Weird and Obscure Things from the 60s and 70s that you remember .

My ear. Never heard of it.
Problem was people got hit in the head
with em. We did not care, but they
banned em anyway.

I remember in the Denver area, you would call a number and there would be a busy signal. You can hear people shouting between the beeps, I remember getting a girl's phone number and we met at an mall. We dated a few times.

Record albums and 45s, cant wait for new ones.
Clay skateboard wheels, wood boards.
Ice cream man, candy cigs and dots.
It rained more, yards were nice, trees to climb.
Sun tan oil, long hair, fast food was a treat.
Corning ware casseroles, clotheslines, church.
Kids mowed lawns, threw newspapers and helped
dad fix the car on weekends.
Garage bands. Boys and girls were friends.
Race didnt matter. Slumber parties.
Horseback riding, cheap.
Moms made dinner.
It Was Lovely.

H&R Puff n Stuff
Dirt weed
Cowboy boots
brown leather coats
corduroy
guys wearing short shorts and net shirts but not gay

Tiny Tim, Tip Toe Through the Tulips was my first memory of a freak / queer.

Sea Monkeys

pubes

I have a SnorkelDorf refrigerator magnet.

Freakies cereal.

Dad fixing the BW TV reception by hitting it on the side ...

.

Believe me it is waaaay more fucked up now...

Finding nudie mags in the field.

Handlebar streamers.

Playing card attached to bike frame, with a clothespin, so the card every spoke and sounded like an engine.

Leaving for kindergarten and mom saying, "have a good day, try to be home before dark." That could NEVER happen now.

Big giant planes taking off from the Air Force base, all day every day.

Double-knee pants.

Yellow sun.

Not knowing that people eventually get cancer and die and how it changes your life. Just living in the moment and loving it.

Ketchup that tasted like tomatoes.

Manual roll down windows.

Family car VW bug with no a/c, no seatbelts, no headrests, no power steering or breaks, and my favorite thing was to squeeze into the tiny way back cubby.

Baseball pool parties.

Howard Cosell.

Bell bottoms and big leather watchbands.

Thinking it was normal to sneak a peek at my dad welding and then have sore eyes for 2 days.

Getting a piece of candy from the dentist after a cleaning.

Banana seats and drum brakes.

Asking my dad to smoke the waterpipe and blow smoke rings.

Getting bummed out when we went to drive-in and forgot the Shasta Cola, so I had to drink one of my dad's beers with popcorn. When I was 6. If only I'd known at that time how well beer and popcorn go together.

Go times yo...

I remember in 4th grade, one of the kids in our school had an exchange student staying with them that was from Japan.

So all of the children got into the cafeteria to meet a real live japaneese person and we got to ask her questions about Japan.

Obviously nobody viewed OP’s video

Completely missed the point of this thread

You have a youtube account, lol.

Jimmy Carter fake Energy Crisis (where he told us we were running out of gasoline, energy, etc.)

they did this to see if they could get away with it

Couldn't wear anything but my uniform to school.

White dog shit on the streets.....

Yes! That was all over the country. The phone lines were mechanical back then. Working those corded switchboards were some of my first jobs.

White dog shit?

Loose dogs. Dogs would roam where they wanted to.

Old school department stores where many things were behind a counter and a sales person helped you.

It was fun to go shopping downtown in the days before malls.

And lots of good independent bookstores because everyone read back then.

Yes, i think they used some lard or tallow back then.

Yep....dog food use to have a high bone meal content turning the poop white.....on the bright side,these land mines were easier to spot in the dark....lol....

Mc Donalds was good.

We said the pledge of allegiance in school, complete with flag bearer and color guards....hands over hearts...

Transistor radios, Jarts, walking barefoot a lot. BB gun fights. Playing kick the bucket. Tether-ball. Putting aluminum foil on rabbit ear antennas to get better reception.

Went over their b@@mer heads

Still don’t. Never forget.

Let's see now.

There were no electronics back then, except primitive radio, and diodes in your car's generator that would fail every so often. You car's coltage regulator was some thing with a spring in it. Once the spring wore out, you needed a new one or your headlights would go yellow.

For fun you could play a game with a ball. Baseball, kickball, softball, foot ball, basket ball. Or you could play badminton if a family visit occurred and it was deemed worthwhile to put up the net.

Chess was actually an exciting thing to do. No video games.

No calculators, so you learned to use a slide rule. Most of the math you did in your head. The slide rule would just help with the digits. My first one was made of freaking wood and humidity would make it swell up and stick. Finally got a plastic one. I remember thinking how wonderful it was to have a plastic slide rule. (Still have it on my mantle).

Cars had AM radios. That was all. I finally bought a radioshack "FM convertor". It was a thing that recieved FM signals and transmitted a weak AM signal that you could tune your AM radio to and hear the FM. It was not stereo, and still subject to lightning interference.

There were no weather alerts. No cell phones. So if you heard static on the AM radio, you knew a storm was coming. Especially if the crashes were growing in frequency and intensity. Then finally you would hear the distant thunder.

If you lived in or travelled through a town like Pittsburgh or Buffalo, the air would be so polluted you could hardly breathe. Acid gases were not scrubbed, and fly ash barely controlled. The acid rain would eat the paint off your car's hood.

There was almost no crime or violence unless a drunk guy was beating his wife. Kids would leave the house and wander all over town, hooking up with friends to play football or baseball if you all had the right stuff with you. Rarely did any kid leave the house without at least his ball glove in case you ran across a game.

Kids unsupervised all day long 10 miles from home. No kidnapping or anything. Parents didn't give 2 shits about you. Just be on time for supper which was just after dark.

I wouldn't eat anything all day. No lunch, skinny as a rail. Boundless energy and rpetty strong. A couple friends would go home for lunch. I would keep playing.

There were only a couple vaccinations that kids got, so maybe that made us so healthy. And most of the childhood diseased I got anyway. Mumps, measles, etc.

I only met 2 black people my entire shildhood until I got old enough to start working in a neghboring town.
There was zero crime. The front door rarely even got locked. And it wasn't a real lock anyway. Push the button on the knob type "lock".

The car keys to the family car were left in the ignition, outside in the driveway. (The driveway was leftover slag and pig iron clinkers from the steel mills).

They spread black ashes from the blast furnace on the roads when it snowed. Made a horrible mess under the car wheel wells, and corroded them like crazy. It did do wonders for traction however.

Basically, it was a lot like people think it will be after an EMP event.

You had a phone at the house. It was a pulse dialer. Made little fart sounds when you released the dial for each number. It would count the farts and figure out what each number was.

Everyone carried some change in case they needed to make a phone call from a phone booth if their car broke down.

If you needed help, you knocked on someone's door and they would cheerfully open the door and let you use their phone if you had a flat tire or something. They might make you a cup of tea or brink you an iced tea to be hospitable. They would almost never shoot you. :)

There must have been sexual predators back then, but you never heard about them. Most of the dad's were WWII vets, and they would simply kill anyone harming kids. My dad was one scary SOB. The school used to be proud of beating kids to correct them. My dad went to the school when my older sisters started school and told them that if they ever so much as touched one of his kids, he would simply come to the school and beat them to death.

Nobody EVER touched his daughters.

War heroes were revered. Elderly people were cared for.
If your dad was out of work, the milkman would still bring you milk, cheese, eggs and butter. To your front doorstep and put them in the insulated "milk box" that they gave you.
It was some sort of hammered aluminum skin over a carboard insulating layer. On the front in Red letters would be the name of the dairy. Inside was a wire basket that the milk bottles would go into. They would also toss some ice in the milk box to keep it cold. They wanted the empty milk bottles back as they would wash them and refill them.

Milk was whole milk, and the cream would be floating on top.
Not really homogenized. Maybe they shook it up a bit, but it would separate back out. The top was sealed with just a crimped bit of foil.

Kids entertained themselves. Rarely did we mess with a board game unless it was raining cats and dogs and you were stuck inside.

Nobody had a 300 piece tool set or whatever. You had 1 single socket set in 3/8 drive and 1/4 drive. and a few open end and box wrenches, pliers, channel lockes, vice grips, a set of screw drivers, a couple hammers and a hatchet. That was pretty much what you had to fix a car. ANd they needed contant tinkering and repairs. Every 5000 miles you replaced the points and condenser, then set the timing and the point gap.
You had feeler gauges, tiny "ignition wrenches", a timing light, and maybe a Dwell meter to recheck your gap without having the keep bumping the engine over until you got the points on the high part of the cam rotor thing.

I used to walk through the Sears tool section and drool, looking at the gleaming tool kits (under glass) that I couldn't afford as a kid. (Man those tool kits were beautiful).

Every 15,000 miles you replaced and gapped all the spark plugs.

And you were always replacing a starter motor, or alternator, or fuel pump, or vaccuum advance unit, or distributor cap.

Brakes would not last long either, so you were always ready to replace the shoes, maybe have to rebuild the brake cylinders.

Then a U Joint would do out on the drive shaft, so you would remove the drive shaft, knock the 2 U joints off it, put new ones on, then put it back on the car.

Didn't have steel belted radials. They were bias ply, nylon thread tires.

Wheel bearings would also fail, and those 3 or so fan belts would always need readjusting or replacing.

And the radiator would spring a leak and you would remove it and take it to the shop downtown. They would boil it out, do some sort of solder rapair on it and give it back to you.
They also had a tank of water where they would submerge it and prove it was not leaking with an air pressure test.


If you couldn't do all that, you pretty much didn't drive a car. Probably a big driving force for girls to have boyfirends. (Can you fix my car? it is broken! Pout pout. :)

In a world without porn, guys would do anything for a girl.

Last Edited by JustmeTX on 08/19/2022 10:24 AM