This is a group where you can add at any time anything you remember from "back then" in our society that isn't the same now. It'll be fun to read how things have changed from a first hand experience of the posters here!
that's cool, elle. now you're making me try to think of when i heard certain songs for the first time. and you know what? i can't remember. unlike now where we have so many ways to "try out" songs, way back then we didn't even have those trial headphones at the record store. but we did have this man named sam who owned the local record store. sam had a fabulous stereo in the store, and when you liked something, he often had a trial copy up front and he would play it for you. sooo human to human, huh?
Look at all the memories my little transistor radio brought up!! I just remember when a song came on we all loved, I'd turn it up and my friends & I would sing--together!!! Very communal :-)
Yes, MR!!! Good topic! And it also made me think of my Dad, who always had one next to his spot at the kitchen table. He'd listen to the news while he ate his breakfast. Sometimes I wish I'd held on to that; not sure what happened to it. : (
And funny, Lisa, now that you mention it, Yesterday is one of the few songs I can remember hearing for the first time. Another is the BeeGees' New York Mining Disaster 1941! Hearing that always puts me right back in the under-the-eaves lilac bedroom of my teens.
You gotta love the past...Our transistor radios were all am, not fm yet..we lived by one of the oldest radio towers in the state owned by CBS-WCCO which we could get even on our 8 party phone line until NW Bell fixed the lines.. LOL! I don't know of any farmer in this state that didn't have these radios to catch the Twins games, farmers reports, local news, etc. Most towns had their local am station here to catch the school closing as well or you could get them on WCCO statewide. It was better than public radio back then. My first Beatle songs were "She Loves You" and "Love Me Do". The Dave Clark Five, Animals, Stones came later..But I'll never forget my sisters in the back yard singing "Henry the 8th" by Hermans Hermits.. LOL! They still talk about it after all these years. They were goodtimes. Mom still says that Elvis was the best.. LOL! Even the car had am radio..so we never missed a thing from blizzards to local celebrations and fairs. Of course us kids wanted dad to put it on one of OUR radio stations that plays OUR music..
oh the dad's and the transistors! yes! i remember my dad having one all the time or having the car radio set to KYW, our local all news/all the time station. i used to make fun of him for listening to the same news repeat itself and beg to change the station to the music. he would let me and then make fun of my music. my mom, on the other hand, had the FM radio and had some kind of easy listening musak thing going on that was also torture. so when i took the car, i used to crank my station. and hell had no fury like my mother if i forgot to change it back to her station. if she got in the car and got blasted with some rock and roll, i got blasted too! :-)
i'm old enough to remember when we didn't talk about weather that much. summers were about 85 degrees. winters had a snowstorm or two. once in awhile we had a big ice storm or something interesting. but we never had day after day of discussing weather....nobody went to the basement for weather. flooding in river areas, yes. all this other junk, no.
No seatbelts and no carseats!! Sitting between my Mom & Dad on the front seat!! AND Sitting in the back of a '64 Chrysler Newport with the seats so clean that we would slide into each other on hard turns!!!
Even I recall no seatbelts.. there were nine of us kids plus mom and dad plus my gr-grandma many times in the old Ford Woody station wagon with the holes in the floors. LOL! I remember lots of tears from both my parents trying to figure out how to afford groceries back then...Add groceries into the car and my oh my.. We were packed! Imagine that,, we could bottom out the car..LOL! No free lunch programs, very very little welfare if any, no housing assistance, not much in tax returns for having us kids, no healthcare insurance at all. Then we wonder how the country can be so broke... We survived and so can this generation if it has to or is forced to. I'm sure there are alot of stories about the 50's and 60's...
my father probably never wore a seatbelt in his life. and it was torture training my mother to use one! we use to just roll around in the back of a huge sedan!
I agree with your comment.. My dad drove a semi in the cities up here and I don't remember ever seeing any.. But I do remember the smell of the deisel exaust fumes on his clothes which is how he died at age 59. He got black lung which is listed as emphazima and shouldn't be. It was one of the occupational hazards at that time, yet no one talked about it..not even OSHA whom we contacted would help him or my mom.
I also recall the seatbelt-free days. I have many good memories of lying down in the back of my parents' car, my head usually on my grandmother's lap as I read aloud the neon signs fronting the many motels along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. They flashed past the side windows at just the perfect angle for reading.
I'm sorry to read about your father, Robert. He must have suffered a lot. My husband talks often of his grandfather who worked all kinds of dangerous jobs inhaling noxious fumes long before OSHA.
i'm so sorry about your dad, bob. i think my dad's death was work induced too, but we won't be sure. .....toby i remember the same thing. we used to do alot of long distance car riding, and i, too, would stretch out and look at the signs going along, i'd look at how the moon followed us, i can't imagine those drives all strapped in sitting in buckets. i realize it's safer, but i'm glad we had it differently and lived through it.
Ignorance IS bliss, Lisa! I couldn't imagine letting my children float around a car today. My personal feeling is that car seats were invented not so much for safety but parents' sanity. And they can't blame us. The government takes that rap!
it's so confusing to know how much is real safety and how much is just fear induced marketing. one thing i remember my parents always doing was getting huge cars. i used to ask my dad why we had such enormous cars, and his answer was always "i'm not driving you all those miles in something we don't have some room to crash in." and he had a point. yes we rolled around. but there was also a million feet between us and the end of the car back then! and then i think of all the things we DON"T keep our kids safe from now that they did back then. back then, my parents were particular about who i hung out with. they had to get to know them. and now we just let our kids text people we have never met or talked to. which is more dangerous? hard to know
i have no idea what made me think of this tonight, but i am old enough to remember when car tires were so big that you couldn't really move them if you were a girl. not much anyway. i remember bugging my father to teach me how to change a tire and him saying "why? you can't move it much less put it on the car!" ...and then there'd be some kind of argument over all that. but those tires were HUGE and took up the garage. does anyone else remember chains on them for the snow?
Most likely they had intertubes as I recall.. And Chains,, Well,,, not that often because they would wreck the roadway surface. My grandfather always talked about the chains on the semi's back in the 1930's and 40's when he drove over the road especially heading towards North Dakota and sometimes Chicago. He would pull over and put them on the truck himself for traction and his safety.
i seem to recall chingalinging along with some chains before they became illegal due to the tearing up of the roadway. they were only for bad ice though. there used to not be all weather tires. so we had to put snow tires on in the winter. that meant the garage was always filled with huge tires for huge cars. winter and summer tires. and the emergency chains. it's funny how i remember the snowstorms really well. my father refused to accept driving defeat when it came to any snow or ice storm. so we would go down streets sideways, and my dad would say "well we got down, didn't we?" :-)
i just had a memory of something. when i was a little girl, i remember some news report or something from a weekly reader at school that said some day in the future we would be able to capture a still image from what we were seeing on tv. i thought that was the COOLEST thing i'd ever heard of and remember trying to tell people about it. nobody would listen to me. and look...now we're doing it!
hahah! it was sooooo bad, maryrose! but i do remember some stories from it that stuck with me. this was one, and another one was all about walt disney world...why am i remembering the weekly reader???? hahah
If you weren't in Atlanta in the early 80's, this will mean nothing. However, I just had to share. There was a club here for a few years called The Limelight. It was a big, big deal--compared to Studio 54 often. It was in an odd location near a Kroger, and the Kroger became known as "Disco Kroger." The club closed in '83 or '84 (I never went there). At work someone younger than I mentioned the Disco Kroger (as it is still known). She said it used to BE a disco, and I was corrected her. She stopped me mid sentence as I told her about the lines around the building, dance floor with sharks underneath it, etc. She said, "You mean you KNOW the TRUE story of the Disco Kroger?" I swear I might as well have been telling her about my travels to Narnia she was so shocked. Good thing I am proud of my years and gray hairs!
hahaha...i love this group, but that's the one thing i don't like about it, margaret. it shows i'm old enough to remember the weekly reader! at least the disco kroger was cool! :-)
They even had the weekly reader when I was in school...just after they invented the printing press..kidding about the printing press but I loved the weekly reader then .....
I don't know if I'm spelling this correctly--mimeograph copies! I use to love to be picked to carry them from the office to the classroom! Mmmm, that smell!!!
oh yeah, i remember them! the teacher used to need copies for us, so she'd go somewhere...to the mimeograph room and crank out 25 copies for the class, and we'd all sniff the ink! hahaha!
oooo yes the ink smelled so good..my mom had a hand mimeograph at home to use for stuff with campfire so I got it there too...maybe that explains a few things about my brain...LOL
ha, nancy! between that and the magic markers, it's amazing we got through school, right? ;-) i remember all those teachers like they were yesterday. i particularly remember my second grade teacher crying when my older sister cut my hair off! :-)
I'll bet anyone who attended elementary school in the 50's can remember those darn polio shots and mantox tests annually until the Saulk polio vacination sipping stuff.. My wife is allergic to the mantox test and has a reaction everytime they did it.. Even to this day and age..right to x-rays.
I have another "Margaret Is a Dinosaur" story. The grocery store near me is starting online ordering with curbside pick-up. I mentioned to the nice young man helping me to the car with my groceries that back when the "interwebs were new," some companies tried online ordering with home delivery. He said, "Oh yeah, like Webvan." I cocked my head a bit and said that he didn't look old enough to remember webvan. His reply was, "I even remember VHS tapes." VHS tapes are now in some people's "old enough" category? That was just yesterday, wasn't it?
Just for the record. I am happy with myself. I take pride in my gray hairs. (Though I would like my 26-year-old metabolism and eyesight back.) I have no trouble owning the 46 years I have laughed, loved, fought and struggled for. I simply forget how damned YOUNG other people are.
Still using VHS here!! For music--cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, and even reel to reel!! Also, my 1st job in a school, we were using an Apple 2E in the computer lab!!
i still have some vhs' going on too! ...ok, i'm sitting here remembering how when i was young we used to get in the car and simply visit people. we assumed people were home and wanted a visitor. and they did the same at our house. there was no big preparation. it was just a stop by hello, have a cup of coffee type of thing. "we were in the neighborhood". people don't do that now. back then there wasn't all of this phoning and texting, so the only way you really could see your friends was if you went and saw them!
oh, and i'd like to add if the people were busy you were either very mannerly and left OR you were even more mannerly and just jumped in and helped! if you dropped by somebody's house while they were house painting, you picked up a brush. if you dropped by while they were having a kid's birthday party, you entertained and cut cake.
Personally, I don't recall a Saturday evening when my parents did NOT play cards and drink some beer, etc. with my grandparents and some aunts and uncles whether at our house or theirs. It was fun! We lived in suburbia but according to my wife, many farm families did this back then which has slowly been dissappearing from society. WHY? I presently live in suburbia and I can honestly say that networking with the neighborhood is dead. I don't even know my neighbors...and though I try to say hi and ask how they're doing they might say,, Okay, and that they've got things to do.. this is scarey!
i agree, robert. it's a scary trend away from community for decades. let's hope it comes back. when i was growing up, my parents either had a dinner party or went to one every saturday night. i was raised to do things like that. and i found that i was doing it and nobody else was. hanging out with friends for an evening is a great way to bond either through conversation, live music, or games, etc. now it seems like people either do super expensive stuff like going away together for the weekend or big 100$ concerts or else they hide in their houses. what ever happened to people coming over for cake and coffee?? i can't think of many more enjoyable experiences than some warm relaxing conversation with people you like in a loving space with some cozy food.
I'm old enough to remember when the Golden Arches were still in heaven and Old MacDonald had a farm. When abortion was an unborn term. I have an old Captain Kangaroo Cup!
I remember diagraming complex sentences in English class and how much fun it really was. I remember, marshmellow roast, looking forward to walking to the Christmas Parade with our neighbors and their son who was a year older than me even if it snowed or was freezing. I remember how much fun those simple things were.
We have a new tv station up here called "ME TV" and it is totally old tv shows from our past. Like, Rifleman, Dick VanDyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Twilight Zone, Bananza, Big Valley, and many others with my all time favorite "M*A*S*H"...The other tv stations are taking notice of this because they are losing shares in audience viewers. One of my young grandsons absolutely loves Batman and Robin..LOL!
i love dick van dyke. it holds the test of time so beautifully. funny is funny. and mary tyler moore was a great show too. i wish i got that on some station. as for batman and robin, i was a big fan of that as a kid. WHAM! BOP! BAM! LOL! ...diagraming sentences was a bit of a waste of time, don't you think? i think it's important to know how a sentence is constructed. i've done this with ESL students. but the elaborate diagrams were a bit over the top! :-)
ha! that's a great memory, rita! i didn't go to them too often. a few times enough that i remember what they were like. but i remember seeing them on the side of the roads more than anything else. they were so huge! but i do remember when a movie theater was an actual theater. i miss those real theaters with the big screens, the ornate insides, the bigger chairs. i hate these new theaters with the bleacher seats or the screen at your nose. i hate being shoved in the lap of the person next to me. ...but i think seeing a great movie on a real screen in a real theater is magical. i was so sad to see our beautiful old theaters go. ...oh now you have me in the mood for a hot dog and popcorn!
I loved those big single theaters!! We saw all the Disney cartoons, The Ten Commandments, and The Sound of Music in those kind of theaters!! I remember when they played movies at Radio City Music Hall!! I went there many times as a child with my family and a classtrip or two! They use to have a Christmas show and an Easter show!!
wiffledust
Aug 24, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Aug 24, 2011
Elle MacNeil
I really miss that "human to human", Lisa!!!
Yes, MR!!! Good topic! And it also made me think of my Dad, who always had one next to his spot at the kitchen table. He'd listen to the news while he ate his breakfast. Sometimes I wish I'd held on to that; not sure what happened to it. : (
And funny, Lisa, now that you mention it, Yesterday is one of the few songs I can remember hearing for the first time. Another is the BeeGees' New York Mining Disaster 1941! Hearing that always puts me right back in the under-the-eaves lilac bedroom of my teens.
Aug 24, 2011
Robert Muscovitz
Aug 24, 2011
wiffledust
Aug 24, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Aug 25, 2011
Bob Carter
Aug 25, 2011
wiffledust
Aug 25, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Aug 25, 2011
wiffledust
Aug 30, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Aug 30, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Sep 1, 2011
Robert Muscovitz
Sep 1, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 1, 2011
Robert Muscovitz
Sep 1, 2011
Toby McConnell
I also recall the seatbelt-free days. I have many good memories of lying down in the back of my parents' car, my head usually on my grandmother's lap as I read aloud the neon signs fronting the many motels along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. They flashed past the side windows at just the perfect angle for reading.
I'm sorry to read about your father, Robert. He must have suffered a lot. My husband talks often of his grandfather who worked all kinds of dangerous jobs inhaling noxious fumes long before OSHA.
Sep 1, 2011
wiffledust
i'm so sorry about your dad, bob. i think my dad's death was work induced too, but we won't be sure. .....toby i remember the same thing. we used to do alot of long distance car riding, and i, too, would stretch out and look at the signs going along, i'd look at how the moon followed us, i can't imagine those drives all strapped in sitting in buckets. i realize it's safer, but i'm glad we had it differently and lived through it.
Sep 1, 2011
Toby McConnell
Sep 1, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 1, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 2, 2011
Robert Muscovitz
Sep 7, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 8, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 18, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Sep 18, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 18, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Sep 18, 2011
margaret kraft
Sep 18, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 18, 2011
nancy Sanchez
Sep 18, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
I don't know if I'm spelling this correctly--mimeograph copies! I use to love to be picked to carry them from the office to the classroom! Mmmm, that smell!!!
This is always a fun group :-)
Sep 18, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 19, 2011
nancy Sanchez
Sep 19, 2011
wiffledust
Sep 19, 2011
Toby McConnell
Sep 19, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
We're probably all missing a few brain cells :-)
Sep 19, 2011
Robert Muscovitz
Sep 21, 2011
margaret kraft
Oct 12, 2011
margaret kraft
Oct 12, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
Oct 12, 2011
wiffledust
Oct 15, 2011
wiffledust
Oct 15, 2011
Robert Muscovitz
Oct 18, 2011
wiffledust
Oct 18, 2011
Betty Prewitt Pollard
I'm old enough to remember when the Golden Arches were still in heaven and Old MacDonald had a farm. When abortion was an unborn term. I have an old Captain Kangaroo Cup!
Nov 25, 2011
Betty Prewitt Pollard
I remember diagraming complex sentences in English class and how much fun it really was. I remember, marshmellow roast, looking forward to walking to the Christmas Parade with our neighbors and their son who was a year older than me even if it snowed or was freezing. I remember how much fun those simple things were.
Nov 25, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
I loved Captain Kangaroo--one of my favorites as a child!! I still like to diagram sentences with my daughter!!! :-)
Nov 26, 2011
Robert Muscovitz
We have a new tv station up here called "ME TV" and it is totally old tv shows from our past. Like, Rifleman, Dick VanDyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Twilight Zone, Bananza, Big Valley, and many others with my all time favorite "M*A*S*H"...The other tv stations are taking notice of this because they are losing shares in audience viewers. One of my young grandsons absolutely loves Batman and Robin..LOL!
Nov 26, 2011
wiffledust
i love dick van dyke. it holds the test of time so beautifully. funny is funny. and mary tyler moore was a great show too. i wish i got that on some station. as for batman and robin, i was a big fan of that as a kid. WHAM! BOP! BAM! LOL! ...diagraming sentences was a bit of a waste of time, don't you think? i think it's important to know how a sentence is constructed. i've done this with ESL students. but the elaborate diagrams were a bit over the top! :-)
Nov 26, 2011
wiffledust
ha! that's a great memory, rita! i didn't go to them too often. a few times enough that i remember what they were like. but i remember seeing them on the side of the roads more than anything else. they were so huge! but i do remember when a movie theater was an actual theater. i miss those real theaters with the big screens, the ornate insides, the bigger chairs. i hate these new theaters with the bleacher seats or the screen at your nose. i hate being shoved in the lap of the person next to me. ...but i think seeing a great movie on a real screen in a real theater is magical. i was so sad to see our beautiful old theaters go. ...oh now you have me in the mood for a hot dog and popcorn!
Nov 29, 2011
Maryrose Orlans
I loved those big single theaters!! We saw all the Disney cartoons, The Ten Commandments, and The Sound of Music in those kind of theaters!! I remember when they played movies at Radio City Music Hall!! I went there many times as a child with my family and a classtrip or two! They use to have a Christmas show and an Easter show!!
Nov 30, 2011