I Remember When......

[Gene O. Carpenter]

Anybody remember "Soupy Sales" or Kukla, Fran & Ollie?
Soupy had White Fang and Black Tooth and was always getting hit with a pie.
Karl

Soupy Sales was from Norfolk Va..

[Keith Outten]

I remember:

Staying up late at night to listen to WABC am radio in New York. It was the only station that played Rock and Roll music which was illegal almost everywhere in those days.

20 ounce denim jeans that were so stiff they would stand up by themselves, you didn't need a hanger you could lean them against the wall

We bought food from a local market and you could have groceries delivered by a guy on a bicycle, before the new fangled supermarkets came to town.

Air conditioniong only existed in the new supermarkets and movie theaters.

There wasn't an Interstate highway anywhere in Virginia.

Shooting the breeze with all of the original seven Astronauts at Smitty's Better Burger in Hampton which was just one block from my home. They used to frequent Smitty's for lunch and I would ride my bicycle to Smitty's to joke with them and do wheelies in the parking lot.

There weren't any ball point pens.

Not one family in my neighborhood owned a television set.

Only men went to work in the morning.

[Steve Schlumpf]

Flashlight Tag
Kick the Can
Catching lightning bugs
Laying on our backs in the cool grass at night watching for Sputnik to go by
The Ed Sullivan Show
Crew cuts
Running trap lines with my Dad and younger brother before school
Hunting and fishing for food - not sport
No fast food restaurants, if you wanted to buy a hamburger you went to Big Boy
Learning to drive at 12
Being taught every day through example that a man has integrity!
Talking back to Mom was hazardous to your face!
Being proud that my Dad was in the Air Force!
Living in Alaska before it was a state
Driving the Alcan highway when it was a washed out 2 lane dirt road - a very long one at that!
Talking to Grandparents and loving the history

Yup........... great times!

[Belinda Barfield]

Seeing The Goat Man.

Having my picture taken on Saturday afternoons by "The Picture Man". He lived in a bus that also served as his dark room. He would park in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and take pictures for 15 cents, developed while you wait. My friends and I would all pitch in for the photo. I have some great pics of us just clowning around and being typical small town kids!

[Bob Moyer]

I just purchased a new suit for a couple of family weddings this summer; it reminded me of when I got my first suit at Robert Hall anyone remember them.

Also, it was the first time someone measured my inseam - the guy didn't even ask me to cough.

[Steve Sawyer]

My 17-year-old and I were walking through Best Buy the other day. I started laughing out loud when I saw a 3-pack of 2gb thumb drives for $40!

Had to explain to my son that I remember when I upgraded my first PC to a Hard Drive and thought I was runnin' with the big dogs - all 5 MEGABYTES worth of HD!! It was huge, heavy and sounded like a 747 taxiing.

I remember skimming the cream off the top of the glass milk bottle for Dad's coffee

I remember getting on the bus and spending the entire day downtown with a couple of friends - window-shopping at Hudson's, playing escalator tag at Cobo Hall, getting a Sub sandwich at Woolworth's - when we were TWELVE!!

I remember listening to Ernie Harwell and George Kell broadcasting Tiger games over the neighbor's clock radio that he'd wedge into the window so he (and the rest of the neighborhood) could listen to the game while he did yard work.

I remember walking home from school for lunch, and watching TV on a 12" B&W console TV while I ate (Soupy Sales?).

I remember our phone number when I was a kid (and yes, it was a party line) - KEnwood 2-7601

[Bob Genovesi]

I remember,

1. President Eisenhower addressing the nation on B&W TV
2. When there were 4 party telephone lines
3. Candling eggs in the basement
4. When the price of a new car was $2,200
5. When gas was 5 gallons for a buck
6. When we built a bomb shelter
7. When Nikita Khrushchev was removed from the UN meeting
8. The Cuban missile blockade and the bay of pigs
9. The Nuclear weapons testing of the 50's and 60's
10. When a bottle of soda was .07 cents
11. When the Police stopped criminals
12. When a letter cost .04 cents to mail
13. Getting a new pair of shoes was the best thing in the world!
14. My first real job I got paid .50 cents an hour.
15. Getting drafted into the Vietnam war - #41
16. When going out to eat was a special treat!
17. Respecting others
18. Waving to each other as you drove by
19. When talking back to you mother meant a beating from your father.
20. When America meant something

[Bob Moyer]

As someone who is in his 60's I often take a trip down memory lane; here are a few things I remembered recently

Living in the country had it's advantages;

We knew almost everyone who drove on the road where we lived.
Fresh Milk and Eggs
Actually taking a rifle or shotgun to school; we had a rod &gun club as one of the activities and we would go hunting after school
Blowing up things with firecrackers and not be considered a terrorist
Praying in school
I remember when girls wore colored leotards to school and that put them into the "hot" girl class
Baseball cards in spokes of bicycle
Teachers administering punishment only knowing that when you got home it would be worse
Chocolate Cigarettes
Model airplanes made out of balsa wood?? and would eventually break, wow what a difference duct tape would have made at that time
School bus rides in the snow; and than that rumble when the bus got on the bare highway with chains

[Lee DeRaud]

I remember...when I could remember...

That was before my time.

[glenn bradley]

- Music came on LP's that you bought at the Hi-Fi store
- TV comes in color? You're kidding.
- Thrifty ice cream at a nickle a scoop (or cylinder if you know what I mean).
- a scooter made out of a plank, a crate and an old keyed roller skate with the frame pounded flat.
- A whole summer's worth of movie passes stuck to the fridge with a magnet. One of those an 15 cents and you were in heaven for the whole afternoon.
- Parking you bike outside the theater for hours and not even locking it.
- setting out milk bottles
- The whistle on the Helm's bakery truck, mmmmm warm donuts.
- The annual Fireman's Pancake Breakfast in town and EVERYBODY went.
- Every house on the block had an incinerator out back.
- Stereo came out . . . WOW!!!

[Steve Sawyer]

Funny how when folks play this game, it's only the good stuff we recall. Sometimes it's a little easier to accept The World as it Is when we consider that not EVERYTHING was wonderful back in the day...

I remember:

• Watching a young black man get off the bus and thinking how sad it was that his life prospects were so much more limited than mine.
• Being amazed along with the rest of the class that one of our classmates' mother drove a taxi. This was in the day when the only thing most girls could aspire to was to be a nurse, a teacher or a housewife. Noble occupations all, but a bit of a limited choice.
• Lying awake at night worrying that the plane I heard passing overhead was the one with The Bomb.
• Listening to the neighbor who was a police officer speak disparagingly in the most graphic terms of every group that wasn't a WASP, and never seeing any kind of negative reaction from any other adults - at least not in public.
• A few teachers who thought nothing of dishing out the most distasteful personal attacks and emotional abuse, and who would hold students up to ridicule by their classmates, including public sexual harassment - things that would get a teacher fired today
• Seeing teachers, responding to the national shock over the launch of Sputnik trying to introduce some more effective and creative teaching methods in the classroom, met with anger and hostility by parents that were convinced that the methods back in their Good Old Days were sufficient to meet the threat of global technological and intellectual competition.
• How those of us sufficiently well-heeled got to go off to college, while our less-affluent friends and fellow students got drafted - and none of us had any say in the matter - we couldn't even vote.
• How many of us started smoking at 11 or 12 because you didn't have to confront an adult to acquire cigarettes - all it took was a quarter and a cigarette machine - or the skill and chutzpah to sneak a couple from Dad's pack!
• How kids were killed (I knew one) just riding their bike down the Big Hill back in the day when there was nothing to secure a loose wheel other than the kid's weight on the forks. I really hate how bicyclists today refer to those restraining flanges on their bike forks as "Lawyer lips".
• How my 14-year-old car was such an oddity, folks would ask if it was an antique or an historic vehicle. Cars' abominably short life spans contributed greatly to the accusations of "Planned Obsolescence". Also, no air bags, no seat belts, no traction control, no ABS - we were lucky that they had safety glass in the windshields.
• How Martindale Beach at the local Metro Park was all black, and Maple Beach at the same park on the same lake was all white.
• How family members who had "personal" problems such as pedophilia were tolerated, and never reported to authorities, but gay cousin Steven, in a stable long-term relationship, was ostracized.

Yeah, there are lots of things I remember fondly about my early years - but in many, many ways I think that things have changed, and are continuing to change for the better, and I'm thankful every day that I live in 2009 and not 1959!!

[Rod Sheridan]

Good post Steve, we've improved a lot, more required.

Regards, Rod.

[Mike Henderson]

I remember when the cops stopped a drunk, one of them would drive the car and drunk home and the other would follow in the cruiser.

I glad things have changed.

Mike

[Jeff Dege]

I remember when we got our first color TV. It came with UHF, which doubled our viewing options from 3 to 6 channels. I also remember when TVs came with some nice furniture, cause I still have the cabinet from that one.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to change channels, you had to walk all the way across the room...

[Larry Browning]

I remember 300 Meg hard drives. Yes - 300 MEGs. Huge at the time.

300? Man, I remember 10meg external hard drives on a PC, and remember thinking "how could you ever fill that thing up?" And it cost $2000 too!!!! (Just the hard drive, the 8088 IBM PC was $5000)

Oh, yeah!, I remember when Visicalc was the standard in spreadsheet software, not Excel. I think Visicalc was actually the first real spreadsheet application. At least that's the one I remember.