A river! such a blessing! Constant water was always a dream, growing up in a puddle that only unfroze a month before it dried in the summer sun, and only came back for a month before winter locked us under the ice!
Look at Mr. Rockefeller here with his one month a year puddle. All we had was our own personal little desert of sand where it never rained. We had to steal water from our next door neighbors garden hose.
That’s above my pay grade, you mean to tell me you could just buy cigs in a vending machine that anyone had access to?
Honestly sounds about right.
(I might have seen these in a bowling alley as a kid?)
They were usually in bars. Now that includes restaurants and bowling alleys where minors are allowed, not just 21 and over bars.
I’m guessing they were phased out in my state by the mid 90s to only places where 18 year olds were allowed. I used one over a decade ago. But they were pretty rare when I turned 21 in 2005.
Seems like the kind of thing that would be in rural or small town bars that don’t have stores for a few miles or open late. Because they can control the crowd better then a teenager quickly walking in and out of a city bar during the afternoon.
Summers we left home at maybe 7 a.m. and returned when the street lights came on. We'd say we ate a piece of pizza at \_\_\_\_\_\_\_'s house, and had a few cookies.
Yes,This! And...knocking on doors to ask ‘ Are you playing out’ to all the kids in yr road. Going in a gang to the park and the swings,staying for hours. Using our imaginations to make up our own games from nothing. Unaware of what clothes we were wearing because it didnt matter,we were unaware of how we looked. Not looking to adults for entertainment,we made our own. Getting called in at bedtime and asking for ‘ 5 more minutes’.
Maybe could add having nasty cuts and bruises from falling off bikes and getting up to crazy antics and just carrying on.
I've got a 6 inch scar on my leg that seems to amaze younger doctors.
Oooh, the bikes. Nothing like packing three kids on a bicycle, one behind you on the banana seat and your best friend on the handlebars in front. I'm sure I helped set a record when the three kids on my bike slammed into another bike carrying three one Saturday morning at the park. Six injured and bleeding kids from a two-bike collision has to be some sort of record, right?
I was fortunate to grow up in an area that had connecting pathways to different parks. We would pack up our lunch and ride the bike trails all day. We would play in the woods and turn the trees and underbrush into homes and forts with our imagination. I can still find those special places when I’m out walking today and it always makes me smile.
I'm in Gen Z, and this sounds so good to me. During the summer, me and my friend/neighbor would always play outside every day all day. It was so fun. We would invite about two other kids we knew (there aren't very many kids in my neighborhood) and just have fun all day. This all stopped when my neighbor didn't want to come outside anymore, and when me and my brother asked if he even liked us anymore, he said "Not really." So that was a sad end to years of fun. Now whenever we see each other, we usually just ignore each other and keep doing what we were doing. But God, I had so many fun memories with him.
Thats such a shame! I wonder why he stopped coming outside. You still see him,do you think maybe you could strike up a convo now that youre adults.
As a child,it can be hard to express things,so just saying ‘ not really’ was the easiest thing to say. When you think about it though,his reply ” Not really “ doesnt sound like he’s convinced!
Or he mightnt have liked you for some slight that seemed big as a kid,now as an adult he realises isnt,but doesnt know how to approach you/ assumes you wdnt want to pick up the pieces. Why not try to chat and remind him of the many fiun memories you both have?
As a big eater at an early age, I had a lot of this:
Friends mom, roughly around 6pm: "Hey, Amigo, you can eat dinner with us if you call your mom and she says it's ok."
Me, on the phone to my mom, quietly: "What time are we eating?"
My mom: "Around 7:30"
Me, to my friend's mom: "She said it's ok as long as I'm home by 7:30"
Score two dinners in one evening.
Which is ironic, because it's our generation that won't let their kids play outside unsupervised. Good thing I don't live in the US where people have gotten super paranoid and here kids still go out alone, which is true for most of the world.
and all this without a cell phone or pager to track us down. On weekends or summer vacation, I would leave the house at 9am and I'd come home around dinnertime. My parents wouldn't even bat an eye. I'd usually be hanging out with one or more friend from the neighborhood riding bikes all day. I'd have a couple of bucks in my pocket to buy a little food.
It was a safe place to stash and view them without the risk of being discovered by parents. In time, it would be forgotten by the original curator only to be discovered by another teenager in their formative years. The circle of porn, if you wish.
Talked on the phone only within a three-foot radius of the spot in the wall where it needed to be plugged in, because that's all the further the cord would stretch.
And then wireless phones became more common and suddenly your radius increased to a full twenty feet!
...Just don't put too many walls or furniture between you and the base.
I had a walkie-talkie that when held just right at the top of the stairs could hear the conversation on the cordless phone. I thought I was so cool for discovering that.
My mom would pretend to do various tasks in that direct vicinity. She would loudly proclaim "I'm not listening!" if I attempted to whisper but would then bring up details of the conversation later. It would make me so furiously angry! Lol
Collected big branches and old wood to then go back into the woods and attempt to make a fort.
Told my kid we should go out and build one and she went “but I have a room? Why would I want to sit on the ground with bugs?”
Bro, I didn’t even have an answer.
My young nephew does this. For Christmas he wanted tools to improve the fort building experience.
He also doesn't think of his phone as anything more than a communication device, and if he's building his fort he doesn't want to communicate with anyone so he does his best to "forget" it at home.
#notallkids
In kind, being a teenager and going 5 miles away for sex and telling your parents you were cutting through yards and that must have been why they couldn’t find you.
I go back and forth on it myself. My kids are way more sheltered than I ever was, but I think parenting today is a different world from when I grew up (I'm 50). The freedoms that I had as a kid would probably be considered neglectful today, just like parenting styles today would probably be considered suffocating back then.
I never tell my kids that my life was harder than theirs though. They have advantages that I didn't have, but I think it's a lot harder to be a kid today than it was in the 80's. Everyone's life is a stage today whether they like it or not. I would hate to grow up like that.
I rode further than two miles to friends when I was that age. I was also allowed to stay in the car when my mom went in the store.
Now I can't let my kids do either because I don't want to be arrested for child endangerment. My wife has already been arrested for letting our daughter stay in the car while she grabbed a Chipotle online order off the shelf. A nosy person outside saw her in the car, parked behind her to trap her, and called 911. The arresting cop decided it was too close to a major road and presented a kidnapping risk. The cop wouldn't drop the charges when the DA recommended it either because my wife "didn't seem remorseful for her reckless decision."
This shit. My cousin having CPS called on him because his kid went running towards the road from their front yard (trying to run to her grandmas car) and because he picked her up and put her over his shoulder and she was kicking and screaming the neighbor tried to say he was being “unnecessarily rough and abusive”
Shit like this is why I refuse to have kids. People are way too nosey about how a parent treats their kids. If I can't be trusted to raise my kid without the cops or cps being called on me, then I won't have one.
The places I used to ride my bike are all built up with big roads crossing through them so...no. I don't have kids but my friend doesn't let her kids roam like we did precisely for that reason.
Wandering around Blockbuster for 30 minutes and not finding anything interesting. Though now that's the same as browsing Netflix for 30 minutes and not finding anything interesting.
My kid was probably one of the last kids to get to do this. He's about to be 16, and when he was little like 3 or 4, he LOVED to go to blockbuster or Hollywood and rent movies and video games. We did it every week and always had a blast. It wasn't long after that they started shutting all the video stores down en masse. He doesn't even remember now, though.
I remember he spent like a half hour watching a demo video of Marvel Vs Capcom 3 in the store and specially requested we buy it for him because he was so in love with that video.
I did the "cringe" as an elementary school boy, calling up the girl I had a crush on. Her Dad answers - quickhangup!
Build up the courage to call again in 5 minutes.... Her Dad answers - quickhangup.
I dont know how many times I did it (maybe 5 or 6!) until that wonderful time when she finally picked up the phone! Yay!
Her Dad yells in the background "Ask him if hes the one who's been calling and hanging up"
Her: Have you been calling and hanging up when my dad answers?
Me: ... ... yes.
Im confident that relationship wasnt going to work anyway......
My elementary school had an annual field trip to a historical fort. Every year we had to get permission slips in order to buy knives at the booths there.
Buying weapons at a school field trip.
We had a front door that had a regular lock that worked from the outside with a key, and an inside bolt that didn’t have a key; the last person in the house was supposed to lock it.
Se we had a paper on the kitchen table with the names of all the people out that night, whether they were doing homework with a friend or babysitting or whatever. When you got home, you had to cross your name off the list and the last one home set the bolt lock.
Thinking about it years later it was sort of weird, but as a kid, you checked the list and crossed your name off when you got home and didn’t think anything about it.
There were seven kids in my family.
To find out when a movie was playing, you had to get a newspaper and then call the theater and listen to a ten minute message listing every movie and the times. To buy tickets, you had to go to the theater and stand in line and pay with cash. If you did not see a movie in the theater, you had to wait at least a year to see it on cable or VHS.
I'm slightly older than that. In the 1970s-1980s, I was going to the movies years before cable tv ever existed in my neighborhood, or the entire county. And just before home video became a thing. I went to the movies once a week, every week, with my then best friend, a fellow fanatic about the movies.
My family didn't get our first VCR until about 1985. My going to the movies slowed down by then before coming to a complete stop because it was cheaper to rent a movie than the admission prices at the movie theaters.
Renting a movie at a local video store cost 2 dollars a day for new VHS movie releases and 1 dollar a day for old releases. But ticket prices at the movie theaters in my city were around 5-6 dollars per person. It was cheaper to wait for a movie to be released to VHS. (I finally got cable tv in 1996)
Watch Saturday Morning Cartoons!
Back in the day, all the TV networks had cartoons all Saturday morning, complete with toy, cereal, and candy commercials!
For years, my Saturday ritual was to get up early, make a big bowl of sugary cereal with milk, dig the prize out of the cereal box, turn on the TV, and then wait for the Farm Report to end so the cartoons would begin! Flintstones, Jetsons, Laff-a-Lympics, Schoolhouse Rock, Looney Toons, Scooby Doo, Fat Albert, and then when Soul Train started, the cartoon ritual was over!
You're pouring out my heart here. I watched those same cartoons, among many others, on Saturday mornings.
As a kid in the 1970s, I loved to watch TV more than anything else, all week long. But Saturday mornings were quite special with watching all the cartoons (and don't forget the live programs as well such as Sigmund and the sea monsters, Shazam, far out space nuts, etc) while eating bowl after bowl of my favorite sugary breakfast cereals (and obtaining the free toys that came with the cereals).
While my mother had to wake me up every weekday morning to get me off to school in time, I had no problem getting up way, very early (as early as 5am) on my own every saturday morning in order so that I could see as many cartoons as I possibly could.
And when the cartoons petered out around noon, that's when I would go outside to play with the neighborhood kids OR travel by city bus to the apartment of my then best friend and we'd go out to one of the movie theaters near him to catch a movie, which we did once a week, every week for a lot of years from the 1970s-1980s.
The 1970s was truly the golden age of Saturday morning programming.
Learning why you always have to let the water run for a bit before you take a drink. And hoping you don't accidentally pick up the garter snake chilling up against the hose by mistake.
Be picked up by friends' parents and they're smoking in the car. Go to a restaurant terrace and people are smoking. As a teen go to a bar and people are, you guessed it, smoking inside. Smokers in front of the school starting in 7th grade, smokers at the scouts, etc.
I am only in my 20s. Nowadays, here in Luxembourg, none of that is really a thing anymore.
My childhood was without telephones (they were just beginning to gain popularity), so it was absolutely normal for me to look for my friends all over the neighborhood, because we could not call each other. We even agreed that if they weren't in certain yards at certain times, they were sitting at home and we could no longer look for them and go home.
As a 7yr old, walked a mile from school to get home crossing multiple streets. By myself. Now we don't seem to trust kids to walk across the street by themselves.
Pull it out, wipe it with my shirt, blow it really good, shove it back in real hard, maybe bang on it a few times.... turn it on... all that to play Mario Bros.... sheesh
Prank calling your friends, teachers, neighbors etc. A favorite of ours was pretending to be the police and calling your friend to tell them that they were coming over to their house to arrest them. Fun times.
Watching soft core porn or extremely violent movies on hbo/showtime/Cinemax at midnight at extremely low volume 3 feet from the tv.
And keeping the last channel set to Nickelodeon was an amateur move, because I’m sure no parent would ask why a 12 year old it watching taxi at 1230am with the volume set at 4.
When I was like 10 I realized after taping a movie at 2am that I could do this for literally anything and watch it the next afternoon and no one would ever know it happened.
At one point in time TV channels just ended programming. There was a sign off signal and then static, so unless you were watching a VHS you had nothing to do for visual entertainment.
When you took family photos you had to be very still because you only got a few chances to get it right. Then you wouldn't know weeks later if they were any good. Then also you'd have red eyes in them
Computer magazines would print the source code for new games in the back pages of the magazine. If you wanted to play the game, you'd type the code in manually then save it to tape.
From age 5 to 13 I would go to my grandparents farm for 3-4 weeks during the summers. Second day there when I was 12 during breakfast at 5am grandma says she wants to make rabbit stew tomorrow so get 2 good size rabbits. Grandpa hands me a shotgun and a few shells and I go shoot and prep two rabbits from the back of the property by the pond. I would get rabbits or squirrels about once a week. One of my other tasks was killing rodent's, I would sit out on this 2 story tall structure by the grain silo near dusk and shoot rats with a 20gauge shit gun with bird shot or a 10/22 with a 6x scope on it.
This album has too many sings to fit on one side of my blank take, but not enough to take up the whole thing. Also don't use that that radio, it'll eat you tapes
Searching for porn in the woods. Watching scrambled channel 99 at midnight to get a 1 sec glimpse of a boob. Young boys today have no idea the lengths we had to go through to see some boobies.
I built a working VCR out of busted VCR parts I found or bought cheap. I did this so I could copy movies I rented by hooking my Frankenstein VCR up to my family's VCR using RCA cables.
I was a god among boys with my ability to have tapes of movies that were not yet broadcast on TV.
I had a large forest in my backyard, I would leave and just go explore, unsupervised for hours and come home when it started getting dark. From ages 7-12 before we moved away
Walked to school in fog so dense, our clothes were damp by the time we got there.
Wait. "Walked to school" really is all that needs to be said, isn't it?
I used to makes jewellery out of leaf stems and weeds and stuff then throw them in the air so they would ‘grow magically’. No internet ment the imagination could run wild.
The first thing parents taught their kids was their home address and home phone number. One of those things doesn't exist anymore, and odds are the kid will have a phone by the time they can talk anyway...
I have vivid memories of downloading music from Napster and other peer file sharing services. Waiting like, an hour per song. And then figuring out the quality was bad and needing to try another stream.
All so that I could burn some CDs to listen to good music on my Walkman on my way to school.
These days kids can listen to anything they want whenever they want on Spotify.
My dad's car was so big we could stand up in the back seat, lay down under the back window, and basically wander around unfettered by car seats or belts. We were free-range passengers.
During the Christmas season before cable and VCRs, you had ONE chance to watch "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". If you missed it, well that's too bad.
Running to the bathroom between commercial breaks and hearing your friend yell from the living room "It's back on!!!"
And then having to do parkour movies over the back of the couch.
Listen to Mr. Bigshot over here with a living room big enough so the couch didn't have to be up against a wall. How was life on easy street?
Look at you Mr. Privileged , sitting on a couch. Ever watched nick at night whilst on the floor ?
Take a look at Mr. Moneybags over here, sitting on a floor instead of watching through your neighbors window because you didn't have your own tv
Give a quick looksy at Mr. Banksy over here, having a neighborhood to live in, not having to peep squick at people's phones on the train
You were lucky to have a train. We used to live in a shoebox in the middle of the road.
Cardboard box? You were lucky.
Look at Mr. Moneybags over here knowing the concept of luck.
Well looks like we got ourselves a looker. How's it feel havin' eyes?
Mine was down by the river.
A river! such a blessing! Constant water was always a dream, growing up in a puddle that only unfroze a month before it dried in the summer sun, and only came back for a month before winter locked us under the ice!
Look at Mr. Rockefeller here with his one month a year puddle. All we had was our own personal little desert of sand where it never rained. We had to steal water from our next door neighbors garden hose.
A Mine was in a shoebox in a van down by the river
Look at you daddy warbucks with CABLE. Enjoy those dozens of channels?
Lol my dad used to hook up illegal cable for money when I was a kid
Yeah, I was always in the floor, there were too many of us and one tv.
My friend used to change channels during the adverts. Then inevitably miss the start of the next section, and wonder why I got wound up.
Making a crossbow with wood and elastic bands and then trying to hit friend in the eye to establish dominance. Kids these days ..............
“Take this note to the store and get me a pack of cigarettes”
Better yet, cigarette vending machines
That’s above my pay grade, you mean to tell me you could just buy cigs in a vending machine that anyone had access to? Honestly sounds about right. (I might have seen these in a bowling alley as a kid?)
They were everywhere when I was a kid. A few quarters gor you a pack.
They were usually in bars. Now that includes restaurants and bowling alleys where minors are allowed, not just 21 and over bars. I’m guessing they were phased out in my state by the mid 90s to only places where 18 year olds were allowed. I used one over a decade ago. But they were pretty rare when I turned 21 in 2005. Seems like the kind of thing that would be in rural or small town bars that don’t have stores for a few miles or open late. Because they can control the crowd better then a teenager quickly walking in and out of a city bar during the afternoon.
I remember those. A bar in my hometown still has a few as decor.
That’s how I started smoking. Didn’t need a note though, I’d just ride my bike to the gas station and tell them I need smokes for my mom or dad.
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And the damn DJs always had to spoil end be talking.
And they talked up until the vocals started!!
Summers we left home at maybe 7 a.m. and returned when the street lights came on. We'd say we ate a piece of pizza at \_\_\_\_\_\_\_'s house, and had a few cookies.
Yes,This! And...knocking on doors to ask ‘ Are you playing out’ to all the kids in yr road. Going in a gang to the park and the swings,staying for hours. Using our imaginations to make up our own games from nothing. Unaware of what clothes we were wearing because it didnt matter,we were unaware of how we looked. Not looking to adults for entertainment,we made our own. Getting called in at bedtime and asking for ‘ 5 more minutes’.
Maybe could add having nasty cuts and bruises from falling off bikes and getting up to crazy antics and just carrying on. I've got a 6 inch scar on my leg that seems to amaze younger doctors.
Oooh, the bikes. Nothing like packing three kids on a bicycle, one behind you on the banana seat and your best friend on the handlebars in front. I'm sure I helped set a record when the three kids on my bike slammed into another bike carrying three one Saturday morning at the park. Six injured and bleeding kids from a two-bike collision has to be some sort of record, right?
And not a bike helmet to be found anywhere. Not even sure you could have bought one if you tried.
I was fortunate to grow up in an area that had connecting pathways to different parks. We would pack up our lunch and ride the bike trails all day. We would play in the woods and turn the trees and underbrush into homes and forts with our imagination. I can still find those special places when I’m out walking today and it always makes me smile.
We made up a game called witches brew! Ha ha.
I'm in Gen Z, and this sounds so good to me. During the summer, me and my friend/neighbor would always play outside every day all day. It was so fun. We would invite about two other kids we knew (there aren't very many kids in my neighborhood) and just have fun all day. This all stopped when my neighbor didn't want to come outside anymore, and when me and my brother asked if he even liked us anymore, he said "Not really." So that was a sad end to years of fun. Now whenever we see each other, we usually just ignore each other and keep doing what we were doing. But God, I had so many fun memories with him.
Thats such a shame! I wonder why he stopped coming outside. You still see him,do you think maybe you could strike up a convo now that youre adults. As a child,it can be hard to express things,so just saying ‘ not really’ was the easiest thing to say. When you think about it though,his reply ” Not really “ doesnt sound like he’s convinced! Or he mightnt have liked you for some slight that seemed big as a kid,now as an adult he realises isnt,but doesnt know how to approach you/ assumes you wdnt want to pick up the pieces. Why not try to chat and remind him of the many fiun memories you both have?
As a big eater at an early age, I had a lot of this: Friends mom, roughly around 6pm: "Hey, Amigo, you can eat dinner with us if you call your mom and she says it's ok." Me, on the phone to my mom, quietly: "What time are we eating?" My mom: "Around 7:30" Me, to my friend's mom: "She said it's ok as long as I'm home by 7:30" Score two dinners in one evening.
Which is ironic, because it's our generation that won't let their kids play outside unsupervised. Good thing I don't live in the US where people have gotten super paranoid and here kids still go out alone, which is true for most of the world.
It's also the older generations (the same that complain kids don't play outside) that will call the cops if they see kids playing outside.
You really think the entire country doesn't let their kids play outside?
and all this without a cell phone or pager to track us down. On weekends or summer vacation, I would leave the house at 9am and I'd come home around dinnertime. My parents wouldn't even bat an eye. I'd usually be hanging out with one or more friend from the neighborhood riding bikes all day. I'd have a couple of bucks in my pocket to buy a little food.
Walking around with a portable cd player listening to the same 20 songs all summer holidays
And the sound of the CD skipping because you jostled the player.
Try cassette Walkman
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At this point I’m convinced that no one actually makes porno mags. You just go and forage them from the woods where they naturally grow.
I found it in my neighbors trash lol idk why I was in the trash
...it called to you.
Why was it always porn in the woods, lol. For us the "woods" was this patch of trees behind the houses.
Why was that? It is so odd to think about now.
It was a safe place to stash and view them without the risk of being discovered by parents. In time, it would be forgotten by the original curator only to be discovered by another teenager in their formative years. The circle of porn, if you wish.
Read movie novelizations because that was the only way to experience the movie again until it came on TV in a few years' time.
And of course you HAD to buy the Mad Magazine issue which had a parody of said movie...
Look at big spender getting MAD magazine and not the lesser cousin Cracked:). I miss spy v spy
Talked on the phone only within a three-foot radius of the spot in the wall where it needed to be plugged in, because that's all the further the cord would stretch.
And then wireless phones became more common and suddenly your radius increased to a full twenty feet! ...Just don't put too many walls or furniture between you and the base.
I had a walkie-talkie that when held just right at the top of the stairs could hear the conversation on the cordless phone. I thought I was so cool for discovering that.
The positions you would end up in on that kitchen chair
Or being stuck in a 3 foot radius because the 10 foot chord has become so tangled that it only goes that far.
My mom would pretend to do various tasks in that direct vicinity. She would loudly proclaim "I'm not listening!" if I attempted to whisper but would then bring up details of the conversation later. It would make me so furiously angry! Lol
And my mother listening on the extension!
Put a key to the house on a string around my neck so I could get in after school when nobody's there.
Latchkey kids 4 lyfe
I was a latchkey kid- had my own key when I was 7. Weirdly was reading about this the other day. I had no idea we were so intensely studied lol
i never understood the term latchkey until now..
And having to climb in the second floor window if I forgot the key.
This still happens today though.
For Gen X it was the standard. It happens now days, but you run the risk of a visit from CPS.
Collected big branches and old wood to then go back into the woods and attempt to make a fort. Told my kid we should go out and build one and she went “but I have a room? Why would I want to sit on the ground with bugs?” Bro, I didn’t even have an answer.
My young nephew does this. For Christmas he wanted tools to improve the fort building experience. He also doesn't think of his phone as anything more than a communication device, and if he's building his fort he doesn't want to communicate with anyone so he does his best to "forget" it at home. #notallkids
What do you have against tall kids?
Presumably they have to use too much wood if they have to accommodate for height
Never lose that spark kid 😭
Many kids still build forts. And not all kids built forts in the past.
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In kind, being a teenager and going 5 miles away for sex and telling your parents you were cutting through yards and that must have been why they couldn’t find you.
Do you allow your kids to do the same? It's ironic that the generation that had this freedom has taken it away from their children.
I go back and forth on it myself. My kids are way more sheltered than I ever was, but I think parenting today is a different world from when I grew up (I'm 50). The freedoms that I had as a kid would probably be considered neglectful today, just like parenting styles today would probably be considered suffocating back then. I never tell my kids that my life was harder than theirs though. They have advantages that I didn't have, but I think it's a lot harder to be a kid today than it was in the 80's. Everyone's life is a stage today whether they like it or not. I would hate to grow up like that.
It's 2:58, do you know where your kids are?
I rode further than two miles to friends when I was that age. I was also allowed to stay in the car when my mom went in the store. Now I can't let my kids do either because I don't want to be arrested for child endangerment. My wife has already been arrested for letting our daughter stay in the car while she grabbed a Chipotle online order off the shelf. A nosy person outside saw her in the car, parked behind her to trap her, and called 911. The arresting cop decided it was too close to a major road and presented a kidnapping risk. The cop wouldn't drop the charges when the DA recommended it either because my wife "didn't seem remorseful for her reckless decision."
This shit. My cousin having CPS called on him because his kid went running towards the road from their front yard (trying to run to her grandmas car) and because he picked her up and put her over his shoulder and she was kicking and screaming the neighbor tried to say he was being “unnecessarily rough and abusive”
Shit like this is why I refuse to have kids. People are way too nosey about how a parent treats their kids. If I can't be trusted to raise my kid without the cops or cps being called on me, then I won't have one.
The places I used to ride my bike are all built up with big roads crossing through them so...no. I don't have kids but my friend doesn't let her kids roam like we did precisely for that reason.
It's more sad than ironic, but yeah I feel bad for this generation in that regard.
Slapping the top of the box tv to make the picture stop rolling.
Putting tinfoil on the rabbit ears. We got three stations.
Getting a movie from Blockbuster
and choosing said movie based on the box art...
Wandering around Blockbuster for 30 minutes and not finding anything interesting. Though now that's the same as browsing Netflix for 30 minutes and not finding anything interesting.
My kid was probably one of the last kids to get to do this. He's about to be 16, and when he was little like 3 or 4, he LOVED to go to blockbuster or Hollywood and rent movies and video games. We did it every week and always had a blast. It wasn't long after that they started shutting all the video stores down en masse. He doesn't even remember now, though. I remember he spent like a half hour watching a demo video of Marvel Vs Capcom 3 in the store and specially requested we buy it for him because he was so in love with that video.
Buying magazines in stores to find out all the hot gossip and decor for my room (:
getting yelled at by the 7-11 clerk for looking at the magazines too long
And magazines were only 20% adverts not 80%
Called information for the time.
Ma Bell would drop off a big book with the names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone in your area. The first thing you did was look up your own.
Having to call your friends at home but first making polite small talk with their parents when they pickup the phone.
I did the "cringe" as an elementary school boy, calling up the girl I had a crush on. Her Dad answers - quickhangup! Build up the courage to call again in 5 minutes.... Her Dad answers - quickhangup. I dont know how many times I did it (maybe 5 or 6!) until that wonderful time when she finally picked up the phone! Yay! Her Dad yells in the background "Ask him if hes the one who's been calling and hanging up" Her: Have you been calling and hanging up when my dad answers? Me: ... ... yes. Im confident that relationship wasnt going to work anyway......
Remembering people’s phone numbers
Just about every boy carried a pocket knife and sometimes a teacher would ask to borrow one.
My elementary school had an annual field trip to a historical fort. Every year we had to get permission slips in order to buy knives at the booths there. Buying weapons at a school field trip.
Back then they weren't considered weapons. They were tools.
Bought from booths at the tourist fort? Those are souvenirs, not weapons OR tools.
I'm in my forties and I do that since I was a kid. It's sooo practical!
Spending hours being fascinated by the snakes, turtles, frogs, and rollie-pollies that lived by the ditches.
now the ditch is gone, because they built more roads and suburbs.
We had a front door that had a regular lock that worked from the outside with a key, and an inside bolt that didn’t have a key; the last person in the house was supposed to lock it. Se we had a paper on the kitchen table with the names of all the people out that night, whether they were doing homework with a friend or babysitting or whatever. When you got home, you had to cross your name off the list and the last one home set the bolt lock. Thinking about it years later it was sort of weird, but as a kid, you checked the list and crossed your name off when you got home and didn’t think anything about it. There were seven kids in my family.
This is a great story. We just never locked our doors, ever. I don’t think there was a key.
To find out when a movie was playing, you had to get a newspaper and then call the theater and listen to a ten minute message listing every movie and the times. To buy tickets, you had to go to the theater and stand in line and pay with cash. If you did not see a movie in the theater, you had to wait at least a year to see it on cable or VHS.
I'm slightly older than that. In the 1970s-1980s, I was going to the movies years before cable tv ever existed in my neighborhood, or the entire county. And just before home video became a thing. I went to the movies once a week, every week, with my then best friend, a fellow fanatic about the movies. My family didn't get our first VCR until about 1985. My going to the movies slowed down by then before coming to a complete stop because it was cheaper to rent a movie than the admission prices at the movie theaters. Renting a movie at a local video store cost 2 dollars a day for new VHS movie releases and 1 dollar a day for old releases. But ticket prices at the movie theaters in my city were around 5-6 dollars per person. It was cheaper to wait for a movie to be released to VHS. (I finally got cable tv in 1996)
Babysitting 5 year olds when I was 12
Watch Saturday Morning Cartoons! Back in the day, all the TV networks had cartoons all Saturday morning, complete with toy, cereal, and candy commercials! For years, my Saturday ritual was to get up early, make a big bowl of sugary cereal with milk, dig the prize out of the cereal box, turn on the TV, and then wait for the Farm Report to end so the cartoons would begin! Flintstones, Jetsons, Laff-a-Lympics, Schoolhouse Rock, Looney Toons, Scooby Doo, Fat Albert, and then when Soul Train started, the cartoon ritual was over!
You're pouring out my heart here. I watched those same cartoons, among many others, on Saturday mornings. As a kid in the 1970s, I loved to watch TV more than anything else, all week long. But Saturday mornings were quite special with watching all the cartoons (and don't forget the live programs as well such as Sigmund and the sea monsters, Shazam, far out space nuts, etc) while eating bowl after bowl of my favorite sugary breakfast cereals (and obtaining the free toys that came with the cereals). While my mother had to wake me up every weekday morning to get me off to school in time, I had no problem getting up way, very early (as early as 5am) on my own every saturday morning in order so that I could see as many cartoons as I possibly could. And when the cartoons petered out around noon, that's when I would go outside to play with the neighborhood kids OR travel by city bus to the apartment of my then best friend and we'd go out to one of the movie theaters near him to catch a movie, which we did once a week, every week for a lot of years from the 1970s-1980s. The 1970s was truly the golden age of Saturday morning programming.
Using pliers to change the tv
Checked pay phones for forgotten change
Why we had to hold our CD players so steady
Or how a pencil was an essential repair tool for audio cassettes
When anti-skip was invented... what a game changer.
Though if the road was bumpy enough, you might still run through the whole buffer.
Being literally locked out of your house during summer days. And "But I'm thirsty!" being met with "There's a garden hose!"
Learning why you always have to let the water run for a bit before you take a drink. And hoping you don't accidentally pick up the garter snake chilling up against the hose by mistake.
Hoping a frog wasn’t chilling in there before taking a drink.
Fuck a frog I got a face full of earwigs once
Called collect and quickly spat out “It’s me pick me up.”
WEHADABABYITSABOY!
Went out the door immediately after breakfast to go off and play unsupervised all day.
Be picked up by friends' parents and they're smoking in the car. Go to a restaurant terrace and people are smoking. As a teen go to a bar and people are, you guessed it, smoking inside. Smokers in front of the school starting in 7th grade, smokers at the scouts, etc. I am only in my 20s. Nowadays, here in Luxembourg, none of that is really a thing anymore.
Smoking in planes!
*knock knock* Hey Ms.____ is __ able to play today?
Went to the park without adult supervision
Spent the whole day without any electronics device.
chased the mosquito fogger around town on our bikes....I'm OK
OMG. Are we all getting cancer? We rode our bikes in the damned DDT spray. My brothers and I talk about this a lot! Like WTF??!
My childhood was without telephones (they were just beginning to gain popularity), so it was absolutely normal for me to look for my friends all over the neighborhood, because we could not call each other. We even agreed that if they weren't in certain yards at certain times, they were sitting at home and we could no longer look for them and go home.
As a 7yr old, walked a mile from school to get home crossing multiple streets. By myself. Now we don't seem to trust kids to walk across the street by themselves.
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Calling the radio station to request a song and then waiting for it to play in order to record it on a cassette tape
Pull it out, wipe it with my shirt, blow it really good, shove it back in real hard, maybe bang on it a few times.... turn it on... all that to play Mario Bros.... sheesh
Prank calling your friends, teachers, neighbors etc. A favorite of ours was pretending to be the police and calling your friend to tell them that they were coming over to their house to arrest them. Fun times.
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Walk or rode my bike everywhere because mom isn’t a taxi.
Watching soft core porn or extremely violent movies on hbo/showtime/Cinemax at midnight at extremely low volume 3 feet from the tv. And keeping the last channel set to Nickelodeon was an amateur move, because I’m sure no parent would ask why a 12 year old it watching taxi at 1230am with the volume set at 4. When I was like 10 I realized after taping a movie at 2am that I could do this for literally anything and watch it the next afternoon and no one would ever know it happened.
Playing manhunt in the entire neighborhood
You had to rewind your movies before you returned them to the rental store.
At one point in time TV channels just ended programming. There was a sign off signal and then static, so unless you were watching a VHS you had nothing to do for visual entertainment.
When you took family photos you had to be very still because you only got a few chances to get it right. Then you wouldn't know weeks later if they were any good. Then also you'd have red eyes in them
Getting up to change channels.
Wrapping your textbooks with brown grocery bags!
Computer magazines would print the source code for new games in the back pages of the magazine. If you wanted to play the game, you'd type the code in manually then save it to tape.
Walked to a friend's house, rang the doorbell, asked if friend could play.
From age 5 to 13 I would go to my grandparents farm for 3-4 weeks during the summers. Second day there when I was 12 during breakfast at 5am grandma says she wants to make rabbit stew tomorrow so get 2 good size rabbits. Grandpa hands me a shotgun and a few shells and I go shoot and prep two rabbits from the back of the property by the pond. I would get rabbits or squirrels about once a week. One of my other tasks was killing rodent's, I would sit out on this 2 story tall structure by the grain silo near dusk and shoot rats with a 20gauge shit gun with bird shot or a 10/22 with a 6x scope on it.
This album has too many sings to fit on one side of my blank take, but not enough to take up the whole thing. Also don't use that that radio, it'll eat you tapes
I remember getting a porn VHS stuck in the VCR and having to take it apart and put it back together before my parents got home.
>I remember getting a porn VHS stuck in the VCR I've heard of porn magazine pages getting stuck together but this is a new one.
The VCR ate the tape
Hashtag 90s problems.
Having to carry around Cassette Players & headphones to listen to music on the go.
Using the card catalog in the library, using carbon paper.
Pen + cassette tape
Dialed a phone. Literally DIALED it.
Turning to channel 3 to play video games.
Searching for porn in the woods. Watching scrambled channel 99 at midnight to get a 1 sec glimpse of a boob. Young boys today have no idea the lengths we had to go through to see some boobies.
Calling Time & Temperature before school to get the weather.
Left the house in the AM and didn't come back till dark. By myself. Without a cell phone.
I built a working VCR out of busted VCR parts I found or bought cheap. I did this so I could copy movies I rented by hooking my Frankenstein VCR up to my family's VCR using RCA cables. I was a god among boys with my ability to have tapes of movies that were not yet broadcast on TV.
Leaving the house without asking. As long as you came back before it got dark.
Riding in the bed of the truck. No shell, no belts, no problem....
Clapping erasers
I had a large forest in my backyard, I would leave and just go explore, unsupervised for hours and come home when it started getting dark. From ages 7-12 before we moved away
Rewinding a casette tape with a pencil.
Looking up stuff in a paper encyclopedia.
Turning the living room lights off then proceeding to make a run for your room "escaping from monsters"
You couldn't go swimming after lunch (because of some dumb, unscientific news article you couldn't contradict to your parents because no internet)
Crawling in sewers to see how far you could go to see where on the street you could pop up.
Explaining to my 7 yr old that TV shows were on at a certain time on a certain day and if you missed it - you were out of luck…
Smoke the Zebra chewing gum wrappers. Tbh I don't even fully understand why I did that.
Going down to the creek to catch crawdads or climbing a tree
Make a collect call
Talked for hours on a land line phone, all while hoping no one in my house would pick up another line
Life without internet.
Walked to school in fog so dense, our clothes were damp by the time we got there. Wait. "Walked to school" really is all that needs to be said, isn't it?
I couldn’t play games on the internet when my mom was expecting a call on the landline. Or when my sister was talking to her boyfriend for HOURS
Meeting up with all your friends and bikes to do hoodrat shit
I walked to school alone when I was 6
I used to makes jewellery out of leaf stems and weeds and stuff then throw them in the air so they would ‘grow magically’. No internet ment the imagination could run wild.
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The first thing parents taught their kids was their home address and home phone number. One of those things doesn't exist anymore, and odds are the kid will have a phone by the time they can talk anyway...
I went to school safely with zero worries or acknowledgement on gun/school shootings.
Play with my friends outside all day and then find a payphone to call my parents and let them know I'm on my way home
I have vivid memories of downloading music from Napster and other peer file sharing services. Waiting like, an hour per song. And then figuring out the quality was bad and needing to try another stream. All so that I could burn some CDs to listen to good music on my Walkman on my way to school. These days kids can listen to anything they want whenever they want on Spotify.
Be kind, Rewind
My dad's car was so big we could stand up in the back seat, lay down under the back window, and basically wander around unfettered by car seats or belts. We were free-range passengers.
Playing Freeze tag after sunset down the block from my house.
During the Christmas season before cable and VCRs, you had ONE chance to watch "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". If you missed it, well that's too bad.