Monday, March 31, 2014

Back in the Day...

Oh my... well, the kids over at Our Freaking Budget manged to both crack me up and make me feel like a complete and total dinosaur with their recent What in the World are we Whining About post.

I always find it interesting to hear a younger person's perspective on the whole "what we take for granted" topic. And I have to admit that it does fill me with hope that at least some folks in the under 30 crowd do have an appreciation for how things were back in the "olden days."


It is an interesting exercise though...to think about what the world was like when I was a kid vs. what it's like today. And as a person who will be crossing that big five-zero landmark in a few years... well, let's just say that with age comes perspective.


So here's a snapshot of what I remember life being like back in my childhood during the 1970's:

Our family had one television set - a 19 inch black and white model that my parents bought to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing. I still remember being awakened in the middle of the night for that - I had absolutely no clue what was happening, but I got to be out of bed, so I was happy!


The TV pulled in a sum total of 5 channels (on a good day) and the stations all stopped broadcasting at around midnight. From then until morning all you got was static or a test signal.


There were no VCR's, and going to the movies was a treat we got to experience only a couple times per year - usually at the drive-in because it was cheaper and you could bring your own popcorn. I still remember making my mother turn down the scary music and hiding behind the seat backs during Jaws.


Music came on vinyl records - which were either the "long playing" 33 revolutions per minute variety - the so-called "LP" - or the singles which played at 45 rpms. Many an afternoon was spent enjoying the sound of Perry Como sped up to 45rpms so he sounded like the Chipmunks!


And remember those little inserts that you had to stick in the hole of the 45 so the spindle would have something to hold onto?


Of course, if you were really hip you might have an 8-track tape player, but I didn't know anybody cool enough to have one of those.


One year my brother and I whined loud enough and got Mom to splurge on a TV tennis game for Christmas. It wasn't a real "Atari Pong" system, it was a cheap knock-off, but I still spent HOURS glued to that thing!


But other than the TV tennis game, "toys" generally consisted of things like balls, skateboards, hula hoops, Pogo sticks and other things that you actually played with rather than looked at.


We had one telephone - a big black rotary dial model that hung on the wall of the kitchen.


There were no answering machines or call waiting, so if you couldn't get through you just had to try back later. We were lucky to have our own number, because a lot of our neighbors still had a party line.


Long distance service was expensive, so we only got to talk to the out of town relatives on birthdays and special occasions. The rest of the time we wrote letters.


Back in those days only the really rich families had 2 cars, so even though most women were stay-at-home moms, kids didn't get shuttled around like they do today. Instead we had things called bikes and feet.


My parents were divorced, which was a real oddity back then, and Mom had to work, so my brother and I were what was known as "latch key kids" from about age 7 or 8 on.

For those too young to remember this era, this meant that we walked home from school and let ourselves in, then we were pretty much on our own until Mom got home around 6 or 7 in the evening. It seemed perfectly normal at the time, but these days I think you might get jailed for child neglect if you took that approach!


Computers were enormous contraptions that filled up entire wings of academic buildings. And while there may have been some connections between large mainframes, there certainly was no "internet" as we currently enjoy it, so doing any sort of research meant going to a library.


And writing school papers? OY! You had to use an actual typewriter. We had an electric model, which was nice because you didn't have to push the keys down quite so hard.


But it still had the keys that flew up to strike the page, so if you accidentally hit more than one key at a time they'd get hopelessly stuck together.


And if you needed more than one copy... well, there weren't Xerox machines back then so you had to use carbon paper. OY!


And when you made a typo.... it was "OY" in duplicate or triplicate! Let's just say I spent a lot of time blowing on my term papers to get the liquid paper to dry...


In school when the teachers wanted to make copies of things, we had a mimeograph machine that you had to put fluid in and turn with a crank.


Remember that purple ink? Anyone? Anyone?


Microwave ovens were confined to places like restaurants and rich people, so convenience food meant TV dinners - which always came out a bit black around the edges.


Or those pouches of chicken a la king that you heated up in a pot of boiling water and poured over toast.


And it still cracks me up that they now have "instant macaroni and cheese"


Apparently the stuff that comes in the box is not quite instant enough for the younger generation - I mean really... having to wait 9 whole minutes for dinner?!?


When you wanted a drink of water you turned on the tap. I still remember that the first brand of bottled water to come out was called "Evian" which, when spelled backwards gets you "Naive." We all thought that was quite appropriate because who in their right mind would pay for water? Oh silly me...


And of course we didn't have a dishwasher - well, not unless you count me. So I got to wash all of the dishes by hand - every. single. night. - hence my lifelong hatred of doing the dishes!


We didn't have a clothes dryer either, so doing the laundry meant hanging it to drip dry in the basement.


When you wanted to take pictures you had to shoot a roll of film and then send it out to be developed. This usually took about a week or two, and if you were lucky about half of the pictures would turn out.


And when you went to the store the cashier actually had to punch in the price for each item from the price tag!


And, of course, you had to actually go to the store in order to buy things, unless you wanted to roll the dice with a mail order catalog.



It's funny... when I think about all the ways that life has gotten more convenient over the years, you would think that people would be so much happier now than they were then. But somehow that doesn't really seem to be the case. It's like our expectations seem to have outpaced every advance in technology.


I don't know, maybe I'm just being nostalgic. I mean I'm really glad that I don't have to use typewriters or carbon paper anymore, and I LOVE my dishwasher beyond compare.

And seriously, Netflix? Are you kidding me? I can watch virtually any movie I want whenever I want to? How can anybody not love Netflix?


But I have to admit, that there is a part of me that really longs for the days when things were slower, and people didn't expect you to be available 24/7.

At least ignoring the technology is still an option in most cases... and I get to pick and choose only the parts of all this "progress" that actually do make my life better.


So tell me, what things stand out to you when you think about how life was different when you were a kid? I'm curious to know which things feel like "progress" to you and which don't.


49 comments :

  1. Yup, I remember all that! I love technology - especially word processing, online banking, Googling, DVDs, iTunes, airline travel as often as needed, cars with air conditioning...but somewhat miss childhood days of being so bored that I would eventually find something to become engrossed in.

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    1. I still have never tried iTunes... but not having a mp3 player, there doesn't seem to be much point. I agree that there is much to enjoy about modern technology, but I don't recall ever being bored as a child - especially not if the weather was nice!

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  2. Well, I'm ten years younger than you and I recognize most of this, though some of from my younger childhood. Here in the UK, our TV had only three channels. My parents returned the rented colour one (the rental people couldn't understand this - they were used to threatening to take them away) to save money, but five-year-old me didn't think the b+w one was worth watching.

    The best toys I had involved making things. I spent many hours cutting out cardboard pieces to assemble forts and castles (can I remember the motte and bailey layout now? Hm, probably not) and then there was Fischertechnik (like Technic Lego, but German, and none of my friends had it). That was brilliant!

    Party lines and drive-through movies were unheard of here, as were TV dinners, at least in my house. My unfortunate school teachers had to contend with my handwriting ("This page looks like a spider has crawled across it"). I do remember the purple duplicator ink, though.

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    1. Sorry, not ten years younger. I missed "in a few years" first time I read that.

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    2. Wow! building forts and castles from cardboard... that sounds like more of a challenge than I'd be up for even as an adult! I had to go look up "motte & bailey" - my, what a cultured upbringing you had!

      I've never heard of Fischertechnik or Technic Lego, but we had something called Lincoln Logs which I loved! I remember building houses for my hamster to "play" in. I'm sure for the hamster it was more like torture, but I enjoyed it!

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    3. Oh yes, terribly middle class! I guess castles are much more a feature of the landscape in Britain - I was taken to many ruined ones as a child, and loved clambering over them - so making them out of cardboard wasn't that much of a stretch. I also neglected to mention that the cardboard pieces were printed in books and came with full instructions! They were probably less of a challenge to make than your hamster houses.

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    4. Ha! I suppose castles would quite be the novelty that they are here. I think there's something hilariously stereotypical about the fact that you grew up in Britain playing with toy castles, and I grew up in the Colorado Rockies playing with toy log cabins! :-)

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  3. I'm a little older than you, but I could relate to every example you gave. One that I hadn't thought about in years, were the type writer keys sticking together. Boy, that was frustrating. Also, the liquid paper brought back another memory--the singing group the Monkees. Mike's mother invented liquid paper so if the Monkee thing didn't work out, he had some money to fall back on. Also, did anyone else like the smell of freshly mimeographs papers as I did?

    Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

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    1. That's hilarious about Mike from the Monkees. Who knew?

      I was a student assistant in elementary school, so I actually got to run the mimeograph machine - such a position of honor! Anyhow, I fondly remember the smell and how the paper would come out of the machine wet. It all made me feel so important!

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  4. yes, the smell of mimeograph paper! i remember that quite a bit. I also remember that we never went out for 'fast food' unless we were travelling and we hardly ever had ice cream in the freezer. i remember being in 7th grade when we got our first color tv. i think i was the last one in my class to get one too. Instead we listened to the stereo (i shared a room with my sister who saved her money for components...remember components? i put mine in my son's room and he listens to the radio that way since his ipod doesn't have radio. we played frisbee, basketball, actually climbed trees. went bike riding (be home before the street lights come on) and went fishing. there were 9 people living in my house and we never had a dishwasher...well, a power dishwasher that is.
    i am glad that my son has things i didn't growing up. he can play xbox live with friends he no longer goes to school with, or who have moved away. pictures are now instant and you can delete what didn't come out right without spending money to do it. i bring up my past often so he realizes that he is lucky and he is completely familiar with shoveling and hanging laundry out to dry! (oh, mom, do you have to hang my boxer shorts? that's so embarrassing!) love it!

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    1. So, by "components" do you mean those boxes for different parts of the stereo system? One for the receiver, one for the tape deck, one for the turntable, etc? If so - I still have them in my living room and use them to listen to music!

      My mother thought that fast food was the greatest invention since sliced bread, so as soon as it became available we were regulars - at least a few times per week we ate there - pretty much all of them except for McDonalds, which Mom hated for reasons I never figured out. But I had the entire menus of the rest committed to memory - and obnoxious nick-names for all of them: Burger King (Burger Death), Pizza Hut (Pizza Slut), Arby's (Roast Beast), Wendy's (The Square Burger), Dairy Queen Brazier (Dairy Queen Brassiere) , A & W (the Snoot Beer Joint), and, of course, Taco Bell (Taco Hell). Makes me shudder to think about it now!

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  5. My mom was a teacher so I got to help operate the mimeograph machine, I wonder now if breathing in those fumes has influenced me now. ;) We never had a real washing machine until after I left for college due to our septic system being too old to handle that amount of water. So for years we had to drag our clothes to the laundrymat. Then when I was in high school my mom found one of the old wringer wash machines so that was how Saturdays were spent, in the basement making dirty clothes soup. ;) Then wring it out, empty and fill with clean water for rinsing and you may have to do a second rinse. Winter sucked for that project and we had clotheslines run all over the basement so by the afternoon you had to walk through the wet clothes maze. We did have an old barrel wood stove that you could get cranking so that you might have dry jeans by Monday morning. Thanks for the memories.

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    1. Wow! That's an amazing laundry story! Makes me even more grateful for my super capacity high efficiency machine!

      I loved the smell of the mimeograph machine too - I was a student assistant in both elementary school and jr. high. In jr. high we had a fancy electric machine though so you didn't have to crank it by hand - now that was living! It does make me shudder though to think of all the fumes I inhaled in those tiny closets where the machines always lived.

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  6. LoLbeing a librarian I loved the prehistoric googling! My parents were a bit behind the times (okay, super behind the times) so I had a rotary phone in my room in high school and I graduated in 2001! Now we don't even have a landline, though I would prefer one just in case an ax murderer barges through our door and I can't find my cell.

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    1. You can never be too prepared for the ax murderer - that's my motto at least! Seriously, I've had an ax murderer fixation my entire life and I am so heartened to learn that I'm not the only crazy person who thinks about this sort of thing.

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  7. I remember the 60s when almost every mom on the block was home all day, most homes just had the one car, which the dad drove to work each day, and all sorts of things were delivered to our house. We had a milkman, a bakery truck, the dry cleaners -- they all delivered to housebound moms. I also remember the coffee clatches my mom would hang out at for an hour in the mornings. When you have no way to get out each day, a little gossip over a cup of coffee with neighbors was very welcome.

    My best "playthings" were trees, pine cones, my bike and skates. On a summer day, after chores were done, we'd get turned out into the neighborhood to play, until the streetlights came on. Then every kid knew it was time to get themselves home for dinner. Our neighborhood now seems deserted on summer days, in comparison.

    The other big change with kids that I see is birthday parties. Our birthday parties were either daytime backyard affairs, or slumber parties. Games were simple -- pin the tail on the donkey, balloon toss or popping games, relay races, scavenger hunts. None of this renting out the local inflatable/bouncy place, or even bringing bouncy houses to your own home. Birthday parties, then, rarely cost more than the ingredients for a cake, and some paper plates. Some kids, today, have birthday parties with budgets that rival big weddings. And we wonder why Americans have so little in savings.

    And yes, sniffing mimeographs is a favorite memory!

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    1. The delivery stuff was just being phased out when I was a kid. But we did get milk delivered for a while.

      And I remember playing outside - it was like the entire neighborhood belonged to the children and we roamed in packs. We all knew to be home before dark for dinner, and if somebody's mom needed them sooner for some reason they'd just shout out a window Even if the kid in question wasn't within earshot, the message would get relayed via "kid-net" over an area of a few square miles. Oh... I miss those days! In my neighborhood things are still a lot like that, but when you get into the more affluent areas the kids all seem to be shut up indoors. Sigh.

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  8. I was born in 1980, but still can remember a lot of those things...my typewriter, Pong, being a latch key kid...

    Thanks for the perspective! It's needed now more than ever.

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    1. It's sort of frightening to think that I'm old enough to have perspective on this sort of thing, but I guess it happens to the best of us! :-)

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  9. "Misty water-colored mem-ries ... of the way ... we were .... " -- just thought a little Barbara would enhance the walk down memory lane. ;)

    We must be close to the same age. You hit the nail on the head with just about everything. In addition to the party phone line (which went away by the time I was in middle school) we only had to dial the last 4 digits of a local phone number and we complained when we had to dial 7 whole digits on a rotary phone to place a local call. I don't remember the inserts for 45 albums looking like that but I do remember being ready to help the needle over the skip in the record. We had a manual typewriter and I loved whacking the heck outta the return bar. Good stress management. In college our suitemates shared a phone with us which was in a rotating box which swiveled between the 2 rooms (and my suitemates spied on my roommate by angling the box and caught her smoking in our room ...).

    As an older mom with young kids, I find that I try to reserve some of the best of my childhood for my kids. I like for them to actually play, not sit in front of a screen tapping buttons. I haven't had a Facebook account for several reasons, some of them being that I want my kids to grow up with the anonymity I had instead of every stage of their lives posted for the world to see--I get why people do it, but it doesn't feel right for us. And while I fully understand why people use their electronics to keep kids occupied while shopping or in restaurants, I sometimes wonder if we are missing an opportunity to teach children to manage their boredom and their impatience. But I also admit that our travel DVD player (does that make me sound like a dinosaur??) is a nice little benefit and that when I made long road trips as a kid, that would have seemed like such a luxury!!!! And I would hate to give up Google and being able to check the latest radar images any time I darn well please. Really, my stance is that technology is a tool, nothing more, and it's up to us to use it well. Like connecting with people who I will never meet face-to-face and discussing how things were when we were kids--now, that's a good use of technology! :)

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    1. "...technology is a tool, nothing more, and it's up to us to use it well." I totally LOVE that. And I too am so happy to be able to connect with like minded people that I never would have had the opportunity to "meet" otherwise!

      Sharing a phone with college suitemates was such an interesting experience - we had a message board to write down all the phone calls. I still chuckle over taking a message for a suitemate from New Jersey. I picked up the phone and the voice asked for L. I said she wasn't there at the moment, so he said in the thickest New Jersey accent you can imagine "Would you just tell her that her faaaawther caaaaawled?" I smiled to myself and wrote on the board "L - your dad called." When she got home and saw the message, she loudly exclaimed "Oh.... my faaaaawther caaaaawled?" It still makes me laugh.

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  10. I haven't hit 30 yet, so I guess that makes me one of the young kids! But my childhood was still different from today. My family didn't have a computer until I was in high school. I grew up with cassette tapes and a tv remote made of metal. My parents let me use their typewriter sometimes - those were the best times! I would happily retype books and draw my own version of the illustrations or create menus (with items such as canned soup and cereal, haha). My parents would also let me use the back of old printouts (on that paper with the little holes down the sides) and I would make anything paper - telephones, pets, tiny grocery stores (all the food made of - you guessed it! - paper). They were good old days. :)

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    1. You young whippersnapper, you! Took me a while to figure out what you were talking about with the paper - you mean the kind designed to fit into the old dot matrix printers with the pin-feed mechanism? I think CatMan still has one of those printers! Oh my...

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  11. Age 51 here and have all the same memories. Except we watched Apollo 11 on our neighbor's TV--it was bigger than ours.

    I remember waiting for a good song to come on the radio so I could record it using my cassette player right next to the speaker--and hoping that a loud truck wouldn't go by while I was recording and that the radio DJ would keep his mouth shut until the song ended.

    I was born in '63, so I was around during the craziness of 1968. All I really noticed was that people were saying that people of all races and genders were equal. Duh. I didn't really get the part about all the drugs and multiple sex partners (yeah for pretty reliable birth control!). Also, yeah for ibuprofen. Aspirin sort of worked and was awesome compared to nothing, but ibuprofen is one of the greatest inventions of all time. (I'm also a big fan of libraries and public schools, much older inventions.)

    My mom loved to tell us "Go run around outside." I'd think to myself, "I'd like to see YOU run around outside." (She really did used to--she was a tomboy.) I mostly played board games, read books, and colored and made stuff out of paper for fun. Oh, we also played with Barbies and Hot Wheels. And my best friend and I would make up lessons for each other in the summer--I made her learn about the solar system and she made me learn about Australia.

    Right in front of me is the stereo cabinet my dad made to perfectly fit the reel-to-reel tape player and turn table on one shelf with the receiver on the shelf above. The shelves below, behind doors, perfectly held the records. It's not quite so perfect for its current uses, but I love it.

    My mom has told us a few interesting stories. When she was a kid they had radio instead of TV. And they did have radio shows. Also, she had a wringer-washer machine. The washer would slosh the clothes around like today, but then you had to wring the clothes out by hand. But then you could get an attachment like a pasta machine that you push the clothes through (and hopefully not your fingers) while cranking them through and then clothes dried much more quickly.

    I really love living in modern times except for one thing--all the pollution and environmental destruction. And still, it's my favorite time. I love that we can just suck down all the amazing work of so many people: musicians, movie makers, writers, athletes! Even when they're strangers and even after they're dead. Back in Mozart's day, he actually had to be around for you to hear him. Now I can listen to music any time guilt free without having to bother the musicians.

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    1. Oh... so many memories! I remember Barbies and Hot Wheels - except that I wasn't allowed to have Barbies of my own (too sexist) so I practically lived at my best friend's house so we could play with hers. But I remember building incredible Hot Wheel tracks all over the basement - never could get the car to turn the upside-down loop without falling out of the track though.

      My dad tells me about the old time radio shows - Fibber McGee and Molly was his favorite. And I actually looked into buying an old wringer washing machine when my 1964 Kenmore gave up the ghost a few years ago - I went the other way though and got a fancy schmancy high efficiency model.

      I have to agree that there is much to love about modern technology except for the pollution and environmental destruction. Unfortunately I think that having the one often leads to the other though. Sigh.

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    2. I wasn't allowed Barbies, either--my mom thought they encouraged materialism (all those clothes and cars and houses) and had too adult of a figure. However, she let my brother buy me a Skipper doll because she was more like a little girl. What mom didn't realize was that the doll was "Growing Up Skipper" and when you rotated her arm, she grew and developed a bustline. Spin the arm the other way and she turned back into a little girl. I spent a lot of time twirling that arm and giggling.

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    3. Ha! I actually had a baby doll that you fed a type of formula and then in 15 minutes or so it would synthetically soil its diaper. Oh my...

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    4. I remember that doll! My mom thought it was too messy for me to have ...

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    5. Ha! Well, I do have to admit that the novelty wore off pretty quickly!

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    6. I had the regular Skipper. Also a Dawn doll (she had way sparklier clothes). My mom made me Barbie doll clothes--except she never got around to the fasteners, so there were always yarn belts.

      I also had a Chrissie(?) doll that had some hair you could pull out to make it longer and then you could also crank it back in. And a Betsy Wetsy--water and peeing.

      With our Matchbox cars, we would dig tunnels and caves in the yard. Rain was very bad for our structures and we sometimes had to do major excavations to find all those underground cars later! We did also have those race tracks--I don't remember if we ever got the loop thing to work right--I think we did.

      What I wasn't allowed to do is to watch "All in the Family" because it was too racist or "Hogan's Heroes" because war is not funny. We did watch M*A*S*H because there the humor was to help them deal with the horror of war.

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    7. I remember wanting that Chrissie doll sooooo bad! Sigh.

      We watched M*A*S*H all the time, but I never really understood what was supposedly funny about All in the Family. Loved Hogan's Heroes though... it was on in the afternoons so there were no parents around to comment one way or another! :-)

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  12. My life was very similar to yours. Our TV was a 25 inch console, which was this huge box that sat on the floor and only pulled in 3 channels and if you were lucky when it aired PBS, We still had a party line when I was in high school, which was 77-81 so in the grand scheme of things that wasn't all that long ago and look how far phones have come. Because long distance cost so (but not so much in comparison to what things cost today) we too wrote lots of letters and came up with interesting ways to trick the phone company into allowing us to send long distance messages. When I would travel, which I did often in high school, I had to call home each day at a predetermined time to let my grandparents know I was okay. To avoid paying for the cal, I would call collect....but here was the trick. If I used a name of a preselected relative that meant I was okay and the charges were refused. If I called collect using my own name that meant I was in trouble. If that was the case they would accept the call, but then I had to pay for it when the bill came in. The best part of all this was our phone bill (being on a party line) cost a total of $9 per month!

    My grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis but it wasn't until she realized I didn't have enough strength in my little finger to push the keys on the keyboard that she broke down and bought an electric one. I think she just needed an excuse other than herself. But that darn carbon paper drove me nuts along with the liquid correction fluid.

    I thought I was so lucky when I found a deal on an under-dash 8-track player for my first car until I realized soon after it was on it's way out for cassettes.

    And for movies, up until I started high school we used to be able to bring our own snacks into the theaters, no hiding needed.

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    1. Ha! I Love your system for tricking the phone company. Good thing that pre-selected relative never actually tried to call collect themself though!

      When I was in high school in the 80's I bought a stereo with my paper route money, and it actually did have an 8 track player along with a "newfangled" cassette deck. But by that point 8 tracks were on the way out so I don't think I ever got to use it. Guess that one was short-lived technology!

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  13. Ditto! And even that phrase dates me!

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    1. OK... shades of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost.

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  14. Loved this! I had forgotten about so much of this. And lemme give you a shout out for this gem: "It's like our expectations seem to have outpaced every advance in technology." Amen, amen, amen!

    I think modern technology, particularly smart phones, are rewiring our brains. I've not only read about studies that support this, I experience it personally. I don't think that's an improvement. And I think you just gave me my next blog post! :P

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    1. Well, apparently I'm missing out on the brain re-wiring part, because I don't think I could figure out a smartphone if my life depended on it! CatMan got me a tablet for my birthday last year and just about the only thing I've figured out how to do on it is play mahjong, watch Netflix and browse the interwebs! I can't imagine trying to navigate a Smartphone - hell, I can't even figure out how to send a text message!

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  15. Another 70s kid here...massive nostalgia with every one of these photos? Remember the smell of the purple mimeograph papers? Loved it.

    I'm a teacher now and I had to find a tape deck for some ancient recordings we were using. Plugged it in and asked one of the kids to operate "pause", "stop" etc. while I was teaching. She seriously asked me, "What is this machine and how do you work it?" I thought she was having me on, but she was serious!

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    1. Oh man... and it's only gonna get worse from here! The kids over at Our Freaking Budget who inspired this post were talking about how "way back when" you had to print out directions on MapQuest instead of using GPS! Oh my!

      I heard somewhere that they no longer teach cursive writing in schools. I suppose on some level that makes sense, but you've gotta wonder what signatures of the future will look like!

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  16. * sorry, that ? was meant to be a ! after "massive nostalgia"!!

    :)

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    1. Ha! No worries... I knew what you meant! :-)

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  17. Oh I love this post!! Brought back such memories of things from my childhood!

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    1. Happy to oblige. It sure was a different world back then, wasn't it?

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  18. What a great post! I can recall every one of these throwbacks, and I love the photos you shared, too. Your mention of expensive long distance telephone service brought back a memory - when my grandma called, she would always talk very fast because we had to get off the phone quickly - no time for small talk in those days! Thanks for stirring up some great old memories.

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    1. I wish I could take credit for the photos, but alas, most of them were simply pilfered from the interwebs. And my grandma used to do the same thing on phone calls. I think even after long distance prices got more reasonable, the mentality remained - it was an expensive treat not to be wasted on trivialities!

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    2. My grandfather is still dreadfully terse on the phone. There, it doesn't help that it's an international call. I tell him it's really not that expensive if I call him (less than $2 for the whole thing if we talk for an hour, never mind the five minutes I can actually keep him on the phone). I wonder if growing up with a party line is part of that?

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    3. I suppose that could be pert of it too... still operating with the idea that you don't want to tie up the phone for others?

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  19. I was born in the 70s so I remember most of this. I especially remember when the family were watching something on the TV and my dad had to get up half way through to fiddle with the dial. I also remember TV channels changing part of the way into a programme, especially during regional news. I miss playing LPs and trying to follow the lyrics sheet inside.

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  20. I remember this post! bwhahaha Ok, shutting up now.

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