Do You Remember Back When...

[crossbody]

What is your remember back when story?

Do you remember when you were in college and hated having those 8am classes, and it was hard to get out of bed to get to them? Now you have to be at work by 7am?

 

[wamose]

What is your remember back when story?

Do you remember when you were in college and hated having those 8am classes, and it was hard to get out of bed to get to them? Now you have to be at work by 7am?

Hell, one morning in Laramie, I walked about a half mile to an 8AM class and it was 88 Below (wind chill factor). After that, nothing was too big a deal, not even NYC traffic, going home at night.

 

[Moonglow]

What is your remember back when story?

Do you remember when you were in college and hated having those 8am classes, and it was hard to get out of bed to get to them? Now you have to be at work by 7am?

No, when I was going to UA you got the 7 am classes so you could find a place to park.

 

[g5000]

What is your remember back when story?

Do you remember when you were in college and hated having those 8am classes, and it was hard to get out of bed to get to them? Now you have to be at work by 7am?

Grocery stores.

You almost never saw a male in a grocery story, except for small boys with their mothers, and the clerks who stocked the shelves.

If you looked at the floor of a grocery store, you would see hundreds of crushed cigarette butts. You could smoke in stores back then, and women would casually grind out their cigarettes out on the floor.

There were no combination grocery/department stores like today. No Walmart type of thing. And grocery stores were much smaller.

Somehow, you would get your groceries rung up and be on your way to your car faster than you do today.

We put our best men to work finding ways to speed up the checkout service. Bar codes, laser scanners, debit cards, conveyor belts at the register.

But someone else figured out how to fuck it all up by asking for your phone number, email address, firstborn's middle name, membership card, and a blood sample since then.

Cashiers were lightning-fast mathematical geniuses back then. Not like the airheads today who can't make change without their cash register telling them how much to give you, and then still struggling to figure out what coins make up 70 cents.

There were no membership cards for stores.

All the coupons your mother brought with her had been clipped out of a newspaper. A newspaper was a non-volatile storage device for the day's current events hand delivered every day to your doorstep by a young lad on a bicycle. We're talking some real Olden Times shit here.

That's another thing. Minors were gainfully employed back then. Delivering newspapers (boys), babysitting (girls), mowing lawns and shoveling snow (boys). There was some definite gender segregation in the youth employment market.

What you got when you paid for your groceries were S&H Green Stamps. They looked like postage stamps and you would get a perforated panel of them, the amount being determined by how much you spent. You took these home, licked them, and put them into a booklet. Once you had enough of them, you could trade them in for cash and prizes.

There were no cart returns in a grocery store parking lot. Everyone just left their carts willy nilly all over the parking lot. Your mother would be cussing up a storm trying to park without hitting a cart in the middle of the goddam parking space.

There were no automatic doors for any stores of any kind. You had to manually push on them like you still have to do in some backward places and at 7-Eleven.

Eventually, there were these rubber mats which had sensors in them and they would open the door when you stepped on them.

Every grocery store had floor-to-ceiling glass windows across the entire front of the store. And then some genius came up with the idea of blocking the windows with gigantic outward-facing posters advertising their prices for meat and other items.

 

[g5000]

Food.

You could not get tomatoes year round. Only when they were "in season", like strawberries still are today. This inability of year round access was the same with most fresh fruits and vegetables at the time. Summer was great, winter not so much.

Meat was expensive. Far more expensive than it is today. Meat was not an everyday meal for most people back then.

In fact, in the early 70s there was some serious meat inflation and shortages. To meat meet this crisis, Betty Crocker came out with Hamburger Helper.

"Hamburger Helper Helped Her Hamburger Help Her…make a great meal!"

I'm gagging just thinking about that crap.

Hamburger Helper stretched your meat. It was a package of dried pasta and seasoning which your mom would work into hamburger meat. This would enable her to feed the entire family with a single pound of hamburger.

And this, boys and girls, is how bulimia was invented. Fucking Hamburger Helper.

Since meat was in short supply and was expensive, people ate a lot more fruits and vegetables back then. It filled up all that empty space on the plate.

Food was more locally sourced. Not by choice, but because we just didn't have the necessary infrastructure or large national chains who could operate on economies of scale.

Jello was big. Every kid consumed his or her body weight in Jello every year. Every mom had a copper Jello mold.

Most stoves were electric, though many were gas. There was no such thing as a glass-topped stove.

I mention this because somewhere back there, somebody invented Jiffy Pop popcorn. If you have kids, you can still find it. I was amazed at that when my kids DEMANDED I get some when I told them about this wonder of science.

Get some.

What you did is take off the carboard cover and then place the Jiffy Pop container on a burner and shake it. And shake it. And shake and shake and shake and shake and shake and shake it.

A few days later, the popcorn kernels within begin to pop, and a magical ball of foil begins to rise from the aluminum pan. A real delight!

]

Modern day campers may be familiar with Jiffy Pop as you can perform this act over a campfire.

If you camp and don't know about Jiffy Pop, get some! Your kids will remember to the day they die.



There were only a couple varieties of food brands back then. For instance, bread. Bread didn't take up a whole aisle with eleventy-hundred brands.

Every kid grew up on Wonder Bread. "Helps build strong bodies 12 ways."


About 40 percent of the average child's composition was Oscar Mayer bologna. "Baloney". And I guarantee you everyone my age knows the Oscar Mayer bologna jingle by heart.

If they need prompting, just say, "My bologna has a first name..." They will not be able to stop themselves from breaking into that song.

No, really. Try it and see.

There were foods which had urban myths. Pop Rocks killed Mikey from the Life cereal commercial.

Poor Mikey. Everyone loved Mikey.

Going out to eat at a fast food emporium was infrequent. It was a real treat when you did.

Every box of cereal had a toy inside. You could also save the box tops and send them off for more toys. This would encourage you to eat as much of the cereal pusher's brand as possible.

Families with multiple children would see the kids trying to be the first to get to a new box of cereal to get the toy.



One of my favorite sweets when I was little were candy cigarettes. Every store carried them. I felt like my Camel non-filter chain-smoking dad.

 

[g5000]

Toys.

Every child had a toy chest.

In a girl's toy chest were dolls.

In a boy's toy chest were cap pistols, cap rifles, dinosaurs, some rocks, a baseball glove, and Tonka trucks. You could not close the lid of a boy's toybox.

Every boy had cap guns, and they didn't have gay orange tips. And there is nothing sweeter to a boy's nostrils than the smell of gunpowder.

Caps were strips of paper with little bubbles of gunpowder. They came in a roll and you loaded them into your gun, and on a good day, six out of ten would pop with a satisfying bang when hit with the gun's hammer.

[


Tonka toys. Because of the Cold War, Tonka trucks were designed to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear bomb.

The world might have ended, but you could play with your dump truck in the ashes.



I had a Tonka mixer, a Tonka dump truck, and a Tonka firetruck.


Creepy Crawlers. Creepy Crawlers were rubbery creatures you baked yourself on a hotplate, without adult supervision, using a liquid material called "goop". Goop had a very distinctive and memorable odor as it cooked.

There was a wide selection of creatures you could make with a creepy crawlers hotplate. My favorites were salamanders.

The Olden Time creepy crawler manufacturing process was nothing like what you see peddled on Amazon today.

You have not had a real childhood unless you have given yourself third degree burns on that fucking hotplate.

Hula hoops. Yes, kids, we goobers actually stood around making a plastic circle revolve around our waists.

Pogo sticks. One of my all-time favorite toys. It was basically a long medal rod with a heavy duty spring and some handles sticking out of it. The idea was to mount this thing and hop up and down for eighty-four hours until your spine compressed.

If you didn't know what you were doing, you could be launched at a 45-degree angle at high velocity and discover the negative side effects of gravity.

What? Wear KNEE PADS and HELMETS!?!? Are you fucking kidding me?

I just checked Amazon and pogo sticks are still around. But I have not seen a kid on one since the 60s.

Jarts. Jarts were "lawn darts". What they really were were unguided death missiles which you would launch by hand into the air and try to make them land in a small circle a lot like a miniature hula hoop.

But what really happens when you hand a boy a missile with a sharp metal tip is a childhood version of Mutual Assured Destruction between the boys in the backyard and the boys in the front yard.

You can't get real Jarts any more. There is a gay safer version available on Amazon.


Whammo. Whammo was a toy company. Their commercials flooded all three TV channels.

Yes, we had just three television channels back then. But we were more advanced than you think because we could watch TV without a cable or a subscription. So HA!


Whammo particularly ruled the waves on Saturday mornings. Cartoons were aired only on Saturday mornings.

There might have been cartoons on Sunday mornings, but the whole country was in church, so I don't know.

Because cartoons were only available on weekend mornings, we had to play outside a lot. In all kinds of weather. It was wonderful.

Whammo. Hula hoops. Frisbees. Super balls.


I would be a traitor to the male species if I failed to mention army men. Every boy had a bucket of army men. Green ones and yellow ones. Americans and Japs.

That's it. Two colors. Good guys vs. bad guys.

Everyone said "Japs" back then. WWII was only six or seven days in the past, so...

Dad said "Japs". Grandpa said "Japs. So you said "Japs".

Army men.

Hot wheels. Tiny metal cars. Metal. You could hit 'em with a hammer. Because that's what boys do.

I have not mentioned girls' toys. That's because boys and girls absolutely did not mix on their down time. You only saw girls in school, unless you had a sister and she had her friends over. But you avoided them because they had cooties.

There is only one toy which jumps out at me in the girl department.

The Easy Bake oven.

The Easy Bake oven was the female version of Creepy Crawlers, except with real cupcakes you could eat.

Because cooking was the destiny of every girl.

 

[g5000]

Automobiles.

Every car had four doors and a trunk. You just chose the color and shape.

There was a singular exception, the "station wagon". I'll get to that.

Back then, you could hit a thousand year old oak with your car, and the tree would die. Your car would make an annoying loud squeaking sound from the fan belt, but you could back up and drive away. That is, if you had not been projected through the windshield and become one with the tree.

Seatbelts? What are those?

I cannot tell you how angry the men of America became when the federal government forced car makers to put a buzzer under the seat which would buzz until you put your seatbelt on.

One of the earliest lessons you were given upon achieving adolescence was when your dad showed you how to rip that fucking wire under the seat.

Not snip it with a wire cutter. You fucking rip that shit out with your bare hands.

After I was involved in two multicar accidents with multiple fatalities and my face was smashed, I became a big believer in seat belts, which I am to this day.

Families were bigger back then. The cars were bigger, too. Way bigger. "Land yachts". But not big enough to fit your whole family and grandma. So at least one kid was sitting on someone's lap.

That was me. And that is how my face came to be mashed. Twice.

I think it improved my looks, but opinions vary.

The seats in cars, front and back, were bench seats. Single passenger seats were not yet a thing.

So in every car, a woman could be seen sidled right up to her man, her left arm wrapped around his right. His combat veteran right arm was her seat belt. I gotcha, baby.

The back seat was a playground. If you were driving behind a car with kids in it, you could see them looking back at you out the back window. They'd be playing with their dolls or Hot Wheels on the little platform on top of the back seat.

They would wave, you would wave. Life was good.

Until you got in a multicar accident, which were way too common back then.

Then those poor kids were destroyed. I was lucky I was not.

A lot of scientists went to work figuring out to make highways safer. They have done a pretty good job so far.

And the government went to work putting children into bondage in the backseat, strapped into a cloth and plastic roll cage.

Those really work. If the car seat is somehow ejected from the car, it completely protects the kid as it rolls down the emergency lane and off a cliff.

If you opened the hood of a car back then, everything was accessible. You could actually see the starter and the alternator. You could take them out with a wrench. 9/16. Everything was 9/16 back then. And none of that gay metric shit.

If your starter shit the bed, you could put off getting a new one for a while. All you had to do was short it with a big screwdriver while someone cranked the engine until it started.

Good luck finding the starter when you open the hood of a new car these days. Optimus Prime is crouched in there, getting in the way of everything.

Pontiac, Ford, Chevy, Oldsmobile, Buick, Chrysler.

You'll notice there are no Jap names. Or Korean names.

Your car's brand name actually mattered to you back then. Fistfights would break out between Ford owners and Chevy owners.

My family was Team Chevy.

FORD: Found On Road Dead. Fix Or Repair Daily.

And then there was the station wagon. The family car. Vans didn't come along until marijuana hit the mainstream, and they were not intended for families.

The station wagon was one ugly car. It was all practicality.

You had the front seat for mom and dad. Then the back seat for some kids. And then the "way back" for luggage. The way back had another small backward-facing bench seat which folded flush with the floor. If not on a long trip requiring that space for luggage, kids would fight over who got to sit in the way back. Everyone wants to sit in the way back. It is the children's first step toward leaving their parents.

For some godawful reason, most station wagons had wood paneling on the outside.

It is not easy to find a station wagon these days, but they are still out there. They are a lot smaller now, though, which defeats the whole purpose.

Oh, I almost forgot.

The vast majority of automobiles had a standard shift. Automatic transmissions were for people with money.

Like a woman on TikTok said, "I love when younger TikTockers comment on older people's pages and it's like 'You shouldn't even be on here, you don't even know how to use technology.' It's like if we started writing in cursive again and driving stick shift cars, we could cripple your entire generation."

 

[g5000]

Moms.

Moms were an entirely different breed in my youth.

I'm not saying they were a better breed or a worse breed. I will tell you about them and let you decide for yourself.

Moms today and moms then are fantastic at kissing boo-boos. They may be first class bitches to everyone else, but they are the ambassadors of mercy with their children.

If you didn't have a mom like that, I am so so sorry. Really.

So anyway, this first part is more about how society has changed us on the child level more than on the mom level. For good or bad is for you to decide.

In the Olden Times, a boy would leave home on Saturday morning after dosing on cartoons and would not be seen again for many, many hours.

Moms would not wonder where their kid was every five minutes. They would sometimes ask the kid where he was going, but she usually knew. He's off to hang with his friends, and she knows all of them and their mothers and their phone numbers.

Good luck finding a modern day mom who keeps track of that stuff. Not when she can track her kid's phone with military-grade GPS.

So off the boy goes. He's playing war in the woods with his buddies. A good straight stick makes a great rifle to kill Japs with.

Then he falls off a cliff and breaks his leg. SNAP!

If that boy cries, his friends will excommunicate him. Limping is acceptable. Limping is cool.

But you better not cry, boy. The fucking Soviets would love to see you cry.

The boy then straightens his spine, clenches his jaw, and marches/limps the 28 miles back to his house.

When he lays eyes on his mother...then, and only then, will he burst into sobs.

Then mom does what moms all over the world do. Kisses, hugs, exclamations of "poor baby", and a full body inspection for injuries to make sure nothing is missed.

Then off to the hospital at 492 mph. Ambulances are a waste of time.

Olden Time moms spent much of their day in hair curlers. They would wear them to the grocery store. Nobody cared.

Housework was hard work. Preparing dinner took five hours out of the day. House cleaning and laundry took up the rest. This is why TV during the weekday was soap operas. They were called soap operas because all the commercials were for laundry detergent, Ajax, Mr. Clean, Clorox, and so forth.

But when everyone was seated around the dining room table, mom's hair was perfect. And she was wearing a dress. And makeup. She looked fantastic.

This was not the same woman at the Piggly Wiggly earlier in the day in curlers with a Camel dangling from her lip.

Speaking of the dining room table, every member of the family was there. Every night. No exceptions.


Olden Times moms checked your homework!


Every mom had the aforementioned Jello mold, a seasoned cast iron skillet, aprons, a mixer, a red and white checkered Betty Crocker cookbook, some cookbooks from church.

There was no such appliance as a dishwasher. Mom was the dishwasher.

Dad would try to moderniz the home by giving mom an electric carving knife. Whenever Mom used it, the TV would go on the fritz. No, really. It would.

There were also two sets of dining ware. One for every day use, and one for when company was over. The same with the hand towels in the bathroom. Do NOT use the good towels! Those are for company!

A lot of moms knew how to do canning. And quilting. And knitting. They knew how to patch a hole in your clothes.

Boys pants all came with super long legs on them. You bought pants for the waist size, and then mom would have to hem them.

That's why in Olden Time movies, the guys have rolled up pants cuffs. So you could grow into them.

Moms made breakfast EVERY morning.

Moms were forced to wear ballistic missile bras. Really, really uncomfortable bras.

Last, but most certainly not least, there were no strollers. You either walked or your mom carried you. She would carry you for hours, through the outback, over the Himalayas, and into the valley of the shadow of death.

But we did a LOT of walking back then. A lot more than the tots of today.

 

[g5000]

Dads.

The only familiarity infants and toddlers had with their dad were his wingtip shoes. The rest of dad was somewhere above the cigarette cloud layer.

This is not really a joke. My dad was a three-pack-a-day man. There was an immobile cloud of smoke in our house, almost like another family member, with a one-foot layer of clear oxygen near the floor. When the sun came through a window, you could see this smoke monster distinctly.

TV news was only broadcast for a half hour each day, and dinner had best be served and over with by the allotted time. No one was to disturb dad during the news. This was the Cold War and every dad had to stay on top of things in case we needed to bolt to the Post Office nuclear shelter.

Most every post office or town hall had a nuclear shelter. You could tell if a government building had a nuclear shelter by the yellow-and-black radiological sign they posted on the exterior of the building.

Should Armageddon come, everyone would survive for the next thirty years on the Saltines and water they had in the shelters. Tonka trucks would be passed from generation to generation.

Every dad was a veteran. Many of them were combat vets. They had either served in Dubya-Dubya-Two or Korea. Not one of them talked about it.

I saw grown men cry, though, when the flag passed at the head of the annual Fourth of July parade.

That happened to me, too, after I retired from active duty. That shit caught me completely by surprise.

Dads didn’t change diapers. There were no baby changing stations in men’s rooms.

My dad was the exception. He had been a medic during the Korean war, and he changed a lot of war baby diapers.

Diapers were thick cotton cloth in the Olden Times. Every baby got a diaper rash. This was your first lesson that life is tough. The severity of the diaper rash was dependent on how attentive and quick mom was about changing a wet diaper.

Babies often had a pair of rubber pants over their diapers, baby fashion not being a thing in Olden Times.

Boy babies wore blue, girl babies wore pink.

Dad was up, out the door, and at his job by 9 am sharp every day. If a dad called in sick to work, he was calling from the hospital and was minutes from death, holding hands with a priest, and was just making a courtesy call to his boss on his way out of this vale of tears.

It was not unusual for a dad to drop dead thirty-eight minutes after his retirement party. And it was not unusual for a dad to drop dead several years before qualifying for a gold watch.

Television broadcasters provided a steady supply of war movies at times convenient for dads.

Tora! Tora! Tora! and The Longest Day were regularly re-broadcast as often as the fricking Wizard of Oz.

This may shock you, but I have never watched The Wizard of Oz. But I have seen all the big war movies dozens of times apiece.

My family has recently learned I have never seen The Wizard of Oz and the womenfolk have mobilized to fix this shocking shortcoming of mine.

Dads were serious men. Dads would spend hours, literally hours, on a single unscripted lecture at you about what you needed to do to get your act together. It’s a tough world out there, son, and life is not fair.

You were Moses on Ararat, dutifully receiving commandments from the Voice booming down from the cloud.

Dads read the newspaper cover to cover every day. The sound of the paper sheets whipping as he flipped to page 19 to finish a story continued from the front page is permanently recorded in my aural memories.

My dad was big on crosswords. He did the newspaper crossword every day. He also did the daily Jumble. The daily jumble was a list of words whose letters were jumbled, with clues how to solve them. Inside each solved word, certain letters were circled which were to be used to solve the main jumble puzzle at the end of the list. They usually ended up being a really bad pun.

Dad was allowed to spank you and he exercised this right often. The most terrifying sentence a mother had in her disciplinary arsenal was, “You just wait until your father gets home!”

The next three hours of dread were scarring. The sun went dark. Your toys weighed several pounds heavier. Even the dog knew something bad was coming down. You hid in your bedroom and waited for the hangman to come and get you.

Moms could spank you, too. Right there in the grocery store, in front of everybody!

Dads took you to ball games. They even coached your Little League team. There was no “for the love of the game” when you played baseball. You were out to slaughter the other teams. Only one team got the trophy at the end of the season. This was total war.

Sure, sure, we all chanted, “Two four six eight, who do we appreciate?” at the end of every game, but do you really think we meant it? Hell no.

If you took a line drive ball to the face, some dad in the stands would always shout, “Is the ball okay?”

 

[g5000]

Why yes, I have posted all this before. How can you tell?

 

[crossbody]

Food.

You could not get tomatoes year round. Only when they were "in season", like strawberries still are today. This inability of year round access was the same with most fresh fruits and vegetables at the time. Summer was great, winter not so much.

Meat was expensive. Far more expensive than it is today. Meat was not an everyday meal for most people back then.

In fact, in the early 70s there was some serious meat inflation and shortages. To meat meet this crisis, Betty Crocker came out with Hamburger Helper.

"Hamburger Helper Helped Her Hamburger Help Her…make a great meal!"

I'm gagging just thinking about that crap.

Hamburger Helper stretched your meat. It was a package of dried pasta and seasoning which your mom would work into hamburger meat. This would enable her to feed the entire family with a single pound of hamburger.

And this, boys and girls, is how bulimia was invented. Fucking Hamburger Helper.

Since meat was in short supply and was expensive, people ate a lot more fruits and vegetables back then. It filled up all that empty space on the plate.

Food was more locally sourced. Not by choice, but because we just didn't have the necessary infrastructure or large national chains who could operate on economies of scale.

Jello was big. Every kid consumed his or her body weight in Jello every year. Every mom had a copper Jello mold.

Most stoves were electric, though many were gas. There was no such thing as a glass-topped stove.

I mention this because somewhere back there, somebody invented Jiffy Pop popcorn. If you have kids, you can still find it. I was amazed at that when my kids DEMANDED I get some when I told them about this wonder of science.

Get some.

What you did is take off the carboard cover and then place the Jiffy Pop container on a burner and shake it. And shake it. And shake and shake and shake and shake and shake and shake it.

A few days later, the popcorn kernels within begin to pop, and a magical ball of foil begins to rise from the aluminum pan. A real delight!

]

Modern day campers may be familiar with Jiffy Pop as you can perform this act over a campfire.

If you camp and don't know about Jiffy Pop, get some! Your kids will remember to the day they die.



There were only a couple varieties of food brands back then. For instance, bread. Bread didn't take up a whole aisle with eleventy-hundred brands.

Every kid grew up on Wonder Bread. "Helps build strong bodies 12 ways."


About 40 percent of the average child's composition was Oscar Mayer bologna. "Baloney". And I guarantee you everyone my age knows the Oscar Mayer bologna jingle by heart.

If they need prompting, just say, "My bologna has a first name..." They will not be able to stop themselves from breaking into that song.

No, really. Try it and see.

There were foods which had urban myths. Pop Rocks killed Mikey from the Life cereal commercial.

Poor Mikey. Everyone loved Mikey.

Going out to eat at a fast food emporium was infrequent. It was a real treat when you did.

Every box of cereal had a toy inside. You could also save the box tops and send them off for more toys. This would encourage you to eat as much of the cereal pusher's brand as possible.

Families with multiple children would see the kids trying to be the first to get to a new box of cereal to get the toy.



One of my favorite sweets when I was little were candy cigarettes. Every store carried them. I felt like my Camel non-filter chain-smoking dad.

those stove top jiffy popcorn would always burn

 

[crossbody]

Why yes, I have posted all this before. How can you tell?

be nice to get some updated information

 

[Arlette]

What is your remember back when story?

Do you remember when you were in college and hated having those 8am classes, and it was hard to get out of bed to get to them? Now you have to be at work by 7am?

It's God's plan for you.

 

[crossbody]

How about this one...

I remember back when the internet first came out and your employer would clock your usage, and monitor sites you went on.

Within no time at... cell phones with the internet on them hit the scene and that cancelled out the employer hanging a noose over your neck for clicking on the wrong pop-ups.