Me (2nd from left), My Sisters, My Mom and Our Dog . In the OLDEN DAYS. Not Taken with a Camera App on Any Device. Taken By a Real Camera. Remember That? Film?
Once upon a time my children looked at me like I was snake handling and speaking in tongues.
They gasped! They winced! They looked horrified!
Why?
We started talking about the “olden days” when I had to roll down our own car windows. With a handle. It’s like the TV situation, revisited. Except we were on a roll talking and it just kept on and on. And on…
Window Handles. Yes, I had to roll down my car windows.
“How did that work?”
Picture me and my children in a kitchen. Picture me acting out how you roll down a window with a handle.
No Seatbelts. If cars had them, we never wore them. In fact, I have clear memories sitting in the back window/storage compartment with throw up in it (that’s another post) of the VW bug my parents had or with my head hanging out of the back of the curved station wagon window looking up at the sky. Seriously, we were like dogs, my sister and I.
“Coooool.”
A Wringing Clothes Washer. The clothes washer had two electric rollers that we put our clothes through to wring out the water. Effectively removes the water and maybe a finger or two. I was literally one step away from a washboard and large tub.
“Huh? Wait a second. What did THAT look like?”
A Clothes Line. They could barely register the concept, well, with all that work and all, outside, hanging and pinning and taking down.
Toys without Lights/Sound. Wooden toys, simple clothes for dolls.
“Hahahhahahahhaaa, that sounds like no fun! Hahahhaaaa….”
Cameras with Film. We had to take pictures then take the film somewhere or send it off to get pictures made.
“Very interesting.”
No Internet. Self explanatory.
Nothing except a palpable collective GULP from the both of them.
Video Games. Well, not exactly VIDEO GAMES per se, but games that are basically a stream of balls dropping top-to-bottom or going side-to-side.
“Uh, sounds fun, Mom!” (insert sarcasm)
To which I replied, “HEY! The video games of today were created on the backs of people like me who played those games for hours!”
They don’t get it. Ingrates.
It’s amazing I’m even alive since I lived through the era of Absolutely No Safety Requirements; lead painted metal high chairs, choking hazards galore and riding in the back windows of cars. What do YOU remember from your “olden days”? Don’t make me think I am the only Aiming Low-er that wrung out her laundry through two rolling pins, I beg you.
Vintage, retro or old? I say retro. Retro is cooler, but you be the judge.
About Julia Roberts
“Mental” is supposed to be “Metal”
Obviously.
Twitter Name: juliaroberts1
Some Toyota Yaries (Yari?) have windows with handles. I got in a friend’s car the other day and went to roll down the window, saw the handle and it was like I forgot how to work it.
Also, my mother in law still has a film camera and whenever she takes pictures, the kids run over after to see the pic on the screen. They are very confused.
Twitter Name: uppoppedafox
The handles in a new car…that is a car I could drive! (I do like my classic auto features).
And the poor little children and their inability to see their image the second their photo is taken. How tragic (that’s what I say to my kids).
Twitter Name: juliaroberts1
Aha! Record players, operators who said, “what number, please”, party lines, no remote and when we got one, Dad had it, no microwaves, no car AC, walking to school in the morning, home for lunch and back to school in all kinds of weather, swimming in a creek not a chlorinated pool, curling irons heated on a stove top… should I continue?
Oh yes, the phones. Yellow and on the wall, with cords that were 50 feet so you could take the phone upstairs to your bedroom.
You got me on the curling irons heated on the stove…off to google that.
Twitter Name: juliaroberts1
Rotary phones and messages that had to be hand written :)
Requesting a song on a radio station and then standing by with a tape recorder. There was no redial back then, so you had to keep dialing the number of the station over and over until you stopped getting the “busy signal”. BLUE EYESHADOW.
Ah…the traditional radio station and a tape recorder. That really is all the technology we we ever needed, right?
Twitter Name: juliaroberts1
When my oldest son got his license we gave him a 1981 Oldsmobile Delta 88, complete with window cranks and an 8 track!!
Ohhhh the 8 tracks! Love a classic car (mine is a 91 volvo).
You know, for the right kid (like mine hopefully) they will see that as a convo started and not embarrassing.
Twitter Name: juliaroberts1
My husband’s truck still has manual roll down windows.
Your husband is clearly a Classic Man! Maybe he could video himself rolling down the window and send it to me to share with my kids.
That sounded so wrong of me to say.
Twitter Name: juliaroberts1
We were telling our kids about the rotary phone not that long ago. And how when we first got cable tv, you changed the channel on the “box.” The box connected to the tv by the cord. My grandfather always had it in his lap, watching the news or Wheel of Fortune. We would wait for him to fall asleep and sneak the box from his chair :). I got a brand-new record player for my 2nd birthday and went to sleep with my 45′s “set” to drop each night so I could listen to consecutive music. In high school my friend’s Dad still had only AM radio (when just about everyone now had FM) in his car so we used to drive around with a big boombox running on batteries, listening to cassette tapes. I also rode in the back of a few hatchback cars as a kid and I remember sitting on my mom’s lap in the front seat as a toddler. Good times. Kids should know how we suffered. They don’t know how good they have it with their clear-sounding music, lack of the card catalog system and baby safety mechanisms.
Twitter Name: HeatherSchiavo
Kinda close to the “no seatbelts” thing is…riding in the bed of a truck.
I remember one of my best neighborhood friends and I STANDING in the bed of her dad’s truck, facing forward, looking over the cab.
As we drive through the neighborhood.
And I’m here today to cringe and secretly giggle about it.
I’d call 911 if I saw that today. How uncool am I?
Twitter Name: ASassyRedhead
Station wagons w/rear facing seats & the tailgate down, sans seatbelts. Cigarette vending machines, & cigarette commercials on TV.
Glass (gasp!) milk bottles in school lunchrooms.
The required shaking of the Polaroid pictures as they develop.
Even after it wasn’t useful.
I still have my Quadraphonic Eight Track cassete player!
Dad slamming on the brakes and throwing his arm across the seat to hold me back from hitting the dash.
Bicycles with shift levers on the crossbar to castrate you if you hit a curb.
Dart guns!
Twitter Name: Curiosityforge
I had to explain to my kids what the phrase “like a broken record” meant. I remember standing on the “hump” on the floor of the backseat of the car, leaning on the back of the front seat. I remember riding lying down in the big flat space behind the back window. Cars, planes, and trains all had little ashtrays in the arm rests.
Turning the channel on the TV meant you had to get up and go turn the knob, and there WAS no cable; we had three channels. Three. The phone was a black rotary dial in the kitchen, where everybody could hear what you were talking about. There were no computers and no video games. And no air conditioning in the car or the house. In Florida.
When I go to GA for my training each year, I always cheap out as much as possible on the rental car (my only requirement is A/C; Athens, GA in August without A/C is insane). Every year the rental folks try to get me to upgrade by lamenting the lack of power windows, as if cranking down the window when I go to a drive through or when I leave the parking garage is such a chore.
My children are appalled at the idea that my sister, brother and I used to share the backseat of the station wagon for the 3 hour trip to the beach and all we had for entertainment was playing the license plate game or reading until we got carsick. No vehicle DVD player, no iPod to listen to if you didn’t like dad’s radio station, no DS…they think it sounds like torture. (I think my parents are jealous of how easy my trip is, since I never have to hear “Are we there yet?!” or “He’s touching me!” or “No, I saw that Alaska tag first- I won!”)
Twitter Name: MamaKaren
How about playing with mercury in science class? My dad loves to talk about how cool it was to roll it around in yours hands.. I’m lucky he lived to have me.