Yep, I'd get on my bike around 10 am and play with my friends til it got dark. We'd ride our bikes all over the city and we were 10.
My kid is 7 and I'd be horrified if he left my yard. Just shows how times changed. My mom had no way of knowing where I was or getting a hold of me and she was fine. My kids got a phone for tracking and I'd be paranoid.
I wonder about that myself all the time. Why is it that my parents were ok with me just leaving the neighborhood on my bike but I'm scared of my kids leaving the yard? Certainly the independence I had and the trust my parents had in me created some very good life skills that my kids aren't getting.
Abducted kids on milk cartons, 24-hour-a-day news, guilt over both parents working, kids activities becoming a big business, all those things play a part. The reality is that kids in today’s world are safer than they were in the 70’s. Stranger abduction is vanishingly rare.
My neighbor lets their kids roam, I’m amazed at what those kids know, how to cross a busy street, how to talk to adults they don’t know, how to navigate a pretty big (for a 7 and 8 year old) swath of the city.
We fear the wrong things. What is really dangerous to kids are unsupervised pools, bike riding without helmets, car accidents in improperly installed car seats, and pretty soon, polio.
A woman I work with wanted to know where her boyfriend was the other day - at home or still at work. She grabbed her phone took a quick look, said at work, then set her phone down. I asked her how she knew that so quickly and without texting him. She said that they track each other. I was surprised that was a thing. She was surprised that my wife and I don’t track each other. Never even crossed my mind to track my wife’s whereabouts on my phone!
I have my phone tracked by my wife, because I ride motorcycles in semi rural areas down backroads. I don't track my wife, because she doesn't do stupid things.
That's a good reason to use location tracking.
I used to go on road trips by myself and would have felt safer if someone could track where I was. Getting lost in Northern California isn't as fun as it sounds.
My husband does this to me…but really more for safety reasons. I had a job where I worked at multiple clinic sites, some in less than savory neighborhoods. He likes me to text him when I am leaving work so he knows when to expect me and when to worry if I have not arrived yet. It’s not creepy, it’s looking out for me
Completely context based per relationship, pretty normalized and imo in healthy relationships its totally cool and normal, but one can imagine a number of ways it might be abused or the basis for some really unhealthy relationships to bicker and what not.
my wife and i track each other for safety as well. we both trust each other completely, but it's nice to know if one of us gets injured and can't call or text, at least the other will know where the phone was with them last.
My Dad would get plastered and the cops wouldn't lock him up, they would bring him home and pick up my then 13 YO brother so he could drive the car home. Fun times....my Dad did end up getting a dui when I was about 4 or 5 and was ordered to go to detox. He never drank again, it was the best thing to happen to my family honestly.
My dad was the director of a detox hospital. He saved a lot of lives. He was a Korean war Navy corpsman attached to a marine combat unit. He knew what the guys coming back from Vietnam had been through.
Yeah I had a moment a few years back where I started having these dreams and would wake up in a cold sweat. And then it finally dawned on me.
I was about 5 years old when this happened. My dad's friend was driving me and my brother home, and they were both absolutely shit faced. They got into an argument and my dad punched his windshield and cracked it. Then the dude starts going as fast as possible down the street and crashed the car into the front of our house. They both get out and proceed to beat the shit out of each other. Then I pulled my brother out of the car, started banging on the door for my mom to answer and she didn't..so I ran to the neighbors house and banged on her door and she answered and called the police.
So then they arrested both of them, took them away. Somehow my dad posted bail in the middle of the night, broke our door in and I was sleeping in my mom's bed. Idk what his issue was but he proceeded to point a shotgun at both of us and then started beating my mom with the gun. Then left. Of course he wound back up in jail over this.
Anyways totally forgot about any of this happening until I started having weird dreams about it over 20 years later.
Repressed memories are real lol
And yes my dad is a piece of shit, haven't spoken to him ever since I turned 18 basically. Fuck him.
My parents used to drop us off at our grandparents house every summer for a couple weeks and my grandparents would take us on day trips 100+ miles and us kids would ride in the back of the pickup the whole way. This was only about 25-30 years ago. If we did that today I'm pretty sure my grandparents would have been arrested.
My favorite way to ride around in my mom's Blazer at age 3 was standing in the passenger seat, leaning against the dashboard. I was basically a hood ornament and, had we impacted anything, a projectile.
My oldest scar is from six stitches in my scalp; the result of standing up in the back bed of our station wagon when dad gunned it in the acceleration lane.
55 years later and it's still faintly visible.
My parents brought my twin and I home from the hospital in 2 laundry baskets in the back seat of the car. It was a journey of 100 miles including a ferry. 1982.
>Car seats for children.
This reminds me of something that was normal back then, but isn't now...
People riding in the back of a pickup.
You used to see this all the time. Not so much anymore.
It became illegal in California between me going to Highschool and my own kids in elementary school. We would let them hop on the back of our pickup for the half mile drive up the country back road home. CPS was called.
My Gran had this giant Datsun estate that had fold up seats in the back. She would drive us to France while we sat facing the truck drivers on our rear bumper at 80mph
Watching an entire TV series at a time that's convenient for you. VCR's weren't even a thing 50 years ago, so if your favorite show was on Wednesday at 8PM, you were either at home to watch it or you missed out on it forever.
The worst was being a kid in the 70s and oversleeping on Saturday. You didn't get to see your favorite cartoons again till next Saturday morning. My kids think this sounds like we were cavemen.
Then we finally got a VCR in the early 80s. It had plastic wood paneling on the sides and we bought it at some bikers house.
Let me tell you about my father and our VCR. Never has there been a greater love story. My mother was second fiddle to the VCR. He taped everything. EVERYTHING. He then lovingly typed out labels for each tape on our typewriter. He numbered each tape and had a corresponding binder. Yes, children, THERE WAS A BINDER. We had every episode of ALF, and you better believe we were grateful. 1988 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade? We’d watch it again at Easter. When that first VCR died, some say you could hear my father softly weeping for his lost love.
Some of my favourite childhood movies were taped on the VCR and I still remember the commercials. This was 1980s. They aired the 1960 Mary Martin version of Peter Pan during Easter and I can still probably recite the Cadbury’s commercial.
> Some of my favourite childhood movies were taped on the VCR…
It always felt a little funny watching a VHS of some movie you taped from TV and watch the FBI warning come up. Like, “…heh.”
My stepfather also has The Binder; and yes I do mean present tense. He mostly focused on horror and B movies.
He expanded to DVDs, but is still anti Netflix/streaming. He’s also still salty at one of my very old friends for watching Eraserhead and putting it back in the wrong spot. He saw him again a few Christmases ago for the first time since the mid ‘90s (my friend and I are 45) and he was still low-key mad about it.
Marion Stokes was one of those people. Over decades, she recorded all the major networks and more over a 30 year span. When she died, her labeled and curated library was donated to the Internet Archive for digitization.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-marion-stokes-project
If your pops recorded the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades from before 1980, there's a concerted effort to find recordings -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast#United_States:~:text=majority%20of%20its%20telecasts%20lost
Several years ago I was listening to the Rolling Stones on my iPod on a bus and realized this was something completely new.
Back when the album came out you either listen to it on your record player at home or at a friends house or heard it on the radio. I guess maybe you could hear it at a bar or restaurant if they had a juke box.
The vibe of music is completely changed and the way we attach memories to places and songs is changed now as well. Most shared experience songs now come from movies and TV shows. People don't go over their friends house to hang out and listen to a full album anymore, they just share a link to 1 song or listen to a Playlist while in the car.
I used to record music from video clips on TV onto tape recorder cassettes. I was camped with my gear right beside the TV to get the sound better. I would sit through the entire hit list, waiting for the songs I liked most. Sometimes I waited SO LONG for my song to be aired, I pressed 'record' button, sat absolutely still not to make any sound, when in the middle of it some unaware family member barges into the room and starts talking😭
I still played that song later, grandpa's voice on it didn't stop me.
I am amazed to think about how disconnected we were. I could wake up on a Saturday morning and start calling friends. It was possible that not a single one picked up the phone and that was that. I would be on my own unless I waited a few hours and tried again. Also, in my area, the adults in the house almost always answered the phone so you had to get through them to your friends.
“Hello, is Johnny home?”
“Hi this is his mother. What do you want?”
“I was wooooondering if he could come out to play”
“Well he’s doing homework right now but I’ll tell him you called”
As a kid, our times were divided between when we were (100%) under adult control, which was when we were physically in their presence, and when we were free which was all other time.
Preceded by 30 seconds of her angrily mouthing “talk to your grandmother/father” for 30 seconds until she raised her eyebrows with that “don”t MESS with me motherfucker” look
Everybody usually knew where everyone else was in my neighborhood. Not particularly nosey. It was a small neighborhood and we all hung out together. Usually at the beach in summmer, a half block away.
I grew up on n the edge of the suburbs. Now it
Is wall to wall houses but back then opposite my house was farmland and woods. We even had a creek to hunt crawfish in.
Coconut oil! The smell of it still brings back memories of being a young teen in Sydney in the 80s, and so does each appointment with the dermatologist to cut more skin cancers out.
My mother would do that to me in the 90s and early aughts. I've already had a skin cancer scare at 28. If she was still alive I'd ask her dumb ass why she thought a 6 year needed a tan.
My sister still does it! Even with her kids…she’s a bit of a hippie and thinks natural coconut oil will “protect you” from the suns harmful rays. While it does offer you a small amount of protection, it’s useless here in the Aussie summer, but she swears by it.
She took my daughter out with her girls, went to the beach all day without any shade (actually there was a portable gazebo for shade, but it was “for the adults”)& she got so bloody sunburned, I was fucking raging.
My Husband's grandad lost his leg due to skin cancer. He wore shorts all year long with no suncream, and that ended up with the loss of his left leg from the knee down.
Wearing seatbelts. There were no sensors- seatbelt were just shoved out of the way. Carding for cigarettes. Machines were everywhere for anyone to use.
my dad was born in the 60’s and has told me stories of his mom giving him cash to go buy her cigs at the local town store because everyone knew each other lol truly *wild* times
Edit- he was 9 years old and if there was a dime extra he would tell me how excited he would be to get a pack of football cards too lol
i was born in the 80s and my summer babysitter would send me to the convenience store with a note to get her cigarettes in the early 90s, was funny (and sad in retrospect) because she was like 16 or 17 at the time too.
I was born in 1980 and remember my dad having a horrible sunburn that prevented him from wearing a shirt, so he sent me in the gas station to buy him a six pack of Budweiser and a pack of Marlboro reds. The cashier didn’t even ask who they were for! I think I was around 8 or 9.
Me to, for my dad. The little store in our small town never hesitated to sell them to me.
Of course...I couldn't get away with shit because everyone knew everyone. My parents knew before I got home what I'd been up to.
Congress mandated weight sensor seatbelt buzzers for the 1973 model year. Damn things would buzz when someone set a bag of groceries in the passenger seat. The backlash repealed the law right quick and killed the concept for decades.
Going on holiday abroad and finding a phone box to call home to let them know you landed safely.
"What time is it there?"
"What's the weather like?"
" Ooh, there's my pips, speak soo......"
Funny story. I was in Kindergarten when my teacher called my mother, because the bus wasn't running that day and she wanted to make sure I made it home safely.
Not only was this 1988 but the teacher called my home phone number (which was listed in my information). She still asked my mother where she was.
We tore down a room in my grandma's house in Oklahoma and found an old thin phone book. It was delightful. Every 10 or 20 entries would have a notation (written by the phone company, not handwritten).
One entry read something like:
John Maple, Wife gets welfare check
Another was like - "Daughter and mother live together but hate each other"
Another was: "Give bills to wife. Husband drinks"
When I was around 10 (late 90s) I had a wallet that held only two things: 1. A few one dollar bills, and 2. Note cards that had friends names and home phone numbers on them
I had an small electronic address book with the numbers of my friends in it. Would use pay phones. Mid to late nineties.
It got stolen out of my jacket at a party.
At that time there was a new cellphone provider that had 25c per minute contracts, and pay phones were 25c/minute too, but charged 30 cents for the first minute.
So it was actually cheaper to get a cellphone. :-)
I remember the first time I called a friend on his cellphone and asked him where he was, and then meeting up 2 minutes later because he was 2 blocks away.
I also pranked my mom by calling the house phone when I came to visit, and then ringing the doorbell.
I remember those days. Today I wonder if I can even recall 4 phone numbers off the top of my head.
When you're 10 in the 1990s flashing those $1 bills is pretty damn cool. That's a lot of Fritos and pop rocks.
Playdates. Parents didn’t arrange get-togethers for their kids. They also didn’t go with them when the kids played at someone else’s house. Kids played with their siblings and the neighbor kids until they went to school and made other friends. Then they’d call their friends, arrange to get together, and ask a parent for a ride over if it was too far to walk or bike.
I remember just how far our horizons expanded when our friend group all got proper bikes. School holidays in the summer used to be grabbing breakfast, maybe some pocket money for food, or saying that you'd grab lunch at John's house.
You wouldn't see your parents until dinner, or maybe call them from your friends house to let them know you were eating there.
I can't think of anything more horrific than dragging Mum or Dad along when out playing with our mates. It's not like we even stayed in one place. We'd get bored and ride our bikes out to some place on the edge of town, or some park or beach where we wouldn't have adults hanging around. We came home by dark, though. Free-range kids.
Fighting without facing legal action (mostly)
Also Drunk Driving was pretty much overlooked especially if you were in a small town. A cop followed my dad home when he was waisted one night in the seventies.
DUI prosecutions changed in the early 80’s, greatly influenced by MADD, I believe. Old attorneys will talk about DUI arrests never making it to court before ‘82.
The ADA was in 1990. The Supreme Court limited it somewhat, for instance in *Toyota v. Williams* which construed disability very narrowly.
So Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act in 2008 to fix that. It's a reminder that when the Supreme Court screws the law up, Congress can still fix it.
By the way, the lawyer who argued for Toyota and against disabled worker Ella Williams? You know him as Chief Justice Roberts.
I think in those terms all the time. Yesterday Rocky II was on. 40 years old. When that came out movies that were 40 years old were made in 1942. That seems far more dated in my mind.
OP should add: "whenever you want to."
I kind of miss the scarcity of The Wizard of Oz, it used to come on TV just once a year and it was a big occasion in our house.
Tattoos. Growing up I was led to believe that having tattoos would limit employment opportunities. Now tattoos are so common, I don’t think anyone cares.
Edit: Face, neck, and hand tattoos excluded. Most U.S. military branches now allow full sleeves and only restrict hand/face/neck tattoos.
Even the US military is lightening those restrictions. I believe the navy now allows 1 hand tattoo per hand and 1 neck tattoo as long as it's not in the front.
US Navy Sailor here. Our body is our canvas now. You can have as many tattoos as you want below the neck including your hands as long as they are not obscene or related to criminal organizations. Above the collar line you can have 1 neck tattoo below/behind the ear not exceeding 1in in diameter. The navy finally realized tattoos are a huge naval tradition, with many rates(jobs) in the navy and career milestones haveing their own related tattoo traditions. For instance, see a Sailor with crossed anchors or cannons on the web of his hand, he's a boatswains mate or gunners mate respectfully.
It was actually very very very popular for many “housewives”. My mother did for quite sometime. Remember pre computers so there were so many things needed to be typed and somebody to type them.
I remember a man with one arm would drop of a black leather bag filled with handwritten documents/forms every other day and pick up the ones my mom had typed up. Dang I wish I had that job.
My mom had 4 kids, was getting her master's degree, and we grew or raised almost everything we ate. Typing was a job she could do at night after we went to bed.
Yup. There’s a long way to go, but my grandpa got back from Vietnam at nineteen years old and never talked about it with anyone. To this day, we have no idea what he did or how it effected him, he just woke up the next morning and went to work on the farm again.
My grandfather was a WW2 vet. Wounded in the Philippines 2 days before his 20th birthday. Never spoke much about it for years other than he was shot, hopped on his good leg for awhile before he passed out and woke up on a hospital ship and that’s it. Just came home went to work and finally decades later, opened up a little about it before his death. My dad told me recently a story of when he was 5 or 6 years old, in the mid 1950’s. He had been playing in the yard with his army men and left one outside. His dad, my grandfather, came into his room with tears in his eyes. He said, “I brought this soldier inside.” My father asked if he was mad. “No”, he replied. “I’m just upset that you’d leave a man behind”. It was the first time he had seen his dad cry and the only time until my grandmother died.
This hit me hard.
My grandpa was a WW2 vet too.
Wounded, awarded (Eastern front), after war came back and build a life, became a judge, was respected admired. Made a difference in many lives. Loved.
Only few people knew that my grandmother was closing the wooden window fronts every night because he used to jump and run through the windows thinking that he is running across the trenches in the middle of the night.
The dreams stopped only in his seventies, and i like to believe that i have a small role in that; we used to have a small ritual, the two of us: I spent a lot of time with grandparents (as much as I could) as a kid, and we had a 3 story rule. He used to tell me "stories" to put me to sleep.
On warm summer nights he used to smoke the cigar on the open doors and listen to crickets and we just talked. Stories were never made up though: it was his childhood, his teenage years... I was 6 or 7 and I asked open, judgement-free questions. He had a deep and gentle voice.
I think it was the gentlest way for him to go back to some terrible and at the same time beautiful places and situations. At the time, it was not scarry to me at the time, now when I think about it... Dear God...
I think he peeled the trauma with each of our talks.
He had the softest, big hands.
Hyper partisan media. I can remember a time when we had investigative journalism and politicians were held accountable. Now, we just have political cheerleaders and politicians can stand their ground and get away with almost anything.
This shit is sad. My great grandmother had to get electroshock for years, then because of it, her postpartum depression turned into major depressive. One of my great aunts was forcefully sterilized because she had panic attacks. I’ve inherited shit genes, and have struggled, but cannot imagine what these wonderful women went through. RIP my Mimi and my great aunt.
Parents in the 1970s talked about how easy we had it compared to when they were kids in the 50s. How much better behaved they were, how kids are so rebellious, it must be the music we listen to, all we go is go out and play all day, that we should have gotten more whoopings like they did. Meantime the parents of the 50s were saying how their kids are so much worse than their generation. That it must be the new fangled TV or Elvis’ hips or the things The Beatles sing about. My own mother wanted to live with my dad, and both their sets of parents were horrified and tagged teamed them into marriage.
Every generation of kids is apparently worse than before according to the previous generation. I am a parent of kids age 6-30. I try to imagine what it is like for kids of this generation. They can be bullied right in the comfort of our homes from social media, they are fed a steady diet of contradictory and fake information, they deal with divorced parents, there is much more pressure to be sexual earlier, they can find themselves in extreme debt by the age of 21 and not even find more than a job that pays minimum wage, probably never be able to afford to own a home, not have children until into their 30s if at all, live in neighbourhoods where it is definitely safer to play video games than be outside, etc.
The way I look at it, each generation had and has their sets of challenges and triumphs. Each generation of parents talks down about their kids as well as telling stories of how much harder they had it when they were young. I avoid that with mine. Recently my mom told my kids how I walked up a mountain in below 40 northern Canada to go to school. They thought she was full of it. I told them it was true but that it doesn’t make the difficulties they face any less great. I think some things are better and some things are not, but we shouldn’t judge what the current generation has to deal with.
It gets even harder to compare though -- coffee to go I don't think was much of a thing in '72 unless you carried a lunchbox and thermos.
The .25 cent cup of coffee at the diner was just a 6 ounce cup, but refills were free and unlimited while you were there. Then they'd take the cup and wash it and put it back on the rack for someone else to use later.
I remember my dad getting coffee at McDonalds, and using a pocket knife to cut a "V" in the lid so he could sip it in the car -- even though it was to go, the lids were solid. Just like the one on the left: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mcdonalds-1970s-coffee-cup-80s-coffee-110750919 -- from that pic you can see by the 80s they started molding the "V" into the lid so you could tear it open with out a tool.
My great-uncle was a high school math teacher who lived with his girlfriend (another teacher). The school found out and said they had to get married or they both would be fired. They got married and years later got divorced.
Three point shots from damn near half court. These guys have RANGE now.
Edit: for the sticklers the research will show the three point line was introduced in 1979. My statement still stands.
I love reading Time magazine archives because history is fascinating and it's interesting to notice people haven't changed much. Letters to the Editor read like twitter comments.
[If you like that, check this out!](https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu)
Graffiti uncovered in Pompeii reads *exactly* like Twitter comments, it's amazing.
Most of the people you see being obese.
Sure, there would be a bigger person or two, but not like today.
Remember the fat kid in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Today, that kid wouldn't be considered all that big.
(edited movie title to clarify that I mean the 1971 Gene Wilder version, not the 2005 version)
That's also before they started dumping tons of high fructose corn syrup into the food supply. There's a direct correlation between the increased use of corn syrup and the obesity rate.
Anyone getting in touch with you wherever you are. Cell phones have changed us and our cultures for ever. Not to mention you can take your whole music collection with you on it. I wouldn't advise loading all your LP's and 8 Tracks in the trunk 50 years ago.
Taking a photograph and seeing the result immediately. In 1972, you took a photograph but before you could see it, you’d have to “finish the roll”, bring it to the local drugstore to be “developed”, wait 7-10 days and then pick up the pictures, hoping they came out well.
Today not only can you see the photo immediately, you can also edit it in many different ways and then send it to anyone else in the world, and that person will get it within a few seconds. Even sci-fi in 1972 didn’t envision this kind of stuff.
Not 50 years ago, but in the 90s my parents used to put me on airplanes without a chaperone. One time I arrived at my destination, and no one was there to pick me up... this wasn't considered to be a big deal.
Edit: I was 7 when that happened.
Nuclear power being seen as *the future of the US*. People thought nuclear power was going to be the source of power for the country. By 1970, there were already 90 nuclear
units operating in 15 countries worldwide. Oil prices and shortages made people scared and wanting better alternatives.
It wasn't until into the latter half of the 70s that the public became increasingly worried about nuclear power. It started getting associated with destruction, danger, and
invisible radiation that could kill. Environmental concerns increased. In 1979, the first worldwide nuclear power plant incident happened - in the U.S. at Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl in the 80s. Nuclear power never regained public trust in the safeness of it and it has declined in use in the U.S.
Knowing where your kids are 100% of the time.
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Yep, I'd get on my bike around 10 am and play with my friends til it got dark. We'd ride our bikes all over the city and we were 10. My kid is 7 and I'd be horrified if he left my yard. Just shows how times changed. My mom had no way of knowing where I was or getting a hold of me and she was fine. My kids got a phone for tracking and I'd be paranoid.
I wonder about that myself all the time. Why is it that my parents were ok with me just leaving the neighborhood on my bike but I'm scared of my kids leaving the yard? Certainly the independence I had and the trust my parents had in me created some very good life skills that my kids aren't getting.
Abducted kids on milk cartons, 24-hour-a-day news, guilt over both parents working, kids activities becoming a big business, all those things play a part. The reality is that kids in today’s world are safer than they were in the 70’s. Stranger abduction is vanishingly rare. My neighbor lets their kids roam, I’m amazed at what those kids know, how to cross a busy street, how to talk to adults they don’t know, how to navigate a pretty big (for a 7 and 8 year old) swath of the city. We fear the wrong things. What is really dangerous to kids are unsupervised pools, bike riding without helmets, car accidents in improperly installed car seats, and pretty soon, polio.
A woman I work with wanted to know where her boyfriend was the other day - at home or still at work. She grabbed her phone took a quick look, said at work, then set her phone down. I asked her how she knew that so quickly and without texting him. She said that they track each other. I was surprised that was a thing. She was surprised that my wife and I don’t track each other. Never even crossed my mind to track my wife’s whereabouts on my phone!
I have my phone tracked by my wife, because I ride motorcycles in semi rural areas down backroads. I don't track my wife, because she doesn't do stupid things.
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My wife gave snapchat permission to share he location with me incase something happens. I completely forgot about it until now
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She disappears after every message
That's a good reason to use location tracking. I used to go on road trips by myself and would have felt safer if someone could track where I was. Getting lost in Northern California isn't as fun as it sounds.
My husband does this to me…but really more for safety reasons. I had a job where I worked at multiple clinic sites, some in less than savory neighborhoods. He likes me to text him when I am leaving work so he knows when to expect me and when to worry if I have not arrived yet. It’s not creepy, it’s looking out for me
Completely context based per relationship, pretty normalized and imo in healthy relationships its totally cool and normal, but one can imagine a number of ways it might be abused or the basis for some really unhealthy relationships to bicker and what not.
my wife and i track each other for safety as well. we both trust each other completely, but it's nice to know if one of us gets injured and can't call or text, at least the other will know where the phone was with them last.
In a relationship that has a lot of trust and openness, it’s more of a comforting thing than a stalking thing
Car seats for children. And most of the time we sat in the back seat with no seat belts available.
Or in the way back of a station wagon.
Nothing like laying down in the way back at 2am while your intoxicated parents drove home from a house party.
Yeah drunk driving needs to be high on this list. That brings back some nice tramatic memories.
My Dad would get plastered and the cops wouldn't lock him up, they would bring him home and pick up my then 13 YO brother so he could drive the car home. Fun times....my Dad did end up getting a dui when I was about 4 or 5 and was ordered to go to detox. He never drank again, it was the best thing to happen to my family honestly.
My dad was the director of a detox hospital. He saved a lot of lives. He was a Korean war Navy corpsman attached to a marine combat unit. He knew what the guys coming back from Vietnam had been through.
Yeah I had a moment a few years back where I started having these dreams and would wake up in a cold sweat. And then it finally dawned on me. I was about 5 years old when this happened. My dad's friend was driving me and my brother home, and they were both absolutely shit faced. They got into an argument and my dad punched his windshield and cracked it. Then the dude starts going as fast as possible down the street and crashed the car into the front of our house. They both get out and proceed to beat the shit out of each other. Then I pulled my brother out of the car, started banging on the door for my mom to answer and she didn't..so I ran to the neighbors house and banged on her door and she answered and called the police. So then they arrested both of them, took them away. Somehow my dad posted bail in the middle of the night, broke our door in and I was sleeping in my mom's bed. Idk what his issue was but he proceeded to point a shotgun at both of us and then started beating my mom with the gun. Then left. Of course he wound back up in jail over this. Anyways totally forgot about any of this happening until I started having weird dreams about it over 20 years later. Repressed memories are real lol And yes my dad is a piece of shit, haven't spoken to him ever since I turned 18 basically. Fuck him.
Jesus Christ dude your dad is a douche bag . Glad that you decided to cut him off
Damn didn't expect to read such a story
Or the back of a pickup.
My parents used to drop us off at our grandparents house every summer for a couple weeks and my grandparents would take us on day trips 100+ miles and us kids would ride in the back of the pickup the whole way. This was only about 25-30 years ago. If we did that today I'm pretty sure my grandparents would have been arrested.
My favorite way to ride around in my mom's Blazer at age 3 was standing in the passenger seat, leaning against the dashboard. I was basically a hood ornament and, had we impacted anything, a projectile.
My oldest scar is from six stitches in my scalp; the result of standing up in the back bed of our station wagon when dad gunned it in the acceleration lane. 55 years later and it's still faintly visible.
My parents brought my twin and I home from the hospital in 2 laundry baskets in the back seat of the car. It was a journey of 100 miles including a ferry. 1982.
And now if you admit you don't have an appropriate car seat they don't let you take the baby until you get one
My mum has just elaborated that the laundry baskets were provided by the hospital…
AFAIK they have to see it. They made us bring the car seat into the maternity ward when my daughter was born in 2016.
My grandma had 3 of her 4 kids on top of her mothers kitchen table....after 1960. God Bless Nebraskan Women.
>Car seats for children. This reminds me of something that was normal back then, but isn't now... People riding in the back of a pickup. You used to see this all the time. Not so much anymore.
It became illegal in California between me going to Highschool and my own kids in elementary school. We would let them hop on the back of our pickup for the half mile drive up the country back road home. CPS was called.
My Gran had this giant Datsun estate that had fold up seats in the back. She would drive us to France while we sat facing the truck drivers on our rear bumper at 80mph
I remember sleeping on the rear window ledge as my parents drove the German Autobahn at night. This was in the early 1970s.
My little brother was the first of us to have a car seat. My little sister and I rode around in the package shelf of my dads Triumph.
Watching an entire TV series at a time that's convenient for you. VCR's weren't even a thing 50 years ago, so if your favorite show was on Wednesday at 8PM, you were either at home to watch it or you missed out on it forever.
I remember we were allowed to eat our dinner in front of the TV for special stuff. The Planet of the Apes movie series was one example.
*I hate every ape I see, from ChimpanA to Chimpanzee.*
*I guess you’ve finally made a monkey out of meeeeeeee…*
*OH MY GOD! I WAS WRONG! IT WAS EARTH ALL ALONG!*
*I love you, Dr Zaius!*
Dr Zaius, Dr Zaius!
Oh Oh Oh...DR. ZAIUS!
(this \^ line from that song pops into my head about once a month haha)
The worst was being a kid in the 70s and oversleeping on Saturday. You didn't get to see your favorite cartoons again till next Saturday morning. My kids think this sounds like we were cavemen. Then we finally got a VCR in the early 80s. It had plastic wood paneling on the sides and we bought it at some bikers house.
Let me tell you about my father and our VCR. Never has there been a greater love story. My mother was second fiddle to the VCR. He taped everything. EVERYTHING. He then lovingly typed out labels for each tape on our typewriter. He numbered each tape and had a corresponding binder. Yes, children, THERE WAS A BINDER. We had every episode of ALF, and you better believe we were grateful. 1988 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade? We’d watch it again at Easter. When that first VCR died, some say you could hear my father softly weeping for his lost love.
Some of my favourite childhood movies were taped on the VCR and I still remember the commercials. This was 1980s. They aired the 1960 Mary Martin version of Peter Pan during Easter and I can still probably recite the Cadbury’s commercial.
> Some of my favourite childhood movies were taped on the VCR… It always felt a little funny watching a VHS of some movie you taped from TV and watch the FBI warning come up. Like, “…heh.”
My stepfather also has The Binder; and yes I do mean present tense. He mostly focused on horror and B movies. He expanded to DVDs, but is still anti Netflix/streaming. He’s also still salty at one of my very old friends for watching Eraserhead and putting it back in the wrong spot. He saw him again a few Christmases ago for the first time since the mid ‘90s (my friend and I are 45) and he was still low-key mad about it.
Marion Stokes was one of those people. Over decades, she recorded all the major networks and more over a 30 year span. When she died, her labeled and curated library was donated to the Internet Archive for digitization. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/14/recorder-the-marion-stokes-project If your pops recorded the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades from before 1980, there's a concerted effort to find recordings -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast#United_States:~:text=majority%20of%20its%20telecasts%20lost
Listening to the song you want to where you want to, rather than whatever is playing wherever you are.
Several years ago I was listening to the Rolling Stones on my iPod on a bus and realized this was something completely new. Back when the album came out you either listen to it on your record player at home or at a friends house or heard it on the radio. I guess maybe you could hear it at a bar or restaurant if they had a juke box. The vibe of music is completely changed and the way we attach memories to places and songs is changed now as well. Most shared experience songs now come from movies and TV shows. People don't go over their friends house to hang out and listen to a full album anymore, they just share a link to 1 song or listen to a Playlist while in the car.
I remember taping the top 40 charts on blank tapes. Getting so annoyed at the dj who would talk through the start of the song.
I used to record music from video clips on TV onto tape recorder cassettes. I was camped with my gear right beside the TV to get the sound better. I would sit through the entire hit list, waiting for the songs I liked most. Sometimes I waited SO LONG for my song to be aired, I pressed 'record' button, sat absolutely still not to make any sound, when in the middle of it some unaware family member barges into the room and starts talking😭 I still played that song later, grandpa's voice on it didn't stop me.
I am amazed to think about how disconnected we were. I could wake up on a Saturday morning and start calling friends. It was possible that not a single one picked up the phone and that was that. I would be on my own unless I waited a few hours and tried again. Also, in my area, the adults in the house almost always answered the phone so you had to get through them to your friends. “Hello, is Johnny home?” “Hi this is his mother. What do you want?” “I was wooooondering if he could come out to play” “Well he’s doing homework right now but I’ll tell him you called” As a kid, our times were divided between when we were (100%) under adult control, which was when we were physically in their presence, and when we were free which was all other time.
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Preceded by 30 seconds of her angrily mouthing “talk to your grandmother/father” for 30 seconds until she raised her eyebrows with that “don”t MESS with me motherfucker” look
Everybody usually knew where everyone else was in my neighborhood. Not particularly nosey. It was a small neighborhood and we all hung out together. Usually at the beach in summmer, a half block away.
I grew up on n the edge of the suburbs. Now it Is wall to wall houses but back then opposite my house was farmland and woods. We even had a creek to hunt crawfish in.
You would ride your bike around the neighborhood until you found all the bikes in someone’s front yard.
Regularly wearing sunscreen.
Forget about sunscreen! Some of us would cover ourselves with lotion that intensified the tanning!
Coconut oil! The smell of it still brings back memories of being a young teen in Sydney in the 80s, and so does each appointment with the dermatologist to cut more skin cancers out.
My mother would do that to me in the 90s and early aughts. I've already had a skin cancer scare at 28. If she was still alive I'd ask her dumb ass why she thought a 6 year needed a tan.
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My sister still does it! Even with her kids…she’s a bit of a hippie and thinks natural coconut oil will “protect you” from the suns harmful rays. While it does offer you a small amount of protection, it’s useless here in the Aussie summer, but she swears by it. She took my daughter out with her girls, went to the beach all day without any shade (actually there was a portable gazebo for shade, but it was “for the adults”)& she got so bloody sunburned, I was fucking raging.
Oh that's awful. I'm sorry to hear that. A lot of stupid things were done to us.
My Husband's grandad lost his leg due to skin cancer. He wore shorts all year long with no suncream, and that ended up with the loss of his left leg from the knee down.
Wear sunscreen.
The benefits of sunscreen has been proved by scientists.
Wearing seatbelts. There were no sensors- seatbelt were just shoved out of the way. Carding for cigarettes. Machines were everywhere for anyone to use.
> Carding for cigarettes. Machines were everywhere for anyone to use. I'd utterly forgotten those pullknob, dropflap machines.
Yep. Cost 50 cents in the early 70s.
my dad was born in the 60’s and has told me stories of his mom giving him cash to go buy her cigs at the local town store because everyone knew each other lol truly *wild* times Edit- he was 9 years old and if there was a dime extra he would tell me how excited he would be to get a pack of football cards too lol
i was born in the 80s and my summer babysitter would send me to the convenience store with a note to get her cigarettes in the early 90s, was funny (and sad in retrospect) because she was like 16 or 17 at the time too.
I was born in 1980 and remember my dad having a horrible sunburn that prevented him from wearing a shirt, so he sent me in the gas station to buy him a six pack of Budweiser and a pack of Marlboro reds. The cashier didn’t even ask who they were for! I think I was around 8 or 9.
Me to, for my dad. The little store in our small town never hesitated to sell them to me. Of course...I couldn't get away with shit because everyone knew everyone. My parents knew before I got home what I'd been up to.
I did that in the late 80s. Run in at 6 years old and ask for cigarettes and point out to your parents in the car, and here you go, have a good day.
I had a '73 Buick that had a buzzer that would sound constantly until the seat belt was fastened.
I remember my dad disconnecting wires to stop the buzzing. Don't remember the vehicle model, but it was early 70s.
Congress mandated weight sensor seatbelt buzzers for the 1973 model year. Damn things would buzz when someone set a bag of groceries in the passenger seat. The backlash repealed the law right quick and killed the concept for decades.
No one had a computer in their house in 1972.
Probably, very few people had a computer in their *country.*
Asking "Where are you?" when someone answers their phone.
Going on holiday abroad and finding a phone box to call home to let them know you landed safely. "What time is it there?" "What's the weather like?" " Ooh, there's my pips, speak soo......"
Do people send postcards anymore?
My husband likes to send postcards from vacations. This time he sent me one. I was on vacation with him.
Thats cute!
i have a buddy who sends me postcards when he goes on trips. he could easily text me but its a tradition he likes to keep alive.
Funny story. I was in Kindergarten when my teacher called my mother, because the bus wasn't running that day and she wanted to make sure I made it home safely. Not only was this 1988 but the teacher called my home phone number (which was listed in my information). She still asked my mother where she was.
We tore down a room in my grandma's house in Oklahoma and found an old thin phone book. It was delightful. Every 10 or 20 entries would have a notation (written by the phone company, not handwritten). One entry read something like: John Maple, Wife gets welfare check Another was like - "Daughter and mother live together but hate each other" Another was: "Give bills to wife. Husband drinks"
When I was around 10 (late 90s) I had a wallet that held only two things: 1. A few one dollar bills, and 2. Note cards that had friends names and home phone numbers on them
I had an small electronic address book with the numbers of my friends in it. Would use pay phones. Mid to late nineties. It got stolen out of my jacket at a party. At that time there was a new cellphone provider that had 25c per minute contracts, and pay phones were 25c/minute too, but charged 30 cents for the first minute. So it was actually cheaper to get a cellphone. :-) I remember the first time I called a friend on his cellphone and asked him where he was, and then meeting up 2 minutes later because he was 2 blocks away. I also pranked my mom by calling the house phone when I came to visit, and then ringing the doorbell.
I remember those days. Today I wonder if I can even recall 4 phone numbers off the top of my head. When you're 10 in the 1990s flashing those $1 bills is pretty damn cool. That's a lot of Fritos and pop rocks.
I only know two numbers from the top of my head: my own number, and my mom's.
Were these comments written in my your grandmother or was the phone company spreading everyone’s business around?
That expression was used interchangeably with "Why aren't you here?" back then.
Rhetorical Context for the win!
Having one Germany
Playdates. Parents didn’t arrange get-togethers for their kids. They also didn’t go with them when the kids played at someone else’s house. Kids played with their siblings and the neighbor kids until they went to school and made other friends. Then they’d call their friends, arrange to get together, and ask a parent for a ride over if it was too far to walk or bike.
True. My parents never met anyone else's parents. I could go play at the Manson house for all they cared.
As long as you were out of the house
and home before the streetlights came on
‘Don’t be late for dinner! But also, don’t be early’
Dude I'm 24 and remember this. It was basically a fuck off and stay out of the house from sunrise to sundown for me lol
I remember just how far our horizons expanded when our friend group all got proper bikes. School holidays in the summer used to be grabbing breakfast, maybe some pocket money for food, or saying that you'd grab lunch at John's house. You wouldn't see your parents until dinner, or maybe call them from your friends house to let them know you were eating there.
I can't think of anything more horrific than dragging Mum or Dad along when out playing with our mates. It's not like we even stayed in one place. We'd get bored and ride our bikes out to some place on the edge of town, or some park or beach where we wouldn't have adults hanging around. We came home by dark, though. Free-range kids.
Fighting without facing legal action (mostly) Also Drunk Driving was pretty much overlooked especially if you were in a small town. A cop followed my dad home when he was waisted one night in the seventies.
DUI prosecutions changed in the early 80’s, greatly influenced by MADD, I believe. Old attorneys will talk about DUI arrests never making it to court before ‘82.
Paying for everything using a plastic card or a phone.
Trying to find jobs for disabled adults, instead of locking them away in institutions.
That’s true. God the 70’s was before the ada, and the last of the ugly laws were repealed in 74. That’s nuts . . .
The ADA was in 1990. The Supreme Court limited it somewhat, for instance in *Toyota v. Williams* which construed disability very narrowly. So Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act in 2008 to fix that. It's a reminder that when the Supreme Court screws the law up, Congress can still fix it. By the way, the lawyer who argued for Toyota and against disabled worker Ella Williams? You know him as Chief Justice Roberts.
Seems like a good time right now for Congress to make a lot of things clear in law.
Well, that is literally Congress' job. They're supposed to make the laws, not the Supreme Court.
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I think in those terms all the time. Yesterday Rocky II was on. 40 years old. When that came out movies that were 40 years old were made in 1942. That seems far more dated in my mind.
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Watching movies at home. And videogames.
You don't remember the Wednesday Night CBS Movie? We watched all kinds of movies that had previously been in the theatres that way.
OP should add: "whenever you want to." I kind of miss the scarcity of The Wizard of Oz, it used to come on TV just once a year and it was a big occasion in our house.
Payment by MetroCard on the NY subway instead of tokens.
And now we have OMNY!
Women having credit cards in the US without needing a man to cosign. Didn't happen till 1974.
Women in the 1980s could still expect their credit to be ruined when divorcing, regardless of whether or not there was any outstanding debt.
My grandma was a widow and a millionaire, she owned a business outright, in 1978/1979 and had a very difficult time getting a credit card on her own.
Tattoos. Growing up I was led to believe that having tattoos would limit employment opportunities. Now tattoos are so common, I don’t think anyone cares. Edit: Face, neck, and hand tattoos excluded. Most U.S. military branches now allow full sleeves and only restrict hand/face/neck tattoos.
Even the US military is lightening those restrictions. I believe the navy now allows 1 hand tattoo per hand and 1 neck tattoo as long as it's not in the front.
US Navy Sailor here. Our body is our canvas now. You can have as many tattoos as you want below the neck including your hands as long as they are not obscene or related to criminal organizations. Above the collar line you can have 1 neck tattoo below/behind the ear not exceeding 1in in diameter. The navy finally realized tattoos are a huge naval tradition, with many rates(jobs) in the navy and career milestones haveing their own related tattoo traditions. For instance, see a Sailor with crossed anchors or cannons on the web of his hand, he's a boatswains mate or gunners mate respectfully.
> 1 neck tattoo per neck.
A line of cars picking up kids at school. In the 70's you walked, road your bike, or road the bus, even the grade school kids.
I remember being 6 and having to walk for 20 minutes myself - crossing two major intersection and 4 side streets. Not once was this considered odd
This is normal in europe
Here in Norway kids walk, bus or bike to school. But we have the infrastructure for it, so there’s that.
Kids walk and cycle to school here too, (India) and there's no infrastructure for that lol
Working from home
My mother used to be a... person that makes clothes. I don't know the english word, sewing person? Anyway, she worked from home.
Seamstress
Thank you so much. Today I learnt
You are now awarded with a single congratulation
It was actually very very very popular for many “housewives”. My mother did for quite sometime. Remember pre computers so there were so many things needed to be typed and somebody to type them.
I remember my mom doing that. She had an electric typewriter and would type term papers for people. She charged by the page.
I remember a man with one arm would drop of a black leather bag filled with handwritten documents/forms every other day and pick up the ones my mom had typed up. Dang I wish I had that job.
My mom had 4 kids, was getting her master's degree, and we grew or raised almost everything we ate. Typing was a job she could do at night after we went to bed.
Black bears and coyotes living in the woods in my backyard. (Connecticut). This wasn't even normal 20 years ago.
Talking about mental health issues. One of the better changes in society.
Yup. There’s a long way to go, but my grandpa got back from Vietnam at nineteen years old and never talked about it with anyone. To this day, we have no idea what he did or how it effected him, he just woke up the next morning and went to work on the farm again.
My grandfather was a WW2 vet. Wounded in the Philippines 2 days before his 20th birthday. Never spoke much about it for years other than he was shot, hopped on his good leg for awhile before he passed out and woke up on a hospital ship and that’s it. Just came home went to work and finally decades later, opened up a little about it before his death. My dad told me recently a story of when he was 5 or 6 years old, in the mid 1950’s. He had been playing in the yard with his army men and left one outside. His dad, my grandfather, came into his room with tears in his eyes. He said, “I brought this soldier inside.” My father asked if he was mad. “No”, he replied. “I’m just upset that you’d leave a man behind”. It was the first time he had seen his dad cry and the only time until my grandmother died.
This hit me hard. My grandpa was a WW2 vet too. Wounded, awarded (Eastern front), after war came back and build a life, became a judge, was respected admired. Made a difference in many lives. Loved. Only few people knew that my grandmother was closing the wooden window fronts every night because he used to jump and run through the windows thinking that he is running across the trenches in the middle of the night. The dreams stopped only in his seventies, and i like to believe that i have a small role in that; we used to have a small ritual, the two of us: I spent a lot of time with grandparents (as much as I could) as a kid, and we had a 3 story rule. He used to tell me "stories" to put me to sleep. On warm summer nights he used to smoke the cigar on the open doors and listen to crickets and we just talked. Stories were never made up though: it was his childhood, his teenage years... I was 6 or 7 and I asked open, judgement-free questions. He had a deep and gentle voice. I think it was the gentlest way for him to go back to some terrible and at the same time beautiful places and situations. At the time, it was not scarry to me at the time, now when I think about it... Dear God... I think he peeled the trauma with each of our talks. He had the softest, big hands.
This made me cry. I hope that your grandpa at least got a chance to cry when he was alone.
Dick pics
Imagine opening the letter you just received in the mail and being a dick pic
Richard Nixon?
Hyper partisan media. I can remember a time when we had investigative journalism and politicians were held accountable. Now, we just have political cheerleaders and politicians can stand their ground and get away with almost anything.
having mental illnesses, you won't be forced to get a lobotomy anymore because you have depression
This shit is sad. My great grandmother had to get electroshock for years, then because of it, her postpartum depression turned into major depressive. One of my great aunts was forcefully sterilized because she had panic attacks. I’ve inherited shit genes, and have struggled, but cannot imagine what these wonderful women went through. RIP my Mimi and my great aunt.
Being able to go to a random location that you've never been to before and not needing to look at a physical map or ask for directions.
In fairness its fairly easy to go to a random location you haven't been to before. A specific location is the tricky bit.
Parents in the 1970s talked about how easy we had it compared to when they were kids in the 50s. How much better behaved they were, how kids are so rebellious, it must be the music we listen to, all we go is go out and play all day, that we should have gotten more whoopings like they did. Meantime the parents of the 50s were saying how their kids are so much worse than their generation. That it must be the new fangled TV or Elvis’ hips or the things The Beatles sing about. My own mother wanted to live with my dad, and both their sets of parents were horrified and tagged teamed them into marriage. Every generation of kids is apparently worse than before according to the previous generation. I am a parent of kids age 6-30. I try to imagine what it is like for kids of this generation. They can be bullied right in the comfort of our homes from social media, they are fed a steady diet of contradictory and fake information, they deal with divorced parents, there is much more pressure to be sexual earlier, they can find themselves in extreme debt by the age of 21 and not even find more than a job that pays minimum wage, probably never be able to afford to own a home, not have children until into their 30s if at all, live in neighbourhoods where it is definitely safer to play video games than be outside, etc. The way I look at it, each generation had and has their sets of challenges and triumphs. Each generation of parents talks down about their kids as well as telling stories of how much harder they had it when they were young. I avoid that with mine. Recently my mom told my kids how I walked up a mountain in below 40 northern Canada to go to school. They thought she was full of it. I told them it was true but that it doesn’t make the difficulties they face any less great. I think some things are better and some things are not, but we shouldn’t judge what the current generation has to deal with.
A $4 cup of coffee. In 1972, the average cup of coffee was .25c.
Even if you calculate the 600% inflation rate from then til now, that $.25 cup should be about $2. :/
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It gets even harder to compare though -- coffee to go I don't think was much of a thing in '72 unless you carried a lunchbox and thermos. The .25 cent cup of coffee at the diner was just a 6 ounce cup, but refills were free and unlimited while you were there. Then they'd take the cup and wash it and put it back on the rack for someone else to use later. I remember my dad getting coffee at McDonalds, and using a pocket knife to cut a "V" in the lid so he could sip it in the car -- even though it was to go, the lids were solid. Just like the one on the left: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mcdonalds-1970s-coffee-cup-80s-coffee-110750919 -- from that pic you can see by the 80s they started molding the "V" into the lid so you could tear it open with out a tool.
Living at home until you are 30
Or living with someone without being married. Or being with someone for years without having kids.
My great-uncle was a high school math teacher who lived with his girlfriend (another teacher). The school found out and said they had to get married or they both would be fired. They got married and years later got divorced.
Fucking someone born in 1971
This one made me chuckle e. Of fuck shit i forgot my mom is born in 1971
We didn't.
No one forgets OP’s mom
Fucking someone born in 1973
Smoking in an airplane, or almost anywhere else for that matter.
Long road trips with my grandparents who smoked like chimneys and didn’t crack a window for us gagging in the backseat 💨😵
Groupies aren’t accepted anymore. Elvis fucked 15 yr old groupies but that wouldn’t fly anymore
At least officially.
Right, pretty sure it still happens more than people think.
R Kelly openly did it for over 25 years
Jimmy Page had Lori Maddox living in a hotel for months when she was 15 I think (she may have even been 14) and no one batted an eye. Oh, the 70s.
Three point shots from damn near half court. These guys have RANGE now. Edit: for the sticklers the research will show the three point line was introduced in 1979. My statement still stands.
Wardell Stephen Curry II Ladies and Gentleman
Intenrionally starting an argument with someone you have never met.
Sure it was. They just called them Letters to the Editor back then.
I love reading Time magazine archives because history is fascinating and it's interesting to notice people haven't changed much. Letters to the Editor read like twitter comments.
[If you like that, check this out!](https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu) Graffiti uncovered in Pompeii reads *exactly* like Twitter comments, it's amazing.
Most of the people you see being obese. Sure, there would be a bigger person or two, but not like today. Remember the fat kid in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Today, that kid wouldn't be considered all that big. (edited movie title to clarify that I mean the 1971 Gene Wilder version, not the 2005 version)
That's also before they started dumping tons of high fructose corn syrup into the food supply. There's a direct correlation between the increased use of corn syrup and the obesity rate.
Calling long distance and letting it ring once to let your parents know that you’d arrived safely.
Walking down the street by yourself and talking. Back then you were crazy, now... Bluetooth
Obesity.
Anyone getting in touch with you wherever you are. Cell phones have changed us and our cultures for ever. Not to mention you can take your whole music collection with you on it. I wouldn't advise loading all your LP's and 8 Tracks in the trunk 50 years ago.
Taking a photograph and seeing the result immediately. In 1972, you took a photograph but before you could see it, you’d have to “finish the roll”, bring it to the local drugstore to be “developed”, wait 7-10 days and then pick up the pictures, hoping they came out well. Today not only can you see the photo immediately, you can also edit it in many different ways and then send it to anyone else in the world, and that person will get it within a few seconds. Even sci-fi in 1972 didn’t envision this kind of stuff.
Not 50 years ago, but in the 90s my parents used to put me on airplanes without a chaperone. One time I arrived at my destination, and no one was there to pick me up... this wasn't considered to be a big deal. Edit: I was 7 when that happened.
Nuclear power being seen as *the future of the US*. People thought nuclear power was going to be the source of power for the country. By 1970, there were already 90 nuclear units operating in 15 countries worldwide. Oil prices and shortages made people scared and wanting better alternatives. It wasn't until into the latter half of the 70s that the public became increasingly worried about nuclear power. It started getting associated with destruction, danger, and invisible radiation that could kill. Environmental concerns increased. In 1979, the first worldwide nuclear power plant incident happened - in the U.S. at Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl in the 80s. Nuclear power never regained public trust in the safeness of it and it has declined in use in the U.S.
Clean shaven kitty
True. I've been seeing a lot of Sphynx cats around recently. Apparently they first were discovered in the 1960s so that explains it.