Back in the old days

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Right? I remember being in a bar and everyone was fascinated with it!
 
I’m not that age yet but I can remember having party lines on phones, having collect calls, when there were no zip codes, when there were no area codes because you had to dial an operator to call long distance, having a kodak instamatic camera and more.
 
My best friend had Pong, and I remember being incredibly bored with it after only a few games and wishing we could do something else, like talk.

I still dislike any video games and never, ever play them. Ever. I don’t understand the fascination.

When our daughters were growing up, we didn’t have any video games in the house except Solitaire (which I believe is still on most computers), and something called Tetras–I believe it involved stacking blocks and fitting them together. The girls would play Tetras while they were on the phone with their friends (regular family phone, not a cell phone–those didn’t exist until they were in high school, and they were just flip phones, like the one I currently use!).

My husband was into Centipede–he loved that game, and had a cool T-shirt that had a Centipede design. I remember those video game arcades in malls!
 
My husband and I were just talking about when there were all of the 10-10 numbers to use to get long distance rates! Remember those? Or having to call people after 9pm to get cheaper rates from the phone company?
 
I remember all of that! I also remember when we could make a local call by only dialing the last 5 numbers…the first two weren’t needed.

Cashiers always wanted your phone number on your checks and when I’d say 6-7678 they’d look at me funny…until I’d add, oh, you want 256-7678? Older clerks just knew to add the first two numbers! I never understood the need for my phone number anyway. This was before marketing calls…if I was forging a check, it’s not like I’d give them my real number anyway?

Remember when store credit cards first came out? The were about half the size of a current credit card and the name and numbers were raised so the could run it through the doohickey that carbon copied your information on paper!

I remember Beta Max tapes. Better quality but not as cheap…VCR tapes won that war! Laser disks? Another tech that died a quick death. How many of you had pagers before cell phones hit the market? Anyone have a cell phone that you had to carry the battery pack with it? I didn’t have one of those either…way too expensive. Remember when calling the next town over was long distance and charged accordingly? How about when microwaves first hit the market! And we could make popcorn in it…poor Jiffy Pop, I barely remember watching you blow your top! 😂
 
When I was very young, Mum used to use a old wringer machine to do the washing. For some reason the rollers on the machine totally used to terrify me.

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My mother used a wringer washer until she died. Didn’t want to ‘waste water’. My dad sold it to a family that took it to the lake and they were happy with that find! lol It often popped off the buttons on my sweaters because they all had to line up flat and that didn’t always happen.
 
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My mother had one of those too. As a young child I thought it was fun to put the clothes through the wringer. Of course, you had to watch your fingers.
 
I think the thing I remember the most is how much freedom we had that kids don’t have today. We played in the street, walked without parents to a public park blocks away. I remember going with my friend on a bus to downtown Detroit without parents. We were both only 10 years old.
 
My mother had a wringer washer out in our backyard. I grew up in El Paso, TX (born in '67) and I remember our backyard being huge, with peach trees, an apricot tree, a nectarine tree, an apple tree, and a grape vine. We lived a block away from a shopping center and on Sundays, when everything was closed, all the neighborhood kids would ride their bikes and skateboards in the parking lot (safer than the street, we didn’t have to worry about cars). The parents of teens who were taking drivers ed would take their kids to the shopping center after they were closed or early in the morning before they opened to let their kids practice driving and parking when the lot was empty.

We had triple digit temperatures in the summer, but I remember walking everywhere we went, even to the library and movie theatre which were a couple of miles from our house. We’d walk to Kmart just to get an ice cream cone (does anyone remember when Kmart had lunch counters and ice cream?), then walk back home, stopping for a Coke at Whataburger to cool us off. We had fun with the simplest things and we were in much better physical shape, too!
 
TheHolyTrinity said:
When I was very young, Mum used to use a old wringer machine to do the washing. For some reason the rollers on the machine totally used to terrify me.

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And for good reason! I once got my arm caught in that wringer! Good thing there was a quick release bar.
 
It’s great to have an electric fridge. You no longer had to deal with the ice man and his huge blocks of ice. But some people still call a refrigerator an icebox.
 
I remember Dark Shadows. The old matron was played by Joan Bennett, I believe. There was the governess who grew up in an orphanage and was hired to tutor David. She became obsessed with a music box that played eerie music. There was Cassandra, purported to be David’s mother but was really a witch who was 200 years old. Thayer David played the old crusty caretaker. There were all kinds of twists and turns, but it was a different kind of soap opera from the typical ones like General Hospital, Days of our Lives, As The World Turns, etc. We got tired of seeing those same olds, and really liked the refreshing new approach that Dark Shadows offered. Yep. I remember it well. Looked forward to each new episode. BTW, the old mansion was called “Collinwood”.
 
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My mother used an old wringer washer to do our laundry, and then hung it all out on clotheslines and racks, out in the sun. Our Boxer pulled all of the clothes off the line one day, and our dad got after him. When we moved into a more modern house, she finally got an electric clothes dryer, but still used a wringer washer. I don’t think she ever had an automatic washer while we were kids. Money was very tight, and we had to make due with what we had. The older wringer washer finally went kaput, but at the time Sears was still selling a few, so that’s where she got the new one. It looked just like the old one. Seeing that photo brings back a lot of memories.
 
I remember knowing all my neighbors , leaving the door unlocked at night there was nothing to worry about - you could leave stuff on the front lawn without it being stolen - I think my dad made 3000 a year so there was some struggle. Seem like a different time to me now compared to today on how people act.
 
Being 38, I’m one of those folks who had a childhood without the tech we’ve got now, but was one of the early mainstream adopters as it became commonplace.

I miss Saturday morning cartoons, playing outside in the grass, walking around places with friends, using walkie-talkies, collecting POGs.

Late 80’s / early 90’s was a really good time to be a kid.
 
I remember when not everyone had a TV, being little and being amazed when the Iceman would come around to fill the Ice Box (early Refrigerator that used Ice not electricity to keep it cold) and us kids would wait for him, and he would swing that Ice hook with precision where he could hunk off 5 equally pieces of Ice off a block and give it to us kids. I remember the fruit and Veggi wagon coming around, where the bananas were perfectly ripe, and the tomatoes were a beautiful shad of deep red. And how he would give us the loose grapes. I remember party lines, where 3-4 people shared a telephone line, and kids could be kids and not have a worry in the world. And best of all, if your screwed up, you prayed that the neighbor would punish you and not tell your parent because you will be punished twice as much. I miss the good ole days.
 
Back in my old days, my father from Brooklyn would tell us about the Ice man, haha! And he would tell us about playing stoop ball with his friends and how many manhole covers down the road you had to hit the ball for it to be a home run!
 
I was in catechism class. The children wanted to know how old the devil was. The answer was that he is very old. One child raised his hand and asked, “Does that mean he is 17?”
 
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