<p>Are you kidding?
We still drive our 1964 Ford 150.
;)</p>
<p>75% of people dont have a BA.
I think high school graduates were a larger % of the population 50 years ago.</p>
<p>*Parents didn’t drive their kids to “activities.” If you couldn’t do it at school or get there on foot or on your bike, you didn’t do it. *</p>
<p>I walked home from my sophomore yr job, I got off work at 10 pm and lived three miles away. I didnt need my kids to do that, for money for school supplies/clothes.
I agree that tutors and test prep were rare. So were any sort of accomodations or therapy for people with disabilities or differences.
Kids were passed along because noone wanted to flunk them & they realized to repeat something isnt often more successful the second time.</p>
<p>But we still needed people who worked hard even if they werent skilled in the classroom in manufacturing american products.</p>
<p>" Whenever I’d call, dad would say, “Your mom isn’t home, do you need money?” Our “conversations” very little time."</p>
<p>You know what they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. Those of us who have a parent who repeats the same stories (increasingly embellished), over and over for decades…just might consider you lucky!</p>
My mother would always answer a long distance or collect call, not with “Hello?” but with “What’s wrong?” No one called long distance without a serious reason. (Of course, there’s also the old joke about the Jewish telegram: “Start worrying. Details to follow.”)</p>
<p>We had codes for collect calls, so the receiving person could refuse the call and then call back directly, or the code could be the message, e.g. a collect call for “Fred” might mean “I arrived safely” and no call would be needed at all.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The polio vaccine certainly was new. But the real revolution occurred during my parents generation with antibiotics - and aspirin before that. It started before my grandparents with anesthesia for surgery but effective treatments really depended on the antibiotic revolution. We still lionize Fleming, but if you read the history he discovered it by accident, didn’t do much with it - and the British, given their existing cultural abhorrence of commerce among the educated, did nothing to industrialize it until the war. Remember, scientists had to bring penicillin in vials in their pockets to the US where it was turned into a product. </p></li>
<li><p>The more I think about it, the biggest change has in many ways been A/C. It isolates people. It pulls them indoors when warm weather used to drive them outside. When I was a kid, the subdivision was kids running around through the backyards and most families with kids had screen patio doors which seemed mostly to be left open. I remember when the Wilics got A/C. Within a decade, all you could hear in the evening was the hum of compressors. All the doors were closed at night. </p></li>
<li><p>I also think the other main difference was the rise of a true youth culture. The 20’s saw a massive shift in morals but that affected people of many ages. The 60’s saw an actual youth culture that was not merely a wilder version of adult life. It was the War. And the draft. And the idea that we were fighting thousands of miles away not because of the enemy at our door but because of the people who backed the enemy we were actually fighting. We would wonder why we were sending our kids to die when the Russians were just sending the weapons, why we were fighting for S. Vietnam in an era when pizza and spaghetti were considered “ethnic”.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Do we really need airconditioning in private homes?
My D traveled in both India and Africa and I daresay many places didnt have fans 24/7 let alone air.
We don’t use air conditioning in Seattle,( in private homes) we don’t really need it however. Plant trees instead.
:)</p>
<p>Well, yes, except that leaving your windows open at night might not actually be safe in some places. So, air conditioning is necessary to some people.</p>
<p>Some other things that have changed massively: birth control. Family planning is an option. Even in the 60s, a woman could be asked if her husband knew about her birth control. A doctor could deny a prescription for the pill on “moral” grounds.</p>
<p>Women work outside the home and have viable careers that are as important as their spouses. Men do much more housework now. The laws governing child abuse are much stricter, and parent’s do not hit their children, as a general rule.</p>
<p>Fathers are much more involved now, and are just as likely to be a part of the extra curricular life of both their daughters and their sons, and nobody would find it odd if a man left work about an emergency situation with the kids. </p>