they were architecturally gorgeous...at least near my house, they were. i remember seeing all the great movies in there. there is no way to describe an experience like "the sound of music" in a theater like that compared to today. maria on those hills was magical in those theaters!

Drive in theaters? I too remember going with my parents.  BUT I also remember taking my baby sister with me on dates to the drive in. Never would she fall asleep :(     And then a few years later I was taking my kids to the same drive in :)  There are a few left around the country and some still do a booming business. Not far from me is the Movie Manor Motel (Monte Vista, Colorado) where you can sit in your car and watch a movie or, if the back seat isn't big enough for you and your date, you can get a room for the night and still watch the movie.

...when television turned off for the night.  One of the channels used to finish with a "video" of a jet flying through the clouds while the voice-over read the poem High Flight.  The memory still gives me chills. 

I remember when the 'program day ended' on TV!!  Almost all the channels went 'off air' with the Star Spangled Banner!!  I also recall a similar video, Julie!!

i remember that too! haha. that star spangled banner moment was kind of hilarious! when i was little i used to think that programming resumed after the kids were absolutely asleep! haha....on a more serious note, today is the day we celebrate the service of martin luther king, jr. i remember a world that was worse when it comes to race. we have so much work to do on race and economic justice. but i do remember when it was unthinkable to for blacks and whites to live in the same neighborhood much less have an african american president. but we must never stop. we are not there yet. but i do remember things being far worse...

Goodness, the times have changed but not the issue..In North Mpls where my buddy lived and I ran around while being in my teens I noticed that we didn't make an issue of the segregation stuff. The local churches and schools and businesses were for all and it didn't matter until the days after MLK was killed. That's when the fun began... race became an issue. My friends of color became racists and turned on me and others, and we personally didn't provoke this. It was an excuse and a pardon for the activity to come. Left a bitter taste in my mouth when my buddy and I got whomped by some 20 kids whom we believed were our friends because we played music together and ball at the park, etc. with no problems until that happened. These days,, they would've all being taken to jail and attorneys would be standing in line to represent them,, but back then,, well , you get the message. Is this progress? Let's hope so...

thanks for sharing that, robert. these days it's very hard to tell what progress is and isn't....isn't it?

The smell of mimeographed math tests. The sound of air raid tests on the last Friday of the month. Banana seats. Typing my resume - on a typewriter. Ethel or regular?

I had a purple bike with a white sparkle banana seat!!  I loved being the 'teacher's helper' so I could pick up the tests--they smelled sooooo good!!

oh wow! i had a banana seat sting ray!!! and that smell! i will never forget that mimeograph smell! and the paper was shiny. ...i remember when our telephone number began with letters! does that make me 100 years old? :-)

Behind my elementary school we would put pennies on the R/R tracks for kicks. Mom didn't know this but the old guy next door would have my brother and I hop a train with him over to a lake so we could pick golden rods for worms so he could fish..We would hop a train to get back home just in time for supper..he always would give mom some fish after he cleaned them. Fun times.. and yes,, our phone number was Melrose 3 XXXX ,,ME 3,,, when we moved it was Harrison 1, HA1. Didn't have banana seats yet...LOL! I think it was a 28" Schwinn with fat tube tires. And we had a 1948 or 9 Packard in need of a motor dad was working on to replace the Hudson..LOL!

Anybody talking about rabbit ears, turning the antennae to get the THIRD local channel, or the first color TV in the household? How about when we got our first mobile phone...you know, the one with the 25' cord, so you could go into the basement to talk, and away from every one else in the kitchen!

I li8ved on a military base...at 5:00pm (1700 hours) SHARP, the cannon was shot and the flag struck by the color guard. If you did not expect it, that cannon would scare the bejeezus out of you.  EVERYTHING stopped...traffic, the checkout at the grocery, everything...while taps was played. 

Oh, yeah...and I remember when a speeding ticket was $27.50...I had a whole collection of them!

oh i remember those rabbit ears!! i lived in the country for awhile, where i not only was dealing with the rabbit ears, but i was attaching tin foil to them to try to get better reception on the UHF! :-)

I'm old enough to remember going over to our neighbor's house to watch TV. I remember party lines on the telephone and how our ring was a bit different than the others on the party line. I remember milk coming in glass bottles and being delivered once a week by Bill the milkman. I remember thinking summers would last forever and all of the good times I had playing with my friends.

oh yes Joanne all of that...did you chase after the milk truck asking for chips of ice ????? we had an icebox for a time when I was about 7 living in Nebraska and got whole blocks of ice chips and all that was fun...

I don't think I have mentioned this in this forum.  It is one of my favorite stories to tell new nurses.  My first job in the hospital was back when nurses could smoke in the nurses' station, patients could smoke in their rooms, and a physicians would walk down the hall with cigarettes or cigars in hand.  There was one surgeon who put his lit cigarette on the lip above the door jamb before he entered the patient room and snagged it on his way out.  My favorite venue announced this week that the deck is now non-smoking.  Prompted the memories.

oh yes in '76 when I first went into nursing everyone smoked ...and on the Psych unit when we did group all the patients lit up and many times so did my co leader then we closed the door...I was the only one not smoking...never thought much about it...docs even smoked in the patient rooms then...Yikes ! health care ????

it's amazing, knowing what we know now, that people survived the hospital back then. but in some ways it was better than it is now!!! thanks for sharing this stuff, guys!

with the school year getting ready to start, does anyone else remember walking home for LUNCH? and having to go back!

For years my Mom picked us up for lunch!!  We ate lunch and watched the Monkees, then back we went!!  Ah, good old Catholic school!! 

from grade school we always walked home for lunch and then of course back...the only kids who could eat at school were kids who had a note from parents saying why...it was bring your own then too .....no hot lunch in grade school in the later 40's or early 50's.....

i had to stay at school for lunch. but i remember the cafeteria food like it was yesterday. my favorite day was pizza. and the other great thing was ice cream between two waffle crackers. but everything was made by the cafeteria ladies, and by today's standards it was completely homemade. unbelievable!

so did my boys..good thing since I worked and by then cafeteria was standard in grade schools.....most likely even before that...we got it in Jr high and of course high school and it was mostly done in the schools then too...that was when I learned that chili and cinnamon rolls go well together...well not quite together first chili then cinnamon roll for after...yu had to be fast though as only a certain number of the rolls were made.... ...

we didn't have a cafeteria in grade school!!! we had lunch mothers!

chili and cinnamon rolls? t hat's a funny menu! what are lunch mothers???

there were lots of other choices but both of those went fast and were soooooooooooooooooo good ..

I moved around a lot as a kid but at times in elementary and junior high school I did go home for lunch. I was at home for lunch when I learned JFK had been shot. We had to go back to school but were let out the first period after lunch when we learned he had died. During my last two years of high school, we were not allowed to leave campus but were served the best rolls ever made in the cafeteria :)

A lunch Mother is a mom that came in at lunch time (cause the teacher has lunch hour) and then went to recess with us.

but, annie, where did the food come from if there was no cafeteria? excuse my slowness here! :-) tom, you really had to go back to school after jfk had been shot? wow. i wonder who made that brilliant decision. the world shut down shortly after. thanks for sharing that!

i'm old enough to rememember my sisters wearing something called POW bracelets for soldiers midding in vietnam....

i'm old enough to remember those white corningware baking dishes with the little blue flowers on them!

My mom had a white Corningware baking dish with little blue flowers, Lisa Wiffle!  And I'M old enough to remember that there were MiGs and B-52 bombers over Vietnam on THE HUNTLEY-BRINKLEY REPORT. ("Good night, Chet." "Good night, David.  And good night for NBC News.")

These days I often think how war isn't on the news.  It's much easier to continue a war (like Afghanistan) for over 10 years when no one Stateside is reminded it's going on.  The economy is hell, so the Army needs no draft; boys with no job opportunities join in droves.  And no one in America sees them on the network news, so it is forgotten they are there.

Y'all are making me feel the years.... I still have a couple of those Corningware dishes. AND I remember the days BEFORE there were reports from Vietnam on the nightly news.

Pamela is right, sadly, that we are sheltered in our cocoons from news of Afghanistan and therefore give the death and destruction little thought. If there was a draft and some of the profiteers were called to duty, there would soon be an end......

yes, we are completely removed from news of the war in ways we were not when we were younger. i remember when there were only a few channels on the tv, and we all watched the same news at 6pm filled with war news in all its gruesome detail. the country watching is what helped bring an end not only to the war but to segregation too!

they do still do some of the war news especially when someone from our area is killed but not the constant coverage that Viet Nam got ...I remember hearing on the radio when the Korean war started and going out to sit in the front yard to watch the sky for bombers...

Between the student protests and Walter Cronkite's televised editorial on why we would never win in Vietnam, enthusiasm for "the war" waned. LBJ was heard to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” 

that sounds like something lbj would say. he was very media intelligent, joanne. oh, nancy so sorry you were looking for bombers. well back in the vietnam era, news wasn't entertainment. it was ...the news. 

thinking my idea of war was a bit off kilter most likely thanks to a Dad and Uncle who were in the Army/Air force in WW ll ..war was bombers in my mind....

and yes the Viet Nam era was news and terrible news....graphic pictures that you never knew when you would see what ...

When I was growing up, a bus ride in NYC was 20 cents, and a car cost $2000.  Today our economy has inflated over tenfold, but I still think a bus ride ought to be 20 cents instead of over $2, and a car ought to be $2000 instead of over $20,000.

i couldn't agree more about the car thing although the prices haven't gone up that much in the last years. but still, a car shouldn't be the downpayment on a house. and many cars are 40K. seems to me a car should be about 10K. max. unless it's some kind of super duper something or other. 

I'm not buying that either one of you are old enough to remember a new vehicle priced at $2000.00. Are you? I don't know about bus fares but I do remember buying gas for 17.9 cents during a "gas war" between stations and regularly, through high school, going down the block for the 29.9 gas (free glass with a fill up) instead of the 32.9 at the Mobil station. 10K was what my first house cost with $100 a month payments that covered taxes and insurance. Wasn't a shabby house in a "bad" neighborhood either.... 

Tom, when I was a kid, a car was $2K, Kennedy was President and Richard Chamberlain was Dr. Kildare.

i'm old enough to vaguely remember dr. kildare....and, frankly, something about him didn't feel "real" :-) 

I remember Dr. Kildare, and his competition Ben Casey quite well. Truman was president when I was hatched and then Ike seemed like a nice grandfatherly figure to a young kid. All of them in black and white and perhaps the shows supported by the ad, "DDT. It's good for you and good for me!"

lol... my parents saved Playbills from shows they saw in the 40s and 50s - when Camels were advertised as a "healthier" cigarette.... and when I was a tot, dad used to make me bacon and bread fried in bacon fat for breakfast (yummy)... how little we knew... by his 70s dad was making baked chicken without the skin with spices on it and avoiding cheese!

there was a WHOLE LOTTA SMOKING GOING ON back then! ooooofa!

and back then it looked cool...now when I see the old movies it just looks silly and or stupid...

some things change for the better, nancy!