order to get cash, before ATMs and service hours. He could not believe it. I remember having only B&W tVs, no remotes. We were upper middle class. I don’t think my parents bought a microwave oven ever.
We got a VCR when they first came out and it was HUGE and cost about $500.
my dad bought one of the first first VCR’s with a camera, it was HUGE, the tape went into a shoulder pack and the whole thing weighed about 10kg. the remote had a cable that was just too short to reach the sofa. it lasted about 15 years, which is a good thing- it cost more than the family car!
my dad was very into the latest ‘gadgets’ so we grew up with colour TV (one of the first to land in Australia) instamatics that popped out blurry photos in 3 minutes, intellivisions, portable pacman and whatever Texas Instrument was making at the time. he also still has his original car phone, which looks like someone bolted a home phone to his center consol rofl!
remember when we all used to gather at one house to make a birthday or christmas phone call to the relatives overseas? scratchy 5 seconds of “heya, is it hot there eh?” before handing over the reciever to the next in line?
i think my favourite memory of the good old days, is a friend of mine was in a computer club..that sent out newsletters and updates by post!!
Remember the huge boatlike station wagons with the wood panel sides? Well when seatbelts were optional (if you could even find the paperthin belt wedged under the seats!) so most of the time all the kids were thrown in the way back of the wagon while the adults got to sit and chat in the regular seats. It was like a kids mosh pit- and I remember jumping around with about half a dozen cousins making faces out the huge back window- which BTW was always cranked half down so we could literally hang at least partially out. And vacations always meant going camping by some remote lake in the middle of nowhere, so the roof of the wagon was loaded with more camping gear and junk (recall huge metal tent poles anyone?)
As kids in large suburban areas we also played outside in huge groups- no video games yet, Roaming packs of neighborhood children and there was always at least one kid with the ‘open house’- which anyone could show up, eat and hang out to play, and equally the one house with the ‘scary strict’ parents who you never dared asked to go to. As kids during the summer- we went out first thing in the morning and didn’t come home until someone was bleeding or we heard our names being called at dusk!
Now you are going to make me cry… when I am old and rich, I am going to get myself a gold Ford Country Squire with fake woody sides and restore it. Our “Goldie” was the centerpiece of family life for many years and copious tears were shed by all when she had to be towed away to her final resting place. Yes, we all rode in the “way back,” bouncing around like popcorn in a popper. Vinyl seats that were sizzling hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. NO seat belts used by anyone, ever. A “car seat” for my baby brother that was raised 8″ off the bench seat (and made out of metal rods slightly padded with foam and vinyl) and pretty much used strictly so he could “see out.” I guess he was somewhat contained as well, but if Mom had ever hit anything he would have been launched out of the front window.
As far as playing outside, that’s ALL I did, when I wasn’t busy playing with my Breyers or reading a book (of course, I also did both of those activities outside, too, when the weather was nice). Naturally, most of my outdoor play revolved around either pretending to be a horse or convincing my friends to be the horse I would “drive,” using willow branches for reins. One-track mind, here!
I constructed lots of jump courses out of branches, brooms, rakes, the toy wagon (made a good Liverpool when filled with water) and other stuff. My brothers played in their “dirt yard” with metal Tonka trucks. We all rode on the neighbor’s swing sets constantly. It was time to come home when Mom rang the bell on the back porch. I sure do miss the Good Old Days!
My mother rang a bell, too, when it was time to come in (usually dinnertime) — the first one back to our house was usually the dog. Dogs just got let out and they roamed around the neighborhood — no leash laws, no anxieties. Not much traffic, either, I guess. The dogs played with their friends, who were usually the pets of our friends. I played with the dogs also, sometimes, if kids weren’t around, there not being any horses in the neighborhood.
Our family rule was the ponies had to be home by dark! (The assumption of course was that the kids would be on the ponies when they returned.)
We had a similar rule. Ponies had to be home before feeding time. Oh and while you are putting your pony up, feed the cows.
I loved the burlap sacks that feed came in. We had fifty or so and took them to the mill to be refilled.
Hahaha…that reminded me of how my mom handled curfew when I was in high school. My first car was one she bought for me and kept in her name – we lived in the middle of nowhere. My CAR had to be home by 11pm on weekends and it was NOT allowed to leave the county.
The one time I seriously broke curfew she cured me of every being late again. She knew where I was, called a good friend on the Highway Patrol for his assistance in her evil plot. Next thing I knew I was being pulled over with friends in the car for having a ‘stolen vehicle’. When mom showed up she promptly grabbed me up, hugged and kissed and fussed over how she was SO GLAD I wasn’t hurt and nothing had happened, etc, etc in front of my friends. She never said a word about curfew. I was so mortified I never ever ever broke curfew again.
We had the same rule when I was at my Aunt’s. Ponies home by dark and they get groomed and fed before you do! In town where I lived the rule was, check in when the street lights come on. If you did you might fenagle a few more minutes outside…if you didn’t it was bath and bed for sure!!!
SuperSTB, I think you and I may have grown up in the same neighborhood…LOL….
I have many fond memories of all the neighbor kids getting together and playing huge games of kickball or softball until it was too dark to see anymore. Especially fun when the Dads would get home from work, run in to change and join the game. Then when it was dusk we would throw the softballs high up in the air and watch bats dive-bomb them. That was aften followed by catching fire-flys in jars. Many summer days spent outside from morning till dark, and growing up in rural New England was just the BEST!
Had a neighbor with an old wood-on-the-side station wagon too. Kids would pile in the back and down those country back roads we went. It was a blast to go over a bump and have your head almost hit the roof! Those WERE the days….
My dad was a pilot and had certain safety concerns (1960′s level concerns) so he had “H” harnesses made out of seat belt material for me and my twin sister. The harnesses had a two foot long tail that went down the back that plug into the seat belt in the back seat of the GTO convertable. We were fastened and “safe” but could wander the back seat standing up. When had a rest stop the parents could also keep us close by holding on to the tail. Ironically when we were older we road in the bed of the pickup on the way to the lake. Go figure.
We always had to have seatbelts on (1980’2 kid) – I think I was about 10 before I didn’t believe that the seatbelts had to be done up for the car to work. My mom caught us taking seatbelts off in the rear view mirror and immediately switched the engine off and coasted to the side (v. quiet country lane), turned round and demanded to know who had taken the belt off – it worked for years and she only had to do it once. lol
I’m only 26 and I spent almost all my childhood out in the woods or roaming round. Even once we got a computer at around 10 I never used it unless it was miserable out. Also spent all my time pretending we were out riding cross country (thwarted in the having a pony thing, too expensive) jumping logs and splashing through streams.
are you my sister SuperSTB…yes we had one of those , and my creative parents fitted a matress in the back for the animals…I mean kids. Remember your mom going shopping in the fabric shop for like 5 hours and leaving you in the car with a coke and chips , naturally you could roll the window down, no power windows. How about those tubes that you put your check or cash in at the bank , and sent it in the shoot to the bank window… that was our ATM in the 70^s
My entertainment as a kid was making mud pies , no video games, ipods or phones. My husband use to have the toilet outside (outhouse) and the old telephone book was the toilet paper. He was born on the floor in the kitchen… no hospital, the mothers were always greatful to have a child born before lunchtime , this ment they had time to rest before making dinner. My husband was also hearding sheep after school in the Swiss Alps, not for money BTW… the last flock of goats or sheep was where he would have to eat his dinner, one family would always feed boiled sheeps head, so he delivered those sheep first.
Who remembers the IBM PC Jr it worked off of cartridges. Oh and the laser disc before VHS took over. Not to mention my niece that did not know how to use a rotary dial phone. The thing I miss the most were NY Seltzers in Raspberry.
I DO! we never had a laser disc player, although they were considered very cool. When my dad bought us out first VCR, it was a VHS, not a Beta–he had it figured out that VHS was going to preside over Beta. The machine was the kind where the holder for the cartridge popped out of the top with this horrible clanging noise.
I also remember when HBO was free with basic cable. That’s how I first saw Star Wars, and my dad video taped it so we’d have it forever. I think I still have the video tape with my dad’s typed label on it: STAR WARS.
Oddly enough, my high school had a laser disc player for some physics videos the head of department refused to upgrade. I’m 22.
We had the same rotary dial phone until 1980 when they got rid of the party line. The tech couldn’t believe that phone was still in service. It is now in a Pac Bell museum in Sacramento. My dad couldn’t believe he had to “buy” a phone.
We still have a rotary phone in use — it works fine. It is a later one, when they offered them in colors besides black — it is white. I was supposed to turn it in when I moved from my apartment but I turned in an old one instead and kept this one. The ringer is turned off because it’s our bedroom phone now.
Believe it or not, the phone in our barn is still a rotary phone! My kid is the only one his age that knows what a rotary phone actually IS!
WOW – Grace does look better already! You go, girl. Much better looking at one on the way up instead of down.
I am cracking up at today’s question, because just last weekend I had a group of ladies at my house and the topic turned to “the way TV used to be.” We all recounted stories of foil on the antennas, dads clambering around on the roof of the house attempting to install/fix antennas, and most amusingly, being made to HOLD the antenna because it made the picture better – just like you said!
I myself swear that the only reason my parents had children is so that someone would be available to jump out of the car and open the garage door. It was a double-wide door, too, and darn heavy. God forbid my Dad should break down and buy one of those new-fangled garage door openers, when he had three able-bodied kids to do the deed! Never mind if it was raining, snowing, icy, blistering hot, freezing cold, someone had a sore arm, etc. – “GET THE DOOR!” (And the mail, while you’re at it) I tell my kids all the time how lucky they are.
YES! Get the door, get the gate, mow the lawn and shovel the driveway! That was definitely my childhood. And I still thought I had it REALLY good because I had my own room with a phone in it!
Mowed the lawn without a self propelled lawn mower. Dad was nice enough to lower the push bar and start it for me – I was 10.
Wow, only my “rich” friend had her own phone — the rest of us just had to hope for privacy in the teenage years. I was lucky in that our old house had an actual phone booth — you could shut the door and if you talked quietly all was well. But my parents could hear things through the door that were louder — I remember one time I missed the Rolling Stones on TV and I said “oh, shit!” to my friend — guess it was a fairly loud exclamation LOL — and my father was so outraged that I said such an awful word that he slapped me in the face! Grim being his daughter at times.
I could take him down now, though…Don’t think I don’t still imagine doing that!
Dang, you were LUCKY… I did have my own room, but I sure as heck didn’t have my own phone. Oh, no: we were restricted to use of the kitchen dial-up on the wall, with the 20-ft cord. That way your every word could be monitored by the ‘rents, usually my mother. This was reaaaallllly fun whilst talking to one’s BF or GF. Of course, I was told I should never call my BFs anyway; nice girls didn’t EVER call boys, no matter if you’d been dating for six months. :-/ My brother dated a girl my folks hated for several years and Mom would set the kitchen timer when he’d call her (in addition to listening in, of course). There was a whole lot of complaining about us tying up the phone. Now, why they didn’t just get a second line, like a bunch of families I knew… nah, then they would have had nothing to complain about. When we finally did get a cordless phone, my mother would hide it so we couldn’t use it! (Can you say “control freak”…. yeah)
Today’s kids should truly appreciate their cell phones a bit more. No lectures about the cost of long distance, no phone-hogging, complete freedom in calling anyone where and when they please, no parental eavesdropping. They have it MADE.
Yep! I think the main reason I got my own phone is my mom just could not listen to one more word about horses!
My barn friends would call on the nights we didn’t ride and we would literally be on the phone for 3 hours straight talking horses. Drove my mom NUTS. She always wanted me to get involved in “something more ladylike.”
I was 14 or so when I got my first mobile – I don’t know how we ever survived without them! Aside from the emergency aspect you can phone the pizza shop and have it delivered and it arrives as you do, it’s great!
I LOVE New York Seltzers in Raspberry. The best part about being in the hospital for a week with mono!
Okay, I can’t resist………
This is not so very long ago. Remember when VCR tapes first became available for home viewing? You could rent the movie PLUS the VCR player, which had to be hooked up to the TV when you got it home. (usually took almost as long as watching the movie!)
Well, once the stores realized that everyone was buying their own VCRs they sold off the rental players……….and we bought one, which (believe it or not) we are still using to this day!
Sigh………they don’t make ‘em like that anymore…..
Yes! You could rent a VCR from Blockbuster…it came in a thing like a briefcase. LOL!
We used to have an incinerator in the basement. It was my job to load it with household trash and burn the load when it was full. The automatic lighting/starter button didn’t work, so I had to start the gas and then light it with a match. I was always afraid I’d cause a gas explosion. If I recall, it just sent the smoke out the regular house/fireplace chimney. I’m sure it would be against all sorts of environmental regulations now.
Also, the cement driveway next to our house (we were in a large city) heaved and ended up tilted toward the house. Whenever it rained a lot, I had to go outside with a large squeegee and push the water down the driveway, away from the house. That was sort of fun, as I’d go out there barefoot and wade in 4-6″ of water while doing it.
Same as everyone else….rotary phone, black and white TV, no microwave, and we made popcorn in a large kettle on the stove in oil, and it tasted great!
Oh, yes, emptying the wastebaskets and burning the papers! That was one of my chores, which I did enjoy. We had a metal lattice incinerator thing on the cement at the side of the driveway. I played a game with myself to see if I could get the whole thing aflame with only one match. Eventually the incinerator rusted and flaked away and we had to get a shiny new one.
Speaking of fires, my brother and I used to cook fried eggs on the tops of big juice cans in the driveway, don’t remember what we used for fuel but that was fun, too.
Oh…puddles!!!! Our street had deep curbs and the puddles were HUGE…..parades of kids stomping through them, during and after the rain!
And we made our popcorn the same way on the stove in the summer….but in the winter we had a popper for the fireplace….and for some reason that popcorn tasted the best! Of course REAL butter was melted and poured over it too!
I’m (ahem) “slightly” older than my husband. A song came on the radio and I said to him, “Wow, I remember when I bought this on 45.” He innocently looked at me and said, “What’s a 45?” Yup.
Oh, no! My son asked me that not too long ago…I still HAVE some 45s in the attic somewhere (I still have EVERYTHING in the attic somewhere, at least from the past 30 years or so…they will have to blow up the house if I die prematurely, they will never get all the stuff out of the attic).
I remember when it wasn’t just a 45, it was a “record” — that was what one had! It wasn’t an album culture yet.
I loved listening to John Denver and the Muppets on my parent’s turn table. My dad had a decent collection of vinyl, and I had numerous cassettes! We had the Texas Instrument when “game systems” were battling with Atari (my cousins had Atari and my Aunt was a Pong queen!). No internet….library only (and boy did I spend HOURS in there for school). I’m afraid I never remember NOT having indoor plumbing, and I really appreciate my color TV with remote (although I’ve actually owned one that didn’t have a remote). I got to play outside all the time and walk to and home from school. Oh, and real keys for hotel rooms…not these credit card things! No idea how much our VCR cost, but friends had the Beta when they were first out!
(I know these aren’t all that old, but my baby will never know what these are!)
OMG! Muppets, muppets, muppets!. I grew up with Kermit & the gang, then loved Fraggle Rock when it came out. They never recaptured the same magic after Jim died. And I dearly loved the Atari 2600. It was a flaky thing though and a couple of the very view pieces came loose. Along the same vein, I greatly miss going to the arcade. Monday nights after CCD were the big nights to go. If I ever win the lottery, I’m having a room filled with arcade machines.
As a kid we also walked and road our bikes EVERYWHERE. I grew up during for the original iteration of Care Bears, my Little Pony, Cabbage Patch kids. And yes I admit I loved the Smurfs. We rode around in the bed of trucks and no one thought a thing of it. I grew up watching classic entertainment on this new thing called cable TV. The classic entertainment included the Little Rascals, 3 Stooges, Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, Woody Pecker. And NONE of it was edited. Funny how I survived childhold growing up with all that violence.
I remember when cassettes first came out – what a HUGE improvement over the 8 track and no need to keep a book of matches handy to make sure the 8-track was in the player just right. AND, if the player pulled the tape out a bit, you could just wind it back up if it wasn’t too chewed up. Get a loop in an 8 track and all you could do was toss it!
Getting out of the car to manually open the garage door (with huge, dangerous springs); having to empty the ice tray and refill (which always seemed to be empty when I wanted ice); two horse trailers with no roof AND a single axle!!!!!; 8mm home movies and…couches with the “herculon”, ugly plaid material that you could stick a pencil through and it still looked new!
What, I still have to empty the ice trays if I want ice (as I did just now) LOL! Refrigerators always die when I am unemployed and so the cheapest model with fewest features is what is purchased.
But, I do remember having to defrost the freezer by hand. It was kind of fun once you got into it, after you were through procrastinating so that your freezer’s available capacity was about half of what it started out as. First you try to eat up anything that would go bad if not frozen, then you turn it off and put all the remaining frozen stuff in the refrigerator part to keep that stuff cold. Then you spread some old (“dog” in my household) towels on the floor at the bottom.
Then you put icecube trays full of boiling water — v-e-r-y carefully — into the freezer part and shut the door. When cool, take out and dump, and repeat. After a couple of iterations, the ice will start to melt onto the floor and you’ll have to wring out the towels. But, more fun, you will be soon able to pull great hunks and sheets of ice off the walls, floor and ceiling of the freezer. You can help it along by chipping away at the ice with sharp objects, but not too sharp, because if you puncture anything, you will be extremely sorry. I never did that but I probably came close.
Throwing the white chunks of ice into the sink and melting them with hot water was fun, too. When the surfaces of the freezer are ice-free, you have to be sure to dry them or else it will turn into ice when you turn the appliance back on.
I remember defrosting the freezer in my first married apartment and finding a piece of someone’s wedding cake frozen into the iceberg at the back! It was fun remembering this but now I can think of better ways to spend an evening. Such as, typing messages on an Internet forum?
To date myself, I was born in ’75. I remember how all us kids functioned just fine without cell phones. There was no call waiting or caller ID. Answering machines were tape machines, and some people didn’t even have answering machines. I still have a problem with pre-teens or tweens having cell phones because of this.
Mom took you to the mall, you hung around for a few hours, went to the $1 theater, and then called her on the pay phone with a quarter to come get you when the movie was over. One friend I had would call collect and her mom would just not accept the charges. She knew it meant we were ready to come home and no need to worry about carrying quarters. You didn’t leave the mall, and you always told your parents what movie you were going to and what time so they knew about when you’d get out and when to expect your call.
A lot of us had Sony Walkmans for our cassette tapes. But teachers actually were strict–no Walkmans during class. If you were caught with one, it meant suspension, and that was serious. There were very few “bad” kids in school, and we all took punishment from teachers and school officials seriously. The paddle at school was a threat when I was a kid but was very rarely used–the threat was enough.
Everyone had a bike. EVERYONE. Whether or not they rode it was their thing, but everyone had one.
During the summer we were enrolled in things to do, such as sports, piano lessons, horseback riding, art classes, etc. No screwing around or getting into trouble. There was always something to do.
We had to WALK to school. That’s right, WALK. Even in the insane heat of Arizona. In Junior High we had to walk to the bus stop. Once I got my driver’s license, I was never allowed to drive to school–only to my after school activities such as choir and drama because those got out late at night. But sometimes even then we walked home–a lot of us lived in the same neighborhood, and it was a safer time then, so we could get home with no problems.
Indoor arcades were all the rage. Then there were Commodore 64s with 5 1/4″ floppys and games such as Oregon Trail, Number Munchers and President for a Day. No mice, and you had to type in commands. Screen was black with green letters. I learned how make a bug move around the screen by programming it in code. Then Nintendo came out and EVERYTHING changed. But Nintendo was easy–up down left right B and A Start and Pause. No need for all these insane buttons they have now.
$10 got you a full tank of gas. Kids never got new cars when they turned 16 unless their parents were super rich–only hand-me-downs or cheap clunkers. I drove my dad’s ’85 Chevy Silverado pickup truck all through high school and college. Allowances were around $10 a week but ONLY if you did all your chores, and as soon as you could drive you had to get a job to pay for your own gas.
Ah, good times, good times…
I remember gas at fifty cents a gallon. That does make me go, aw, the good old days!
Lowest I remember is 11 cents a gallon — that was somewhere in the South, probably around 1960 when my family drove to Florida for Christmas one year, and they were having a “Gas War.” It was remarkable enough that my father pointed it out and explained it to us.
Hmm — they never do that anymore, do they? At least not the same kind of gas war…
Ok Cathy, I must be a little older than you because I remember gas at 28 cents a gallon…LOL…and you didnt even have to pump it yourself!
How many of us remember when gas stations were full serve and we actually got to know the guys who owned and worked at them?? My favorite station when I was a kid was an old victorian train station that was converted to a gas station. The owner was a little old man who knew every customer by name. He was always sitting in his chair outside the station waiting for customers. No matter when you drove by, he was always sitting there. And he gave lolipops to the kids.
I remember when gas jumped from 24 to 28 cents a gallon Mom started making us ride out bikes around
town instead of driving us. I had a hot pink Schwinn with a banana seat and those big tall handle bars. Try finding one of those nowadays and it will cost you a small fortune.
I had a hot pink Huffy … LOL!
Cool..but did you attach a tail to the back of your huffy and pretend it was a pony??…LOL
Mine had a long white tail….thanks to Moms feather boa that I “borrowed”……
No but my friend and I did pretend we WERE horses nonstop…we were five gaited. I am sure it was fairly entertaining to watch unless you were our moms and had that going back and forth, back and forth in the house all the time.
I was always galloping around, pretending to do jumping courses or give lessons. In the winter time, I’d use the mop and the brush from the kitchen, angle them so they made jumps in the hall and spent hours running up and down the hall. It wasn’t a very big hall either!
In the summer time I’d get my friends to pretend to be riding ponies, and we’d take turns at giving lessons. We all did lessons together at the weekends (1 lesson per week) – so we’d be changing the rein, trot to the end of the ride, full ride – trot on! – etc. I even recall squabbling over who got to ride what (imaginary) horse since we inevitably pretended to be riding our favourites from riding school!
We also set up jumping courses in our back gardens, and my Dad actually made me little jumps for us to play with, which was amazing. (He also made me sets of wings when I got my first pony, so again, amazing
)
OK. I know this will blow your mind… I remember when gas was .25 a gallon. Yeah. A quarter a gallon!! We had this gas station in my home town called the Gas-A-Mat. You had to use tokens to operate the pumps. A quarter would get you one token. Then you’d take the tokens and feed them into the pumps and gas up your car. It was self-service so it was cheap!
Speaking of gas stations, remember when they used to be called “Service Stations” and there were actual attendants who’d pump the gas AND clean your windshield? Some would even check the air in your tires!! And the stations used to give away scenic glasses with a tank of gas. There used to be lots of stations you never see anymore. Remember Texaco stations??
I remember when boxes of laundry detergent had glasses or towels inside. You could collect whole sets. I remember S&H Green Stamps for crying out loud!
We used to go to the A&W and get root beers. A buck would buy ten (10!) mugs!
Oh, and remember penny candy??? 5 cent Hershey bars? Pixy Stix????
I loved the days when they’d clean your windshield!
In Oregon, you still cannot pump your own gas. I loved that about Oregon!
I worked in a full serve gas station (in Ohio) as recently as 10 years ago. It’s really a horrible job in Ohio! I worked there through the winter, and $6 an hour just wasn’t enough for having to go out there in the freezing cold to pump gas! And our pumps were the old style that had to be reset with a key after each use, so I had to go to the self serve pumps after each use and reset them for the next customer. There’s still full serve stations in Ft Wayne and New Haven, IN called “Swifty” but you get a penny discount if you pump it yourself!
We still have an A&W Root Beer Stand, too. The prices aren’t that great anymore, though! Back when I was in high school, they had an old car cruise-in, and filmed a commercial with some kids I went to school with, making it look like it was the 50′s. I just saw that commercial a few weeks ago, I’d forgotten all about it.
I grew up in the age of “You have to watch your kids so the child molester doesn’t kidnap them” so I don’t have any cool stories.
This is true! And sometimes they will still clean your windshield and check your air pressure if you ask nicely and they’re not too busy.
I pumped my first tank of gas at 22 when I brought my car down to CA for college. I probably looked pretty silly standing there carefully reading all of the instructions on the pump. XD
there still are texaco stations around, now, 7-11′s are getting scarse.
lol, a case of beer was about $2.50 and a pack of cigarettes 35 cents. A&W and White Spot hamburgers were the BEST. Elvis on Ed Sullivan–I wasn’t allowed to watch cause of his swivvel hips. We made our own entertainment, imaginative and usually energetic. Playing “hooky” to go to the barn.
I remember those games! I’m proud to say I learned on a DOS computer, in my preschool years. I couldn’t do much, but I knew enough to play games, and that’s all that mattered. We had an IBM at the time. It was stolen when I was 6, and we replaced it with a Mac. When my dad asked me if it was the same as the ones at school I said no, because the screen was in colour.
We got 2 channels on B&W TV and we had to get up to switch them. If you wanted to talk on the (rotary) phone in private you could streach the cord into the closet (not too comfey and sublings hastled you). When off-roading in the sugar bush (maple producing family) I used to have to get out and lock the hubs -usually in the middle of a muddy mess. I used a typwriter to type school papers, but first they had to be hand written so you didn’t have to keep re-typing it. If you were listeng to music and a younger sibling came stomping in, that was grounds for a beat down since it made the record skip. We rented a beta player since they were too expensive. My grampa listened to 8 tracks in his truck on the way to the dump (dump trips were very exciting). Cars had vinal seats that I stuck to when wearing shorts. My parents bought a cell phone (for safety reasons when my dad would go out plowing) and it was about the size of a loaf of bread and required being plugged in with an antenna on the roof. We felt very advanced. We had to get up every 3 hours to put wood on the fire (well, my parents still do I supose…I live in Fl now, yuck). When we got in trouble we didn’t have electronics to be taken away, we just had to go muck out the bull pen (or chicken coop, or pig pen, etc). I could go on…
Ha! My earlieast recollection of computer was going to the “computer room” in grade school. They gave us a punch card, we entered it in a slot at the front of the computer and it spit it out at the end of the computer. Not sure what that did , or why it did it. Wow. In 1981 I lived with a guy who had like the first Apple and he used a phone modem to connect to the computer school & he tied my phone up & I had no social life for the better part of winter quarter.
I walked to and from elementary school (about 1 mile each way) every day, rain or shine, hot or cold. It wasn’t uphill both directions in the snow, but I grew up in the Dallas, TX area. 100+ degrees in May, August & September and freezing temperatures in Nov, Dec & Jan. We were not allowed to wear shorts and my 1st grade year were required to wear skirts/dresses.
Oh yeah….we didn’t have backpacks either.
Hey, I actually DID walk uphill both ways to school! lol! Our small town was in a valley, we lived on one side of town, school was on the other side. So I walked *down* one hill, across downtown, the up the other hill to the grade school. and you walked to school if you were cool, no sissy buses! Another perk of walking to and from school was using your leftover lunch money at the hardware store’s penny candy counter!
I grew up in Arlington (Dallas suburb) and the bus was only available if you lived two miles or greater from school. It didn’t matter if you had sidewalks. We walked unless it was pouring rain. Really hot or really cold we walked and it sucked! Oddly enough though, very few fat kids…
Yeah, I think I walked about 2 or 3 miles to school too. When I finally went to a school that I needed to take a bus to, I walked about 5 blocks to the closest bus stop. Nowadays if I follow a school bus thru my neighborhood, it seems to stop at every single kid’s house to personally let them off in their own driveway. Apparently they can’t walk blocks anymore? And gosh, the extra gas that wastes…
I walked no matter what to my elementary school, but I was over a mile away from the Junior high, so I got to ride the bus “in the winter”. From about mid November until the end of March. The rest of the year I walked or rode my bike. I don’t remember our bus driver’s name – we called her “baggy-jaws” and she was ancient. BUT…if you were misbehaving she would take off her shoe (boot, original wooden Dr. Scholl’s exercise sandals, etc) and throw them at the offender by looking in her mirror and flinging it over her shoulder. She was deadass accurate too. And you know what….you got it again when you went home with a lump for misbehaving on the bus….no one ever thought of suing. There really should be a special place in heaven for bus drivers.
Littlebigred, where in Dallas? I went to George B. Dealy Elementary School. Good Gawd that was a long time ago……*sighs*
Yes, in the summers being ordered out of the house after breakfast, and not allowed back in until the streetlights came on, except to eat. Spending hours outside in the South Dakota winters building elaborate snow forts, waging huge snowball fights against neighbor kids. On Halloween, we went trick or treating in large groups with a couple of older kids, all over the neighborhood for what seemed like hours. Many of those houses offered homemade treats, and we never thought twice about scarfing them down immediately so no one else would get them later. I also remember helping my grandma and great grandma make popcorn balls wrapped in colored cellophane with ribbons to give out at Halloween–now they would be X-rayed for razor blades. Riding all over town on my gorgeous maroon Schwinn bike with the sparkly banana seat, going to visit friends, to the park, all on my own, or maybe with friends, no helicopter parents, cell phones not even imagined yet. How did I survive all that unstructured time without every waking moment scheduled and monitored by adults?
Mom wouldnt let us build snow forts because she was afraid they would collapse and smother us…LOL..
But when the snow plow would come and leave huge mounds of snow on the curbs we would carve them to look like horses backs and ride them.
I remember going on a family vacation with my parent’s, brother, grandparent’s & cousin. Seven people driving from Portland, OR to Disneyland in a blue Chevrolet station wagon, in July with NO AIR CONDITIONING! AND the seats had plastic covers on them! It was hotter than hell and my teen aged brother and cousin thought it was funny to sit in the back and fart the whole way,,,,,OMG. I don’t know how we all survived that trip. I was 4 yrs old and still remember it like it was yesterday.
Another favorite memory (this IS fun, Fugs). Those long vacaton car trips, with the kids in the back. Now cars come with not just one but two video screens in the back so the kids can plug in their earplugs and watch individual shows. Parents are happy because the kids are quiet — and non-communicative! So even on the way to a supposed vacation, there are still means of wrapping kids up in their own individual cocoons (sp?)
OMG you made me laugh! That reminded me of the trip my BF took with his family of 9 in a stion wagon, camping out west with just peanut butter and bread to eat for 3 days. His family never believed in planning anything. just go!
Portland makes a move to protect carriage horses. Willamette Week mocks the mayor for it:
http://blogs.wweek.com/news/2010/09/10/mayor-sam-adams-proposes-regulations-for-horse-drawn-carriages/
Ohhhhh….why oh why do we want to talk about how old we are?!?!
3 channels on TV. You could get PBS IF you held your jaw just so.
We used to ride our bikes to school, dental appointments, bank – in heavy traffic – no way would I do that now! But there was no car available because parents did not drop everything to chauffer your butt any where you wanted to go.
We used to ride our bikes right behind the truck that sprayed for mosquitos (we lived in Hawaii) so we could ride blind in the fog. How’s that for fun?!!
We played outside till the street lights came on.
We made copies on a mimeograph. More purple was on your hands than on the paper.
We had a party line phone (4 families)
We had milk delivered.
Learned to type on a manual typewriter.
I grew up with records and 8-track tapes (and the folded match book or penny to keep the cartridge in tight so it would play.
I had forgotten we had to keep a written bank book that was signed off on every time you went to the bank. Gah!
Well, I guess I’ll go shuffle off now….
Oh, man, typewriters… yessirree. I was still using mine in college, and thought I was hot stuff because it had built-in correction. My final year I had a “computer lab” available where I could go and write papers. God forbid you lost or damaged your ginormous floppy disk with all your work on it…
And milk delivery – wish I still had THAT. I’m always running out for milk, with a teenage boy in the house. Furthermore, the milk box on the front porch made a handy depository for other stuff people were dropping off. It also made a great step stool if the guy you’d gone out with happened to be a lot taller! (I’m 5’6″ and had a 6’8″ BF)
Remember when windshield wipers actually had metal in them? I do and have a four inch scar on my left foot from walking on the hood of our 1967 blue Chevy and slicing my foot open. Thirty-three stitches and the resident who put them in turned the lips of the wound the wrong way and the foot popped back open when pediatrician took them out.
We had a creek in our neighborhood and we’d make peanut butter sandwiches, put ‘em in a bag and be gone from morning until dusk. We built forts, tree houses, rafts and explored every inch of that creek. Also there were horses on the side of the creek opposite our neighborhood and I fed, petted and walked in the pasture with them after carefully shimmying through the strands of barbed wire. Nowadays I’d have a screaming fit if some little girl was feeding, petting, in the pasture with my horses. If my memory is correct the teenage girl who owned the horses babysat for us but not really sure. We had a blast growing up except during Lent when Dad would give up beer, cigarettes, and coffee. Plus he made us kids give up TV–yup we were a happy household then! >extreme sarcasm<
I’m only 23 and had to get up to reposition the bunny ears on our old TV when the screen got fuzzy… you don’t know how amazed I was when I went over to my friend’s house and she had 500 channels (to my 3), and… gasp… a remote control!
We didn’t have more than the 5 ‘main’ channels till 2001 when we finally got Sky.
Once when my sisters and I were driving teenagers, my sisters Chevy Truck broke down in a Los Angeles City. She called me to pick up both her and her friend, as the truck had been towed to a service station. I drove from Ventura to pick them up and by the time I got there the weather had changed. Well I drove a rusty old International. It didn’t have the top on and the window shield whippers didn’t work. We all sat in the front, I drove my sister sat in the middle over the stick shift and her friend in the passenger side. As we were driving down a long dark highway it started to rain. Heavy! Just like that, all at once and hard. My sister had to lean over the driver’s windshield and manually move the whippers back and forth. I could hardly see. Then her friend yelled at me “There’s a car coming towards us in our lane!” He was headed straight for us! Well I was young… So I said “he’s in our lane he needs to move.” She was screaming at me to move, it was so dark and my sister was yelling at me too, as she continued to move the windshield whipper. I kept driving straight and as my sisters friend was having a heart attack the car that was headed for us swerved into his own lane, and just in the nick of time. Both my sister and her friend said they would never drive with me again. I reminded them they were stranded and I was the only one would pick them up.
Born in the 1950′s- so I rode home from the hospital in my mom’s arms, just like every other baby boomer. Three channels on the TV plus 1 public television station, plus 2 stations that played nothing but re-runs. All cars had vinyl upholstry, unless you were really wealthy. No gourmet coffee- If you wanted a latte, you went to an Italian restaurant. No leather running shoes, everyone wore keds or buster browns. Bottled water? That was for your steam iron, or your car radiator. VCR’s? You saw it in the movie theatre, or waited three years for it to show up on TV.
As children my brothers, sister and myself got to watch 1/2 hour of TV a day during the week, an hour of cartoons on Saturday, and Ponderosa on Sunday nights. We only had 1 TV, but we had the first color TV in the neighborhood, and it was huge, bigger than a coffin, with a mahogony wood console. It sure made Ponderosa better.
Girls wore dresses or skirts to school. I was in high school before they allowed slacks, not jeans.
We were also kicked out of the house in the morning, and had to be in before dark. We all ate dinner at the table every night. We went to church twice on Sundays, had our big dinner between services, and had sandwiches or soup in the living room after the evening service, while we watched Ponderosa. I wanted to marry Little Joe and live on a ranch because I loved the house and his horse.
I feel really old right now, and I’m only 15.
I remember getting our first remote control- I think I kept jumping up & then wondering where the Channel+ button went for about a year, haha. We finally lost the bunny ears last year. One of my friends had the best setup for years: a dial TV with 700 channels.
I remember when Mom and Dad bought a color TV. They were pretty impressed by color TV.. by my six year old imagination MADE the colors all by itself. I insisted we already HAD color TV.
I also got really frustrated becasue I was unable to climb up bare walls… and got my head stuck in the porch railing playing ‘zoo’ or ‘jail’ or something… odd child, I was. still am.
Should have tried hallways. My friends & I used to shimmy up hallways/doorways, and then make everyone duck under. We thought it was hilarious, even if no one else did.
“…we realized we both had families that not only made us get up and change the TV channel…but also stand there holding the antenna because that made the picture come in more clearly!…”
Well, I don’t know about other people, but we don’t have cable at our house, and with those damn “boxes” you had to get (with the government rebate) to see digital TV, we’re STILL doing this! Others in my area, also without cable, are in the same boat!
OT: This past week, our mare and someone else’s mare was molested by a very disturbed, perverted man. He was caught sticking his arm up both horses’ reproductive tracts, removing the arm, and sniffing it. There are 4 witnesses, one of which is a deputy sheriff. He spent about three days in jail before posting bond. Unfortunately, Ohio laws suck and the prosecutor is going after indecent exposure (misdemeanor) and a felony 3 charge (not sure what it is specifically). Neither mare is injured, though ours is on strict observation to watch for infection from dirt on his arm.
This happened in the midst of a very busy evening. When arrested, the guy was only worried about missing the following night’s concert. They’ve banned him from the fairgrounds, they’re going to get a restraining order on him, and I’m working with the deputies on trying to get his picture posted in all the barns and released to the public for the animals’ protection.
Ew. That is just so wrong. What a sicko.
My family had a commodore sx-64- “portable” computer. 23 lbs, and don’t jiggle it cause it might turn off. SNL was funny (anyone remember the happy fun ball? “do not taunt happy fun ball…” or the driving cat…”
MS-DOS was the pc operating system c:/!!!
PBS had the painter that did happy trees and one summer my oldest sister was driven insane by my sis and I watching Muppets take Manhattan’ oh, and my pop buying firecrackers and real sparklers (which are illegal in CA now) then letting us play with them and blow stuff up.
In 93 we got direct tv. Everyone was amazed by the amount of channels we got (however we got no local channels on the system, lol).
I explained to my son how internet used to work with modems and phones. He was shocked that research used to be limited to what book your library had.
the guy that painted happy trees was Bob Ross, he passed away in july 4th 1995. i thought he was sooo awesome
Oh the memories! We actually still have Drive in movies here, not many but we do go at least once a year.
My kids were so confused when they saw the casette player in my van, they had no idea what it was.
The original Nintendo, I remember having to blow into the cartridges all the time. My old sitter had the original Atari with the wood paneled look LOL!
I played with barbies until I was probably 13, my 10 year old would never touch a barbie or any other doll. There are kids in her grade that have cell phones now!
I’m Canadian and I remember paper $1 and $2 bills. My grandmother gave my eldest a $2 bill for her birthday and she thought it was play money.
I too remember playing outside for all hours of the day. There were no worries back then, we were often in the woods behind our homes and we could go to any neighbor’s house if we needed anything. We had cable but there were no cartoon channels, we had to wait until Saturday morning.
Oh and no one had heated water buckets, we just had to smash the crap out of the buckets when they iced over.
Ayup. I’m one of the old ones I guess. Heck, I didn’t even have my own phone growing up! We had one telephone and one TV. I remember when we upgraded from the B&W to the color TV. Used to watch Disney, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, CHiPs, and Emergency! (then it was Emergency One!). Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood! (It’s a Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood…)
As a child, I used to roam the neighborhood and woods for miles and miles. Even before I was a teenager, I’d ride my bike a couple of miles to the river to go fishing, or follow a creek waaaay up into the woods, where I’d sometimes see black bear tracks, but never saw a bear. I knew the area within a 5 mile radius of our house like the back of my hand!
We weren’t allowed calculators in math class at all, until we started doing logarithms. No calculators during tests at all! Even in 11th grade, we were still hand-writing essays, no sissy typewriters!
The first computer I ever used was a keyboard and long greenbar paper – no monitor, input and output was directly to the paper! My high school got personal computers in my sophomore year – Tandy TRS-80s (“trash 80s”). My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20, which is currently in the computer museum at my college. I was in the first ever “computer science” class in 11th grade, we learned BASIC programming. Computers weren’t used in the classroom, even in the compsci class.
I walked to school from kindergarten on. Ok, so my Elementary school was only a couple hundred feet from home, but heck – I see parents on our 100 foot culdesac drive to the intersection to pick their kids up from the bus. 100 FEET! I walked to high school a lot, a mile and a half each way I think.
My parents would not buy me a car, and did not put me through college – paid my own way.
When I bought my first car, a Chevy Chevette (used to like to say “I drive a ‘vette!”), gas was 69 cents a gallon.
As for horses, the first horse I ever handled on a regular basis, I think I was 12 or 13, was my uncle’s racing Standardbred stallion, Atta Duke. I loved horses for as long as I can remember… the first picture of me on a horse, I was 2 moths old, and on, I think, Atta Duke’s daddy. Or maybe Duke himself, dunno. My father did everything he could to discourage my addiction, like “forcing” me to work at the riding stable to earn my hour weekly lesson… which utterly backfired on him, of course.
Fun topic! Us old folks always do like to talk about “the way things were”
Hm,
Parachute pants, one glove, bangs that went straight up four inches before they flopped over and hair that stuck out above each ear as far as possible! Rubber “jelly” shoes, BASIC and ASCII programming. Needing to know DOS commands and a pre-windows, pre-mouse internet with chat-bots.
Blue eyeshadow, valley-girl slang, tearing the necks and wrists out of every shirt and wearing six layers at a time, artfully torn and sagging off one shoulder, of course. Rolling up the bottom hems of your jeans, super tight to the ankle….aaah, the good old days.
I got hooked on the internet in 1993 on a telnet chat board from the University of Iowa…anyone remember those days? I used to argue politics with people in other countries at 3 AM…LOVED it. HOOKED.
haha! on the big CRT boxes with little screens and green block letters! Hoo boy…good times, good times.
I was in library school in the early 1980′s, the internet dark ages. Only a handful of us reference students signed up for online searching class. You had to pay for each search query you dialed up using boolian logic and you had better be searching the correct database ( only one at a time per phone call) or you wasted your $4.00. Some goofball Senator named Al Gore wanted the government to PAY to support the technology that the military was using to allow public electronic information sharing. What a nutcase he was, it was never going to fly – there would never be a market for such tomfoolery. He was almost shouted down.
Hah. Yeah. I remember in college being asked a question that completely threw my entire world view. In a good way.
I was in telnet chat at about 10pm talking to this guy from Italy when he came out with:
‘What’s it like to live in a country where terrorists are active?’
I was completely unable to answer that question! The IRA were background noise in my childhood despite the fact that I have actually had the experience of hearing a bomb go off (don’t worry, it was a controlled explosion and I was nowhere near it) and, perhaps more disturbing, finding out that the incredibly nice Irish couple renting one of the flats next door…
…yeah, you guessed it, they were terrorists. Background noise. I’ve actually compared it with the husband to his attitude towards tornados. Grow up in the Midwest, tornados are background noise.
But until that moment it had not really OCCURRED to me that there were places in the world where there weren’t any terrorists! Of course, these days I’m not sure there are…sigh.
I live in RURAL Illinois. We didnt have an indoor bathroom till I was 5. My dad would have the toilet door wide open with his pants down past his knees; swatting at wasps with his feed cap. I always knew where my grandpa was if the dog was setting or laying outside the door of the toilet. My grandpa would chore every morning before breakfast. We would go feed the cows and set in the pasture and count them while grandpa smoked a cigarette. We then went in and had breakfast. They listened to the news and the obituaries on the radio. My grandma made out the grocery list and my grandpa and his older (batchelor) brother and I went to town to get groceries, go to the bank, pay bills; then meet grandpas’ other older (batchelor) brother at the pool hall and listen to gossip.
Remember when the dimmer was a button you pushed with your foot on the floor of the car or truck? Most radios were AM. Most kids on the school bus had older or younger siblings. One boy in our class came from a Catholic family of 10 kids. They had a milk cow and my mom would go buy milk from them. Cereal the next morning had cream on it. Wonderful!!! We had a black and white TV. NBC and CBS. Sometimes PBS if the weather was right. Everybody watched Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Bewitched, Hogans’ Heroes. I would be completely livid on Saturday mornings when some kind of rocket was shot into space and interrupt Scooby Doo; Johnny Quest or Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner.
My grandpa was a staunch Democrat and we had to watch the Watergate hearings. One Christmas Eve fell on Saturday nite and we couldnt open Christmas presents till Hee Haw was over. Our telephone was rotary dial too. We were on a party line also and you could tell when someone picked up and was listening to your conversation. My moms’ sister and mother lived in the next town and your long distance call was 10 minutes and then it automatically disconnected. So you would have to call them back to finish what you were talking about. My first pack of cigarettes cost me .75. The late 60s’ and 70s’ had the best music. My son watches TV now and they use an oldie in a commercial and I will keep singing and he would ask me how I know the song. I reply it was really a song when I was a kid. Not a jingle for a commercial. Remember Kaptain Kangaroo?
Oh, yes — smoking in the bad old days! When I started smoking, cigarettes were 35 cents a pack in a machine, but you could save money by getting a carton for $2.95. That is 10 packs of 20 each, in case they don’t sell them that way anymore…
Before I started smoking, and you could still of course smoke on airplanes, I remember they actually used to hand them out — your nice tray, which would include a little bottle of wine in addition to the half-decent meal you got in those days, would also have a little pack of four Kents or something like that.
And there was flying Standby with a student card — my husband-to-be was in medical school in Wisconsin and I was stuck with my parents in Florida one summer. Flew out to see him and it was $40, with the nice meal, etc. as described above.
Ahhh……the good ole days….when $2 (the lunch money you should have gone to the canteen with) got you a MASSIVE bag of mixed lollies on your way home from school! The joys of having a lolly shop right across from school – how smart were those shop owners!
I remember the gas wars when gas was 27 cents a gallon. I am old enough to come from an era before tampons or disposable diapers. Remember those fringed saddle pads, which were followed by those “carpet” show pads? How about those polyester, one piece, zip up equitation suits often in colors such as lavender or orange! How about buckstitched tack? I remember before silver show halters when colt show halters had 3 lines of sticthing and filly’s had 2. I remember when we decided we could no longer afford chocolate eclaires when they went from 15 cents to 25. My mom would complain about spending $20 and only getting six bags of groceries! I remember when Mc Donalds finially reached “One Million Sold” and we couldn’t believe it was possible.
I’m SO old that when I was a kid, milk and bread were delivered to your home by horse-drawn wagon – Silverwoods Milk wagon was pulled by a white (grey) horse, and Brown’s Bread wagon by, of course, a brown horse. The horses knew the routes off by heart, but if someone moved, it took them a while to not stop at that house. In older parts of the city, you can still see the (now sealed off) milk boxes beside the back doors. As for TV? No TV! We listened to the radio – Our Miss Brooks and Jack Benny on Sunday evenings, and no niche broadcasting. On any one station, you’d hear a C&W piece, then Patti Page, then the Weavers, then some rhythm & blues, followed by a Frank Sinatra ballad, and after that some big band dance music. We heard every kind of music, including classical, of course – whereas I think that today, there are lots of kids who don’t know that there IS any other kind of music than hip hop. TV, when it did come, was three stations – the CBC from Toronto, and ABC and CBS from Buffalo. The TV Guide could give detailed descriptions of every episode of any show because there were only three on at a time. We walked to school, and wrote with ink pens – every desk had an ink well. Fountain pens and ballpoints were strictly forbidden. Any girl unwise enough to have braids could count on having them dunked in an ink well at least once by some obnoxious boy. I took riding (actually, mostly falling off) at a Pony Club stable on the outskirts of town – the area is now carpeted by 20 storey apartment houses and malls. Even the stables I rode at as an adult 30 years ago, way north of the city and that took me an hour to get to, live on only in memory and the names of streets in the housing developments that go up like mushrooms overnight – Redstone Court, Citation Terrace, Northwick Crescent, Sundance Avenue …
Ah, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be! ;o)
born in 1970. I remember riding and clambering around with my friend in the very back of our VW bug, in that little compartment – could do that since the engine was in front. Played outside ALL the time or in basement playrooms. Rode my bike to school -are kids even allowed to these days? I see them walking, but never on a bike with a backpack or with those bike basket things over the back wheel Oh my! Remeber those little rickety seats parents could put you in on the back of THEIR bikes?!?!, and you would be leaning half over about to fall out from the side when they were at a stop. No such thing as helemts then. Saw Star Wars in the theatre -got one of the special mail kits for the first figures. Lots of Hamburger Helper and Chef Boy-R-Dee make your own pizza kits. Evel Knievel -I got this great toy where you could turn this crank thing and an Evel doll on his bike would rev up and shoot out (and down our family room stairs). I also had Bionic Man AND Woman dolls -that was a big birthday score. Our huge console tv, watching Land of the Lost. And I remember when that song about the horse “Wildfire” was a hit and on the radio constantly -oh how I swooned over that! Oh my gosh, this is fun, have loved reading what others have written! Thanks FUGLY!
Speaking of horses -did anyone grow-up close enough to Columbus, OH/Zanesville, OH to go to Marmon Valley Farm horse camp? I think it now is a Christain Farm retreat, but back in the late seventies when I went, it was a sleepaway horse camp that got me hooked on all things horses. A bit scary in quite a few other ways, but it was definitely a horse immersion experience! Some of those ponies were so tough and humbled me right away!
Marmon Valley Farm is still in existence! I know some horse crazy little girls that still look forward to that every year. It is a Christian camp, but kept the horse part of it, too! I never was allowed to go away to horse camp, although I thought riding horses other than my own was so much fun. But I always got the, “Why should we pay for you to go ride some other horse when yours is in the barn?” speech.
Imagine a phone that is attached to the wall.. with a headset that is attached to the phone by a long coiled cord!
Imagine… if someone tries to call you, they get a busy signal. If they are *that* motivated to talk to you, they will call back another time.. and leave a message with someone if you don’t happen to be home then!
Imagine.. typing college research papers on an actual typewriter, and having to have your rough draft in some sort of reasonable shape before retyping THE ENTIRE THING with zero mistakes.. because even ‘correctape’ corrections were frowned upon (and ERASABLE BOND was considered to be rather tacky)
IMAGINE: no cable, no DVR, no VCR.. if you wanted to watch TV you had a choice of 3 networks (NBC, CBS, or ABC. Eventually we had some UHF channels.. with educational and ‘specialty’ programming) You had to watch what you wanted to watch WHEN IT WAS ON. There was no recording of TV.
IMAGINE watching the news ONLY at 7 AM, noon, or 6 PM.. or the 11PM news if you were a bit of a night owl. No CNN!
When I was a kid, my sister and I had to ask to be excused from the dinner table – because that was polite. We were forced ‘kicking and screaming’ to put in an appearance and ‘be friendly’ to mom and dad’s adult friends.. in return they were polite to our friends (except when ‘messing with us’ and then it was all in good fun. More than one ‘boyfriend’ left with me to go out on a date TERRIFIED of my very dry-humorey father!)
Instead of playing on FB, texting, etc… we played bloody knuckles or just ‘hung out’ in my neighborhood. When the street lamps (nat’l gas, in front of each house) came on at dusk, we’d better get home PRONTO — or else!.
Hmm… things I’ve had to do in my 23 years… I know! Let’s talk about college.
Freshman year of college, the summer after, and sophomore year of college saw me living in the world’s scariest dorms. We had a freight elevator… but it would catch fire if anyone used it and we’d all have to evacuate so they could put it out. In the dead of night, a company came to remove barrels of asbestos from the dorm rooms we were about to move into, loaded into a giant dumpster labeled “caution: carcinogens” that was only there between 10:00 PM and 5:00 AM. It and all signs of the asbestos removal disappeared during the day. We dubbed it Cancer Dorm during move in. Also, part of the ceiling came unglued and fell on my head in the middle of the night. And the light fixture blew up in the bathroom, which had only bright red water that looked like it came from the river in Hell. And occasionally the vents in the ceiling would belch to life and coat the entire room in blue, fibrous dust of unknown origin. For both summer semesters, my floor didn’t have an RA. Neither of them ever showed up. My first roommate spoke sixteen words to me for the entire semester we lived together. I counted. My second roommate was fond of bringing married men back to have sex with at early hours of the morning. My third and final roommate had explosive diarrhea for six months and refused to clean the bathroom under any circumstances. At one point, room break-ins and the occasional attempted rape got so bad, the school advised everyone to buy pepper spray and make copious use of the two deadbolts and chain that came standard on the steel room doors. Two people got knifed amidst the used condoms and syringes out back behind the “Munchie Mart” a block from my dorm while I was living there. Someone else got shot on campus during a mugging. Two girls disappeared at a particularly nasty frat party and were never found as far as I know. They were still combing the nearby woods for bodies when I gave up and transferred to somewhere sane.
There has GOT to be some web site for rating colleges to post that on…
I suspect the public would love to know where to avoid!
Living in the south with no air conditioning – going to sleep with all the windows open and carefully moving over to the “cool” spot and hoping you fell asleep before you ran out of them.
Riding bikes to the store
Black and white tv
Going barefoot in the summer
Group games that took place over the entire neighborhood
Playing in the woods
Milk that got delivered
Coke in glass bottles
Knowing which families in the neighborhood served real butter or oleo – and which ones to avoid.
Breyer’s were cheap enough to save your allowance for
Oh no kidding about the Breyers! I remember using saved birthday money to buy 2 of the regular sized ones for $9.99 each from a little private toy store, no less. Can remember holding each bag against the handlebar and them rythmically banging my knees as I rode the half hour way home. Not sure I would let my daughter at that age ride a bike on busy streets that far on shopping mission, but I was determined to get those Breyers. Still have them.
Those were the days when your parents would tell you to go get it yourself, or figure it out yourself, if you wanted something right now that badly! Now it is too scary to do that.
It’s posts like this that tell me there are a few “older people” in here, and they have better memories than I do about such things. Everything above fits my criteria too. NO AC, NO color TV, milk delivered in glass bottles… I like the new technology, but life seemed less hectic then, and less complicated.
Oh what a fun question!! Here’s my list
I remember when the ‘internet’ first came to our home. You had a box called a dialer to access it. There was no Google.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out when I was a kid. I remember my best friend got the album first and called me (on a regular old land line phone, don’t you know) and played it over the phone. That was one of the first albums I bought on my own and it was a vinyl record.
Oh yes, we had the rabbit ears and 3 channels. We also didn’t watch much tv – there was far too much to do outside. But I do remember the premier of MTV. We were too far out for cable, but a friend had it. Of course, that was when MTV was actually music videos.
The first ‘portable’ cell phone we had was in a big bag and required an antennae. It was bulky, expensive, ugly and not that reliable. I think the general feeling was this thing would never catch on.
Jelly shoes were big.
MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” were first cool – before Glee.
My sister and I rode to the beach stretched out in the back of the hatch back car with the dog, playing and coloring -not strapped into seat belts or car seats.
Gas was less than a dollar a gallon. When it hit 98 cents everybody started to panic. (My mom, of course reminds me SHE got it for a lot less in earlier days – AND they pumped it for her and washed the windshield)
We had an Atari 2600. Pong ruled. Then came Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Atari was cool, but we’d still rather be outside playing or riding horses.
Everyone suddenly realized that the money was in business. There was a huge influx of adult college students that went to night school to get MBA’s (business degrees).
Discipline was not an issue in school – we behaved. If we got into trouble in school, it meant double that when our parents found out. Most of the older boys hunted and belonged to the volunteer fire department – during hunting season shotguns and rifles were proudly perched in the rear windows of pickup trucks.
This is fun! Wonder what else I’ll remember after hitting send!
When I was a kid, every Saturday morning we mowed the lawn – the entire acre with a push mower and my dad did not believe in using a mower with a bag, so we also got to rake and pick up the grass. All four of us kids were out there helping until dad was satisfied that the job was done right. Before we started the yard work, one of us got to walk the 1/2 mile to the gas station with the 1 gallon gas can, and we would get 1 (one) dollar to fill the can, then we got to keep the change! Across the street was a Circle K and we could use the change to buy a slush and a candy bar to eat on the way home. When we were completely finished, the folks would take us out for an ice cream cone. A single scoop was a nickle, double for a dime, or fifteen cents for a triple scoop! For 10 cents more you could have a sugar cone instead of the regular cones (they didn’t splurge for the sugar cones very often!) BTW – I am only 44, so this really was not that long ago…
Okay so i may only be 19 but…….. This post still brings back memories. I to was kicked out of the house at first sign of light (from the age of about 3.) we didn’t have to be home before dark but I guess mum figured we would turn up when we got hungry enough anyway. we had an ancient off-cream coloured P.C and a giant old gaming console that only played pac-man and table tennis. We never used it tho and if we ever showed up at home during the day and annoyed mum we would always get the same answer.. “go outside and play.” growing up in New Zealand was the best back when we actuary used to get descent summers.
Koko, sweetheart, I have a dog that is older then you, by several years and I’ll bet there are a bunch of horses here that are double your age. I also have one that is named Koko!
Really fun to read this post. I got a kick out of my nephew, aged 24, who couldn’t imagine what we did if the car broke down with no cell phones!
We also played outside until the “5:00 whistle” blew, time for supper. In the summer we rode our bikes to the public pool and swam all day on one dime.
Halloween was a special, planned it for weeks. Mr. Ed was a favorite show. Lots of us were married before age 20, and very few had a car until then. Now it seems they all have a car at age 16.
Buy a house!! Didn’t even think of it. Back then it was starter homes. Little tiny things, now they all seem to want homes worth half a million right away.
I too remember gas at 50 cents. And only one McDonalds in town.
I’m not even that old, about to be 24, and even I still remember the good old days when all the moms in the neighborhood (mine included) kicked us out into the street to go play, rain or shine, instead of letting us sit around on our butts and watch tv and play video games until we were painfully overweight.
Hi Cathy,
I was hoping to ask for your advice. Someone is selling a reg Swedish mare that they rescued and did a wonderful job rehabilitating. She is very well bred and appears to have the temperment and confirmation I am looking for in a broodmare. I am interested in breeding her to a well known Hungarian stallion with a show record for my future FEI winner! A one time only thing, def not a byb. She is also a riding horse that we would love and take care of after the baby was born. I am concerned that her being so malnourished at one time she was 300 lbs under weight, if that will affect her reproduction. I definately do not want to cause the mare harm after she has been through so much. The breeding wouldn’t be until the spring and she is at a good weight now. She just needs more muscle tone. Any advice on this issue would be great.
I see nothing at all wrong with breeding a well-bred, well-conformed rescue that has been fully rehabilitated. I have not noticed any unusual issues with mares who were severely underweight at one time – common sense tells me it would be more of an issue if that starvation happened while they were still young and growing, as that could affect development in many ways, but I am not a reproductive vet. If your repro vet says she is good to go, go for it.
If she’s cycling normally, looks good now, she *should* be fine. Do get a specialist repro vet to check her over though…its expensive, but likely worth it. Have him check her hip angles too…I know somebody who bred a TB mare with, I swear, hips like a boy…and nearly lost both animals because there was barely room for the foal to get through.
Thank you both very much for your help! I will definately have my vet check her first. I just think it would be amazing if a horse that someone left to die could be the mare that produces a future Gran prix foal!
Some things I remember about my long-ago childhood: There was no library on our side of town and we had the Bookmobile come every Tuesday evening. You had one pair of shoes for school, one pair for church. You got a pair of sneakers for summer. In the summer time we would wake up, eat breakfast and then ‘go out and play’ until lunch time. Come in for lunch – you knew it was noon because the fire whistle blew – and then back out until dinner time. After dinner it was back outside to play until the street lights came on. We used to go down and play in the ‘hollow’. My mom would tell us to stay out of the stream so we didn’t get polio. We also watched cartoons every Saturday morning and Ponderosa every Sunday night. And I remember watching Roy Rogers. It’s all his fault that I have a palomino obsession! lol
I can remember doing the RV-thing in the summer – no phone, no TV, 1 old radio (that sorta worked lol), those plastic multi-coloured patio laterns and lots of campfires (i.e. nightly!) fetching beer for dad (always relegated to the youngest as we could be trusted to open them – no such thing as twist-off caps! – without “sampling”), riding with no helmets (which at the time was perfectly acceptable!), popcorn made on the stove top, pop that came in glass bottles that you saved and got a refund for…., the phone at home was off limits (and rotary), VCR’s were rented not owned, if you wanted a treat from the store, you WALKED/biked (no matter how far!) and paid with your allowance (which was earned via chores and was in the form of change(or if you were really lucky, paper money!). Parents could “turn their kids loose” in the neighborhood and not have to worry as long as you showed back up for lunch and supper (and made it in before the street lights came on!). Rain meant you wore rubber boots and a rain coat (cuz you weren’t getting driven anywhere!) or you stayed inside and played cards/board games.
Teachers were respected – getting in trouble in class resulted in a LOT more than sending a note home to mom/dad (and may the powers-that-be save you should that note be sent!!) and getting sent to the principle’s office was not a “break from class” (more like a paddle across your ass!). Showing up to school dressed like a prostitute/pants hanging off your ass just didn’t happen. Bicycles had pedal breaks. calculators were banned, “spell check” involved a dictionary (and, you know, learning how to spell!!) “Texts” = school books, “cells” = jail, “blackberries” = fruit you picked on a nature walk. If someone was packing a “gun” it involved a water fight.
Anyone remember those awesome toys? Lawn darts (the sharp kind!), wood burning kits (seriously, why was THAT a good idea??), baby walkers (you know, the ones on wheels that meshed oh-so-well with stair cases!), those metal “merry-go-round” things at playgrounds (that you’d get flung off of eventually).
We had the ultimate – a “tarzan” rope in the hayloft…that we’d swing out the mow window on….why we’re all alive, I’ll never know
We went outside to play! It was sandy where we lived and we had a huge sand “box.” Sometimes we buried ourselves in the sand. I can’t imagine how my mother handled all the sand we must have brought into the house. I still have the local newspaper from when the astronauts first walked on the moon!!
Okay, back to the horses for me. For my first horse, board was, get this, $125 per month! This included 3, yes THREE lessons per week. We had a huge indoor arena but turn out was limited. I pulled my first trailer with a station wagon for several years. Horses were deworned once or twice per year. EIA was a new thing and when they tested the horses at our barn one little girl’s horse was positive. They had to put the mare down. The 10 year old kid was devestated!
I meant “devastated.” Too early on a Saturday morning to type or spell. I took typing class in 7th grade. Every desk had a typewriter. Computers were only on TV or in movies. In college, reporting 101 class we also had typewriters at every desk. It was a two-hour class. The professor would walk into class, write a topic on the blackboard tells us we needed at least three sources, give us a word count and a piece of paper with general info about a relevant news topic and would point to the door and say, “Go!” At the end of the two hours we had to hand in a typewritten news story on the topic. A misspelled word was an automatic “F.” Miss-punctuation was one letter grade down. The class was a “core” class and we had to get at least a “C” or we had to take it over in order to graduate. Our best friends were a little book called, “20,000 words” and a thesaurus. No computers, no spell check etc. Ah, the good old days! I’d rather be in the start box on a crazy horse facing a big cross-country course!
I took typing class too…my mom said if you learned to type well, you’d always have a job and she pretty much had a point! Typing is probably THE most important skill I learned in high school in terms of what has supported myself and my horses during my adult life.
My school didn’t offer it but my mother thought it was valuable also, so I went to summer school after my Junior year and took typing and chemistry (because you had to take two things). The typing class had big manual typewriters for everyone with no characters on the keys — you had to look up at the giant chart in the front of the room. It made me a very good touch-typist at the time — I still am decent, but the advent of word processors has made me a bit sloppy.
I remember in graduate school they had Selectric typewriters in the basement of the library that you could rent for 25 cents for 45 minutes — a dream way to get papers done and looking good! That was at my second school — at my first one, we had to type our papers onto mimeograph stencils and run off copies for the class. Ugh — I always made stupid typing mistakes on those just because it was such a pain to fix things. Got purple stuff all over me. Xerox or other photocopy machines were a ways in the future.
When photocopiers did arrive, the copies were light sensitive — I think you had to use special paper, too. And keep the copies in folders or otherwise in the dark, or they would bleach out and you couldn’t read them. At the place where we had that machine — Filene’s Advertising Department on the 8th floor of the Boston flagship store — we also had this huge (diazo?) machine for reproducing newspaper ad page layouts. It used a solution you had to make up out of a powder and water, and then the machine had to be cleaned every week or the copies would be unreadable.
Because it was before computers, the newspapers set the ad copy for us and assembled the ads. We’d get a stack of proofs and have to check them to make sure everything was done right (the right dress with the right copy, etc.) before releasing them for publication. In those days there were a number of newspaper editions throughout the day, in addition to there being both a morning and an evening version of the same papers. We had to check that the ads ran properly and pull tearsheets, for each edition (the papers had couriers that dropped things off pretty often — the major stores’ advertising departments were close together downtown: Filene’s, Jordan March, Gilchrist’s, Kennedy’s, R.H. Stearns) and that was kind of an excuse for reading the paper during the work day. I was pretty well informed back then!
All these posts make me so nostalgic!
I was one of those lucky kids who grew up with a horse. And I grew up with the most wonderful horse ever! We lived next door to my grandparents and were surrounded by creeks, ponds, and miles of trails. From the time I could saddle my horse by myself, we were gone! I rode every morning in the summer and usually every evening during school – definitely every weekend! I would climb on and take off – sometimes with friends, either riding double or with a neighbor who also had a horse. I would ride over to my grandparents, tie him up to the porch railing and run in for a snack or cold drink. Of course, as a parent now, I can’t even imagine! But my girls also don’t have the benefit of my old horse.
But with that privilege also came responsibility. By the time I was 9, I had sole responsibility for my horses’ care. That meant up every day before school to feed and every night. Until I was in junior high, we had no electricity in the barn. So during the winter months, it was always dark and I had to use a battery operated lantern to see. We also had no running water in the barn. The only way to get water was to run 3 hoses connected together from the spicket at the house. Or in the winter when the hoses were frozen, I would carry buckets of warm water down from the house.
Summertime meant local open shows and the highlight of our year – the county fair! I lived for that week! My girls will be joining 4-H next year and I can’t wait! I hope they have as wonderful memories when they are grown as I do now.
born in 1950: tv had rabbit ears and channels 2, 5, 7, 9 and 11. black and white. was only allowed to watch tv for an hour a night and for three hours on saturday morning (cartoons!) and only in the winter. in the summer, we were outside literally from dawn to dark. i was always either a horse, or riding one (being the only horse-crazy kid in my family, and living in chicago, i had to make it all up!)
those were the days when kids didn’t use the telephone for much except emergencies. friends were called out with “yo-oh, ritaaaaaa” under their bedroom window. we played in the alley or backyard and we were safe.
the highlight in my early life was when my friend asked if i could take riding lessons with her on saturday mornings. i was sure my parents would say “no,” but they said ok. i rode once a week on a good ole appaloosa mare named gypsy who took amazing care of a little eight year old girl. to this day, whenever i see a mottled grey appy with a mustache i think of her.
thanks for the walk down memory lane, fugs.
I view the site everyday but this is my first time posting, couldn’t resist with the ‘remember when’!! I’m not all that old but I remember having the big console tv with 3, 6, 10, 15, and 24! My grandma had a HUGE microwave, our first ‘cable’ was the old 6 foot satellite dish that looked hideous out in the yard. I was a teenager before I had any video games and then it was the original Nintendo (hubby and I keep talking about finding one for us to play, we can’t play those new games very good). And that was only played if it was too yucky outside or we were sick. Usually we played outside from dawn til well after dark, coming in only long enough to inhale some supper, rain or shine. Oh, and we drank out of the hose if we wanted a drink of water!! I still do on occassion and hubby’s kids shudder when they see me do it. I remember rotary phones, pre-cell phone times, pre internet times, and when everything was packaged in styrofoam. I miss all those good tv shows – Hardcastle and McCormick, Fall Guy, Knight Rider, and The Dukes of Hazzard (grew up with a crush on Bo and Luke). We never had a station wagon but my mom drove a 1973 Pontiac Grand Am. I have pictures of it when they bought it new. I told hubby that some day I want to find one and restore it, he thinks I’m nuts for wanting a car like that. I also have notebooks from where my dad kept track of their car payments – only like $30 a month! My grandma only cooked with cast iron pans and we always had a big garden because she canned everything! I grew up with neighbors that had horses and we were always out there with the horses, barefoot or with tennis shoes and no helmets. I’d ride all over the place bareback, even out along the 4 lane highway! Ahhh, the good ol’ days!
Beautiful idea for topic.
Used to ride bicycles *gasp* sans helmet, knee or elbow pads…have scars to prove it too.
Trees were meant to be climbed. Gram’s huge weeping willow (with the help of upholstery pads – she reupholstered furniture) made a quite excellent horse. “Rode” for miles on those bouncy branches.
Stone skipping competitions.
Poor fire flies, not nearly as many of them anymore, guess they weren’t released from jars soon enough.
Play Dough entertained for hours.
Flying down the banister – pillow on the end post softened the stop.
Can you smell that from scratch apple pie – miss that good old tree. Pass the fresh picked blueberries and cream (from the delivered daily, gotta shake it milk).
Country pic nic drives, drinking from springs, eating wild strawberries and watercress.
Listening to baseball games on the ancient console radio with more dial numbers than stations.
Not having to lock doors – ever.
Gram’s “home brew” – yeah, she’d allow me a small juice glass every now and then.
HA! My daughter hid the remote once, I just smiled, walked to the TV and changed the channel. She didn’t know that could be done.
When I was a kid, I remember when BAG PHONES first came out… remember those things?! I remember how *toootally kewl* it was to have a phone in your car… even though it weighed about five pounds and you had to keep it plugged in to the cigarette lighter.
LOL. Oh. Boy.
I remember the first time I logged on to AOL, with the HUGE computer monitor and the buzzing and whining of the dial tone. It was the second kewlest thing ever.
A lot of my childhood wasn’t the most super stuff ever. But, I do remember going fishing in PA with my Dad. We would get up before the sun was up and sit in a little row boat for hours and fish and fish. I remember one time I asked him to cast the line, so I didn’t get it stuck on the log I wanted it near. He threw it out there, and I got the rod back as soon as he did. Within a second, that bobber sunk and the pole just about ripped out of my hands. My Dad had to reel it in, and it was a largemouth bass, the biggest one I had ever seen. (I was 5). It was about 21″ long, at it was just so much bigger than the rest of the bluegills and sunnys we brought home.
A little later that summer my parents got divorced and the next several decades were every kids’ nightmare.
I think the most cherished memory I have from post-divorce era was the very very first riding lesson I ever took. My Dad brought me to a barn on my 13th birthday as a gift, and I rode a black horse named Windbreaker, in a Western Saddle. I rode most of that summer and fall. Now, 18 years later, and 11 horses later, I still ride, and I bet my Dad regrets ever taking me to that lesson. That started it all. My 13 years of harping about wanting to ride a horsey finally paid off. LOL
http://www.kshai1715.wordpress.com
A barrel horse learns to jump
I had a bag phone! LOL!
I was just talking with a 20-something girl working in a Chicago office. She was taking off her heels and putting on her gym shoes to walk to the train. When I told her that in “my day” we would walk blocks to the office in our high heels, she was shocked. She thought women had “always” worn gym shoes to work! I distinctly remember when the trend started. I wasn’t an early adopter because I thought it looked so ugly, but it didn’t take me long!
Speaking of walking for blocks in high heels, we could even RUN in them if we had a train or bus to catch!
Ha! I still can, must be something to do with age. I could jog in high heels if I needed to.
My brother, cousins and I regularly rode in the bed of our parents pick ups. (and not just around the block – we would go from town to town) No toppers, no helmets, nothing but your butt on the hot metal and the wind in your hair and an occasional yell from our mom’s to “SIT DOWN”. I loved that feeling!
We were farmed out to our grandparents and great-grandparents for weeks at a time during the summers. All 5 of us would spend weeks at my great grandparents – to help get the garden in, then help pick, can and freeze, and detassle. But usually by noon it was “too hot to think” outside and Gramma would turn us loose. Where did we go…back through the timber to the swimming hole by the old homestead. It was about 4 ft deep and about 10 ft wide. No adult supervision….and lots of fun!! And no one ever went in the house to get a drink. We stuck our heads under the pump while another pumped furiously. The water came rushing out and you were soaked….but cooled off!
Oh – you just brought tears to my eyes (in a good way lol). We got “farmed” out to my Grandma Honey’s tobacco farm in the summers… we were dawn to dusk unpaid labor to be sure… picking, weeding, hoeing, canning and freezing. Honey’s garden was huge. I’m so thankful for the work ethic that was instilled in my sister and I… makes loading hay and moving manure today seem like nothing
Best memories…
- the smell of tobacco curing in the barns
- trying to catch escaped piglets (!!!)
- “fishing” in the mud puddles with a stick, string and bread bag twisties for hooks
- finding treasure in the freshly tilled fields
- cleaning out the chicken house (NOT!)
I remembered something else. I didn’t have horses when I was a kid, but my mother had a cousin who owned two arabs, needless to say I loved it when we visited him. He used to save all of his old Arabian Times and give them to me, I had several stacks. At the time, Fadjur was the big stud in the Arab world and I fell in love with him. I still think he was a beautiful horse. I’ve never owned an arab or part arab, but I still think that if you want to watch a horse running around your pasture, there’s nothing more beautiful than an arab.
My memories are a little different…I grew up in England.
I remember my parents getting a color TV and how thrilled I was…not because we got color, but because they let me HAVE the black and white one. It was also the ‘monitor’ for my first computer. Anyone here even heard of a ZX-81? (I wasn’t quite old enough to have the 80, and one of my biggest regrets was selling the 81 to somebody who trashed it…it would be worth so much now). Then I had a ZX Spectrum, which was color, and they gave me the old color TV and got a better one.
Gave it to me because the tube was half dead. You had to turn it on, wait five minutes, then thump it on the side in the precisely right point for it to work. My computer games were on magnetic tape. My ‘Hobbit’ game was text based and took *fifteen minutes* to load. No chance of the internet at home…there was no unlimited local phone service in England in those days…you had British Telecom or British Telecom. Local calls were 40p a minute or something ridiculous! And then you had to pay by time for the internet as well.
I used to walk to school in grade school. As a teenager I would walk half a mile plus…I honestly don’t know how far it was…carrying my saddle to the barn (After the tack room got robbed three times in a year, I stopped leaving my tack there. Their ‘vicious guard dog’ was no use at all…total blancmange, that dog). Almost nobody wore helmets even after a nine year old girl got killed…
Two and a half channels on TV (The half being BBC2 which didn’t broadcast full time). Channel 4 was added…it too didn’t broadcast full time. And teletext. Americans did not have teletext, but it was a remarkable service. You hit a button on your TV remote and you could pull up the schedule, articles about shows, trivia games…sound familiar, right? Yeah. We had our very own, very primitive version of the Web…broadcast with over the air television signals. Wonderful, forgotten technology. NOBODY had cable. (In fact, cable television did not become widespread in England until about 10-15 years ago). Nobody had cell phones, either. A few people had satellite TV, but it was considered a luxury. We looked into getting it, but the tree in the neighbors yard *precisely* blocked our line of sight…and it was illegal to cut down trees without permission from the county. Any trees.
One of the highlights of the year was the tiny two-bit circus with its ‘Appaloosa stallions’ (British Spotted Pony geldings, ahem). I remember being kinda disappointed when they retired them all (I hate to think what happened to those ponies…likely the knacker man got them)…and replaced them with ‘white stallions’ (grey Welsh Pony geldings
). They also had a camel. Seriously. A camel. And a llama. And a trained goat, which ‘did tricks’. (The entire point was that it was bad at them). And excellent clowns. They used to stop in the dirt track parking lot…dirt motorbike track. I cried when I found out that track closed. It was so wrong…it was the only good sporting venue the town had and they replaced it with a freaking parking lot.
I remember playgrounds that had metal slides with sharp edges and concrete under the equipment, and nobody cared. Heck, I used to (my parents did NOT allow this, but you know what kids are like) play out on the railroad flats, dangerously close to the trains. Everyone did. After they closed most of that depot and planted birch trees on it, we’d ride the horses there…we’d use the old abandoned sleepers as jumps. Yes, it was adults…trainers…doing this silly, dangerous stuff, but it didn’t seem dangerous at the time (except the not wearing helmets. *I* always wore a helmet).
I remember crying, too, when they closed the Ritz. That was our theater. One screen, tucked away between store fronts, beautifully accoutred. Anyone here remember *intermission*? Kids these days don’t know movies are supposed to have a 15 minute break. The ice cream cart would come up the aisles and we’d get choc ices (like Klondike bars) – people in England don’t eat popcorn during movies, they eat ice cream. Popcorn’s more popular these days. Or we’d have little bowls of cheap crappy vanilla ice cream. The stuff that just tastes like milk. I saw Empire Strikes Back in that theater. A bunch of other things. The multiplex killed it, in the end.
And I remember going to Skegness (which I now know is the most boring place ever). My mother would play bingo and me and my dad would hang out on the beach. I remember the beach donkeys, who always looked bored and appreciated being petted. (No surprise they were bored, they’d pop kids up on these things and they’d walk fifty yards down the beach and back, then the next kid…not a very interesting life for a donkey). With their colored bridles with their names embroidered on the browbands and saddles like bareback pads with stirrups and handles on the front so the kids wouldn’t grab the reins. And the ‘ducks’…wheeled boats that would go up and down the beach and then around town, and into the ocean. It used to be clean enough to swim there, then it just got worse…(off shore drilling IS evil, people). And we’d go in the arcades and play the penny slots (perfectly legal for kids to gamble in England up to a certain amount) and the penny fall and the Derby (little fake metal horses). And ride the Ferris wheel. Who knows what the place is like now.
And we’d go visit my grandparents, who spent their summers in a ‘static caravan’ (what Americans would call a trailer) on the top of the cliffs above the Severn estuary, and I’d go down to the little rocky beach and sit in this little cave just watching the water.
I think I’ll stop now.
We spent every summer with the Grands in Wales. We would walk to the post office to buy candy – STILL addicted to Cadburys Flakes. Go down to the pebble (shale) beach. AND I would play in the water! I went back a while ago, and thought I must have been insane, that water is COLD!
GB is one of my favorite places to visit! We are taking the kiddos to visit next year, and I can’t wait to show them everything…
I remember going to a caravan site with one of those tiny towable caravans which had a table that converted into a double bed for the parents, I got the sofa and there was a hamock type thing that my sister got. We started riding there – got to ride the donkeys out to the field.
When I was very young we had a VW bug with a “well” at the back. We used to get 2 to 3 kids in the well, and another 3-4 in the back seat.
We had a normal suburban home, at least I thought so at the time, but we didn’t get a color TV for ages. Nope, we had a b&w set until… I was sick and my mom decided to wheel the TV into my room. (This tells you how sick I was — normally, TV time was restricted and with 1 TV in the house, parents chose what to watch.) At any rate, the TV fell off the cart and…died. Yep, we got a color TV. Woo hoo!
We also had (have) a summer cabin and that’s where most of my “you WHAT?” stories come from. Yes, a party line until the 80s, complete with rotary phone. Above ground water system, so no water if the temps dropped below freezing. And, for a long time when I was little, a busted water heater. My mom would lay the hose in the sun with a shut-off sprayer at one end. Sun heated up the water. Water went into tin washtub. Daughter took bath on lawn in tin washtub.
Dog took baths in same washtub, too, though not at the same time…
Suburban evenings were great. Same thing — packs of kids roaming the neighborhood, playing endless rounds of my favorite game, Ringolevio. More about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringolevio (We had to say “Caught, caught, ringolevio 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3,” though, to capture an opposing team-mate…)
Lots of other games we played. Jump rope, of course, with attendant skipping rhymes. High water-low water. Johnny may I cross your golden river. Kickball. Spud (I SUCKED at Spud). Ghost in the Graveyard. Simon Says. Running Bases. Freeze tag and dunamanay variations like “Statue” and “Dance” tag. Red Rover. Hide-and-go-seek.
Oh, there was hopscotch. And Colors, Colors Out (another chalk game). And the basketball game where you had to bounce the ball under your leg and recite “A my name is (pick female name that begins with “A”) and my husband’s name is (male name that begins with “A.” We come from (place that begins with A) and we sell (item that begins with A) and so on through the alphabet. Flub a name and you have to start over from the beginning. I never made it to Z, personally… Yep, we spent HOURS outside.
And in summer there was the local pool, too, and Marco Polo and tag, and Jump or Dive and (my other favorite) All Fish Under (most other places, this is called Sharks and Minnows).
Hmm. Brings back some good memories.
Summer is ending here in CT. Seems like Autumn sort of descended here with an almighty “WHUMP!”
I was born (1971) and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts which is a neighborhood of Boston. Had many of the same great memories folks have already mentioned like rolling around the wheel well seats of a woody station wagon, rotary phones, no remote control or cable (until 1984 or thereabouts). And you know what, I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything, certainly not for what passes for it these days. The only thing I would change is the lack of horses. I was horse crazy from the get-go which is kinda funny since where I grew up, there WERE no horses with the exception of the occasional police or parade horse. And when I saw one I was in absolute heaven.
*sigh*
What about the old TV shows? Big Valley (I had a crush on Nick) , Rifleman, Bonanza, Fury, Bewitched. I now have over 350 channels and can NEVER find something to watch. When I had 4 channels I did not have that problem!
Hows this for revealing my age…..
Massachusetts, 1972. Self-care board in a great facility $25 per month. Summer turnout on a lush 30 acre field with pond, $20 per month. Alfalfa hay $1.35 a bale, if you bought 300 or more bales they dropped it to 65 cents a bale. Drive to the local sawmill and fill your horse trailer jammed pack with fresh pine shavings…a whopping $5 bucks. If you had to buy your shavings at the feed store that would cost you a whole $1.17 a compressed bale. $3 to enter a class at your local riding club horse show. And I think the farrier charged like $12 for a trim and $25 for shoes.
It blows my mind what it costs to keep a horse nowadays, especially in Arizona where I now live where there is no pasture and you have to buy feed year round. Yikes.
Just saw this!
http://www.sharppillows.com/WebJPGs/LessonLearned.jpg
My daughter (8th grade) wants a Polaroid. I told her about asking my dad to let me sniff the developing chemical as it dried – that was 45 years ago and I think I would recognize it.
Oh, and I still have the rotary phone I grew up with – in a box somewhere with my Brownie Bullet.
Shoot, I remember my grandma’s party line phone in Mart, Texas…
We used to play a game called “outside”, as in Mom said get out and stay there
Kick the can and flashlight tag – now that was fun! I also walked a mile to school and it really was uphill both ways (that one didn’t really dawn on me until I was watching Bill Cosby doing stand up one night).
Sidebar: While working on our family tree, I learned that my grandmother was born before sneakers were invented; and how weird is that I ask you?
What a great topic! Things I remember:
TV night at my best friend’s house watching “One Day At a Time†with Valerie Bertinelli. I loved that show! We felt so grown up watching it because the topics were so risqué – like fully clothed ‘almost’ sex. I was a teenaged girl, it was cool! Or “All in the Family†back in the days when political opinion wasn’t censured but nudity was.
Riding with half the neighborhood kids in the back of a 60’s Chevy Convertible without seatbelts and having no fear of being arrested.
My dad’s ’56 Volkswagen Bug with the teenie rear window. It was named Herman and I still remember the way it smelled and the scratchy fabric in the way back where I rode.
If our ponies pooped on a ride in someone’s front yard, the lady of the house would be thrilled & run out with a shovel to pick it up and head to her roses. They were never appalled. Now, I’d be sued.
My parents’ stereo in the basement, circa 1960, and all the 78’s we listened to. (these were pre-45’s and the turntable spun like crazy to play them) And my favorite 45, Couldn’t Get It Right by the Climax Blues Band….
Mostly I miss the carefree way life was. If I was late coming home from a friend’s house and it was dark, I didn’t expect a ride home. I ran like the dickens through the woods (only about 300’ but felt like a mile) and backyards to get myself home. Outran the ghosts every single time.
I rode my blue Columbia bike to the barn (3 miles) if I wanted to see my pony before I had a license. My first ride (mom’s) was a ’74 AMC Hornet with manual brakes and steering. It was orange and ugly and hard to start and it tried to go off the road when I hit the brakes. There was no electronic ignition then, cars did not want to start when it was cold out and starting them with a remote was unheard of!
My mom had a YELLOW AMC Hornet! I hated that car with a passion. No air conditioning, no radio, manual everything. I blame that car completely for my love of luxury cars as an adult.
LOL! Your mom had one too? Not only did I drive that car but had a boy who liked me in HS who followed my bus home in his purple Gremlin. Do not miss those cars at all! My F250 seems like luxury in comparison.
We had one black rotary phone forever. I remember the excitement when my folks got a white “princess” phone for their bedroom. I can still remember the groan of the rotary antenna as it ground into position for one of the 4 channels we got – it had a huge dial with numbers up to 100, which seemed whacked when we only got the four.
I work with a lot of young people now in an organization where the average age is 48. I always take a moment to explain to them that most of the folks they’ll be working for and with didn’t get their first computers until their late twenties, never had microwaves, cell phones, and had their first look at the internet at work. I remember in 1995 having to write a business case in order for my boss to authorize my getting an email account for work purposes. There was serious shock & awe when items that normally took a month to come from Australia arrived in 10 days because the request was received in one day instead of how long it took for snail mail to arrive. Mental.
Horse-related nostalgia… when my dad was 10, on Saturdays he rode with the milkman and helped with the deliveries for the whopping fee of an ice cream cone. The milkman delivered using a horse & cart. My dad to this day can’t get over the fact that the milkman only had to make one new stop or one new pass for the horse to remember a new or dropped customer. This was downtown Montreal in the 1940′s.
What kind of nostalgia is my 7 yr old going to talk about when he’s my age? The days when you didn’t have a computer chip embedded in your brain?
TV dinners came in a tin tray, i still have my ATARI…. McDonalds sold fried okra..
Forgot to mention…milk floats! I remember being very upset when milk delivery in our area ended…I was worried about the old ladies who found it difficult to walk (no decent bus) half a mile to the store.
But everyone who had to share the road with those things *hated* them. There’s still a prejudice against electric cars in England thanks to milk floats. Top speed of 15 miles per hour…(I know in a couple of areas they were still using horses when delivery stopped).
My parent always complain that the these days the theater isn’t half as much fun as it used to be during the Soviet Union. Most of the plays back then were riddled with very well hidden jokes about the government and finding them was half the fun. See – censorship has it’s perks, lol.
Before seeing a movie, instead of trailers, you had to watch short films like ‘Why all children love Lenin’ or ‘Look how well our economy is doing!’, though all the shops were empty.
Oh, and my first cellphone looked like this:
Except that it had been chewed by my grandfathers dog.
No one had AC in their home — the only places that had AC were the movie theaters and the grocery stores. Stores weren’t open 24/7 — I think Kroger’s closed at 6 pm. One TV set, black and white, that had to warm up before you’d see the picture. Rabbit ears and aluminum foil — yep. I remember it well. No one allowed to leave the kitchen after dinner until all the dishes were washed, dried and put away — who needed an electric dishwasher, there were 3 kids in the house! We’d go out bike riding all day — no helmets, but no traffic and people watched for bikes then, and we kept a lookout for cars.
Pea shooters
TV repairmen who made house calls to change the tubes on the B/W US-made TV in a beautiful wood cabinet.
Springtime in the Santa Clara valley, the roads covered with blossoms instead of cars.
Riding my pony in fields now occupied by Apple Computer. Being able to afford fields now occupied by Apple Computer.
Phone phreaking.
Rec.equestrian.
Sending an email to a co-worker across the SF Bay. The address was something like: blah/blahblah/morestuff/Joe@gizmo.sun.com.us.earth. You had to trace the entire path, if you got it wrong it would circle the globe 5 times then disappear.
From my husband: building a computer, writing the modem software, connecting to Compuserve, then getting a $1000+ bill for time on the service plus long distance from Vacaville to Sacramento (the closest dialup)
I remember climbing over the fence into the woods right behind the house, trying not to get caught (I was 5 and wasn’t supposed to go without my sister) We would go and spend hours climbing trees – the best fun was climbing on this tree trunk that was lying flat (it was 3-4 times our height at that time) grabbing the branches of a tree next to it and swinging around.
I used to spend almost all my time out on my bike going miles, but we had set times we had to be home by and big trouble, usually grounding, if we weren’t back on time.
I don’t remember having a black and white tv in the main sitting room but the first tv my mom had in her room was a second hand b&w one. Had a rotary phone and a corded one for ages.
Spent all my weekends at the riding school we had lessons at – my mom would drop me and my sister off and we’d work all day and have a lesson. Almost all the riding schools where I’m now won’t allow the students to do that in case anything happened and they got sued. I learnt so much doing that.
when I was in kindergarten our principal was still allowed to spank kids that were sent to his office. I was taken out of my 1st grade class because I was doing too much for my twin brother, the principal came in to get me , and I thought he was taking me to the office to spank me . I remember walking behind him, I think I came up to his waist , I was terrified. My parents had a bell at the front door that my mom would ring when it was time to come home. If I didnt eat something on my plate I had to sit at the table until I finally ate it ..I spent hours and hours alone, crying in my spinich, and fish soup.
I’m 19, but some of these posts bring back memories from my early childhood and stories my parents have told.
We had a minimum of 5 cars until I was about 11. One such car was a Willys, with no seatbelts. I always felt special when I got to ride in it, because my mom would never let me, so my dad would have to be sneaky with me. I don’t remember my dad EVER wearing a seatbelt. Also, I didn’t even know automatic transmissions existed until I was about 10, because all of our cars were manual (my dad liked cars. A lot.) until we bought a Eurovan (our second, the first got old) in ’99 or 2000 ish that was an automatic. And ironically, I now drive a manual, despite the fact I learned to drive on an automatic (not the Eurovan). And it’s a 2010. (I LOVE it…not sure I’ll own an automatic again for a VERY long time).
I remember my dad getting a cell phone for work, and it was a Big Deal. The phone was also about the size of a brick…and it was way cool to talk on. My mom got a phone for work a few years later. I got a cell phone three days after I got my driver’s license…and only so my mom could call me and ask where I was. To this day, I HATE having a cell phone, but unfortunately in today’s world it’s necessary…
I remember going to my grandparents’ farm (dad’s parents) in Michigan. They had one flush toilet, and pots in all bedrooms for night-time use. At one time, the farm had been functional (not when I was there), and I remember my dad telling me stories about working on the farm. He also used to tell me about waking up to do chores before school and having to deal with frost on the nailheads in the floor!
I know how to write in cursive. It seems like anyone younger than me doesn’t. Now, I don’t actually write in cursive ever, but I know how to.
Oregon trail is the best game ever. I don’t remember ever not having a computer. However, every computer I have ever had in my house to use has been a Mac. I’m pretty much Windows-illiterate. That seems rare for people my age because Macs didn’t become really popular until a few years ago, it seems.
My mom always tells me about how she was so excited to get a basic calculator to go to college. And her older brother was extremely talented with a slide rule. I tried a slide rule once. It was super confusing…it would be so much faster to do it by hand.
We used to have a black and white TV in our basement, and a color one with no remote upstairs. I also remember I used to think my older cousin was so cool because he could change the TV channel with his toes, eliminating the need to get up. My TV in my dorm room last year (still in my room, but I don’t live in a dorm anymore and it’s not hooked up to anything) was manufactured in 1992 and has a built-in VCR. It looked so ancient compared to the rest of the floor (well, the people who had TVs) that had fancy HD TVs…but hey, it has a remote! That mostly works (you have to turn the TV on/off with the button on the TV…the power button on the remote doesn’t work.)
I frequently think about how people who are 16 and just starting to drive and buy their own gas right now are super lucky. When I turned 16, gas was close to $4/gallon. And I didn’t have a job…so I was highly motivated to just drive to school and back (school was about 3 miles away…too far to walk/ride a bike, mostly because there is NO way to get there that doesn’t involve a major highway. I took the public bus before I got my license.)
In my small town, every dog ran loose and we all knew who’s dog was who’s. No one cared, it was part of life. You only went home when the noon whistle blew or it was dark outside. The hot places to work in the summer were the public swimming pool and the root beer stand. Only the cheer leaders and jocks got those jobs.
There were NO sports for girls and I wore dresses every day of my life until college when I rebelled and wore bib overalls for 3 years straight and drove my mother mad.
Ooops! Dog jumped in lap and upset apple cart here…
7:15 eat dinner prepared by self-employed hubby (self-employed hubby has already fed small house beasts)
7:45 general home duties: cleaning, laundry, grading, planning, long phone calls with riding buddies, etc.
9:00 shower, PJs, in bed with Bostons & books
10:15ish take Bosties down for final bathroom break, then lights out
Hubby takes care of most of stall/paddock cleaning, hay hauling & stacking, fence repair, etc. Never rides.
Shhhh! Don’t let my hubby know how much he caters to me and my ‘spensive habit…
Hey what about the record players??? Or the records themselves. Am Radio and also when we had the tape player for music with 1 ear plug. LOL. I remember the phone on the wall B/W TV and the 4 0r 5 channels we got. Also the static or the round bulls eye when the station went off air. The 1950′s pickup truck we all rode in the back bed. Taking off on my pony in the morning and returning at night. Rode bare back didn’t have a saddle. Riding down to the river swimming the horses. No cell phone no video games, just plenty of fresh air and imagination. Brown paper sack lunches walking to school. Saving pop bottles for the deposit money. LOL Remember the Christmas tree lights they were those big honker lights. LOL