For those born in the 60's or earlier
 

DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN...?

All the girls had ugly gym uniforms?

It took five minutes for the TV warm up?

Nearly everyone's Mom was at home when the kids got home from school?

Nobody owned a purebred dog?

When a quarter was a decent allowance?

You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?

Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?

All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had
their hair done every day and wore high heels?

You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped,
without asking, all for free, every time?
And you didn't pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?

Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?

It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner
at a real restaurant with your parents?

They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed. . ...and they did?

When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...to cruise,
peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady?

No one ever asked where the car keys were
because they were always in the car,
in the ignition, and the doors were never locked?

Lying on your back in the grass with your friends
and saying things like, "That cloud looks like a ..."

and playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?

Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals
because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?

And with all our progress, don't you just wish, just once,
you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace,
and share it with the children of today?

When being sent to the principal's office was nothing
compared to the fate that awaited the student at home?
Basically we were in fear for our lives,
but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc.
Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!
But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.

Send this on to someone who can still remember
Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Laurel and Hardy,
Howdy Doody and the Peanut Gallery,
the Lone Ranger, The Shadow ,
Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk.

As well as summers filled with bike rides, baseball games,
Hula Hoops, bowling and visits to the pool,
and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say, "Yeah, I remember that"?

I am sharing this with you today
because it ended with a double dog dare to pass it on.
To remember what a double dog dare is, read on.
And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between
old enough to know better and too young to care.

How many of these do you remember?

Candy cigarettes
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
Newsreels before the movie
P.F. Fliers
Telephone numbers with a word prefix....(Raymond 4-601).
Party lines
Peashooters
Howdy Doody
45 RPM records
Green Stamps
Hi-Fi's
Metal ice cubes trays with levers
Mimeograph paper
Beanie and Cecil
Roller-skate keys
Cork pop guns
Drive ins
Studebakers
Washtub wringers
The Fuller Brush Man
Reel-To-Reel tape recorders
Tinkertoys
Erector Sets
The Fort Apache Play Set
Lincoln Logs
15 cent McDonald hamburgers
5 cent packs of baseball cards -
with that awful pink slab of bubble gum
Penny candy
15 cents a gallon gasoline
Jiffy Pop popcorn

Do you remember a time when...

Decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-moe"?
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, "Do Over!"?
"Race issue" meant arguing about who ran the fastest?
Catching the fireflies could happily occupy an entire evening?
It wasn't odd to have two or three "Best Friends"?
The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was "cooties"?
Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a slingshot?
A foot of snow was a dream come true?
Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures?
Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?
The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team?
War was a card game?
Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?
Taking drugs meant orange-flavored chewable aspirin?
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?
If you can remember most or all of these, then you have lived!!!!!!!

Gawd, justamom... you're putting me in the era when dinosaurs once roamed the earth! :) I can remember most of these things from my misspent youth! (Mind you, I'm already approaching the "first anniversary of my 39th birthday!")

Lessee... I still own a couple of 1969 NY Mets World Champions beer mugs that were gas station giveaways, a copy of We Came In Peace, a Gulf gas station giveaway book commemorating the moon landing. How's about Space Food Sticks and Tang? And when Frosted Flakes were Sugar Frosted Flakes? (And Sugar Smacks, Super Sugar Crisp, Sugar Pops, etc...)

And not to forget:

Cable TV was once considered a luxury - and the channel selector was connected by a cable! Waiting until the cable company finally wired up your neighborhood - it wasn't until my senior year of high school over 20 years ago that my mother relented and got cable TV for the house!

VHS videotape players that once cost over $700 - now you can buy one on sale for $25!

My late grandpa's collection of Broadway show tunes on reel-to-reel tapes. Is it any wonder why my favorite music is movie and theatrical soundtracks?

When MTV lived up to its motto "all music, all the time". Now it's a pale shadow of what it once was.

My neighborhood didn't get cable until 1990. I was deprived! :(

Well, I remember every single thing.

Growing up, our phone number was JEfferson 3040. Then, when they needed more numbers, it became AMherst 3-3040.

For my first car, I had a heck of a time deciding between a 57 Chevy and a 58 Austin Healy Sprite. The sports car won out. And when I bought it, besides having the windshield washed and the oil checked, I asked for $2.00 worth of "high test," and it wouldn't fit in the nearly empty tank. It was only 21 cents a gallon, and the Sprite only had a 6 gallon tank.

PS I can't imagine that JAM knows about submarine races...

I've read about prefixes before numbers in older novels and seen them in movies and books. How exactly did it work?

In American (and probably Canadian) telephones you'll notice the alphabet grouped in three letter groups. The first two letters are actually a mnemonic for the telephone exchange, such as 'Butterfield 8'.

BUtterfield 8
BU8 = 288-(last four digits of the individual phone number)

PEnnsylvania 6-5000 - (the phone number for the New York Stadler Hilton, also a Glenn Miller Big Band tune)
PE6 = 736-5000

Descriptive telephone exchanges fell into disuse in the 1960s when area codes were first introduced.

More info: http://www.ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html

BTW, my mom's old phone number in Elmhurst, Queens - before she married my dad: DEfender 5-5582 (335-5582)

Thanks justamom! Flash back city!

OMG hell when you got your butt beat by the teacher, I was not a bad boy, but boy was I mischevious as hell!

I like people who come into my smoke shop, Well, I remember when Cigarettes were so much a pack! Da well, how much money did you have then!

.05 for a fountain Coke, da lucky to have .05 to pay for it!

Guess all is relative!:) Oh, Gasoline was a lot cheaper also and nobody had SUVs or Mini Vans either! Pick ups were for those that had to work!

DA, I had a Bugeye with a Toyaota Engine in it but when I was a little older! First School, always had roomies from Iowa, they had cars, city guys didnt!:D

I honestly can't remember those 5¢ Cokes, but I can remember when they were a quarter. Now, a Coke has twice the Coke in it, twice the calories, and costs three times the price!

Whoa ... :eek: and I thought I had a rough decade ...

Back in the days when I was in the military, taking advantage of tax-free (but rationed) cigarettes and liquor (beer and wine were not rationed) you could buy a carton of weeds at the commissary for just shy of $4.00 (limit four cartons every two weeks) and about 3-1/2 liters of booze for less than $20.00.

Thank you so much, JAM!

(Thinking of the days when every girl played the piano and had a poodle)

Poodle skirt.

No, a poodle! EVERYBODY had poodles!

OH YEAH, I remember all those things. How about those days when you could get 50 cents worth of gas (and not have to pump your own gas) and drive around for days!!
Or leaving the door open for the milkman to come right on in and put the milk in the ice box.

And my phone number was JEfferson 45972!! Jefferson, Glendale, Market, Walnut, Edison, Pershing, Atlas, Axminster, Terminal - those were the Fort Worth exchanges.

Houston had a lot of Spanish-themed exchanges like MIssion and OLive.

And those gym outfits were horrible--a major reason I joined the dance team, so I wouldn't have to wear one!

I can remember when Girl Scout cookies were 50 cents a box....

The best I can recall was gas wars between 19-22 cents a gallon.
Yes, a dollar a week allowance meant a movie (. 50) a coke, and popcorn and a bit of change left over. I went to a little store that sold 45s from juke boxes for 49 cents. I still have some AND the little plastic thingy that went in the center. When they broke, I'd stick my finger in the center and try to even it up as it went round and round. (We ALL stuck money in a musical beer stine to save up for a record player.)First album-Berl Ives.

I had Chatty Cathy, Tiny Tears and Terry Lee with her trunk.
Pickup Stix, marbles, and rainy afternoons of Crazy Eight, Slap Jack or reading Nancy Drew.

I wore my hair in TIGHT braids and couldn't eat breakfast till after Communion. No air-conditioning in the classrooms and almost falling asleep to the hum of the fans. Bomb drills.

Nuns who used a ruler on your hands and memorization, memorization, memorization! One kid in my class had flunked 3 years up to 5th grade.

Living in the country-
Making mud pies and getting REALLY dirty. We had to be creative because we had ONE CHANNEL that came in clear and shut down after the news. We didn't have a dial on our phone, just a red bar-the operator would connect us...and of course party lines.
Being chased by a bunch of CHICKENS and butted by a goat!
Introduced to propagation by a stallion with the biggest *thing* I had ever seen in my LIFE!:eek:

wow jam...
as always talking to me.

One thing I remembered recently was, when I was a kid, we spent most of our weekends in the country. We would drop egg cartons and money off at a Mennonite family, and as we were leaving on Sunday, the eggs would be in the shade, ready to go.

I was about to throw out an egg carton the other day, and suddenly thought, "I have to save that for the Sunday eggs!"

I miss those days!!

So I was born way later than the 60s but I'm having a blast reading all your memories! I can relate to some, I think, because I grew up in a small Iowan farming community. I remember when we could just dial 6-#### (no city prefix, no area code) to get anyone in town and the Co-op had ice cold glass bottles of soda for $.25. I love hearing all the stories from my dad about what it was like there when he was growing up.

Reminisce away! :)

Hey, when I was a kid (the 80's) my cousin lived in a small town in MI, and if you wanted to call within the town you only had to dial 7-XXXX. I thought that was the coolest thing! :)

I was about to post the same thing. I grew up in a very small (Wisconsin) town that never quite left the 1940s. Talk about a culture shock when I moved away to college.

I worked in a gas station where you didn't pay for your gas each time, we just wrote your name down on a sheet and asked you for the total at the end of the month. And no woman pumped her own gas!

In high school we had single-sex gym... the boys had shop, and the girls had home-ec.

We also had the shortened numbers! Sometime in late grade school we switched to having to dial all 7 numbers... before that my phone number was 7-0126... but most of my friends had 6-xxxx numbers because they lived in town and I lived in the country.

Milk delivery came every Saturday!

No one used to pump their own gas! LOL Remember "high test" gas? Put a tiger in your tank?

slight hijack.

I wish I could have a 5 digit phone number. I wish I could have a 7 digit number. There are so many people in the greater Toronto area now that you have to dial the area code before every number even if you're calling you're next door neighbour.
There are 3 area codes in the GTA, 416, 905, and 647. So now everyone has a 10 digit number.

:) Well, I mean, our station was full service, but if one of the attendants were busy helping other cars, a lot of men would just start their own. A woman, however, would wait patiently in her car. Most of the attendants we had were ancient old men (sweetest things you'll ever meet) and the sight of a woman starting her own gas might be the end of them!

Same here is the greater Atlanta area. There is 770 404 and 678


In the Greater Pheonix area was 602 480 623. but luckily if you lived in 602 and were dialing some one is 602 you only had to dial the other 7 #'s

In Ga you have to dial all 10.


Christia

When did STDs, gangs, and school violence start to factor in?

-Rudey
--And was DeltAlum in the ham radio club?

Shee-it, boss, I dunno... I remember a shooting at my high school during my senior year - and that was considered extremely rare back then; the last time there was a gun situation at school was in 1972.

Nowadays, schools are more like prison camps... except without barbed wire, death strips and guard towers! They keep cutting back the extracurricular activity and athletics budget, ya might as well convert the PE fields into mine fields as well!

Ditto here in the DFW area. Originally it was 214 for Dallas and 817 for Fort Worth. When a new area code was assigned to Dallas, people raised a big stink over whether it would be an 'overlay' (creating the area code within the existing code) or physically defining one. The latter prevailed; area code 972 begins roughly around the I-635 perimeter outward towards the suburbs. A third area code, 469 was overlaid over both of them a couple of years ago.

I think Fort Worth finally had another area code added to it, but don't know what it is.

The 905s have a cell phone area code too. It's 2-something-something, I think.

Also, some schools still have single sex gym (at least in the mid 90s. My friend went to a public high school in North York (1994-1998), and her gym class was all girls)

Funny you should ask. No.

But I was the president of the Radio (broadcasting) Club and did the morning announcements on the PA system as well as being the announcer for the Marching Band. Also announced for the Public Schools FM station and hosted a Junior Achievement radio program on a local commercial station. Worked for the local rock station answering the phones after school during "Beatlemania."

There is a Bob Greene book called "Be True to Your School" which talks specifically about the stations I worked for and some of the personalities I worked with. Greene graduated from a high school about ten miles from mine the same year. The book is a expansion of a diary he kept the second half of his junior and first half of his senior year. I don't know that I ever met him, but was undoubtedly at some of the street and "open house" parties he mentions. And I later directed the Ohio State Basketball games with the TV announcer he talks about.

STDs were with us back then, but they were treatable and not as likely to kill you.

One high school I attended was about 50/50 white and black and there was some racial tension, but we generally got along. I do remember a knifing at a football game, and "rumbles" (gang fights) did happen -- but were probably more the stuff of legend than reality in many cases.

And, of course, thanks to the Beach Boys, every teenager wanted to live on the California Beaches.

Let's hear it for White Levis!

(we've had 10 number local dialing here in Denver for several years.)

That is sooo funny some one was just saying to me the other day how when we sold girl scout cookies they were 50 cents a box v. the $4 a box

the line about determining your fate at the princpals office. I know that and i wasn;t even in trouble....just being called there!


Party lines. Whenw you tried to dial out and you hear other ppl talking...too funny!


That brought back many wonderful memories of growing up in the 60s and some of the 70s....Wonderful thread!

Did you drink malts and wear a cool leather jacket Fonzie?

-Rudey

Geez - flashback city! :eek:

I remember the old version of the "remote control" for the TV - it was my dad making ME get up, walk over, and turn to the correct channel (of which there were only a total of 13 available to choose from, of those, only 5 were channels we actually received a signal on!) And of course, the fine tuning of the rabbit ears depending on which channel - that always took time to get right.

I remember our FIRST microwave in 1979 - way before microwaved dinners or even microwave popcorn came out (and, for those of us fogies, remember the first brands of microwave popcorn had to be stored frozen until ready to pop!?)

We used to have a three-way party line at our house in Montana.

Never had cable until a Junior in High School. First saw cable in 7th grade, and HBO was WAY different - just a carrier signal between movies (no special filler segments, fancy introductions, etc... -just a blank screen with a text announcement of when the next movie would be shown).

Wow - I just don't FEEL old anymore, now I know I AM old!

"Be True To Your School" is a wonderful book. I can't tell you how many times I've read it. :)

I was born in 1973 but I can still relate to a lot of those things! We didn't have the five digit phone numbers here but at IU if we lived in the dorm and wanted to call any campus number (855- or 857-) we just dialed the last five digits. My gym classes in grade school and junior high were coed (although in junior high we started wearing uniforms) but were single-sex in high school. I remember when Girl Scout cookies were $1/box. Now they are $3-$3.50 around here. I too had a ton of 45s and the plastic thing that went in the middle.

There is a guy named Tom Williamson who is mentioned a couple of times in the book. He was the best man in our wedding.

Yes on the malts -- if you mean malt liquor. No on the jacket. Never combed my hair in "duck tails" either.

EDITED for crummy spelling!
All your posts are really revving my memory.

Delt Alum, you may appreciate this!
I remember one moment in particular when I felt so darn stupid.
I asked someone-"What's FM?" HAHAHAHAHA! Can anyone beat THAT!

The BEST radio station we could get-had to be a cloudy night-was out of OK 101. Otherwise, we got the Farm Report and Lawrence Welks' greatest hits!

Born in 1964 and I can relate to most of the stuff that was mention. I collected a whole bunch of 45's and 33 1/3 albums. I also remember when Comic Books used to be 25 cents back in the early 70's.

Fountain cokes were the best. A&W Drive Ins and rootbeer floats.
The drag. Did you all call them hoods-skanks or scuds? What was the motorcycle crowd called?
What was the last movie you saw at the drive in?

Another stupid move!
Choice-
Tom Jones-"What's New Pussycat"
The Stones-"Satisfaction"

Guess which one I bought!

On radio-Battle of the Bands, Beatles, Dave Clark 5, Stones

I was living in
"Pleasantville" !;)

JAM,

Damn, I loved 1960's AM Rock Radio.

Don't know if this is the same station, but one of the really legendary rockers of the 60's was "KOMA in Oklahoma" out of OKC.

This is from the history section of their current website:

"Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, KOMA was the favorite of teens all across the western US. With the big 50,000-watt signal and the relatively few rock-n-roll radio stations across the plains, KOMA was the main station for the hits. KOMA (along with handful of other legendary stations including 890 WLS, Chicago; 1090 KAAY, Little Rock; 1060 WNOE, New Orleans; 770 WABC, New York; 800 CKLW, Windsor/Detroit (DA edit: in my opinion, CKLW was the greatest station/format in early rock and roll); and 1100 WKYC, Cleveland) could be heard on car radios, in homes, and everywhere a kid could tune in. Often teens in New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, and other western states would eagerly await sunset when the mighty 1520 would come booming through with the newest hits of the day. They would sit in their cars on hilltops, turn it up at parties, or fall asleep with the radio next to their beds as they listened to Chuck Berry, the Supremes, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the Beatles. Soldiers in Viet Nam even reported tuning in KOMA to give them a little feeling of being back home."

We could sometimes get KOMA in Ohio when the atmosphere was just right. In addition, I would have to add a couple more stations to their "legendary list" including WBZ, Boston; WOWO, Ft. Wayne; KFWB and KRLA, Los Angeles; WKBW, Buffalo; and a few others.

These were the 60's "hitmaker" stations and home to some of the greatest rock jocks of all times.

There were other, lower power, stations that were local hits, but not big enough to be national powers. These include WMCA, NYC; KQV, Pittsburgh, WSAI, Cincinnati, WTVN, Columbus; WKNR, Detroit; KIMN, Denver and many, many more.

Then, of course, there was the always famous WATH, Athens, Ohio, "The Voice of the (Hocking River) Valley," where yours truly worked part of his way through college "playing the hits." I'm sure you all remember that. Right.