W: When

by Donna Posted on

I grew up in the 50s-60 and I remember when…

  • moms made you leave the house and you wouldn’t return until a) you got called home, b) the streetlights came on, c) you got hungry
  • there was smoking everywhere, even in restaurants while you were eating
  • you couldn’t communicate except by snail mail or a landline phone
  • anyone could walk to the gates at the airport and anyone could walk onto a cruise ship to say goodbye 
  • there were no seat belts in vehicles
  • you’d see a bunch of kids crowded in to the back of a station wagon
  • stores were closed on Sundays and after 5-6pm except on Thurs or Fri nights
  • no such thing as an ATM and everyone knew how long to float a check written locally
  • phones were rotary dial and there was nothing wireless or cordless
  • waiting till after 6pm on a Sunday night to make a long distance call
  • women couldn’t have their own credit file or get their own credit card
  • television stations went off the air at night and showed a test pattern until they came back on the next morning
  • AM radio was all there was until FM came out and then we couldn’t wait to buy our own small portable radio
  • you hid under the covers with a flashlight so you could read your comics or books
  • it took days to get camera film developed only to find out most of the photos were bad
  • records you played over and over started to skip from playing it so often or the needle needed replacing on the record player
  • banging the side of the television was used to improve the reception OR aluminum foil was wrapped around the end of the rabbit ears for the same purpose

What would you add to the list?


My A-Z this year are random thoughts, ideas, and whatever pops into my mind for the letter of the day. As in previous years, I will keep it short and sweet.

Till next time…

34 thoughts on “W: When”

  1. Eyeglasses with real glass. Mine were so heavy I had permanent sores on my nose. Help wanted Male/Female listings in the newspaper. The F(emale)listings were mainly for secretaries or “gal Fridays”. Let’s see, what else? Female teachers had to go on leave as soon as they started to show. I lost one of my favorite history teachers in high school that way. Alana ramblinwitham

  2. We’d have two sets of clothing, one for school (dresses in elementary), and play clothes we’d change into when we got home. Doctors made house calls.
    Things that weren’t so good…
    No one neutered or spayed their pets. There were many ads in the newspapers for free puppies and kittens.
    There were no dress codes, but no one got “distracted” by mini-skirts or halter-tops and 100% graduated!

    1. Yup, I remember changing into play clothes after school. We also had Sunday clothes. We did have dress codes, girls had to wear dresses or skirts and boys weren’t allowed to wear jeans or collarless shirts. Our dresses/skirts had to be just below the knee.

  3. Being born in 1950, I remember all of them. I also remember prices. I lived in NYC. To get on a subway $.10, stamps for a first class letter $.04, and a whole pizza $1.25 (and I don’t remember any choices of toppings, just cheese), comics cost $.10 unless is was a special edition when it was $.25 . Little league was the only organized sport that I played. We were allowed to play, unsupervised in the street. Equipment we used to play were broomstick handles, a rubber ball called a spaldeen (Spalding) which cost $.25, and any natural or standing objects as bases (cars, rocks, trees, etc. As the song goes, “Ah yes, I remember it well.”

  4. No seatbelts – I wouldn’t like that one. I do like films as you’ll never know how the photos turn out which I find always a fun surprise.

    Have a lovely day.

    1. I’d forgotten about no seatbelts! No GPS, no power steering or power brakes either! Thanks again for dropping in.

  5. Wow that was a blast to the past. I remember most of them. Others: There were only 3 tv stations (4 if you counted pbs.) Cars had real character in their looks. You knew what they were when you saw them.

    1. Good ones! Living outside of Boston, we did get PBS along with NBC and CBS. We didn’t get ABC until the late 50s.

        1. They were to the Boston area. I found this: In the 1950s, Boston had several television stations, including WBZ-TV (Channel 4 – NBC), which was the first to air in Boston in 1948. WNAC-TV (Channel 7 – CBS) was the second, starting in 1948, and WHDH-TV (Channel 5 – ABC) joined later in 1957.

  6. Yes remember all except one – wouldn’t know about women not having cards/accounts. 🙂 Visiting from the A-Z and enjoyed the post – refreshed some great memories. All the best for the end days of the challenge

  7. No bike helmets and you needed to use your hand signals for turning. Milk had cream on top. School milk was in small bottles. Birthday cakes came from your oven.

    1. Yes to all of the them!! And I remember having to collect the milk bottle caps from home delivery. We had to bring 100 of them to class in first grade, we used them to learn how to count.

  8. I love these! My parents grew up in the 50s and 60s too and I feel like they held onto some of those items and values so I grew up with them, too. (I grew up in the 80s and 90s, which still feel so fun and innocent compared to now.) My parents still have a rotary phone! And I could take off on my bike and come home when the streetlights came on. My friends and I would also ride in the back of station wagons or pickup trucks and no one batted an eye! I did have a lot of penpals, too – friends who moved away or people I met on family vacations at the hotel pool. I loved getting letters! And remember wanting a cordless phone for my room – not even my own phone line! I’d still use our landline but I was just desperate for my own cordless – I thought it would make me feel so grown up.

    – Allison
    https://lightningflashwriting.blogspot.com/

    1. I remember when my daughter actually got her own phone but on our line. It was a Princess phone and the only reason she got it was my company paid for a second line in the house for me to us (home office).

  9. I remember most of these having been born in 1960! My brothers and I really enjoyed climbing trees in our backyard and building tree forts. I fell out a couple of times but survived unscathed. Those were the days. 🙂 Thank you for the trip down memory lane, Donna!

  11. The store closing after 5pm (except Thurs) is still prevalent in Sydney and it completely surprised me when I first came to the city as the stores back home would close only by 11 pm.
    I still bang on my remote to make it work. haha old habits!!

    1. I was used to Friday being the late night but when I moved to another state, it was Thursday. That was so strange to me. Now it seems as though 9-10pm is more normal on most all nights. Anything with batteries gets banged before deciding it needs new ones. LOL!

  12. Great list, Donna. Much of it was still true when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Switzerland.
    What I would add:
    No parent would dare to challenge a teacher if they gave a bad grade or grounded our kid.

  14. There is a generation now who would have no idea what this means “everyone knew how long to float a check written locally” lol – great list Donna – imagine writing a story around these things and the incomprehension of a younger generation…

  15. Books came from the library, as my school was brand-new when I started there and didn’t get many books for months after the school opened. If you wanted to read a specific book, you requested to reserve it from the library. If it was an adult book, your mom or dad had to sign a paper saying you were allowed to choose books from the adult side of the public library.

    Hardly any early photos of me exist because film cost money to buy it and then, to develop it. There were no selfies. As a teen, I bought myself a Polaroid Swinger for $19.95 and it kept getting stolen. I loved it, though. I got one from my grandkids recently, but it doesn’t have the same allure as it once did because I do not hang out with friends anymore.

    It was 25 cents to go to the Saturday matinee for kids, so Mom would drop us off in the morning with a dime each and come back hours later. All the moms did it. There was nothing but kids in the audience. I remember seeing The Sword in the Stone and other Disney movies with a cartoon featurette. One time, the kid movie theater didn’t get the delivery of the kid movie, so instead they showed a more growup movie, The Thief of Bagdad from 1940. Another time, a magician came after the movie and gave away baby rabbits and doves. It was chaos. He also did the sawing a person trick. LOL.

    I played in the woods, and the creek, even though I was not allowed to. I pulled off the ticks before I came home so Mom wouldn’t know. And I would hose myself off in the back yard so I would be allowed to come in after playing outside and getting dirty.

    No one in the neighborhood had a fence and we crossed people’s yards like it was nothing to get to the common area where we all played in a big grassy area and in winter, built snow forts and threw snowballs.

    We had cap guns, which was dangerous in itself, but we would hit the caps with rocks, too.

    We jumped rope and sang jump rope songs with questionable lyrics. We played with jacks and elastic bands called Chinese jump ropes.

    Each kid in my family had our own vegetable garden.

    No one had a built-in swimming pool, but we had above-ground pools and every kid learned to swim.

    One summer, I read the whole World Book encyclopedia and it was great stuff.

    Girl Scouts was awesome. We got to do stuff my family never did: camped at a lodge, roasted hotdogs and marshmallows on sticks we peeled, learned to square dance, sang peace songs, made art projects to take home. Got badges. I had a deaf friend in Girl Scouts and she was amazing and we made ourselves understood to each other.

    I had a book club with my best friend and we would read the Mary Poppins books, the Narnia series, all of the Ray Bradbury books/stories and Heinlein books, etc.

    I saw the first episode of Star Trek when it aired and was hooked ever since.

    I read magazines in drugstores and rarely bought one. I was not allowed to read comic books because my mom thought they were junk. I read them in stores and every store had book racks and newspaper racks.

    My sister and I went on vacation by ourselves when I was 14 and she was 12.5 and used our babysitting money to buy student fare on Greyhound that lasted the whole summer. We went to California and stayed with cousins, aunts, and family friends who had left Arizona. We walked around Hollywood and other places all by ourselves. We also went to San Francisco. We hated going home. Our parents said it was okay. Can you imagine?

      1. Thanks for sharing yours, too. It is fun to read all of the comments!

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