Old-Timey Stuff

I remember getting out of a car because they guy I was dating was attempting something close to hijinks. Does that work?

Lol. Okay, then, GB Good for you for getting out. Did you slap him?

I was always better with screaming vile things with great fury. He came back to pick me up and apologized.

When gas hit 38 cents I said they're never going to stop raising the price now.

Tube radios, then tube TVs.

On grocery shopping day the parents would slip a dollar into a machine. Out would come a carton of cigarettes with the change taped to the package.

I remember before cable tv, when we only had three or four channels.

I also remember that around 1:00 in the morning all those channels signed off the air.

I think the channels might say "This concludes our broadcast" and a couple of phrases. Then the National anthem would be played. Then there would be those rainbow color lines appearing on the tv screen. Sometimes it might have a big round circle appearing on the tv screen. Then the channel would become a blank snowy screen with the sound of static.

You had to turn the Tv off, because the broadcasting had concluded for that day.
If you left the tv on, all you would get is a blank snowy screen with that static sound.

I also remember when we had UHF and VHF channels and manual dials to switch channels.

I also remember the first time we had cable tv. The cable box that was sitting on top of the tv had a manual dial to switch the cable channels.

I also remember the first time I saw a remote control for a television.

The tv remote was not wireless.

The remote had a long chord connected to the television.

Only 3 or 4?

We had two.

Wow. You only had 2 channels.

I have to make a correction from my first post.

Before cable tv, I remember having only 5 channels.

We had NBC, CBS, and ABC on (VHF/Very High Frequency).

We also had PBS and another local channel on (UHF/Ultra High Frequency).

Back then, there was no cable tv, no internet, no smart phones, no cell phones, no streaming.

Back then if you were out and about somewhere and needed to make a phone call, we had to find a public pay phone.

I remember public pay phones being widely available everywhere.

Since the invention of the cell phone and then Smart phone, public pay phones have virtually disappeared from existence.

Do you remember using rotary phones?

And, by the jeezus, that was a whopping Imperial gallon!

I remember rotary phones. We had two channels BBC and ITV. When the BBC launched a second channel our television could not pick it up so we didn't get three channels until about 1973 when we got a colour telly.

Channel 4 was launched in 1982 Sony then we had four channels.

Channel 5 came in the mid 90s was only available in certain areas and had already been eclipsed by the launch of satellite/cable.

We didn't have a phone until we moved house in 1977.

I think the first time I ever heard of cable tv was probably somewhere around 1976 or 1977. I'm not really sure of what year, because it was so long ago.

A family friend in our neighborhood had just got a new thing called cable tv and invited us over to see this new thing called cable tv.

I remember they were explaining to us what cable tv was.

We all sat around their cable tv and watched Burt Reynold's Smokey and the Bandit.

Watching a movie without commercials and uncensored in someone's house.
That was almost like going to the movie. That was huge thing to us.

As far as I can remember we always had a phone at home.

Our earliest phones were rotary phones with cords connecting the phone to the phone jack.

Back then I never seen or heard of a cordless phone.

I was born in the 1960s and I spent most of my youth in the 1970s.

Sometime during the early or maybe middle 1970s, I seem to remember being able to get an ice cream cone for 10 cents.

I was born in the sixties too.

When I was a kid America was always held up as the place to aspire too, it had colour TV with more TV channels, Disneyland and a range of things we couldn't get over here.

We only came off rationing in the 50s, and by the 60s/70s there was a huge gap between us and the other side of the Atlantic, not so much now globalisation has flattened a lot of things out.

I remember wanting to try a twinkie so much after seeing them advertised by Spiderman and the Hulk in their own comic strips no less.

They were unavailable over here and it wasn't until 87 that I tried one on holiday in Texas. I thought it was horrible.

Now there are specialist shops and aisles in supermarkets dedicated to foreign food, mostly Indian, Polish, American, and twinkies are sold there.

also born in the 60's.

i probably had a twinkie in my lunch box every day of first grade.



dinner was often a TV Dinner that was covered in foil.

beverages of choice were Tang or Hawaiian Punch.

i fondly remember getting the first movie channels on cable -- HBO in '75 and then Showtime in '79.

full, uninterrupted, unedited movies on TV!

Our beverage was squash. An orange or lemon cordial diluted with water.

Our equivalent of kool aid. Fizzy pop was a treat at the weekends, usually RWhites or Corona lemonade or cherryade.

They sell a drink called squash in Denmark but it's fizzy.

What kind of rationing occurred where you are when you were a kid?

When I was a kid, hostess twinkies were one of my favorite dessert treats.

I no longer like twinkies.

I was a huge fan of comic books growing up

I was primarily a huge fan of Marvel comic books during the 1970s.

I wasn't really much of a fan of DC comics.

Back in the 1970s I use to love Hawaiian punch.

I didn't really care too much for Tang.

None, it stopped in the 50s, but that had its own problems, sugar was in everything, after being scarce it was everywhere.

There was not the range of products there is today. I was taken back the first time I saw popping corn, that would have been the mid 70s. Before then I though popcorn was something magical done in factories. I never realised you could make your own.

We got it at a Scout fair, and in order to get it elsewhere we had to go to a specialist delicatessen.

Food was seasonal, we could only get strawberries between May and August, now they're available all year round.

Certain foods weren't eaten at all, Mexican good was unheard of. The first pizza restaurant I remember wasn't until the end of the 70s early 80s.

Pizza was something Scooby Doo and Shaggy ate, it wasn't something we could get hold of.

The first "pizza" I had was in a kit aged 15. It wasn't very nice and I was very ill for a week afterwards, nothing to do with the pizza, just bad coincidence but it put me off real pizza for a very long time.