Managing Editor
Looking back on my time on Planet Earth, I grew up in a time when technology was advancing rapidly but from a cultural and social perspective, life moved at a much slower pace than it does today.
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| A rotary telephone from around 1962. COURTESY PHOTO |
I suppose it has been that way for generations and will always be a fact of life for mankind. While there are probably still some remote tribes existing deep in the Amazon jungle or nomadic hunter-gatherer groups living in the interior rainforests of Borneo who have never listened to the radio or tasted chicken wings dipped in Ranch salad dressing, my generation that was born in the 1950s seemed to clash constantly with cultural norms of my Depression-era parents.
My father would tell me about how as a student he would walk seven miles one way in the snow to attend school each day. The school district didn’t have school buses in the 1930s and his family didn’t own a car. His family was poor and every supper that they ate was homemade, unlike today’s Door Dash fast food delivery or Hello Fresh heat-and-eat meals.
I would make fun of my father’s baggy trousers and slicked “a little dab'll do ya” Brylcreem hair, but he would laugh at the hair length of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
As much as I detested listening to my parents’ Perry Como, Peggy Lee, The Andrews Sisters and Perez Prado records, my parents didn’t care for my older sister’s 45s from The Coasters, Lloyd Price, and Elvis Presley and they loathed my collection of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Strawberry Alarm Clock. I recall my father telling me upon hearing “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells that it resembled fingernails scraping on a chalkboard.
The roles are now reversed for me as I tell stories about what it was like for me way back when and here’s a few that seem outlandish 60 years on.
After classes got out for the summer having finished sixth grade in 1965, I went every morning to a typing class at the high school and learned how to type using paper on a manual typewriter. To pass the class, you needed to type at a minimum of 40 words per minute and maintain a 90 percent accuracy rate.
When our family moved to a newly built home in 1959, our telephone service was a party line with at least four neighbors that my parents didn’t know. For those who don’t know, a party line was shared telephone service. That meant at any given time, if you picked up the telephone receiver to make a call and you heard a conversation going on, someone else was using the shared line and you weren’t able to place your call.
If this happened when my mother was trying to call someone, being the snoop that she was, she would hold her hand over the microphone in the receiver and then listen in to someone else’s conservation. It was a major source of developing gossip for her.
And the lone telephone in our household was a black rotary phone on a small table in the hallway by the foot of the stairs to the second floor. It had a short cord, so all phone calls were made while standing. Again, for those who aren’t aware what a rotary phone is, the telephone dial had cut-out holes in which you put your fingers through and rotated the plastic wheel for each digit dialed. When we first moved, the town where we lived was still using BA as a phone number prefix, followed by four digits. Sometime in 1960, the phone company created a three-digit area code for long-distance dialing and phased out the letter prefix, switching to a seven-digit all-numeric phone number.
Smoking was tolerated everywhere including at workplaces, in hospitals, at restaurants, in elevators, on Greyhound buses and on commercial airplane trips. So were cigarette vending machines which were even in restaurant restrooms.
In the 1980s, my wife and I were frequent guests at the homes of friends who were sponsoring parties selling something. Party hosts would provide a space and invite their friends to attend as companies would demonstrate cookware sets, lingerie, women’s perfumes and men’s colognes and Tupperware. In case you have never heard of Tupperware, it was a popular type of plastic food storage items.
Based upon the percentage of the products sold that night, the party hosts would receive a product or item to keep or purchase at a deeply discounted price. My wife and I hosted an art party in which guests could order paintings and artwork which could be enhanced through elaborate frames. We were able to keep one painting and received a customized frame for it and I still have it on a wall in my home today 40 years later.
One final shocking revelation. I continue to use a paper grocery list each week when I go shopping. Old habits are hard to break. <
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