I was always jealous of the kids that had a paper route. Got to ride their bikes and get paid for it.
Did anyone here have a go-kart? I had one with a Briggs&Stratton engine off a lawn mower. Drove the hell out of it. Used it to chase the wild hogs away from our truck patch. Keeping it running was my first serious experience with tools and engines.
I remember our first microwave oven…that thing was ridiculously expensive for the time. And I remember all the experimenting we did as a family to figure out what you could “cook” with it, and what you couldn’t…
Getting cable was a HUGE deal. I grew up in rural New Hampshire. Had a huge, directional antenna on the roof of our house until I was about 15. Got 4 channels…with varying degrees of fuzziness. Cable was, by comparison, quite awesome.
Getting an air conditioner in the house was very nice. I think we got that when I was 12. Hard to believe now that we ever lived without it.
Air conditioning as a standard option in a car…also very nice.
Being able to shoot guns in the backyard without worrying about hitting anyone…and not drawing an immediate police response.
We heated our entire house with a wood stove in the winter…which meant summer was spent cutting, splitting and stacking wood for the upcoming winter. I didn’t realize then how much physical labor was going to prepare me for the rest of my life. I see people doing sets of 10-12 reps with a sledge hammer on a tire and laugh. Try swinging one to split wood for 8 or 9 hours straight. Then come see me. (Some of you have done this…and you know exactly what I’m talking about.)
I’m not complaining though. I don’t look back on all of my youth fondly…but I’m glad life is easier now.
Anyone remember when cable TV didn’t have commercials?
I always thought you paid for TV precisely so you didn’t have to watch commercials.
We had 2 TV channels in black and white.
Now I have 100+++ in HD and I dont watch TV.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Great song.
Takes me back to when I was a young man.
How about buying a ticket for a movie, then either seeing it multiple times (Star Wars, f’rinstance), or else just waltzing into another (R) movie when your first movie (PG) was done?
I went door to door in a 120-unit apartment complex, selling potted plants, yarn weavings, and shoeshines. I also operated a frozen kool-ade business from my apartment, which was the most lucrative of all of my entrepreneurial ventures. A fifty-cent investment in Kool-ade powder and sugar netted two dollars in profit at a dime per Dixie Cup pop. And it was all tax free! Muahahahaha!
Later on, in Junior High, I would do odd jobs, like eradicating a yard of thistles. The owner of the yard offered me five cents for every thistle I removed, clearly having no idea how many thistles his yard contained, nor how tenacious I could be when cash money was involved. He ended up paying me fifty dollars.
I would also work at the local Renaissance Festival. Our school required athletes to work as trash-picker-uppers at the Festival, to offset the cost of uniforms and other expenses. But they also had the option of paying a surrogate to do the job for them. The going rate was twenty dollars for a full day’s labor, and I did it every weekend until I was 16. It was hard, dirty work, picking up after a bunch of fat Midwestern drunken slobs, but I got to enjoy the Festival at the same time, and before my sixteenth birthday I had saved 520 dollars, enough to buy a Colt Combat Government .45 pistol.
Yup, it was a different country then.
[quote]sufiandy wrote:
http://www.reproworthy.com/high-school-1970-vs-2015-accurate-hurts.html[/quote]
Fuck.
So true.
I had a Big Mac a few years back, pretty much tastes the same as it ever did, lousy. The Burger King Whopper always had it beat for taste, hands down. I eat fast food maybe 4-5 times a year and buy the sandwich only.
We had a 1/4 telephone.
What that meant was that you shared your telephone line with 3 other households and if one of those used their telephone, you did not.
The nationalized phone company assured us that the last of those lines would be offline by the year 2000. Happened a bit faster than that because cell phones.
We were surrounded by communist countries, well, on one side at least, so, semi surrounded, and Jesus, our radio signals needed to be amplified to reach all that mountain villages, you know.
That of course also meant that it reached the countries close to us, the Iron Curtain was probably a 100 kms away.
All that EM noise was of course provided by our also nationalized broadcasting company.
Much more subversive than most people realize.
While technically neutral, we mined all the Alpine passes because in case of a war we would have sucked Nato cock in a heartbeat and arent those North- South alpine passes a nice bargaining cheap (chip, I know, but cheap is interesting too)?
Of course Vienna would have been sacrificed, no way we could have held it.
We had milk cartels, cheese cartels, beer cartels and a plethora of other cartels and on top of a nationalized broadcasting and telecommunications industry, also a nationalized airline monopoly, also, trains, steel, and so further and so on…
Basically a socialist shithole under siege.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]treco wrote:
OP I thought the Burger King Whopper trumped the Big Mac back then - being ‘flame broiled’ and all.
Look up school pictures or magazines from that era and one thing that really stands out is how slim the general population was. A kid with 15% body fat was teased even shunned for being the fat kid. The middle aged have no bellies, double chins, wide asses,etc that seem to e the rule today
This bike was tricked out - 5 speed with big shifter, handle brakes, banana seat,shocks, sissy bar, whew![/quote]
I had that bike. THAT bike. It was green. The year was 1969. It was stolen off my front porch. Shucks.
[/quote]
You didn’t deserve that bike anyway, Push. If you did you would have know it was Apple Krate not “green”.
Btw, I had a red one except mine had a regular front wheel and forks with no shocks. Not stolen but my Webco BMX bike a few years later was stolen and I never really got over it. That’s why my grownup bike is an old school BMX. It’s an '84 Mongoose. I also have a 1977 Cook Bros that needs to be built.
[quote]Chushin wrote:
When I was in college taking a stats class, we entered our data on punch cards that then got run through a reader.[/quote]
The first computer I ever programmed (in BASIC) had to be booted up from a cassette tape.