The New York Times on or about December 7, 1941.  Reading the texts of the Japanese, German and Italian declarations of war against the US makes for an interesting - and very scratchy - read.

Our 1st color TV, a Philco Ford, was "installed" on a Saturday morning in 1965. 1st color TV show I saw was a Spiderman cartoon.

When TV broadcasts ended early in the morning, the National Anthem was played on every channel.

The plastic smell of a new GI Joe. - The real ones.

Yep, same here.

Chips were delivered to your house in a can
Milk was delivered in glass bottles
The egg man would come by and sell farm goods and fresh meat
The high beam switch was on the floor (who was the fuck'n genius that changed that now my left foot has nothing to do)
There was no liberals, we called them commies
Moms stayed at home and raised the kids
Farts were funny
Barfing was sick
Sick was ill
Gay was happy
Bitches were dogs
Hoes were garden tools
News was at 5:00 and 11:00 and only 1/2 hour
Ed Sullivan was the show to watch

When you could tell the model and yr of a car by looking at its tail lights after dark, The test signal on most tv stations after midnight, smoking everywhere including the Boyz Room, Hunting small game in the morning to school, leaving shotgun in school office, then hunting back home after school. both Mom & Dad were home, Chicks were Chicks and Dudes were Dudes.

I remember

Rotary phones, and Ma Bell owned all the phones.  If you bought a vanity phone it was expensive, and you still didn't own the phone.
When long-distance was expensive, even if it was just outside your area code
Before "call waiting", when answering machines with tapes in them were high tech.  
The biggest screen was 27" and your televisions where pieces of expensive furniture
When VCR's were huge, very expensive luxury items
Drive-in theaters
When going to Disney World was a huge deal, and E-Ticket rides where limited.
When staying in a Motel with a pool was a big deal
When family vacations involved the car.
When your mom's arm was the only seat-belt that you got.
When skates strapped on your shoes, and only had 4 steel wheels
When master bathrooms were small
When eating out in a restaurant was a rare event
When the only news you got came in the form of a newspaper or the evening news.  
When Saturday morning was all kids shows and cartoons
Station wagons
Almost nothing was "computerized"
Calculators were expensive
Typewriters
Telegrams
U.S. Postal Service was the only mail
Paper routes
Sears Catalogues, The Christmas catalogue was huge!
S&H Green stamps
Having an FM radio in the car was unique
Bicycles with banana seats
Bottle Water was Pierre, and stupid.  
A car making it to 100k miles was a big deal.  
Speedometers were limited to 85 mph
You couldn't legally go faster than 55 mph ....anywhere.
Roll-up car windows were common, as were window vents


...damn things are so much better today.

All of that, every bit of it.

Pull up to the a store in town, with a pistol in the glove box, rifle behind the back seats or in the window ( pickup truck ), cassette tapes or 8 tracks plus anything you bought at a previous store, laying on the seats for the world to see, and you left your windows down, and your doors unlocked. If you were going to be in there for over an hour, it didn't matter. There was no thought, it just did occur, that anything would be stolen, and , not only that, we left the keys in the ignition.


Maybe it's a small town thing, but, walking up the sidewalk from store to store to get the goods you needed and / or wanted, and bumping into people from school, church, etc, and having a 15 minuted conversation with each one of them about "ya mama and them" and how they were, and finding out that the persons "Ain't Judy , you know, Leroy's wife, Bobbie Jo and Betty and them's mama, that you were kin to by your 1st cousin Jimbo marrying Leroy's sister Ellie, yeah that one, had just had her gall bladder removed, but she was fine."

Then you'd walk about 10 steps , bump into somebody else, and start that conversation all over.

It would take you 3 hours to walk three blocks and go in 4 stores, but, we all liked it that way. Your community and churches took care of the sick, the needy, and the elderly. You took care of each other, watched out for each other. Everybody knew each other, all the children were welcome at anyone's home or yard to play and be fed.

All the meat was local, even in the supermarkets, but most of us bought it from the butcher who dealt with local farms.

As above, real milk, in glass bottles, delivered to your porch, and your old bottles were picked up.

You ordered groceries if you were not going to be able to get into town on grocery day and they were delivered.

Going into about any store in town for about anything, and picking up what you wanted or needed, and it being written on a tab to be settled up at the end of the month.

Our furniture store, we carried one line of furniture. We only carried top of the line, name brand furniture. We wanted everyone to have the best, something that would last them their entire lives, and longer. We have furniture still in houses here that people's grandparents were born in back in the 1930s, still just as nice as the day it was bought.

No matter your station in life, your race, or anything, you came in and picked out what you wanted. Many, many times I heard " Mr C.O., we can't afford that."   My father or grandfather would tell them, " Look, I want you to have the best. This is what it costs total, how much can you pay a week, or a month? "  They would sometimes settle for $2 a week on furniture that was around $1000. No interest was put on it, not added costs, and there was not one bit of paperwork done. The deal was made on a handshake. We never once had to pick up a piece of furniture . Dad said he did pick up one living room suite once, and that's all he could ever remember having to pick up for non payment, and that was in the early 60s.

Our customers didn't pay the week before or the week of Christmas unless they wanted to. That was just something that the store had always done to make Christmas a little easier on them.
People's word was everything back then, and people went out of their way to pay us. There were some that couldn't always pay money, but they would give us stuff from their garden, cook meals from their garden or animals. One old lady, had to be 100, used to cook daddy a glazed possum once a year. That was not something I wanted to eat. lol




Diapers. Cloth diapers. I do not know how I remember this, but I remember being in cloth diapers, and when I pooped in them, mom or dad would take the diaper off, and hold it over the toilet, and dump the contents and flush it down, and then they would take the diaper, if it was messy, and dunk it in the toilet until it was sort of clean, or take it outside to the hosepipe. From there it would go into the diaper hamper, which had a plastic bag in it, and at the end of the week, a man came by with fresh diapers, and he would pick those up to take back to be processed through a wash / heat thing. I remember the diaper pins too. Got poked a few times with them.

 

I used to get sent to radio shack with a shoe box with all the TV's tubes in it to use their tester.


There was hell to pay if I came back with the wrong one.

Everybody smoked and almost nobody was fat.
Now everybody is fat and almost nobody smokes.

Coincidence? I think not.

Only girls had pony tails

The only males that didn't get a haircut regularly were either too old or too young to have any hair, people that were naturally bald excepting.

Got a genuine out of me.

i remember when the country didn't argue over which bathroom a mentally disturbed freak who cut off his dick used.

i remember when college was a place to debate different ideas.

Now those were good times.

Either you knew no Native Americans, or the ones you knew were all Europeanized.

I remember pay phones

also remember video rental stores and renting VHS movies



I was kind and always rewound my tapes before returning them

Can of snuff was 55 cents and a six pack of lone star long necks was 99 cents if you had the bottles.

I did too. When I was working in the nuclear industry, I used to go out of my way to use them for non-emergency use, out of nostalgia. They sucked just as much as I remembered. But I could still tell you where they're all located.

Also, to this day, when someone fires up a fax machine, I wait for that Compuserve "WELCOME!". That modem wharblegarble still takes me back.

I can remember when there were no zip codes.  You had to share a phone line, a.k.a. Party line.  Edited to add: Atomic bomb drill by getting under your desk and covering your head,

One thing I forgot was I'm old enough to remember when major league baseball games were done in 2 hours.

I remember riding bicycles up and down the road with my sister looking for Coke bottles ( or any other brand ) 72'-77', and taking them to the stores and getting the deposit money. Usually we traded the value of them for drinks and snacks or little toys in the stores, but we'd save some of the money to buy our mom and dad something for their birthday or Christmas.

When you could tell the year of a car by looking at the number cast on the taillight. (cars changed subtly every year).
Sky Lab.
Dad pulling into the gas station in the Buick Electra 225 and saying "5 or full".
Topless women pictures on the matchbook covers advertising the only bar in town. I think Dad left those laying around for us to find. Thanks Dad.

I can remember when kids walked to school

Today, we still have "school zones", and LEOs still hand out speeding tickets for the special speed limits that drop on certain days at certain times,  but you never see kids anymore.  They're either being bused or picked up.  In our city they let go all the cross guards several years ago (a big deal at the time), because the city was just paying these guys to sit there a couple of hours in the morning and afternoon, they never ever had kids crossing the street.  

Learning the hard way not to put polish on the vinyl front bench seat of the car... ended up on the passenger side after the first curve.
 

when I was little I had to carry flashlight to outhouse until Dad ran a wire with a couple electric lights.

When to cold to go out use a slop jar.

Not in my neck of the woods.  Nor were there any when we moved to NYC.

They're still around Convenience Stores.  You never know when your cell will lose its charge and need to make a phone call.



25 More Posts, Drill Sergeant!

How about when Double Headers were part of the yearly scheduled?  Not to make up a Rained out game, but as a Regularly Scheduled event?  Once every other month or so a Sunday at a Baseball Park meant two games.  Play Game 1, intermission for about half an hour, play Game 2.
HEY! What about Twi-Night Double Headers?  Start Game 1 around 5 or 6, Game 2 ending around Midnight.  Again, a Regularly Scheduled event and not to make up a rainout.

Day/Night Double Headers where you paid separate admissions for either game were about as rare as an honest politician.

We didn't have the remote for the vcr, so all there was was a play and stop button, no rewinding until it was done and the tape rewound itself.

I always got tapes from the dick who would watch it halfway through and not rewind it.

Curb feelers

Nobody knew who Rudi Gernreich was.  Then after he invented his bathing suit for women in 1964, you either blessed or cursed the design.

out of

I can remember when the World Series were all Day Games and Never Night games.

In fact, I can remember the schedule being mostly days games, Night Games being notated differently.

 




 

I remember learning to capitalize the first letter in a sentence

I occasionally will get a all circuits are busy when I'm dialing a cell number.

I remember going to the outhouse at night in the middle of winter.   Not part of the good ole days I want to go back to!

... Duck, and cover

You could smoke in the mall

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I wish a buck was still silver , it was back when the country was strong

Yep. Remember the Freedom Train?

How bout these?

!

Wow!   I really enjoyed reading these posts tonight....every one of them.   Arf truly is an amazing place!