Small town thing? Phone exchange where only had to dial last 4 numbers for in town calls. Loved Captain Kangeroo!
@TomSrOfBoston Textbooks cost $20 or $25 too. I couldn’t believe paying over $100 for my books. Protests on the Public Garden.
Tom Snyder.
Anybody else have the super looonnggg phone cord on the phone in the house (the only one) so you’d stretch it as far as it went into the next room when the boy you had a crush on called you so your whole family wouldn’t eavesdrop?
(and your mom would tell you that girls didn’t call boys, you’d have to wait for them to call you)
Times have changed.
^ I was able to stretch that phone cord down the basement steps for privacy.
And the phone in our house was in the kitchen so there was always people around!
How about party lines on the phone? We had a four party line in NH when I first moved there. Younhad to listen for YOUR ring (ours was two long…someone else had two short…someone else had a long/short, and the last had short/long.
Manual typewriters, rabbit ear antennae . In terms of toys, Marvel the Mustang, Inchworm , a “footsie” ( the ring that you put around your ankle and jumped over the rope with a bell on it) my Dawn doll who had hair that grew or shortened with the knob on the back.
Yes, the footsie!
Do kids still play chinese jump rope? or chinese checkers? And is it un-PC to even call it that these days?
And wishniks or tro-ll dolls? (it wouldn’t let me spell the t word 
)
Gumby and Pokey?
Unfortunately not @doschicos . I don’t see many kids in my area just playing outside. Many kids are involved in organized sports , and I don’t often see them just playing with their neighbors. I can remember the kids in my neighborhood growing up playing Tag, Mother May I, Hide and Seek until the streetlights came on.
My kids had a footsie or whatever they are called as recently as 7 years ago. The elementary school had them for recess and PE, too.
Reminds me of the Tim McGraw song “Do you Remember”. “A coke was just a coke” “Down with that meant you had the flu”
Speaking of coke, I remember we kids would get coke syrup if our stomachs were upset on car rides. It came in little bottles from the pharmacy. Wow, that seems old timey.
And I remember my mom and all her tennis ladies drinking Tab, out of cans with the pull tabs.
And Fresca @doschicos
My husband still loves Fresca.
Wasn’t Tab the first diet cola?
My freshman year in college, I virtually lived on Tab and Fresca.
Also my sophomore, junior and senior years too.
Playground equipment such as merry go rounds, teeter totters and monkey bars oh my!
The milkman delivered chocolate milk, coffee flavored milk, buttermilk, cream, and orange juice.
In addition to the milkman, there was a delivery truck for fresh bread and rolls in our neighborhood. It was heaven to step inside. And in late summer/early fall, there was a produce truck with open sides that cruised the neighborhood. You could flag him down and buy fresh corn, squash, and tomatoes.
All the drugstores had soda fountains, with sundaes and better milkshakes than Friendly’s ever dreamed of.
I had a cardboard Barbie Dream House that folded up in a complicated way.
I tend to agree with the sentiment we have gone forward in many ways and backwards in others. I get upset when people say “back then, we had jungle gyms made of metal, cars often didn’t have seatbelts (and our parents wouldn’t make them), people smoked everywhere, the car, in the house, and no one got sick” and I really want to get them a good swift kick in the keister for saying things like that, for one thing, back then (with driving miles a significant percent less than today), the number of people killed on the roads each year was around 50+, today it is in the low 30’s with the death rate per 100,000 miles roughly half of what it once was. As far as people not getting sick from being around all that smoke, tell that to people who worked where people often smoked and got lung cancer and heart disease and asthma attacks and such…likewise, I hear people cursing Ralph Nader and the car safety and pollution regs, when in the end it has turned out cars that are safer, and last many times longer, then their "golden age’ cars of the 50’s and 60’s.
On the other hand, we have regressed. Back when I as growing up, kids actually had the time to be kids, and we had the freedom to do things that today parents would blanche at. The mania over schooling, that has turned into hours of homework and obsessions with getting into the right school starting from grade school, has taken away so much of the kid’s free time we had. No, kids don’t really play together much outside, everything is organized, whether it is sports, play dates, ‘targeted learning’ activities and the like, they have taken a lot of the fun out of kids lives, and a lot of the freedom as well. It is one thing to be concerned about things like kidnapping and kids being molested, it is another to have turned it into a bogeyman that lives around every corner. It is funny, many of the same people who think that there is a monster out to get their kids around every corner, whose kids are on a tight leash, often don’t think twice about sending kids to sleep away camp, or sending young kids into a public bathroom alone or other activities where there is an elevated chance of the kid being molested. People have lost trust, and I understand that, I know a lot of folks who grew up Catholic who would no more think of letting their kids do activities with a priest then to let them hitchhike cross country by themselves…there has been a loss of trust, plus these days thanks to the internet ad news cycle things like one poster, talking about a girl who disappeared hitchiking, that would have been front page on the local paper and maybe just maybe make page 56 of a big paper in the area, is on CNN and the like and all over the web.
I am not one of those saying “it was much better back then”,I think a lot of people (including myself) look at the past through the eyes of children and don’t see the bad things. Those who grew up in the 50’s tend to be like that, leaving out just how much darkness was in the 50’s (among other things, the threat of nuclear destruction and the hysteria of the “Red Menace”), the conformity, what it was like if you weren’t white, male and straight (for example, that women even in the 1950’s were limited to very few fields, women engineers back then could only find jobs with few companies, Hughes aircraft was one of them). I think in some ways we have improved in a lot of things, but in others we have retreated into unreasonable fear (“50k kids a year go missing”…true, but a large percentage of those are taken by a parent in a custody squabble. An FBI agent back when the issue of missing kids became publicly visible through campaigns like milk cartons, said that 57,000 US personnel died in Vietnam, and almost everyone knows someone or knew of someone who died there…how many of us know of a child (personally_) who went missing?), and with the economic anxiety out there have turned our kids lives in many ways into being a little adult, rather than being kids.