In response to Other Things I Remember, reader (not “one of my readers”, my reader) KG sends in his list of things he remembers:
- TVs that took 2 minutes to come on and left a white dot in the middle of the screen for 10 minutes after you turned it off
- The UHF knob
- Changing channels by hand
- Pop Tarts packaged in a zip-strip foil package
- When Kelloggs Corn Pops were called Sugar Pops, Smacks were Sugar Smacks and Super Crisp was Super Sugar Crisp
- When you missed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at Christmas (or Charlie Brown, or any seasonal show), you MISSED it. Better luck next year.
- When you rented videos, you also rented the player.
- 8 tracks (to this day, I will pause in certain songs waiting for the track to change)
- Six to eight weeks for delivery
Hey, I remember eight tracks, too. And musical recording media you had to flip, such as records and cassettes. To this day, I think of the CDs that I upgraded from older media as having two sides. As for pausing in songs, I assume he means singing them, and I’ll have to admit that yes, when singing certain songs (Billy Joel’s “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”), I still sometimes truncate lines to accommodate a scratch in the my 45. Forty-five revolutions per minute record, you damn kids, not caliber.
So here are some other things I remember on a good day:
- Drive In Movies
Not in their heyday, of course, and not as a necker. It was cheaper to go to the movies by carload than by individual tickets, so my parents and other parents would combine the families into an Impala and off we’d go. I saw Xtro for the first time at the drive in. Come to think of it, it’s the only time I saw the movie. - Air Raid Drills
Not that putting my head between my knees against the wall of the school corridor would have extended my life by a single millisecond when the concussion wave of a nuclear blast hit, but that’s the official policy of schools and government everywhere: we care, and we’re making a show of doing something, no matter how ineffective. - Basement Rec Rooms
Anyone with mostly dry basements, some wood, and some second hand carpet had a room with an old sofa and perhaps a console stereo where they could send the kids. Or maybe those were Wreck Rooms, I don’t know. Sure, people have dens and whatnot, but they’re upgrades now, with new furniture and elaborate entertainment facilities.Or perhaps I am just lamenting the lack of a rec room in this house which I could convert into a sweet bar.
- Bell Bottoms, the Original
I remember these all too well because by the time they were handed down to me / recycled from the neighbors, it was 1981 and I was the only kid in school wearing them yet. I was retro when retro wasn’t cool.
That’s all I can remember now. Now old Brian needs his nap, and maybe sometime I’ll tell you about the how good it was and how much better behaved children were in the 1980s. Or at least my parents asserted that the rest of the children were, why couldn’t I?
