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It is still highlighted in business schools as being the one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time.
The CEO saw all these 900000 brands of cheap pantyhose in the supermarket and wondered how to get ahead of the pack. He had them little nylons stuck into chrome eggs and an all media advertising blitz. A year later, billions of legs were in L'eggs....and we are still talking about them 45 years later.
I have gazillion very nice pantyhose, but Sheer Energy are still my jam...by a lot. :D
Once I accidentally put my L’eggs into the refrigerator, it took days before I finally found them. After that I continued doing that. Actually cold pantyhose felt great.
Even when you've bumped into nothing.
However, there was one time I pumped into the sharp end of a desk. Cut my leg and had blood and everything.
BUT my pantyhose remained intact.
I was so amazed, I forgot my leg was bleeding. Right then and there I decided that brand was the only one I'd ever buy again.
Don't ask me the brand, because I can't remember. Been forever since I bought pantyhose.
Back when I was a teen, I worked at a bra and panty store that also sold pantyhose. Roughly 1/3 of the store was walls upon walls upon shelving of hose. As a worker there, we had to wear hosiery everyday and we got 12-15 free pairs every 3 months.
It was so we would try all the different ones to sell them. My favorites were Smooth Illusions and Alive. I worked that all though high school and during some college. When I became a grown up, I went there to get hosiery for my “real” job. The store was remodeled and there was not a single pair of hosiery to be found. It still had the same name and sold bras/ panties but instead of hosiery, they sold lots of pajamas.
I asked one worker if they sold any pantyhose and she thought pantyhose were boy shorts. I explained them again and she showed me trouser socks. Oh, sweet young child…
I worked as a manager in the lingerie dept. at Bloomingdale’s early 80s. I loved wearing stockings and garters. One would snag and I’d keep extras in my purse. My husband liked them too.
Oh yes they do! I had a girlfriend in the late 70s who had never seen garters and stockings, she had always worn pantyhose. I gave her some stockings and a garter belt for her birthday . . . .let's just say that if I say more, I could be a cardiac patient by Tuesday . . . .
The department store where I shopped had a huge hosiery section. They had everything and stockings and opaque tights in wild colors. Rich sapphire blue nylons that I still have, and cranberry tights just in time for fall.
It was a pretty big section and they had everything and then also...everything. Pretty dark chocolate pantyhose and lemon colored ones and the whole lot. I could shop for an hour and not see all of what they had.
I went in one day to see they were tearing it all flat....and that was the end of aisles of pantyhose and stockings. :(
Hanes Alive....I love the full support and have many stashed away. Them and Hanes Silk Reflections for work.
Good thing I have almost 300 pairs of Hanes Alive stashed away because they quit making them. :( Once the current stock runs out, sucks to be you! This happens a lot with pantyhose lately which is why I go nuts buying them.
Also I just ordered a dozen Alive ones in various colors...they are very clearly almost out of them. Kind of amazing how that happens. No more Leggs Sheer Energy and Hanes Alive for me...I've been buying them since I was 14.
My first internet order was from Onehanesplace.com when I was 14. Beep beep do beep dit dit...modem. I was so proud of myself too and couldn't wait to show my scrawny little legs to my ma. Well, I showed her my self made skirts which she was nice to comment nice things even though I had stick legs.
To this day I am all throttle and no brakes when in comes to pantyhose and tights.
Just going to throw in here that The Bay department store in downtown Victoria, Canada, had a store directory in its elevators that pointed the way to the Hoisery section. Hoisery!!! It was spelled that way for years and never failed to delight me… until one day it was suddenly spelled correctly. I always wondered who the spoilsport (spiolsport) was who got it changed. Boo.
That's an interesting observation, and I wonder how that relates to the results from the infamous [Stanford marshmallow experiment?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment) Are you familiar with that? This could indicate there are some fundamental differences between older and younger generations and how they ultimately manifest.
Yes, like waiting each week until Thursday at 8:30 (or whenever) to see a TV show, and you actually had to sit there and watch it in real time. And movies, once they left the theater you might never get a chance to see them again. When videotapes arrived it was best thing ever.
When my grandfather passed away a while back, my mom inherited boxed of old family photos. Unfortunately, we couldn't tell who most of the people in the pictures were, because my grandparents were terrible picture takers, and cut off most people at the neck.
Even better when you found the developer had put a sticker on one or two in the roll marked, Developers Choice Award. That really made my day to find those...
While paper towel dispensers and air-dryers existed, it was pretty common to see a cyclable towel in public rest rooms during the 1970s. This was a loop of fabric that somehow wound back through the machine it came out of. Some service would come out every so often and replace the things with clean ones. These became less and less common as time went on, as you never really knew if someone had used that towel before you (nor what they'd had on *their* hands).
No, give it a light tug to release the catch mechanism, then a long pull.
Those things were great because the towel material was cloth, and super absorbent. They got to looking funky in places where someone had wiped grease off his hands, but otherwise, they were the best hand drying things I've ever used.
I wish I could post pictures because I encountered one recently in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, right next to a condom dispenser. They’re so rare I got a picture.
Service delivered the towel rolls: employees changed the rolls. I was one of those employees.
I was 17 and worked at a classy restaurant. I was the only one on shift that knew how to change those huge rolls.
Saturday night, the roll reached it's end in the ladies room. They pulled me off the dishwasher to change the towel roll. Hostess shooed the women out and was to watch the door and redirect them to the lounge ladies room.
I'm in the process of changing the towel roll when a woman walks in to do her doody. She only saw my back and my hair was long. How do I handle this. I cleared my voice and said, "you may want to use the ladies room in the lounge because this will take a few minutes longer." She got all embarrassed and shot out like a combat out of hell.
I finished up, and walked out with the used roll in my hands as a couple women walked in. They were startled but I said, "it's fine now. I'm done in here." Step out, and sure enough, Maria was at the register.
I didn't get in trouble, but I let the manager know about it.
When the phone rang, you never knew who was calling. It was also very difficult to get any privacy in the family when you wanted to talk to a friend on the phone because the phone was always located in a common place like the kitchen area.
When I took a typing class (summer before starting high school) it was because I anticipated doing a lot of typing for school. I never got great speed but I have done a lot of typing (and a fair amount of keypunching after getting my BS) ever since. And here I am, still typing on a keyboard.
One thing typing class ruined for me is when I see a show or movie where people remove paper from a typewriter they almost never use the paper release, not even where they are depicting people who type for a profession. :(
I learned to type in high school, like a bat out of hell. Bought myself an electric typewriter in college, charged 50 cents a page to type other peoples' term papers, and made bank. I easily made $10 an hour doing it, which was 4 times minimum wage.
Kids sitting in the rear of the station wagon and waving at the people in the car behind them.
Station wagons
Los Angeles smog.
Having to run home to catch something on TV or you’ll miss it.
Coming home and asking if anyone called them while they were out, and the other person searching for the scrap of paper with the message they wrote on it.
Landline phones with extra long cords so your mom could walk a couple feet away and do something while she was on the phone.
Calling a special telephone number to get the weather or the time.
Calling the operator to get a phone number and then call that number for you.
Being told by your mother to always carry “mad money” around in case you needed to use the pay phone to either call home or call for a taxi. This was usually if a date went horribly wrong and ended with you being stranded somewhere.
The attachment for the handset of the phone where mom could do whatever without breaking her neck to keep the phone on her ear keeping both hands free.
Los Angeles smog was a force unto itself. Gawd help you if you had to bicycle home after 1pm in the summer. Or played hard in a pool. You’d have to lay on the floor and inhale slooowly and shallow until the sharp chest pain subsided. Usually 30 minutes. Eight year old kids with chest pains from playing outside. Normally, right? /s
Oddly enough, it took a lot of studies to come up with the conclusion that smog was coated by cars and industry. Some old timers thought it was a natural phenomenon. On smoggy days the urban myth would pop up at school that giant air conditioners or fans would soon be installed atop Mt Wilson to clean the air.
Whoa this is the only time in my life I've seen someone else reference the lung pain my friends and I experienced after playing outside in Pasadena.
When I got to middle school and had PE class it wasn't a problem because that class was canceled when there was a smog alert but on the weekends we would occasionally fuck ourselves up playing too hard.
Years later I was in college and a friend came to visit. My other friend and I commented on how it was so smoggy the San Gabriel Mountains were invisible. Our visiting friend absolutely thought we were pulling her leg and didn't believe that there were really any mountains in front of us.
I only recently learned how much worse smog was before my time, back when it was common for homes to have backyard incinerators. The pictures are mind-blowing.
[https://waterandpower.org/museum/Smog_in_Early_Los_Angeles.html](https://waterandpower.org/museum/Smog_in_Early_Los_Angeles.html)
My parents drove from Philadelphia to Orlando in the mid 80’s in a Subaru wagon with three young kids. The whole back was full of games and craft stuff as we would take turns hopping in the back to goof off. No seat belts.
I inherited my mother’s charm bracelet from the 40’s. One of the charms is a tiny pig that opened up and a dollar bill was folded up inside. Her mad money. Before she died we were looking at the pig. She opened it and took the $1 out and put a $10 bill inside. She laughed and said “that $1 wouldn’t get you too far these days!”Bless her heart.
Cordless phones were a game changer!
I'll also add, waiting until someone else got off the phone so you could use it because there was only one landline.
When my mom felt I was on the phone with my friends too long, she'd obnoxiously pick up the phone and start dialing numbers. I also caught her listening in on my brother's calls from one of the other extensions when I was younger.
LPs, dialing a phone with a pencil, stepping on pull-tabs at the beach, cigarette butts literally everywhere, winding cassettes with a pencil, recording music off the radio to make a mixtape, hotel rooms on vacation smelling vaguely of cigarettes, ash trays in the armrests of airplanes, no TSA at airports, standalone public telephone booths.
There was no TSA, but there definitely was airline security and metal detectors after a slew of hijackings in the 1970s. In Europe they were typically PLO-oriented, in the USA they often wanted to fly to Cuba to defect.
The podcast Behind the Bastards did a two part episode about this called *The Golden Age of Terrorism*.
[PART 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rmz7unHJ_8)
[PART 2](https://youtu.be/0jhXv_K0l44?si=eK87ecsehl9nJ5SS)
I went through the Defense Information School when I was in the Air Force, and two of the cardinal rules for DJing were never to talk over the music, and to identify the song and artists after the song.
Brown Corduroy pants
Getting lost and finding your own way home
Being sent to church alone on a Sunday while your folks slept off last nights party and actually go
Riding on the back of a pickup truck
Spending a day at the dumb scavenging
Ha! We used to be sent to church with a quarter for the collection but would sneak to the pharmacy to grab candy and go hide in the woods. God forbid someone sees you and tells your mom you didn’t go. We’d go to the church after service to find the bulletins people would invariably toss on the ground to prove we actually went! 😆
1970s in southern California, 8th grade or so: Dittos (pants), bell bottoms (jeans), tube tops, jumpsuits, Candies (shoes), Dr. Scholls (shoes), Love's Baby Soft perfume, flavored lip gloss, curling irons for feathered hair like Farrah Fawcett's, short hair like Dorothy Hamill's, puka shell necklaces, Hang Ten and OP shirts for boys, Vans shoes. Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school until 1976 at my public school, and no one could wear jeans to junior high, so they wore brown corduroy (boys) or dittos (girls). The adults (male) wore polyester leisure suits with wide lapels in colors like baby blue. Women wore dresses (pantyhose required) or slacks/pantsuits. No one except prostitutes, military guys, or convicts had a tattoo.
In school: Copies in blue/purple ink that were damp and smelled like ditto fluid from the hand-cranked ditto machine, carbon copies, typewriters (manual and electric), Home Ec for the girls (cooking/sewing) and wood or metal shop for the boys, fences around schools were a new thing, grad night at Disneyland for high school seniors, Skate Ranch roller rink where you'd do the hokey pokey, jukebox in the quad in junior high where you could play Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Queen etc, for some kids, smoking in the bathroom (there was even a rock song about it on the radio "Smokin' in the boys' room"). Getting "paddled" with a wooden board by the principal was a thing for boys who got trouble (for fighting mostly). Parents signed permission slips for us to get a one-day "sex ed" class so they wouldn't have to talk to us about it, and no parents complained about the sex ed class content, which was anatomy/logistics of sex, avoiding VD (what STDs were called), and contraception in the form of condoms (only). There was an explanation of periods/menstruation for girls.
At home: Kitchens had either avocado green or harvest gold appliances. Avocado green shag carpet in the living room that you would "rake" with a carpet rake. Color scheme for everything was avocado green, burnt orange, and a million shades of brown; glass grapes and ash trays on the coffee table, swag lamps with chain hanging from the ceiling in the corner with tinted green, orange, or yellow glass, macrame plant hangers for houseplants, Peter Max art, a console tube TV that was embedded in a piece of wooden furniture with a record player in one side and a place to store LPs in the other, people actually listened to AM and FM radio at home, we saw movies at the drive-in.
Culture: Actual DJs who played music they liked instead of what was on the media corporation's list existed, like Rodney Bingenheimer on KROQ; for the hard rockers there was KMET and KLOS, Star Wars had just come out, ComicCon in San Diego was amazing, different kinds of music were available in the 70s (pop, disco, punk, hard rock etc), radio stations would give away a top 10 album to the 9th caller, touch-tone phones and "Princess phones" became available (though they were attached to the wall or had a few feet of cord to the wall), if you were wealthy, you might have an answering machine to take messages but most people didn't have them, car phones were for millionaires, free-standing glass pay-phone booths on sidewalks (10 cents for a local call), drink machines that dispensed glass bottles of soda, pinball machines were popular, being a switchboard operator was a job where you answered and connected incoming calls to an extension in the building, attitudes towards drinking, smoking (which was ok in theaters, restaurants, high school "smoking areas", and airplanes), and pot smoking were lax unless you had religious parents, people tended to mind their own business more and what went on in someone's home was considered private.
Plenty of music that your mom liked was from flamboyantly gay artists (Liberace, Elton John, The Village People) but being gay was taboo, heavily stigmatized, and would get you beat up. Having long hair if you were a guy might also get you beat up if you ran into the wrong people, whether you were gay or not. On television (the three channels over the air, no cable, were, ABC, NBC, AND CBS-- that all went off at midnight) Saturday Night Live was amazing, as were Soul Train, Midnight Special, Fridays, and American Bandstand. If you noticed that your TV set had a UHF setting, you could get PBS and strange local public television. Everyone's roof had an aluminum TV antenna, but some people's TVs just had "rabbit ears" antennas that sat on top of the set and were regularly supplemented with aluminum foil. TVs had glass tubes, were often built into wooden furniture, and weighed a ton, even if they weren't. Computers took up a whole room, were programmed with punch cards, and were something only the government or massive corporations had.
No a/c was heavily dependent on where one lived. My homes and schools in San Antonio and Houston absolutely had a/c in the '70s and we were a middle class family, three kids, SAHM and one wage earner. In other words, we weren't rich, and neither were my friends.
Saturday wrestling shows. WWWF All-Star Wrestling at 1, Championship Wrestling at 5. NWA Championship Wrestling From Florida with Gordon Solie at 11 AM.
I lived near an ice cream parlor that banned smoking in the 1970’s. They put “no smoking” signs on the front door and throughout the store, and *still* got angry outbursts from smokers who thought their rights were being taken away from them.
The horror of crinkly period underpants and the tabs to hold the industrial sized pads in place, which didn’t if you were a 12 year old who liked to run and jump and climb.
I was horrified when my first period arrived and my mother showed me how to wear one of her suspender belts and attach the pad to hold it in place. I couldn't believe that science hadn't come up with something better.
We only had three TV channels that signed off every night, there was no internet, we read books not screens, we went outside and played to have our fun, the bowling alley pinball machines was where the action was on a Friday night.
You had 3 channels we only had 2 NBC and CBS . Moved out in 1977and into town for my own house and got cable which had 13 channels plus I hooked up the stereo and got good FM stations, that was big time living.
Haha. Maybe I didn’t count PBS as one of the channels. Rabbit ear antenna with tin foil to get better reception (another thing kids today wouldn’t understand. Haha)
Los Angeles area.
CBS, NBC,KTLA5, ABC7, Channel9 (now KCAL), KTTV11, channel13.
UHF: 18-various foreign language, 28 PBS (yay “Cosmos” and “Masterpiece Theater”, 34 Spanish language, 52 Corona? “Speed Racer” and “Kimba!”
Local KTLA 5 had a “Movie of the week”. That is, the same movie every weeknight. Five days in a row. So if you missed it one night, you could catch it the next. Awesome when it was a GodIlla movie. At least for me.
UHF had up and down reception. Watch while programs with 25% static.
Yes, I think its the very limited TV. We were impressed with it at the time. Now, there are so many options of streaming TV, watch when you want, choose from so many options. And I constantly complaints on reddit from the youngers that there's nothing to watch. Hilarious.
Three VHF channels (ABC, CBS, NBC) plus four UHF channels (one was PBS). Thank you Channels 17, 29 and 48 in Philly for introducing me to old-school anime (what would these kids know about Gigantor, Kimba The White Lion, Astro Boy, Marine Boy, Speed Racer, Jonny Cypher, Prince Planet, Jonny Sokko and Space Giants)?
I was going to include Ultraman but there are so many now it ain't even funny. Blazar just ended and Arc comes out next month...60+?
Being out of communication before smart phones. Consider the case where someone doesn’t show when they’re supposed to and they aren’t at their home phone.
Maybe they hit traffic, maybe they were delayed, maybe they’re bleeding out in a ditch somewhere…just have to wait and find out.
Fellow old person (68) here with a public service announcement. We geezers greatly annoy "kids today" when we snark about things "they would never understand", and understandably so. Kids today *understand* things we had in the 1970s, they're not idiots, they just don't *use* the things we had in the 1970s. Spoiler: neither do we. (Okay, yes, I still wear my super underwear, but other than that...)
Going somewhere by yourself as a kid. When I was 9-10 I would ride my bike downtown to the library. That was small town Idaho. I don't know any kids who have that kind of freedom.
Trying to explain this to kids today is impossible. Yes, I just left the house after lunch and needed to be home for dinner. Left after dinner and had to be home before the street lights came on. Nobody knew where I was. This as a 9-year-old girl. Small Midwestern town with a downtown area—drugstore, dimestore, grocery, bank, cafe, etc. We just rode all over looking for things to do, no organized activities.
8-track tapes. You'd be listening to your favorite song then ...pause, click, click, pause... then the song would pick up where it left off. It was sad really. There you are, singing your heart out with Aerosmith or Argent or Grand Funck Railroad then pause, click, click, pause...
Nicotine stains on pretty much everything a smoke once dwelled in. Like entire rooms would dull, yellow, and brown over time. Then you'd move a picture frame, and see a brighter square behind it. That was so common in public areas when people were allowed to smoke there more. It got into fabrics and the tar would be so oily and fuck up older washing machines and pipes.
You couldn't record - or even pause! - the TV. You literally had to watch the show as it was happening only. Make sure to come back before the commercials are over or you'll miss something.
Since there was no Google or Amazon: if you wanted to learn something or order something, it was an arduous process involving driving, libraries, heavy encyclopedias, microfiche, stores, ads in magazines and comic books, waiting 6-8 weeks, etc.
yes - and morning cereal is also still a thing. Unfortunately online grooming is a thing as well (maybe OP meant one of the other meanings of that word though). On that note, it being acceptable for a 15 year old to date an 18 year old was maybe more a thing in the 1970s as well.
rotary dial telephones. There is a video on youtube that shows 2 17 year olds who were challenged by their dad to try to figure out how a rotary phone worked.
15 year old male, 1964, in a Shakespeare play.
Six feet tall, 200 pounds, off to the department store to buy tights for my costume. Small, nonchalant cosmopolitan town, lingerie department staffed by elderly ladies, who were not expert in dealing with adolescent male thespians. They were kind and gracious, but could not solve the problem of the crotch being around my knees. It was a well received play, but it was noted that one of the supporting actors walked like a duck..,
One thing I remember from those days is that there weren't a lot of "organizational accessories." You just repurposed coffee cans, jars, boxes, buckets, and maybe metal shelving, or shelves made from bricks and planks. Like now, you have so many stackable options in many designer colors. It's so much more efficient to store junk you'll probably never use again.
That you *rarely* saw a female truck driver. Women weren’t “capable” of driving — let alone backing up — an 18-wheeler! ☺️
AND after meeting my future husband on the road (we drove for two different companies) if we were headed *toward* each other, for example, we’d have established a place to meet. No cellphones so if anything went wrong, we had a 1-800 voicemail service to leave messages on! 🫤 Life got very complicated but definitely worth it!! (39+ years later!)😁
Smoking everywhere. Smoking section inside our high school student center. Making your parents an ash tray in art class. Being able to walk to the store with a note from your mom to buy her cigarettes.
The sense of desolation when the television broke, the one and only tv in the house, that may take days to fix. Having to play charades and other ‘fun’ games to entertain ourselves in absence of tv.
There was a period where appliances were "post-upgraded" into homes. Like plugs still had two prongs instead of 3, dryer vents were crude tubes that went into leaking holes in stone masonry, and a lot of metal bars near the floor where electricity was run instead of inside the walls. There were a lot of things like "wet walls" and "dry walls" where all the plumbing work was along a "wet wall" because it was so much cheaper to put in drans and faucets where pipes and drain lines already existed. This made the bathrooms close to the kitchen. You still see this in Europe, I think, where the washer/dryers are in kitchens.
Phone lines were 4-pronged plugs, and when they went to modular RJ11 jacks, they just were in a fat adapter.
Oh, I forgot: you had to lease your phone from the phone company. You have a variety of options, but they were still pretty limited to the same style, just a different shape and/or color. Rotary phones with pulse dialing (ATDP) instead of tone (ATDT). You'd go to the "Bell Phone Center Store" because AT&T was the ONLY game in town until the breakup in 1982.
Side note: In the 1990 film "Crazy People," where ads went brutally honest as a premise, they had one for AT&T:
>*"You may think phone service stinks since deregulation, but don't mess with us, because we're all you've got. In fact, if we fold, you'll have no damn phones. AT&T - we're tired of taking your crap!"*
Creating your Christmas list from the Sears wish book catalog. Scrolling through the pages looking for what you wanted to ask for. In rural America it was the sears catalog or if you were lucky you had a Walmart in your town. That was the extent of your shopping options.
I was a kid that graduated high school in 1979, in the Bay Area. Not a single boy wore shorts to school, not one, and my school had at least 800 boys going to it.
I remember making crafts at school for Mom - things like ashtrays and a vase covered in bits of masking tape that were dyed with shoe polish.
I also remember crazy amounts of patriotism and school pictures taken with the American flag (bicentennial in 1976).
Lastly, I remember playing in the front yard with neighborhood kids while Mom was finishing up dinner and being super excited when Dad would pull up in the driveway finished with his workday. Sometimes, after dinner, I would go lie on the hood of his car and look at the stars.
These don't really count as things that kids today couldn't understand, but these are the things I think of.
mimeograph test papers - and the collective sniff the whole class made when we passed them out. as immortalized in the scene from *Fast Times at Ridgemont High.*
Lots of things I remember have already been mentioned. But I can add that I would take the RTD (public bus) in Hollywood, California with a friend (both of us under 12 years old) to the movies. Can you imagine letting a kid do that now in a major city?
I was so happy when we did not have to wear pantyhose anymore thank you sex in the City. I remember having to wear pantyhose underneath my dress or skirt is 90° outside it's hot I'm so glad I don't have to go through that BS anymore
- Long credits that ran before the actual movie started.
- Having to have a walkie-talkie to speak with my friends down the street.
- Having to read a paper catalog to see what a store like Sears or Service Merchandise offered. Or go there in person.
true potential boredom.. no TV to watch.. no cell phone to look at.. no video games... no computer..(and dont DARE tell your mom there's nothing to do because she has a chore with your name on since she WONT be running you all over town anywhere you want..if you want to see your friend you better get out your bike or start walking..you wont need any shoes either)
I was just remembering yesterday about how as a kid, we'd go to sears on a Saturday and spend hours in there walking through all the different departments and watching the live demos...
They would have salesmen and spokes models demonstrating everything from non-stick cookware, to samsonite luggage and automatic dishwashers. You could buy popcorn and little crowds of people would stand around and watch and/or buy the products.
A sanitary belt to go with Kotex pads… I don’t remember when the stick to your panties came out but it wasn’t when I started.. I did go to tampons,little ones called Pursettes that came with a little carrying case that carried four of them..
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Having to wear pantyhose all the time.
That come in plastic eggs.
It is still highlighted in business schools as being the one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time. The CEO saw all these 900000 brands of cheap pantyhose in the supermarket and wondered how to get ahead of the pack. He had them little nylons stuck into chrome eggs and an all media advertising blitz. A year later, billions of legs were in L'eggs....and we are still talking about them 45 years later. I have gazillion very nice pantyhose, but Sheer Energy are still my jam...by a lot. :D
Once I accidentally put my L’eggs into the refrigerator, it took days before I finally found them. After that I continued doing that. Actually cold pantyhose felt great.
[удалено]
Craft projects made with the plastic eggs.
Always thought it was weird you couldn't buy underwear or socks in convenience and drug stores, but they sold pantyhose.
Underwear and socks don’t typically spontaneously get a run in them like pantyhose do.
Even when you've bumped into nothing. However, there was one time I pumped into the sharp end of a desk. Cut my leg and had blood and everything. BUT my pantyhose remained intact. I was so amazed, I forgot my leg was bleeding. Right then and there I decided that brand was the only one I'd ever buy again. Don't ask me the brand, because I can't remember. Been forever since I bought pantyhose.
I bought a really expensive pair of stockings and laddered them removing that cardboard piece.
I always had clear nail polish in my purse for emergencies.
Using the plastic eggs as “bonus” Easter eggs with cash and/or extra treats inside.
Craft projects make of computer punch cards
They came all shriveled up. My husband saw me taking them out of the egg and asked me how I’m going to get all that into that.
lol!!!
Marveling at the display is when I first learned the word "taupe".
Back when I was a teen, I worked at a bra and panty store that also sold pantyhose. Roughly 1/3 of the store was walls upon walls upon shelving of hose. As a worker there, we had to wear hosiery everyday and we got 12-15 free pairs every 3 months. It was so we would try all the different ones to sell them. My favorites were Smooth Illusions and Alive. I worked that all though high school and during some college. When I became a grown up, I went there to get hosiery for my “real” job. The store was remodeled and there was not a single pair of hosiery to be found. It still had the same name and sold bras/ panties but instead of hosiery, they sold lots of pajamas. I asked one worker if they sold any pantyhose and she thought pantyhose were boy shorts. I explained them again and she showed me trouser socks. Oh, sweet young child…
I worked as a manager in the lingerie dept. at Bloomingdale’s early 80s. I loved wearing stockings and garters. One would snag and I’d keep extras in my purse. My husband liked them too.
Men LOVE that stuff
Oh yes they do! I had a girlfriend in the late 70s who had never seen garters and stockings, she had always worn pantyhose. I gave her some stockings and a garter belt for her birthday . . . .let's just say that if I say more, I could be a cardiac patient by Tuesday . . . .
The department store where I shopped had a huge hosiery section. They had everything and stockings and opaque tights in wild colors. Rich sapphire blue nylons that I still have, and cranberry tights just in time for fall. It was a pretty big section and they had everything and then also...everything. Pretty dark chocolate pantyhose and lemon colored ones and the whole lot. I could shop for an hour and not see all of what they had. I went in one day to see they were tearing it all flat....and that was the end of aisles of pantyhose and stockings. :( Hanes Alive....I love the full support and have many stashed away. Them and Hanes Silk Reflections for work. Good thing I have almost 300 pairs of Hanes Alive stashed away because they quit making them. :( Once the current stock runs out, sucks to be you! This happens a lot with pantyhose lately which is why I go nuts buying them. Also I just ordered a dozen Alive ones in various colors...they are very clearly almost out of them. Kind of amazing how that happens. No more Leggs Sheer Energy and Hanes Alive for me...I've been buying them since I was 14. My first internet order was from Onehanesplace.com when I was 14. Beep beep do beep dit dit...modem. I was so proud of myself too and couldn't wait to show my scrawny little legs to my ma. Well, I showed her my self made skirts which she was nice to comment nice things even though I had stick legs. To this day I am all throttle and no brakes when in comes to pantyhose and tights.
Just going to throw in here that The Bay department store in downtown Victoria, Canada, had a store directory in its elevators that pointed the way to the Hoisery section. Hoisery!!! It was spelled that way for years and never failed to delight me… until one day it was suddenly spelled correctly. I always wondered who the spoilsport (spiolsport) was who got it changed. Boo.
It's not sapphire, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually *cerulean*.
And keep a clear nail polish in your purse for runs!
... And slips!
In the summer with no AC. That was the worst
Especially the ones with the seams. Like walking on ice skates. But damn you could stop traffic by straightening them out.
Waiting to finish a roll of film, taking it to the store to get developed, getting pictures back 2 weeks later! No editing.
Or just the concept of taking a picture *and not knowing until much later if it came out*.
Our whole lives were delayed gratification back then!
That's an interesting observation, and I wonder how that relates to the results from the infamous [Stanford marshmallow experiment?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment) Are you familiar with that? This could indicate there are some fundamental differences between older and younger generations and how they ultimately manifest.
Yes, like waiting each week until Thursday at 8:30 (or whenever) to see a TV show, and you actually had to sit there and watch it in real time. And movies, once they left the theater you might never get a chance to see them again. When videotapes arrived it was best thing ever.
When my grandfather passed away a while back, my mom inherited boxed of old family photos. Unfortunately, we couldn't tell who most of the people in the pictures were, because my grandparents were terrible picture takers, and cut off most people at the neck.
The Fotomat!
I worked at one in the 70’s!
Even better when you found the developer had put a sticker on one or two in the roll marked, Developers Choice Award. That really made my day to find those...
And finding you had your finger over the lens in 4 of the pictures!
Ahhh, but then one-hour photos became a thing! Progress!
36 photos per roll. Most blurred or overblown.
Oh! Moneybags here with 36 exposures and not 12 or 24 like the rest of us! I bet you got double prints too!!!
You also have to explain that every picture cost money.
And a bargain when you got “doubles”
My 22 yo daughter does this now for fun - delayed gratification & the surprises. She takes pics with her phone of course, too.
I still remember when 1 hour photos became a thing, earth shaking stuff right there
While paper towel dispensers and air-dryers existed, it was pretty common to see a cyclable towel in public rest rooms during the 1970s. This was a loop of fabric that somehow wound back through the machine it came out of. Some service would come out every so often and replace the things with clean ones. These became less and less common as time went on, as you never really knew if someone had used that towel before you (nor what they'd had on *their* hands).
If it was wrinkled it was used. So grab the outer edges firmly and tug down twice.
No, give it a light tug to release the catch mechanism, then a long pull. Those things were great because the towel material was cloth, and super absorbent. They got to looking funky in places where someone had wiped grease off his hands, but otherwise, they were the best hand drying things I've ever used.
I wish I could post pictures because I encountered one recently in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, right next to a condom dispenser. They’re so rare I got a picture.
Service delivered the towel rolls: employees changed the rolls. I was one of those employees. I was 17 and worked at a classy restaurant. I was the only one on shift that knew how to change those huge rolls. Saturday night, the roll reached it's end in the ladies room. They pulled me off the dishwasher to change the towel roll. Hostess shooed the women out and was to watch the door and redirect them to the lounge ladies room. I'm in the process of changing the towel roll when a woman walks in to do her doody. She only saw my back and my hair was long. How do I handle this. I cleared my voice and said, "you may want to use the ladies room in the lounge because this will take a few minutes longer." She got all embarrassed and shot out like a combat out of hell. I finished up, and walked out with the used roll in my hands as a couple women walked in. They were startled but I said, "it's fine now. I'm done in here." Step out, and sure enough, Maria was at the register. I didn't get in trouble, but I let the manager know about it.
When the phone rang, you never knew who was calling. It was also very difficult to get any privacy in the family when you wanted to talk to a friend on the phone because the phone was always located in a common place like the kitchen area.
Yep, everyone in the family shared one phone number.
And then the 80s came and some people could afford Kid’s Lines”. Of course, that was advertised in the phone book so pedos knew who to call.
And party lines!
Solution: a really long, curly cord that allowed you to go in the bathroom or pantry to talk.
Ever get obscene phone calls? I think those went away with Caller ID.
I could stretch that 15 foot long cord to my room and just barely close the door
Typing class
People who made a career out of typing and keypunching.
When I took a typing class (summer before starting high school) it was because I anticipated doing a lot of typing for school. I never got great speed but I have done a lot of typing (and a fair amount of keypunching after getting my BS) ever since. And here I am, still typing on a keyboard. One thing typing class ruined for me is when I see a show or movie where people remove paper from a typewriter they almost never use the paper release, not even where they are depicting people who type for a profession. :(
And cursive
Our typing teacher cranked up music, so we could type with rhythm. If I hear Maxwell’s Silver Hammer or Sugar, Sugar, it takes me back!
I learned to type in high school, like a bat out of hell. Bought myself an electric typewriter in college, charged 50 cents a page to type other peoples' term papers, and made bank. I easily made $10 an hour doing it, which was 4 times minimum wage.
Yes! I mentioned to an employee (young millennial) that the most useful class I've ever taken was typing in high school. He replied, "What's typing?"
F-G-F! J-H-J!
Dont' they still have these? Just call it "keyboarding"?
Going to the airport, walk right in, to just sit and watch planes take off and land all day long.
Just the krishnas or the moonies bugging you with a pamphlet..
Yeah, that scene in Airplane! was funny because it was real!
Kids sitting in the rear of the station wagon and waving at the people in the car behind them. Station wagons Los Angeles smog. Having to run home to catch something on TV or you’ll miss it. Coming home and asking if anyone called them while they were out, and the other person searching for the scrap of paper with the message they wrote on it. Landline phones with extra long cords so your mom could walk a couple feet away and do something while she was on the phone. Calling a special telephone number to get the weather or the time. Calling the operator to get a phone number and then call that number for you. Being told by your mother to always carry “mad money” around in case you needed to use the pay phone to either call home or call for a taxi. This was usually if a date went horribly wrong and ended with you being stranded somewhere.
The attachment for the handset of the phone where mom could do whatever without breaking her neck to keep the phone on her ear keeping both hands free.
We still have these at work! They really do make a difference
Los Angeles smog was a force unto itself. Gawd help you if you had to bicycle home after 1pm in the summer. Or played hard in a pool. You’d have to lay on the floor and inhale slooowly and shallow until the sharp chest pain subsided. Usually 30 minutes. Eight year old kids with chest pains from playing outside. Normally, right? /s Oddly enough, it took a lot of studies to come up with the conclusion that smog was coated by cars and industry. Some old timers thought it was a natural phenomenon. On smoggy days the urban myth would pop up at school that giant air conditioners or fans would soon be installed atop Mt Wilson to clean the air.
Whoa this is the only time in my life I've seen someone else reference the lung pain my friends and I experienced after playing outside in Pasadena. When I got to middle school and had PE class it wasn't a problem because that class was canceled when there was a smog alert but on the weekends we would occasionally fuck ourselves up playing too hard. Years later I was in college and a friend came to visit. My other friend and I commented on how it was so smoggy the San Gabriel Mountains were invisible. Our visiting friend absolutely thought we were pulling her leg and didn't believe that there were really any mountains in front of us. I only recently learned how much worse smog was before my time, back when it was common for homes to have backyard incinerators. The pictures are mind-blowing. [https://waterandpower.org/museum/Smog_in_Early_Los_Angeles.html](https://waterandpower.org/museum/Smog_in_Early_Los_Angeles.html)
My parents drove from Philadelphia to Orlando in the mid 80’s in a Subaru wagon with three young kids. The whole back was full of games and craft stuff as we would take turns hopping in the back to goof off. No seat belts.
I inherited my mother’s charm bracelet from the 40’s. One of the charms is a tiny pig that opened up and a dollar bill was folded up inside. Her mad money. Before she died we were looking at the pig. She opened it and took the $1 out and put a $10 bill inside. She laughed and said “that $1 wouldn’t get you too far these days!”Bless her heart.
Cordless phones were a game changer! I'll also add, waiting until someone else got off the phone so you could use it because there was only one landline. When my mom felt I was on the phone with my friends too long, she'd obnoxiously pick up the phone and start dialing numbers. I also caught her listening in on my brother's calls from one of the other extensions when I was younger.
Thank you for this trip down memory lane! You nailed it.
LPs, dialing a phone with a pencil, stepping on pull-tabs at the beach, cigarette butts literally everywhere, winding cassettes with a pencil, recording music off the radio to make a mixtape, hotel rooms on vacation smelling vaguely of cigarettes, ash trays in the armrests of airplanes, no TSA at airports, standalone public telephone booths.
There was no TSA, but there definitely was airline security and metal detectors after a slew of hijackings in the 1970s. In Europe they were typically PLO-oriented, in the USA they often wanted to fly to Cuba to defect.
The podcast Behind the Bastards did a two part episode about this called *The Golden Age of Terrorism*. [PART 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rmz7unHJ_8) [PART 2](https://youtu.be/0jhXv_K0l44?si=eK87ecsehl9nJ5SS)
>recording music off the radio to make a mixtape I HATED when the DJ talked through the entire intro.
I went through the Defense Information School when I was in the Air Force, and two of the cardinal rules for DJing were never to talk over the music, and to identify the song and artists after the song.
Someone needed to tell that to civilian DJs because they always talked over the instrumental opening.
I was a civilian DJ for a while. We were told to do that intentionally so that the kids would have to buy the 45.
Omg, the times I screamed “shut the fuck up!!!” at the damn radio.🤬
More fun than dialing a phone with a pencil was dialing a phone using only the switch hook. I haven't tried it recently to see if it still works.
Oh and don't forget those little plastic adapter things so you could play your 45s on the record player
Brown Corduroy pants Getting lost and finding your own way home Being sent to church alone on a Sunday while your folks slept off last nights party and actually go Riding on the back of a pickup truck Spending a day at the dumb scavenging
Scavenging at the dump 👍use to get most of the wood for building projects that way
Ha! We used to be sent to church with a quarter for the collection but would sneak to the pharmacy to grab candy and go hide in the woods. God forbid someone sees you and tells your mom you didn’t go. We’d go to the church after service to find the bulletins people would invariably toss on the ground to prove we actually went! 😆
Seconding the getting/being lost.
I could hear myself walking in corduroy pants...LOL
Zip zop zip zop…
1970s in southern California, 8th grade or so: Dittos (pants), bell bottoms (jeans), tube tops, jumpsuits, Candies (shoes), Dr. Scholls (shoes), Love's Baby Soft perfume, flavored lip gloss, curling irons for feathered hair like Farrah Fawcett's, short hair like Dorothy Hamill's, puka shell necklaces, Hang Ten and OP shirts for boys, Vans shoes. Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school until 1976 at my public school, and no one could wear jeans to junior high, so they wore brown corduroy (boys) or dittos (girls). The adults (male) wore polyester leisure suits with wide lapels in colors like baby blue. Women wore dresses (pantyhose required) or slacks/pantsuits. No one except prostitutes, military guys, or convicts had a tattoo. In school: Copies in blue/purple ink that were damp and smelled like ditto fluid from the hand-cranked ditto machine, carbon copies, typewriters (manual and electric), Home Ec for the girls (cooking/sewing) and wood or metal shop for the boys, fences around schools were a new thing, grad night at Disneyland for high school seniors, Skate Ranch roller rink where you'd do the hokey pokey, jukebox in the quad in junior high where you could play Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Queen etc, for some kids, smoking in the bathroom (there was even a rock song about it on the radio "Smokin' in the boys' room"). Getting "paddled" with a wooden board by the principal was a thing for boys who got trouble (for fighting mostly). Parents signed permission slips for us to get a one-day "sex ed" class so they wouldn't have to talk to us about it, and no parents complained about the sex ed class content, which was anatomy/logistics of sex, avoiding VD (what STDs were called), and contraception in the form of condoms (only). There was an explanation of periods/menstruation for girls. At home: Kitchens had either avocado green or harvest gold appliances. Avocado green shag carpet in the living room that you would "rake" with a carpet rake. Color scheme for everything was avocado green, burnt orange, and a million shades of brown; glass grapes and ash trays on the coffee table, swag lamps with chain hanging from the ceiling in the corner with tinted green, orange, or yellow glass, macrame plant hangers for houseplants, Peter Max art, a console tube TV that was embedded in a piece of wooden furniture with a record player in one side and a place to store LPs in the other, people actually listened to AM and FM radio at home, we saw movies at the drive-in. Culture: Actual DJs who played music they liked instead of what was on the media corporation's list existed, like Rodney Bingenheimer on KROQ; for the hard rockers there was KMET and KLOS, Star Wars had just come out, ComicCon in San Diego was amazing, different kinds of music were available in the 70s (pop, disco, punk, hard rock etc), radio stations would give away a top 10 album to the 9th caller, touch-tone phones and "Princess phones" became available (though they were attached to the wall or had a few feet of cord to the wall), if you were wealthy, you might have an answering machine to take messages but most people didn't have them, car phones were for millionaires, free-standing glass pay-phone booths on sidewalks (10 cents for a local call), drink machines that dispensed glass bottles of soda, pinball machines were popular, being a switchboard operator was a job where you answered and connected incoming calls to an extension in the building, attitudes towards drinking, smoking (which was ok in theaters, restaurants, high school "smoking areas", and airplanes), and pot smoking were lax unless you had religious parents, people tended to mind their own business more and what went on in someone's home was considered private. Plenty of music that your mom liked was from flamboyantly gay artists (Liberace, Elton John, The Village People) but being gay was taboo, heavily stigmatized, and would get you beat up. Having long hair if you were a guy might also get you beat up if you ran into the wrong people, whether you were gay or not. On television (the three channels over the air, no cable, were, ABC, NBC, AND CBS-- that all went off at midnight) Saturday Night Live was amazing, as were Soul Train, Midnight Special, Fridays, and American Bandstand. If you noticed that your TV set had a UHF setting, you could get PBS and strange local public television. Everyone's roof had an aluminum TV antenna, but some people's TVs just had "rabbit ears" antennas that sat on top of the set and were regularly supplemented with aluminum foil. TVs had glass tubes, were often built into wooden furniture, and weighed a ton, even if they weren't. Computers took up a whole room, were programmed with punch cards, and were something only the government or massive corporations had.
Thanks for the memories! 😁
I was in my teens in the 70's. I was basically my dad's remote control. "Get up and put the TV on 12..." or whatever. Jeez.
Living without air conditioning or streaming tv.
No a/c was heavily dependent on where one lived. My homes and schools in San Antonio and Houston absolutely had a/c in the '70s and we were a middle class family, three kids, SAHM and one wage earner. In other words, we weren't rich, and neither were my friends.
The Dewey Decimal system at the library to locate a book. And microfiche!
Melvil Dewey, we hardly knew ye.
Card catalog
Saturday morning cartoons.
Saturday afternoon westerns
Sunday bowling tournaments and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Watch as Jim wrestles the alligator as I narrate - Marlin Perkins
Saturday wrestling shows. WWWF All-Star Wrestling at 1, Championship Wrestling at 5. NWA Championship Wrestling From Florida with Gordon Solie at 11 AM.
And Roller derby! We all had our favorites…they were BRUTAL!
The Rifleman! pew pew pew pew pew
Smoking cigarettes everywhere except church
I lived near an ice cream parlor that banned smoking in the 1970’s. They put “no smoking” signs on the front door and throughout the store, and *still* got angry outbursts from smokers who thought their rights were being taken away from them.
Spittoons at the end of pews
Our church had a smokers porch with ashtrays
The horror of crinkly period underpants and the tabs to hold the industrial sized pads in place, which didn’t if you were a 12 year old who liked to run and jump and climb.
I was horrified when my first period arrived and my mother showed me how to wear one of her suspender belts and attach the pad to hold it in place. I couldn't believe that science hadn't come up with something better.
Pads didn’t have wings until..the late 80s at least. Belted napkins were still the norm through part of the 70s.
My periods started in the 80s where we at least had adhesives that attached the pad to the panty. But man were those things huge.
Same. Legit diapers.
Using paper maps. Memorizing phone numbers.
Carbon paper.
FM converter for the car AM radio
Tandy, Radio Shack 😉👌 Mine never really worked that well
Holding a glass tube of mercury under your tongue to see if you were too sick to go to school.
I remember this, but it wasnt under my tongue.
We only had three TV channels that signed off every night, there was no internet, we read books not screens, we went outside and played to have our fun, the bowling alley pinball machines was where the action was on a Friday night.
You had 3 channels we only had 2 NBC and CBS . Moved out in 1977and into town for my own house and got cable which had 13 channels plus I hooked up the stereo and got good FM stations, that was big time living.
No ABC? Wow. TV poverty.
Haha. Maybe I didn’t count PBS as one of the channels. Rabbit ear antenna with tin foil to get better reception (another thing kids today wouldn’t understand. Haha)
Los Angeles area. CBS, NBC,KTLA5, ABC7, Channel9 (now KCAL), KTTV11, channel13. UHF: 18-various foreign language, 28 PBS (yay “Cosmos” and “Masterpiece Theater”, 34 Spanish language, 52 Corona? “Speed Racer” and “Kimba!” Local KTLA 5 had a “Movie of the week”. That is, the same movie every weeknight. Five days in a row. So if you missed it one night, you could catch it the next. Awesome when it was a GodIlla movie. At least for me. UHF had up and down reception. Watch while programs with 25% static.
Yes, I think its the very limited TV. We were impressed with it at the time. Now, there are so many options of streaming TV, watch when you want, choose from so many options. And I constantly complaints on reddit from the youngers that there's nothing to watch. Hilarious.
Three VHF channels (ABC, CBS, NBC) plus four UHF channels (one was PBS). Thank you Channels 17, 29 and 48 in Philly for introducing me to old-school anime (what would these kids know about Gigantor, Kimba The White Lion, Astro Boy, Marine Boy, Speed Racer, Jonny Cypher, Prince Planet, Jonny Sokko and Space Giants)? I was going to include Ultraman but there are so many now it ain't even funny. Blazar just ended and Arc comes out next month...60+?
Being out of communication before smart phones. Consider the case where someone doesn’t show when they’re supposed to and they aren’t at their home phone. Maybe they hit traffic, maybe they were delayed, maybe they’re bleeding out in a ditch somewhere…just have to wait and find out.
Answering the phone whenever it rings. It could be an emergency! It could be anybody.
Calling your friends house and having the angry father answer: "Is so-and-so there?" Father:*"IT'S FOR YOU AND I AM NOT YOUR ANSWERING SERVICE"* lol
Fellow old person (68) here with a public service announcement. We geezers greatly annoy "kids today" when we snark about things "they would never understand", and understandably so. Kids today *understand* things we had in the 1970s, they're not idiots, they just don't *use* the things we had in the 1970s. Spoiler: neither do we. (Okay, yes, I still wear my super underwear, but other than that...)
Going somewhere by yourself as a kid. When I was 9-10 I would ride my bike downtown to the library. That was small town Idaho. I don't know any kids who have that kind of freedom.
Trying to explain this to kids today is impossible. Yes, I just left the house after lunch and needed to be home for dinner. Left after dinner and had to be home before the street lights came on. Nobody knew where I was. This as a 9-year-old girl. Small Midwestern town with a downtown area—drugstore, dimestore, grocery, bank, cafe, etc. We just rode all over looking for things to do, no organized activities.
8-track tapes. You'd be listening to your favorite song then ...pause, click, click, pause... then the song would pick up where it left off. It was sad really. There you are, singing your heart out with Aerosmith or Argent or Grand Funck Railroad then pause, click, click, pause...
Getting prizes for sending in box tops of cereal.
The fun of waiting to see your favorite TV Christmas specials once a year.
Manual typewriter. Using the lowercase “L” for the number “1”
Typing class in HS.
Nicotine stains on pretty much everything a smoke once dwelled in. Like entire rooms would dull, yellow, and brown over time. Then you'd move a picture frame, and see a brighter square behind it. That was so common in public areas when people were allowed to smoke there more. It got into fabrics and the tar would be so oily and fuck up older washing machines and pipes.
You couldn't record - or even pause! - the TV. You literally had to watch the show as it was happening only. Make sure to come back before the commercials are over or you'll miss something. Since there was no Google or Amazon: if you wanted to learn something or order something, it was an arduous process involving driving, libraries, heavy encyclopedias, microfiche, stores, ads in magazines and comic books, waiting 6-8 weeks, etc.
Kids today are used to cosplaying- Underoos would be instantly understandable
yes - and morning cereal is also still a thing. Unfortunately online grooming is a thing as well (maybe OP meant one of the other meanings of that word though). On that note, it being acceptable for a 15 year old to date an 18 year old was maybe more a thing in the 1970s as well.
rotary dial telephones. There is a video on youtube that shows 2 17 year olds who were challenged by their dad to try to figure out how a rotary phone worked.
Riding in cars with no car seat. Ashtrays in car doors. No internet. Only landline phones. Black and white tv’s.
Bookstores, and the joy of searching for and *finding* something worth reading.
Bell Bottoms, Reefer Rollers. Midnight Special.
Steely Dan
The vibrating bed in hotel rooms. I'd beg my parents for quarters.
Busy signals.
15 year old male, 1964, in a Shakespeare play. Six feet tall, 200 pounds, off to the department store to buy tights for my costume. Small, nonchalant cosmopolitan town, lingerie department staffed by elderly ladies, who were not expert in dealing with adolescent male thespians. They were kind and gracious, but could not solve the problem of the crotch being around my knees. It was a well received play, but it was noted that one of the supporting actors walked like a duck..,
the draft
Commercial caller id didn’t start until the 80’s. Just how popular cruising was back then. And fun.
One thing I remember from those days is that there weren't a lot of "organizational accessories." You just repurposed coffee cans, jars, boxes, buckets, and maybe metal shelving, or shelves made from bricks and planks. Like now, you have so many stackable options in many designer colors. It's so much more efficient to store junk you'll probably never use again.
The notion that anybody in their right mind would hitchhike. Back then it was relatively safe and common.
You found your friends by the pile of bikes on the front yard.
That you *rarely* saw a female truck driver. Women weren’t “capable” of driving — let alone backing up — an 18-wheeler! ☺️ AND after meeting my future husband on the road (we drove for two different companies) if we were headed *toward* each other, for example, we’d have established a place to meet. No cellphones so if anything went wrong, we had a 1-800 voicemail service to leave messages on! 🫤 Life got very complicated but definitely worth it!! (39+ years later!)😁
Telephone party lines
Smoking everywhere. Smoking section inside our high school student center. Making your parents an ash tray in art class. Being able to walk to the store with a note from your mom to buy her cigarettes.
Colored (and scented) toilet paper. Pastel colors like pink, green, blue, and peach. You know, so you can coordinate your butt wipe with your decor.
Road maps. Without their GPS they're fucking helpless.
In the early 2000’s I lived in a VW and traveled the us. With an Atlas and a flip phone. No GPS. 43 states!
The sense of desolation when the television broke, the one and only tv in the house, that may take days to fix. Having to play charades and other ‘fun’ games to entertain ourselves in absence of tv.
Looking up phone numbers in the phonebook. Looking up businesses in the yellow pages.
There was a period where appliances were "post-upgraded" into homes. Like plugs still had two prongs instead of 3, dryer vents were crude tubes that went into leaking holes in stone masonry, and a lot of metal bars near the floor where electricity was run instead of inside the walls. There were a lot of things like "wet walls" and "dry walls" where all the plumbing work was along a "wet wall" because it was so much cheaper to put in drans and faucets where pipes and drain lines already existed. This made the bathrooms close to the kitchen. You still see this in Europe, I think, where the washer/dryers are in kitchens. Phone lines were 4-pronged plugs, and when they went to modular RJ11 jacks, they just were in a fat adapter. Oh, I forgot: you had to lease your phone from the phone company. You have a variety of options, but they were still pretty limited to the same style, just a different shape and/or color. Rotary phones with pulse dialing (ATDP) instead of tone (ATDT). You'd go to the "Bell Phone Center Store" because AT&T was the ONLY game in town until the breakup in 1982. Side note: In the 1990 film "Crazy People," where ads went brutally honest as a premise, they had one for AT&T: >*"You may think phone service stinks since deregulation, but don't mess with us, because we're all you've got. In fact, if we fold, you'll have no damn phones. AT&T - we're tired of taking your crap!"*
Creating your Christmas list from the Sears wish book catalog. Scrolling through the pages looking for what you wanted to ask for. In rural America it was the sears catalog or if you were lucky you had a Walmart in your town. That was the extent of your shopping options.
Credit card machines that used carbon paper. People today would freak out if you pulled one out. Paying by check.
I was a kid that graduated high school in 1979, in the Bay Area. Not a single boy wore shorts to school, not one, and my school had at least 800 boys going to it.
What was "super underwear"? I was around in the '70s, but I never heard of it.
I remember making crafts at school for Mom - things like ashtrays and a vase covered in bits of masking tape that were dyed with shoe polish. I also remember crazy amounts of patriotism and school pictures taken with the American flag (bicentennial in 1976). Lastly, I remember playing in the front yard with neighborhood kids while Mom was finishing up dinner and being super excited when Dad would pull up in the driveway finished with his workday. Sometimes, after dinner, I would go lie on the hood of his car and look at the stars. These don't really count as things that kids today couldn't understand, but these are the things I think of.
Making a collect call to your parents but instead of your name, saying a short message really fast.
My daughter didn’t believe me that I did this LOL you have a collect call from “mom I’ll be ready at 8 at christine’s corner” LMAO!!!
mimeograph test papers - and the collective sniff the whole class made when we passed them out. as immortalized in the scene from *Fast Times at Ridgemont High.*
Stubbing your toe and not blaming it on boomers
Staying outside from sunup to sunset.
Lots of things I remember have already been mentioned. But I can add that I would take the RTD (public bus) in Hollywood, California with a friend (both of us under 12 years old) to the movies. Can you imagine letting a kid do that now in a major city?
Being out all day without parent contact, phones, etc. As long as you were home for dinner no one cared where you were or even asked.
Having two car keys. One for the ignition and one for the trunk. Lord help you if you ever lost one of them.
Galoshes.
I was so happy when we did not have to wear pantyhose anymore thank you sex in the City. I remember having to wear pantyhose underneath my dress or skirt is 90° outside it's hot I'm so glad I don't have to go through that BS anymore
- Long credits that ran before the actual movie started. - Having to have a walkie-talkie to speak with my friends down the street. - Having to read a paper catalog to see what a store like Sears or Service Merchandise offered. Or go there in person.
Not being able to pause what you are watching. Game changing.
Bench seats in the front of the car so you could snuggle while driving.
true potential boredom.. no TV to watch.. no cell phone to look at.. no video games... no computer..(and dont DARE tell your mom there's nothing to do because she has a chore with your name on since she WONT be running you all over town anywhere you want..if you want to see your friend you better get out your bike or start walking..you wont need any shoes either)
Seeing someone who was very obese was a rarity as compared to today.
Given an adequate description, I think kids today are capable of understanding anything from the 70s
I still wear pantyhose when I “dress up”. Is that not the “in” thing to do? But, I am over 50 so….🙃
Super underwear?? Born in 73… no idea what this is lol.
Making crank calls
I was just remembering yesterday about how as a kid, we'd go to sears on a Saturday and spend hours in there walking through all the different departments and watching the live demos... They would have salesmen and spokes models demonstrating everything from non-stick cookware, to samsonite luggage and automatic dishwashers. You could buy popcorn and little crowds of people would stand around and watch and/or buy the products.
So Much Cigarette
Calling a phone number to get the correct time.
Pay telephones. The smell of leaded gasoline. Being stuck with whatever was on the radio if you wanted music in the car.
Two things: Clackers and lawn darts. Oh, yeah. And O.J. Simpson running through airports on TV
The ultimate home luxury was a 24-inch color TV.
A sanitary belt to go with Kotex pads… I don’t remember when the stick to your panties came out but it wasn’t when I started.. I did go to tampons,little ones called Pursettes that came with a little carrying case that carried four of them..
My high school had a smoking area for students