Life in the late 1900s

Things I remember being a thing that are now just a memory.

In a fit of nostalgia, I sat down and made an unsystematic list of all the stuff I could remember that was part of life and now is no more.

Our family’s first phone machine. And the fact that you could dial your own phone machine from a payphone and get your messages.

Dial a Joke.

Dialing a number to find out the official time.

Phone tables with a shelf for the phone book and an ashtray.

Collect calls.

Phone booths with doors.

Two kids I knew had their own phone in their room. Whenever we had sleepovers, we would make prank phone calls. There was no caller ID, but then they introduced *69 and our victims could call us back.

Looking up our number in the phonebook was thrilling, like minor fame

Yellow Pages

Little black books.

Rolodex. If you were really important, you might have more than one.

Filofax. My mother got one when I was in high school, and it seemed like the most grown-up, organized thing. I craved one, and then I got one for my birthday.

Electric typewriters with a night cover. Carbon paper. Onion skin paper. Round typewriter eraser with a brush. Liquid Paper correction fluid. Mimeographs.

Making textbook covers out of brown grocery bags.

Pink phone message pads

Manila Interoffice envelopes

S&H Green stamps

Aerograms

Subway tokens. Gum machine on the subway platform

Miss Turnstiles. A campaign that ran in the subways when I was in high school. Each month they would feature a photograph and brief biography of a young woman. Fortunately, they didn’t give their address or phone number.

Pulsar watch. The first digital watch I ever saw, circa 1975. When he pushed a button on the side, the time would appear in red numbers on its black screen. My step-uncle Don Kahan, a Chicago lawyer, was the first one I knew to have one.

My stepfather got our first calculator and the first thing we learned was that if you typed in 07734 and turn the calculator upside down, it said hello. It was considered cheating to use it for homework.

I got my first cassette player in 7th grade. I heard what my voice sounded like for the first time. The only tape I had was the one that came with it, a recording of Fur Elise by Beethoven. I played it till it broke. I can never listen to Fur Elise ever again.

My friend Tommy got a Sony Walkman, and for the first time I heard music through headphones while walking down the street. It was mind-blowing. Everything became a movie.

Listening to a new record while standing in a booth in the store.

Buying 45 rpm singles with the thing that went in the hole. Girls kept them in a special mini suitcase.

Every record store had a Sheet Music section.

Readers Digest. TV Guide. Parade magazine. Popular Mechanics. National Geographic. Time and Newsweek. Life and Look.

Morning and Evening newspapers.

T-shirts without slogans or logos.

Departments stores. Abraham and Strauss. Korvettes. Gimbels. Woolworths. Macys.

No book chains or box stores or baristas or Thai food or sourdough or craft beer or weed dispensaries or nail salons or Pilates or wood oven pizza.

No kid had a camera.

1-hour photo

Smoking in bars and restaurants and the office and on the subway and in hospitals. Cigarettes cost a dollar a pack.

Smoking sections on planes and ashtrays in the armrests.

Canoe, Brut. The whistling sailor with the dufflebag in Old Spice commercials

Vitalis

BrylCream

Men’s hair spray. The Dry Look from Gillette. TV commercials: The Wet Head is Dead

A little dab’ll do ya

Right Guard. Mennen. Raise your hand if you’re sure.

Manly, but I like it too.

I bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan and never let you forget you’re a man.

Jock straps.

Mandatory showers in gym class

Swanson TV dinners

Minute Maid concentrated orange juice

El Paso taco kit

Orange Julius

Baskin-Robbins Pink Bubble Gum, Rocky Road, Pralines and Cream.

Dannon was the only yogurt brand. Commercials said it was eaten by 100-year-old Russians.

How do you handle a Hungry Man?

Mr Whipple

Plop plop fizz fizz

Dentures. Dentugrip.

Martha Rae for Polident.

Lena Horne for Sanka.

Joe DiMaggio for Mr Coffee.

Phil Rizzuto for the Money Store

Joe Namath for pantyhose.

Ricardo Montalbán and rich Corinthian leather.

Do you know me? Don’t leave home without it. Diners Club. Charge cards.

Commercials for the Ritz Thrift Shop fur store on 57th Street. “You don’t need a million to look like a million.”

L’Eggs.

Sticks of gum in a pack. Bazooka. Black Jack gum.

Paper match books with Famous Artist School tests: “Can you draw the pirate?”

Esso folding maps

Cans with pull tabs that you’d drop back into the drink

Ad on the backs of comics. X-ray specs. Sea Monkeys. 100 toy soldiers in a footlocker. Charles Atlas. Sell seeds and win prizes.

I signed up to sell shoes door-to-door. My mother forbade it.

Wind-up watches.

Saturday morning cartoons.

Sunday morning TV was soooo boring: church and news.

Zoom was a TV show. So was the Electric Company.

Our first Betamax recorder when everyone else got a VHS.

Recording TV shows over and over on used tapes. There were no video stores.

Reading the covers of records while listening to them.

Reading cereal boxes while eating them.

K-tel record collection commercials on TV — a constant scroll of the songs, with the one being played in yellow. No one ever orders them. Or Franklin Mint collectible plates.

Book of the Month Clubs.

TVs without remotes. Hanger antennas.

Watching the Honeymooners, The Odd Couple, Good Times, Sanford and Son, James at 15.

Sunday morning. Abbott and Costello. How many movies did they make?

When staying home sick: Mr Ed, The Mothers-In-Law, Green Acres. Punctuated with lots of commercials to learn air conditioner repair and truck driving,

National anthem on TV meant the end of broadcast day

Test pattern.

What do you remember?

Your pal,

Danny