When you look back, what's one memory that just floors you on how times have changed?

When I was seven, the kid who lived upstairs in our duplex joined me in going door-to-door around the neighborhood to shovel snow out of driveways. We got a little bit of pocket money, and just about every other house had us come inside for hot chocolate or tea. Lots of fun. No parents in sight.

I can’t imagine any sane parents these days allowing two first graders to wander out of the yard by themselves, much less inside the homes of strangers for a whole afternoon.

The safety gear.

Helmets, shin guards, seat belts, safety glasses.. oh my!

That and techie toys. Kids have mobiles, and PSP whatever, computers used to teach children in school.

Allergies. Food allergies. And obesity. It was quite rare for kids to have food allergies when I was in school. And if a kid was fat they were picked on.

Now bullying is according to the hype heinous crime that can result in suicide…

No one had a right to be that fragile. It’s just odd..

^^^GA

I think of that a lot, too, @Seek_Kolinahr. Especially if you get a kid online (like here) asking about ways to make some extra money. I always start with, ” Well, first you can’t do anything without your parents knowledge and permission!”

@Unbroken I worked in a food factory doing night sanitation. We were a uniform, boots and a hard hat. Sometimes safety glasses. By the time I retired 20 years later, it was a 30 minute ordeal for those guys to suit up, and the chemicals were ¼ the potency.

Those heavy, dangerous, unpredictable metal skates.

I got a chemistry set when I was a kid that contained some chemicals you’d never find in a chemistry set nowadays. The experiments were actually pretty cool, and only a little bit lethal. One involved setting sulfur on fire (releasing SO2 gas, which becomes sulfuric acid in contact with your lungs and nasal passages). Another involved burning magnesium ribbon (which burns at around 5600°F). There were also a few experiments that asked for a mysterious substance not included in the kit—urine. I didn’t know what that was, so I asked my mom if we had any. She said we didn’t.

From what I hear, chemistry sets nowadays are pretty unexciting affairs. When I get nostalgic, I can just look at the scar in the palm of my left hand left by a broken glass tube and reminisce.

lol @thorninmud “urine. I didn’t know what that was, so I asked my mom if we had any. She said we didn’t.” Funny!

My older brother got out chemistry set and I remember much of the stuff you talk about. He cooked up some crap that ate the ends out of the test tubes. Given those kits and the internet, gourd knows what kind of bombs or drugs could be cooked. Oh, my brother would have been all over cooking up a nice batch of hallucinogens!

We used to have to drive miles and miles before there was a gas station or place to eat. Now they are every 15 minutes. There was no such thing as a freeway, and the trip from Denver to Grand Junction did not go through a mountain, but rather over it.

You could always see the mountains from downtown (both Denver and Los Angeles). In the 1980’s when I visited my parents in Denver, I cried when the plane landed and all we could see was smog.

When I was a young kid, service station attendants not only pumped your gas but also checked oil and water and tire pressure and cleaned your windows all around. In those years the 7–11 down the street from our house had curb service, movies cost a quarter, bubblegum was a penny, and kids went to the Public Library. I could fill pages on how much things have changed in my lifetime but I don’t want to bore you.

Candy cigarettes!

I don’t remember no freeway @YARNLADY, but I remember Stuckey’s and the Howard Johnson’s restaurants!

Not, not boring at all, @Pachyderm_In_The_Room. I have very fond memories of the Public Library. Back to @Seek_Kolinahr, my mom would drop me off at the Library and pick me up an hour or so later. LOL They’d probably call child services on her today.

I much preferred the bubble gum cigars, @Dutchess_III

I had an M&M gun. The thing looked like a handgun and literally shot M&Ms at a fast speed and with significant force. Kids had a choice of (1) turning the gun into his/her own mouth and pulling the trigger (if you’re picturing a 6-year-old committing suicide, you have the right image) or (2) shooting an M&M into a friend’s mouth (switch to the picture of a 6-year-old homicidal maniac).

Aside from the hideous imagery of kids putting a fairly realistic gun into their own mouths, or the mouths of their friends, and pulling the trigger, that thing was more immediately dangerous. It was a serious choking and aspiration risk, shooting high-velocity candy into kids’ mouths and sometimes down their windpipes (I believe that it was powered by a large rubber band).

Whether you’re aiming at the Viet Cong, a U.S.S.R. invasion, or your best friend, an M&M gun is clearly the weapon of choice. But, didn’t we already know that candy can be hazardous to a child’s health?

Until about 10 years ago, I had 20–600 vision. I couldn’t get around without my contact lenses. If I wanted a glass of water at night and didn’t have my eyeglasses, I had to put the tip of my index finger over the rim of the glass, so that I could feel when it was full.

After laser surgery, 20–25 vision. It was like a miracle. As soon as I’d gotten up from the operating table, I grabbed my surgeon and hugged him. (A very cool guy, and the same surgeon who’d performed the procedure on Patrick Ewing and Tiger Woods.)

Sometimes, changing times, and being floored, can be a wonderful thing indeed.

Was it Howard Johnsons who had that incredible chocolate that they used on Sundaes?

@SadieMartinPaul My eyes were that bad. Lasik WAS a miracle.

Great example with the M&M gun, @SadieMartinPaul! I can’t imagine that my mom would have let us have one, even back then. Although before my time, I collect these, and that’s a pretty scary thing to give a kid, too.

Great example on the surgery, too. I was hoping people would bring forward both positive and negative things.

Thanks!

Don’t know, @Dutchess_III. We went to HoJos because my mom had to have her pistachio ice cream fix! lol

When I was a young teen my girlfriend and I used to go to a place called Orange Julius. They made this wonderful orange-flavored concoction made with a secret powder and o.j., a forerunner, now that I think of it, of today’s smoothies. They were delicious!

I had one at a mall recently and it was terrible! Tasted nothing like the drink in the ‘50s.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room the secret ingredient was a raw egg. Dairy Queen has acquired the rights to Orange Julius and now offer them, at least here in the Midwest.

@ibstubro—YES, you’re absolutely right. I was going to say I thought I remembered they used eggs, but I just had a hard time believing it.

In the ‘50s my dad bought for his store one of the city’s first desk calculators. It did only four things—add, subtract, divide and multiply, didn’t even give a printout—and it cost well over $1,000. He LOVED it. Today you can pick up a tiny scientific calculator anywhere for a couple of bucks!

Transistor radios….

Something else that’s changed a lot over the decades—the weather.

A cancer diagnosis was a death sentence. Everyone smoked cigarettes everywhere, including doctor’s offices and the doctor often had one hanging from his lips while giving examinations.

Cars had big exterior sun visors above the windshield and, because the visor blocked your ability to see the traffic light, there was a thick glass pryzm on top of the steering column that you could look into and see when the light turned green.

When I first moved to Clearwater, Florida, every gas station had three restrooms: Male, Female, and Colored. On the main street, there were two clearly marked drinking fountains side by side on every block: White and Colored. Brown Brother’s Coffee Shop had a sign next to the cash register: No Coloreds will be Served Here and they didn’t have to have a third restroom. The local country club excluded Jews. They had their own clubs. We had segregated schools (except the Catholic School). We had new text books. The black public schools got the used public schools’ used ones along with their athletic and band equipment. The KKK was a legitimate men’s civic organization who that money to (white) hospitals, Little League Baseball, etc. The Little League, Babe Ruth League, PAL Football League, were for white kids only. Cub Scout Dens and Boy Scout Troops were segregated as were the Girl Scouts and Blue Birds.

We had coconuts on our palms, but never again after the freeze of ‘63. The bays were clearer, ice blue—you could see the bottom, but since they’ve blocked the natural ebb and flow of tide by building artificial islands for real estate purposes, they are now dark grey or dirty blue-green. Mullet schools migrating the bays were literally measured by the acre on the nightly fish report, a segment of the local news. People often burned trash in the back yard in 55 gallon drums. The Mass was said in Latin. We rarely ever watched TV before dinner. The local paper was 10 cents. Today it’s $1.00. A cup of coffee was 10 cents and a penny tax. Krystal hamburgers were five cents each. A new, white Van Heusen dress shirt cost six bucks.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room Haha..Orange Julius I almost forgot!

I was a kid in the 60’s and came of age in the mid-to late 70’s.
Endless days of unsupervised roamings around, driving around half lit with your friends and the cops would pull you over and just say ” You girls better be getting home now.” haha
No helmets and I was an avid bike rider, horsewoman, river rafter/kayaker.

Most of all no freaking CELL phones! How the hell did we ever survive without the internet and cell phones and video games? Our parents actually kicked us out of the house no later than 10 a.m. after Saturday morning cartoons.
” Go out and PLAY!”

We actually PLAYED outside, rode our bikes, roller skayed, played “Ditch’em” in vacant fields, went swimming all day in the park and weren’t little fatties from sitting on our electronically controlled little butts all day.

Yes, @Pachyderm_In_The_Room, I remember when my mom got our first calculator. It was small and it printed (Technics) but had cost a pretty penny (my mom, over $10). She kept it in a drawer in the kitchen and we were not allowed to touch it the first couple of years. Later she’d let me take it out and play with it. Add and multiply number and marvel at it’s speed and consistency. I believe myself to have been an ‘odd’ child. lol

(my, @Coloma, electronically controlled little butts?)

pay phones > cell phones
radios > 60-plus inch plasma TVs
Encyclopedia Britannica > Internet
phone calls or face-to-face chats > tweets and IMs
Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck > Amazon
Christmas > most critical retail season
Halloween on Oct. 31 > Halloween, starts in early October
rakes > leaf blowers
baseball bats > guns
Churchill, FDR > Tom Cruz, Sarah Palin
cigarettes > e-cigarettes
crayons and coloring paper > iPads
chemistry sets > bomb-making instructions
girlfriends and boyfriends > S/Os
Pencil and paper > tablets
typewriters > computers

I specified one, @Pachyderm_In_The_Room, but that was a great list and I couldn’t kick it for crackers. It’s like the index of the question, appearing in the middle.

Thanks.

Being a spring chicken, I can’t contribute my own memories, but a conversation with my husband’s grandpa today might be relevant.

We were discussing the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination and I asked him if he remembered what he was doing when it happened. He said he was in math class and they announced the shooting on the radio and the death a few minutes later. He mentioned that a few people were clapping. My husband and I were surprised about that. His grandpa said, “now, this was South Carolina in the 60s, when they had separate state fairs for black people and white people and no one was scared to tell you what they thought.” His grandpa is a southern baptist republican, but even he expressed his disgust at this. All I could say was, “and they call those the good ole days!” Good ole days, my ass.

In the mid-seventies, I took an introductory class in Architectural Engineering. Along with our textbook, we had to buy this new, fantastic, state-of-the-art Texas Instrument calculator that did geometry and trig calculations. The instructor was all excited when he talked about this amazing marvel. We wouldn’t be needing our slide rules anymore, we now would have at our very fingertips the brainpower that just a few years previously required a computer that took up four-acres in a temperature controlled building. The guy was ecstatic. It would cost us all $78 each at the bookstore. We totally freaked at the cost.

I was a member of the Gun Club in Junior High School. We brought hand guns and rifles to school for the after classes meeting. Have the guns unloaded was a requirement. This was in the 1950’s.

My friends and I used to play down in the canyons of Southern California. We’d be sent out to play right after Saturday morning cartoons, and wouldn’t return until dusk. No cell phones, no search parties. We’d build forts, create roads and bury secret treasures in those canyons. My best friend and I, being artistes, would dig clay out of the side of the hill and make creations that we would dry on top of the water heater.

No one would, or have wanted to spend the day inside the house (some of my young cousins, almost seem to have a phobia about playing outside, unattached to phones or electronics, and it pains me) We had things to do, and places to be. We rode bikes, and roller skated (with those metal wheeled skates that would catch in the cracks of the sidewalk sending you careening onto your knees, which would inevitably get scraped and start bleeding, or onto your arse) and we had swing sets and sand boxes and vacant lots and other kid’s backyards, and miles and miles of canyon. We were also allowed to walk about a mile to the liquor store where we’d spend about 25 cents total for a Freezer Pop, a bag of Laura Scudders BBQ Potato Chips and a Hershey bar.

If we were just playing in the neighborhood (also, completely unsupervised) when it was tieme for dinner, all the Dad’s would come outside and each one would have their specific whistle to call you home for dinner. Not an actual whistle like a coach would use, but their actual voice whistling.

Shop class. They got rid of before I was old enough.

The blue start up screen.

Doing chores like cooking dinner, washing laundry, vacuuming and dusting mowing the grass and spreading fertilizer while my parents were at work, before I was ten.

Three wheelers.

Little girls dressing like little girls.

Homophobia. Rascism.

It was rare kids were on Ritalin and diagnosed with behavorial problems.

I read (and enjoyed) every word of your post, @Kardamom

Thanks

My brother and I were around 10 and 11 years old, and my Mom used to drop us off in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, and we would walk down to Montgomery Wards, while she did other shopping.
That whole area now is not fit for anyone.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room “Something else that’s changed a lot over the decades—the weather.”

Yeah. I remember the sky being a lot bluer.

Computer games when I was a kid.

@ibstubro One thing I like about my little community is that the library is a designated “Safe Place” – where you can actually bring your kids after school for a while and no one has a fit.

I wouldn’t leave a five-year-old there, but ten? sure.

We too were thrown out of the house to go play from morning till dusk, unsupervised. Well, I was in charge of supervising my little sister. I was 5, she was 2. I saved her life twice. Once she fell in a neighbor’s indoor pool. I remember thinking it was odd to have an indoor pool when we had saltwater canals running through out our back yard. They were man made and came came off of Tampa Bay (I think) like spokes, and had tides and ocean critters Probably alligators too. They were not fenced. and we were not watched.

I’ve been trying for quite a while to answer this, but each time I start reading the other replies, I laugh so hard I pee myself, and then I have to go take a shower. Espescially difficult to get past was the chemistry sets ans M&M guns. Actually, after the gun visual, I had a hard time getting into the shower, because I think I bruised a gut. Whoooooooooooo! Dry my eyes and try to pull it together.
I never lived down south, and I only visited as an adult. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to see a colored only sign. I lived on a farm, in an all white community. It wasn’t about who was welcome, just settlers claimed farmland, and it stayed in their families for generations. New people didn’t move in, until the Amish came. Our school invited a social worker from another county to visit our first grade class, so we could see a real colored person, and ask her questions. I saw her palms were lighter than the rest of her. I remembered this negro college commercial I’d seen. I asked her if the color had rubbed off scrubbing floors. She was a real sweet lady, and we must have seemed obscenely uninformed to her.
Cursive writing is no longer taught in most schools. I taught my daughter anyway, and told her that by high school, it will be like knowing a secret code. She has her own flash drive, looks like Mike from Monsters Inc. She wears it on a chain around her neck.
When we still lived on the farm, and I was about nine, I rode my pony to my best friends house, about three miles away. My mom followed in the car, because although there wasn’t much traffic on the highway by our house, everybody went seventy. She had the flashers going the whole way so people would see her and slow down.
When we moved to town, my brother and I rode our bikes all over until sundown.

Thanks, @Jonesn4burgers I wondered where you’d been!

I OWN a vintage “COLORED” sign that hung above a door, just as a piece of Americana.

I lived in California until I was 8½. Up to that time, when we visited San Francisco, I was allowed to wander all over downtown, the wharf, and ride the cable cars wherever I chose—just my little girlfriend and me.

But we moved to Mississippi. The first place we went was to the zoo. In the entrance, I saw the water fountain marked “white,” but when I looked far across the entrance, I saw the one marked “Colored.” I took off in a sprint toward the “colored” one, shouting, “Kool-Aid!” Mother grabbed me by the neck of my dress and started educating me. By the time she was through, I “knew” things I’d never before known. Just as I walked away from that lecture, a black family walked in. I looked the four up and down and quickly learned that what Mother had said was a lie. In deed, they looked far cleaner than I felt, and they were all dressed way better. From that moment on, I was suspicious of all white people, such that when I was introduced to that class of all-white 3rd graders, I ended the introduction with, “And I’m a Yankee.” For some reason, I never got along with any of my teachers there.

Were everyone of your teachers racist @Qav?

As far as I knew, and judging by how I was treated, but I was a mouthy brat about it. It would have been difficult for my teachers to be kind, in spite of me. I let it be known that I didn’t like anything about the South and was only somewhat nice . . . sometimes. I just wanted to go back home but Mother told me that I would spend the rest of my life in Mississippi, and I believed it. So, @Dutchess III, I was a complete little snot and didn’t care. I hated everything.

Now, I see some value in the experience and would actually like to go visit, but I have such an attitude that I probably would not live through the experience.

The South certainly has a bad rep.