Someone asked the other day,,,,,,,,,,,,,

[Sinkrate]

I remember when it was cool to suck one of these ‘til it turns white.....


And smoke these…..



So stick this in your pipe and….eat it!


Cool to be un-cool

sink

[SpaceHippy1975]

Errrmmm........... Guys.......................

Been reading all these posts & working out how old you all are.........................

I'm truly, really, really amazed that you guys are able to work a computer at all at your age!!!

Keith.

(43-ish, can remember some of the things mentioned & now running for the hills!!)

[FlexibleFlier]

Oleomargarine with a red dot you had to hand massage into the white mass to make it look like butter.

[B0ikat]

Errrmmm........... Guys.......................

Been reading all these posts & working out how old you all are.........................

I'm truly, really, really amazed that you guys are able to work a computer at all at your age!!!

Keith.

(43-ish, can remember some of the things mentioned & now running for the hills!!)

Well, it was our generation who used arcane incantations and wizardry that invented these demonic computer contraptions to begin with!

Smartphones, however, were shipped in directly from hell!

[yancovitch]

[Anthindelahunt]

Plus

Anthin.

[H]

'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?'
'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up I informed him, 'All the food was slow.'
'C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?'
'It was a place called 'at home,' I explained!

For the occasional breakfast, this depended upon the season... and, during the summer, we did have fast food -- which we neither cooked nor, sometimes, ate indoors. The wild strawberries were small but very sweet and plentiful in June (a huge patch near our MacIntosh tree); by July, the raspberries, both red and black, ripened... although we often had these berries at the kitchen table with cereal or pancakes (topped with the maple syrup boiled from the sap of our maple trees). In August, the plums ripened, as did the blackberries, and most of the apples had ripened before September's end; ready in October were butternuts and grapes (Concord and a very sweet, marble-sized hybrid blue; there were also vines of wild grapes in two opposite extremities of our farm but they were very sour). Sometimes we also had blueberries from our cousins' farm.
However, speaking of fast food, my cousin and his dad hunted every year and, if they weren't caught by surprise, those deer and pheasants can really move.

'Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, & if I didn't like what she put on my plate, I was allowed to sit there until I did like it. By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.

It was the kitchen table and my parents weren't quite as harsh. If you didn't want to eat it, don't put it on your plate. However, if you did put it on your plate...! Hey? There are some who don't have to excuse themselves from the table? Oh, yeah, I didn't do it... when no one else was left at the table.

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis, set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card.

At one time, mine actually owned a summer camp hut on 30 acres (allotted to my dad in the divorce; spent my 16th summer there), a cottage overlooking the bay (spent my infancy and a bit more there) and our farm (allotted to my mom in the divorce but she remarried; my stepdad had her take out another mortgage, divorced her, and I wound up paying off the mortgage). Levis were not womanly so mom never wore them. I don't know if they ever set foot on a golf course but, if so, they weren't carrying golf clubs. To my knowledge, they never left the country in my lifetime but my dad told me he blinked and almost missed the village my mom was born in on Prince Edward Island; an Army medic, he was also in Africa, Italy, England and Scotland during WWII. I don't believe my dad ever had a credit card but my mom did earlier in later years (she just died last September).

My parents never drove me to school. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow).

My dad assembled my 1st bike, a wide-tired single speed, from salvaged parts but it had no brakes; he then installed a new coaster brake but didn't secure the brake arm. Because our farm was on a hill, its single speed wasn't necessarily slow and trying to stop on a fairly good downgrade... well... I was thrown over the handle bars and hit by the bike going over me; I came to with my shirt ripped and a badly scratched, bleeding chest (the drive up to our farm was a gravel road). My last bike was a 3-speed Huffy which I only occasioned to pedal the three miles to school if not taking the school bus. There was a small store not a mile before my school where I'd stop and get some licorice sticks; yes, they were colored black, not red... and licorice is the flavor... not strawberry, not cherry -- if its red it's not licorice! That's as bad as the other faux pas, 'artificial sweetener'; if it's taking the place of sugar, I suppose it can be called artificial sugar but, if it sweetens it's not artificial, it's a sweetener.

We didn't have a television in our house until I was 10. It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at 11, after playing the national anthem...

Yep, a color TV -- black and white and shades of gray. I believe I was 8. In the early days each channel had its own antenna (dipoles matched to frequency); our previous owners had left us antennas for channels 3 (Burlington, Vt), 6 (Schenectady, NY) and 8 (Poland Spring, ME). Another channel six went on air in Maine, almost directly opposite Schenectady. Fortunately they were both NBC because we'd often be getting NY's snowy px with ME's audio; however, they didn't always show the same commercials: as they guzzled down Pepsi in NY's commercial, ME's audio boomed in with, "Put a tiger in your tank... get Esso gasoline!"

I never had a telephone in my room. Our only phone was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

A party line, never in my room and none until my stepdad arrived.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home... But milk was & so was bread.

I believe we got our pizza recipe from our neighbor across from the end of our drive (less than ¼-mile down the hill), the milk was delivered next door to our house from Paula, the Jersey cow in our barn but, if mom didn't bake her own bread in our wood range, it was sometimes swapped for some of our eggs (yes, we also had eggs from our Austrolorps).

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers --my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. He had to get up at 5 AM every morning.

Don't know if all bike deliveries were by boys but, after my parents' divorce, I assisted Mom in her 100+ mile paper route in our pickup truck. Our 1st stop was 10 miles away in the next town (Newport) so that those bicyclists would have their papers to deliver, then we delivered to the outlying stores and subscribers.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies! There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

This aggravates me. If a 6-year-old shouldn't watch it, I don't need to -- some shows just have to put one scene in that shouldn't be there. Also, one of the few outdoor drive-ins left in the world is @ 6 miles away near Weirs Beach. When I was young, the town's outdoor accompanied the multi-flavor ice cream stand and the A&W Root Beer stands. The closing of the theaters killed the stands.

I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to 'sprinkle' clothes with because we didn't have steam irons.

Although electrics were available, Mom did her ironing in the kitchen as the iron was heated up on our wood stove. This also reminds me of things from even older times, something to set modern social services on a warpath: not long after starting school, I learned to steer the tractor so that Dad could operate the converted horse-drawn equipment.

How many do you remember?

Head lights dimmer switches on the floor. [Gave your left foot something to do.]
Ignition switches on the dashboard. [Switch broke, used toggle switch for power and button doorbell switch for starter.]
Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards [Never used the clips, pant leg got caught.]
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner. [An old plumber's iron -- all my electronics ones have been electric.]
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals. [The hand signals are still in the NH Driver's Manual and are supposed to be used by bicyclists; however, motorists wave back to you and proceed to run you over.]

I'll skip the test...
it's enough to know we were the ones who flipped the glass to start the sands of time...
but I still have a tubful of 33-1/3 rpm records in storage. I think my mom's 78s were thrown out years ago. One of our 1st record players had a steel needle connected to a metal diaphragm for sound; I crushed up a "D" battery core and fashioned it in a tube holder for the needle; I wired it up to a hobby amplifier circuit; not the best fidelity but it worked.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

No... and now you've ignited all these memories of times we'll never regain...