Ramfins59 Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Here's some stuff to remember............ If you're old enough... Black and White (under age 40? You won't understand.) You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, 'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.' My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all took gym, not PE...and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym was not an option.... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then... Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and th en Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either; because if we did we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home. I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive? LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA; AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry P. Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Great stuff, Rich! And so true. These days we've evolved into such fragile, frail, injury and desease-susceptible creatures that we can't enter a store without "sanitizing" the shopping cart handle! When I was a kid we all rode our bikes all day long. Bike helmets were unknown, yet somehow we all miraculously managed to survive to adulthood without a tragic "no bike helmet"-related accident. I guess we were just super lucky back then... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry P. Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Black and White (under age 40? You won't understand.) We had a B/W TV. I remember my dad taking a tube out of the back and taking it to the grocery store where they had a TV tube checking machine where you could check the tube to see if the it was blown or still good. If bad, you just bought a new tube and plugged it back in to your TV set... problem solved! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dieseldawg142 Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 (edited) ....... Edited May 11, 2018 by dieseldawg142 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramfins59 Posted December 17, 2014 Author Share Posted December 17, 2014 Yeah Harry, I remember those old tube TV's. Man were they big and HEAVY. They were huge "pieces of furniture" with real wood cabinets in the living rooms. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wayne swayze Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Ah...they WERE the good old days....good topic Rich! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hedotwo Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Thanks for the smiles this morning.... I especially liked the line: "I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.' Being in my 60's I can relate Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blunc Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 (edited) there were classes like "home-eck" where cooking was taught..without these new fangled microwave machines. "space-food sticks" were cool because the astronauts ate them too. the "avon lady" came to your house and sold your mom horrible smelling perfume. Popeye beat the krap out of Bluto every time... there were no crossing guards to make sure everyones little "snowflake" made it to school okay. Edited December 17, 2014 by blunc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Modlguy Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Great post, Rich. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vintagedragcrazy Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 i remember walking to school because if you lived less than a mile you didn't get a bus trip and once in a very long while someone drove us to school mostly because it was pouring down rain. now if you can't see the school from your front porch a bus picks you up and if not you get a ride in the car, around here when school is about to start its like new york city around the schools. then there's the people who take the kids and park right in front of the school (i call them baby kissers) and have to sit there till they go in the building all the while the next person is in line to move up the length of a car and do the same thing. man we had it bad!!!!!! vince Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
High octane Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 I shared those days Rich, and I'm VERY happy that I did. My wife says that I'd still be watching a B&W TV if it weren't for her. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry P. Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Yeah Harry, I remember those old tube TV's. Man were they big and HEAVY. They were huge "pieces of furniture" with real wood cabinets in the living rooms. Yes, many came with beautiful real wood cabinetry. Our Motorola B/W set had a real wooden cabinet. I remember somehow the side of the cabinet got scratched and my mom freaked out! And I remember that when you turned it on, it had to "warm up" for a few seconds before the picture came on. You changed the channel by turning the big knob at the top of the control panel... no remote. And only 4-5 channels. Yet again, we somehow managed to do just fine without 300 channels... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chunkypeanutbutter Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 ADHD used to be called "bratty kid...." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harry P. Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 ADHD used to be called "bratty kid...." Right! And the "cure" wasn't a pill, it was a smack on the backside! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cobraman Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Yes the good old days. I remember when my folks got our first color TV. It was a large Magnavox in a nice wooden cabinet with 2 sliding doors on top. Under one was a stereo ( record player ) and under the other was a radio and a bin that held LP's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cobraman Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 I remember that all the folks on the block were your "parents" and you dare not to anything wrong because they would pay your parents a visit. And your parents believed and acted upon what they reported you did. Try doing that now a days and your likely to be cussed and ordered off their property because their little angel would never do anything wrong. You have to wonder sometimes how much better are we really off now. I would not want to be a child in today's world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chunkypeanutbutter Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Right! And the "cure" wasn't a pill, it was a smack on the backside! Exactly what I used to get... I grew up with different inconveniences, such as, "Get off the phone, I'm trying to get on the Internet!" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom Geiger Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Yes, many came with beautiful real wood cabinetry. Our Motorola B/W set had a real wooden cabinet. My Uncle Dan died a few years ago at 93. He was a tinkerer and handy man, but most of all he never wasted anything. When we cleared out his house we found he had a recent flat screen TV, but it sat on top of a cabinet that was familiar... yea, when his old TV died, he pulled it out of the wood cabinet, put a shelf inside and put wood doors on it. He made a piece of furniture out of it. That gave a whole new meaning to TV stand! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Buckaroo Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Richard - This is a fantastic thread you started. I copied your original and gave it to my Wife who teaches a "one room schoolhouse" in Montana. She enjoyrd very much also. Thank you for the good memories ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZTony8 Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Ah,the joys of B&W TV.Ours was an RCA on a swivel base with a blond wood cabinet.We were deluxe though-we had an outside antenna lashed to the chimney(No Tenna Rotor-those came later).I didn't have my own color TV until 1976 when I bought one for myself. It's chilling to think that now is going to be someone else's "good old days" in 40 or 50 years.Ugh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foxer Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 and look at how many of us survived this nightmarish childhood to reminish about it! eheh I have to mention those crunkled pieces of aluminum foil on our rabbit ears, though ... I still remember the correct position for channel 30. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom Geiger Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 I didn't have my own color TV until 1976 when I bought one for myself. I got my first apartment in 1978 and bought a 13" color TV. And it was something like $400 in those days! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deano Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Right! And the "cure" wasn't a pill, it was a smack on the backside! And it worked quite well, thank-you-very-much! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 Amen, amen, amen, amen!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike_G Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 When I was a kid, if your TV quit working you could take out all the tubes and go down to the Rexall drugstore and use their tube-tester to find the bad one, then get a replacement tube out of the cabinet in the bottom of the tester. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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