…you ask a young woman in the glassware department of Gargantuan Booze Warehouse if they have any highball glasses and she doesn’t know what a “highball” is.
…you’re glad to see the latest shades of green, brown, gold, and orange back in style, because now you can haul out the old 1970s knick-knacks you stashed in the back of the closet because you could never bring yourself to throw them way.
…the piece of junk you gave to the Salvation Army last year is going for $500 at Snooty Antiquities.
…you think capris are just as unflattering now as they were back when you wore them and called them “pedal-pushers.”
…a front-loading washer brings to mind all those sudsy overflows and all those back-aches from bending over to unload and reload the darn thing.
…you find yourself instructing young women about how to hang their laundry out on a line.
…young girls tell you that women in the 50s dressed elegantly to do housework, and then say they know that’s so because they saw it on I Love Lucy reruns. 🙄
…you still have an Encyclopaedia Britannica in your bookcase.
…you know how to use an Encyclopaedia Britannica.
…you have a smallpox vaccination scar.
…you can remember when all women were SAHMs—or 99.8 percent of them, anyway.
…you think that holidays once came on specific days of the year, not on Monday. Come to think of it, school’s not supposed to start till after Labor Day, is it?
…you know how to use a typewriter.
…the last time you worked as a secretary you were called a “secretary,” not an “administrative assistant.”
…cheap tumblers remind you of the glasses and mugs gas stations used to give away.
…you miss having a gas station attendant fill your car, check the oil, and wash the windshield.
…you still use a lamp, tableware, wicker hamper, or other valuable purchased with S & H Green Stamps.
😀 Are you a survivor of some prior geologic age? What memories do you own to prove it?
Image: © S&H Green Stamps, date unknown. The fair use rationale for this use, educationally illustrating an article mentioning the depicted subject, is that the reduced size image of a trading stamp has no substantial impact on the commercial value of the original, and cannot replace it in the marketplace or diminish its value there (which is in any event negligible).
I can use a typewriter and rememeber writing my university essays on them, only to get to the second to last line of a sheet and realize I’d forgotten a sentence. retype the whole page.
while I no longer have my encyclopedias, I still remember their smell and how sharp their page edges were…especially the gilded ones.
I was just out hanging laundry on my line. I am 40 and live on a street with folks about a generation older than i am and I am the only one with a line LOL
@ Jolie: LOL! They ran those gilded pages through a knife sharpener before binding them.
Oh, the horror of the Smith-Corona portable! Every third page, you would get to the last line and the paper would scootch up as you were typing. Then you got to throw out yet another sheet and type it over.
I remember when stores only stayed open late one night a week-and late was 8pm. Most stores didn’t even open on Sundays.
I went to school in the 60’s and the girls were not allowed to wear pants.
Looking at old class photos I just noticed that no children were fat or each class had maybe one fat child.
@ Rebecca D: Yes! It was Thursday night! I think in the Big City the stores stayed open until 9:00 p.m. on Thursdays.
And do you remember when grocery stores opened at 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. and — mirabilis! — did NOT stay open all night long attracting all the passing cockroaches into your neighborhood?
I think kids weren’t fat because we played outside every day. And at school we had actual recess, not hateful P.E. or teacher-run activities, during which we ran around like banshees for a half-hour or 45 minutes.
How about silver-plated flatware bought using cereal boxtops? My mother, rest her soul, still had hers a couple of years ago when we were emptying her house. They found a home with a neighbor’s granddaughter who had just lost everything in an apartment fire, along with a lot of the other kitchen stuff they we were happy for her to have until she got back on her feet financially.
And I so agree about kids not getting fat because they played outside after school. I remember roller skating around the neighborhood with skates that I clamped on my shoes using a skate key.
@ Carol! Yes! I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller-skates, you got a brand-new key… Wonder if any young people today would even know what that’s about? And (heh) “about.”
My mother assiduously collected coupons from the murderous tobacco manufacturers, who for some time used a plan not unlike Green Stamps to lure people into buying more and more of their products. Unknown to me, she was saving up for a wedding gift: a VAST collection of frou-frou cheap silverplate, which she was very proud to present to me on my wedding day.
Heaven help us.
Well, I thought it was truly hideous, but I did use it occasionally when we had a lot of people over for dinner.
Then, after the tobacco addiction killed her, I couldn’t stand to look at the stuff. But on the other hand, it broke my heart to think of getting rid of it, because she did go to a great deal of trouble to collect it for me — my father would never have allowed her to go out and buy a set of tableware for me! — and because she was SO proud of herself for having found a way to get it.
Somewhere along the line, the ex- and I acquired a set of Christofle silverplate. When I ran away from home, I grabbed the Christofle and left the giant set of cigarette-coupon plate in the dining-room drawer, where the last I saw it still resides. LOL! If only his current wife knew the history behind some of that stuff she so blithely accepts.
I’m stuck on the idea that you might still have something you purchased with green stamps. Really? I don’t think I do, but I wonder if my mom, who is 83, does.
When there were 2 television stations here in the UK; they transmitted for 2 hours over lunchtime with programmes for children and housewives.Then started again at maybe 5 or 6pm, closing at 10.30pm.
Oh, and I still have Christmas decorations that were free with boxes of soap powder my Gran and Great Aunt bought in the early 60’s….
I remember when my aunt was drooling over a pair of table lamps in the Green Stamp catalog, but she only had enough stamps saved to buy one lamp. When I generously gave her a book of stamps from my own stash, you would have thought it was a million bucks. She had those lamps in her living room for at least 30 years.
Oh my goodness, those are all great ones. I remember the cookie tin in which my mom saved her greenstamps and helping to choose what to redeem them for. One of the good things that has come out of the demise of the typewriter is that mostly only girls took typing; everyone takes “keyboarding”.
Loved the encyclopedia, used to read them at random. I was a secretary so long ago that I didn’t realize “administrative assistant” was the same thing! 🙂
Grew up in the upburbs so no clothes lines allowed.
How fun to remember some of this stuff! Thanks
1. I not only own but have used a scrub-board. I was a single mom and absolutely broke so I did all our clothes (including diapers) that way for about 16 months. Every few weeks I would take a load of jeans to the laundromat and throw in the sheets along with them; the rest of the time I washed the sheets at home.
2. I learned to type in the fourth grade on a huge old upright typewriter my mom bought for $10 when it was going to be discarded at her workplace. (Which begs the question: Why didn’t they just give it to her???) And I remember using “correct tape” to fix errors.
3. I also remember mimeographing, although my mom called it “ditto-ing.” Purple stains, anyone?
4. Microwave ovens were for rich people. So were disposable diapers.
5. I wore clothes that had first been worn by my two sisters and possibly also by various cousins before that.
6. Four of us kids shared a not-very-big room until my dad finished off the attic and sent my brother to sleep up there. (There was no heat source in either room, incidentally.) These days everyone seems to think each child needs his own room.
7. The doctor in our rural township made house calls. He also let us mow the lawn to pay for part of the bill.
8. Penny candy! Except for Hershey’s Kisses, which were two for a penny. Also: 5- and 10-cent candy bars.
9. Only boys could play in Little League.
Boy, I’m old. 🙂
Roller Skate – key? Oh dear, now I get it!!! I’m a very literal person – obviously. Everyone that learned to type on a manual, raise your hand!!!
My 4 siblings & I shared one pair of those roller skates with a key that you wore with your regular shoes.
I understand why it’s called “cut and paste” — because that’s what you really did when you were typing up mimeograph stencils. & at my first job I had an IBM Selectric & had to justify the right margin manually by counting the space each character took up.
I know how to actually dial a phone (there are younger people out there who literally don’t know how to use a real dial, since, ahem, push buttons came in the early 1980’s). And we were just talking at work yesterday about how it used to be easy to tell if a phone was ringing, because all the phones actually sounded like a telephone ringing.
I still have (& use regularly) the mustard gold & white corningware mixing bowl set I got when married the first time around in 1975.
And, the siblings’ first school car was – a Pinto! With manual transmission.
Oh, forgot one: I’m using Tupperware my mom bought when I was really little, barely old enough to remember the Tupperware “party.” (I remember all us kids plus the children of the guests being sent upstairs and my mom pulling a dresser across the doorway to keep us in the room.)
These are awesome. Who would think times would have changed so much during our lifetimes? When men landed on the moon during my father’s lifetime — he whose early job was delivering milk in a horse-drawn wagon — I thought our culture had done its technological surge and our generation would not see such radical shifts. LOL!
@ kjg & jvthomp: I had a Green Stamp floor lamp until relatively recently — finally replaced it with a much nicer light from Restoration Hardware, stunned at how much those things had come to cost.
@ Lynda: We didn’t have TV when I was growing up in the Middle East, but I can remember seeing the test pattern on televisions in this country; the US also did not have 24-hour broadcasts for quite some time.
@ Donna Freedman: Amazing list! We never used a washboard (!!), but I sure can remember my mother’s wringer washer, and hauling everything out to the line once a week. We did wash quite a few things by hand, mostly because they wouldn’t stand up to the rigors of a wringer washer. And ironing stuff with a table press…ugh! My mother eventually decided it was easier to stand at an ironing board for hours than to wrestle with that thing.
LOL! I can remember when a Mounds Bar was more than one teensy bite of candy. And when 50 cents was a lot to pay for a chocolate soda, and when milkshakes were brought to your table along with the ice-cold blender container, so you got about a glass and half of shake. A big glass and a half.
My mother was a mimeograph operator. She was given a raise to move from receptionist (where she screened people applying to rent an apartment by race and perceived religion) to the print room. Full-time exposure to the chemicals destroyed her fingernails.
@ Ellen: OMG!! I’d put justifying margins out of my mind. Jolly experience! I loved the Selectric, though.
@ Ellen & Donna: Corningware was great stuff…practically indestructible. And you can still use it in a microwave, without risking your health. I think Tupperware is still being made, but IMHO there are better products now, including the plastic containers you can get at Ikea.
I would never have thought a person would not know how to operate a telephone dial! Ah yes, the nerve-wracking jangle of the phone ringing…I remember it well. Also remember that you couldn’t unplug phones. If you took the phone off the hook because you needed a nap and didn’t want to be disturbed by the incessant pestering of phone solicitors, the phone company would disconnect your telephone. It could take a day to get the SOBs to reconnect your phone, and they sure wouldn’t give you any rebate for the day of lost service. When I was pregnant, I put the phone inside the freezer to muffle the racket so I could sleep for a couple of hours during the afternoon.
{sigh} Those were the good ole days. 😉
This has been so fun! I still use an olive green, hand-held Sunbeam mixer, a wedding gift and the only mixer I’ve ever owned. Tupperware home parties came to El Paso about the time I married, and my mother-in-law had a wide circle of friends, so she bought Tupperware for both of us. I still have pieces, including the (earth-toned) olive green, harvest yellow, and burnt orange food storage keepers in three sizes. The problem with Tupperware’s lifetime warranty is that I still have some of that ugly stuff. I’m so sick of olive green, in particular.
@ kjg: LOL! I wonder if Tupperware can be painted?
How about punching holes in the bottom of them and using them as starter pots for your garden plants? Great last act for the things.
How about hurrying to the stores on Saturdays to get what you needed for the week because all the stores closed at 6 PM and were closed on Sundays.
White gloves to go out in public , When only men anchored the news desk and their names were Huntly & Brinkly or Walter C.
When your parents could send you to the gas station with a note to buy their smokes.
When big families were the norm and not considered socially irresponsible.( This comming from someone who has 6 siblings 🙂 )