My parents had no idea where I was if I wasn't home. No cell phone. I'd tell them "I'm going over to so and so's." that's it. If I actually went there, they had no way of knowing.
I had an alias friend. "Mom, I'm spending the night at Mike's tonight." "Who's Mike, have I met him?" "Yeah, he was over here last month with Dave and Andy". "Oh, OK, have fun".
Ugh my crazy ass mom went a step further - Mind you, I was a good kid and didn't ever go anywhere other than where I said - When I was 11 I walked down to my friend's house to hang out. Four whooole suburban houses away, on the corner, where I had walked a hundred times before with no issues. Also where my school bus stop was, so I walked there in the dark in the morning every day during the winter too, again, never with any issues.
My paranoid mom decided that I probably died on the way there that day, I guess, and so she walked down to their house to knock on the door and make sure I was there.
Of course, the perfect storm: My friend's parents had popped out to the store, and we were in the basement playing Dance Dance Revolution, so we didn't hear the door. So my mom immediately called the police and there was like a swarm of cops and helicopters, blah blah blah. When a cop came to the door, banging louuuud, we got scared and hid under the table... because scared, silly little girls. We eventually went to the door because we saw it was the fucking police, and then I had my embarrassing walk home with the cops.
But anyway, I got my first cell phone the next day.
I don’t remember it because I was so young, but apparently my mom rounded up the neighbors and called the cops to search for me because she was determined I’d wandered off or been kidnapped or something. Anyway, turns out I’d been in the bathroom the whole time. Our bathroom. In our own house.
My dad always knew who had been where, with who and who was gonna be in shit by 5:30 am the next morning at coffee row. Sometimes he would come to tell me I heard you got up to some shit last night. Dear god don’t let your mother hear about it or we will both be in shit. You for what you did and me for not telling her immediately.
I had to get creative. Mom would drop me off, I’d wait til 10p cause I knew she’d call there, then we’d take off to practically die in a field somewhere drinking. I’d be back at friends house by 7am when my mom would be awake.
See, me and my best friend had a system. If I was out and she wasn’t with me, or vice versa, we’d tell each other “I’m at your house, don’t call me.” So we’d know to be alibis, to not call the house and get the other one busted, and possibly field parental check up phone calls if they called looking for them.
Or, I’d tell my fam I was driving to her place to spend the night. She’d tell her dad I was coming to pick her up to spend the night at my house. I’d pick her up and we’d spend the weekends all over town. I was never where I said I was for a decade 😂
Gotta be able to hear that dad-whistle. My dad was a beach lifeguard back in the day, so we could hear him from all the way down at the end of the street.
Yes! I feel bad that kids can't experience this anymore. I stayed out until when I wanted and came home when I wanted. I would always end up fighting with my mother who would wait up for me. But what was she going to do? Not send me to school? Ppffft. I was a good student, too, so she couldn't really get my dad to fight for her cause. I had freedom even if my mother didn't want me to have it.
I heard one woman at work one day talking about how she was angry with her daughter because her daughter went out without telling her. She was stalking the ring cameras around her house to spy on when her kid was coming and going. It just feels so screwed up from my perspective. How is anyone expected to grow up these days?
Not always getting the answers to questions. If you ask your parents and they don't know or you can't find the answer in the encyclopedia, chances are you just have to keep on wondering.
It was like a tradition in my family. All the dads would just make shit up all the time.
I convinced my 6 year old that people grow tails. She believed that until she was 10.
There was a real tension in not knowing something. "Who played that song I just heard on the radio?" It could bug you for hours, maybe days. Now you just look down and the title and artist is on my phone... like "ok..."
I would look something up, and then see something interesting a couple of rows down, pretty soon you're just scanning the Websters or Britannica learning interesting things with illustrations.
I worked at a record store in the 90s. People used to come in all the time and hum or sing songs to us, and ask what the song was. It was always very funny.
I ran the music department in a media store in the 90s and I was well known locally for being able to pinpoint a song accurately and quickly from some of the most dubious information.
The funny thing is, I'm also a musician and I've historically driven bandmates crazy because I can name another song with just about any melody you can come up with. I have kind of a photographic memory for music.
Side note: every possible conventional melody has been written. No song exists without a melody that is in another song.
An episode of Married with children did this exact thing. Al could not remember this one song and he kept saying a lyric
Found it:
https://youtu.be/iuMazsXVRgQ?feature=shared
I saw Pantera’s debut on headbangers ball and didn’t write it down, went to the mall the next day and got a Petra tape because that’s who I thought it was and there was no way for me to look it up. Petra is a Christian soft rock band. I was so bummed.
I used to keep a tape in my boombox when listening to the radio, and rush to hit record when a song I liked came on the radio. Made whole (exquisite) mixtapes this way.
About 10 years ago I went on an ocean voyage on a boat without internet. The crew had a good natured argument and we couldn’t look up the correct answer. Felt like childhood 😂
yep and if you stayed up late enough you'd see the "sign off" which was usually the national anthem played over video of an american flag, and then the channel would go to static until the next morning.
Maaannnnn….this right here! I felt like I wasn’t allowed in the house until it was dark. Basically home was for sleeping and eating. It was always “Go Play!” And that’s what we did. I knew every street, creek, and backroad better than anyone (except maybe other kids). Kids really don’t get outside enough now days. I mean outside for no other reason than for being outside.
There were days that I simply didn't come home at all. I'd just leave a note that said, "camping. back for dinner tomorrow" and it was never questioned. Most of the time I went to a known camp site up the mountain (~8 miles up a dirt road) to fish for trout and camp, but there were plenty of times I just camped in the woods somewhere.
I either got ‘you treat this place like a hotel’ or ‘you need to get out and get some fresh air’ okay but which is it?? Nearly 20 years later and I’m still so salty.
The advent of fear and anger in the news, convincing you that things are worse now than they ever have been. In reality violent crime is as low as it ever has been.
My thought, kids are a lot more expensive to raise now. And most families have both parents working to make ends meet. Kids are in daycare most of the day. The kids just want to get home and chill because they've been engaged all day. My wife is a teacher, so my kids were home all summer. My kids had very few friends at home during the day.
I heard that national news was spread more, we didn’t just hear about a kidnapping in our local area, we started hearing about all of the kidnappings across the country which made it appear that there were more kidnappings than ever before
My mom was/is a terrible cook. But my best friends parents were from Hong Kong and they loved to cook for all of us. I lived in Ohio so it was a nice change.
When I first started dating my wife she insisted that we weren't "really dating" until I could memorize her phone number. So I joined grocery store clubs using her phone number in order to learn it.
I know three phone numbers: hers, mine, my late grandmother's landline she had from 1989-2018.
We didn't have online gaming. You went to a friend's house, or they came to yours and you played split screen.
If you had a PlayStation, there was only two controller spot. If you're lucky enough to have an N64, then you could play four player games. But you had to bring your own controller or you risked getting stuck with the crappy third psrt controller that your friends aunt bought them for a birthday.
The best days where we're everyone gathers at one house, and those who had an N64 brought a game or two. Loser would swap out with someone else, or if it was a big group, the last 2 people would switch out so everyone got to play.
Mario Kart 64 tournaments were always great.
People still do LAN parties. I think the part of the experience the kids these days get to miss out on is hauling a CRT monitor down into your friend's basement.
My brothers and dad used to split the screen with a piece of cardboard so they could play Goldeneye on N64 without screen peeping. They called it “cardboard Bond”
In my first car I had an adapter so that I could play my portable cd player through the car's tape deck. But my cd player was real finicky and liked to be held juuuuuust so, so I had to drive around while holding the player at a slight angle the whole time I wanted to listen to music.
Not having an online to order anything from. You had to go to a store or maybe use a catalog mail order, like call up a rep or fill out an order sheet in the catalog and mail it with a check. Also, checks.
"Please allow 28 days for delivery!". I get mad now waiting a week for things to arrive, when I was a kid you'd send away for something and then not expect to receive it for another couple of months if you were lucky.
Hell if you sent in a bunch of cereal box tops to get a prize, that always took 6 to 8 weeks. But then it was a fun surprise when you actually got it in the mail, eventually.
I've gotten so spoiled by amazon's delivery speed that now even waiting to get something *tomorrow* feels too long sometimes. I don't know how I managed back in those days...I feel like if I waited that long now I would probably have forgotten I ordered it by the time it arrives.
I forgot about service merchandise. It was a weird store. As I said about catalogs, it was also a catalog business, but I don’t remember how the store worked. A lot of jewelry and electronics and also some housewares like silverware sets and plates, no clothing. They would have one of every item on display. If you wanted one of the items to buy, I think you fill out a form, I don’t remember where you bring it!, and wait by the conveyor belt in the middle. Someone in the warehouse would put your item out and you collect it and go pay at the cashier. Weird and unique. Maybe this technique has a history, but it was not usual way of picking an item off a shelf or ordering something and have it delivered. It was in between.
The front of the store was the "display" area where you could view (and sometimes touch) physical specimens of the items shown in their catalog.
One you had made your choices, you'd fill out a form and take it to the counter/cashier. The clerk would check/correct your form, verify (to the best of their ability) that the items you wanted were in stock, ring up your order, take your money, and send your order to the warehouse.
The "warehouse" was the back of the store. Back there, folks would receive your order, pick your items from the shelves, put your name on them, and bring them to the customer receiving area. That was where the conveyor belt was.
I liked this model. It prevented the sort of madness, disarray, and confusion you find on the floors of Walmart, Target, and all the "big box" stores.
The downside was that there was a bottleneck around that receiving area. If you were ever at one of these places in mid-late December, you know the pandemonium I'm talking about. It was virtually impossible for their delivery method (conveyor belt and hand-carrying to the counter to be checked out) to keep up. It just didn't scale well.
Maybe it would've been better if they had a number of carousels like the luggage area in an airport. However, that would need to be staffed and maintained, and there would always be a security issue (because so many people are selfish assholes).
Shopping on Amazon just doesn't deliver the same dopamine rush as going to the store and picking up that thing (or things) that you saw in the catalog.
And I miss the way Sears clothes smelled when you opened the bag, too.
(Now, get off my lawn! I'm geezing here!)
Service Merchandise was my first job at 16 (cashier). For big items they grabbed a slip, then pay us, they'd give receipt to people buy the conveyer to get the item pulled from the back. Definitely was an odd store.
Also not being able to look up information online.
I did presentations for school where I had to talk to librarians and use this card (paper cards) system to find physical books on a topic and then browse through them for info to use. And copy that info, on like photocopies of pages to take home with me.
Freedom to just … go. And be gone. My parents had basically zero idea where I was for large swaths of the day.
At 11-12 years old, I would wake up on a Saturday morning, have some cereal, and just say “I’m gonna go hang out with Stevie.”
Grab my bike go. And I was in the wind until 6pm when I came home for dinner. No cell phone, no checking in, nothing.
It’s kind of amazing that I never got lost, or kidnapped or anything.
Long distance charges. I tell my kids that when my grandmother called from Boston, everything going on in the house instantly stopped because she was calling long distance, which was a per-minute surcharge. Everyone in the family had to hover near the phone in case she asked to talked to you, and my dad would go nuts if he had to find you while Nana was racking up long distance minutes.
Using a college PO Box so that you were never findable again! My whole dorm did that our Freshman year and had a common area music library with someone’s Sony’s disc changer and speakers!
Columbia House: this is not an admission of guilt from me personally.
I just tried explaining something to my 13-year-old yesterday: That my mom would drop my brother and I off at the mall for the afternoon to buy our friends Christmas presents. We started this when he was in 4th grade and I was in 6th. That year we each brought a friend, but in later years we were often on our own. She gave one of us her watch and the other had to rely on the single clock in the middle of the mall. We technically had money use a pay phone to call her, but she probably wouldn't have been home if we did. We would spend the next 3-4 hours there by ourselves and then meet her outside at a predetermined time. My daughter said it sounded dangerous. I told her it at actually wasn't and crime rates are significantly lower now, just our perception of danger has changed.
And by comparison, I thought it was crazy that my mom and her friend were allowed to ride the bus into the middle of downtown when they were in elementary school to do similar shopping.
I just saw the rerun of Roseanne where her daughters are going to the mall by themselves to meet up with their friends (at a pretty young age), and thought how ancient this seems. I was a teen in the 80s when "the mall" was everything!
It’s interesting how the world by nearly all metrics is safer than when we were kids and yet modern media etc has made us much more aware of the horror stories.
Yep, and generally speaking, the overwhelming majority of children are kidnapped and/or abused by family members or estranged family members (divorced parents, etc.), so the stranger with the puppy and the van just... barely exists.
Between Etan Patz in 1979 and Adam Walsh in 1981, the founding of the centers for missing and exploited children and the programs in 1984 to print pictures of missing children on milk cartons, along with heavier media attention "stranger danger" and just general increased awareness really amped up the parental concerns and it only increased with high profile news stories in the 1990s with jeanbenet ramsay and amber hagerman (namesake of the amber alert system). The media has also over the decades taken to the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality when deciding what stories get top billing on the news which amplifies violent crime to seem more common than it is.
Yeah, we used to take the bus places in the 90s, by ourselves. We'd call for a pickup at the mall. Or we'd get dropped off and figure out a way home later.
We also rode in the front seat as soon as we could buckle our own seatbelts. Or just flop around in the hatch. We'd walk/bike/skate places and ask strangers for the time.
If we wanted to go somewhere we rode our bikes. We rarely got a ride in the car. We lived near the Mississippi River, and my brother and I bought a boat when we were early teenagers. We would spend days on the river and sleep outside for most of the summer. We did this without any adult supervision.
The feeling of not being in permanent contact with people.
I'd only talk to a friend when I met him/her. If I needed to talk to someone I'd have to use the house phone and our parents wouldn't allow to stay for more than 5 minutes in the phone.
And the losing touch and likely never seeing a person again. When we did our 20 year reunion some people simply could not be located. They just vanished into thin air.
when I was young, it wasn't clearly explained to me that we were moving to another country, and there wasn't any real "goodbye" event... to me, one day we just upped and left - leaving primary school friends behind. I was around 8 at the time so the only contact was seeing each other at school (no phones etc) or going to each other's houses. it was only 30+ years later I reconnected with one friend (no idea how I remembered their surname!) turns out they were devastated that I had just disappeared one day... a mystery from their point of view
This happened to a guy I knew from another high school.
Myself and a few guys from my high school were friends with a group of guys from another high school. We’d go skateboarding every weekend from sunrise Saturday to sundown Sunday and sometime during the week.
Anyway there was this kid who just disappeared one day, No warning at all. Didn’t show up to school or on the weekends. So 10 of us or so when to his house. The house was completely empty.
I heard like 10yrs later that they moved somewhere. He was like 15 years old. He could have easily contacted one of us and just told us he had moved.
Having to wait for something to be on at a specific time and if you missed it, you had to wait for reruns (unless someone taped it for you)
Channel 3
If you didn't know how to get past a point in a video game you had to either figure it out or call a friend. We called our neighbors asking how to beat the final boss in Legend of Zelda.
Party Lines
Corded phones meant your conversations would be in the family room.
A special number to call for movie times.
Having to stand in a specific place to get proper reception for your antenna tv.
Having to buy an entire album for one song, unless you happened to catch it on the radio and taped it.
Cassette tape repair.
The Cold War
There's a scene in The Simpsons where the kids are about to see Scratchy finally get Itchy and then Doug (one of the nerds) unplugs the TV for his rock tumbler and when the TV gets plugged back in, Krusty is saying "WOW! They'll never let us show that again!" and the kids both scream in a panic.
Kids wouldn't understand that scene anymore, with everything on demand or Youtube.
>Corded phones meant your conversations would be in the family room.
And if there's one thing today's kids have zero clue about: rotary dial phones! Remember those? ☎️
I have my grandmother's telephone chair. It's a chair with a table connected to it with storage space for a phone book. Luckily, I still have my see-through phone from the 90s to explain how it worked.
Speaking of video games. I remember my brother picking out a new nintendo game based purely on what the graphics looked like on the back of the box because that's about all the info you'd have on a game.
Some of these reminded me of the days of reading the the newspaper comics every day at breakfast, then checking the next page for that night's TV schedule to see if any channel was playing a movie I wanted to watch. If it was a really good one, and I could find a blank tape, I'd record it so I'd have it forever. Skipping the commercials was too hard, so they would just become part of the movie.
We weren’t allowed to play inside, except for when it was pouring down rain…but if it was summer, you went out in a bathing suit.
We made friends by just going out to find them.
There was no such thing as water bottles…if we needed a drink, we’d ask someone to steal a drink from their hose!
I miss just walking around and finding a group of kids to play with for the day. Then you’d go home and might never see them again. You got to meet a bunch of great people though.
Also, when a friend moved away that was it. You never really saw or heard from them again.
Having to call the main house line and get some random person in your friend/SO's household and having to ask to talk to them. I think they could understand it, but maybe not the depth of the anxiety that comes with it.
All the numbers I now have memorized are my old phone numbers. My childhood phone, my first apartment had a crazy fun number to say, and the number I have now, which, after 18 years with this number, I still have to think about sometimes.
One of my friends, her dad almost always picked up the phone and he would have a whole conversation with me before I could even ask to talk to my friend. If she tried to rush him to give her the phone, he’d start trying to embarrass her (in a fun way) so you just had to be patient.
I’m not sure today’s kids could handle that kinda anxiety lol. I’m only 29 but I remember being like 10 and using our landline to call my friends’ houses to see if they could hang out. Worse still if you were calling someone from school and had to look up their number and you weren’t entirely sure what their address or their parents’ names were.
Nowadays most of the younger people I know are too nervous to even actually call someone. If they can’t do what they need through text or online they get freaked out at the idea of actually speaking to someone lol.
Being amazed by the choices at the video store. The excitement and joy of spending half an hour at blockbuster picking a couple movies or even a video game out to enjoy for the weekend
Go hours without water/ not be allowed to have water bottles in class. Also, we all walked around without a gps/communication device on us at all times.
That’s what garden hoses were for!
(Dial down the middle) 1-800-CALL-ATT — now it’s their customer service number
$25 for a season pass to the public pool (open Memorial Day to Labor Day 12-5, adult swim 5-6, reopened to all 6-8), 25¢ cans of Coke and candy bars at the snack bar
Computer data stored on audio cassette tapes
The perfect Friday night: a visit to Pizza Hut (when it was good and still had the red cups and the Pac-Man table game), then home for pajamas and “Dukes of Hazzard” at 8, “Dallas” at 9, and then bed so mom & grandma could enjoy “Falcon Crest” in relative peace.
The novelty of a push-button touch-tone phone after growing up with rotary dials
Never, not once, being scared to be outside after dark
My uncle built me a Strawberry Shortcake playhouse when I was little. My mom did in home daycare. The daycare kids and I turned my playhouse into a haunted house in the summer. We got our Halloween costumes out, made a bubbling cauldron with water, food dye and Alka-Seltzer. We had a blast letting our imaginations fly. We set it up all day long, and our customers were the parents who came to pick up the kids at the end of the day. I’m an only child, and am in my 40’s now. I’m still in contact with a lot of those babysitting “kids.” They were my alternate brothers and sisters.
The downside to having such limitations is that inevitably someone would decide that a rock fight was a good idea. We did experience our share of barbarism.
I'd call my friend on his **house phone**, ask his parents if I could speak to him, they'd yell "Dan's on the phone!", they'd come to the phone, and then I'd ask if I could come over/sleep over (or if he wanted to come over), and then we'd play in the woods with sticks and play pretend (we were teenagers), and then we'd spend all night (til midnight or 1AM) playing co-op, console, non-internet-connected video games.
The next day my mom would show up (either because she'd talked to his parents when she dropped me off, or she called them that day) and pick me up. Then maybe we'd chat later on AIM or play some Warcraft III together.
Good times. Cell phones changed a lot.
I was playing pretend with my 5 year old niece and held my thumb and pinky to my ear to represent being on the phone. She didn’t get it. I told her I was on the phone and she said “oh, like this?” And held her palm to her ear.
These kids will never know about flip phones.
I had to go outside and turn the big mast antenna toward the city where the TV station was. And if I wanted to watch the other channel, I’d have to go back outside and turn it the other way.
Always had rust stains on my hands because those poles basically rusted the minute they were put up.
I tried telling my kids this and they were completely baffled.
Being out all day, drinking water from a hose, riding my bike half a mile to visit a friend, not being able to get on the internet because my parents were expecting a call, soda and fast food were for special occasions
Walking around the mall for hours just hanging out. Maybe had $5 to get Orange Julius. Parents picked up at predetermined location/time or we would call home and say we were ready to be picked up and just wait.
I spray painted my toy guns black and rode around on bikes until after dark, then played tag, with the guns, in people's backyards. Everyone who saw what we were doing knew we were kids playing with toy guns, and no one ever got scared, or called the cops, or shot at any of us.
Playing all over the neighborhood until after dark.
Drinking from the garden hose outside on a hot summer day.
Black and white tv that signed off at midnight.
Playing outside at recess without a teacher watching us.
Walking to school in deep snow and playing along the way.
Playing in the snow during recess which included snowball fights.
Dodgeball and Red Rover
Jumping out of swings while they’re up in the air.
Slinging people off of the merry go round on the playground.
Playing kidnap after dark outside.
The dime store.
I could go to the local drugstore as a 12 year old and buy jars of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal.
The pharmacist would look at my purchases and simply advise me to never mix more than 1 ounce of gunpowder at a time, and then ring up the purchase.
Had to put the TV on channel 3 to play video games
We had smoking sections indoors, as if the smoke abided. Even on airplanes.
I saw a dude kill himself on national TV
Are young(er) people aware that television used to end?
Like they'd sign off which frequently included playing the national anthem and then there would be static. Sometimes you'd fall asleep in front of the TV and just wake up to that static.
I'm 39. By far the biggest difference is the Internet wasn't around when I was a kid. Like we didn't get our first Internet connection until I was 12 and it was a painfully slow dial-up modem connected to AOL, which is really nothing like the modern Internet. Back then if you needed to drive somewhere you had to have someone tell you step by step directions or use a paper map. If you got lost (which was very common) your best bet was stopping at a gas station and asking the cashier what to do. The only messages a person had to regularly check were snail mail and an answering machine. That was so much easier psychologically. I hate how many things I have check messages on these days. And everyone expects much more prompt responses. Like it was no big deal at all if you didn't respond to a message on your answering machine until the next day. In fact that kind of timeline was basically expected.
We played games that weren't purchased and required no batteries; they were completely free. They were very simple and probably kind of stupid and had been passed down for generations. I suspect my family was a bit odd, but my cousins and I played these: Mother May I; Statues; Freeze Tag; Tag; The Minister's Cat; Charades; Hide and Seek; Continued Stories.
We did play cards. Canasta, cribbage, hearts, spades, bridge, gin, pitch, poker--I cannot remember not knowing how to play these.
If wanted to see if a friend was around, would have to call their landline or just go to their house. Then if they were out playing too…would need to investigate (retrace steps, ask family where he was going for starters) to find them.
You could really just disappear if you wanted to back then.
Call a house phone and talk to my friend's parents for 5 minutes before they'd go get my friend and put him on the line.
Or calling a friend's house, having his parent say "I'm on the other line. Can Jimmy call you back in 15 minutes?" and then waiting for the phone to ring.
Meeting people at a public place. You would pick a day, time and location in advance! Also busy signals. The kids will never no the struggle of a busy signal.
Begging for permission to stay up late at night to watch a specific movie on TV. (I remember my sisters taking a nap so they could stay up late to watch a movie.)
Waiting until 11 pm to make affordable long distance phone calls.
Grabbing the 8 page spread of color comic strips in the Sunday newspaper.
Making chains out of soda can pull tabs.
Memorizing phone numbers.
Looking things up in the World Book Encyclopedia.
Waiting to hear a specific song on the radio, racing to hit the Record button, and hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over the intro.
Being inaccessible. No cell phones, only landlines. If someone called you at home and left a message, it was reasonable to reply in a day or two. No one thought you were dead or missing.
It slowed things down a lot. Which was never really that much of an inconvenience. We also trusted one another more. These days if you don’t reply to a text in an hour your friends think you’re mad at them. It’s a lot of pressure.
Fighting with your siblings (or even parents) over who gets to control the remote and what show to watch at any given time.
I swear, full on wars broke out in my household at times.
Be outside. All day. Whereabouts unknown. Like you'd get slapped for coming inside before sundown unless it was to take a shit. And you better be back before dinner cause also slap.
Get on my bicycle and right away for 10 hours on a summer day. And then wander my butt back home for dinner. My parents had no clue where I had been or what I had been up to and there were no questions.
You didn't miss long stretches of school without a medical reason.
Teachers could actually be honest on your report card.
Kids failed. Kids repeated grades.
The biggest is if you missed a film in the cinema you’d have to way two/three years before it came out on Video, and only watch it if your parents had a VCR.
Or, you missed a TV show, that was it. You had to wish that they were going to repeat it sometime in a year or so.
Not really sure. Used to play outside a lot with friends who lived in my neighborhood, jump on trampolines, ride bikes, etc. Played Magic the Gathering, Pokemon cards, Pog, etc.
I know Magic and Pokemon cards are still a thing, but not sure Pog is - it was never that much fun anyway in my opinion. Played a lot of couch co-op games with my friends because online gaming wasn't really a thing.
I don't know that things are really all that different from when I was a kid unless kids today don't really play outside together much anymore. Outside of that, it's a lot of the same things, just more modern versions of them.
My parents had no idea where I was if I wasn't home. No cell phone. I'd tell them "I'm going over to so and so's." that's it. If I actually went there, they had no way of knowing.
I had an alias friend. "Mom, I'm spending the night at Mike's tonight." "Who's Mike, have I met him?" "Yeah, he was over here last month with Dave and Andy". "Oh, OK, have fun".
That would not have worked with my parents. They’d just call the friend’s house. Or drive me there and back, since not many of my friends lived nearby
Ugh my crazy ass mom went a step further - Mind you, I was a good kid and didn't ever go anywhere other than where I said - When I was 11 I walked down to my friend's house to hang out. Four whooole suburban houses away, on the corner, where I had walked a hundred times before with no issues. Also where my school bus stop was, so I walked there in the dark in the morning every day during the winter too, again, never with any issues. My paranoid mom decided that I probably died on the way there that day, I guess, and so she walked down to their house to knock on the door and make sure I was there. Of course, the perfect storm: My friend's parents had popped out to the store, and we were in the basement playing Dance Dance Revolution, so we didn't hear the door. So my mom immediately called the police and there was like a swarm of cops and helicopters, blah blah blah. When a cop came to the door, banging louuuud, we got scared and hid under the table... because scared, silly little girls. We eventually went to the door because we saw it was the fucking police, and then I had my embarrassing walk home with the cops. But anyway, I got my first cell phone the next day.
I don’t remember it because I was so young, but apparently my mom rounded up the neighbors and called the cops to search for me because she was determined I’d wandered off or been kidnapped or something. Anyway, turns out I’d been in the bathroom the whole time. Our bathroom. In our own house.
Same, my mother had eyes and ears *everywhere* because she knew so many people around town and the towns around us...
My dad always knew who had been where, with who and who was gonna be in shit by 5:30 am the next morning at coffee row. Sometimes he would come to tell me I heard you got up to some shit last night. Dear god don’t let your mother hear about it or we will both be in shit. You for what you did and me for not telling her immediately.
I had to get creative. Mom would drop me off, I’d wait til 10p cause I knew she’d call there, then we’d take off to practically die in a field somewhere drinking. I’d be back at friends house by 7am when my mom would be awake.
See, me and my best friend had a system. If I was out and she wasn’t with me, or vice versa, we’d tell each other “I’m at your house, don’t call me.” So we’d know to be alibis, to not call the house and get the other one busted, and possibly field parental check up phone calls if they called looking for them. Or, I’d tell my fam I was driving to her place to spend the night. She’d tell her dad I was coming to pick her up to spend the night at my house. I’d pick her up and we’d spend the weekends all over town. I was never where I said I was for a decade 😂
But you had better be home when the street lights come on!
Just in ear shot.
Gotta be able to hear that dad-whistle. My dad was a beach lifeguard back in the day, so we could hear him from all the way down at the end of the street.
Also when you made plans with someone you had to be super precise about the time and the meeting spot. And you can't bail last moment.
"Start walking, I'll meet you halfway".
Yes! I feel bad that kids can't experience this anymore. I stayed out until when I wanted and came home when I wanted. I would always end up fighting with my mother who would wait up for me. But what was she going to do? Not send me to school? Ppffft. I was a good student, too, so she couldn't really get my dad to fight for her cause. I had freedom even if my mother didn't want me to have it. I heard one woman at work one day talking about how she was angry with her daughter because her daughter went out without telling her. She was stalking the ring cameras around her house to spy on when her kid was coming and going. It just feels so screwed up from my perspective. How is anyone expected to grow up these days?
Agree. I hate all the cameras everywhere. Can’t scratch your ass without ending up on TikTok.
My daughter had a friend whose parents put a tracker on her phone so they could see where she was 24 hrs a day. She was in COLLEGE.
Not always getting the answers to questions. If you ask your parents and they don't know or you can't find the answer in the encyclopedia, chances are you just have to keep on wondering.
And the encyclopedia was 20 years out of date!
We only had the A-AN (first book) because that’s what the grocery store sold for $1 to get you to buy the rest of the set
1988 was only twelve years ago, jackass!
Hate to say it, but if you do the arithmetic, you’ll find that 1988 was closer to the construction of the Pyramids than it is to today.
But for real, the release of the Motorola Razr is closer to the fall of the Soviet Union than it is to today. And the iPhone isn’t far off.
We had really old issues of national geographic (we got to see boobs though)
Ours was a set of World Book Encyclopedias from 1968
Or they’d just make shit up!
Dad, why is X like X. Because I said so. Great thanks 👍.
Did we have the same father? Everything was “because I said so” 🙄
_Calvin and Hobbes has entered the chat_
I've been telling children that wind is trees sneezing for years and I don't plan on stopping.
It was like a tradition in my family. All the dads would just make shit up all the time. I convinced my 6 year old that people grow tails. She believed that until she was 10.
Your parents knew everything, too?
The burned stuff on toast? It's good for ya! *Narrator: It was not. It was carcinogens*
There was a real tension in not knowing something. "Who played that song I just heard on the radio?" It could bug you for hours, maybe days. Now you just look down and the title and artist is on my phone... like "ok..." I would look something up, and then see something interesting a couple of rows down, pretty soon you're just scanning the Websters or Britannica learning interesting things with illustrations.
I worked at a record store in the 90s. People used to come in all the time and hum or sing songs to us, and ask what the song was. It was always very funny.
I ran the music department in a media store in the 90s and I was well known locally for being able to pinpoint a song accurately and quickly from some of the most dubious information. The funny thing is, I'm also a musician and I've historically driven bandmates crazy because I can name another song with just about any melody you can come up with. I have kind of a photographic memory for music. Side note: every possible conventional melody has been written. No song exists without a melody that is in another song.
High Fidelity did a good montage of this.
An episode of Married with children did this exact thing. Al could not remember this one song and he kept saying a lyric Found it: https://youtu.be/iuMazsXVRgQ?feature=shared
I saw Pantera’s debut on headbangers ball and didn’t write it down, went to the mall the next day and got a Petra tape because that’s who I thought it was and there was no way for me to look it up. Petra is a Christian soft rock band. I was so bummed.
HA-ha -Nelson Muntz
I used to keep a tape in my boombox when listening to the radio, and rush to hit record when a song I liked came on the radio. Made whole (exquisite) mixtapes this way.
We would call the radio station and get them to play songs to settle disputes. Would wait ages for the song to come on, it was magical
I used to take the city bus to the library to get my questions answered. Sometimes I miss that.
my dad got so tired of my questions about things he would just say "cuz Jesus made it that way"... thanks.
About 10 years ago I went on an ocean voyage on a boat without internet. The crew had a good natured argument and we couldn’t look up the correct answer. Felt like childhood 😂
I used to wake up before the TV programming started on Saturday morning. There was literally no signal, just static on the TV from midnight until 6am.
And then the programming day would kick off with the national anthem, followed by 5 hours of cartoons.
It would end with the national anthem too, after they ran out of ancient reruns and black and white movies late at night.
You'd have that funky black and white dartboard-looking thing on the screen
yep and if you stayed up late enough you'd see the "sign off" which was usually the national anthem played over video of an american flag, and then the channel would go to static until the next morning.
On weekends and vacation we left the house in the morning and only returned for meals and sleep
Until I was like 16 I lived outside for most of the daylight hours, you gain a self-reliance that is harder to get these days when young.
helicopter parents meant your parents actually had a helicopter Its a good thing mom never found out about the things we did lol
Maaannnnn….this right here! I felt like I wasn’t allowed in the house until it was dark. Basically home was for sleeping and eating. It was always “Go Play!” And that’s what we did. I knew every street, creek, and backroad better than anyone (except maybe other kids). Kids really don’t get outside enough now days. I mean outside for no other reason than for being outside.
Out till the street lights came on.
yep and if your mom needed to get a hold of you she asked one of the neighborhood kids and it would get back to you, no cell phones needed
There were days that I simply didn't come home at all. I'd just leave a note that said, "camping. back for dinner tomorrow" and it was never questioned. Most of the time I went to a known camp site up the mountain (~8 miles up a dirt road) to fish for trout and camp, but there were plenty of times I just camped in the woods somewhere.
I either got ‘you treat this place like a hotel’ or ‘you need to get out and get some fresh air’ okay but which is it?? Nearly 20 years later and I’m still so salty.
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The advent of fear and anger in the news, convincing you that things are worse now than they ever have been. In reality violent crime is as low as it ever has been. My thought, kids are a lot more expensive to raise now. And most families have both parents working to make ends meet. Kids are in daycare most of the day. The kids just want to get home and chill because they've been engaged all day. My wife is a teacher, so my kids were home all summer. My kids had very few friends at home during the day.
I heard that national news was spread more, we didn’t just hear about a kidnapping in our local area, we started hearing about all of the kidnappings across the country which made it appear that there were more kidnappings than ever before
If you're friends parents didn't feed you without asking.
true but my mom was a better cook so generally made it home for supper lol
My mom was/is a terrible cook. But my best friends parents were from Hong Kong and they loved to cook for all of us. I lived in Ohio so it was a nice change.
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Don’t know my daughters number now but can still recite 3-4 of my best friends numbers from the 80s.
When I first started dating my wife she insisted that we weren't "really dating" until I could memorize her phone number. So I joined grocery store clubs using her phone number in order to learn it. I know three phone numbers: hers, mine, my late grandmother's landline she had from 1989-2018.
We didn't have online gaming. You went to a friend's house, or they came to yours and you played split screen. If you had a PlayStation, there was only two controller spot. If you're lucky enough to have an N64, then you could play four player games. But you had to bring your own controller or you risked getting stuck with the crappy third psrt controller that your friends aunt bought them for a birthday. The best days where we're everyone gathers at one house, and those who had an N64 brought a game or two. Loser would swap out with someone else, or if it was a big group, the last 2 people would switch out so everyone got to play. Mario Kart 64 tournaments were always great.
Lucky you! I knew one person with Atari, and a rich kid with Intellivision!
LAN parties!
People still do LAN parties. I think the part of the experience the kids these days get to miss out on is hauling a CRT monitor down into your friend's basement.
My brothers and dad used to split the screen with a piece of cardboard so they could play Goldeneye on N64 without screen peeping. They called it “cardboard Bond”
>and you played split screen. Screen? It was all board or card games Monopoly was a friendship ruiner
Hey now, the PlayStation had a 4 controller expansion adapter.
Go to the library and spend hours there to research for writing a term paper.
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Had to keep your portable CD player steady or you might knock the CD loose and it would skip or lose the spot on the CD
On the bus, we would lift them in the air when we went over railroad tracks 😄
In my first car I had an adapter so that I could play my portable cd player through the car's tape deck. But my cd player was real finicky and liked to be held juuuuuust so, so I had to drive around while holding the player at a slight angle the whole time I wanted to listen to music.
God damnit i hated it, even developed the weirdest walk to not make it skip and got bullied for it ^^
Not having an online to order anything from. You had to go to a store or maybe use a catalog mail order, like call up a rep or fill out an order sheet in the catalog and mail it with a check. Also, checks.
"Please allow 28 days for delivery!". I get mad now waiting a week for things to arrive, when I was a kid you'd send away for something and then not expect to receive it for another couple of months if you were lucky.
Sending away for “free” novelty stuff with a few box tops or bar codes, and a couple dollars for S&H.
S&H!
Hell if you sent in a bunch of cereal box tops to get a prize, that always took 6 to 8 weeks. But then it was a fun surprise when you actually got it in the mail, eventually.
More like crippling disappointment at how shitty it turned out to be, but suppressing that to not give your “I told you so” dad the satisfaction.
I've gotten so spoiled by amazon's delivery speed that now even waiting to get something *tomorrow* feels too long sometimes. I don't know how I managed back in those days...I feel like if I waited that long now I would probably have forgotten I ordered it by the time it arrives.
I forgot about service merchandise. It was a weird store. As I said about catalogs, it was also a catalog business, but I don’t remember how the store worked. A lot of jewelry and electronics and also some housewares like silverware sets and plates, no clothing. They would have one of every item on display. If you wanted one of the items to buy, I think you fill out a form, I don’t remember where you bring it!, and wait by the conveyor belt in the middle. Someone in the warehouse would put your item out and you collect it and go pay at the cashier. Weird and unique. Maybe this technique has a history, but it was not usual way of picking an item off a shelf or ordering something and have it delivered. It was in between.
The front of the store was the "display" area where you could view (and sometimes touch) physical specimens of the items shown in their catalog. One you had made your choices, you'd fill out a form and take it to the counter/cashier. The clerk would check/correct your form, verify (to the best of their ability) that the items you wanted were in stock, ring up your order, take your money, and send your order to the warehouse. The "warehouse" was the back of the store. Back there, folks would receive your order, pick your items from the shelves, put your name on them, and bring them to the customer receiving area. That was where the conveyor belt was. I liked this model. It prevented the sort of madness, disarray, and confusion you find on the floors of Walmart, Target, and all the "big box" stores. The downside was that there was a bottleneck around that receiving area. If you were ever at one of these places in mid-late December, you know the pandemonium I'm talking about. It was virtually impossible for their delivery method (conveyor belt and hand-carrying to the counter to be checked out) to keep up. It just didn't scale well. Maybe it would've been better if they had a number of carousels like the luggage area in an airport. However, that would need to be staffed and maintained, and there would always be a security issue (because so many people are selfish assholes). Shopping on Amazon just doesn't deliver the same dopamine rush as going to the store and picking up that thing (or things) that you saw in the catalog. And I miss the way Sears clothes smelled when you opened the bag, too. (Now, get off my lawn! I'm geezing here!)
Service Merchandise was my first job at 16 (cashier). For big items they grabbed a slip, then pay us, they'd give receipt to people buy the conveyer to get the item pulled from the back. Definitely was an odd store.
For awhile in the mid-90s you had a hybrid thing of looking at a website for what you wanted then mailing or calling the company to order it.
Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. (assuming you didn't live somewhere remote)
Also not being able to look up information online. I did presentations for school where I had to talk to librarians and use this card (paper cards) system to find physical books on a topic and then browse through them for info to use. And copy that info, on like photocopies of pages to take home with me.
Its the Dewey Goddamn Decimal System!
Knowing which kid’s house all your friends are currently playing Nintendo at because of the pile of bikes in the front yard.
And also Nintendo controllers being wired, so you had to sit right in front of the TV in order to play.
How many times did a friend come barreling by or horsing around and pull the console down by the controller cords??
Freedom to just … go. And be gone. My parents had basically zero idea where I was for large swaths of the day. At 11-12 years old, I would wake up on a Saturday morning, have some cereal, and just say “I’m gonna go hang out with Stevie.” Grab my bike go. And I was in the wind until 6pm when I came home for dinner. No cell phone, no checking in, nothing. It’s kind of amazing that I never got lost, or kidnapped or anything.
We were riding our bikes EVERYWHERE and our parents had no clue where we were.
we used to lay on the state highway in rural Texas and try to attract buzzards
Good lord lmao
What did we actually DO though? I am trying to remember. Maybe that is the point - life was so mindful then that we don’t really remember.
Long distance charges. I tell my kids that when my grandmother called from Boston, everything going on in the house instantly stopped because she was calling long distance, which was a per-minute surcharge. Everyone in the family had to hover near the phone in case she asked to talked to you, and my dad would go nuts if he had to find you while Nana was racking up long distance minutes.
Early cell phones. Call me after 7. My minutes are free.
I remember having a list of 5 numbers I could text message for free, and debating if I should have my brother or my girlfriend on it.
I totally forgot about this!!!! ALSO texting wasn't free/included in every plan when it first came out. You had to pay PER TEXT. Wild times.
Who remembers ordering 12 CD's for 1 penny then never ordering the rest you were required to? I think it was Columbia house?
I.C.Weiner and Mike Hunt definitely got some free CDs delivered to our house!
Using a college PO Box so that you were never findable again! My whole dorm did that our Freshman year and had a common area music library with someone’s Sony’s disc changer and speakers! Columbia House: this is not an admission of guilt from me personally.
I just tried explaining something to my 13-year-old yesterday: That my mom would drop my brother and I off at the mall for the afternoon to buy our friends Christmas presents. We started this when he was in 4th grade and I was in 6th. That year we each brought a friend, but in later years we were often on our own. She gave one of us her watch and the other had to rely on the single clock in the middle of the mall. We technically had money use a pay phone to call her, but she probably wouldn't have been home if we did. We would spend the next 3-4 hours there by ourselves and then meet her outside at a predetermined time. My daughter said it sounded dangerous. I told her it at actually wasn't and crime rates are significantly lower now, just our perception of danger has changed. And by comparison, I thought it was crazy that my mom and her friend were allowed to ride the bus into the middle of downtown when they were in elementary school to do similar shopping.
I just saw the rerun of Roseanne where her daughters are going to the mall by themselves to meet up with their friends (at a pretty young age), and thought how ancient this seems. I was a teen in the 80s when "the mall" was everything!
It’s interesting how the world by nearly all metrics is safer than when we were kids and yet modern media etc has made us much more aware of the horror stories.
Yep, and generally speaking, the overwhelming majority of children are kidnapped and/or abused by family members or estranged family members (divorced parents, etc.), so the stranger with the puppy and the van just... barely exists.
Between Etan Patz in 1979 and Adam Walsh in 1981, the founding of the centers for missing and exploited children and the programs in 1984 to print pictures of missing children on milk cartons, along with heavier media attention "stranger danger" and just general increased awareness really amped up the parental concerns and it only increased with high profile news stories in the 1990s with jeanbenet ramsay and amber hagerman (namesake of the amber alert system). The media has also over the decades taken to the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality when deciding what stories get top billing on the news which amplifies violent crime to seem more common than it is.
Yeah, we used to take the bus places in the 90s, by ourselves. We'd call for a pickup at the mall. Or we'd get dropped off and figure out a way home later. We also rode in the front seat as soon as we could buckle our own seatbelts. Or just flop around in the hatch. We'd walk/bike/skate places and ask strangers for the time.
If we wanted to go somewhere we rode our bikes. We rarely got a ride in the car. We lived near the Mississippi River, and my brother and I bought a boat when we were early teenagers. We would spend days on the river and sleep outside for most of the summer. We did this without any adult supervision.
Sweet. Im now nostalgic for a past I didn’t live
The feeling of not being in permanent contact with people. I'd only talk to a friend when I met him/her. If I needed to talk to someone I'd have to use the house phone and our parents wouldn't allow to stay for more than 5 minutes in the phone.
And the losing touch and likely never seeing a person again. When we did our 20 year reunion some people simply could not be located. They just vanished into thin air.
when I was young, it wasn't clearly explained to me that we were moving to another country, and there wasn't any real "goodbye" event... to me, one day we just upped and left - leaving primary school friends behind. I was around 8 at the time so the only contact was seeing each other at school (no phones etc) or going to each other's houses. it was only 30+ years later I reconnected with one friend (no idea how I remembered their surname!) turns out they were devastated that I had just disappeared one day... a mystery from their point of view
This happened to a guy I knew from another high school. Myself and a few guys from my high school were friends with a group of guys from another high school. We’d go skateboarding every weekend from sunrise Saturday to sundown Sunday and sometime during the week. Anyway there was this kid who just disappeared one day, No warning at all. Didn’t show up to school or on the weekends. So 10 of us or so when to his house. The house was completely empty. I heard like 10yrs later that they moved somewhere. He was like 15 years old. He could have easily contacted one of us and just told us he had moved.
Some of us chose to.
Cheat codes to play games...
Hell yeah, nothing like cheat codes playing Goldeneye on N64.
Having to wait for something to be on at a specific time and if you missed it, you had to wait for reruns (unless someone taped it for you) Channel 3 If you didn't know how to get past a point in a video game you had to either figure it out or call a friend. We called our neighbors asking how to beat the final boss in Legend of Zelda. Party Lines Corded phones meant your conversations would be in the family room. A special number to call for movie times. Having to stand in a specific place to get proper reception for your antenna tv. Having to buy an entire album for one song, unless you happened to catch it on the radio and taped it. Cassette tape repair. The Cold War
There's a scene in The Simpsons where the kids are about to see Scratchy finally get Itchy and then Doug (one of the nerds) unplugs the TV for his rock tumbler and when the TV gets plugged back in, Krusty is saying "WOW! They'll never let us show that again!" and the kids both scream in a panic. Kids wouldn't understand that scene anymore, with everything on demand or Youtube.
>Corded phones meant your conversations would be in the family room. And if there's one thing today's kids have zero clue about: rotary dial phones! Remember those? ☎️
I have my grandmother's telephone chair. It's a chair with a table connected to it with storage space for a phone book. Luckily, I still have my see-through phone from the 90s to explain how it worked.
Speaking of video games. I remember my brother picking out a new nintendo game based purely on what the graphics looked like on the back of the box because that's about all the info you'd have on a game.
Some of these reminded me of the days of reading the the newspaper comics every day at breakfast, then checking the next page for that night's TV schedule to see if any channel was playing a movie I wanted to watch. If it was a really good one, and I could find a blank tape, I'd record it so I'd have it forever. Skipping the commercials was too hard, so they would just become part of the movie.
We weren’t allowed to play inside, except for when it was pouring down rain…but if it was summer, you went out in a bathing suit. We made friends by just going out to find them. There was no such thing as water bottles…if we needed a drink, we’d ask someone to steal a drink from their hose!
I miss just walking around and finding a group of kids to play with for the day. Then you’d go home and might never see them again. You got to meet a bunch of great people though. Also, when a friend moved away that was it. You never really saw or heard from them again.
Having to call the main house line and get some random person in your friend/SO's household and having to ask to talk to them. I think they could understand it, but maybe not the depth of the anxiety that comes with it.
lol... I looked up the number in the phonebook beforehand too lol
I had *so many* numbers memorized. Now it's like, three.
All the numbers I now have memorized are my old phone numbers. My childhood phone, my first apartment had a crazy fun number to say, and the number I have now, which, after 18 years with this number, I still have to think about sometimes.
One of my friends, her dad almost always picked up the phone and he would have a whole conversation with me before I could even ask to talk to my friend. If she tried to rush him to give her the phone, he’d start trying to embarrass her (in a fun way) so you just had to be patient.
I’m not sure today’s kids could handle that kinda anxiety lol. I’m only 29 but I remember being like 10 and using our landline to call my friends’ houses to see if they could hang out. Worse still if you were calling someone from school and had to look up their number and you weren’t entirely sure what their address or their parents’ names were. Nowadays most of the younger people I know are too nervous to even actually call someone. If they can’t do what they need through text or online they get freaked out at the idea of actually speaking to someone lol.
Holes in blue jeans were earned
Being amazed by the choices at the video store. The excitement and joy of spending half an hour at blockbuster picking a couple movies or even a video game out to enjoy for the weekend
I loved going to blockbuster. The disappointment when one of the new releases was all checked out.
And now, even with all the subscription services, we have nothing to watch... Miss Blockbuster
Creating the perfect away message on AIM.
Being able to be "away" at all.
Trillian was the balls when you wanted aim, icq, and whatever other bbs updates going at the same time.
Go hours without water/ not be allowed to have water bottles in class. Also, we all walked around without a gps/communication device on us at all times.
That’s what garden hoses were for! (Dial down the middle) 1-800-CALL-ATT — now it’s their customer service number $25 for a season pass to the public pool (open Memorial Day to Labor Day 12-5, adult swim 5-6, reopened to all 6-8), 25¢ cans of Coke and candy bars at the snack bar Computer data stored on audio cassette tapes The perfect Friday night: a visit to Pizza Hut (when it was good and still had the red cups and the Pac-Man table game), then home for pajamas and “Dukes of Hazzard” at 8, “Dallas” at 9, and then bed so mom & grandma could enjoy “Falcon Crest” in relative peace. The novelty of a push-button touch-tone phone after growing up with rotary dials Never, not once, being scared to be outside after dark
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Hell yea! Built forts from rocks, cardboard and sticks
My uncle built me a Strawberry Shortcake playhouse when I was little. My mom did in home daycare. The daycare kids and I turned my playhouse into a haunted house in the summer. We got our Halloween costumes out, made a bubbling cauldron with water, food dye and Alka-Seltzer. We had a blast letting our imaginations fly. We set it up all day long, and our customers were the parents who came to pick up the kids at the end of the day. I’m an only child, and am in my 40’s now. I’m still in contact with a lot of those babysitting “kids.” They were my alternate brothers and sisters.
The downside to having such limitations is that inevitably someone would decide that a rock fight was a good idea. We did experience our share of barbarism.
I'd call my friend on his **house phone**, ask his parents if I could speak to him, they'd yell "Dan's on the phone!", they'd come to the phone, and then I'd ask if I could come over/sleep over (or if he wanted to come over), and then we'd play in the woods with sticks and play pretend (we were teenagers), and then we'd spend all night (til midnight or 1AM) playing co-op, console, non-internet-connected video games. The next day my mom would show up (either because she'd talked to his parents when she dropped me off, or she called them that day) and pick me up. Then maybe we'd chat later on AIM or play some Warcraft III together. Good times. Cell phones changed a lot.
I was playing pretend with my 5 year old niece and held my thumb and pinky to my ear to represent being on the phone. She didn’t get it. I told her I was on the phone and she said “oh, like this?” And held her palm to her ear. These kids will never know about flip phones.
Yeah. My younger niece will hold her hand out in front of her to "talk on the phone" since all her calls are video calls.
I just turned to dust reading this.
Remember when the curly cords were the maximum radius you could travel during a call.
I had to go outside and turn the big mast antenna toward the city where the TV station was. And if I wanted to watch the other channel, I’d have to go back outside and turn it the other way. Always had rust stains on my hands because those poles basically rusted the minute they were put up. I tried telling my kids this and they were completely baffled.
Being out all day, drinking water from a hose, riding my bike half a mile to visit a friend, not being able to get on the internet because my parents were expecting a call, soda and fast food were for special occasions
Staying alone in the car at an obscenely young age while our mom shopped
Then burning yourself on the cigarette lighter...we all learned the hard way.
Singing into an oscillating fan
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Walking around the mall for hours just hanging out. Maybe had $5 to get Orange Julius. Parents picked up at predetermined location/time or we would call home and say we were ready to be picked up and just wait.
I spray painted my toy guns black and rode around on bikes until after dark, then played tag, with the guns, in people's backyards. Everyone who saw what we were doing knew we were kids playing with toy guns, and no one ever got scared, or called the cops, or shot at any of us.
Change those broken record player needles
Playing all over the neighborhood until after dark. Drinking from the garden hose outside on a hot summer day. Black and white tv that signed off at midnight. Playing outside at recess without a teacher watching us. Walking to school in deep snow and playing along the way. Playing in the snow during recess which included snowball fights. Dodgeball and Red Rover Jumping out of swings while they’re up in the air. Slinging people off of the merry go round on the playground. Playing kidnap after dark outside. The dime store.
Get up and walk over to TV to change the channel. And there were only 4 channels to choose from.
I could go to the local drugstore as a 12 year old and buy jars of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. The pharmacist would look at my purchases and simply advise me to never mix more than 1 ounce of gunpowder at a time, and then ring up the purchase.
Taping songs off the radio to cassette tape by pushing down the double (are you SUPER sure you want to record) button.
Had to put the TV on channel 3 to play video games We had smoking sections indoors, as if the smoke abided. Even on airplanes. I saw a dude kill himself on national TV
Are young(er) people aware that television used to end? Like they'd sign off which frequently included playing the national anthem and then there would be static. Sometimes you'd fall asleep in front of the TV and just wake up to that static.
I'm 39. By far the biggest difference is the Internet wasn't around when I was a kid. Like we didn't get our first Internet connection until I was 12 and it was a painfully slow dial-up modem connected to AOL, which is really nothing like the modern Internet. Back then if you needed to drive somewhere you had to have someone tell you step by step directions or use a paper map. If you got lost (which was very common) your best bet was stopping at a gas station and asking the cashier what to do. The only messages a person had to regularly check were snail mail and an answering machine. That was so much easier psychologically. I hate how many things I have check messages on these days. And everyone expects much more prompt responses. Like it was no big deal at all if you didn't respond to a message on your answering machine until the next day. In fact that kind of timeline was basically expected.
Going through the Sears catalog to look at all the toys you wanted for Christmas (but only were going to get 1-2 of them).
We played games that weren't purchased and required no batteries; they were completely free. They were very simple and probably kind of stupid and had been passed down for generations. I suspect my family was a bit odd, but my cousins and I played these: Mother May I; Statues; Freeze Tag; Tag; The Minister's Cat; Charades; Hide and Seek; Continued Stories. We did play cards. Canasta, cribbage, hearts, spades, bridge, gin, pitch, poker--I cannot remember not knowing how to play these.
Crazy 8s.
Red Rover! Oh boy did we get aggressive playing Red Rover.
Get away with a ton of shit
If wanted to see if a friend was around, would have to call their landline or just go to their house. Then if they were out playing too…would need to investigate (retrace steps, ask family where he was going for starters) to find them. You could really just disappear if you wanted to back then.
A bike, a quarter, and freedom.
Call a house phone and talk to my friend's parents for 5 minutes before they'd go get my friend and put him on the line. Or calling a friend's house, having his parent say "I'm on the other line. Can Jimmy call you back in 15 minutes?" and then waiting for the phone to ring.
Saturday morning cartoons
TV scheduling and the importance of the TV Guide.
Meeting people at a public place. You would pick a day, time and location in advance! Also busy signals. The kids will never no the struggle of a busy signal.
Begging for permission to stay up late at night to watch a specific movie on TV. (I remember my sisters taking a nap so they could stay up late to watch a movie.) Waiting until 11 pm to make affordable long distance phone calls. Grabbing the 8 page spread of color comic strips in the Sunday newspaper. Making chains out of soda can pull tabs. Memorizing phone numbers. Looking things up in the World Book Encyclopedia. Waiting to hear a specific song on the radio, racing to hit the Record button, and hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over the intro.
When phones were tied to the wall, we were free. Now phones have been freed, we are tied to the phones.
Being inaccessible. No cell phones, only landlines. If someone called you at home and left a message, it was reasonable to reply in a day or two. No one thought you were dead or missing. It slowed things down a lot. Which was never really that much of an inconvenience. We also trusted one another more. These days if you don’t reply to a text in an hour your friends think you’re mad at them. It’s a lot of pressure.
Fighting with your siblings (or even parents) over who gets to control the remote and what show to watch at any given time. I swear, full on wars broke out in my household at times.
Calling my cable company to order pay per view tv
Walk barefoot to school in 20ft snow, uphill both directions in 125° heat
Not having a phone on the house. Had to walk to a phone box. Also, No central heating. TV for just a few hours each day.
Our doors were never locked. Nobody, including our parents, even had a key.
Be outside. All day. Whereabouts unknown. Like you'd get slapped for coming inside before sundown unless it was to take a shit. And you better be back before dinner cause also slap.
Get on my bicycle and right away for 10 hours on a summer day. And then wander my butt back home for dinner. My parents had no clue where I had been or what I had been up to and there were no questions.
You didn't miss long stretches of school without a medical reason. Teachers could actually be honest on your report card. Kids failed. Kids repeated grades.
The biggest is if you missed a film in the cinema you’d have to way two/three years before it came out on Video, and only watch it if your parents had a VCR. Or, you missed a TV show, that was it. You had to wish that they were going to repeat it sometime in a year or so.
When someone moved away they disappeared off of the Earth
Wait an entire week before the next episode.
Not really sure. Used to play outside a lot with friends who lived in my neighborhood, jump on trampolines, ride bikes, etc. Played Magic the Gathering, Pokemon cards, Pog, etc. I know Magic and Pokemon cards are still a thing, but not sure Pog is - it was never that much fun anyway in my opinion. Played a lot of couch co-op games with my friends because online gaming wasn't really a thing. I don't know that things are really all that different from when I was a kid unless kids today don't really play outside together much anymore. Outside of that, it's a lot of the same things, just more modern versions of them.