Listen, kid, when I was your age...
January 23, 2006 :: Link :: Journal
I remember when I was a kid seeing a standup comic on TV who had a routine about the classic "When I was your age" line our parents always fed us. His angle was that kids my age wouldn't be able to use that line when they grew up. "What are they gonna say? When I was your age we had only one VCR?" It wasn't a funny routine, but it made me think.
When you're a kid, you just roll your eyes at those stories. But as I got older, I've found "When I was your age" stories to sometimes be shocking and amazing. The one that sticks in my mind is about how in the 1960s, single women could not get a checking account. You could be 40 years old, but if you were a single woman, the only way to get a checking account was to open a joint account with your dad.
Anyway, here's a little something for the kids: some weird facts about what life was like when I was a wee lad. Enjoy.
Listen kid, when I was your age...
- Cable TV had three channels: Showtime, TBS, and KMSP. There were probably other packages, because I remember people talking about HBO, but this is what we had.
- Shampoo came in glass bottles. Think about how retarded that is. I remember when I first saw shampoo in a plastic bottle. Everyone was talking about the newfangled "shatterproof" bottles. As soon as we got one, the first thing I did was throw it across the room. It didn't break.
- There were no protective seals on pill bottles, butter tubs, or anything of the like. You opened the container and the product was right there. No one ever thought that it might be tampered with.
- There was only one building in the neighborhood with air conditioning: National Foods. In the summer, we'd beg our moms to take us grocery shopping.
- There were two Duluth newspapers: the morning paper (The News-Tribune) and the afternoon paper (The Herald). My family subscribed to both.
- TV weather reporters stood in front of an actual map and used a wooden pointer.
- Elementary school kids who worked as crossing guards were given knives with "Duluth Public Schools" printed on the handle.
I am an old, old man. Well, actually, I'm just an adult.
Comments
o yes, i remember the not-sealed-by-today's-standards sundries and whatnot. i believe the practice was abandoned after the poisoned tylenol incident(s).
the razor blades in the apples/poisoned candy scare started right here in houston, with a man trying to kill his own child via a poisoned pixy stick. he poisoned two of them, and gave one to a neighbor's child (who died, as i recall) as a red herring.
i don't remember the glass shampoo bottles.
we had the movie channel, and that was it, i think. unless i'm making shit up, cable TV was commercial-free when it was first introduced.
being in texas, almost everything was air-conditioned, at least in houston, for as far back as i can remember. there were places in my hometown and other small towns without a/c, but it was more common to have it than to not have it.
when we had 'the talk' in our elementary school, examples of feminine hygiene products included a contraption with a belt and pins to hold pads in place. i don't think those are made at all anymore. i never saw anything like it in a store.
(i know, i'm always sullying the comments with female body functions. sorry.)
what else, what else...oh, pull tabs on coke cans and necklaces made out of said tabs...lots and lots and lots of litter (remember the crying native american PSA?)...no seat belt laws (at least in texas), no child safety seats, and we had blue laws that kept merchants from selling and customers from buying certain seemingly random things on sundays.
Posted by: wix, working from memory | January 23, 2006 2:28 PM
In Minnesota, it's illegal to sell cars on Sundays.
Speaking of cars, the first thing my dad would do when he got a new car was to shove the seat belts between the cracks of the seat. I liked to ride on the armrest between the driver's and passenger's seats. This was standard practice back then, I think.
Posted by: Barrett | January 24, 2006 10:26 AM
The thing that amazes me the most about when I was a kid is that we threw all of our garbage in the garbage.
It wasn't until about 1990 that recycling bins started popping up in Duluth.
We did separate aluminum cans back then, which could be brought to a recycling facility and exchanged for money, but all those newspapers and glass jars were landfilled.
It's nice that we finally started recycling, but it really should have started in the 1960s. Sheesh!
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | January 24, 2006 11:12 AM
Lungren they still all end up in the same place. It is a big conspiracy.
Posted by: Ca-chee | January 24, 2006 11:48 AM
Well, yes, some cities have horrible recycling programs -- and even the good ones only recycle about half of what they are supposed to -- but that's still a hell of a lot more than before 1990.
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | January 24, 2006 7:35 PM
For the last year that Ca-chee and I lived together, we didn't recycle. People are so programmed, it was hilarious to see their faces as we'd casually chuck beer cans into the garbage.
Posted by: Barrett | January 25, 2006 12:29 AM
I know what you mean. Sometimes I shit into my garbage. People are just so programmed to shit into a toilet that they think I'm weird.
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | January 25, 2006 8:33 AM
Lundgren you are a sucker.
Posted by: Ca-chee | January 25, 2006 11:28 AM
It's not that we're programmed to shit in toilets, it's that everyone knows shit is readily biodegradable and therefore belongs in the compost, not with the regular garbage.
Posted by: Barrett | January 25, 2006 11:55 AM
Knives! For real?!
Posted by: Sarah B. | January 25, 2006 4:45 PM
It's not that we're programmed to recycle glass, it's that everyone knows glass is recyclable and therefore belongs in the recycling bin, not with the regular garbage.
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | January 25, 2006 7:12 PM
Glass belongs on the beach.
Posted by: Barrett | January 25, 2006 7:24 PM
Glass belongs up your ASS Lundgren!
Posted by: Ca-chee | January 25, 2006 8:17 PM
Lundgren,
Yo mama's so nasty, she made right guard turn left!
Yo mama has wooden boobs and breast feeds beavers.
Yo mama got a house that's so dusty, the Cockroaches drive around in Dune Buggies.
Posted by: Ca-chee | January 26, 2006 7:07 PM