<p>Thinking about how different the world is now from when I was a kid (smack dab in the middle of the boomer cohort).</p>
<ul>
<li>No plastic bags. Sandwiches on white bread wrapped in waxed paper in a brown paper bag for lunch.</li>
<li>No panty hose; stockings with garter belts and clips at the thighs.</li>
<li>No tampons. Remember the clip in pad thingees? No wonder women stayed home =/'</li>
<li>Women did not work after marriage / children. It was simply expected that once you had a family you forfeited your job. If hubby was a ne’er do well that was your tough luck.</li>
<li>No remote controls (if you even had TV).</li>
<li>Cheap gasoline.</li>
<li>An expensive house cost $25k.</li>
<li>Women were not allowed to have bank accounts.</li>
<li>No credit cards. When credit cards were invented women were not allowed to have 'em.</li>
<li>No atm’s. You had to do bank transactions during bank hours (usually 10-3 PM).</li>
<li>Hair spray, girdles, compacts (powder my nose).</li>
<li>No aerosol cans.</li>
<li>Cloth diapers.</li>
<li>Playpens.</li>
<li>No baby back packs; big strollers.</li>
<li>Pregnancy was considered taboo in public.</li>
<li>Labor and delivery under sedation, no hubbies allowed.</li>
<li>Cigarrette smoke hanging in sheets and clouds everywhere (Madmen misses this completely.)</li>
<li>Garbage tossed out the car window willy nilly - no pollution control at all.</li>
<li>Rivers and streams running in chemicals and colors from uncontrolled factory discharges every where industry was present.</li>
<li>Duck and cover.</li>
<li>Walking to school.</li>
<li>Wash your hair once a week.</li>
<li>Ironing.</li>
<li>Crisco was a fancy new invention to replace lard.</li>
<li>Air travel was a rare treat for the rich.</li>
<li>Library research; card catalogues. Microfiche was new and way cool.</li>
<li>Japanese portable hand held radios were new and cool.</li>
<li>45 records.</li>
<li>Bell bottoms were the new thing. Jeans were rebellious!!</li>
</ul>
<p>My mom always talks about sharing her “best dress” with sister. Both girls couldn’t have date night on the same night becuase neither wanted to wear their school dress for special night. </p>
<p>(Though both she and my grandmother worked. Too many mouths to feed not to. Grandmother left 9 children with older girls to work then own mother was “berren” so got a career until she could adopt)</p>
<p>I remember my mother and I dressing up, including white gloves, to go shopping downtown. And like MizzBee, my mother worked throughout my childhood.</p>
<p>-Manual typewriters. Getting an electric typewriter was a novelty!
-Carbon paper
-washing machines with the wringer thing that you had to crank? lol</p>
<p>“Duck and cover” must mean those air raid drills? Kruschev and his scary shoe-banging . . . .
Bee hive hairdos
“Colored” people were “just as good as us”
We also wore those white gloves to church
I remember the first color TV on the block
Spinach came from a can</p>
<p>My mom went back to college for her master’s in special ed when the youngest kid started kindergarten & worked until said kid finished his grad degree. She was SO HAPPY to quit that job of teaching special ed, as it was very physically demanding to have to provide physical care for such heavy, needy kids.</p>
<p>Most kids could generally walk to all sports practices. Only the boys were in team league sports. We all went to church together as a family & saw everyone at weekly mass. You could walk home from school and save the $.10 bus fare!</p>
<p>Catholic mass used to be in Latin, with the priest having his back to the congregation most of the time.</p>
<p>In fact, a lot of women worked. I was the first generation of women in my family who could afford to be an at-home parent. My own mother was a nurse and her mother cleaned houses before switching to secretarial work in her 30s. My husband’s grandmothers worked in factories before and after their children were born.</p>
<p>Where I was raised, no diapers. Mom swears that 90%+ of all kids were toilet trained by their first birthday, something that I’ve heard pediatricians here is not possible because kids that young physically don’t have that muscle control ability. (Perhaps based on studies sponsored by obliging companies). Also, toilet paper? what is that?</p>
<p>Shortwave radios (vacuum tube based) and BBC world service ruled, and I still remember the inch square “magic eye” on the front that was supposed to assist in tuning. Aunt’s wedding captured on 16mm film (the pros measured the duration in feet rather than minutes) that cracked and broke in its reel, while aunt and uncle are still going strong. Everyone - kids and adults went places by bike.</p>
<p>First real opinion of America - NASA, and reading about the Manhattan project, Life magazine.</p>
<p>Education was interesting too - pencils-only till about 6th grade (when parents wanted us to double-check that we had our rubbers, we were thinking of something very different), quill pens and ink wells on desks through MS, and fountain pens and ink fillers from HS through college. Ball-point pens being banned, at least in HS because apparently it destroyed students’ handwriting. Coursework was obviously quaint too - doing square roots long hand in HS, log tables, slide rules, and the lovely “steam tables” in engineering school…</p>
<p>Corporal punishment was very popular in Catholic Schools.
You might have party lines on your phone and you could hear neighbors talk and have to wait until their phone call was finished.
Brylcream was the number one item boys used for their hair.
Beatle Boots and Beatle Haircuts.
If you had no money and car then hitchhiking was the best way to get to the next town or state.
The only “travel teams” in sports was the Little League World Series team in your town.
Boys had to tryout to make the Little League team. There was no minimum play rules so you could sit on the bench the entire year!
Kids made their own science fair projects.
Trains usually arrived every ten minutes during rush hour.
You couldn’t wear blue jeans to school.
Boys rode bicycles everywhere and played sports until dark.
Our house with 1 1/2 acres cost $10,800.</p>
<p>Everyone squeezed their own OJ. All the neighbors watched anyone’s kids, bandaged booboos, fed whatever kids were around. The smell and feel of sheets that had dried outside. (I do this now and my kids complain!) I remember my mom mixing up ironing starch from a bottle and placing clothes in a large bowl in the frig to absorb it. Yeah, I remember that old cream deodorant- still think of how it felt on your fingers, after. Yuck. </p>
<p>Drive-in movies were everywhere. There were always tales of some couple caught in the backseat. Kids had to have a date to go to the prom. No easy access to birth control; if you got pregnant, you had to drop out of hs.</p>
<p>Transistor radios. Ha, and late night radio talk hosts who were not right-wing or conspiracy theorists. </p>
There were credit cards back then. I got a Mastercharge card when I was 16 (my mother worked in a bank). It had a $50 limit. She told me to always pay it off every month so as not to have to pay interest. To this day I’ve always done that - good advice.</p>
<p>
Yuck - not me - I washed mine every day. We even had hot and cold running water (exactly the same as today). What you say is true for some of my grandparents’ generation if they lived on a farm but most people had running hot/cold water and didn’t have to ration washing.</p>
<p>For the items that have really changed society - </p>
<ul>
<li>No internet</li>
<li>No cell phones</li>
<li>No cordless phones</li>
<li>No email</li>
<li>No texting</li>
<li>No IM</li>
<li>No online forums like CC</li>
<li>No instant access to almost all knowledge</li>
<li>No ADHD (diagnosed) kids</li>
<li>Only 3 or 4 TV channels (usually with nothing good on)</li>
<li>No movies on demand or on other media like DVD/tape</li>
<li>No video games (Pong, the first video game, just appeared as I was in college)</li>
<li>No portable high quality music (ipod, small tape players)</li>
<li>No spell checking - people actually had to know how to spell if they didn’t want to look like a dufus (they still do but many people just don’t know it)</li>
<li>Less safe cars
– no airbags
– no crumple zones
– no seat belts or only lap belts
– no steel belted radial tires (just coming into service around the time I was in college I think)
– less reliable mechanically
– no electronic stability control
– no right side mirror on most cars
– no 4 wheel disk brakes
– no side impact beams
– etc. (but I still drive a 1960s vehicle much of the time)</li>
</ul>
<p>What WAS there that is less so now - </p>
<ul>
<li>Newspapers on paper (quickly becoming extinct as well they should be IMO)</li>
<li>Weekly news magazines (ditto)</li>
<li>Drive-in movie theaters (there are still some around but not many)</li>
<li>Actual physical friends (as opposed to virtual online so-called friends)</li>
<li>Kids who played outside all day</li>
<li>Freedom for kids to walk/bike all over the neighborhood </li>
<li>Kids who had to imagine and entertain themselves rather than having their lives filled with structured activities</li>
<li>People, especially kids, who ‘watched their language’, especially around women. Now the women are worse than the guys were back than (not all - some).</li>
</ul>
<p>We still have that here. They don’t squeegee or check your oil very often, but now and then they will. But they pump the gas, run your card or give you change if you pay cash. NJ and Oregon don’t allow customers to pump their own gas.</p>
<p>-Newspaper Help Wanted classifieds had separate sections for Men’s jobs and Women’s jobs.</p>
<p>-No such thing as maternity leave. If a woman got pregnant she had to quit her job. Women would hide it as long as they could. </p>
<p>-Doctors were men and nurses were women. Principals were men and teachers were women. Pilots were men and stewardesses were women. Bosses were men and secretaries were women. </p>
<p>-Ivy League schools admitted only men.</p>
<p>-Organizations had “womens’ auxilliaries.” Women couldn’t be a member of the “real” organization.</p>
<p>-Doctors would not dispense birth control, even to married women with children. Doctors refused to tie a woman’s tubes, no matter how many children she had. (Wealthy women had private doctors who sometimes made concessions that blue collar woman never got.)</p>
<p>-Lots of people thought it was “a waste” to send a woman to college because she was just going to get married. (Wealthy families sent their daughters to college to “find a husband.”)</p>
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