Chinese checkers
Encyclopedias.
@Yomama12, you still can’t buy liquor in Minnesota on Sunday. Many times I needed wine for cooking and drove across the border to Wisconsin.
Chinese checkers on one side and regular checkers on the other - metal tin.
California in the 1980s:
- Most of the state population was white (not Hispanic or Latino).
- A slight majority of the undergraduates at the state flagship were white (but it seemed that few white students studied engineering even back then).
- Some now-common kinds of ethnic restaurants like Indian and Vietnamese were rare and exotic back then.
- Many cars had worse fuel economy due to California emissions requirements (but the air quality was still awful compared to today).
- California's electoral votes went to Republican candidates (Reagan, Reagan, Bush 41) in all three presidential elections that decade.
- Jerry Brown was governor in the early part of that decade.
Waiting until 11 pm to make a long distance phone call, because that was when the rates went down.
My freshman year of college, my BF and I would talk in the phone for 30 minutes each week, at 11 pm Friday. We took turns doing the calling (and hence paying for it). The rest of the time we only had snail mail!!
Remember… the AT&T breakup into several regional local phone companies, with the remaining AT&T competing with other companies like MCI and Sprint for long distance service? You can set a default long distance company, but could override it on a per-call basis by dialing a 10xxx code for the desired long distance company.
Of course, the regional local phone companies eventually acquired each other, leaving just three of them, one of which acquired the remaining AT&T company and renamed itself to AT&T.
As a SF Giants fan, I remember the phone company changes as the new park was first named Pacific Bell Park, then SBC Park and now is AT&T Park.
Fans joked that it should just have kept the SBC name - Some Big Corporation.
Re: stores being closed on Sundays. I was chuckling to myself remembering how my dad would get knee deep in some house project on Saturday. There would be several trips to the hardware store. Then, if the project wasn’t going well, anxiety would set in. He’d have until 5-ish on Saturday to get to the hardware store one last time before they closed, and of course, if that didn’t do the trick, doomed until Monday.
I’m right in OP’s demographic:
Highly anticipated visits from the Fuller Brush man–he always left intriguing samples, even if my mom didn’t buy anything.
Continuous run movies with 50 cent admission. We’d get there whenever our folks managed to drop us off and stay until we’d seen the whole film–hence the phrase, “This is where we came in.” I can’t imagine seeing a movie that way now, but we thought it was fine. And kids had to watch from the balcony.
5 cent Cokes at the Woolworth lunch counter after school. Lime or raspberry rickeys if you really wanted to splurge.
Drawing a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk with a rock if no one had chalk.
Walking several blocks to the neighborhood variety store to get my parents’ cigarettes. Yup, they sold them to kids of any age then. If memory serves, they were 28 cents a pack.
Listening to my nifty red plastic transistor radio at night when I was supposed to be asleep, and loving how AM stations in other states would come in so clearly after sunset–it all seemed quite exotic.
When the best auto route from Massachusetts to NYC required a good chunk of driving on the Boston Post Road.
Sledding down our sloped street–there was no sanding and salting then, so even after plowing, there was a layer of snow that got hard and slippery after enough cars had gone by.
My dad putting chains on the tires after a snowfall–and removing them after the snow melted. It was a royal pain.
Chains made from folded gun wrappers. Every girl did this, and there was a lot of prestige attached to having a really long one.
@MommaJ - Oh yeah, the folded gum wrapper chains. They were so cool. And making things with “gimp.”
Calling cards where you had to enter something like 20 digit code to make a cheap long distance call.
Getting glassware with fill-ups at the gas station
Paper dolls (my mom would buy them for me when I was home sick)
Speaking of sick, the Vics vaporub in the vaporizer machine that was glass
Pine Bros. chewy cough drops in Honey flavor.
Doctors who made house calls. Penicillin shots.
Sucrets lozenges in the little tin box.
Does anyone remember pop-it beads necklaces? I could not find them at a craft store recently. Also no one at work of any age has heard of them. Am I imagining? They were like plastic “pearls” that you would snap together. Anyone?
Yes, I remember them and they made kind of a funny noise when you pulled them apart!
Thank you!! Yes, they popped!
@doschicos Do you remember Betsy McCall, the paper doll from the pages of McCall magazine.