You know you are getting old when ...

A

akivory

Joined
Feb 5, 2001
Messages
808
The other day I found myself in the checkout line at the grocery store with my 13 year old daughter telling her about when the items all had prices on them and the checker would read them and put the price in the cash register.
I was born in 1954 and her reaction reminded me of how I felt when I was told of the great Depression or WW2 by people younger than than am now.
 
I hear ya! Last year I bought a turntable to play my old LPs. My grandchildren were amazed, confused and in awe of this. They had never seen a record (2 of them are teenagers) much less a turntable!
 
They've never seen a mechanical cash register or a phonograph, but they know all the old songs and all the old tv shows.... They see the old tv shows on cable tv; I don't know where they hear the old songs but they know them all -- try a few Beatles songs on them, they'll sing along -- they know the words.... Times have changed and even the way times change has changed!

When I was a kid my father told me about the radio dramas like The Shadow, I Love a Mystery, The Thin Man -- I knew what a radio was, I even knew what a cathedral tube radio looked like and sounded like, but I had no opportunity to hear those shows until years later when they came out on cassettes (there weren't any cassettes when I was a kid)....
 
Imagine telling some kid with a cell phone stuck in his ear (or, worse yet, clamped to it!) that your first phone was black, sat on a little table, and had a crank on it to ring the operator so you could tell her who you wanted to talk to! :eek:

Try explaining what it felt like the day you walked home from school and found the men installing your first television set and putting the antenna up on the roof.

Now think about a time when most of us had a father who would sit on the ground under a maple tree with their boy and teach him how to play mumblypeg with his pocket knife.

I could go on and on, but why bother? Old? You betcha! Old as dirt. Old as kerosene. Been around since Christ was a corporal. Yet here I sit typing away on the keyboard of this computer and having a blast on the Internet as well as most of you younguns. :D
 
Dr. Mudd said:
that your first phone was black, sat on a little table, and had a crank on it to ring the operator so you could tell her who you wanted to talk to! :eek:
Click to expand...

Or that the old "party lines" were kind of like our modern teleconference calls. ;)
 
I told my daughter that when I was a kid you couldn't die from having sex, she couldn't believe there wasn't any HIV.
 
I remember my mother sitting in front of the TV watching the launch of one of the space shuttles in the 1980's. She thought it was the most amazing thing, because as a young girl was captivated like the rest of the country, when a young pilot named Charles Lindberg was the first man to fly over the Atlantic ocean in his little single engine monoplane. She remembered the barnstormers in biplanes.

I remember when a house had one phone in it, and you had to put your finger in a hole and pull the thing around for each number you had to dial. Then I remember seeing the first episode of a sci-fi show called Star Trek, and thinking how nice and convienent to have a little communication device that flipped open and be able to talk to somebody anyplace. Hey, whats that thing in my pocket beeping at me?:D

"Beam me up, Scotty. Theres no intellegent life down here."
 
Dr. Mudd said:
Imagine telling some kid with a cell phone stuck in his ear (or, worse yet, clamped to it!) that your first phone was black, sat on a little table, and had a crank on it to ring the operator so you could tell her who you wanted to talk to! :eek:

Try explaining what it felt like the day you walked home from school and found the men installing your first television set and putting the antenna up on the roof.

Now think about a time when most of us had a father who would sit on the ground under a maple tree with their boy and teach him how to play mumblypeg with his pocket knife.

I could go on and on, but why bother? Old? You betcha! Old as dirt. Old as kerosene. Been around since Christ was a corporal. Yet here I sit typing away on the keyboard of this computer and having a blast on the Internet as well as most of you younguns. :D
Click to expand...


Hmm. We must be 'of an age,' or at least a 'similar age.' I recognized every one of your examples. :D

Computers? Easy as pie!! :):cool:;)
 
I remember when a big improvement in phone technology was having a 30 foot cord from the phone base to the handset instead of a 2 foot cord. You could walk all over the house talking. I remember being jealous of friends who got this great advancement before we did.
 
Candy cigarettes
Wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
Hoola hoop contests
Buying milk from a vending machine for a quarter, with your penny change taped to the side
Coffee shops with tableside juke boxes
Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum
Home milk delivery in glass bottles, with cardboard stoppers
Party lines
Newsreels before the movie
P. F. Flyers
Butch wax
Telephone numbers with a word prefix .... (Drexel-5505
Peashooters
Howdy Doody
45 RPM Records
Green Stamps
Hi-fi's
Metal ice cube trays with levers
Mimeograph paper
Blue flash bulbs
Beanie and Cecil
Roller skate keys
Cork pop guns
Drive ins
Studebakers
Wash Tub wringers
The Fuller Brush man
Reel-to-reel tape recorders
Phonographs
The "twist", "mashed potatoes", and "funky-chicken"
Tinkertoys
The Erector Set
The Fort Apache Playset
Lincoln Logs
15 cent McDonald hamburgers & 10 cent fries
5 cent packs of baseball cards..... with that slab of pink bubblegum
penny candy
35 cent-a-gallon gasoline
When the first man walked on the moon
When Elvis Presley first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show
When the Beatles arrived
When the Barbie doll hit the scene
 
Darn near every one.

Probably the ones I don't recall were geographically-oriented (I just lived in the wrong place).
 
Pretty much every one of them also. (all but 3 or so).

I knew I was getting old when almost everything started to hurt a lot and it was taking more than a day or two to heal. :D.

On the bright side, at least my dogs do not realize they are a lot stronger and faster than I am. ;)
 
They are stronger and faster but they don't know how to work the canopener so you are their buddy. :cool:
 
I remember thirty-seven of those. I'm probably old enough to remember a couple more, but my parents never did believe in television.
 
akivory said:
Candy cigarettes
Wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
Hoola hoop contests
Buying milk from a vending machine for a quarter, with your penny change taped to the side
Coffee shops with tableside juke boxes
Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum
Home milk delivery in glass bottles, with cardboard stoppers
Party lines
Newsreels before the movie
P. F. Flyers
Butch wax
Telephone numbers with a word prefix .... (Drexel-5505
Peashooters
Howdy Doody
45 RPM Records
Green Stamps
Hi-fi's
Metal ice cube trays with levers
Mimeograph paper
Blue flash bulbs
Beanie and Cecil
Roller skate keys
Cork pop guns
Drive ins
Studebakers
Wash Tub wringers
The Fuller Brush man
Reel-to-reel tape recorders
Phonographs
The "twist", "mashed potatoes", and "funky-chicken"
Tinkertoys
The Erector Set
The Fort Apache Playset
Lincoln Logs
15 cent McDonald hamburgers & 10 cent fries
5 cent packs of baseball cards..... with that slab of pink bubblegum
penny candy
35 cent-a-gallon gasoline
When the first man walked on the moon
When Elvis Presley first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show
When the Beatles arrived
When the Barbie doll hit the scene
Click to expand...

Yup, recall every one. Plus when gas was 23 cents a gallon.
TV westerns were the thing.
The advertising jingle "Edsel for '59.
Indian motorcycles were still being made.
We went to a "police action" in a place called Korea.
The Pressident de-segregated the military.
Drug stores had a soda fountain with 5 cent Coke's.
You learned to write with a fountain pen in grade school
Teachers actually tought.
Bogie and Bacall were still cool.
 
OK looked them over again. Who were Beanie and Cecil?
:D.
 
I remember a lot of the ones on that list. I also remember two more that weren't on there:

Odd Rods

odder_odd_rods_32.jpg


and Wacky Packages

weakies.jpg
 
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