What Old-Fashioned Things Do You Remember?

Remember a lot of things.

I remember the three number and one letter telephone numbers of several family members in the DFW area.

PAUL TALKINGTON wrote:

Our first telephone was made of wood, was bolted on the wall and had a

handle you had to crank in 3 big U shaped magnets to make electricity.

gasoline was 21 cents/gallon. Our water came from a well with a large hand

pump on top of the well. Our car had two bench seats which you could fit

8 people and the area behind the rear seat and back window was big

enough for two small kids to lay, and there were no seat belts, and the

windshield wipers would stop when you let off the gas.

Our school bus drivers were also our teachers and if you were bad a school,

you would be paddled by the teacher and when you got home you got a

paddling by your parents.

Your school bus drivers were also your teachers? That's certainly old-fashioned but that really sounds like more of a rural thing.

Two of my friends' parents had the paddle at home. It was hung right in the foyer as I recall and even had a trade name of some sort ("The Disciplinarian" or something like that). This was the late 80s. Parents could evidently go to the store and actually buy a device specifically designed to beat their kids. Fifty or a hundred years ago of course parents and teachers would wack children but it took the 80s to actually trademark and bring to market a piece of wood specifically designed for the task so someone could make money.

Another corporeal punishment story - my sister's babysitter spanked her with a meat tenderizer which left a zigzag mark on her butt - this was probably late 70s. I wasn't alive at the time; I heard about it from somewhere. It wasn't even considered abuse - the baby sitter freely stated it ("she did something naughty so I hit her with the meat tenderizer.") My parents thought that was a bit too much and switched baby-sitters but there was no talk of lawsuits or anything; it seemed to be fairly common practice (not necessarily meat tenderizers, but baby sitters being allowed to spank and whatnot).

Roy was asked to play the closing at Woodstock (the original) and he declined. Said he'd never play for them "dirty hippies)!

Gramps wrote:

Sky King: Out of the blue of the Western Sky.

Every week was the same plot: his hot niece Penny got kidnapped by bank robbers/cattle thieves/bums, and he had to find her, in his plane no less.

Penny came before Annette and Tuesday Weld in my prepubescent pantheon.

Gloria Winters

Cigarette smokers who were rich and/or intelligent.

Mimeographed tests in school.

Women's volleyball teams wore bun hungers.

car windows you had to roll up and down by hand

drum brakes

carburetors

convertible tops you had to fold up by hand

the "three on the tree" manual shifter

Viewmaster

Label maker

Manual typewriters

Camping out for concert tickets

Spyder bikes

Dewey Decimal System and Card Catalogs

World Book Encyclopedia

Paper and metal oil cans with funnel/ opener

Bias-ply tires

aluminum hard hats

Mon and her friends Tupperware Parties

Pencil fights in school.

Eraser cars with staples stuck on the bottom so we could slide them across desks.

Do schools still use film projectors?

Kids teasing me with, "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!" as one of the few Asians in my white neighborhood. Now those schools are maybe 1/3 Asian.

Walking and biking to school every day. I was stubborn, and would refuse ride offers from my mom even when it was raining, so I'd be soaked sometimes at school.

Playing, biking, outside all over the place for hours after school. (Actually, I haven't broken this habit - I'm still outside 2 hours a day.)

Still have my 20 inch tube TV (and digital converter box) and VCR as my only TV. I used the VCR as recently as last year to record something.

jbcsj wrote:

CB radio. Smokey and the Bandit was the best ever!

A friend and I shared a call sign. I had a base station he had a base and a mobile so he called KMD 1648 mobile from his car or home & I just called Kiss Me Darling 1648.

Many a night was spent sitting in his car with our GFs submarine race watching and occasionally calling CQ DX "calling all stations located in a different continent to the caller", at the West End parking lot at Jones Beach NY with a wild dream of getting a skip from Europe, We got laid a lot but never got a call back from Europe

Dad used to smoke in the car with the windows up and 7 kids.

Re-runs of Hogan's Heroes, white guys setting world running records.

Remember when your tires had innertubes?

I remember getting out of 5th period in high school to help prepare the dirt 440 yard track for a dual meet. The track needed to be lined with chalk. It also needed to be graded sometimes, though that was rarely done. We just had ruts (and puddles when raining) in lane one most the time.

I remember when there was a Northern California state meet in high school cross country. The girls from my school won the last NorCal state cross country meet before there was an all California state meet.

We used to have open campus in high school. Kids would go off campus for lunch. That ended when some kids got messed up or killed in a car accident during lunch (a lot of kids packed into a car, tried to get air on a rolling hill and ran into a garbage truck that they couldn't see on the landing side of the hill).

I used an old fashioned technique during my ski today. I did the marathon skate for a while. I also did the Alsgaard skate, which might be considered old-fashioned. I haven't noticed anyone using that skate since he was racing (though he seemed to be the only one who ever did it).

Basketball players used to wear short shorts.

Black people used to have huge Afros.

My dad used to wear a leather jacket.

PCs used to be basically useless. My mom just used to play Frogger and Centipede on our IBM PC. I think I might have written a paper on it once. Or not. The printer was dot-matrix.

We used mechanical typewriters in typing class in junior high. We had a fancy IBM Selectric with memory at home.

Like someone else remembered, we also had milk delivered to our door, though for just a short while (it probably wasn't worth it) in the 1970s.

Racing balsa chips that we shaped and put into little streams when it rained as a kid.

Wolfman Jack

American Bandstand

All white footbal teams in the SEC

Dirt tracks

Lenny Bruce

Amos & Andy

Cassius Clay

The St. Louis Cardinals

Houston Oilers

O.J.Simpson at San Francisco City

Ministicks, aka the greatest sport of all time

Baywatch!!!!

Baywatch!!!